War in the Balkans: Conflict and Diplomacy before World War I 9780755621729, 9780857726414

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James Pettifer was Professor in the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom from 2002 to 2012, and teaches modern Balkan history at St Cross College, Oxford. He also works with the Osteuropaische Geschichte seminar in the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Tom Buchanan is Professor of Modern British and European History at the University of Oxford, where he is Director of Studies in History and Politics at the Department for Continuing Education and a Fellow of Kellogg College.

“Always in the shadow of World War I, the Balkan Wars haven’t got the attention they deserve in historiography. This fine piece of scholarship assembles the findings of researchers from the region itself and from outside, addressing a variety of intriguing topics. It tells among others of the fight against cholera, of Croat sympathies and help for Serbia, of the role of war correspondents, of the meaning of the wars for the symbolic representation of the region as well as of the mutual perception in the Balkans of the time.” Prof. Dr Nada Bosˇkovska, University of Zurich

WAR IN THE BALKANS Conflict and Diplomacy before World War I

JAMES

Edited by PETTIFER AND TOM BUCHANAN

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 by I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. Paperback edition first published by Bloomsbury Academic 2020 Copyright Editorial Selection © James Pettifer and Tom Buchanan, 2016 Copyright Individual Chapters © Enika Abazi, Tom Buchanan, Robert Evans, Bernd J. Fischer, Melina Grizo, Helen Katsiadakis, Jasmina Knezovic, James Pettifer, Christian Promitzer, Sabrina P. Ramet, Biljana Vankovska and Eric Beckett Weaver, 2016 James Pettifer and Tom Buchanan have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7845-3190-4 PB: 978-1-3501-5332-5 ePDF: 978-0-8577-2641-4 ePub: 978-0-8577-3968-1 Series: International Library of Twentieth Century History, vol 84 Typeset by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

In Memory of Professor Sir Dimitri Obolensky (1918–2001)

CONTENTS

Foreword R.J.W. Evans Contributors Part I The Contested Inheritance 1. The Balkan Wars after 100 Years Tom Buchanan

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2. Realpolitik or Foreign Policy Surrealism: A Reconsideration of the Peace Treaties of Berlin (1878), London (1913), Versailles (1919), and Trianon (1920) 19 Sabrina P. Ramet Part II International Dimensions 3. Yugoslavism in Hungary during the Balkan Wars Eric Beckett Weaver 4. Combating Cholera during the Balkan Wars: The Case of Bulgaria Christian Promitzer 5. The Balkan Wars and the Creation of Albanian Independence Bernd J. Fischer

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6. History and Memories of the Balkan Wars in the Republic of Macedonia: Debates over the Past Biljana Vankovska

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7. After the Golden Age? – The Journalism of the Balkan Wars James Pettifer

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8. Croatian Nationalism and the Balkan Wars Jasmina Knezovic

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Part III The Bitter Inheritance 9. Macedonia – The Crisis After the Paris Peace Conference 183 Melina Grizo 10. Between Facts and Interpretations: Three Images of the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 Enika Abazi

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11. The Balkan Wars Experience: Understanding the Enemy Helen Katsiadakis

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12. Some Concluding Thoughts James Pettifer

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Index

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FOREWORD

In mid-October 1912, combat had just begun between the troops of the Ottoman empire and a hostile alliance of its four Balkan neighbours. The tiny state of Montenegro provoked the conflict on 8 October; within ten days the other belligerents were in the field. Bulgarians marched towards eastern Thrace; Serbs attacked Skopje and Monastir; Greeks moved northward from Thessaly. The first major engagement, a Bulgarian victory at Kirk Kilisse, would follow on the 24th. These events were, of course, also commemorated in various locations closer to the seats of action in 1912– 13. Yet it was certainly not inappropriate to mark this anniversary at Oxford.1 The contemporary British press then was full of reports from the front; of background stories to inform about the latest phase of the Eastern Question; and of apprehensive reflections on its implications for the region and for Europe more widely. On 17 and 18 October 1912 The Times dilated across column after column about “war preliminaries”, “the text of the Balkan note”, “the rupture with Servia”, “the dangers of intervention”, “Russian discontent”, “the peace with Italy”, “sea power and the Balkan War”, “Austrian sympathies”, and “the Turko-Italian peace agreement”. At the same time the Manchester Guardian reflected on “war or peace in the Balkans” and “indignation in Sofia”; asked “who will gain from war? Balkan Socialists’ manifesto”; reported on “neglected wounded: terrible conditions in Tuzi” and on “the capture of Berane”; wondered about “increased Russian army estimates”, and about “Great Britain and a Turkish loan”. Its readers noted: “Turkish losses continue”; “Turkey

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declares war”; “Turkey on the aggressive”. They heard simultaneously about “stories of Montenegrin reverses” and “shattered fortresses after the Montenegrin victories”. Oxford had its own connections with the region. The university had pioneered Slavonic studies in Great Britain. It also contributed to early thinking about the geopolitics of the area. Halford Mackinder, a prominent extra-mural lecturer and founder of the department of geography, stressed the vital role of eastern Europe for future control of the world’s resources. Another extra-mural lecturer and redoubtable college tutor, J.A.R. Marriott, would write the classic account of the Eastern Question as a “historical study in European diplomacy”. Recently retired in 1912 as Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, Arthur Evans, the archaeologist of early Cretan civilisation, could deploy 40 years’ experience of the Balkans and remained a strong supporter of the Slavs there. A different Oxford collection, the Pitt-Rivers, later acquired the folklore items amassed by the great traveller Edith Durham in Albania and adjacent territories. There was student interest too: the future novelist Joyce Cary for example, freshly graduated, set off to serve with the Red Cross in Montenegro when the conflict broke out. Thereafter, however, memories faded, in the United Kingdom as a whole, even gradually in Oxford too. They were effaced by the experience of World War I, which indeed began seemingly as a “third Balkan War”, triggered by the Sarajevo assassination, but speedily turned into a protracted clash of armies much nearer home and the unthinkable horrors that resulted. Yet the two Balkan Wars retain a lasting significance, as this volume confirms. They were not just a testing ground for much of the new technology and the new challenges of the Great War: aircraft, heavy weapons, infectious diseases and their control, even trench defence. They also initiated a transformation in international politics, a ten-year-long “war of Ottoman succession”. The Balkans in 1912–13 offer a defining moment for the emergence of nations, or of those who affected to speak and act on behalf of nations, as the key players in the twentieth-century world order. And the roles of the national belligerents in the Balkans were by no means so simple as often presumed. Even if the war aims of these peoples seem crude enough – territorial aggrandisement at the expense of neighbours, largely the Turks – they formed an intricate set of interlocking pieces,

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each markedly different from the rest. There were the diminutive but feisty Montenegrins, longest-established of the Balkan nation-states, but very shortly to be swallowed up in a new Yugoslavia; the Serbs, with a century of autonomy on their core territories, but grand plans (soon to be implemented) for domination of the whole South Slav world; the Bulgarians, the most recent state creation in the area, but already one of Europe’s more formidable military powers, still seeking to embrace their broader kin in indeterminate linguistic-ethnic borderlands; the Greeks, with as much to lose as to gain, so events proved, by upsetting the Balkan status quo, since their wider cultural and religious hegemony was at risk from political-military successes. Two peoples remained in still subordinate regions: on one hand the Macedonians, coveted by all four surrounding states, and still lacking the internal and external prerequisites for statehood of their own; on the other hand the Albanians, long a source of support to embattled governments in Istanbul, but poised in 1912 to win independence over part of their national territory once their symbiotic relationship with Ottoman authority was destroyed by others. And on the perimeter of the Balkans began the realms of the other powers affected by the conflict. The Romanians joined the fighting in 1913 to aggrandise themselves at the expense of Bulgaria. Beyond them, the AustroHungarian monarchy and the Russian tsardom would be spurred by the Balkan Wars to the brinkmanship during the following year which provoked general European war, and issued as a consequence in the collapse of both empires into their national components. The Italian state awaited its chance to acquire a foothold in the eastern Adriatic. Meanwhile, on the ruins of the main Balkan-based empire, the Turks themselves actually proved, to widespread surprise, the chief victors in that war of Ottoman succession that had been unleashed in the autumn of 1912. These themes are reflected in the present volume. It cannot possibly embrace all facets of the Balkan Wars (especially we could not do justice to the Turkish dimension here). But it presents a conspectus of current views and many new insights. The organisers would like to express their thanks to the Fell Fund for its support, and to the staff of the History Faculty, particularly Jane Cunning. R.J.W. Evans

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Note 1. Address given on 17 October 2012 to open the conference organised by James Pettifer and Tom Buchanan held on the Anniversary of the Balkan Wars 1912– 13 in the University of Oxford History Faculty.

CONTRIBUTORS

Enika Abazi is Associate Professor of the Sociology of International Relations, and Director of the Centre for Balkan Studies, European University of Tirana, Albania. Tom Buchanan is Professor of Modern British and European History at the University of Oxford, where he is Director of Studies in History and Politics at the Department for Continuing Education and a Fellow of Kellogg College. Robert Evans is Regius Professor of History Emeritus in the University of Oxford. Bernd J. Fisher is Chair of the History Department in the University of Indiana at Fort Wayne. Melina Grizo is Assistant Professor in the Justinian Faculty of Law, University of St Cyril and Methodius, Skopje. Helen Katsiadakis is Director of Modern History Research at the Academy of Athens. Jasmina Knezovic is preparing her Ph.D. thesis at Brasenose College, University of Oxford. James Pettifer was Professor in the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom from 2002 to 2012, and teaches modern Balkan history at St Cross College, Oxford. He also works with the Osteuropaische Geschichte seminar in the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

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Christian Promitzer is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Graz, Austria and works on the medical and intellectual history of the Balkans. Sabrina P. Ramet is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Political Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. Biljana Vankovska is Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy in the University of St Cyril and Methodius, Skopje. Eric Beckett Weaver is Associate Professor in the University of Debrecen, Hungary and Editor of The South Slav Journal.

PART I THE CONTESTED INHERITANCE

CHAPTER 1 THE BALKAN WARS AFTER 100 YEARS Tom Buchanan

The Balkan Wars of 1912 – 13 have inevitably been eclipsed by the far greater conflict that started just over a year later. Yet, in their time, they were neither negligible nor anachronistic. It is easily forgotten that the battles in eastern Thrace in the autumn of 1912 involved, as one newspaper observed, “a far larger number [of soldiers] than fought at Sedan” some 40 years earlier.1 These were, moreover, wars conducted with many of the trappings of modernity: primitive aircraft carried out daring reconnaissance and bombing missions, medical units struggled to halt the spread of infectious disease, Bulgarian warships launched successful torpedo attacks on the Ottoman fleet, and powerful searchlights swept the battlefields by night. In addition, their consequences were profound. After five centuries, Ottoman rule over the Balkan peninsula was finally ended. The Ottomans, who lost 69 per cent of the population of their European lands and 83 per cent of the territory, were left with only a small foothold in continental Europe.2 In contrast, the victorious states significantly expanded in size (both Greece and Serbia grew by 50 per cent or more) while a completely new state – Albania – came into being. The wars did not only redraw borders, but also – by precipitating fierce inter-ethnic violence – changed the balance of populations across the region. Between 1912 and 1913 some 177,000 Muslim refugees fled to

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Turkey, while thousands more followed (in all directions across the new borders) after the end of the two wars.3 The Ottomans had finally, as Gladstone famously demanded in 1877, been unceremoniously evicted – “bag and baggage” – from Europe. All of this took place under the watchful eyes of the great powers, occasionally eliciting their intervention, and in at least two cases – Russia and AustriaHungary – posing a challenge to their vital interests.

Origins The Balkan Wars had their origins in three principal developments: first, the century-long decline of the Ottoman Empire, compounded latterly by the attempts by the “Young Turks” to revive the empire’s fortunes; secondly, the emergence during the nineteenth century of independent states in the Balkans, which were eager not only to enhance their territory at the expense of the Ottomans but also to exact revenge for perceived historic wrongs; and thirdly, the intensifying rivalries between the great powers and their willingness to intervene both diplomatically and militarily in the region. By 1900 the Ottoman Empire had a population of some 24 million: these were primarily Muslim Turks, Arabs and Kurds, but there were very substantial Greek, Jewish, and Armenian minorities. The empire had historically been based on religious tolerance, and minorities were allowed to govern their own affairs in millets so long as they paid their taxes and respected Ottoman rule. This arrangement began to break down in the nineteenth century with the rise of ethnically defined “national” identities in the Balkans. Former subject peoples began to establish independent states, and asserted their sovereignty (Greece in 1832, Rumania, Serbia and Montenegro in 1878, and Bulgaria – de jure – as late as 1908). Even so, in 1900 the Ottomans still retained control of a swathe of Balkan territory, where they governed a complex and volatile mixture of communities. However, their rule in the region was not only being undermined by external threats, but also those from within its borders. In particular, the Albanians, mainly Muslim and spread widely across the western Balkan region, began to reconsider their traditional loyalty to the Sultan in the later nineteenth century as the Porte’s ability to protect them from the ambitions of neighbouring states declined. As Bernd Fischer argues in

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this volume, the emergence of modern Albanian nationalism and statehood was, to some extent, a choice imposed by the collapse of Ottoman power during the Balkan Wars. Internationally, the Ottoman Empire was protected for much of the nineteenth century by the willingness of Britain to uphold the status quo. In 1853– 6 Britain and France had fought the Crimean War to resist Russian encroachments on Ottoman territory. The great powers intervened again at the Congress of Berlin, following the Ottoman defeat by Russia in the war of 1877– 8, to curb the gains of Russia and its Bulgarian client. However, this situation was inherently unstable as Britain had its own interests in the region. After the construction of the Suez Canal, in 1882 Britain established a form of protectorate over Egypt (still nominally an Ottoman possession). Britain also took control of Cyprus in 1878 as a military base in the eastern Mediterranean. Moreover, the Ottomans’ increasing reliance on violence to uphold their authority (such as the “Bulgarian atrocities” of 1875 and the “Armenian massacres” of 1894– 6) horrified Gladstonian liberal sentiment in Britain. The only major state that expressed strong support for Turkey by the early twentieth century was Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Constantinople in 1898, before travelling on to Jerusalem and Damascus where he pledged to be the “friend for all time” of the Sultan and the 300 million Muslims for whom he was their Caliph.4 Under Wilhelm II Germany increased its military advisory mission to the Ottoman army, and in 1903 a German company began work on constructing a railway from Konya to Baghdad. As a result of the military and diplomatic crisis of 1875– 8 a spasmodic reform process got underway within the Ottoman Empire. The new Sultan Abdul Hamid approved a constitution and a parliament in 1876, but from 1878 onwards reverted to governing as an autocrat. Having broken with the constitutional opposition he now had to confront an exiled opposition based in Paris. This new generation of reformers, who became known as the “Young Turks”, hoped that Western institutions would allow the modernisation of the empire and a new union of its many peoples – hence their formal title, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP: established in 1889). The “Young Turks” were a diverse movement ranging from reform-minded civilian politicians to progressive junior army officers. The young Mustafa Kemal, for instance, read widely during his first posting in Syria, and

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greatly admired Benjamin Franklin as a scientist, diplomat and man of virtue. He helped to found a secret “Society for the Fatherland and Liberty” in 1906, and a year later, after his return to his native Macedonia, this fused with the CUP.5 Increasingly the Ottoman province of Macedonia (a far larger territory than the modern state of that name) became the focus for the intense nationalist rivalries between Balkan states. It was inhabited by a highly mixed population, including Muslims (some of them Slavs) and Orthodox Christians (both Greek Orthodox and, from 1870, members of the Bulgarian exarchate). There was also a substantial Jewish population, which formed the largest community in the city of Thessaloniki (also known as Salonica or Salonika).6 Neighbouring Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece all aspired to control this territory, either wholly or in part. During the 1890s all three sought to strengthen their position by winning over the native Slavs, either by means of nationalist propaganda, or by promoting their educational and religious interests, or, indeed, by sponsoring political and terrorist groups. Moreover, an indigenous revolutionary movement (IMRO: Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation) aspired to autonomy or even independence for Macedonia. In 1903, in response to IMRO’s failed rebellion and the subsequent Ottoman repression, Austria and Russia imposed the Mu¨rzsteg Programme, whereby the great powers would oversee reforms of administration and policing in order to protect minority rights. These measures failed to halt the violence, and when Edward VII met Tsar Nicholas II at Reval in June 1908 they discussed imposing further reforms on Macedonia. As a result, young Ottoman officers in Macedonia led by Enver Pasha, fearful of foreign intervention and partition, rebelled against the Sultan’s rule. Abdul Hamid swiftly agreed to restore the constitution and held elections. However, Austria-Hungary took the opportunity presented by the empire’s temporary weakness to annex Bosnia-Herzegovina (which it had administered since 1878), Bulgaria declared its full independence, and Greece accepted union (enosis) with Crete. In elections held in February 1909 the Young Turks swept to power. However, in April Abdul Hamid supported a botched counterrevolution and was forced to abdicate in favour of his brother. Therefore, although the Young Turks now tightened their grip on power, the new regime inherited a crisis in Turkey’s international relations, and a perceived vulnerability that others were quick to exploit.

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In 1911 the decision by Italy to seize the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (modern Libya) further demonstrated the empire’s weakness.7 The Italians swiftly captured the coastal cities, but struggled to subdue the interior. The war crept ever closer to the Balkans as Italy sought to put pressure on the Ottoman government to accept defeat. Italian forces captured the Dodecanese islands, and shelled Turkish positions in the Dardanelles in April 1912. In June the Chief of the General Staff even called for an Italian attack on Smyrna (modern Izmir). Italy’s actions inspired the Balkan states (apart from Romania) to mount their own attack. In March 1912 the traditional rivals Bulgaria and Serbia (which had fought each other as recently as 1885) signed an alliance.8 This contained a secret agreement for each state to seize a part of Macedonia, while Russia (Bulgaria’s historic ally) would arbitrate on the remaining contested zone. Soon afterwards bilateral agreements were made between the other Balkan states, although Bulgaria failed to predetermine a division of the spoils in its agreement with Greece. The Balkan rulers rallied their people with a call to religion and liberation: for King (or Tsar as he now preferred) Ferdinand of Bulgaria the First Balkan War was “a sacred struggle of the Cross against the Crescent”, while King Peter of Serbia described it as a war of liberation “to free our brothers by blood, by language and by custom.”9 However, while there is considerable evidence that soldiers of the Balkan League were motivated to fight by such rhetoric, this was essentially a war fought by an unlikely alliance of states each seeking “to achieve national unity at the expense of the increasingly decrepit Ottoman Empire. . .”10 It was also, however, a war to advance the interest of Balkan dynasties, as both the kings of Greece and Montenegro gave substantial military roles to their sons and heirs. On 8 October 1912 Montenegro precipitately declared war, to be followed ten days later by its larger allies. The League brought together four relatively small and economically under-developed states (with a combined population of just over ten million) against a powerful adversary. However, the Balkan states enjoyed a number of significant military advantages. The Ottoman Empire was still undergoing a major military reorganisation initiated in 1910, and the recent introduction of conscription for Christian and other minorities meant that the loyalty of some of its soldiers was suspect. The Ottoman armed forces also faced severe shortages of draft animals (used for moving both artillery and

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supplies), medical supplies, and trained personnel in engineering, telegraphy and other specialist areas.11 In addition, the Ottomans were hampered by the sheer extent of their domains, given that the war against Italy continued until October 1912, and revolt was simmering in distant Yemen. Accordingly, the Balkan states were able to seize the initiative in Thrace and Macedonia and dictate the course of the war. Bulgaria, in particular, had invested heavily in its military and was able to field a large, well-equipped and well-motivated army. As the politician Vasil Radoslavov observed: “We have not spent 950 million leva on the army just to look at it in parades.”12 Likewise Greece, which had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Ottoman forces in 1897, had embarked on significant political and military reform in 1910 under the leadership of the liberal populist Eleftherios Venizelos.13 In particular, Greece’s navy proved a powerful weapon. It swiftly won control of the Aegean, captured a number of islands, pinned down Ottoman coastal garrisons, and prevented Ottoman forces from deploying by sea in the theatre of war.

The First and Second Balkan Wars, 1912 –13 The most significant fighting of the First Balkan War took place in eastern Thrace, where the main Bulgarian and Ottoman armies clashed head on. The Bulgarians won the major battle at Lule Burgas (29 –31 October 1912), defeating poorly supplied Ottoman forces through a combination of superior artillery and reckless infantry charges. The Ottoman Empire was now in dire straits, and on 4 November requested that the great powers send warships to protect their civilians in the capital – they duly arrived on 18 November.14 However, Tsar Ferdinand now became fixated on the prospect of capturing Constantinople and rejected Ottoman offers of an armistice. The Bulgarian army advanced on the formidable Chataldzha lines, just outside of Constantinople. Here, on 17–18 November 1912, after mounting a frontal assault against well-prepared Ottoman positions supported by naval gunfire, they suffered a costly defeat. The Bulgarian forces now became bogged down far away from their real target, Macedonia, and their army was ravaged by cholera, which soon affected as many as one in six of their soldiers. Meanwhile, Serb forces had advanced rapidly into Macedonia. They defeated the Ottomans at the battle of Kumanovo (23 – 4 October),

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and then took Skopje. The destruction of the Ottoman forces in Macedonia was completed at the battle of Monastir/Bitola on 17 November, whereupon the survivors retreated into Albania. The Greeks also narrowly won the race with the Bulgarians to be first into Thessaloniki – the greatest prize in Macedonia – on 10 November. On 3 December 1912 the great powers imposed a truce while concurrent sets of talks (for both the belligerents and the powers) opened in London. The issue that initially concerned the powers was the future of Albania. Austria-Hungary and Italy, in particular, were adamant that Serbia should not gain a coastline on the Adriatic. Austria went as far as to initiate a military mobilisation in order to force Serbia and its Russian sponsor to back down, prompting Punch to speculate that an “Armageddon” of Christian states may yet preserve Ottoman interests.15 The powers had supported a declaration of independence by an Albanian “National Assembly” at Vlora on 28 November, within borders that remained to be determined. When the talks broke down on 3 February 1913 the renewed fighting centred on the sieges of three cities; Adrianople, which fell to the Bulgarians after a sustained assault on 28 March; Janina, which was captured by the Greeks on 6 March; and Scutari/Shko¨der, which had been besieged by the Montenegrin and Serbian forces since the start of the war. The powers were determined that Scutari should form part of the new Albanian state and sent a combined fleet to enforce their will. When the city finally fell on 23 April, King Nicolas of Montenegro was promptly forced to hand it over (on 5 May) to an international column. The Treaty of London was concluded on 30 May 1913. All of the belligerents gained ground apart from the Ottomans, who were left with the barest remnant of territory in Europe. However, most of the victorious states were unhappy with the outcome. Serbia felt cheated of access to the sea and sought compensation in Macedonia. Bulgaria felt that its gains (especially in Macedonia) were not equal to its sacrifice, and resented the Greek control of Thessaloniki. The Bulgarian Prime Minister had told his minister in Athens that “entry into a city is not a title to rule the city,”16 and the Bulgarians were careful to maintain their claim by the presence of a token force. An independent Albania had come into existence, but many Albanians were now left under Greek, Montenegrin and Serbian rule. Meanwhile, the assassination of King George I, by a Greek anarchist, soon after his triumphal entry into

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Thessaloniki, took some of the lustre from Greece’s unexpected successes. In the war’s aftermath, moreover, Romania put pressure on Bulgaria to give up border territory in the Southern Dobrujda region by way of “compensation” for its non-participation in the war. On 29 – 30 June 1913 a surprise attack by Bulgarian forces against Serbian and Greek positions in Macedonia marked the beginning of the Second Balkan War. The Bulgarian forces enjoyed initial success, but the war soon went disastrously wrong. Romania declared war and its army marched across the border almost unopposed and its forces encamped outside Sofia. Bulgaria’s assumption that it would be protected by Russia had proved wholly false. Russia did not want to see the break-up of the Balkan League, which it regarded as a bulwark against Austrian influence, and was suspicious of Bulgarian designs on Constantinople and the Straits. Russian foreign minister Sazonov told the Bulgarian minister in St Petersburg that his country had “rejected Russia and Slavdom . . . Do not expect anything from us.”17 This dramatic turn of events encouraged the Young Turks, who had removed their remaining opponents in a coup in January 1913, to renew the war. Ottoman forces advanced from the Chataldzha lines, retook Adrianople with barely a shot fired, and invaded Bulgarian territory. Bulgaria was swiftly forced to the conference table and under the terms of the Treaty of Bucharest (10 August 1913) it was forced to give up most of its gains (apart from a corner of eastern Macedonia, and a small Aegean coastline). The main beneficiaries were Serbia and Greece, while the Ottoman Empire regained some of its lost territory and prestige. Although the Second Balkan War was far shorter than the first, very high casualties were sustained in combat. For the Greeks and Serbs the well-trained Bulgarians had proved a far tougher opponent than the Ottoman forces.18

Impacts and Legacies of the Balkan Wars The diplomatic and strategic consequences of the Balkan Wars were manifold. Above all, as Sabrina Ramet argues in her contribution to this volume, the great powers had finally abandoned their commitment to the “concert of Europe”, and instead pursued their own interests in the most damaging fashion. The Balkan Wars had undoubtedly affected the balance of diplomatic forces within Europe. The historic, albeit

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troubled, link between Russia and Bulgaria was for the time being broken. Russia was now committed to support Serbia, with fateful consequences in the summer of 1914. Meanwhile Bulgaria was nudged in the direction of the central powers, whom it joined in 1915 after Serbia had been overrun. Bulgaria took control of Macedonia for much of World War I, but eventually had to surrender not only this but even its limited gains of 1912–13 at the peace settlement. For Greece, as Helen Katsiadakis shows in this volume, success in the Balkan Wars brought new – and potentially more dangerous – strategic rivalries and challenges. Meanwhile, for Austria-Hungary, as Christopher Clark has recently argued, “the Balkan Wars changed everything.”19 Austria appeared isolated and misunderstood: for the rest of Europe it seemed to be a waning power, and a part of the problems of the Balkan region rather than of their solution. Moreover, as both Eric Weaver and Jasmina Knezovic demonstrate in their contributions to this volume, the Balkan Wars greatly intensified nationalist sentiment amongst the South Slavs within the Habsburg Empire. All of this merely reinforced the Habsburgs’ determination to deal forcefully with the challenge posed by Serbia when the opportunity arose. The ripples from the Balkan Wars spread much further than Hungary and Croatia. Indian Muslims, defending the religious authority of the Caliphate, celebrated the Ottoman recapture of Adrianople. A German agent reported to Berlin that there were “large public demonstrations [in India] which were . . . very uncomfortable for the English authorities.”20 The financial uncertainty created by the Balkan Wars in the London money market even halted a loan to China.21 The war created patriotic fervour among diasporic populations, such as the estimated 350,000 Greek subjects in the United States, many of whom pledged funds or were willing to return to fight as volunteers. Other foreigners also played their part. The writer Joyce Cary served as a young man in a medical unit with Montenegrin forces: he reflected many years later that he had “wanted the experience of war . . . I thought there would be no more wars.” He had “a certain romantic enthusiasm for the cause of the Montenegrins . . . [and] was young and eager for any sort of adventure.”22 The feminist Mabel St Clair Stobart – dismayed to be told by the Red Cross that there was “no work fitted for women in the Balkans” – led an ox-cart convoy of female medical volunteers into the Thracian war zone.23 Journalists also flocked to the region, as James

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Pettifer describes in his contribution to this book. Many – such as the veteran Henry Nevinson – were deeply sympathetic to the Balkan League: accordingly, Bulgaria’s policy of keeping the journalists away from the front, which ensured that the full extent of their initial victories was not immediately understood, proved counter-productive. The future of Macedonia had been central to the conflicts, and accordingly the region was the focus for much of the ethnic violence which accompanied the Balkan Wars. The Serbian and Montenegrin advance was accompanied by savage atrocities against the Muslim population, including ethnic Albanians. The atrocities were widely commented upon at the time, although often brushed off as due to the actions of irregular forces and “six of one and half a dozen of the other.”24 A Serbian friend of Leon Trotsky who ventured into Macedonia during the war gave a memorable description of how the horrors actually began as soon as we crossed the old frontier . . . the darker the sky became, the more brightly the fearful illumination of the fires stood out against it. Burning was going on all around us. Entire Albanian villages had been turned into pillars of fire – far and near, right up to the railway line . . . this picture was repeated all the way to Skopje.25 In 1913 the atrocities were investigated by a seven-man team sent by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (which had been established in 1910). The ensuing report, published in 1914, was a pitilessly detailed and well-observed document, which catalogued the massacres, forced conversions and evictions that had accompanied the war. None of the participants escaped criticism, as the members of the Balkan League had not only assaulted Muslims, but also sought to assert their authority over the indigenous Slavic populations. Inevitably the report evoked memories of the Balkan massacres of the nineteenth century, but it also noted the novelty of this many-cornered struggle of rival Christian nationalities. As the report stated with regard to the violence of the Serbs and Montenegrins, it was intended to change the “ethnic character of regions exclusively inhabited by Albanians”. In his introduction the French Nobel laureate the Baron d’Estournelles de Constant warned presciently of further wars to come – “or rather of a continuous war, the worst of all, a war of religion, of

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reprisals, of race.”26 Indeed, as Melina Grizo demonstrates in her chapter, the Macedonian question was not resolved either by the Balkan Wars or by the peace settlement of 1919, and low level conflicts over Macedonia continued to bedevil relations within the Balkans well into the inter-war years. The atrocities, which were also a feature of the Second Balkan War, shocked international opinion. However, as Enika Abazi argues in this volume, the violence was all too easily dismissed as the product of an endemic “Balkan” mindset, forged over many centuries of Ottoman rule, and marking the region out from “civilised” Europe. It is certainly the case that some pacifist and socialist voices were raised against the rush to war, and that they have tended to be neglected by historians. In Bulgaria the Socialist Janko Sakazov was the only parliamentarian to vote against the war, and the journal Novo Vreme (New Times) later claimed that the socialists alone had stood for common sense at a time when “the new masters were frenzy, barbarism, massacres, and manslaughters”. In Serbia, likewise, the Social Democrats opposed the war and called instead for a Balkan Federation.27 Despite the relative weakness of these socialist parties, the ease with which nationalism trumped internationalism should surely have given a valuable lesson to the parties of the Second International. Quite apart from diplomatic and political consequences, the Balkan Wars also provided some interesting military lessons. Admittedly, the Bulgarian successes of the autumn of 1912 – achieved with the kind of e´lan which contemporary French generals craved – offered few pointers for future wars. The Bulgarians had proved themselves to be, according to Henry Nevinson at least, the “most dogged, capable, highly educated and silent – the only silent – nation in the Balkans.”28 However, in the words of one commentator writing in the war’s immediate aftermath: “The days of Lule Burgas afford no proof that the old-fashioned attack in mass from a distance is possible in the face of modern rifles.”29 Against a better trained and supplied enemy – and indeed against the Ottoman forces secure behind the Chataldzha lines – the results would have been catastrophic. Strangely the warfare witnessed by Joyce Cary on the borders of Albania and Montenegro was in certain respects more prescient. Although this was ostensibly a war fought by peasant soldiers among precipitous mountains, during the siege of Scutari Cary also witnessed vicious trench warfare. In particular, he noted the problems of

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cutting barbed wire: shelling merely created a greater entanglement, while the old men charged with pushing eight-foot tubes under the wire in order to cut it succeeded at terrible cost. His sketch entitled “first advance on Tarabos” would not look out of place as an image of the Western Front.30 The liberal MP Noel Buxton responded to the Thracian battlefields with an enthusiasm and aesthetic pleasure that would soon appear unseemly: The sight of trenches is always thrilling; they are the very framework of momentous human efforts . . . The scene on these ridges was peculiarly suggestive. There were Turkish trenches looking west, mixed with Bulgar trenches looking east: the same ridge had served to defend Asiatic government and to advance European ideals.31 Ottoman casualties had been severe in the wars – as many as 50,000 had been killed, 100,000 wounded, and a further 75,000 had died from disease. The Ottoman armies had suffered heavy defeats at the start of the war, and were often described by contemporary observers as incompetently led, poorly fed and equipped, and riven by ethnic divisions. The journalist Lionel James noted apropos the Ottoman mobilisation that there had been a chronic lack of officers, soldiers were poorly shod in “cheap contract boots that hurt the feet”, and men heading for the front line were learning “the mechanism of the rifle for the first time.”32 Another reporter commented that at the forward base in Thrace: There was a complete lack of organisation. Regiments would arrive in the camp worn out and hungry after a long day’s march, and instead of finding food and the shelter of a tent, would be left to spend the night without shelter in pelting rain and a bitter north-east wind. The nights were intensely cold, there being on several occasions 12– 14 degrees of frost.33 However, the performance of the Ottoman forces in the war’s later stages was more effective, and this included a sophisticated – albeit unsuccessful – combined operation in the Sea of Marmara in February 1912, intended to relieve Adrianople. Edward J. Erickson’s major recent

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study argues that the Ottomans were operationally adept and, above all, willing to learn from their defeats. The Ottoman army that emerged from the Balkan Wars was, he concludes, “effective, resilient and capable of sustained combat”, and the proof lies in the fact that in November 1918 – unlike the armies of the other central powers – it was “still on its feet and in the field.”34 The wars’ most eye-catching innovation was the military use of aircraft, which had developed at a remarkable pace since their initial deployment in the deserts of Libya barely a year earlier. While flying was still in its hazardous infancy, and trained pilots, ground crew and aircraft were in short supply, a number of states (notably Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire) made significant use of the new technology. There were a number of “firsts” during the Balkan Wars, some more welcome than others. These included the first pilot to die in action; the first use of recognition markings, the first use of prefabricated airstrips, and the first over flight of an enemy capital (when a Romanian aircraft was seen over Sofia).35 An eye-witness account by the journalist Philip Gibbs of a sortie during the siege of Adrianople captures the sheer novelty of the new warfare: A great bird flew across the sky towards the city, and as it flew it sang a droning song like the buzzing of an enormous bee. It was a monoplane, flown by a Bulgarian aviator, who had volunteered to reconnoitre the Turkish defences.36 The plane survived the ad hoc air defences, although Gibbs later learnt that the plane had crashed and the pilot had been killed. The other particularly military striking aspect of the Balkan Wars was the role of infectious disease. According to one Bulgarian intellectual “the louse is a frightful thing . . . It is perhaps the most frightful thing of all in war.”37 During the Balkan Wars, however, the water-borne bacteria that spread cholera were even more devastating. As Christian Promitzer’s chapter in this collection shows, the Balkan states were frequently deficient in medical services and their armies swiftly succumbed to disease, which in turn spread to other fronts and to non-combatant areas. Both sides suffered severely. A journalist who visited an Ottoman cholera camp just outside Constantinople reported that: “There were hundreds of dead and thousands of sick men in this

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camp. Many were lying on the open ground . . . Fortunate, indeed, are those comparatively few of the Turkish army who have been brought to the hospitals, barracks and mosques in the city to die.”38 Despite the appalling suffering, however, lessons were learnt from the Balkan Wars, and the impact of cholera was contained. During World War I the main threat in the Balkan theatre would be posed by malaria and typhus. * The Balkan Wars will, of course, forever be connected with the European war that followed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914. Indeed, the standard English-language history of the Balkan Wars is subtitled “prelude to World War I.”39 A number of books have recently emphasised the relative peacefulness and normality of Europe in 1913 and, thereby, implicitly challenge this linkage.40 Europe’s prosperous, advanced societies – it can be argued – had no particular reason to go to war with each other, let alone gamble everything on a war to the knife. Yet the connections are not difficult to make. The Balkan Wars may not have caused World War I, but they helped to prime the detonator, and added to the combustible material. As Noel and Charles Roden Buxton wrote in 1915, “if the Balkans had not offered the occasion [for war in 1914], the occasion would have been found elsewhere. The fact remains that the Balkans did provide the occasion.”41 The Balkan Wars had shaken the stability of the international system, and encouraged other states to seek territorial gain at the expense of declining multinational empires. They also showed how even a war in a remote corner of Europe could draw in the great powers and provide an opportunity for the deployment of the latest military technologies. Above all, the Balkan Wars showed that short, brutal wars could rally populations behind nationalist demands. No wonder that Henry Nevinson, who had immersed himself in the region’s problems more than most, felt a growing sense of apprehension in the winter of 1912– 13. He claimed that he suffered at this time from the recurrence of a childhood dream: “of a terrible ship, like a dragon, coming into a bay where I was playing on the sand, and beginning to fire great guns into the lodging-houses; whereupon I would awake with the cry of ‘War!’.”42

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Notes 1. Manchester Guardian, 3 November 1912. 2. Mark Biondich, The Balkans: Revolution, War and Political Violence since 1878 (Oxford, 2011), p. 78. 3. Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1985), pp. 44– 6. 4. Sean McMeekin, The Berlin – Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898– 1918 (London, 2010), p. 14. 5. George W. Gawrych, The Young Atatu¨rk: From Ottoman Soldier to Statesman of Turkey (London, 2013), pp. 16– 24. 6. See Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Jews and Muslims, 1430– 1950 (London, 2004). 7. See Richard Bosworth, Italy, the Least of the Great Powers: Italian Foreign Policy Before the First World War (Cambridge, 1979). 8. There is a detailed account of Bulgarian diplomacy in Richard C. Hall, Bulgaria’s Road to the First World War (New York, 1996), pp. 35– 55. 9. Biondich, The Balkans, p. 75. 10. Richard C. Hall, The Balkan Wars, 1912 –13: Prelude to the First World War (London, 2000), p. 21. 11. Edward J. Erickson, Defeat in Detail: The Ottoman Army in the Balkans, 1912– 1913 (Westport, CT, 2003), pp. 60– 1. 12. Richard Crampton, Bulgaria, 1878–1918: A History (Boulder, CO, 1993), p. 405. 13. See Mark Mazower, “The Messiah and the Bourgeoisie: Venizelos and Politics in Greece, 1909 –1912”, Historical Journal, 35:4 (1992), pp. 885–905. 14. Hall, The Balkan Wars, p. 33. 15. In a Punch cartoon of 4 December 1912, an Ottoman soldier surveying the prospect of war comments that “I may have a dog’s chance yet”. Cited in Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson (eds), An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War One and European Culture Before 1914 (New York and Oxford, 2007), p. 289. 16. Hall, Bulgaria’s Road, p. 111. 17. Crampton, Bulgaria, pp. 421 – 2. 18. See Igor Despot, The Balkan Wars in the Eyes of the Warring Parties: Perceptions and Interpretations (Bloomington, IN, 2012), pp. 155 – 6. 19. Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to War in 1914 (London, 2012), p. 288. 20. McMeekin, Berlin – Baghdad Express, p. 81. 21. New York Times, 27 October 1912. 22. Joyce Cary, Memoir of the Bobotes (Readers Union edition, London, 1965), introduction by Walter Allen, pp. 7 – 8. 23. See Mabel St Clair Stobart, War and Women: From Experience in the Balkans and Elsewhere (London, 1913), p. 17, and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry by Harriet Blodgett. The formal title of her unit was the “Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps”.

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24. See The Times, 29 January 1913. 25. Leon Trotsky, The Balkan Wars, 1912– 13 (New York, 1980), p. 329. 26. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Consequences of the Balkan Wars (Washington, DC, 1913), p. 151. The violence of the Balkan Wars is contextualised in Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford, 2007), pp. 132 – 40. 27. Despot, The Balkan Wars, pp. 63 – 4 and 72 – 3. 28. Henry Nevinson, Fire of Life (London, 1935), p. 283. 29. A. Hilliard Atteridge, Famous Modern Battles (London, 1913), p. 478. 30. Cary, Bobotes, pp. 112 – 19. 31. Noel Buxton, With the Bulgarian Staff (London, 1913), pp. 25– 6. 32. Lionel James, With the Conquered Turk (Boston, 1913), pp. 19 – 20. 33. Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, With the Turks in Thrace (New York, 1913), p. 99. 34. Erickson, Defeat in Detail, pp. 343 – 4. 35. Michael Paris, “The First Air Wars – North Africa and the Balkans, 1911 – 13”, Journal of Contemporary History, 26:1 (Jan. 1991), pp. 97–109; see also the appendix by Bu¨lent Yilmazer, in Erickson, Defeat in Detail, pp. 347– 70. 36. Philip Gibbs and Bernard Grant, The Balkan War: Adventures of War with Cross and Crescent (Boston, 1912), p. 108. Gibbs wrote for the London Graphic. 37. Trotsky, The Balkan Wars, p. 337. 38. Manchester Guardian, 22 November 1912. 39. Hall, The Balkan Wars. 40. Charles Emmerson, 1913: The World Before the Great War (London, 2013); Florian Illies, 1913: The Ye ar Before the Storm (London, 2013). 41. Noel Buxton and Charles Roden Buxton, The War and the Balkans, 2nd edn (London, 1915), p. 9. 42. Nevinson, Fire of Life, p. 284.

CHAPTER 2

REALPOLITIK OR FOREIGN POLICY SURREALISM: A RECONSIDERATION OF THE PEACE TREATIES OF BERLIN (1878), LONDON (1913), VERSAILLES (1919), AND TRIANON (1920) Sabrina P. Ramet

Contending Approaches (Filosofico ma non troppo) Realpolitik, championed by such diverse and able writers as Niccolo´ Machiavelli and Hans Morgenthau, is commonly understood as policy directed toward the enhancement of the power, wealth, prestige, and/or influence of one’s nation or state. Such enhancement is generally thought to include, among other things, territorial expansion, the levying of postwar reparations on defeated rivals, the rewarding of one’s allies (at the expense of one’s foes), and sometimes (as in the follow-up to the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne) the forced exchange of populations or expulsion of ethnic minorities, on the supposition that an ethnically homogeneous state is stronger and more stable than an ethnically diverse state (a supposition supported by John Stuart Mill in his Considerations on Representative Government incidentally). Whether these means are the

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most conducive to the long-range interests of a state is a matter for historical and empirical research. The alternative to Realpolitik has gone by a number of names, among which idealism is perhaps the most readily understood and misunderstood. Andreas Hasenclever has offered an alternative term, calling this orientation the moral sociological approach.1 Be that as it may, idealists, while not scorning power, wealth, prestige, and influence, nonetheless insist on the importance of doing what is right and believe, as Immanuel Kant did, that doing the right thing is generally to everyone’s advantage. I therefore take it as a given that there may be a happy marriage between Realpolitik and Idealpolitik, but suggest that we may also identify extremes of both of these orientations. I shall call these extremes surrealism, by which I shall mean the myopic pursuit of short-term advantage, without much understanding of the possible consequences of the policies embraced, and naı¨ve hyper-idealism (hereafter occasionally, hyperism), by which I shall mean the stubborn clinging to impossible fantasies. The Hungarian party Jobbik’s advocacy of a return to Hungary’s pre-1914 borders is an example of naı¨ve hyper-idealism, while Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic´’s declaration that he will not trade Kosovo (over which Serbia does not exercise effective sovereignty) for European Union membership might be an example of cunning Realpolitik, whether directed toward building his domestic support or intended to obtain some concessions internationally, or it might be rather an example of hyperism – time will tell. (One should not forget, of course, that the Serbian constitution declares that Kosovo is an integral part of Serbia; this places rather obvious constraints on what the elected president of the country can do or say.) Thus stated, it should be clear that hyperidealists are not necessarily on the side of the angels; indeed, I doubt that they ever are. But notice that both foreign-policy surrealism and naı¨ve hyper-idealism result in delusional politics. Here, I find I think back to Socrates’ debate with Thrasymachus, as recorded in Book I of Plato’s Republic. There we find Thrasymachus arguing that “governments use their power to make tyrannical, democratic, or aristocratic laws, as suits their interests. These laws, then, [are] designed to serve the interests of the ruling class.”2 Although Socrates/Plato did not allow Thrasymachus sufficient space to develop

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his ideas, we may safely take the latter’s claims as the earliest expostulation of what has come to be called the “realist” position. The classic advocates of the realist and idealist points of view are respectively Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Reflecting on the English Civil War and being no doubt cognizant of the various other wars ravaging Europe during his lifetime – including the French Wars of Religion (1562–98), the Ottoman–Habsburg War (1593–1606), the Polish–Swedish Wars (1600–29), the Polish–Muscovite War (1605–18), the Ingrian War between Sweden and Russia (1610–17), the Kalmar War in which Denmark-Norway fought against Sweden (1611–13), the Franco– Spanish War (1635), the Thirty Years War (1618–48), the Second Northern War (1655–8), and the Gyldenløve War (1675–9) – Hobbes viewed the world as threatening and peace as uncertain. To remedy the problem, he recommended that people entrust their security to an absolute sovereign; he scorned democracy, which he believed sowed only faction and strife. But Hobbes neither dismissed morality nor counselled immorality. He recognised nonetheless that people might have different opinions about what was moral and what immoral, and therefore urged that the sovereign be authorised to make definitive judgements about the content of the moral law.3 In this way, Hobbes believed it was possible for societies to secure domestic peace. He devoted little attention to international politics, but if one were to extrapolate from his theory about domestic security, one might surmise that having an institution, sufficiently powerful to enforce its decisions, making definite judgements about the content of international law, might be conducive to the peaceful settlement of at least some disputes. International relations theorists drawing upon Leviathan have tended, however, to draw the lesson that statesmen should grab what they can, seeking power above all. Hobbes was, of course, pessimistic in certain ways, but he was not as pessimistic as some interpreters have made him out to be. Kant, the patron saint of idealism, famously criticised Hobbes on a few occasions, and certainly Kant’s sympathy for a Rechtsstaat or what he called republican rule already signalled his aversion to political absolutism of the sort Hobbes assigned to the sovereign. Kant also believed that the moral law was not so elusive that the king needed to sort it out; on the contrary, he believed that, on most moral questions, one could expect a broad consensus of opinion. Kant also believed that

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morality had political consequences and that, while brutal regimes relied on violence, whether domestically or vis-a`-vis other states, to survive, and were inherently unstable, regimes that respect human rights and operate according to law, tended to be peace-loving and stable. Kant may, thus, be credited as the founder of the theory of democratic peace. Kant never claimed that universal peace was achievable. On the contrary, he believed that “perpetual peace, the ultimate goal of the whole Right of Nations, is indeed an unachievable idea”. But he insisted at the same time that “the political principles directed toward perpetual peace, of entering into such alliances of states, which serve for continual approximation to it, are not unachievable”.4 Moreover, in Kant’s view, efforts directed toward building consensus and harmony among nations should be understood as a duty. Given Kant’s qualified and careful defence of his position, it is hard to agree with Kenneth Thompson’s allegation, in 1977, that “Idealists . . . are more likely [than realists] . . . to assume that peace will be secure once evil men have been defeated.”5 Certainly, for Kant, advancing the cause of peace involved, in the first place, not defeating “evil men” but developing international law and international organisations in which nations could endeavor to resolve differences in viewpoint in a peaceful and mutually rewarding way. Percy Corbett, a twentieth-century idealist, writing in his classic work, Morals, Law, and Power in International Relations (1956), argued that “the indispensable foundation” for an “inclusive social order” that allows member states to work in harmony toward the peaceful resolution of disputes and the advancement of common interests “is an operative recognition of moral values transcending all particular State interests”,6 thus shifting one’s focus from the particular to the whole. Sir Halford Mackinder may be taken as an archetypcal realist, although one whose writings also may have encouraged foreign policy surrealism. In his Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919), Mackinder questioned the ability of democratic systems to defend themselves and suggested that power was founded on empire: the more strategically important land a state controlled – or the more minerals it could mine and petroleum it could pump – and the more people a state ruled over, the more powerful that state was.7 Advocating for the United Kingdom some decades ago, Edward Dicey declared, “In every part of the world where British interests are at stake, I am in favour of advancing these interests even at the cost of war. The only qualification I admit is that the

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country we desire to annex or take under our protection should be calculated to confer a tangible advantage upon the British Empire.”8 Hans Morgenthau, while acknowledging the relevance of moral concerns, nonetheless advised that “the state has no right to let its moral disapprobation of the infringement of liberty get in the way of successful political action”.9 While one might ask what exactly qualifies as “successful political action”, it seems that, for the realists, power trumps morality or – to put it in its classic formulation – might makes right. But for idealists, power built on the foundation of “control over people who resent that control is an unstable basis for continuing economic growth”.10 Indeed, as the collapse of the communist organisational monopoly in eastern Europe in the course of 1989 –90 and the Arab Spring of 2011 remind us, nonconsensual power is also a recipe for political instability, if not for political implosion. If then, unright – to employ a rarely used word – makes for weakness, then, it seems, right makes might.

The Argument (Allegro e preciso) The peace treaties brokered by the great powers in 1878, 1913 and 1919 – 20 were all guided by certain understandings or misunderstandings of Realpolitik. In each of these cases, the great powers sought to reward their friends and restrict, deny or punish their rivals and foes, and the clients of their rivals and foes. In each of the latter two cases (thus excluding 1878), there was also a marked tendency to sanction territorial reapportionment achieved by force. Again, in each of the cases, there was a tendency – which is to say, not a consistent pattern – to ignore the wishes of local populations in redrawing or sanctioning new boundaries. And yet, even though the great powers were, in effect, able to dictate the terms of these peace settlements, not one of these treaties achieved results with which those powers could be thought to have been satisfied. In each case, the misunderstanding of Realpolitik produced results that the great powers did not want. Either the great powers have consistently failed to practise Realpolitik, and have, rather, been practising Surrealpolitik (which one might associate with the egoist philosopher Max Stirner, whose central assertion was “I want”11), or Realpolitik, as understood by its practitioners simply does not work.

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The Cases (Theme and Variations) Realpolitik may be advocated or negated by scholars, but it is practised or eschewed by statesmen. The question is: did the statesmen representing the great powers advance the long-term interests of their respective states or promote results quite adverse to those interests? Il caso primo: the Treaty of Berlin (1878). As is well known, the Congress of Berlin was convened in the summer of 1878 for the purpose of revising the territorial settlement reached at San Stefano the previous March. The major beneficiaries of the Treaty of San Stefano were to have been the Bulgarians, who were to have been granted a large independent state, dominating the central Balkan peninsula, and the Russians, who were to have been allowed to occupy territory up to the outskirts of Constantinople. The Greeks and Serbs were antagonistic to the Treaty of San Stefano, because the Bulgarian state foreseen by that treaty would have blocked the realisation of their respective, but not entirely compatible, ambitions. Bulgaria was widely perceived to be Russia’s client; thus, Austria-Hungary, which was competing with Russia for control and influence in the Balkans, wanted to see Bulgaria reduced in size. What neither Russia nor Austria-Hungary cared about was what the people inhabiting the peninsula wanted. Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, presided over the Congress of Berlin, to which Great Britain, Russia, France, and AustriaHungary also sent negotiators. The Balkan states, which would be affected by the outcome of the negotiations, were not allowed to participate in the deliberations, only to send representatives to present their respective demands.12 The delegates of the great powers behaved according to what seemed to them to be the rules of Realpolitik. The Ottoman Empire, the victim spread out before the diplomats “like a patient etherized upon a table”,13 was to cede land all around. Russia obtained southern Bessarabia, Batum, Kars, and Ardahan; Britain took control of Cyprus; Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina (and would annex it in 1908) and was allowed to garrison the Sandzˇak of Novi Pazar; and Serbia, Montenegro and Romania were recognised as independent states. Where the “Greater Bulgaria” of San Stefano was concerned, Macedonia was returned to Ottoman control, a small Bulgarian state occupying the territory corresponding roughly to the northern half of today’s Bulgaria was recognised as autonomous under

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Ottoman suzerainty, but not independent, and what was left of “Greater Bulgaria” was established as a separate province under the name Eastern Rumelia. The Sultan was to appoint a Christian governor to administer Eastern Rumelia, which was to operate under a separate statute. But, as Jelavich and Jelavich point out, “at Berlin the diplomats had realized that the separation of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia was of a temporary nature, and that the two provinces would eventually unite”.14 In the short run, the great powers went to work drafting the organic statute for Eastern Rumelia, as if they were preparing a document that would stand the test of time. The British got to work on electoral procedures, the French on administration, the Austrians on the legal system, and the Russians and French on the organisation of the militia. Even the Italians played a role in the largely inconsequential effort, drafting the sections of the statute dealing with finances. By April 1879, the work on the statute was complete; six years later, in September 1885, unionist leaders in Eastern Rumelia, with the support of the militia, overthrew the government and proclaimed union with Bulgaria. Seven years earlier, it was Britain which had been the most vocal advocate of the division of Bulgaria and the creation of Eastern Rumelia – over Russian objections. Now, the British supported unification and the Russians were opposed. The Russian court was not opposed so much to the nation’s unification as such, but to the nation’s unification under Prince Alexander Battenberg, who had already shown his readiness to defy St Petersburg.15 Since the Treaty of Berlin had failed to produce a stable or workable result where Bulgaria was concerned, the great powers convened an informal conference of ambassadors in Constantinople in early November 1885. The conference ended in a stalemate, since the powers sought to advance mutually exclusive interests. This, in turn, suggested to Serbian Prince Milan that this might be a good time to expand his realm. He therefore declared war on Bulgaria on 13 November 1885. Within less than two weeks, Bulgarian forces had routed the invading Serbian army and Austria intervened diplomatically on the side of the Serbs to stop the Bulgarian army from entering Belgrade.16 Serbia gained nothing from this adventure, but Bulgaria’s military victory assured international recognition of the union of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia, which was achieved, in diplomatic terms, on 5 April 1886.

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While the abortive division of Bulgaria into (northern) Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia accomplished nothing except to provoke a short war and delay the inevitable, the return of Macedonia to Ottoman control was quite another matter. Bulgaria, obviously, hoped to fulfill the promise of San Stefano and gain control of the region which came to be known, now, as the “Balkan apple of discord”. From a linguistic (though not a political) point of view, Macedonian may be considered a dialect of Bulgarian and, in the nineteenth century the Macedonian and Bulgarian languages were, if anything, closer than they are today. The Greeks, nurturing memories of the Byzantine Empire as well as fanciful “recollections” of the empire of Alexander the Great, wanted to bring Macedonia under their rule. And, to the north, Belgrade dreamt of bringing Macedonia under a Serbian scepter. Commenting on the demographics of Macedonia in 1869–70, Liobe´n Karavelov, a Bulgarian publicist, wrote the following: The Greeks show no interest in knowing what kind of people live in such a country as Macedonia. It is true that they say that the country formerly belonged to the Greeks and therefore ought to belong to them again . . . But we are in the nineteenth century and historical and canonical rights have lost all significance. Every people, like every individual, ought to be free and every nation has the right to live for itself. Thrace and Macedonia ought then to be Bulgarian since the people who live there are Bulgarians.17 Following the Treaty of Berlin, both the Greeks and the Bulgarians used their respective Orthodox Churches to promote their territorial agendas in Macedonia. Greek schools were opened in Macedonia under “the patronage of Greek or Hellenized metropolitans and bishops”.18 The Greek – Bulgarian ecclesiastical competition in Macedonia had been underway since 1830, and by 1869 relations between the two hierarchies were characterised by rancour. The following year, the Ottoman Sultan issued a firman (decree) granting the Bulgarian Church the right to establish an exarchate; in reply, the ecumenical patriarchate excommunicated the Bulgarians.19 The exarchate used the resources at its disposal to promote the Bulgarian national agenda among Macedonians. And in Serbian eyes, the region others called Macedonia was better seen as south Serbia; accordingly, the Serbian Orthodox

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Church also nurtured ambitions there, ambitions which would be realised after 1913. In the meantime, the three rivals used churches, schools, newspapers, communal organisations, and propaganda to try to establish control and exclude each other from territory which, according to the Treaty of Berlin, belonged to the Ottoman Empire. Linguistic assimilation was a key tool in the process, but in fact it was scarcely promoted with sufficient vigor to achieve its aims. Thus, [m]ost Macedonians attended religious services in a language they did not understand . . . The vast majority of students at foreign (propaganda) schools received only one to three years of elementary schooling – insufficient even to grasp Bulgarian and Serbian, let alone Greek. Macedonian dialects remained the language of home and everyday life for Macedonians.20 The contest also became violent, with armed bands terrorising the population by 1900. After the Ilinden Uprising of 1903, the violence escalated, with supporters of all three rivals resorting to violence to intimidate those not accepting their respective national agendas.21 By 1904, nonetheless, Bulgaria and Serbia started to build ties, because of their shared ambition to annex land controlled by the Ottomans; by 1911, the Bulgarians were also negotiating with the Greeks, and managed to secure a defensive alliance. The problem was that the territorial ambitions of the three rivals remained mutually exclusive. Thus, the Balkan Wars of 1912– 13 could not produce a result satisfying to all three parties. Discussion of the outcome of that war belongs to the next section. At this point, however, we may ask ourselves if the Treaty of Berlin worked to the long-term advantage of the British, French, and other European would-be Real-politicians. Neither the British nor the Russians were, in the long term, able to hold onto the lands they awarded themselves in 1878. Without entering into a discussion of such possible benefits as may have accrued to them from these annexations in the short term, we may ask, did the great powers hope, at Berlin, to sow instability and hatred in Macedonia? Did they believe it was in their interests to see armed bands terrorising the population of Macedonia? Was it in the interests of Britain and France to set the stage for the

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Balkan Wars of 1912– 13? Or, alternatively, if the assumption was that the Ottoman Empire was in retreat, might it not have served the common interests of all concerned, and have promoted stability, to have held referenda in the various districts of Macedonia in order to allow local people to decide their own fate? Or was this democratic principle not for export? Il caso secondo: the Treaty of London (1913). In the wake of the Young Turk rebellion in 1908, Ottoman control in the southern Balkan peninsula seemed ever more tenuous. The Albanians were in a state of constant revolt between 1909 and 1912; Macedonia was rife with discontent and sliding into chaos. Then, in early 1912, with Russian encouragement, Serbia and Bulgaria began negotiations directed toward establishing an offensive alliance against Ottoman Turkey. The treaty of alliance was signed in February 1912, but without an agreement between the two signatories concerning the ultimate disposition of certain parts of Macedonia.22 Subsequently, Greece also forged an alliance with Serbia. A large pro-war demonstration was held in Sofia on 5 September, even as war preparations were underway. In the British House of Commons, some MPs were watching these developments with growing concern. On 7 October 1912, David Mason, MP, asked in session what the government was doing to prevent war from breaking out in the Balkans. The reply offered by the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, suggested that little was being done by any of the great powers besides expressing “strong disapproval of a breach of the peace in the Balkans”, while encouraging Turkey to make further domestic reforms on top of those already carried out.23 The following day, Montenegro initiated hostilities, to be joined shortly thereafter by Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece. The allied armies totalled more than 700,000 men, against which the Ottomans possessed only 320,000 locally. The Greek navy effectively blocked the Straits, preventing reinforcements from reaching the Ottoman defenders.24 Back at Whitehall, the British government refused to take any action to prevent financiers from supplying funds to the combatants, and professed a policy of strict neutrality.25 By the end of November, Serbian forces had taken control of the Albanian port city of Durre¨s. “Serb cavalry rode their horses into the sea, crying out ‘Long live the Serbian sea!’”26 Montenegrin and Serbian forces also laid siege to Shkode¨r, finally starving the defenders into surrender.

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The allied forces drove the Ottomans back on all fronts, and proceeded to annex the territories evacuated by Ottoman troops. The Turks signed an armistice with Serbia and Bulgaria on 3 December 1912, although Greek and also Serbian forces continued to advance after that date. In an effort to resolve at least some of the issues in dispute, it was decided to convene a peace conference in London, to be chaired by Britain’s foreign secretary. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith declared his position as follows: “The policy of Great Britain is to promote the happiness of all the populations concerned or interested . . . We are equally interested in the happiness of all the populations concerned.”27 In fact, in the months leading up to the signing of the Treaty of London on 30 May 1913, there were members of parliament who expressed concerns about human rights, adopting the idealist high ground. A notable example was Lord Lamington who, speaking in the House of Lords in mid-February, cited sources alleging that the allied forces had been butchering Muslim men, and often women and children as well, calling the conflict a “war of extermination”.28 But when Lord Lamington requested that British consular reports be made available, in order to confirm sundry eye-witness accounts of Christian massacres of Muslims, Viscount Morley, in his capacity as Lord President of the Council, simply refused. The Viscount’s refusal in turn provoked the Earl of Cromer to confess, “I cannot help contrasting the extreme indignation shown by certain classes in this country when it has been a question of Turks massacring Christians with the apparent apathy which is shown on the other side when it is a question of Christians massacring Turks.”29 Lord Lamington took up the Albanian cause once again at the end of April 1913, to urge the establishment of an International Commission to assure that those Muslims, who had been driven from their homes but who might want to return to them and regain possession, could do so in safety. Viscount Morley dismissed Lamington’s plea out of hand. But Lamington also appealed, on this occasion, to considerations of Realpolitik, suggesting in turn the compatibility of idealism and Realpolitik. “For the sake of peace in the Balkan States”, he told the House of Lords, it is most essential to have a strong Albania, and to leave considerable portions of the Albanian population outside this new State may not lead to contentment. Further, a strong Albania is

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essential; otherwise there are certainly two Powers in Europe who are directly interested in the affairs of Albania, and unless you have a country able to be self-supporting and which has districts other than mere wild mountain tracts, it will be difficult to prevent intrigues being carried on.30 Lord Lamington had some allies in the House of Commons, specifically James Hope and Sir J.D. Rees. In March, Hope expressed his concern that there should be “guarantees for racial and religious freedom in all the country conquered by the Balkan League” – a concern that transparently reflected an intention to afford protection to all believers who were not Orthodox Christians.31 The following month, Rees lent his support to a resolution taken by the “All-India Moslem League” which demanded “that the Foreign Office should take action with regard to the outrages perpetrated by the Balkan invaders against the Mussulman population of Macedonia”.32 But such protests were of no avail. The London peace conference had convened on 17 December 1912 under Sir Edward Grey’s chairmanship. The Albanian delegation sought international support for its claim to an Albanian state within its ethnic borders, which is to say to include also Kosova. It was only due to Austria’s threat of unilateral military intervention33 that Slavic forces were eventually withdrawn from Durre¨s and Shkode¨r but, even so, much of ethnic Albania remained under foreign occupation, and a decision in Albania’s favour would have required the withdrawal of Serbian, Montenegrin, and Greek forces from additional recent conquests. Fighting resumed on 30 January 1913 – resulting in a suspension in the peace negotiations – and on 26 March 1913, Bulgarian forces overran Adrianople. A second armistice was signed on 16 April 1913 and peace negotiations, which had been suspended upon the resumption of hostilities, reopened on 20 May. Austria-Hungary and Italy took Albania’s side at the conference, while Russia and France backed Serbia and Montenegro. Britain and Germany stayed aloof, maintaining a posture of neutrality. As a result, more than half of ethnic Albania was awarded to the states occupying Albanian land.34 Aubrey Herbert had already warned the Commons that “[b]y reducing, by curtailing, and by mutilating Albania, you make that one thing that everybody most desires – that is, equilibrium and stability in the Balkans – very much harder to obtain.”35 His words would prove to be prophetic.

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Bulgarian forces had borne the brunt of the fighting against the Ottoman Empire but, in turning to assume control in that portion of Macedonia that had been previously agreed should fall to Sofia, the Bulgarians found that the Serbs and the Greeks had no intention of honouring their agreements and preferred to hold onto land promised to Bulgaria, as well as to land which was supposed to have been submitted to the Russian tsar for arbitration. Bulgaria therefore responded by attacking Serbia and Greece during the night of 29– 30 June 1913. But Montenegro, Romania and the Ottoman Empire now entered the war against Bulgaria, which, in consequence, ended up with less territory than it would have been able to annex, had it not resumed hostilities. The Treaty of Bucharest (10 August 1913), concluded without the participation of the great powers, confirmed the territorial changes effected on the battlefield as well as the independence of Albania, within the truncated boundaries recognised in the Treaty of London. There were, as we have seen, voices pleading for respect for the wishes of local inhabitants, such as Lord Lamington. But these pleas fell on deaf ears at the London conference, where Surrealpolitik prevailed. Thus, following their misguided notion of what was “realistic”, the great powers advocated for their respective clients, not for justice. Even Austria-Hungary was probably more concerned to defend a potential client, Albania, against the Serbs, with whom the Austrians had recently quarrelled in what has come down as the “Pig War” and whom Vienna wanted to contain,36 than in championing Kantian-style justice. The result, in London, was a kind of oldfashioned horse-trading, in which the great powers looked out for what they thought would serve their interests and, not only that, but had their eyes fixed only on the short term. The result was that, although large numbers of Albanians living in compact areas were assigned to foreign rule under the terms of the Treaty of London, none of the states directly concerned were satisfied with its terms. Serbian troops had occupied the land along the Adriatic coast for a while, and the Montenegrin government wanted to annex Shkode¨r. As previously mentioned, only pressure from Austria forced the Serbs and Montenegrins to yield these claims to the Albanians. On the other hand, the Albanian cities of Ipek (Pec´), Prizren, Gjakove¨ (Djakovica), and Dibe¨r (Debar) were transferred to Slavic control. Athens was also dissatisfied with the territorial settlement, in spite of the transfer of

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2,800 sq. miles to Greek control. But the new Albanian– Greek border left an equal number of Greeks under Albanian rule as Albanians under Greek rule – about 35,000 in each case.37 Neither the Serbs nor the Montenegrins made any pretence that the Albanians had come under their control freely. On the contrary, and as if to prove that their annexations had proceeded without regard to the wishes of the local population, Serbian and Montenegrin forces began killing and forcibly expelling local Albanians already in 1912 and continued this policy until 1915, when the Serbian army was driven out by a combination of German and Austro-Hungarian arms.38 As the Albanians were removed from their land, Serb “colonists” were sent in to take possession of Albanian homes. The names of towns were, of course, changed; Ferizaj, for example, was renamed Urosˇevac in 1914. Serbian sources claim that, between 1876 and 1912, about 150,000 Serbs had been forced, by Albanians, to flee from Kosova.39 But Serbian revenge was harsh and those Albanians who remained in Kosova organised resistance. As of spring 1919, resistance leader Azem Bejta (1889 – 1924) had roughly 10,000 Albanian fighters (kac�aks) under his command.40 The authorities replied with counterforce, and during 1918 and 1919 the Serbian Army was repeatedly deployed to suppress uprisings on the part of Albanians. There were reports of massacres of Albanians by the Serbian Army in and around Podgor Metohijski (near Pec´), in Rozˇaj (in the Sandzˇak), in the Djakovica region, in the Rugovo Gorge, and in the Plav and Gusinje districts. [Kosta] Pec´anac’s Chetniks were also given free rein in Kosovo. The Kosove¨ Committee [which was a key player in organising the resistance] became involved in arms trafficking . . . The kac� aks bombed government buildings, attacked trains, and rustled cattle during the years 1918–1924.41 But by 1924, the resistance had been crushed. In the meantime, Belgrade had closed all Albanian-language schools in Kosova, and decided later to exclude Albanian schoolchildren and students also from Serbian-language state schools. A fresh wave of Serb “colonisation” was organised and, by 1938, nearly 11,000 Serb and Montenegrin families had settled on land seized from Albanian families.42

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In fact, the Albanians of Kosova were treated as second-class citizens throughout the years of rule by Belgrade, except during the years 1968– 81.43 In the years when Slobodan Milosˇevic´ ran Serbia (1987–2000), Kosova’s autonomy was abolished, its provincial assembly was suppressed, Albanian-language instruction at the University of Prishtina was terminated, and large numbers of Albanian professors, judges, police, physicians and other medical personnel, and factory directors were fired – totalling some 130,000 between 1990 and early 1995.44 Ibrahim Rugova, the de facto leader of the Kosovar Albanians during this troubled time, counselled peaceful resistance. But a peaceful Albanian demonstration to defend the Yugoslav constitution of 1974 was broken up by Milosˇevic´’s police, because the Serbian government in those years was determined to act in violation of country’s constitution! During the years of the War of Yugoslav Succession (1991– 5), the Albanians held to their pacifist strategy and, when the Dayton peace talks began in November 1995, hoped that some note would be taken of their human rights. When that did not happen, the Albanians resorted to armed insurrection; Milosˇevic´ responded by letting convicted criminals out of prison on condition that they arm themselves, go to Kosova, steal whatever they liked from local Albanians, and do what they wished to the houses owned by Albanians.45 By early autumn 1998, there were more than 265,000 Albanians without shelter, many of whom were camping in the woods.46 Serbian security forces joined in the rampage and, in March 1999, NATO went to war with Serbia in order to stop the violence against the Albanians. Today, Kosova is an independent, if impoverished, state, in which criminality developed in the conditions created by the Milosˇevic´ regime. The question is, if the great powers who were party to the London Conference of 1913 could have known the consequences of assigning Kosova to Serbia, would they have considered such a move in their own interests? Since Realpolitik, understood as grabbing what one wants and rewarding one’s allies, is still touted by many as the wisest approach in international politics, it is fair to ask if the interests of the great powers were served by the killing of large numbers of Albanians following Kosova’s annexation by Serbia, or by the second-class treatment suffered by the Albanians during much of the lifespan of first and second Yugoslavia, or by the systematic violation of the human rights of Albanians in the Milosˇevic´ era? Of course, some may choose to believe

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that the interests of the great powers were neither served nor damaged by any of this, and that the great powers have no vested interest in peace or stability or human rights, and thus, that Prime Minister Asquith’s declaration that Great Britain was “equally interested in the happiness of all the populations concerned” was just a bit of pleasant-sounding blather, not to be taken literally. But, in fact, the great powers became convinced, at least by 1999 if not earlier, that their interests were at stake in Kosova, and hence NATO’s 78-day war with Serbia. The deliberations in London in 1912– 13, I venture, exemplified not Realpolitik, but Surrealpolitik, with ultimately very destructive consequences. Il caso terzo: the Paris treaties (1919– 20). There were five peace treaties signed in Paris between June 1919 and August 1920. These were: the Treaty of Versailles with Germany (28 June 1919), the Treaty of Saint-Germain with Austria (10 September 1919), the Treaty of Neuilly with Bulgaria (27 November 1919), the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary (4 June 1920), and the Treaty of Se`vres with Turkey (10 August 1920). The last of these was later revised by the Treaty of Lausanne (24 June 1923). World War I – called “the Great War” until a fresh continental war broke out in September 1939 – was a war for territory. America’s Woodrow Wilson was the only leader of a great power who did not see it that way. Russia wanted Constantinople and the Straits, Austria-Hungary wanted to expand southward, Italy wanted to annex land from both Austria and Albania, France wanted to retrieve Alsace-Lorraine and, as it turned out later, also hoped to annex the Saarland from Germany, Britain eventually decided to take Germany’s African colonies, and, judging from the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Germany had territorial ambitions in the east. Among the lesser powers, Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria were not alone in also seeking to expand their domains. During 1913–14, Austria-Hungary, Italy and Great Britain had cooperated to force Montenegro to pull out of northern Albania and seemed to be determined to safeguard Albanian independence within the borders fixed at the London conference.47 But once the “Great War” broke out in summer 1914, Britain and Italy happily abandoned any pretense of commitment to the young Albanian state and, under the Pact of London (26 April 1915), Whitehall agreed to Italian annexation of the Albanian port of Vlore¨ (Valona in Italian) and the surrounding area, as well as Saseno Island, together with the ‘neutralisation’ of the Albanian coast.48

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Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s Foreign Minister, had no doubts about what moral judgement might be rendered concerning British concessions to Italy’s territorial appetite and offered, as justification of the Pact, that “[i]n war you will have secret treaties. Many things regarded as criminal [in peacetime] are regarded as inevitable in war”.49 Although Italy was not awarded the promised Albanian territories,50 the Treaties of Versailles and Trianon disposed of German and Hungarian land in such a way as to guarantee that those two states would be eager to retrieve at least a portion of their alienated patrimony, whether by diplomacy or by purchase51 or by resort to arms. If the point of those two treaties was to push Europe toward a new, major war, they were admirably suited to the purpose. Under the Treaty of Trianon, Hungary lost 189,907 sq. km of land, which included the port of Rijeka, with a total population of 10,649,416 (according to the 1910 census); it was left with only 92,963 sq. km, thus one-third of its pre-war extent, with no access to the sea, and a modest residual population of 7,615,117 (again citing the 1910 census and thus not counting the fact that 661,000 soldiers mobilised in Hungary had lost their lives in the war, not to mention huge losses in civilian casualties).52 Roughly three million Magyars – almost onethird of the Magyar population of pre-war Hungary – lived in compact areas adjacent to the Hungarian frontier but seized by Czechoslovakia, Romania, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (hereafter, the Kingdom of SHS). The only referendum held in south-eastern Europe involved the Slovenes, some of whom chose to remain conjoined with what was left of Austria. Among those lands lost by Hungary was Ba´cska, which was annexed by the Kingdom of SHS and called Vojvodina by the Serbs. Although the government in Belgrade adopted policies after 1919 designed to induce Magyars to leave Vojvodina, a census conducted during World War II, when Hungary briefly retrieved control of the region, showed that Magyars still outnumbered Serbs locally, by more than two to one. According to the 1941 census, 37 per cent of Vojvodina’s population at that time still consisted of Magyars, with 19 per cent Germans, 18 per cent Croats, 16 per cent Serbs, and 10 per cent members of other national groups.53 Altogether, about half a million Magyars were assigned to the Kingdom of SHS by the Treaty of Trianon; more than a million found themselves under Czechoslovak rule and some 1,704,000 Magyars had been brought by force under Romanian rule.54

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Under the circumstances, revanchism became mainstream in Hungary, Regent (Admiral) Miklo´s Horthy’s government embraced revisionism, and secret and not-so-secret nationalist societies flourished. Nor was revanchism just a question of sentiment or even of the natural and practical desire of people to live together with others speaking the same language. There were also economic considerations. As Miklo´s Molna´r explains: Economic adaptation to the country’s reduced geography was hard. The Great Plain and Transdanubia (give or take a few borders) provided the bulk of national product. Aside from a small quantity of coal, there was no energy source or raw materials. Waterways had been cut at the new frontiers, as [had] roads and railway lines, which came to dead ends. Furthermore, there were no more outlets to the Adriatic; the forests belonged to the new distant and foreign Carpathians. The economic consequences of peace were as disastrous as those of war.55 Hungarian anger and resentment were directed toward the victors in World War II – which meant, in the first place, toward the three countries that had seized Hungarian land by force and that had joined together to form the anti-Hungarian “Little Entente”, and, in the second place, toward Great Britain and France. After Gyula Go¨mbo¨s, a radical-right leader, became prime minister of Hungary in October 1932, the Budapest government quickly entered into friendly relations with Italy’s Mussolini and Germany’s Hitler. Thanks to its alignment with the Third Reich, Hungary benefitted from the two “Vienna Awards” arranged by the German Fu¨hrer, as a result of which Hungary was able to retrieve 12,000 sq. km of land seized by Czechoslovkia, in which 86.5 per cent of the local population was Magyar, and 43,590 sq. km of land that had been seized two decades previous by Romania, in which 51.4 per cent of the local population was Magyar.56 Putting its eggs in the German basket, Hungary was also able to regain control, again temporarily, of Ruthenia and Ba´cska. Hungarian resentment of the terms of the Treaty of Trianon was, thus, a powerful inducement to Budapest to align with Berlin.

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But the decisive treaty was, of course, the Treaty of Versailles. Signed on 28 June 1919, the treaty compelled Germany to cede territory to France (Alsace-Lorraine), Belgium, Poland, and Lithuania, while Danzig (a city whose population was 95 per cent German) was established as a free city without consulting the wishes of the city’s population. A referendum held in Schleswig-Holstein in 1920 resulted in the surrender to Denmark of northern Schleswig. As a result of these transfers, the German land mass shrank by 13.5 per cent, its economic capacity by 13 per cent, its iron ore reserves by 74 per cent, and its pig iron reserves by 41 per cent.57 While the Congress of Vienna, steered by the capable Count Clemens von Metternich, had restored France to its pre-Napoleonic borders and set the stage for the rapid rehabilitation of post-revolutionary France into the European family of nations – showing where Idealpolitik and Realpolitik, when properly understood, meet – the Treaty of Versailles also included a clause in which, by signing the treaty, the German representatives accepted that their nation bore sole responsibility for the war in which so many states had nurtured and pursued territorial ambitions. The Treaty of Versailles also imposed reparations later fixed at 34 billion marks.58 In addition, French and Belgian troops occupied the Rhineland, in order to enforce reparations payments, and France also occupied the Saarland until 1935, introducing French as a mandatory subject in the schools of that region, with an eye to eventual annexation. That particular French objective was not achieved and, after a referendum conducted on 13 January 1935, the Saarland was returned to German control.59 These harsh and punitive measures were not, perhaps, sufficient to drive the country toward Nazism but, combined with high unemployment and generally bad economic conditions after 1929, they most certainly made their contribution. The Nazi war cry “Deutschland, erwache!” (“Germany, wake up!”) was a shrill call to fight and reverse the Versailles diktat. If it may be accepted that the punitive treatment of Weimar Germany, upon which French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau insisted, sowed seeds of deep resentment that encouraged Germans to support the Nazis in embarking on a war of vengeance, restoration, and expansion, then, I venture to suggest, both the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Trianon were characterised by unadulterated Surrealpolitik, and a surreal diktat should not be expected to be conducive to either domestic or international stability and peace.

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Aufhebung (Senza Paura) The conditions under which Belgrade and Bucharest had enlarged their domains at Hungary’s expense, involving force, allowed Hitler to present himself as a protector of national self-determination, at least where Hungarians were concerned and, of course, in the case of Danzig, which was annexed to the Third Reich in 1939, with the enthusiastic support of the city’s population. Subsequently, given a general understanding that Nazi Germany’s drive to annex the Polish corridor and the Sudetenland had been supported by some of the local Germans, postwar Poland and Czechoslovakia resolved upon and carried out a massive, forcible deportation of almost all of their German populations.60 With the peace of 1815 framed on idealist, which is to say realistic, principles, a Concert of Europe came into being, in which the great powers endeavoured to resolve their differences diplomatically.61 The years from 1815 to 1848 were thus – with the exception of the revolutionary upheavals of 1830–1 – an era of peace. But even after the fall of Metternich in March 1848 and the turmoil of 1848–9 – and in spite of a series of conflicts among which one may mention the Crimean War (1854–6), the Italian War of Independence (1859), the Polish Insurrection of 1863 –4, the Austro-Prussian War (1866), and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870– 1 – the Concert of Europe continued to operate, albeit less securely than it did in the age of Metternich. The Concert system ended in 1875– 8, not because of the anti-Ottoman unrest which began in 1875, but because of the response of Britain, France and the other great powers at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Beginning there, the great powers abandoned the principles that had underpinned the post-Napoleonic peace; instead of viewing the world as a community, in which decisions could be reached that would work, in the long run, to everyone’s benefit, they came to see the world of politics as a zero-sum game, in which a gain for one party could only come at the expense of another party. To put it in philosophical terms, what the great powers did at the Congress of Berlin was to abandon Kant for Hobbes or even, one might say, for Machiavelli. In Berlin in 1878, in London in 1913, or in Paris in 1919– 20, the great powers did not ask themselves what policies would be most satisfactory to the local populations concerned or even what policies were most conducive to

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peace. Rather, they looked to achieve short-term gains for themselves and their allies and clients, and to satisfice, rather than contain, potential trouble-makers (such as Serbia and Greece in 1913). But the marked tendency “on the part of Britain and France to value their own comfort over stability and self-determination on the continent”62 – even at costs they would come to consider regrettable – betrayed the failings of foreign policy surrealism. The myth of “ancient hatreds” in the Yugoslav lands served, whether intentionally or not, to camouflage and obscure the culpability of the great powers in fuelling inter-ethnic rancour and even hatreds in south-eastern Europe. But, as I wrote in 1996, “[n]one of these hatreds [in the Balkans] is of ‘ancient’ vintage, and none arose solely on the basis of indigenous forces. Indeed, all are the products of Western-supported annexations or Westernsponsored treaties.”63 Surrealpolitik is the product of fear and greed, not of reason. But a stable peace can be secured only by reason, not by fear and certainly not by territorial greed or choleric punitiveness. If there is anything to be learned from the foregoing record, and indeed from the century and a quarter of violence in south-eastern Europe, 1875 – 1999, it is that aggression is usually more costly, not only to the victim of aggression but also to the aggressor, than diplomacy and that both domestic and international peace are best served by respect for basic human rights including, when empires break up, for national self-determination.

Notes 1. See Andreas Hasenclever, Die Macht der Moral in der internationalen Politik: Milita¨rische Interventionen westlicher Staaten in Somalia, Ruanda und BosnienHerzegowina (Frankfurt, 2000). 2. Plato, The Republic, trans. from ancient Greek by Richard W. Sterling and William C. Scott (New York and London, 1985), p. 36(339a). 3. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. by Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge, 1998). 4. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. from German by Mary Gregor (Cambridge, 1991; reprinted 1993), p. 156. 5. Kenneth W. Thompson, “Idealism and Realism, Beyond the Great Debate”, British Journal of International Studies, 3:2 (July 1997), p. 202.

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6. Percy E. Corbett, Morals, Law, and Power in International Relations (Los Angeles, 1956), p. 16. 7. As summarised in Stanley Kober, “Idealpolitik”, Foreign Policy, 79 (Summer 1990), pp. 4 – 6. 8. As quoted in Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (London, 1963), p. 84, my emphasis. 9. As quoted in Kober, “Idealpolitik”, p. 7. 10. Ibid., p. 16. 11. Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, trans. by Steven Byington, ed. by James J. Martin (New York, 1963). 12. Charles and Barbara Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804 – 1920 (Seattle and London, 1977), p. 156. 13. T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. 14. Jelavich and Jelavich, Establishment of the Balkan National States, p. 158. 15. L.S. Stavrianos, The Balkans Since 1453 (London, 2000; reissue of the original 1958 edition), pp. 430 – 2. 16. R.J. Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2005), p. 99. 17. As quoted in Report of the International Commission To Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, DC, 1914), reissued by the Carnegie Endowment in 1993 under the title The Other Balkan Wars, p. 24. 18. Andrew Rossos, Macedonia and the Macedonians: A History (Stanford, CA, 2008), p. 58. 19. Spas T. Raikin, “Nationalism and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church”, in Pedro Ramet (ed.), Religion and Nationalism in Soviet and East European Politics, Rev. and expanded edn (Durham, NC, 1989), pp. 354 – 5. 20. Rossos, Macedonia and the Macedonians, p. 89. 21. Ibid., p. 88. 22. Crampton, Concise History of Bulgaria, p. 132. 23. Sir Edward Grey, addressing the House of Commons (7 October 1912), vol. 42 cc. 24–5, at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1912/oct/07/greatpowers-and-balkans#S5CV0042P0_19121007_HOC_103 [all internet sources cited in this chapter were accessed on 28 July 2012]. 24. Jelavich and Jelavich, Establishment of the Balkan National States, pp. 218– 19. 25. Sir Edward Grey, addressing the House of Commons (31 October 1912), vol. 43 cc. 528–9, at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1912/oct/31/warin-balkans#S5CV0043P0_19121031_HOC_23; and Grey, addressing the House of Commons (5 December 1912), vol. 44 cc. 2477–8, at http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/commons/1912/dec/05/war-in-balkans#S5CV0044P0_ 19121205_HOC_149. 26. Sabrina P. Ramet, “Albania – Then and Now”, European History Quarterly, 39:1 (2009), p. 109, quoting the Serbian cavalrymen’s cry from Owen Pearson,

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27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

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Albania and King Zog: Independence, Republic and Monarchy 1908– 1939 (London, 2005), p. 35. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, addressing the House of Commons (11 December 1912), vol. 45 cc. 449–52, at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/ commons/1912/dec/11/balkan-settlement-british-interests#S5CV0045P0_ 19121211_HOC_239. Lord Lamington, addressing the House of Lords (19 February 1913), vol. 13 cc. 1429–39, at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1913/feb/19/allegedatrocities-by-the-allied-forces#S5LV0013P0_19130219_HOL_5. The Earl of Cromer, addressing the House of Lords (19 February 1913), vol. 13 cc. 1429– 39, at the same website listed in the previous note. Lord Lamington, addressing the House of Lords (30 April 1913), vol. 13 cc. 364 – 9, at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1913/apr/30/thefuture-of-albania#S5LV0014P0_19130430_HOL_14. Mr James Hope, addressing the House of Commons (31 March 1913), vol. 51 cc. 5 – 6, at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1913/mar/31/ balkan-league#S5CV0051P0_19130331_HOC_40. Sir J.D. Rees, addressing the House of Commons (16 April 1913), vol. 51 cc. 1925, at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1913/apr/16/ macedonian-mussulmans-outrages#S5CV0051P0_19130416_HOC_117. Erwin A. Schmidl, “The International Operation in Albania, 1913– 14”, International Peacekeeping, 6:3 (Autumn 1999), p. 5. Stavrianos, The Balkans Since 1453, p. 537; Jelavich and Jelavich, Establishment of the Balkan National States, p. 230; and Expulsions of Albanians and Colonisation of Kosova (Prishtina, 1997) – ch. 2, “Serbian Occupying Wars and Other Measures for Expulsion of Albanians (1912– 1941)”, at http://www.ess. uwe.ac.uk/kosovo/chap2.htm. Mr Aubrey Herbert, addressing the House of Commons (8 May 1913), vol. 52 cc. 2298– 329, at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1913/may/ 08/albania-and-montenegro#S5CV0052P0_19130508_HOC_266. For details, see Jelavich and Jelavich, Establishment of the Balkan National States, p. 192. Ibid., p. 232. Expulsions of Albanians and Colonisation of Kosova. Milija Sˇc´epanovic´, “The Exodus of Serbs and Montenegrins 1878 – 1988”, in Kosovo, Past and Present (Belgrade, 1989), p. 146. Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (Basingstoke and London, 1998), p. 274. Sabrina P. Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias: State-Building and Legitimation, 1918– 2005 (Washington, DC and Bloomington, 2006), p. 48. Miranda Vickers, Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo (New York, 1998), p. 105.

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43. For a superb treatment of Kosovo in the 40 years following World War II, see Milosˇ Misˇovic´, Ko je trazˇio republiku, Kosovo: 1945 – 1985 (Belgrade, 1987). 44. Sabrina P. Ramet, Whose Democracy? Nationalism, Religion, and the Doctrine of Collective Rights in Post-1989 Eastern Europe (Lanham, MD, 1997), pp. 148 – 9. 45. For details and documentation, see Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge (New Haven, CT, 2000). 46. Ramet, Three Yugoslavias, p. 514. 47. Schmidl, “The International Operation”, pp. 2, 4 – 6, 9. 48. The Pact also provided for Italian annexation of Trentino, Istria, Dalmatia, and the Adriatic islands, in spite of the presence of large numbers of Croats in Dalmatia and on the islands. See Nicola Guy, “The Albanian Question in British Policy and the Italian Intervention, August 1914–April 1915”, in Diplomacy and Statecraft, 18:1 (2007), pp. 109–31, especially pp. 110, 124–5. 49. As quoted in ibid., p. 126. 50. ”At the peace conference the major danger to Albania came from Italy. After much controversy that government finally agreed to the restoration of the 1913 borders [of Albania] in return for the acquisition of the port of Rijeka.” – Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans, vol. 2: Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1983), p. 125. 51. German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann would hope to purchase from Belgium the small enclave of Eupen-Malme´dy which was transferred to Belgian control under the Treaty of Versailles – Jonathan Wright, “Stresemann and Locarno”, Contemporary European History, 4:2 (July 1995), p. 121. 52. Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle, 1974), p. 155; and Miklo´s Molna´r, A Concise History of Hungary, trans. from Hungarian by Anna Magyar (Cambridge, 2001), p. 241. 53. Krisztia´n Ungva´ry, “Vojvodina under Hungarian Rule”, in Sabrina P. Ramet and Ola Listhaug (eds), Serbia and the Serbs in World War Two (Basingstoke, 2011), p. 71. 54. Molna´r, Concise History of Hungary, p. 262. 55. Ibid., p. 269. 56. Ibid., p. 281. 57. Ruth Henig, The Weimar Republic 1919– 1933 (London and New York, 1998), pp. 5 – 6, 20 – 1. 58. Harold James, “The Weimar Economy”, in Anthony McElligott (ed.), Weimar Germany (Oxford and New York, 2009; reprinted 2011), p. 118. 59. Stefan Wolff, The German Question Since 1919: An Analysis with Key Documents (Westport, CT, 2003), pp. 29– 31. 60. See Włodzimierz Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2010), pp. 258 – 60; and Istva´n Poga´ny, “International Human Rights Law, Reparatory Justice and the Re-Ordering of Memory in Central and Eastern Europe“, Human Rights Law Review, 10:3 (2010), pp. 397–428.

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61. For discussion, see Charles de Visscher, Theory and Reality in Public International Law, revised edn (Princeton, NJ, 1968), pp. 45– 8. 62. Sabrina P. Ramet, Social Currents in Eastern Europe: The Sources and Consequences of the Great Transformation, 2nd edn (Durham, NC, 1995), pp. 456– 7. 63. Sabrina P. Ramet, “Eastern Europe’s Painful Transition”, Current History, 95:599 (March 1996), p. 100.

PART II INTERNATIONAL DIMENSIONS

CHAPTER 3 YUGOSLAVISM IN HUNGARY DURING THE BALKAN WARS Eric Beckett Weaver

The affiliations of the Habsburg monarchy’s Slavic minorities, particularly the South Slavs, are central to three interconnected arguments about the break-up of the monarchy. The first argument is over the question of whether the monarchy was successfully handling its nationalities prior to World War I, or rather whether national dissatisfaction would inevitably have torn the monarchy apart even without the world war.1 Oddly, given the central role they played in the demolition of the monarchy, relatively little attention has been paid to the South Slavs, with the exception of the Slovenes, in this regard.2 Specifically, was loyalty to the Habsburg dynasty restricted to a few Serbian and Croatian elites favoured by the regime, while the masses of the South Slavs were infused with nationalist and/or Yugoslavist aspirations? Or, by contrast, was Yugoslavism merely an elite dream? Was there, until the Great War a reserve of loyalty to the Habsburgs, or – at the very least – an indifference to nationalism among the masses of South Slavs?3 The second argument, closely related to the first, is whether the dismemberment of Hungary after the Great War was actually desired by Hungary’s national minorities? Or, contrarily, was the dismemberment of historic Hungary forced upon bewildered locals by foreign powers? And more specifically, did the newly created South Slav

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Kingdom have any real popular support among Hungary’s South Slavs?4 The final argument is over the successor states that took the place of the old monarchy, and whether those states were justifiable and popular among their people, or in any way an improvement on old Hungary and the monarchy as a whole. After all, when Yugoslavia was created, the claim was that the monarchy had been a prison of nationalities, whereas this new multinational state reflected the long cherished dream of the South Slavs.5 The question might also be put in this way: was the act that led to war, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, carried out by deranged, consumptive students from the poorest, least representative part of the monarchy, goaded on by a narrow circle of similarly misguided military conspirators from Serbia?6 Or did the conspiracy to kill the archduke in Sarajevo actually represent a wider popular desire for Yugoslav unity?7 Even before Yugoslavia was created, some argued that it was unnatural and unsustainable, and contained nationalities with irreconcilable differences.8 This idea gained renewed strength with the breakup of Yugoslavia. The argument that Yugoslavia was merely an elite or even a foreign project appears convincing after the bloody ethnic conflicts that accompanied the end of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.9 Thus, a Hungarian author recently denounced the Versailles settlements for “driving, for example, millions of Germans, Hungarians, and Jews into the nonexisting ‘Czechoslovak nation’, ‘Yugoslav nation’, or Boyar [sic] Romanian rule”.10 Similarly, Yugoslavs and Yugoslavia have been called an “impossible nation” and an “impossible country”.11 Yugoslavism among some elites has never been denied, and has been well documented. With regard to Hungary, specifically, Yugoslavism among the masses from the end of World War I to the Versailles settlements has also been covered.12 A number of authors have worked on attitudes toward the monarchy, Serbia, and Yugoslavism expressed in the South Slav press throughout the Habsburg Monarchy, including Hungary. Work has also been done on Yugoslavism during the Balkan Wars in areas where South Slavs formed a majority of the population, such as Croatia-Slavonia. The question is whether Yugoslavism had any popular support in Hungary prior to World War I? In what follows I will give a brief outline of the identities of Hungary’s South Slavs during the Balkan Wars (1912–13). Next I will examine the

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concerns of Habsburg, and particularly Hungarian officialdom vis-a`-vis the identities of the Habsburg monarchy’s South Slavs. Then I will discuss Serbia’s treatment of South Slavs in the Habsburg lands. Finally, through the lens of documents from Hungary’s Interior Ministry, I will look for signs of Yugoslavism among Hungary’s Slavs.

South Slavs and Identity in Hungary Many of the identities held by South Slavs prior to World War I now seem so unusual that they surely ought to be on some list for critically endangered varieties of human experience. One such was that of the Illyrians: not the ancient people, but the community of South Slavs living on the lands of ancient Illyria, which served as a proto-Yugoslav identity. Another, pan-Slavism, was a real concern of Austrian and (especially) Hungarian officials, who saw it as undermining their state.13 Similarly, the Yugoslav identity was also seen as a real threat, especially to Hungary. Of all the forms of endangered identity, none has been so suppressed recently as Yugoslavism. However even the Yugoslav language, Serbo-Croatian, was recognised by officials in Hungary at the start of the twentieth century. Yet many today seem to doubt that Yugoslavism ever really existed, or claim that the disintegration of Yugoslavia is proof that it was a false ideology, forced upon the unwitting masses.14

Hungarian and Austrian Attitudes toward Serbia At the time of the Balkan Wars there was a general mistrust of Serbia among Habsburg officials. Even some previously sympathetic to Serbia had hardened their hearts by the time war broke out.15 In Hungary, which had far tighter controls on the press than Austria, contempt of Serbia was expressed freely and openly in print. In 1902 one author wrote that Hungary would certainly absorb Bosnia and Dalmatia, and “may or may not annex Serbia” at some point in the future.16 The feeling that Serbs were a threat to be eliminated was so common among Hungarian elites that in a book published for English readers in 1910 one of Hungary’s most prominent historians wrote that Serbs were “the most dangerous adversaries of the Hungarians”.17 Hostility, contempt, fears of pan-Slavism, and of Serbia as the South Slav Piedmont, were the

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norm in leading circles.18 Among officials of the governments in Hungary, as in Austria, the dominant thought was that Serbia’s irredentism was aimed at the monarchy’s South Slavs as a whole, not just her Serbs, and that Serbia was working to demolish AustriaHungary (especially Hungary). During the Balkan Wars, some felt the time had come to punish Serbia. The future Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister (Hungarian) Count Buria´n’s diary entry for 22 November 1912 is telling: “Serbia wants to be taught a lesson, internally and externally.”19 The issue for such officials was not whether the dual monarchy would have to go to war with Serbia, but when – and in Hungary, as in Austria, the Balkan Wars seemed a good chance to act. If, however, there was to be no war immediately with Serbia (as there was not), the consensus was that everything should be done to block Serbia’s aggrandisement, and especially prevent her from getting an outlet to the sea, particularly through the establishment of an independent Albania.20 With few exceptions, officials from the two halves of the dual monarchy were on the same wavelength, though there were individual differences as to when war was favoured.21 It was as if the double-headed imperial eagle had been transformed into a creature with a single belligerent head stuck onto two bodies.22 Of those who hoped to avoid conflict, some hoped to ameliorate Serbia’s attractiveness by creating a trialist, or newly federated monarchy – that is, by adding a third member to the dualist monarchy comprised of an autonomous South Slav unit. But even some trialists were warmongers, who wanted to precede trialism by conquering Serbia.23 Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, who was thought to be associated with trialism, took a wry lesson from the successes of Serbia during the Balkan Wars, and how Serbia’s attractiveness to the monarchy’s South Slavs had increased. He observed that “Instead of the German drive to the East, the Pan-Slav train has come to the West.”24 Note, again, the term “pan-Slav”. This was no slip of the pen. It reflected thinking throughout the monarchy, especially in Hungary. Yugoslav movements were filed under “pan-Slav” agitation in the Hungarian Interior Ministry files, now stored in the Hungarian national archives. Trialism was generally disliked by leading Hungarian politicians, as it would have required that Hungary share her special relationship

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within the monarchy with a third entity, and possibly also give up control of Croatia-Slavonia, and other areas occupied by South Slavs. Nonetheless, trialism did have some ethnic Hungarian backers, most on the left, who saw it as a way of achieving peace and prosperity.25 Indeed, trialism was held right up to the end of World War I by some leftists in Hungary (notably Oscar Ja´szi).26 Some prominent South Slavs in the Monarchy also backed trialism, as a form of Yugoslavism with a Habsburg monarch.27 But for the most part, in Hungary the ruling elites were opposed to any concessions to Serbia, and some even hoped to conquer and absorb the country at some point in the future. Those who wished to give concessions to South Slavs in Hungary were in the minority in every sense.

Serbia For its part, ruling circles in Serbia in fact did all they could to encourage the spread of Yugoslav ideas among the monarchy’s South Slavs, and to encourage irredentist aspirations against the monarchy among the population of Serbia. Habsburg officials were not exaggerating when they accused Serbia of irredentism. The title of one Serbian journal, Pijemont (Piedmont), is indicative enough.28 In 1908, following the Monarchy’s annexation of Bosnia, the Serbian geographer Jovan Cvijic´ openly wrote of the Habsburg lands “The Serbian problem has to be resolved by force”, and that preparations for this should be both military and educational.29 Children in Serbia were duly taught that the Habsburg monarchy’s South Slavs were waiting to be liberated, and that Serbia would have to do the liberating.30 Thus, Habsburg (and Hungarian) ideas about conquering Serbia were matched by Serbian ideas on liberating South Slav lands in the monarchy. Here is not the place to go into the intricacies of whether and by whom this was seen merely as support for other Serbs, or reflected broader Yugoslav sympathies in Serbia. Both motives were present.31 Suffice it to say that the Serbian government clandestinely and openly backed Yugoslavism before and throughout the Balkan Wars through subventions to the South Slav press in Hungary, as well as stipends and scholarships for South Slavs (including Croats) to study in Prague and Vienna and to visit Belgrade, and support for a variety of secret and open

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organisations in the monarchy.32 Perhaps indicative of the triumphal mood among Serbs during the Balkan Wars were the comments made by Milan Markovic´, a citizen of Serbia working on a Hungarian steamship plying the Danube, who told his shipmates – to the captain’s shock and disgust – that in the spring he would be ploughing with Hungarians. “I’ll harness up fifty Hungarian lords”, he said, “and if they don’t pull, they’ll get it!”33

Conditions in Hungary Going through the notes of the Hungarian government, it is impossible to find a sign of leniency to any of the various sorts of South Slavs living in Hungary. In Hungary the reins were held tighter than in Austria in 1912– 13. Censorship in Hungary (and Croatia) was stricter than in Austria, and anything with a hint of Slavic agitation was not allowed. Press banned for import to Hungary even included some Viennese journals (Muskete and Die Zeit), as well as the Serbian and Croatian journals from America, Oslobodjenje (Chicago), and Hrvatski Svijet (New York). These last two were also banned in Austria. Indeed, Austria’s Interior Minister Krobatin warned his counterpart in Hungary that agitation in the North American Slavic press was particularly dangerous to the monarchy, for there were some 80,000 South Slavs there who were of age to serve in the military.34 Hungarian policies did much to offend minorities in general, and South Slavs in particular in the years of the Balkan Wars. This is not the place to cover Croatian affairs, but it is worth note that Budapest was where so many policies abhorrent to Croatians were set. In June 1913 Hungary’s PM Istva´n Tisza addressed Parliament in Budapest regarding the suppression of Croatia’s state rights over the previous year. Tisza was unapologetic, telling an ecstatic lower house that the emergency measures imposed and other punitive acts dealt out to minorities by himself and his predecessors would continue to be imposed just as long as was “absolutely necessary”.35 While oppressive measures pre-dated the Balkan Wars, the two years of the conflict were especially painful in Hungary. The government imposed emergency conditions, concentrated the gendarmerie in regions with large South Slav populations. With Vienna’s blessing, the armed forces were mobilised in Hungary not merely in case of war, but to help control internal unrest. The Balkan conflict was not the only reason for this.

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There were strikes throughout 1912, brutally put down by sword, bayonet and gunfire.36 The armed forces were put on high alert at the time of the abortive general strike called by Hungary’s Social Democrats for the end of January 1913. The Social Democrats were able to hold massive public meetings despite tight police control. Their protests were, in part, against the government’s unwillingness to broaden the electoral franchise.37 Great popular interest shown in the Hungarian Republican Party, founded at the start of September 1912, also brought intense attention from the authorities, who banned the party at the start of July 1913.38 Explaining the government’s rejection of liberalisation and electoral reform in a country where barely six per cent of the population had the right to vote, Tisza wrote that broadening the franchise would strengthen nationalism among minorities, thereby unleashing centrifugal forces that would tear Hungary apart and sweep away the dynasty. Elsewhere, in an essay about war in the Balkans, Tisza expressed his conviction that Hungary was being destroyed by liberal socialism, while the Balkan peoples by contrast were showing an admirable willingness to sacrifice for their nations.39 In most parts of Hungary extra forces had to be delegated to deal with strikes and socialist unrest. By contrast, areas with large South Slav populations were more than sufficiently supplied with forces. When asked whether reinforcements would be needed to keep order during the general strike, the leadership of Ba´cs-Bodrog County said the forces already in place to control the “Serbian movement” would be sufficient.40 Indeed, the Social Democrats’ annual party report for 1912 particularly noted the “brutal procedures” taken against “Serbian speakers” throughout the previous year.41 During the Balkan Wars conditions only worsened for South Slavs. Among emergency acts particularly affecting South Slavs was the suspension of the autonomy of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Hungary, pushed through by Tisza’s predecessor and sanctified by royal decree, signed by Franz Joseph, on 11 July 1912. The elimination of this last remaining and most essential of the special rights first granted to Serbs by the crown in 1690 alienated many.42 The excuse for this and the other legislation against South Slavs was pan-Slav agitation, which was seen – perhaps correctly – as inherently anti-Hungarian. I say perhaps correctly, because any concessions of

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autonomy to South Slavs could surely come only at the expense of Hungarian domination.43

South Slavs throughout the Habsburg Monarchy The reactions of Hungary’s South Slavs to the pressures they were under and to the Balkan Wars make sense within the context of the broader South Slav world within the monarchy. A multitude of ordinary South Slavs throughout the monarchy seemingly acted with one accord during the Balkan Wars. So, in the context of the South Slavs throughout the monarchy, we find that: In Dalmatia, at the outbreak of the war contributions were gathered from the populace for the Red Cross in Serbia – more than 200,000 Crowns by the start of November 1912 – and demonstrations were held in support of the Southern Slav armies. One observer claimed that 10,000 demonstrated in Split and 6,000 in Sˇibenik.44 A Dalmatian correspondent noted with dismay how upset people were that there might be war with Serbia over Albania: The real reason why we, the South Slavs of the Monarchy are wild over this Albanian question is the very thought that our sons should go to fight for Albanian autonomy, at the same moment when autonomy and freedom, which we should help to win for Albania, are denied us, here in the Monarchy . . . I tell you this also: if Vienna doesn’t change soon its policy towards the South Slavs every Croat, Serb and Slovene will be a rebel.45 This was not just one individual’s private opinion. The same sentiments were expressed in an opinion piece published at the end of August 1912 in the newspaper Crvena Hrvatska from Dubrovnik.46 Moving on to Bosnia, where controls were far stricter than in Dalmatia, an Austrian observer noted “internally everyone is keyed up . . . Muslims are depressed”. Croats were divided, with “the poorer classes” sympathising with the Christians. While “The Serbs are naturally in high spirits”, and “Over a thousand volunteers” serve in the Serbian army. “Cases are reported of men giving up good positions [in Bosnia] to go into Serbia to join up. Collections for the Serbian Red Cross” have got “80,000 crowns in Sarajevo, and two other towns have

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each produced 40,000.” And there were ladies study nursing “who are now going to the theatre of war”.47 Finally, in Croatia proper, harried by the “cruel” and “myopic” Hungarian suppression of Croatian state rights (the quote is from the politician Stjepan Radic´), many Croats, especially students, were increasingly attracted to the Yugoslav idea.48 Censorship of the press was stricter in Croatia than in Dalmatia. But this hardly kept a lid on sentiments. Among other prominent assassination attempts, in 1912 some students tried to kill Slavko Cuvaj, a Croat faithful to Hungary who was made Commissioner of Croatia after the dissolution of the Croatian diet. In Croatia, too, Croats and Serbs alike left to join the Serbian army. And in Croatia, as elsewhere, funds were collected for the Red Cross and Serbia.49

Hungary’s South Slavs As we turn to the South Slavs of Hungary proper, it is useful to recall how relatively few of them there were, compared to the total population. In a nationalising state, they were a small minority. Data from Hungary’s 1910 census gave the following figures. .

.

Serbs: Of Hungary’s 821,926 South Slavs (comprising roughly 4.5 per cent of the total population), the majority – 461,516 – were counted as Serbs (note: numbers here are confused, for some were registered as Catholic Serbs – people now generally considered Croats). Serbs formed absolute majorities in some towns and regions, especially in the south (e.g. Ba´cs-Bodrog and Toronta´l counties). Other South Slavs: Of the rest, 194,808 were Croats, 88,204 were various peoples for the most part now considered Croats (a very few Muslims), while 77,398 were Slovenes.50

Before and throughout the Balkan Wars, Hungary’s South Slavs were under remarkable pressure to keep their heads down. At a minimum they were expected to show indifference to the identity and the state if they wished to stay out of trouble. Preferably they were to express their fealty to a dynasty and state (Hungary) that were contemplating war with Serbia. Naturally, various attitudes (support, indifference or

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hostility) were displayed by Hungary’s South Slavs to the Habsburg dynasty, the Hungarian state, and South Slav identities. As an example of loyalty to the Habsburgs above all, one might mention Oskar Hranilovic´ von Cvetassin, a Croat who, in 1914, was made director of the Evidenzbureau, the monarchy’s military secret service.51 An outstanding example of a South Slav who was a Hungarian nationalist is the High Sheriff (Fo˝ispa´n) Baron Istva´n Vojnics (also sp. Vojnits), the scion of a distinguished South Slavic family who claimed Dalmatian ancestry. The Vojnics family was just one of many leading South Slav families patriotic to Hungary and the dynasty, who also spoke the South Slavic language (whether Serbian, Croatian, SerboCroatian, Illyrian, or what have you).52 Baron Vojnics shines through the files of the Interior Ministry as a scourge of Serbs in his region. Prominent among patriots to Hungary who expressed fealty to the dynasty along with a strong sense of affinity to their ethnic kin was the much harried Serbian Patriarch Lucian (Bogdanovic´) of Karlovci. In a speech to the foreign affairs subcommittee of the monarchy’s common ministerial council that discussed the conflict in the Balkans, Lucian expressed his pious wishes that the bloodshed would soon end, and that the monarchy would find a “peaceful way” to resolve the difficulties it faced – this at a time when many in Hungary hoped for war with Serbia. Lucian added that his Serbian flock, “though they hold brotherly feelings toward the Christian peoples of the Balkans, were still faithful” to their sovereign, and “honestly cling to” their “beloved homeland”. At the same meeting Count Pejacsevich, representing Croatia-Slavonia, expressed his nation’s feelings of brotherhood toward the Balkan peoples, their faithfulness to their sovereign, as well as their sincere hopes that relations with Serbia would improve on the cessation of hostilities. Both the Patriarch and the Count thus expressed their fealty to the dynasty and the state, but also their people’s feelings of brotherhood toward South Slavs abroad, and their desire to avoid war with Serbia at a time when the leaders of the monarchy were contemplating just that.53 They thus found a way to be good citizens, good servants of the King and Emperor, and good South Slavs who felt solidarity with other South Slavs outside the monarchy. Among the populace in Hungary positions were being taken that were not so clearly faithful to crown or country, though this was not

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always admitted by officials who witnessed it. At the start of 1913 the former (and future) Hungarian Prime Minister Sa´ndor Wekerle told an Austrian politician Hungary’s Serbs were quite calm, despite the unrest in the Balkans. Among the Serbs there had been, Wekerle conceded, “a certain movement, meetings for the Serbian Red Cross roused sympathy, but no more: there is no danger”. His interlocutor noted incredulously: “he seems to have no suspicion of the great Jugo-Slav movement that has swept through the whole of the young people”.54 Wekerle’s claims indeed appear strange in light of other reports, but his statements were echoed by others. In October 1912 the then Hungarian Prime Minister Luka´cs reported to the common Ministerial Council that there were no “symptoms” in Croatia-Slavonia or the Serbian border counties, but noted that Baron Tallia´n said that Serbs in his district (around Szeged) were a source of concern.55 It is impossible to judge whether Wekerle was clueless or was lying. Luka´cs was certainly not being entirely honest when he played down problems in his fiefdom. The files of Hungary’s Interior Ministry reveal something quite different from Luka´cs’s report. Despite the constant pressure from officials such as Vojnics and the examples of fealty set by the Patriarch and other leading figures, many of Hungary’s South Slavs, like their compatriots elsewhere in the monarchy, were acting in ways that were neither patriotic to the country or to the dynasty, nor even safely indifferent. In another common ministerial meeting in October 1912, F.M. Berchtold was so concerned with conditions throughout the monarchy that he warned his colleagues that if the aspirations of the monarchy’s South Slavs were not in some way satisfied, “there may come a time at which centrifugal forces will gain the upper hand”.56 These centrifugal forces were noted with dismay even at the highest levels of officialdom within Hungary. At the outbreak of war in November 1912, Buria´n noted that “the nationalities” (e.g. Slavs of Hungary) “are seething. The enemy is in our camp as well.”57 The evidence collected by the Interior Ministry in Hungary was indeed worrying.

Evidence from the Hungarian Interior Ministry Files Under the emergency conditions during the Balkan Wars, it was not hard to fall foul of the authorities in Hungary. Throughout 1912– 13 the

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Hungarian gendarmerie and police revealed extraordinary happenings. Solidarity with Slavs of the Balkans was being expressed by Slavs right through Hungary, from north to south. This was extraordinary, because such expressions of solidarity were strictly punished. Even off-the-cuff comments could get people into trouble in Hungary in those days. A teacher with the most un-Slavic-sounding name, Sa´muel Krausz, came to the attention after the authorities after he declared in a post office that war was certain between Austria-Hungary and Serbia in the spring (of 1913). Ominously for Krausz, the police report noted that he had “pan-Slavic sympathies”.58 Krausz’s indiscretion seems innocent compared with the actions of other Slavs discovered by Hungarian security forces. Far from the Serbian border, in Pozsony (now Bratislava in Slovakia) outrageous correspondence was discovered between the Catholic seminarian Vilmos Jurcsovics (perhaps a Croat) and a fresh army recruit Ja´nos Hlavati (a Slovak surname). In his letters Jurcsovics told Hlavati he was lucky to have a Czech officer – a fellow Slav. Jurcsovics instructed Hlavati to teach other Slav soldiers that in case of war with Russia or Serbia they should fire their guns into the air or ground. The Hungarian police chief noted that Jurcsovics wrote that, in any case, the Russians would “beat us” (Hungarians), and “our bones will fly in the air”. Jurcsovics was immediately expelled from his seminary, and he and Hlavati were prosecuted.59 Authorities in Pozsony also reported that the Slovak bank, Tatra, had been collecting funds for Serbia. A list of donors, including many women, was sent to Budapest for the Interior Ministry’s perusal.60 Slovaks are, of course, not South Slavs. Here, then, were clear examples not merely of Yugoslav sentiments but of Slavic solidarity – of the pan-Slav sentiments so feared by the authorities. After all, funds sent to the Red Cross’s general fund were not suspect, and might be used to succour any country’s troops – Turks as well as Slavs. Yet these were general funds collected by Slovaks specifically for Serbia, and not specifically for the Red Cross. They might well have been used for weapons as well as medical assistance. More serious affairs were revealed among Hungary’s South Slavs. In an incident at the end of November 1912 a certain Joczo´ Stakity of Pala´nka was arrested because he had openly cursed Austria-Hungary for backing an independent Albania, and thereby blocking Serbia from reaching the sea.61

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In Pancsova (Pancˇevo), near the border with Serbia, a Social Democrat meeting in January 1913 was interrupted by the local chief of police, Ro´th, when a delegate speaking in Serbian, Lazar Vukovics of ´ jvide´k (Novi Sad), criticised Austro-Hungarian policies backing U Albania, because “so much Serbian blood has been spilled” at Kumanovo and in Albania. Ro´th warned the delegates that he would not tolerate this sort of speech.62 Vukovics was not just speaking from his Slavic heart – this was to be the party line. A few months later, in November 1913, the Social Democrats adopted a programme calling on Austria-Hungary to keep out of war, to stop offending South Slavs, to collaborate economically with Serbia, and to stop backing Albanian independence.63 Vukovics was not alone – and it was not just Social Democrats who expressed such sentiments. Measuring the local mood at the start of the First Balkan War, Vojnics told the Interior Minister that the Serbs of Pancsova had “the greatest sympathy for their Serbian brothers”. Some were even crossing to Belgrade to take gifts for the wounded, and taking up collections, which Vojnics would only permit to be done through the Hungarian Red Cross, on threat of punishment.64 Vojnics was as good as his word. At the end of November 1912 a woman from Nagybecskerek (Zrenjanin) was arrested for collecting linens and money for Serbia without a permit. In mid-December a Serbian Orthodox teacher from ´ jvide´k was suspended from his duties for doing the same.65 Again, U though people might have openly made legal donations to the Hungarian Red Cross, they preferred to clandestinely break the law to ensure that their funds would go to Serbia. To prevent such illicit traffic, border posts were strengthened, telephones were installed in them, and two motorboats were put into service on the Danube.66 Border personnel were also on the lookout for smugglers, and deserters from the Serbian army. As Leon Trotsky noticed on his departure to Serbia via Hungary, Hungarian border guards were under strict orders to detain any Hungarian citizens trying to volunteer for the Serbian army. Trotsky considered this just another of those “police fantasies” that could “not be achieved by means of a stupid iron chain”.67 Looking through the Hungarian Interior Ministry’s files, it is hard to disagree with Trotsky. Although any Hungarian citizen who tried to join the Serbian army was liable to be prosecuted, and every attempt was made to stop people crossing the border clandestinely, the authorities

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discovered that men were still slipping through their grasp. In December 1912, even a Serbian Orthodox priest was prosecuted for visiting Serbia without a permit.68 If authorities discovered people had slipped across the border and did not return, they tried other tactics to lure them back. In one case, the authorities arrested the father of a fellow who had gone to Belgrade to join the Serbian army.69 People leaving Hungary to volunteer for the Serbian army were one problem; deserters from the Serbian army entering Hungary were another. Officials worried that spies and agitators were sprinkled among the deserters, and so orders were issued to return all of them to Serbia – despite the fact that this clearly supported Serbian military discipline. In general, local Hungarian officials seemed willing to comply. One notable exception was the mayor of Kecskeme´t, in the centre of Hungary, who took pity on the deserters who made their way to his town but who spoke no Hungarian. They were so miserable that the mayor had them fed at the city’s expense. He also found them work when he could. Interestingly, this group of deserters included a few women.70 Vojnics’s conviction was that it was best to do away with these people, some of whom he was convinced were spies and agitators. It was reported to him that one supposed deserter had been later spotted wearing a gendarme’s uniform in Belgrade. Another fellow, Dusa´n Jovanovics, first appeared in Pancsova as a deserter from the Serbian army, but then, suspiciously, returned to Belgrade. Also suspiciously, a certain Dusan Zsivkovics of Zagreb visited Pancsova twice, each time with a basket in which authorities suspected he had messenger pigeons. The order, therefore, was to tighten controls and deport all deserters to Serbia, even those who had in the meantime applied for Hungarian citizenship.71 Surprise inspections bought new evidence of Serbian perfidy. When gendarmes made a random visit to the house of La´za´r Jeftics of Tama´slak (Tomasˇevac), a subscriber to the Serbian journal Zastava, they discovered a Serbian map showing the Hungarian counties Ba´cs-Bodrog, Toronta´l and Temes as part of Serbia. The authorities were convinced that Jeftics was part of a plot to invade and take part of Hungary.72 Confirming that citizens of Serbia visiting Hungary were up to no good, at the end of November 1912 a man reported the appearance of agitators from Serbia in Ba´csto´va´ros (Tovarisˇevo). One of these agitators

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had spoken with the man’s wife (he claimed), telling her that they were preparing to kill Hungarians and Germans with the help of locals. The gendarmerie was immediately dispatched to the town.73 But perhaps most dramatically, Habsburg secret services uncovered a plot to assassinate Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand on his visit to U´jvide´k in southern Hungary.74 Hungarian officials were told to be on the lookout for the would-be assassins: the elderly Lazar Antic´, the younger Jovan Puljo, and the photographer Zorka Veljicˇeva, all of whom were Serbs, perhaps of Hungarian citizenship. Antic´ was to have made the first attempt. If he missed, Puljo would try. If Puljo also missed, Veljicˇeva would ask to take the Crown Prince’s photograph and then do the deed. Austro-Hungarian agents also discovered that these three, whose mission failed, had the financial backing of a shady organisation in Belgrade.75 So, despite Wekerle’s disingenuous claim that Hungary’s South Slavs were loyal, and despite the demonstrable loyalty of some at the highest level, throughout Hungary authorities were discovering ordinary Slavs – Slovaks, Croats and Serbs alike – who were clandestinely supporting Serbia. In this they were like their brethren in other Southern Slav lands in the monarchy. Just how widespread Yugoslavism was among Hungary’s South Slavs is impossible to judge. It was something Hungarian officials tried to discover in vain. Yugoslavism was hidden because of the punishment it inevitably brought from authorities. Nonetheless Yugoslav sentiments were expressed by ordinary people – by Slavs at the lowest levels of Hungary’s society. While high Slavic officials declared their fealty to Hungary during the Balkan Wars, Slavic solidarity was a grassroots affair.

Summing Up To close, I should stress that I do not wish to downplay loyalty to the crown or to Hungary, or to suggest that indifference to identity was irrelevant. It is important to acknowledge that these sentiments also existed among Hungary’s Slavs, even if these sentiments are not terribly difficult to explain. They are not difficult to explain because loyalty was rewarded, and indifference could be assumed without risk. For these reasons, also, it is difficult to judge the sincerity of those who professed loyalty or feigned indifference.

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By contrast, however, anyone in Hungary who espoused pan-Slavism or the Yugoslav ideal, or in any way supported Serbian victory in the Balkan Wars, faced at the very least suspicion and mistrust, and often risked a great deal more. That some still professed solidarity with Serbia during the Balkan Wars, despite the very real risks involved testifies to strength of pan-Slavism and Yugoslavism among common people. Though controls were tight in Hungary, sentiments of Slavic solidarity reached the very bottom of society. Little people took great risks and underwent hardship to express solidarity with Serbia during the Balkan Wars. The Yugoslav ideal was not merely an elite construction. Indeed, in Hungary it was scarcely visible among the elites, who were co-opted into the system. Instead, it was rooted among ordinary Slavs in Hungary, as elsewhere in the monarchy. Now that Yugoslavia is gone, this bears remembering, and still wants explaining. While teasing out a full explanation goes beyond the scope of this work, I might offer some tentative hypotheses. One possible explanation for this popular expression of Yugoslavism comes again from the grassroots level. Among ordinary people there was communication in the tongue (or tongues) they shared within and across the Habsburg monarchy’s borders.76 South Slavs of all sorts in Hungary found something common in a language that was so clearly different from the Hungarian and German of their surroundings.77 Talented Serbs and others from Hungary could and did move to Serbia, and some of them played prominent roles in public life there. Ties of friendship and family crossed state boundaries. These connections were recognised even at the highest levels of the Hungarian government.78 Alliances (and rivalries) were long-lasting, multiple and, given linguistic and ethnic affinities, one is tempted to say natural.79 It is also possible to speculate on how this affected affairs after the Balkan Wars. What the Hungarian government discovered about Yugoslavism among its South Slavs during the Balkan Wars surely played a role on the monarchy’s policies leading up to and during World War I. Frustration with Serbia had already reached a high pitch before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. There was never any doubt in Vienna or Budapest that the authors of the attempted assassination of the archduke in 1912 were to be found in Belgrade, just as were those who backed his murder in 1914. That this had not been the first attempt made it all the more outrageous, and made a response from Austro-Hungary all the more necessary.80

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After the outbreak of World War I, the mass arrest of South Slavs in Hungary, especially Serbs, made sense (according to official logic) in light of the sympathy ordinary Slavs had shown to Serbia during the Balkan Wars. The particular brutality of the Habsburg occupation of Serbia arose from a sense that the Serbian nation was, on the whole, inimical to Hungary and the Habsburgs.81 Hungarian troops were particularly known for their cruelty. In his diary of 23 August 1914 the heroin addict and author, Ge´za Csa´th, then serving as a medical officer, noted: “Because of the Serbian people’s franc tireur fight, the Hungarian army is with all its might destroying children, women, the old – this the Serbs won’t be able to forgive.”82 Abuses were also committed by Austro-Hungarian military authorities against Slovaks and Ruthenes in northern Hungary, out of a general sense that Slavs could not be trusted. These were so egregious that they evoked a letter of complaint from Tisza.83 Although such abuses clearly exacerbated irritation, based on what the authorities found among Slavs during the Balkan Wars, official fears of liberalism, pan-Slavism, Yugoslavism, and minority nationalism in general do not seem irrational. The volunteers who left Hungary for Serbia during the Balkan Wars were not a one-off anomaly. They presaged an even greater betrayal of their homeland, Hungary. At the start of World War I, one Hungarian officer noted that stones were thrown at his car when it travelled through Serbian villages in Croatia.84 Shortly after, when Serbian troops briefly occupied parts of southern Hungary, local Serbs greeted them with enthusiasm.85 At the very outset of World War I, some South Slavs clandestinely left Bosnia, Croatia, Dalmatia and Hungary to volunteer for the Serbian army.86 They did so despite tighter border controls, and despite the fact that if caught by Austro-Hungarian authorities or captured in battle, the punishment for this act was death. Along with volunteers, some 200,000 civilians fled southern Hungary and Bosnia and entered Serbia.87 Elsewhere, great numbers of the monarchy’s Slavs ended up in Russian captivity, along with Hungarian and German troops. Current research argues that the rate of desertion among certain Slavs was not particularly high, but this does not refute the fact that some Slavic soldiers were apparently reluctant to fight against their Slavic brethren for a state they saw as inimical to Slavdom.88 As we have seen, this

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sentiment too had been expressed during the Balkan Wars. Most extraordinarily, not a few of the Slavs in Russian captivity – men who had already experienced the horrors of war – volunteered to rejoin the fight, this time against the monarchy. These were men who knew not only what dangers they would face on the battlefield, but that if captured they would be summarily executed as traitors. Yet instead of staying safe in Russian captivity, they volunteered to risk battle. Many fought in Serbian uniform.89 In terms of integration, the Balkan Wars bolstered Yugoslavism through expressions of solidarity in the South Slav community as a whole. Instead of crushing Yugoslavism, the Hungarian state’s heavy policing of minorities during the Balkan Wars hardened the resolve and increased the sense of alienation among South Slavs. The Balkan Wars shored up Yugoslavism in other ways as well. Yugoslavism was solidified externally with the elimination of the Turkish question. With the end of Turkish rule, the focus of Yugoslav grievances was concentrated on Austria-Hungary. The nightmares of officials in Hungary became real after World War I. Yugoslavism and pan-Slavism were not bogeymen. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were created out of Habsburg territories because these sentiments did exist. Other fears held by Hungarian officials at the time of the Balkan Wars also do not seem irrational in the light of what later happened. In 1918 Hungarian socialists and republicans helped to dismantle the dual monarchy by creating an independent Hungary, just as national councils were founding Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Greater Romania out of Hungarian lands.90 With that in mind, it is difficult to refute the argument Tisza made during the Balkan Wars that liberalism, socialism and nationalism threatened Hungary and the Habsburg Dynasty, and would undermine the Hungarian state. That the Yugoslav state failed and twice disintegrated in violence should not blind us to the fact that Yugoslavism once did exist – in the minds of many South Slavs who supported it, and of Austro-Hungarian officials who feared it. Though it may seem ‘impossible’ today, the Yugoslav impulses and identities that were revealed during the Balkan Wars actually achieved something. Within a few extremely traumatic years, the people who professed Yugoslavism were on the winning side of history.

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Notes 1. See the summary by Solomon Wank, The Nationalities Question in the Habsburg Monarchy: Reflections on the Historical Record, Working Paper, Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota, April 1993. 2. On how understudied the question of loyalty has been among South Slavs, except Slovenes, see Mark Cornwall, “The Great War and the Yugoslav Grassroots: Popular mobilization in the Habsburg Monarchy”, in Dejan Djokic´ and James Ker-Lindsay (eds), New Perspectives on Yugoslavia: Key Issues and Controversies (London, 2011), pp. 27 –45 (27– 8). 3. I may be old fashioned, but it seems to me that expressions of indifference, which were not dangerous, or loyalty to Crown and state, which might be rewarded, are much easier to explain and even trivial in comparison with expressions of disloyalty, which brought very quick and stern punishment. On the question of loyalty to the Habsburgs among nationalities in general, see: R.J.W. Evans, “Afterword, The Limits of Loyalty”, in Laurence Cole and Daniel Unowsky (eds), The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy (New York, 2007), pp. 223 – 32. For the idea that the monarchy’s inability to deal with nationalism led to its demise, see: Oscar Ja´szi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (Chicago, 1929), esp. the chapter “The Yugoslav Irredenta”, pp. 403– 29. For overviews of works challenging Ja´szi’s thesis, and plumping for widespread loyalty to the Habsburgs or indifference to nationality – all neglecting Ja´szi’s stomping ground, Hungary, see: Jonathan Kwan, “Nationalism and All That: Reassessing the Habsburg Monarchy and its Legacy”, European History Quarterly, 41:1 (2001), pp. 88–108; and Pieter M. Judson and Tara Zahra, “Introduction”, Austrian History Yearbook, 43 (2012), pp. 21–7. 4. The literature on the justice and injustice of the break-up of Hungary is enormous, and the polemics are so intense even today that this point wants no supporting reference. I will note, however, that because the focus of this chapter is minorities, and not Hungarians, I have intentionally simplified things here, leaving out the argument, used by some in Hungary, that the dismemberment of Hungary was justified in as much as pure minority areas were taken from Hungary, but the separation of large areas with Hungarian majorities from Hungary was not, and could never be justified. 5. Fairly massive literature, even for the early period – two representative examples, R.W. Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy (London, 1911); and Jovan M. Jovanovic´, Stvaranje zajednicˇke drzˇave Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca, 3 vols (Belgrade, 1928 – 30). Also see the summary, Dennison Rusinow, “The Yugoslav Idea before Yugoslavism”, in Dejan Djokic´ (ed.), Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918 – 1992 (London, 2003), pp. 11 – 26. 6. On how miserable many students in Bosnia were, see the summary in Robin Okey, Taming Balkan Nationalism: The Habsburg “Civilizing Mission” in Bosnia, 1878– 1914 (Oxford, 2007), p. 194 and ff.

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7. This is the view given in Vladimir Dedijer, Road to Sarajevo (New York, 1966), esp. pp. 175 – 234. 8. For example, see: Julius Andra´ssy, Diplomacy and the War, trans. by J. Holroyd Reece (London, 1921), pp. 164 – 5. This argument was a constant in interwar Hungary, but also had backing among some South Slavs, especially those who would have preferred independent national states, federalism, or union with some other state to what they perceived as Serbian dominance of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. For a later example, see: George W. Cesarich, “Yugoslavia Was Created Against the Will of the Croatian People”, in Antun F. Bonifacˇicˇ and Clement S. Mihanovich (eds), The Croatian Nation in its Struggle for Freedom and Independence (Chicago, 1955), pp. 192 – 211. 9. An author who stresses the role of outsiders’ perceptions in the creation of Yugoslavia, and is dismissive of grassroots support for Yugoslavism prior to Yugoslavia’s creation is Vesna Drapac, Constructing Yugoslavia: A Transnational History (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 54 – 62 (esp. 54). 10. La´szlo´ To˝ke´czki, “Ne´ha´ny gondolat a demokra´cia´ro´l”, Hitel, 25 March 2012, pp. 72 – 80 (72). 11. Ksenija Cvetkovic´-Sander, “Die unmo¨gliche Nation, Jugoslawen im Land von ‘Bru¨derlichkeit und Einheit’”, Su¨dosteuropa¨ische Hefte, 1:1, pp. 42– 56; and Brian Hall, The Impossible Country: A Journey Through the Last Days of Yugoslavia (London, 1994). 12. On Yugoslavism and the masses in Hungary in 1918–19, see: La´szlo´ Ko˝va´go´, A magyarorsza´gi de´lszla´vok 1918–1919-ben (Budapest, 1964). For documents on Hungarian South Slavs’ union with Serbia, see: Drago Njegovan (ed.), Prisajedinjenje Srema, Banata, Bacˇke i Baranje Srbiji 1918, 2nd revised edn (Novi Sad, 2001); and for other Habsburg lands, Ferdo Sˇisˇic´ (ed.), Dokumenti o postanku Kraljevine Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca 1914–1919 (Zagreb, 1920). 13. For example, Philipp Franz Bresnitz von Sydacˇoff, Die panslavistische Agitation und die su¨dslavische Bewegung in Oesterreich-Ungarn (Berlin and Leipzig, 1899). For an overview, Ka´lma´n Ra´tz, A pa´nszla´vizmus to¨rte´nete (Budapest, 1941). 14. Other forms of identity once common but now impossible to find include Catholic Serbs, who were long recognised in Austro-Hungarian lands, and appeared on the census of 1910; Sˇokci and Bunjevci, not as proto-Croats, but as distinct people in their own right; or Dalmatians, not as inhabitants of Dalmatia, but as S. Slavs in parts of Hungary. 15. See Robin Okey, “A Trio of Hungarian Balkanists, Be´ni Ka´llay, Istva´n Buria´n and Lajos Thallo´czy in the Age of High Nationalism”, Slavonic and East European Review, 80:2 (2002), pp. 234 – 66. 16. Pa´l Hoitsy, Nagymagyarorsza´g (Budapest, 1902), p. 7; cited by Andrew C. Janos, “The Decline of Oligarchy, Bureaucratic and Mass Politics in the Age of Dualism (1867– 1918)”, in A.C. Janos and W.B. Slottman (eds), Revolution in Perspective: Essays on the Hungarian Soviet Republic (Berkeley, 1971), p. 26. 17. Henry Marczali, Hungary in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1910), p. 210.

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18. This view of Serbia as a threat was taken up by foreign observers of the Monarchy. See Francis Gribble, The Life of the Emperor Francis Joseph (London, 1914), pp. 342 – 3 (esp. 343). 19. Ba´ro´ Buria´n Istva´n naplo´i 1907– 1922, Ba´ro´ Buria´n Istva´n ta´virati ko¨nyvei 1913– 1915 (Budapest, 1999), p. 54. 20. Buria´n’s diary entries of 22 November 1912 and 27 September 1913 (ibid.) are explicit that Albania was wanted and expected by ruling circles in AustriaHungary to act against Serbia. More importantly, this was then F.M. Berchtold’s view: Council minutes of 16 October 1912, in Ludwig Bittner and Hans Uebersberger (eds), O¨sterreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik von der bosnischen Krise 1908 bis zum Kriegsausbruch 1914, 8 vols (Vienna, 1930), vol. 4, pp. 659–61; comments in Leon Trotsky, “A Mass of Contradictions” (13 December 1912), in The Balkan Wars 1912–13: The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky (New York, 1980), pp. 102–7 (103–4); and summary by Anatol Schmied Kowarzik, “Einleitung”, in idem. (ed.), Die Protokolle des gemeinsamen Ministerrates der o¨sterreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie, 1908–1914 (Budapest, 2011), pp. 9–139 (121 and 125). 21. The similarity in thinking wants stressing because of claims (made by excellent historians to me, and in print) that there were essential differences between Austrian and Hungarian views. For a reconstruction of various figures’ changes in mood for and against war, see: John Leslie, “The Antecedents of AustriaHungary’s War Aims, Policies and Policy-makers in Vienna and Budapest before and during 1914”, in Elisabeth Springer and Leopold Kammerhofer (eds), Archiv und Forschung, Das Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv in seiner Bedeutung fu¨r die Geschichte O¨sterreichs und Europas (Vienna, 1993), pp. 307–94. For examples, see Berchtold and Buria´n’s arrythmic flip-flops for and against war, Berchtold against war but for containment via creation of Albania: Minutes of 16 October 1912, O¨sterreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik, vol. 4, pp. 659–61; Buria´n for giving Serbia “a lesson”, 22 November 1912, naplo´i, p. 54; Berchtold for, Buria´n against intervention, 28 July 1913, ibid., p. 69; Buria´n and Tisza argue with Berchtold for issuing a militant ultimatum to Serbia to evacuate Albania, finally agreed to by Berchtold, 1 and 7 October 1913 and n. 37, ibid., p. 73; for Hungarian PM Luka´cs’s views, see Minutes of 2 May 1913, O¨sterreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik, vol. 6, pp. 324–37. Also see: Margareta A. Faissler, “AustriaHungary and the Disruption of the Balkan League”, The Slavonic Year-Book, 19 (1939–40), pp. 141–57. 22. On the desire for war in 1912– 13, but hesitations about when it should begin, see: Leslie, “The Antecedents”; Samuel R. Williamson, Jr, “Military Dimensions of Habsburg – Romanov Relations During the Era of the Balkan Wars”, in Be´la K. Kira´ly and Dimitrije Djordjevic (eds), East European Society and the Balkan Wars (Boulder, CO, 1987), pp. 317– 37 (320, and esp. 323); John R. Lampe, “Austro-Serbian Antagonism and the Economic Background to the Balkan Wars”, ibid., pp. 338 – 45; Nikola Petrovic´, “Zajednicˇki Austro-Ugarski Kabinet i jugoslovensko pitanje 1912– 18”, in

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23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

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Vasa Cˇubrilovic´, Jugoslovenski narodi pred Prvi Svetski Rat (Belgrade, 1967), pp. 725 – 60 (727); Faissler, “Austria-Hungary and the Disruption of the Balkan League.” For examples of the thinking, see: Conrad’s letter to von Moltke, 15 February 1913, in Feldmarschall Conrad, Aus meiner Dienstzeit 1906–1918, 5 vols (Vienna, 1922), vol. 3, pp. 147–51 (150); Constantin Theodor Dumba, “Why Austria is at War with Russia”, The North American Review (September 1914), pp. 346–52 (348–9); Comments on general hopes for war in Budapest, Joseph M. Baernreither, Fragments of a Political Diary (London, 1930), p. 138; Andra´ssy, Diplomacy and the War, pp. 67–70 and 77; Stephan Buria´n von Rajecz, Austria in Dissolution, Being the Personal Recollections of Stephan, Count Buria´n (London, 1925), 172; and id. naplo´i, entries for November–December 1912, and 28 July 1913. Tisza and Andra´ssy are often given as evidence of overall Hungarian attitudes against incorporating more S. Slavs in Hungary. For one of the Hungarians who, during World War I, wanted to incorporate all South Slavs in the country, see: Ludwig Windischgraetz, My Memoirs (London, 1921), pp. 140, 202, and passim. See Baernreither’s notes on dinner with Baroness Franckenstein, Hoyos and others, 1 December 1912, Diary, p. 141. Note of 14 Apr. 1913, in Leopold von Chlumecky, Erzherzog Franz Ferdinands Wirken und Wollen (Berlin, 1929), p. 203. For arguments on the assumption (nevertheless held) that Franz Ferdinand was trialist, see: Vladimir Dedijer, “Sarajevo Fifty Years After”, Foreign Affairs, 42:4 (July 1964), pp. 569– 84 (571 – 5); and Robert Kann, “Franz Ferdinand and the Bohemian Question”, in idem., Dynasty, Politics, and Culture: Selected Essays, ed. by S.B. Winters (Boulder, CO, 1991), pp. 151 – 89 (152). Resistance to trialism among Hungarian elites, Baernreither, 5 July 1913, Diary, pp. 211 and 214. Oszka´r Ja´szi, “Ku¨lpolitika´nk cso˝dje” (21 June 1914); “A de´lszla´v tenger” (5 July 1914); and “A de´lszla´v renaissance” (16 September 1917), repr. in idem., Mult e´s jo¨vo˝ hata´ra´n (Budapest, 1918), pp. 9 – 13, 14– 21 and 242– 6; and idem., Magyarorsza´g jo¨vo˝je e´s a Dunai Egyesu¨lt A´llamok, A Mona´rchia jo¨vo˝je cimu˝ munka ma´sodik kiada´sa (Budapest, 1918). A forerunner to Ja´szi’s idea of Danubian confederation was penned by a Romanian with S. Slavic surname, and was immediately banned in Hungary: Aurel C. Popovici, Die Vereinigten Staaten von Gro¨ss-O¨sterreich (Leipzig, 1906). Also see the denunciation of Popovici and of Franz Ferdinand in Ne´pszava, 14 July 1909, repr. Ga´bor G. Keme´ny (ed.), Iratok a nemzetise´gi ke´rde´s to¨rte´nete´hez Magyarorsza´gon a dualizmus kora´ban, vol. 5: 1906 –1913 (Budapest, 1971), pp. 310– 11. Among others noted below, see Jagic´ (Vienna) to Seton-Watson, 1 January 1913, R.W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs: Correspondence 1906 –1941, 2 vols (London, 1976), vol. 1, pp. 131– 2 (132). On Serbia as a Piedmont, see: David MacKenzie, “Serbia as Piedmont and the Yugoslav Idea, 1804– 1914”, East European Quarterly, 28:2 (1994), pp. 153 – 82. The idea of Serbia as a Piedmont was expressed in English as

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29.

30.

31.

32.

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early as 1864 by Humphry Sandwith, Notes on the South Slavonic Countries in Austria and Turkey in Europe, containing historical and political information added to the substance of a paper read at the meeting of the British Association at Bath, 1864 (Edinburgh and London, 1865), p. 51. Jovan Cvijic´, “Znacˇaj Bosne i Hercegovine za srpski narod”, “Duh i smisao austrougarske uprave u Bosne”, and “Srspki i jugoslovenski problem”, in vol. 3 of his collected works, Govori i cˇlanci, ed. by R. Lukic´ et al. (Belgrade, 1991), pp. 169 –82 (182); excerpts in English “The Annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Serbian Question” (1908), Serbian Literary Magazine, new ser. (1– 2 January/April 1995), pp. 287– 306 (305). On the atmosphere in Serbia, also see Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation: Breaking a Nation, Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford, CA, 1998), pp. 53 – 4. Charles Jelavich, “The Issue of Serbian Textbooks in the Origins of World War I”, Slavic Review, 48:2 (1989), pp. 214 – 33; and an example given by John Reed, The War in Eastern Europe (New York, 1916), p. 25. But also note the study claiming there was little evidence of Yugoslavism in education: Charles Jelavich, “South Slav Education: Was there Yugoslavism?”, in Norman M. Naimark and Holly Case (eds), Yugoslavism and its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s (Stanford, 2003), pp. 93 –115 (98). On two Serbian Yugoslavists, see: David Mackenzie, “Ljuba Jovanovic´-Cˇupa and the Search for Yugoslav Unity”, The International History Review, 1:1 (January 1979), pp. 36– 54; and Bojan Aleksov, “One Hundred Years of Yugoslavia: The Vision of Stojan Novakovic´ Revisited”, Nationalities Papers, 39:6 (November 2011), pp. 997 –1010. For the greatest work of a third, see: Jovan Cvijic´, La pe´ninsule balkanique: Ge´ographie humaine (Paris, 1918). Press, anti-Habsburg, and pro-Yugoslav mood in Serbia: Otto Franz (Belgrade) to Vienna, 30 September 1908, O¨sterreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik, vol. 1, pp. 108 – 9; Leon Trotsky, “A Mass of Contradictions”, pp. 104– 6. Subvention from Serbia to S. Slav press in Austria-Hungary: Pasˇic´ to Jovanovic´ (Vienna), 30 January/12 February 1913, in M. Boghitschewitsch (ed.), Die auswa¨rtige Poltik Serbiens 1903– 1914 (Berlin, 1929), vol. 2, p. 298. Sympathies of Hab. Monarchy’s S. Slav press during the Balkan Wars: Branislav Vranesˇevic´, “Opoziciona i radicˇna sˇtampa u Vojvodini uocˇi prvog svetskog rata i pitanju opstanka austro-ugarske”, in Vasa Cˇubrilovic´ (ed.), Jugoslovenski narodi pred Prvi Svetski Rata (Belgrade, 1967), pp. 127–55 (esp. 139 – 40); Vasilije Ð. Krestic´, Istorija srpske sˇtampe u Ugarskoj 1791– 1914 (Novi Sad, 1980), pp. 329 – 480; Igor Despot, “Tisak Hrvatske i Dalmacije o balkanskim ratovima (1912– 1913)”, Historijski Zbornik, 62:1 (2009), pp. 109 – 35. Students: Mirjana Gross, “Nacionalne ideje studentske omladine u Hrvatskoj uocˇi i svjetskog rata”, Historijski Zbornik, 21–2 (1968 –9), pp. 75– 143; Okey, Taming Balkan Nationalism, pp. 193 – 216; and Dedijer, Road to Sarajevo, pp. 175 – 234 (note Dedijer’s designation here; “primitive rebels” merely meant not-Marxist). Austro-Hungary awareness of Serbian backing for irredentism: Zagreb to Vienna, 20 June 1912, O¨sterreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik,

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33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

40. 41.

42.

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vol. 4, pp. 273 – 5; Belgrade to Vienna, 20, 21, and 22 April, 8 and 11 August, 30 October 1912, ibid., pp. 109–14, 118–19, 319–22, 332, 725–6, 797–8, etc. Also see summary O.H. Wedel, “Austro-Hungarian Diplomatic Documents 1908–1914”, The Journal of Modern History, 3:1 (Mar. 1931), pp. 84–107 (99). Report from Captain Ka´roly Ho¨nich, U´jvide´k, 5 December 1912, OL (Hungarian National Archives) BM (Interior Ministry) K149 (49 doboz) 1912-2. OL BM K149 48 doboz 1912-3-15; and Krobatin to Sa´ndor, 20 October 1913, OL BM K149 51 doboz 1913-1-262. Tisza’s address of 12 June 1913, in Keme´ny (ed.), Iratok, vol. 6: 1913– 1914 (Budapest, 1985), pp. 1 – 4 (2). See report in Ne´pszava, 25 May 1912, on the repression of the massive demonstrations in Budapest on 23 – 24 May, repub. in Tibor Ere´nyi et al. (eds), A magyar munka´smozgalom to¨rte´nete´nek va´olgatott dokumentumai, 8 vols, vol. 4/a: 1907– 1918 (Budapest, 1966), pp. 487 – 502, and on other demonstrations and conditions in general, pp. 435– 686. See the interior ministry files on Social Democrat meetings and mobilisation for the general strike, in OL BM K149 51 doboz 1913 6170/12. Also see: Ga´bor Vermes, “Leap into the Dark: The Issue of Suffrage in Hungary during World War I”, in Robert A. Kann, Be´la K. Kira´ly, and Paula S. Fichtner (eds), The Habsburg Empire in World War I: Essays on the Intellectual, Military, Political and Economic Aspects of the Habsburg War Effort (Boulder, CO, 1977), pp. 29 – 44. See, Gyo¨rgy Bo´nis, Nagy Gyo¨rgy e´s az 1914 elo˝tti magyar ko¨zta´rsasa´gi mozgalom (Budapest, 1962); and Andra´s Horva´th, “A respublica a´lmodo´ja”: Nagy Gyo¨rgy harca a fu¨ggetlen magyar ko¨zta´rsasa´ge´rt (Budapest, 1992). Istva´n Tisza, “A va´laszto´jogi reform ku¨szo¨be´n”, “Az a´ltala´nos va´laszto´jog e´s a dinasztia” (1913), and “To¨rte´nelmi materializmus a Balka´non”, repr. in Gro´f Tisza Istva´n o¨sszes munkai (Budapest, 1923), pp. 206 – 27 (esp. 227), 228– 36 (esp. 230), and 140 – 4. OL BM K149 51 doboz 1913 6170/12, 26 January 1913, file p. 102. These included Bunjevci, which is why I have not reduced the phrase “Serbian speakers” to Serbs. See Ere´nyi et al. (eds), A magyar munka´smozgalom, vol. 4/a, p. 465; also see Social Democrat criticism of official treatment of South Slavs driving them to support Serbia in Ne´pszava, repeated in Gyo¨rgy I. Kalma´r, Szocia´ldemokra´cia, nemzeti e´s nemzetise´gi ke´rde´s Magyarorsza´gon (1900 – 1914) (Budapest, 1976), pp. 194– 5. Royal decree eliminating church autonomy in Keme´ny (ed.), Iratok, vol. 5, p. 564; also PM L. Luka´cs’s submissions to the Ministerial Council, ibid., pp. 561–3. On Serbian rights, see royal patents in Jovan Radonic´ (ed.), Srpske privilegije od 1690 do 1792 (Belgrade, 1954); doc. in Ja´nos Hornyik, “A ra´czok ellenforradalma 1703–1711”, Sza´zadok, pp. 530–52, 608–32, 693–719 (535–8); and summary, La´szlo´ Szalay, Magyarorsza´gi szerb telepek jogviszonya az a´llamhoz (Pest, 1861). On alienation of Serbs, see: Nicholas J. Miller, Between Nation and State: Serbian Politics in Croatia before the First World War (Pittsburgh,

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43.

44.

45. 46. 47.

48.

49.

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1997), pp. 155–9; docs in Keme´ny, Iratok, vol. 5, pp. 565–6; and comments in Michael Pupin, From Immigrant to Inventor (1923; new edn, Belgrade, 2000), pp. 20–2 (esp. 22). See Andra´ssy’s melodramatic claim that if Serbia took control of Hungarian lands it would cause the “Hungarian race” to “perish”: Julius Andra´ssy, Whose Sin is the World War? trans. by E.J. Euphrat (New York, 1915), p. 65. Smodlaka to Seton-Watson, 2 May and (200,000 kr.) 6 November, and (demonstrators) Lupis-Vukicˇ to Seton-Watson, 15 November 1912, in Correspondence, vol. 1, pp. 109, and 116– 19. Lupis-Vukicˇ to Seton-Watson, 4 December 1912, ibid., pp. 120– 3 (121). Also see id. 29 December 1912, ibid., pp. 129– 30 (129). Despot, ‘Tisak Hrvatske i Dalmacije’, p. 112 n. 8. Baernreither, 2 November 1912, Diary, pp. 125 – 6. Also see: Bilin´ski’s comments, “convinced” of Serb loyalty, but admitting disturbances at calls for military precautions, Vienna, 3 October 1912, in Schmied-Kowarzik (ed.), Protokolle, pp. 491 – 9 (498); Dusˇan T. Batakovic´, “Prelude to Sarajevo: The Serbian Question in Bosnia and Herzegovina 1878– 1914”, Balcanica, vol. 27/1996 (Belgrade, 1997), pp. 117 – 55 (152– 4); and, esp. on Bosnian Muslim and Serbian attitudes, Amir Duranovic´, “The Aggressiveness of Bosnian and Herzegovinian Serbs in the Public Discourse during the Balkan Wars”, in M. Hakan Yavuz and Isa Blumi (eds), War and Nationalism: The Balkan Wars, 1912– 1913, and Their Socio-Political Implications (Salt Lake City, 2013), pp. 371 – 98 (esp. 379 – 85). “Myopic”, Stjepan Radic´ (from prison) to Seton-Watson, 5 April 1912, Correspondence, pp. 107 –8 (107). Youth, and trialism or Yugoslavism: 9 May 1913, Baernreither, Diary, 202; and Wayne S. Vucinich, “Mlada Bosna and the First World War”, in Kann, Kira´ly, and Fichtner (eds), The Habsburg Empire in World War I, pp. 45 – 70. Also see the discussions of resentment against Hungary, on conditions in Croatia, and among Croats outside Croatia, Ðurde Knezˇevic´, “The Enemy Side of National Ideologies: Croatia at the End of the 19th and in the First Half of the 20th Century”, in La´szlo´ Kontler (ed.), Pride and Prejudice: National Stereotypes in 19th and 20th Century Europe East to West (Budapest, 1995), pp. 105 – 17; Sarah A. Kent, “State Ritual and Ritual Parody, Croatian Student Protest and the Limits of Loyalty at the End of the Nineteenth Century”, in Cole and Unowsky (eds), The Limits of Loyalty, pp. 162 – 77; Fernando Veliz, The Politics of Croatia-Slavonia, 1903– 1918: Nationalism, State Allegiance and the Changing International Order (Wiesbaden, 2012), pp. 130 – 2; and Robert J. Donia, Sarajevo: A Biography (London, 2006), pp. 114 –18. In a conference presentation at the University of Oxford’s History Faculty on 18 October 2012 Jasmina Knezovic´ discussed Croatian volunteers and Red Cross donations. Also see letter of 20 November 1912 from Slavonski Brod, in Vasilije Ð. Krestic´ (ed.), Grada o srbima u Hrvatskoj i Slavoniji (1848 – 1914), 2 vols (Belgrade, 1995), vol. 2, pp. 747 – 8. For an overview of various Croatian

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51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

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positions, see: Mirjana Gross, “Croatian National-Integrational Ideologies from the End of Illyrism to the Creation of Yugoslavia”, Austrian History Yearbook, 15 (1979), pp. 2 – 33; ead. “Zur Frage der jugoslawischen Ideologie bei den Kroaten”, in Adam Wandruszka, Richard G. Plaschka, and Anna M. Drabek (eds), Die Donaumonarchie und die su¨dslawische Frage von 1848 bis 1918 (Vienna, 1978), pp. 19 –38; Wachtel, Making a Nation, pp. 54– 60. On Croatian press and literature, see: Igor Despot, Balkanski ratovi 1912– 1913. i njihov odjek u Hrvatskoj (Zagreb, 2013), pp. 211 – 82; and on the Second Balkan War, Ante Bralic´, “‘Narodni List’ i ‘Hrvatska Kruna’ o Drugom Balkanskom Ratu”, Radovi Zadova za povijesne znanosti, HAZU u Zadru, 41 (1999), pp. 277 – 98. Summary of data in Ko˝va´go´, A magyarorsza´gi de´lszla´vok, pp. 10– 11. Hungarian census data was controversial. Ko˝va´go´’s figures are close to those of 300,000 Croats and 500,000 Serbs in Hungary, given by Ja´szi, Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, p. 405. For critical remarks on the oddities of Austrian and Hungarian census data from a Yugoslav viewpoint, see: Jovan Cvijic´, “La frontie`re septentrionale des Jugoslaves” (Paris, 1919), repr. as “Severna granica juzˇnih Slovena”, in Govori i ˇclanci (Belgrade, 1991), pp. 315– 27 (324). See the biography by Szila´rd Szabo´, “Oskar Hranilovic´ von Cvetassin”, The South Slav Journal, 32:1 – 2 (2013), pp. 17– 23. Other such were the Antunovits, Csernovics, Fratricsevits, Latinovits, Markovics, Parcsetich, Piukovits, Rudits, Siskovits, Somssich, Szkenderovits, Sztrilich, and Szutsits families. Vojnits family mythology in Gyula Lelbach, Romba do˝lt via´g, Ke´pek e´s to¨rte´netek a De´lvide´k mu´ltja´ro´l (Budapest, 2009), pp. 13 – 14. Also see idem., Ba´cskai katonacsala´dok to¨rte´nete (Budapest, 2011); and Ma´rton Szluha, Ba´cs-Bodrog va´rmegye nemes csala´djai (Budapest, 2002). 19 November 1912, Keme´ny, Iratok, vol. 5, pp. 573 – 4. 15 February 1913, Baernreither, Diary, p. 168. Minutes, Vienna, 3 October 1912, in Schmied-Kowarzik (ed.), Protokolle, p. 498. Minutes of the Common Ministerial Council, Vienna, 16 October 1912, in Schmied-Kowarzik (ed.), Protokolle, pp. 510 – 20 (510). 24 November 1912, Buria´n, naplo´i, p. 54. OL BM K149 (50/51) doboz 1912-2-98. Letter from Captain Ka´lma´n Peta´rdi, 17 December 1912, OL BM K149 (50/51) doboz 1912-2 te´tel 702. 21 December 1912, OL BM K149 (50/51) doboz 1912-2 te´tel 702. The list is missing from the report, but can be found in a different part of the same file. Report of 28 November 1912, OL BM K149 (50/51) doboz 1912-2 te´tel. Report from Pancsova to Budapest, 13 January 1913, OL BM K149 51 doboz 1913-1-196. Speeches by Dezso˝ Boka´nyi and Emanuel Buchinger, and result of vote on their motion, OL BM K149 51 doboz 1912-1-1115. For the Social Democrats’ and other socialists’ position, see: Tibor Ere´nyi, “Die Sozialdemokratische

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64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76.

77.

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Partei Ungarns und die Aussenpolitik der O¨sterreichisch-Ungarischen Monarchie in den Jahren 1908– 1914”, E´tudes Historiques 1970 (Budapest, 1970), pp. 397 –426 (esp. 411 –19); and Ja´nos Jemnitz, A ha´boru´ vesze´lye e´s a II. Interna´ciona´le´ (1911 – 1914) (Budapest, 1966), pp. 175– 226. Report of 3 November 1912, OL BM K149 (49 doboz) 1912-2 te´tel p. 176. Reports of 29 November and 14 December 1912, OL BM K149 (49 doboz) 1912-2 te´tel. OL BM K149 (49 doboz) 1912-2-805. Leon Trotsky, “First Impressions” (3 October 1912), The Balkan Wars, pp. 97– 102 (99). 2 December 1912, signed Sheriff (Fo˝ispa´n) Dellimanics, Nagybecskerek, OL BM K149 (49 doboz) 1912-2 te´tel. Pancsova, 5 October 1912, etc. OL BM K149 (49 doboz) 1912-2. 17 December Kecskeme´t, and also see names from 18 December Cegle´d, ibid. 12 and 14 November 1912, OL BM K149 (49 doboz) 1912-1-176. 5 December 1912, OL BM K149 (49 doboz) 1912-2. Handwritten letter, 30 November 1912, OL BM K149 1912-2. OL BM K149 48 doboz 1912-5t 45 csomo´. Belgrade to Vienna, 19 May 1912, O¨sterreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik, vol. 4, p. 215; and Vienna to Budapest, 14 June 1912, OL BM K149 48 doboz 19125t. 45cs. Among many other contacts, this is attested to by the long history of trade among South Slavs from the Balkans in Hungary, of travelling Bosnian salesmen in Hungary, of South Slav Franciscan monks who served throughout Hungary, Croatia-Slavonia, and Bosnia for centuries, and of journals and literature read across national lines. On trade, see docs in Slavko Gavrilovic´ (ed.), Grad¯a o balkanskim trgovcima u Ugarskoj XVIII veka, 2 vols (Belgrade, 1985 and 1996); on Franciscans, Istva´n Gyo¨rgy To´th, “Bosnya´k ferencesek a holdoltsa´gi misszio´ban”, in Missziona´riusok a kora u´jkori Magyarorsza´gon (Budapest, 2007), pp. 257–309; on Bosnian traders in Hungary, “A Hungarian Peasant in Occupied Belgrade in WWI: Excerpts from the Memoirs of Miha´ly Csonka”, trans. by E.B. Weaver, The South Slav Journal, 29:3–4 (2010), pp. 98–115 (99–101); and Imre Danko´, “A bosnya´k (A sza´zadfordulo´ egyik jellegzetes va´ndora´rusa)”, Mu´zeumi Kurı´r, 40 (December 1982), pp. 105–10; on press Jovan Pejin, “‘Zastava’ o stavovima ugarskog javnog mnjenja za vreme primirja izmedu Srbije i Turske 1877. godine”, in Vladimir Stojancˇevic´ (ed.), Srbija i oslobodenje srpskog naroda u Turskoj 1804– 1912 (Belgrade, 2003), pp. 119–35; and Krestic´, Istorije srpke sˇtampe u Ugarskoj. Multiple examples of communication along and across national lines, and of the varieties of Yugoslavism, pan-Slavism, and nationalism among the South Slavs of Hungary the end of the nineteenth century are to be found in the first chapters of Jakov Ignjatovic´, Memoari, Rapsodije iz prosˇlog srpskog zˇivota (Belgrade, 1966); and the correspondence of Bishop Antunovic´, esp. letters to an unknown Serb, 25 February 1871, and to Lazar Knezˇevic´, 5 December 1878, in Matija Evetovic´, Zˇivot i rad Biskupa Ivana Antunovic´a narodnog preporoditelja (Subotica, 1935), pp.

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79.

80.

81.

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163–5 and 172–4. For background on the tension between Yugoslav, Croatian, and Serbian national ideals, see: Slobodan Drakulic, “Freaks and Flukes in the Making of Serbo-Croat Relations”, Balkanistica, 25:1 (2012), pp. 63–95. At the start of World War I, the Hungarian Interior Minister informed his colleagues that the Serbs of Pancsova “engaged in thick and constant communication with the citizens of the Serbian Kingdom, and as a result of inter-marriage, and these ties become stronger and more active”. Minutes of the Hungarian Ministerial Council of 31 August 1914, in Emma Iva´nyi (ed.), Magyar minisztertana´csi jegyzo˝ko¨nyvek az elso˝ vila´gha´boru´ kora´bo´l, 1914– 1918 (Budapest, 1960), pp. 85 – 7 (86). Such ties included, in 1831, no less than the marriage of Jovan Nikolic´, from Hungary, to the daughter of Serbia’s Prince Milosˇ Obrenovic´ – see: “The Nikolic´ Family of Rudna, Excerpts of Bishop Sze´ka´cs’s memoirs”, trans. by E.B. Weaver, The South Slav Journal, 29:3– 4 (2010), pp. 116– 29 (126 –8). Naturally such similarities do not preclude conflict, on which see Freud’s theory on the narcissism of minor differences and, for an example, Michael Ignatieff, “The Narcissism of Minor Differences”, in The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New York, 1997), pp. 34 –71. On Habsburg officials’ desire for war in 1914 to eliminate the Serbian and internal Yugoslav threat, see: Solomon Wank, “Desperate Counsel in Vienna in July 1914, Berthold Molden’s unpublished memorandum”, Central European History, 26:3 (1993), pp. 281–310 (esp. 282 –3 and 286); and a similar reading by R.J.W. Evans, “The Habsburg Monarchy and the Coming of the War”, in R.J.W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (eds), The Coming of the First World War (Oxford, 1988), pp. 33 – 55 (34– 5); but note the argument that Austria wanted war for not because of any perceived threat, but for reasons of honour and prestige by Alan Sked, “Historians, the Nationality Question and the Downfall of the Habsburg Empire”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. (1981), pp. 175 – 93. Even before hostilities had commenced, Krobatin claimed Croats were universally faithful but urged the crushing of domestic Serbs whom he regarded as traitors – see: Krobatin to Tisza, 14 July 1914, in Count Stephen Tisza, Prime Minister of Hungary Letters (1914–1916), ed. and trans. by Carvel de Bussy (New York, 1991), pp. 8–9. In subsequent repression in Hungary Bunjevci, then considered Catholic Serbs (now generally regarded as Croats), were targeted along with Orthodox Serbs during the Great War. On abuses of South Slavs, especially in Hungary, and the brutality of the occupation of Serbia, see: Andrej Mitrovic´, Serbia’s Great War, 1914–1918 (London 2007), pp. 63–8; Jonathan E. Gumz, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914–1918 (Cambridge 2009); Irina Marin, “World War I and Internal Repression: The Case of Major General Nikolaus Cena”, Austrian History Yearbook, 44 (2013), pp. 195–208; R.-A. Reiss, How Austria-Hungary Waged War in Serbia: Personal Investigations of a Neutral (Paris, 1915); and Henry Baerlein, The Birth of Yugoslavia, 2 vols (London, 1922), vol. 1, pp. 248ff.

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82. Ge´za Csa´th, Fej a poha´rban, Naplo´k e´s levelek 1914– 1916, ed. by Zolta´n De´r and Miha´ly Szajbe´ly, 2nd edn (Budapest, 1997), p. 19, also see entry of 16 August, p. 14; and Ka´rolyi Miha´lyne´ [Mrs Miha´ly Ka´rolyi], Egyu¨tt a forradalomban, 4th edn (Budapest, 1985), p. 171. For a refutation of one atrocity, see: Windischgraetz, Memoirs, pp. 60 – 1; and for an account of what Windischgraetz denied, Ferenc Pollmann, “A szerbekkel szembeni osztra´kmagyar atrocı´ta´sok az elso˝ vila´gha´boru´ kezdete´n. Sabac, 1914. augusztus 17”, Hadto¨rte´nelmi Ko¨zleme´nyek, 122:3 (September 2009), pp. 715–30. 83. Tisza to Archduke Friedrich, 19 September 1914, in Tisza Letters, pp. 49– 50. 84. Windischgraetz, Memoirs, p. 58. 85. Mitrovic´, Serbia’s Great War, pp. 74– 6. 86. List of volunteers from Croatia, Dalmatia, and Hungary, 29 September 1914, in Nikola Popovic´ (ed.), Jugoslovenski dobrovoljci 1914– 1918, Srbija, Juzˇna Amerika, Severna Amerika, Australija, Francuska, Italija, Solunska front, zbornik dokumenata (Belgrade, 1980), pp. 19 – 23, and other lists passim. For details, see Mitrovic´, Serbia’s Great War, pp. 79 – 85; and P.D. Ostovic´, The Truth about Yugoslavia (New York, 1952), pp. 62 – 8. 87. Mitrovic´, Serbia’s Great War, p. 80. 88. My argument here might ruffle some feathers, and so it seems wise to acknowledge that many South Slavs, including Serbs, fought well against the Russians – see Windischgraetz, Memoirs, p. 100. On the myths and realities of Czech desertions: Czechs surrender to Russians, in T.G. Masaryk, The Making of a State: Memories and Observations 1914–1918 (London, 1927), p. 26; Czechs surrender to Serbians at Battle of Cer, in Windischgraetz, Memoirs, p. 63. A refutation: Richard Lein, Pflichterfu¨llung oder Hochverrat. Die tschechischen Soldaten O¨sterreich-Ungarns im Ersten Weltkrieg (Vienna, 2011); contrast with Geoffrey Wawro, “Morale in the Austro-Hungarian Army: The Evidence of Habsburg Army Campaign Reports and Allied Intelligence Officers”, in Hugh Cecil and Peter H. Liddle (eds), Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experience, second printing (Barnsley, 2003), pp. 399–412; and the feisty antiJa´szian riposte to Wawro (again, focussed on Austria), Alan Sked, “AustriaHungary and the Great War”, Histoire@Politique. Politique, culture, socie´te´, 22 (January–April 2014), online at http://www.histoire-politique.fr/index.php? numero¼22&rub¼dossier&item¼213. 89. On Serbian and other volunteers in Russia, see docs in Nikola Popovic´ (ed.), Jugoslovenski dobrovoljci u Rusiji 1914 –1918 (Belgrade, 1977). 90. Overview, Mark Cornwall, “Disintegration and Defeat: The AustroHungarian Revolution”, in idem. (ed.), The Last Years of Austria-Hungary: A Multi-national Experiment in Early Twentieth-century Europe, 2nd revised edn (Exeter, 2002), pp. 167 – 96.

CHAPTER 4 COMBATING CHOLERA DURING THE BALKAN WARS: THE CASE OF BULGARIA Christian Promitzer

Among the many and manifold aspects that render the brutal campaigns of 1912–13 in the Balkans the harbingers of World War I issues of health and physical integrity are not among the least important. The challenges of military medicine and the task of saving the population in the hinterlands from epidemics that were rampant on the front line became particularly topical because of the imminent danger of a general war on the European continent. But the challenges military medicine had to face were different than those in former wars: surgeons, in the first case, had to deal with complicated wounds that had been caused by various forms of modern bullets, for the first time tried out on human flesh in these two wars. Of even greater significance were war epidemics: the Balkan Wars were the first theatre where methods of bacteriology were applied on a large scale, in order to analyse and attempting to prevent the upsurge of contagious diseases among the soldiers and the civilian population. Consequently, the First Balkan War became notable for the reason that “for the first time in a European war zone the modern doctrines of bacteriology and the modern principles of control of epidemics were applied”, as is expressed by the words of the Viennese immunologist Rudolf Kraus (1868– 1932), who himself visited the theatre of war.1 The Austrian historian Indira Durakovic´ critically

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speaks of the warring Balkan states as fields of experimentation for Austro-Hungarian doctors and students of medicine who could now deepen their theoretical insights by practical application.2 But how efficient were these moments, when the Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars tells us about “the black flags, hanging outside the doors of the hovels, a dismal sign of the mourning caused by the war and its sad accompaniment, cholera”.3 This chapter tries to single out the role of cholera in this conflict and in Bulgaria in particular; thereby it aims to scrutinise the perception of this war epidemic by medical doctors from the Habsburg Empire and Germany. In Europe cholera had unfolded its horrors for the first time in the early 1830s. As a war epidemic it became rampant during the Crimean War, when in summer of 1854 on a stopover to the Crimea at the Black Sea port of Varna on the territory of modern Bulgaria, many French and British marines, foot soldiers and cavalrymen became victim to this pest, which they had brought along themselves.4 The other situation of war where cholera appeared was during the Austro-Prussian conflict of 1866. The Prussian army was heavily infested with cholera, and every Austrian area that was occupied by it contracted the epidemic. The Prussian army counted 12,000 cases of cholera, about 4,500 soldiers died of their wounds, but about 6,500 of cholera. The so-called generous conditions of the Prussian king were partly a result of time pressure due to cholera.5 Our concentration on Bulgaria proceeds from the fact that the Turkish medical historian Oya Dagˆlar has already written an extensive study on the role of epidemics during the wars of the late Ottoman Empire.6 A similar account for Bulgaria is still missing, however. This is the more regrettable, because this country in both Balkan Wars occupied a central position both by terms of geography and military action; it consequently became an important turntable for the dissemination of cholera in the region. The example of Varna in 1854 shows cholera was not totally unknown in the region. In the years preceding the Balkan Wars, cholera had been observed in Bulgaria in 1910 with five fatal cases and in 1911 with 29 cases and 15 fatalities,7 all of whom had been introduced from Turkish citizens who had travelled to the Ottoman Empire. There, by May of 1911, cholera had taken more than 18,000 victims with more than 12, 000 fatalities.8

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As already mentioned, the second focus of this chapter lies on the interest in cholera, foreign – mainly Austrian and German – doctors showed at the time. Most of them were confronted with the epidemic during their voluntary service with the Red Cross. Historiography on their role in the Balkan Wars already exists. But the bulk of these works almost exclusively deals with the treatment of the wounded as part of international humanitarian work only.9 Within this framework the monograph of Konstantin Troshev on the mission of Czech doctors in the Balkan Wars forms an exception, because it also discusses broader issues of public health and military medicine in Bulgaria.10 Still more an exception is the contribution of Indira Durakovic´ which gives an overview of several aspects of the missions of Austro-Hungarian doctors in the Balkans and of their perception of this region in particular.11 Some aspects of cholera in the Balkan Wars are furthermore addressed in an article written by Bulgarian authors whose findings rest on material from the Bulgarian Central Military Archive in Veliko Tarnovo.12 This chapter, in turn, concentrates itself upon the evaluation of the papers of the Austrian and German doctors involved in these missions and in their comparison with the accounts of their Bulgarian colleagues in order to reconstruct and to understand the significance of the cholera epidemic of 1912–13 and the applied methods of epidemic defence.

A Turkish “Gift” One of the earliest international reactions to the presence of cholera in the conflict and the ensuing eventual dangers for the Western great powers originates from the German Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim; on 15 November 1912, not even a month after the Bulgarian declaration of war, he reported to the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs that “according to information by reliable eyewitnesses, cholera, smallpox and typhoid are rampaging among the Turkish troops in C¸atalca to an extent, that nobody can think about serious resistance”.13 At the time, the victorious Bulgarian troops on their advance in eastern Thrace in bloody battles had already overrun the Ottoman fortresses of Kırkkilise, Lu¨le Burgaz and Pinarhisar. The Ottoman army had retreated to the fortifications of C¸atalca, about 20 miles west of Istanbul, and the first and third Bulgarian army had already lined up vis-a`-vis to the last Ottoman positions in front of

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Istanbul. Not only the Ottoman army, but also the Bulgarian troops were heavily infested with cholera, and an Ottoman rout back to Istanbul and an ensuing Bulgarian invasion of the Ottoman capital could not be excluded. The Europeans living in the city and the corps diplomatique of the great powers became uneasy, the German ambassador in another minute reported about “whole railway trains with soldiers sick of cholera arriving in San Stefano and even at the station of Sirkeci [in the European part of Istanbul], as well as bodies dead of cholera covering the areas alongside the railway and the front line of C¸atalca”.14 The epidemic had also grasped the Muslim civilian population of the immediate war zone and those parts of eastern Thrace that had been recently conquered by the Bulgarian units. Within a short period about 40– 50,000 refugees arrived in Istanbul. They occupied cemeteries, courtyards of mosques and stations. According to the city government, about 20 to 50 new cases of cholera were daily registered, mainly among the Muslim refugees from the war zones. Big hotels and waterside residences at the Bosphorus, Schools and mosques had to be turned into hospitals.15 On 17 November the threat of infection by cholera by the two warring armies became the topic of the proceedings of the International Sanitary Council, which was the supreme public health authority of the Ottoman Empire and whose members to a major part were representatives of the great powers. On request of the British delegate this body appealed to the Ottoman authorities to prevent the entry of its troops and asked the governments of the great powers to act upon Bulgaria likewise to keep off its army from the Ottoman capital.16 At the same meeting the Ottoman minister of foreign affairs, Gabriel Effendi Nuradunghian, asked the foreign delegates of the Sanitary Council to support the city authorities in the fight against cholera. With respect to the numerous Europeans in the city and in the interest of international navigation the European representatives consented to this request and assigned 10,000 Turkish pounds for the fight against cholera. The money had to be spent for the protection of the water supply, warding off any military units, accommodation of cholera-infested or suspected persons, and for vaccination. A mixed commission of Ottoman and foreign members should monitor the disposition of the money.17 As is generally known, the Ottoman troops were able to maintain their position at the C¸atalca line both in the period to the armistice of

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3 December and also after the resumption of fighting in early February 1913. Thus, the Ottoman capital was spared the mass entry of cholerainfested military units. Those soldiers, who would thereafter come from the war zones, would be isolated from the population. But still, until the end of 1912 more than 2,300 cholera cases were registered among the inhabitants of Istanbul, not including the many thousands of cases that had occurred in November among immigrants and returning soldiers from the front. The spread of the disease could be partly prevented by the daily bacteriological control of the water supplies of the city that had been implemented in the course of the events.18 This episode was supposed to show that the Balkan Wars were inextricably connected with war epidemics. In his monograph on the Balkan Wars Richard C. Hall describes the impotence of the Ottoman High Command to control the threat and the effects of cholera, but he also remarks that cholera became “a critical Ottoman weapon in the . . . fight for Constantinople”.19 In another place he again speaks about cholera as an “inadvertent Ottoman biological weapon”.20 It is for certain that soldiers from Anatolia and Syria brought the epidemic to the Thracian theatre of war which had been free from cholera before the war.21 On the basis of the above quoted German sources one can at least contend that the Ottoman authorities were keen to reassure Western observers on the well-being of “European” inhabitants of Istanbul and on the future perspectives of international navigation.

Cholera on the Bulgarian Side of the Frontline In the following part of my paper I will deal with the other side of the frontline and give a mirror-inverted image of the development of cholera on the Bulgarian side: I will shed additional light on the sanitary aspects of the warfare in eastern Thrace and give information on the contemporary Bulgarian discussion of the sanitary mistakes of the Bulgarian army as well as on the consequences for the civilian population. By doing so, I will make use of the observations of two Bulgarian medical doctors and of the accounts of Austrian and German doctors volunteering in the war zones. Here, I will only introduce the Bulgarian witnesses: The first is Toshko Petrov (1872– 1942), who had a specialisation in hygiene and was member of the mobile hygienicdisinfecting unit of the First Bulgarian Army in eastern Thrace; this unit

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included the heads of the institutes of bacteriology and of hygiene in Sofia22 and disposed of a microbiological laboratory.23 The other person, whose account I will use, is the internist Vasil Mollov (1875– 1938) who had already made a name in the international medical press by his examination of the distribution of malaria in Bulgaria. In 1913 he was the head of the epidemic hospital in Kırkkilise. According to Petrov, after the battles of Lu¨leburgaz and Pinarhisar several dead bodies of Ottoman soldiers looked suspicious, because they showed no signs of being wounded, but had “the appearance of extremely drained and parched individuals”. These bodies were often lying in rivers and swampy waters used for potable water of the Bulgarian army.24 An Austrian regimental doctor, Fritz Tintner, who volunteered in the Bulgarian campaign, observed that, due to lack of qualitative food supplies, Bulgarian soldiers regularly softened stale bread in these waters.25 These observations may hint at possible sources for infection with cholera. But the actual contamination of the Bulgarian army with the cholera pathogen happened when a reconnoitring Bulgarian cavalry regiment encountered an Ottoman infantry regiment before C¸atalca; the cavalry repulsed the Ottoman unit and occupied its camp.26 Thenceforward the epidemic grasped the Bulgarian forces: From 5 – 6 November, when the main bulk of the two Bulgarian armies was still resting before resuming the march to C¸atalca, doctors of the First Army observed the first cases of profuse diarrhoea and the first fatality. First bacteriological evidence of cholera was found on 9 November in a Bulgarian soldier in the town of C¸orlu.27 Thereafter suspected and diseased soldiers were isolated in so-called “epidemic hospitals”. The main hospital was erected in the Ottoman barracks of C¸orlu, smaller ones were erected on other places in the hinterlands of the C¸atalca front line. 28 According to Italian and Russian examples the doctors administered the diseased soldiers the intake of a few drops of iodine tincture. The Bulgarian doctors further observed that several solders preferred to defecate in the outside. Consequently, the surroundings of the bivouacs soon turned into mud. From there the soldiers brought the matter inside with their boots. After they had taken them off, they would start to eat without washing their hands. In order to prevent this chain reaction and to compel the soldiers to use latrines, the orderly disposal of excrements was controlled by sentries. By these simple measures

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the first onslaught of cholera could indeed be averted in the First Bulgarian Army.29 Much more dramatic was the situation to its left among the 95,000 men of the Third Bulgarian Army, which was likewise on the increase to C¸atalca. Around 10 November 400 suspected cases of cholera were counted among its ranks, and this number augmented to 7,000 cases by 16 November.30 The Third Army’s only bacteriologist and his laboratory had been left behind in the recently conquered town of Kırkkilise. Therefore the mobile hygienic-disinfection unit of the First Army had to be transferred to the Third Army for assistance. This happened on 18 November, amidst the battle of C¸atalca. The disinfection unit counted 23,500 cases of cholera and more than 2,200 fatalities. During the next four days another 5,700 cases and more than 600 fatalities had to be registered.31 The military historian Edward J. Erickson puts it bluntly: “Although its full effects had yet to be felt, cholera would ultimately kill and disable more Bulgarian soldiers than would Ottoman munitions.”32 Up to the armistice of 3 December almost 30,000 Bulgarian soldiers at C¸atalca would fall sick of cholera; altogether more than 4,600 of them would be dead by that date. About one-sixth of the Bulgarian manpower was knocked out.33 At the same time, on the Ottoman side of the frontline, up to 20,000 soldiers suffered from cholera.34 The provisional epidemic field hospitals of the Bulgarian Army close to the frontline were equipped for 200 persons only. But in the aisles one could find 500 up to more than one thousand patients lying on the soil and in the cold. Each day several dozens of them lost their lives.35 At the sight of these conditions the already mentioned Viennese bacteriologist Rudolf Kraus remarked towards an official of the Bulgarian Red Cross with ill-concealed disdain: “With respect to the Bulgarian hospitals allow me to keep silent.”36 Many doctors initially misdiagnosed the disease as Gastro enteritis or as Gastro enteritis acutissima, and sought the reasons in bad food and exhaustion of the soldiers.37 Vasil Mollov contends that “the commanding officers and the army doctors were not allowed to proclaim the outbreak of cholera; . . . they only did not mention cholera for fear of creating panic among the army. The soldiers, however, very well knew that cholera was rampaging among them.”38 Only by way of bacteriological examinations could the mobile hygienic-disinfecting unit finally demonstrate that cholera was a concern.39

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The Spread of Cholera as a Consequence of Logistic Deficiencies A serious problem was the lack of isolation: the majority of the wounded soldiers contracted cholera during transport or in the field hospitals and in turn infected their fellow soldiers. Vasil Mollov explains this by the chaotic circumstances on the front lines: The doctors of the units separated the cholera-infested, the latter often fell ill in the trenches and died there, other ones, when they observed the first signs, went to the hospitals nearby. The transport of the diseased from the units to the divisional lazarettos was realised in the most primitive way; usually the diseased walked a distance of several kilometres alone and they spread cholera everywhere; along the way one frequently could bounce upon the dead bodies of soldiers. There were also many inapparent cases of cholera; they hardly showed any symptoms, but were nonetheless a source of infection.40 Toshko Petrov explained the dissemination of cholera among the Bulgarian forces not only with the deficient isolation of diseased soldiers, but also with the small number of bacteriologists.41 The lack of medical staff was a general problem, however, which could not be limited to a single professional branch: According to contemporary assessments the Bulgarian Army was in need of about 1,300–1,400 doctors in order to grant a satisfying system of medical treatment. But Bulgaria altogether possessed only 680 doctors at the time. Of this number about 100 were serving in the army during peace times.42 Now also the civilian doctors, without any exception, had to be mobilised, which had the consequence that the civilian population of Bulgaria became devoid of qualified medical personnel. These circumstances may explain the willingness of the Bulgarian authorities to accept voluntary missions of foreign doctors. Petrov furthermore complained about the behaviour of foreign bacteriologists, who had been invited by the staff of the Bulgarian army. Instead of remaining in the back areas in order to examine the wounded, sick and healthy soldiers coming from the theatre of war, they rather preferred to study the various cases of diseases at the front line and rushed to the main hospital in C¸orlu.43 This assessment is in

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contradiction with the observations of the Austrian army doctor Ambros Celewicz, however, who claimed that the major part of the foreign medical missions was retained in the hinterlands.44 Also the small Czech bacteriological detachment worked far from the front line in Plovdiv.45 Vasil Mollov, in turn, disapproved of the Bulgarian high command, which did not trust its own medical staff and could not believe that cholera was among the army. It spent about 100,000 Leva to summon Professor Rudolf Kraus and three of his assistants in order to check the findings of the Bulgarian doctors. “This behaviour of the high command”, writes Mollov, “caused distrust among our bacteriologists and it was a completely unjustified insult of the rank of medical doctors.”46 This criticism was all the more grave, because Kraus had been personally invited by the Supreme Commander of the Bulgarian forces, King Ferdinand.47 Toshko Petrov relates that Kraus “in the beginning, before he had a chance to examine a diseased person, expressed doubts that cholera was in concern”. The Bulgarian bacteriologists had to show him 11 kinds of vibrio cholera, isolated from diseased persons. Kraus finally admitted that among workers of Kırkkilise who had cleaned the rifles of soldiers killed in action, cases of cholera had appeared. Kraus furthermore examined 98 diseased in the staging hospital of Kırkkilise, among whom he found several patients who had contracted cholera. Only thereafter was he persuaded that cholera was rampant.48 For his Bulgarian colleagues the actual labour of Kraus’ expensive bacteriological mission remained “quite mysterious”. Already on 10 December Kraus and his team left the still cholera-stricken country, maligned by his Bulgarian colleagues with the statement: “The flag bearer leaves, because there is nothing left to do.”49 According to Kraus, the low mortality spoke against cholera: however, the way in which the epidemic developed in individual cases suggested otherwise. Bacteriological examination explained that both cholera and dysentery were concerned. Kraus consequently came to the assessment that only in one-sixth of the cases was cholera indeed a concern.50 He also held the view that the relatively mild appearance of cholera was a consequence of the sanitary provisions and of the seasonal circumstances that were not favourable for the development of the cholera pathogen.51 In any case, after Kraus had assessed that cholera indeed was a concern, the Bulgarian soldiers had to give an oath to drink boiled water only and they were informed about the dangers of cholera. He furthermore ordered the separation of diseased soldiers from wounded ones already

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from the front line to the staging hospitals.52 Four additional bacteriological laboratories were established in eastern Thrace and four in Bulgaria proper, also a sanitary service for the civilian population of the occupied eastern Thracian territory was brought into being.53 Kraus furthermore used the occasion to check out the anti-cholera vaccine he had developed during the cholera epidemic of 1908 in St Petersburg. It was applied upon 3,000 wounded soldiers at the staging hospital of Kırkkilise from the second half of November until late December 1912.54 Petrov writes that it was impossible to isolate the front line from the hinterlands, because the wounded had to be transported to the rear areas.55 By this way cholera was brought to the Second Bulgarian Army back in the rear area that was engaged in the siege of the city of Adrianople. Also among the Serbian Danube Division, which assisted the Second Bulgarian Army there, cases of cholera were observed in December.56 Later that month a Bulgarian prisoner of war, who had contracted cholera, also infected the Ottoman garrison of Adrianople. In the following months until the capitulation, due to lack of food and clean water, more and more inhabitants would become victims of cholera, typhoid and dysentery.57 Far more alarming was the fact that cholera also invaded the interior of Bulgaria and even the war zone in Macedonia by the transport of Ottoman prisoners of war and of wounded Bulgarian soldiers to the rear area. The town of Yambol in eastern Bulgaria, which hosted a huge evacuation hospital, was the first place where cholera appeared. On 7 December it was observed among the wounded in the hospital, but already one week later, on 15 December, it had grasped the first two victims among the civilian population of the town.58 An Austrian bacteriologist observed that the coachmen who provided for the transport of goods to and wounded from the frontline were often carriers of cholera, and that one of the civilian victims had been in contact with the coachmen.59 Wounded soldiers, who were sent back to the central staging hospital in Sofia, were also infected with cholera. The first case of cholera occurred in Sofia on the night of 21– 2 November. The missions of foreign doctors, who had been organised by the Bulgarian Red Cross, were informed immediately. This first case of cholera in the Bulgarian capital for a short period almost caused panic. On 24 November during a meeting of about 25 –30 agitated foreign doctors at the Hotel “Balgariya” the Bulgarian doctor Petar Orahovats

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tried to calm the mood and declared that “Bulgaria serves as a barrier against the transmission of the disease to the West of Europe”. The foreign doctors nonetheless formed a commission that worked out detailed suggestions of how to deal with persons that had contracted cholera. The Bulgarian government overtly accepted the plan, which consisted of rather general suggestions.60 Up to the beginning of the Second Balkan War altogether 34 cases of cholera were registered in Sofia.61 The AustroHungarian consulate in the north-western Bulgarian town of Vidin in late December nonetheless suspected that the Bulgarian authorities concealed cases of cholera that had occurred among the families of wounded soldiers who had returned home.62 Rudolf Kraus, in turn, after his return to Vienna declared that for the protection of the Bulgarian civilian population quarantining of returning soldiers would be useless; he rather suggested mass vaccination of the whole population.63 This suggestion was never put into practice, as we will see.

Cholera in the Further Course of the Conflict After the expiration of the armistice, on 8 February 1913 fighting continued at Gallipoli. There members of the newly formed Fourth Bulgarian Army in the course of gathering the belongings of killed and wounded Ottoman soldiers became infected.64 The bacteriological laboratory back in Kırkkilise assessed cholera among them and was consequently transferred to the town of Uzunko¨pru¨ on the way between Adrianople and Gallipoli – a measure that should have been taken already the previous November! In Uzunko¨pru¨ also a staging hospital was established, while the respective mobile hygienic-disinfecting unit had the task to examine all diseased with diarrhoea; it had also to take care that no carrier of the disease could leave the town to any of the three war zones of Adrianople, Gallipolli and C¸atalca.65 After the capitulation of Adrianople on 26 March, the commanding officers of the victorious Second Bulgarian Army did not listen to the warnings of the army doctors about the danger of infection in the city.66 The latter had elaborated a special plan for sanitising the town. It foresaw that the Bulgarian soldiers should not enter the town. Vasil Mollov remarks: “Sad to say, the plan was not executed; the soldiers had to file past the supreme commander and stayed within the town. Consequently, cholera appeared again and took the lives of about 1,000

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persons.”67 The surrendering town’s Ottoman garrison, which since the beginning of the war had been isolated from its army and had since then to grapple with cholera and other epidemics all alone, was detained on an island in the river Tundzha (“Tunca” in Turkish); there they were left to die from starvation, cholera and other epidemic diseases.68 In the meantime the situation among the Bulgarian occupying forces and the remaining population in the town also deteriorated: the internal departments of the local hospital became crowded with diseased soldiers. Those who had contracted cholera were placed in a separate hospital on the periphery of the town for the purpose of isolation. The Austrian regimental doctor Karl von Mu¨llern ascribed the fact that of the 1,200 patients only 200 died to the ample use of intravenous injections with saline solution.69 Already Kraus had observed that this treatment was at least as promising as the internal administration of iodine tincture.70 Due to the carelessness of the military authorites, one division that should have been transferred from Adrianople to C¸atalca spread the disease anew among the other Bulgarian troops still engaged in the remaining theatres of war in eastern Thrace.71 Adrianople also became the springboard for a new round of infections in regard of the imminent Second Balkan War. The bulk of the Second Army, which in late May and early June was already on its march to its new positions in southern Macedonia, had cholera as its constant companion. In that period about 1,500 new cases had to be dealt with.72 In mid-June the AustroHungarian consul of Salonica reported 500 cases of cholera in the Bulgarian camps around Serres and Demir Hisar (today’s Siridokastro) and 32 fatalities among the civilian population of a village nearby.73 Also the Fourth Army would take along cholera on its transfer from Gallipoli to the Macedonian theatre of war, so that at the beginning of the Second Balkan War about 6,500 cases were registered among its soldiers.74 Finally, the so-called Adrianople Brigade, which had been formed out of the Second Army, left the city without medical examination. It was infested with cholera and spread the epidemic on its way to Sofia and further on to its new positions within the newly formed Fifth Army around Kyustendil and Radomir in western Bulgaria. There, an additional 1,500 new cases of cholera were soon to be registered.75 In the early phase of the Second Balkan War the first cholera hospital was erected in Kyustendil, but due to the massive increase of cases among the Second and Fourth Armies additional field hospitals had

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to be established in western Bulgaria and in settlements in eastern Macedonia held by the Bulgarian forces, so that the epidemic – according to Toshko Petrov – could be kept under control.76 In the two hospitals in Sofia providing for cases of cholera, altogether 1,805 cases were received; of these 155 (8.6 per cent) died.77 The claim that cholera was under control could only be postulated by ignoring the personal tragedy of the people in concern. Their lot is central to the retrospective novel Cholera by the Bulgarian author Ljudmil Stoyanov who tells us about two soldiers who contract cholera on the Macedonian front. They are bereft of medical treatment and have to beat their way back to the Bulgarian hinterlands on their own. Stoyanov’s account is not an invention. In his criticism of the Bulgarian system of war medicine Vasil Mollov picks at individual army doctors who in time of cholera only looked on their own health and refused treatment. Some of them “even fenced themselves off by an impenetrable cordon”.78 Toshko Petrov, in turn, contends that the consequences of the famous victories of the Bulgarian forces would have been totally different if there had not been the terrible assault of the cholera epidemic. With respect to the effect cholera had on the civilian population in Bulgaria he only laconically confesses that it took on a dramatic scale, and it was more disseminated in those regions of Bulgaria that were occupied by the Romanian and Serbian armies.79

Criticisms and the Effect of Cholera on the Civilian Population In autumn 1913, after the lost second war, a disenchanted and indignant Bulgarian public looked at a potential culprit for the defeat; among others the medical profession as a whole came under criticism. In defence, Toshko Petrov declared that after the great battles of the first and the second war all 500 Bulgarian doctors had to deal with tens of thousands of wounded soldiers within a period of three or four days and that they had to treat more than 60,000 persons sick of cholera during the days of the Bulgarian assault on the C¸atalca front line.80 The semi-official Bulgarian League of Doctors added that 3 per cent of the army doctors lost their lives in the combat against cholera.81 But both Petrov and the Bulgarian League of Doctors neglect the role of the

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600 volunteering foreign doctors who had been organised by the Bulgarian Red Cross on the initiative of its president, Doctor Stefan Vatev. The largest group among these volunteers were 150 doctors of Czech origin.82 But even so, it was undeniable that “[t]he war . . . showed our full bankruptcy in sanitary respect”, as Vasil Mollov expressed it.83 He ascribed part of the guilt to the drawbacks of the existing system of the army’s sanitary inspection. Most of the drafted physicians were not instructed in the new plan for sanitary service in the army, which had been decreed two weeks before the beginning of the First Balkan War.84 The means of transport that were disposable for the diseased formed a problem by itself, since the Bulgarian forces “were at the end of a long and tenuous logistical system that relied in part on oxen for transportation”, as Richard C. Hall remarks. Vasil Mollov furthermore pointed out that “[o]ur means of transport for those with infectious diseases were the same as for wounded and even for foodstuffs. This was by no way harmless and . . . a high percentage of the army supply trains was infected and [its staff] died of cholera.”85 But in general, Mollov contends that “[t]hese mistakes are not those of the sanitary inspection, but of the general staff of the army which should have listened to the views of the sanitary part and yield to it unconditionally.”86 Combating infectious diseases was the task of hygienists and bacteriologists. But their rating within the army was paltry: The commanding officers looked at them like at superficial ballast, of whom they tried to be liberated from as quickly as possible, so that they left them behind in the rear of the army. Until the outbreak of cholera they were never consulted: indeed, their competency was subjected to daily questioning. Only after the outbreak of cholera in November 1912 would this behaviour change.87 The discussion about the culprits for the loss of national pride took place without any notice of the suffering of the civilian population. To the contrary, the Bulgarian doctors’ league boasted that Bulgarian doctors had refused to apply anti-cholera vaccines that had been bought at 60,000 leva by the government for the Bulgarian army. Under the pretext of saving Bulgarian soldiers from becoming the object of experiments,

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a possible means of prevention, which two other warring parties did use, was abandoned.88 But the missed chance of mass immunisation does not account for the whole tragedy. More important was the fact that the mobilisation of all doctors totally deprived the Bulgarian society of its customary system of healthcare. Vasil Mollov noted: “All doctors were taken into the ranks of the army, all [civic] hospitals were closed, even our first one – the Aleksander Hospital, and all the medical staff was taken to the army.”89 Throughout the country, even the furnishings and instruments of the closed civic hospitals were taken for the military ones.90 An Austrian doctor observed that in regard of healthcare the municipalities were now dependent on provisional, so-called “feldshers” who had previously occupied different professions. Thus the Bulgarian sanitary service, which had worked well during peacetime, was almost totally incapacitated.91 Another Austrian doctor, who had been during the Second Balkan War in Bulgaria, remarked that “the medical treatment of the civilian population came to a halt. Even in Sofia, where some of the local civilian physicians remained, although they were now in military service, chronic diseases were not treated anymore.”92 Not only were the basic institutions of healthcare abolished, also the supreme administrative bodies of public health and the bacteriological institute in Sofia were disbanded.93 In this situation the attempt to instruct the civilian population to abstain from drinking unboiled water remained futile.94 For the common people the situation in the Second Balkan War was indeed more dramatic than in the first one. Now the capital was only 120 kilometres away from the front lines, and the whole western part of Bulgaria had become a deployment zone. The fairly good hygienic situation of the city did not allow for the breeding of the cholera pathogen; however, neither the water supply nor the sewage system were endangered. Consequently, cholera did not claim civilian victims among the inhabitants.95 But this was not the case in the northern parts of the country, which in the course of July were occupied by the Romanian army. In the town of Vratsa, about 100 kilometres north of Sofia, cholera was probably triggered by two Bulgarian renegade soldiers; it broke out on 16 July and lasted until 22 August. The local authorities did not undertake any measures, so that of the 547 registered cases 236, i.e. the hight rate of 43 per cent, would die.96 As we will see, even these figures were far too low. By late August the AustroHungarian embassy reported 60 cholera fatalities in the town of Vidin,

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and by 8 September 17 cases with eight fatalities in the town of Ruse, as well as 14 fatalities in Veliko Tarnovo and 60 cases in the town of Svistov.97 Also these figures do not reveal the whole truth. Since 10 August, the day the Treaty of Bucharest was concluded, the Bulgarian soldiers – several of them infected – returned home. Consequently, the Bulgarian authorities declared the just mentioned regions as well as the district of Pleven as being infested by cholera. Only by mid-October was the number of new cases decreasing in this part of the country.98 In the town of Gabrovo, another town to the north of the Balkan mountain range, the mortality in the hospital was about 50 per cent. Not only was the population seized with panic at the cholera, the people were also terrified to go to the hospital and the police had to bring them by force.99 Bacteriological examination showed that the epidemic spread alongside watercourses and in particular alongside the Iskar River.100 Also in Plovidv, south of the Balkan Mountains, civilians from a distance up to 20 kilometres were brought on oxcarts to the local cholera hospital, where one-quarter of the 283 registered cases died.101 As we have said, the figures that circulated at the time were far too low: 25 years later a retrospective statistical examination of the cholera epidemic of 1913 in Bulgaria revealed a total sum of 19,205 cases, of which 9,548 were fatal. The figures confirmed that the highest number of cases was north of the Balkan mountain range; almost three-quarters of the cases were to be found in the districts of Vratcha, Vidin, Pleven and Veliko Tarnovo, whereby the Vratcha district alone counted more than 7,000 cases.102

A Bulgarian “Gift” The cholera epidemic in the Bulgarian Army and among the Bulgarian civilian population also infected the invading armies. On its advance through eastern Thrace the Ottoman Army did not meet any serious military resistance, but it lost 4,000 men to the epidemic.103 In this situation the Ottoman doctors for the first time deployed the ample use of cholera vaccine, prepared by the Gu¨lhane School of Medical Practice.104 But this measure could not prevent that within a year the original Turkish gift had been returned by the Bulgarians. The Romanian army mainly contracted cholera via contact with the Bulgarian population in the districts north of the Balkan mountain range. The main seat of the epidemic was Orhanie (today’s Botevgrad)

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with more than 900 cases. Altogether almost 15,000 cases of cholera and more than 1,600 fatalities were observed among the Romanian army. The Romanian doctors undertook mass vaccinations of the soldiers, and after the end of the war they tried to quarantine them on their way back home across the Danube. They also applied about half a million vaccinations to the civilian population of Romania, but all these measures could not prevent about 5,700 cases from appearing, of whom about 3,000 died.105 Richard C. Hall contends that “the outbreak of cholera in the Romanian army in Bulgaria acted as an incentive to resolve the conflict”.106 Also the Serbian army suffered infection both during occupation of Bulgarian territory and in contact with the Bulgarian forces in Macedonia and in Serbia proper; the two main seats of infection were the Bregalnica River, where a major battle between the Serbian forces and the Fourth Bulgarian Army took place. From mid-July onwards the infection proceeded among the population of the town of Kumanovo for several weeks. The second focus of infection was the area between the Serbian towns of Zajecˇar to the north and of Pirot to the south. After the retreat of the Bulgarian forces, the advancing Serbian army and the returning Serbian population contracted cholera. About 1 – 2 per cent of the population of the district of Pirot became infected. After the war the disbanded soldiers disseminated the epidemic over the whole country.107 Altogether, 4,800 Serbian soldiers died of cholera in the Balkan Wars, of whom 4,000 in the Second Balkan War.108 In this number, cases of cholera among the Serbian civilian population are not included. The Greek army was the only one that from the very beginning of the Second Balkan War conducted precautions by mass vaccination and revaccination of its soldiers and by the ample use of mobile field laboratories as well as by the application of disinfection.109 Consequently, the total number of cholera cases remained relatively small. These measures notwithstanding, in Salonika up to 20 cases of cholera per day were registered in July.110 In the central Greek staging hospital in the town of Siridokastro, which had been wrested from the Bulgarians, by the end of the war 431 cases were registered; of these 130 died, while the percentage of the two-times vaccinated soldiers was 10 per cent lower than the average (30 per cent).111 After the treaty of Bucharest the Greek army retreated from a part of the territory it had conquered, because it was assigned to Bulgaria. This

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caused the flight of about 12,000 persons who considered themselves Greeks or Turks to Siridokastro. There, all of them were vaccinated against cholera.112 But even these precautions could not prevent the Bulgarian prisoners of war from Serres spreading the epidemic to Salonica and further on to Athens.113

Conclusion Compared to previous wars, the imperfect application of epidemic defence in the Balkan Wars, despite its perceived failure, at least helped to reduce the lethality among cases of cholera in the Bulgarian Army. This has partly to do with advances in hygiene and was a consequence of the insights of germ theory. It had become general knowledge that cholera was a water-borne disease and that the spread of its pathogens could be prevented by the use of clean potable water and by isolation of the diseased. Even if the principles emanating from this knowledge were not always applied during the two Balkan Wars, their lack would certainly become a topic of subsequent criticism. As for the Bulgarian civilian population, which was bereft of any medical treatment, this assessment is not valid, as the high lethality – almost the half of 20,000 diseased persons – suggest. In the defeated Bulgaria the harsh criticism of healthcare during the two Balkan Wars led to a search for a solution in the sanitary problems with which the country had been confronted during the Balkan Wars. In autumn of 1915 the Bulgarian government was confronted with the possibility to participate in World War I on the side of the central powers, who promised the best chances to gain Macedonia, which had been the actual Bulgarian objective in the Balkan Wars. In this situation, some Bulgarian intellectuals reflected on how to use the lessons of the sanitary catastrophe in the two preceding wars for a better outcome. Everybody realised that the lack of native doctors had been a major reason for the precarious course of events. Therefore the Bulgarian public supported the foundation of the first Bulgarian medical faculty in Sofia, which did indeed take place in the last year of World War I. The other major issue was how to protect the civilian population in a sanitary respect, when all the physicians were recruited to the army. It was not a doctor, but a sociologist, the Social Democrat Iliya Yanulov, who on his own initiative founded the institution of

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hygienic councils. The idea was simple: in the absence of the doctors, the population was asked to nominate bodies that would be responsible for the enforcement of hygienic measures and the control of epidemics in a municipality.114 With respect to the Balkans in general, the dissemination of cholera in the course of the two Balkan Wars showed the central epidemiological role Bulgaria took in the region. Its soldiers contracted cholera from the almost defeated Ottoman Army at the front-line, and they in turn disseminated it among their enemies when they were themselves beaten during the Second Balkan War. Thus, similar to a Greek Gift, cholera was handed over to the respective victors. With the onset of World War I the context would again drastically change. Most important was the fact that the Ottoman Empire became an ally of Bulgaria. With respect to military medicine nothing else can demonstrate this change better than the fact that the German hygienist and expert on tropical medicine, Hermann Mu¨hlens, up to 1915 worked as a consultant of the Ottoman Army and thereafter would be in the service of the Bulgarian forces. Also the sanitary threats would change: in the Balkans cholera remained a minor threat up to 1916, but already in 1915 the first place as sanitary scourge would be occupied by typhus; malaria, in turn, would dominate both sides of the Salonika front until the end of World War I.115

Notes ¨ ber Maßnahmen zur Beka¨mpfung der Cholera auf dem 1. R[udolf] Kraus, “U bulgarischen Kriegsschauplatz”, Wiener klinische Wochenschrift, 26:7 (1913), p. 241. 2. Indira Durakovic´, “Experimentierfeld Balkan. A¨rzte am Schauplatz der Balkankriege von 1912/1913”, Su¨dost-Forschungen, 68 (2009), p. 303. 3. Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, DC, 1914), p. 236. 4. Cf. Matthew Smallman-Raynor and Andrew David Cliff, War Epidemics: An Historical Geography of Infectious Diseases in Military Conflict and Civil Strife, 1850– 2000 (New York, 2004), pp. 417 –41. 5. Cf. Stefan Winkle, Geißeln der Menschheit, Kulturgeschichte der Seuchen, 3rd edn (Du¨sseldorf, 2005), pp. 210 – 12. 6. Oya Dagˆlar, War, Epidemics and Medicine in the Late Ottoman Empire (1912 – 1918) (Haarlem, Netherlands, 2008).

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7. I[van] G[olosmanov], “Svedeniya otnosno broya na zabolelite i umrelite ot holera v Balgariya ot 1893 do 1913”, Balgarski meditsinski pregled za zarazni bolesti, mikrobiologiya i parazitologiya, 2:3 – 4 (1938) gos: 120–1. 8. I[van Konstantinov] Popivanov et. al., “Organizatsionni i epidemiologichni aspekti na borbata s holerata sred balgarskata voyska prez Balkanskata voyna”, Asklkepiy / Asklepios, 19 (2006), p. 160. 9. K[onstantin]. Troshev, “Deyatel’nost cheshkih vrachebnyh missiy vo vremya Balkanskih voyn (1912 –1913) v Bolgarii”, Asklepiy, 3 (1974), pp. 192– 8; Vasil Topuzov, “Chuzhdestrannite sanitarni misii v Balgariya po vreme na Balkanskata voyna (1912 – 1913 g.)”, in XXVIe Congres international d’histoire de la me´decine, Plovdiv, 20 – 25 Aout 1978. Actes du Congres I (Sofiya, 1978), pp. 61 – 2. 10. Konstantin Trosˇev [i.e. Troshev], Cˇesti le´karˇi v Bulharsku v dobe˘ Balka´nsky´ch va´lek (1912 – 1913) / Cheshki lekari v Balgariya prez Balkanskite voyni (1912 – 1913) (Prague, 1984), pp. 127 – 34 and 189 – 90. 11. Durakovic´, “Experimentierfeld Balkan”. 12. Popivanov et al., “Organizatsionni i epidemiologichni aspekti”. 13. Political Archive (PA) of the Federal Foreign Office Berlin, Akten der Kaiserlichen deutschen Botschaft zu Konstantinopel pro 1911–1914 betreffend epidemische Krankheiten, No. 4457-XII-3, Constantinople, 15 November 1912. 14. Ibid., No. 4517– 12 – 3, Constantinople, 22 November 1912. 15. Ibid.; cf. in detail Dagˆlar, War, Epidemics and Medicine, pp. 12–22 and 30– 4. 16. PA, Akten der Kaiserlichen deutschen Botschaft zu Konstantinopel pro 1911 – 1914 betreffend epidemische Krankheiten, No 4485-12-3, 18 November 1912. 17. Ibid., No. 4517-12-3, Constantinople, 22 November 1912; cf. Dagˆlar, War, Epidemics and Medicine, 52 – 3, 72, 74 and 111. 18. Nuran Yıldırım, A History of Healthcare in Istanbul, Health Organizations – Epidemics, Infections and Disease Control – Preventive Health Institutions – Hospitals – Medical Eduction, 2nd edn (Istanbul, 2010), pp. 95 – 7; Dagˆlar, War, Epidemics and Medicine, p. 76. 19. Richard C. Hall, The Balkan Wars 1912– 1913: Prelude to the First World War (London et al., Routledge, 2000), p. 31. 20. Ibid., p. 119. 21. Dagˆlar, War, Epidemics and Medicine, p. 11. 22. Cf. T[oshko] Petrov, “Nyakolko dumi za holerata v balgarskata voyska prez voynata na Balkanite”, Letopisi na lekarskiya sayuz, 10:8 – 10 (1913), p. 505. 23. Popivanov et al., “Organizatsionni i epidemiologichni aspekti”, p. 161. 24. Petrov, “Nyakolko dumi za holerata”, p. 502. 25. Fritz Tintner, “Erlebnisse und Beobachtungen im Tu¨rkisch-Bulgarischen Kriege”, Der Milita¨rarzt, 47:6 (1913), p. 88. 26. Ibid., p. 89. 27. Petrov, “Nyakolko dumi za holerata”, pp. 502 –3. According to the History of the War between Bulgaria and Turkey of 1932 the first signs of cholera were

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28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

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observed one day later – cf. Popivanov et al., “Organizatsionni i epidemiologichni aspekti”, pp. 157 – 8. Petrov, “Nyakolko dumi za holerata”, p. 503. Ibid., pp. 503 – 4; on the rejection of latrines see [Hans] Eckert, “Die Rolle der Kontaktinfektion in der Epidemiologie der Cholera (Nach in Bulgarien gesammelten Erfahrungen)”, Berliner klinische Wochenschrift, 50:50 (1914), p. 2326. Popivanov et al., “Organizatsionni i epidemiologichni aspekti”, p. 158. Petrov, “Nyakolko dumi za holerata”, p. 504. Edward J. Erickson, Defeat in Detail: The Ottoman Army in the Balkan Wars, 1912– 1913 (Westport, CT, 2003), p. 129. Hall, The Balkan Wars 1912– 1913, p. 35. Rudolf Kraus counts 29,626 cases and 1,849 fatalities – he claims that only 5,000 of the cases were really cholera – cf. Kraus, “U¨ber Maßnahmen zur Beka¨mpfung der Cholera”, p. 242. Baruch ¨ ber die Choleraepidemien in Bulgarien wa¨hrend und nach dem Davidoff, “U Balkan- und Weltkriege” (Dental diss., University of Berlin, 1925), p. 11, in turn, calculates 47,217 cases, of which 5,203 died. Also Popivanov et al., “Organizatsionni i epidemiologichni aspekti,” p. 158, speak of 41,165 cases and 5,244 fatalities for the same period. Erickson, Defeat in Detail, p. 137. Petrov, “Nyakolko dumi za holerata”, p. 504. St[iliyan] Kutinchev, Sanitarnata sluzba, Cherveniyat krast i Balkanskata voyna, Belezhki i vpechatleniya (Sofia, 1914), p. 97. Petrov, “Nyakolko dumi za holerata”, p. 504. Dimitar Mollov, “Voenno-sanitarnoto delo prez vreme na voynata”, Letopisi na lekarskiya sayuz, 10:8–10 (1913), p. 442. Petrov, “Nyakolko dumi za holerata”, p. 504. Mollov, “Voenno-sanitarnoto delo,” p. 442; cf. Kutinchev, Sanitarnata sluzba, pp. 80 – 2. Petrov, “Nyakolko dumi za holerata”, p. 505. Trosˇev, Cˇesti le´karˇi v Bulharsku, p. 132. Petrov, “Nyakolko dumi za holerata”, p. 505. Ambros Celewicz, “Der bulgarische Sanita¨tsdienst auf dem thrazischen Kriegsschauplatz”, Der Milita¨rarzt, 47:12 (1913), p. 169. Trosˇev, Cˇesti le´karˇi v Bulharsku, pp. 189 – 90. Mollov, “Voenno-sanitarnoto delo”, p. 442. Tintner, “Erlebnisse und Beobachtungen”, p. 89. Petrov, “Nyakolko dumi za holerata”, p. 506. Kutinchev, Sanitarnata sluzba, pp. 219 –20. Kraus, “U¨ber Maßnahmen zur Beka¨mpfung der Cholera”, p. 242; see also Tintner, “Erlebnisse und Beobachtungen”, p. 89. Ibid., p. 89. Kraus, “U¨ber Maßnahmen zur Beka¨mpfung der Cholera”, p. 244; Tintner, “Erlebnisse und Beobachtungen”, p. 89.

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53. [Rudolf] Kraus, “ Erfahrungen und Erlebnisse aus dem Balkankriege”, Berliner klinische Wochenschrift, 50:11 (1913), p. 521; Kraus, “U¨ber Maßnahmen zur Beka¨mpfung der Cholera”, p. 242. 54. Ibid., p. 246; see also [Paul] Clairmont, “Bericht an die O¨sterreichische Gesellschaft vom ‘Roten Kreuz’ u¨ber die Mission nach Bulgarien”, Der Milita¨rarzt, 47:9 (1913), p. 140. 55. Petrov, “Nyakolko dumi za holerata”, p. 506. 56. Austrian State Archives Vienna, Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv (AVA), Ministerium des Inneren, Sanita¨tsakten Sign. 34a, box 3072, No 7799/S, Vienna, 23 December 1912; Petrov, “Nyakolko dumi za holerata”, p. 506. 57. Karl von Mu¨llern, “Eindru¨cke und sanita¨re Erfahrungen aus Adrianopel vom Standpunkte des Internisten”, Der Milita¨rarzt, 48:11 (1914), p. 235. 58. Petrov, “Nyakolko dumi za holerata”, p. 506. 59. K[lemens] I[sidor] Schopper, “Erfahrungen u¨ber die Cholera in Ostrumelien wa¨hrend des Balkankrieges 1912”, Wiener klinische Wochenschrift, 26:10 (1913), p. 368. The author also found several cholera-infested coachmen around the village of Straldzha [Strandzha?] – ibid., pp. 367 – 8. 60. For the Bulgarian version, Petar Orahovats, “Sanitarnata sluzhba v Sofiya prez voynite 1912–1913 g.”, Sbornik na Balgarskata akademiya na naukite 5 / Klon prirodo-matematichen 2 (1915), pp. 19–20; for the Austrian one, Josef Ballner, “Kriegschriurgische Erfahrungen aus dem Bulgarisch-Tu¨rkischen Kriege”, Der Milita¨rarzt, 47:10 (1913), p. 147; on the advent of cholera in Sofia see AVA Sanita¨tsakten Sign. 34a, box 3072, ad 88671/S, attachment, 16 December 1912; Schopper, “Erfahrungen u¨ber die Cholera in Ostrumelien”, p. 367. 61. Orahovats, “Sanitarnata sluzhba v Sofiya prez voynite”, p. 22. 62. AVA Sanita¨tsakten Sign. 34a, box 3072, No 120/S Blg. 1, Vidin, 27 December 1912. 63. Kraus, “U¨ber Maßnahmen zur Beka¨mpfung der Cholera”, p. 246. 64. Petrov, “Nyakolko dumi za holerata”, p. 507. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Mollov, “Voenno-sanitarnoto delo”, p. 442. 68. These horrors and other cruelties committed by Bulgarian soldiers are described by the Report of the International Commission, pp. 111– 13; cf. Dagˆlar, War, Epidemics and Medicine, pp. 100 – 1. 69. Mu¨llern,“Eindru¨cke und sanita¨re Erfahrungen”, pp. 236– 7 and 262. 70. Kraus, “U¨ber Maßnahmen zur Beka¨mpfung der Cholera”, p. 246. 71. Petrov, “Nyakolko dumi za holerata”, p. 508. 72. Ibid. 73. AVA Sanita¨tsakten Sign 34a box 3984, No 4053/S, Salonika, 12 June 1913. 74. Petrov, “Nyakolko dumi za holerata”, p. 508. 75. Ibid., pp. 508 – 9. 76. Ibid., p. 509. 77. Orahovats, “Sanitarnata sluzhba v Sofiya prez voynite”, p. 22.

98 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93. 94.

95. 96. 97.

98. 99.

100. 101. 102. 103.

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Mollov, “Voenno-sanitarnoto delo”, p. 444. Petrov, “Nyakolko dumi za holerata”, p. 509. Ibid., p. 501. Upravitelniyat savet na Lekarskiya sayuz v Balgariya, “Do redaktsiite na vestnitsite v Sofiya”, Letopisi na lekarskiya sayuz, 10:8– 10 (1913), p. 518. Celewicz, “Der bulgarische Sanita¨tsdienst”, p. 171; cf. Trosˇev, Cˇesti le´karˇi v Bulharsku. Mollov, “Voenno-sanitarnoto delo”, p. 434. Ibid., p. 434; cf. Kutinchev, Sanitarnata sluzba, p. 34; Trosˇev, Cˇesti le´karˇi v Bulharsku, pp. 131– 2. Mollov, “Voenno-sanitarnoto delo”, p. 443. Ibid., p. 442. Ibid., p. 441. N.N., “80. Prez vreme na voynata”, Letopisi na lekarskiya sayuz, 10:8– 10 (1913), p. 526; Kutinchev, Sanitarnata sluzba, p. 219. Mollov, “Voenno-sanitarnoto delo”, p. 437. Orahovats, “Sanitarnata sluzhba v Sofiya prez voynite”, p. 5. Schopper, “Erfahrungen u¨ber die Cholera”, pp. 367 and 370. Bertold Reder, “Der Krankenzug der O¨sterreichischen Gesellschaft vom Roten Kreuze auf dem bulgarisch-serbischen Kriegsschauplatz”, Der Milita¨rarzt, 48:2 (1914), p. 34. Orahovats, “Sanitarnata sluzhba v Sofiya prez voynite”, p. 5. Oskar Hanasiewicz, “Aus den bulgarischen Kriegsspita¨lern zu Dedeagatsch, Jamboli und Sofia wa¨hrend des Balkankrieges 1912– 13”, Wiener klinische Wochenschrift, 27 (1914), p. 819; cf. Durakovic´, “Experimentierfeld Balkan”, p. 307. Eckert, “Die Rolle der Kontaktinfektion”, p. 2327. H.N., “Holerata v Vrattsa”, Letopisi na lekarskiya sayuz, 10:8 – 10 (1913), p. 516. AVA Sanita¨tsakten Sign. 34a, box 3072, No 5778/S, Vienna, 26 August 1913, No 6039/S, Vienna, 3 September 1913, No 6275/S, Vienna, 11 September 1913. AVA Sanita¨tsakten Sign. 34a, box 3072, No 7598/S attachment 2, 20 October 1913. Franz Rosenthal, “Medizinische Eindru¨cke von einer Expedition nach Bulgarien, speziell ein Beitrag zur Diagnose und Therapie der Cholera asiatica”, Berliner klinische Wochenschrift, 51:8 (1914), p. 344. Victor Babes, “Studien u¨ber Cholerabeka¨mpfung”, Zeitschrift fu¨r Hygiene und Infektionskrankheiten, 77 (1914), p. 503. Rosenthal, “Medizinische Eindru¨cke von einer Expedition nach Bulgarien”, p. 344. G[olosmanov], “Svedeniya otnosno broya na zabolelite i umrelite”, p. 130. Hall, The Balkan Wars 1912– 1913, p. 119.

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104. Yıldırım, A History of Healthcare in Istanbul, p. 98; Dagˆlar, War, Epidemics and Medicine, p. 103. 105. Babes, “Studien u¨ber Cholerabeka¨mpfung”, pp. 501– 15, 525– 6, 530. Hall, The Balkan Wars 1912– 1913, p. 118, speaks of 6,000 fatalities of cholera among the Romanian army. 106. Ibid., p. 123. 107. [August] Aumann, “Welche Bedeutung kommt dem Kontakt bei der Verbreitung der Cholera in Serbien 1913 zu?”, Berliner klinische Wochenschrift, 51:2 (1914), pp. 62– 3. 108. Report of the International Commission, p. 395; cf. Hall, The Balkan Wars 1912– 1913, p. 135. 109. Konstantin J. Moutouses, “Die Cholerabeka¨mpfung in der griechischen Armee wa¨hrend des griechisch-bulgarischen Krieges”, Der Milita¨rarzt, 48:4 (1914), pp. 65 – 8. 110. Ibid., p. 68. 111. Ibid., p. 70. 112. Ibid., pp. 68 – 9. 113. Iv[an] Golosmanov, “Voyni i epidemii. II. Razprostranenie na zaraznite bolest mezhdu naselenie v vreme na voyni”, Balgarski meditsinski pregled za zarazni bolesti, mikrobiologiya i parazitologiya, 4:1–2 (1940), p. 115; Durakovic´, “Experimentierfeld Balkan,” p. 316, speaks of 5,000 cases of cholera of whom 1,700 died. 114. Iliya Yanulov, Sotsialno zakonodatelstvo v Balgariya, vol. 2: Razvitie na socialnoto zakonodatelstvo v Balgariya (Sofia, 1939), pp. 117 – 32. 115. Peter Mu¨hlens, “Kriegshygienische Erinnerungen”, Archiv fu¨r Schiffs- und Tropenhygiene, 43:12 (1939), pp. 531– 61; Christian Promitzer, “Typhus, Turks and Roma. Hygiene and Ethnic Difference in Bulgaria, 1912– 1944”, in Christian Promitzer, Sevasti Trubeta and Marius Turda (eds), Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945 (Budapest and New York, 2011), pp. 95 – 9.

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Promitzer, Christian, “Typhus, Turks and Roma. Hygiene and Ethnic Difference in Bulgaria, 1912– 1944”, in Christian Promitzer, Sevasti Trubeta and Marius Turda, Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945 (Budapest and New York, 2011), pp. 87 –125. ¨ sterreichischen Gesellschafts vom Roten Reder, Bertold, “Der Krankenzug der O Kreuze auf dem bulgarisch-serbischen Kriegsschauplatz”, Der Milita¨rarzt, 48:2 (1914), pp. 33 – 45. Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, 1914). Rosenthal, Franz, “Medizinische Eindru¨cke von einer Expedition nach Bulgarien, speziell ein Beitrag zur Diagnose und Therapie der Cholera asiatica”, Berliner klinische Wochenschrift, 51:8 (1914), pp. 342 – 4. Schopper, K[lemens] I[sidor], “Erfahrungen u¨ber die Cholera in Ostrumelien wa¨hrend des Balkankrieges 1912”, Wiener klinische Wochenschrift, 26:10 (1913), pp. 366 – 70. Smallman-Raynor, Matthew and Andrew David Cliff, War Epidemics: An Historical Geography of Infectious Diseases in Military Conflict and Civil Strife, 1850– 2000 (New York, 2004). Tintner, Fritz, “Erlebnisse und Beobachtungen im Tu¨rkisch-Bulgarischen Kriege”, Der Milita¨rarzt, 47:6 (1913), pp. 86– 90. Topuzov, Vasil, “Chuzhdestrannite sanitarni misii v Balgariya po vreme na Balkanskata voyna (1912 –1913 g.)”, in XXVIe Congres international d’histoire de la me´decine, Plovdiv, 20 – 25 Aout 1978. Actes du Congres I (Sofiya, 1978), pp. 61 – 2. Trosˇev [i.e. Troshev], Konstantin, Cˇesti le´karˇi v Bulharsku v dobe˘ Balka´nsky´ch va´lek (1912– 1913) / Cheshki lekari v Balgariya prez Balkanskite voyni (1912 –1913) (Prague, 1984). Troshev, K[onstantin], “Deyatel’nost cheshkih vrachebnyh missiy vo vremya Balkanskih voyn (1912 – 13) v Bolgarii”, Asklepiy, 3 (1974), pp. 192–8. Upravitelniyat savet na Lekarskiya sayuz v Balgariya, “Do redaktsiite na vestnitsite v Sofiya”, Letopisi na lekarskiya sayuz, 10:8 – 10 (1913), pp. 517–18. Winkle, Stefan, Geisseln der Menschheit: Kulturgeschichte der Seuchen, 3rd edn (Du¨sseldorf, 2005). Yanulov, Iliya, Sotsialno zakonodatelstvo v Balgariya, vol. 2: Razvitie na socialnoto zakonodatelstvo v Balgariya (Sofia, 1939). Yıldırım, Nuran, A History of Healthcare in Istanbul: Health Organizations – Epidemics, Infections and Disease Control – Preventive Health Institutions – Hospitals – Medical Eduction, 2nd edn (Istanbul, 2010).

CHAPTER 5 THE BALKAN WARS AND THE CREATION OF ALBANIAN INDEPENDENCE Bernd J. Fischer

One of the most welcome recent developments among Albanian historians and historians of Albania is a general reevaluation of critical periods in Albanian history, periods traditionally viewed through a generally accepted nationalist narrative not often challenged. This narrative, encouraged by political actors and most Albanian historians, was reinforced with the collapse of communism in 1991 and the occasion of various celebrated milestones in Albanian history.1 One such period subject to reevaluation is the period of Albanian independence, which was proclaimed in Vlora in November 1912, in the midst of the Balkan Wars. The traditional narrative accepted by most Albanian scholars, as well as some prominent Western scholars of Albanian topics, was a narrative of struggle to free Albania from the oppressors which included all neighbours but concentrated particularly on the Ottomans who took control of Albanian lands beginning in the fifteenth century.2 Some more nationalist-minded historians suggest that the struggle for freedom and independence dates as far back as the fifteenth century, the era of the Albanian national hero Skanderbeg and progressed in linear fashion from that day. But virtually all Albanian historians believe that, at the minimum, progressive political Albanianism developed slowly in

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the nineteenth century, and then was given considerable impetus by the Eastern Crisis, which saw traditional Albanian lands handed over to the Montenegrins as part of a great power bargain. We are told that from this point a determined struggle for independence by single-minded nationalists/patriots with the support of a considerable percentage of the population developed rapidly. Indeed the more extreme official histories, particularly those from the Socialist period that are still often repeated today, argue that substantial popular gatherings supported the nationalists/patriots and that on the eve of the Balkan Wars, a vast movement demanding independence arose across Albania, demonstrating the remarkable level of political maturity the masses had achieved.3 While independence and the creation of the nation-state were inevitable in this view, the Balkan Wars provided the occasion for the glorious moment. This traditional narrative is now being challenged by a small but growing number of historians both inside Albania and abroad who are offering up the beginnings of a more nuanced and sophisticated scenario, which relies less on the narrative of constant struggle. Instead these historians examine the complex loyalties of Albanian intellectuals during the late Ottoman period, responding to Ottoman policy which favoured Albanians, and see Albanian developments less as completely unique but rather within the Balkan context. At the risk of ignoring many fine historians of this new school, let me just mention two who have already or will significantly impact this new developing narrative. Perhaps foremost among this new generation of historians is Oliver Jens Schmitt of the University of Vienna who, as a student of Peter Bartl, continues the centuries old tradition of German scholarship on Albania. He has already generated much, frankly quite welcome, controversy concerning such fundamental Albanian topics as the origins of the Albanians themselves, as well as the origin and nature of Skanderbeg.4 Also of note is the young Albanian historian Artan Puto, son of the well-known historian Arben Puto. The younger Puto, who earned his doctorate at the European University Institute in Florence in 2009, concentrates principally on the modern period, while working, too, with the prominent Albanian literary figure Fatos Labonja on the groundbreaking journal Perpjeka. While the work of the new generation is broad ranging, in general, what emerges for the period under consideration here is an analysis of the

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interplay of cultural and political Albanianism, with Ottomanism and Islamism, which, rather than being constantly in conflict, are often in harmony.5 This still developing scenario suggests that those who are today considered the principal nationalist heroes in the Albanian pantheon were more than just nationalists but were also, and perhaps not in contradiction, Ottoman intellectuals who believed that working for what they saw as the natural ethnic rights of Albanians was not just a means by which to encourage Albanian enlightenment and to insure elite survival, but would also strengthen and sustain the Ottoman Empire. If this scenario is projected, one could conclude that the Balkan Wars became one of the causes of Albanian independence rather than just the occasion, that the wars played a central and decisive role in the creation of the modern Albanian state. To examine this hypothesis, a brief overview of the nature of Albanian nationalism in the nineteenth century is useful. Albanian nationalism was certainly not nearly as well developed as the nationalisms of the rest of the Balkans for some relatively clear reasons, stemming from both obstacles generated by conscious Ottoman policy as well as some positive Ottoman reinforcement. Albanians lacked many of the necessary preconditions generally associated with unity, including an advanced civilisation based upon a developed educational structure. There was no advanced centralisation and a lack of an infrastructure to provide one. The literacy rate at the end of the nineteenth century was the lowest in the Balkans and there was no proper national education system. Despite the requirements of the Tanzimat reforms that recognised the right of primary education in national languages in the Ottoman Empire, only a few Catholic schools in the north actually taught in the Albanian language.6 The few state schools that did exist used Turkish, and the Greek schools in the south, run by the Orthodox clergy, of course taught in Greek. Albanians also lacked linquistic unity, being divided between the Tosk and Geg dialects and being without a standard literary language. Indeed, Albania was burdened with different levels of civilisation, including the mountain clans in the north, the feudal aristocrats in the south and the more educated and urbanised population of the Orthodox and Catholic fringes. Religious division added another challenge, since by the nineteenth century Albanians were divided into four principal faiths. With the Turkish invasions of the fifteenth century, Orthodox and Catholic Albanians converted to Islam in large numbers, with most

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adhering to the conservative Sunni sect, although Bektashism, which fused a number of Sunni, Shi‘a and Sufi concepts, made considerable inroads in the centre and the south. This religious diversity deprived Albanians of one of the important catalysts for nationalism in the Balkans. From a social and economic standpoint there was no leadership of a self-conscious class. The middle class was tiny and the economy was primitive. Again unlike most of the rest of the Balkan peoples, the Albanians had a less well-developed medieval hero mythology. While Skenderbeg ultimately assumed that role, he pales in comparison to Dushan of Serbia and Boris of Bulgaria as a unifying symbol. There was little in the way of foreign intellectual stimulus and foreign support. Unlike most of the rest of the Balkan peoples who relied upon powerful advocates, the interest that Austria-Hungary and Italy showed in the Albanians was often superficial and changeable.7 Neither provided the type of sustained support that Serbia could count on, and still takes for granted, from Russia. As the Ottomans began to understand the dangers of nationalism, they instituted policies that put further obstacles in the way of Albanian unity, including a restrictive language policy and the division of Albanian speakers into four provinces. The Ottomans, though, also successfully presented themselves as the protectors of Albanian lands against Slavic and Greek encroachment and favoured the Albanians in many ways. Except during times of revolt there was little official Ottoman oppression. The clans in the north were left with virtual autonomy, subject only to sporadic taxes and military draft requirements. Albanians were actively recruited for high-level administrative and military positions in the Ottoman Empire. Fully one-fifth of all Grand Viziers, some 30 of them, were Albanians. Abdul Hamid had a particular weakness for Albanians, his personal guard was made up of Albanians and he often commented that his empire depended on the Albanians and the Arabs.8 These and other factors slowed the development of a national consciousness among the Albanians. When it first began to develop it tended to be cultural rather than political and was initially developed abroad. The diaspora tends to produce more enthusiastic nationalists and those of Albanian origin in the West had clear models to emulate. It was nineteenth-century Italo-Albanians, influenced by the Risorgimento – individuals like Demetrio Camarada and Girlolamo

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de Rada who are considered responsible for much of the cultural spark for modern Albanian nationalism.9 The political spark for Albanian nationalism did not materialise until a powerful challenge to the Ottoman Empire, through the Eastern Crisis of 1875– 8, threatened the detachment of Albanian inhabited lands. The movement among the Albanians was, in a way, reactionary in that it hoped to reestablish something that had been lost. Rather than a separatist movement, as found elsewhere in the Balkans, the Albanian political nationalist movement in the form of the League of Prizren, initially at least, fought against the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The League’s founding platform was limited to regional issues and pledged to defend the Sultan and the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire.10 The Albanian nationalist Abdul Frasheri eventually expanded this limited agenda into a national reform programme that sought the unity of all Albanian-speaking peoples and autonomy within the empire. But his influence should not be overemphasised; there was much disunity in the League with different groups pursuing different agendas through various means. The Sultan initially saw this movement as a patriotic one and encouraged it, using it to reclaim some territorial losses. Once it had outlived its usefulness, and with the talk of autonomy encouraged by Abdul Frasheri, the Sultan imposed a military solution and crushed the League. The years following the crisis were relatively quiet in the Albanian lands. The policy of Abdul Hamid slowly shifted to the encouragement of Islamism as a bulwark against secular nationalism, away from the Ottomanism of the Tanzimat period. While Ottomanism did not vanish, there was less official encouragement of it. Islamism as a way to build unity came to the fore.11 For the Albanians this new emphasis resulted in the introduction of a rather complex policy. Abdul Hamid clearly favoured Albanians – he even spoke some Albanian. He saw them as much more of an asset than a liability. He understood how dependent Albanians were on the Ottoman state and yet also recognised their importance to him. He even supported reforms and some would likely have been implemented had it not been for growing financial chaos in the empire. Abdul Hamid did, however, further integrate Albanians into imperial structures and increased his reliance on Albanians, who he referred to as his “iron barrier”12 in the Balkans. This included personal protection as he expanded the role of Albanians in the palace guard.

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Albanians protected his residence at Yildiz, the parliament at Ciragan palace, as well as the most significant religious leaders. The commander of the guard until 1909 was an Albanian, and Albanians eventually outnumbered other groups in the rank and file as well as controlling a disproportionate number of top positions in the guard. Likewise there were many Albanians in the second imperial division, tasked with the protection of the capital.13 At the same time, Abdul Hamid continued the practice of co-opting local Albanian chiefs and expanded his reliance on influential families in the centre and the south. Through these policies, Albanians were kept relatively quiet for 30 years. Despite this lull, however, Albania did during those years experience a marked growth in sophistication of thought with regard to nationalism, thought which was certainly impacted by the empire’s enhanced appreciation of the Albanians. It is of value to briefly look at three of the most prominent of the contributors to pre-independence nationalism and some of their basic ideas, which generally combined being Ottoman with being Albanian. These were multi-identity elites that had been integrated, even assimilated into the Ottoman establishment, rather than monolithic single-minded patriots as they are sometimes portrayed. All were of course elitist intellectuals who argued that the people were backward and needed to be educated and guided by them. All were influenced by French experience, indeed one even wrote his major works in French. While all were prolific writers let us concentrate on some of the positions that they took on the major national issues. One of the central goals of these individuals, like many of their predecessors in the League of Prizren, was the preservation of the Ottoman Empire, although again as with the League there was much debate about how to save it. The first of the three, Pasho Vasa, who died in 1892, will serve as a representative of the first generation of the Albanian nationalist movement. As a Catholic he was aware of the divisive nature of religion in Albania and hoped to downplay it by publicising the notion that the religion of Albanians was Albanianism, perhaps a bit of wishful thinking during his period. He was a politician and publicist as well as a highranking Ottoman official, serving as governor general of Lebanon from 1883 until his death. He argued for the position that all Albanians should be allowed to live in a single province and use their own

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language. He downplayed the call for autonomy, arguing that the Albanians were under-developed and not yet capable of self-government. He wrote about a paternalistic Ottoman state, something that Albanians had come to depend on, which sheltered the Albanians to the extent that a certain symbiosis has developed between the two. He saw the Ottoman government, of which he was an integral part, as the most illuminated part of society, something that should be nurtured and protected. He saw the Albanians as ready to do that, to defend the state and the Sultan.14 Representative of the second generation of nationalist thinkers is Sami Frasheri, who died 1904. Sami, brother of Abdul Frasheri, was one of the leading intellectual lights of the late Ottoman period and is remembered as a linguist and a journalist. His loyalties were even more complex than those of Vasa, having essentially a triple identity including Albanian, Turkish and Ottoman. But once again, his loyalties were essentially complementary and rarely in tension. As a linguist he wrote extensively about the Turkish language producing dictionaries and articles and his major contributions involved work in the standardisation process of both Turkish and Albanian. He is perhaps best known, however, for his play Besa, which he saw as an attempt to teach Ottomans about Albania.15 In his work on nationalism he wrote about the general and the specific Vatan (or motherland), in his case Ottomanism and Albanianism.16 He saw them joined by an umbilical cord, essentially nurturing each other. He saw the Albanians as an integral part of the Ottoman Muslim people. Again like Vasa he argued that Albanians should be unified into one province with their own language. With that increased cohesion and strength they would then be ready to more vigorously defend the state and Sultan. He, too, downplayed autonomy but, at the end of his life, as it became increasingly clear that the empire might not survive, he became more politicised and ruminated on an Albanian state.17 Having lived and died in Istanbul, he was considered Turkish and Ottoman to the extent that his body was not returned to Albania until the 1950s. Finally as a representative of the third generation we have Ismail Kemal Bey who is often referred to as the father of Albanian independence. He, like Vasa, was an Ottoman politician and dignitary serving as a provincial administrator throughout the empire, the heir to a powerful Albanian family that had faithfully served the empire for

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centuries in consolidating its power in Albanian lands. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the early Tanizimat period, which aimed to establish a somewhat more decentralised system in the empire, but his fundamental goal of saving the empire is clear throughout his writings. In his widely read memoirs he sets aside more space for an exploration of his devotion to the Ottoman Empire than to his homeland of Albania and its people.18 He described the Albanians as a noble savage community that required the protection of a benevolent Ottoman Empire. He saw the linking of Albania to the empire as a way of both strengthening Ottoman rule in the Balkans and preserving the Albanians as a separate and distinct peoples. Kemal refused to abandon the empire until it became clear that it could no longer offer the protection that the Albanians required.19 Like Vasa and Frasheri, Kemal concentrated on the creation of a nation, rather than the creation of a state. But this slow formation of the intellectual foundation of a nation in Albania was quickly outpaced by geopolitical events in Europe and the empire. Abdul Hamid’s repression and conservatism generated opposition, some of which led to the organisation of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) dedicated to reform by any means, again in the hopes of strengthening the empire. The CUP understood the importance of Albanians in any future changes so consciously courted Albanian leaders. To that end, the initial CUP propaganda avoided specific attacks on Abdul Hamid himself, knowing the Albanians tended to view him in a positive light. But internal conditions in the empire continued to deteriorate with a food crisis in 1908 resulting in revolts even in Albania. Internationally, the Reval accords, seen by many as the government’s inability to prevent foreign occupation of the empire’s territory, galvanised the Committee to call for a general revolt. Albanian clans joined in with the cry “constitution and Sultan”, seeing their participation as a patriotic act resisting outside aggression. The success of the revolution brought profound changes for at least literate Albanians. The removal of traditional restrictions led to a cultural revival generating a flood of literary societies, newspapers, journals, clubs of various sorts and schools that taught in the hitherto forbidden Albanian language. These unprecedented innovations came so quickly that many conservative Albanians were caught off-guard

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and objected to this rapid dismantling of the old status quo. Some of these latter elements supported Abdul Hamid’s counter-revolution in 1909, which was principally the work of political opposition to the CUP, Moslem religious leaders, as well as some disaffected Albanian regiments. Like the cultural revival, the counter-revolution resulted in some disunity among Albanian elites. While many progressive elements, including most of the patriotic clubs, objected to this attempted reverse of course, the counter-revolution gained the support of many Albanian chieftains like Isa Boletin, who were tied to Abdul Hamid through position and favours.20 Indeed, even nationalists like Ismail Kemal called for respect for the new government of the Sultan. Each new action or event seemed to emphasise once again the continuing disunity among the Albanian elite rather than the monolithic unity claimed by nationalist writers. But soon CUP policy alienated various segments of Albanian society. With the swift failure of the counter-revolution, the CUP initiated a new harder policy in their efforts to modernise and save the empire. Abdul Hamid’s goal of transforming the Albanians into one of the principal pillars of support for the empire in Europe based upon a reenergised Islamism was abandoned in favour of a revived Ottomanism based upon order and progress through centralisation. This alienated traditional conservative Albanian tribes in the north, particularly following an attempt to arrest Isa Boletin for his support of Abdul Hamid. And those nationalists in the south who had opposed the counter-revolution and had hoped that an expansive understanding of Ottomanism would include Albanianism, were alienated when they saw order and security take precedence over reform.21 Indeed, the CUP, surprised by the enthusiasm generated by the Albanian cultural awakening, began to view it as a threat to Ottomanism and moved against it. The result was a series of rolling uprisings originating from local disturbances in 1909 which continued in one form or another until the onset of the Balkan Wars, principally in the north but also in scattered areas of the centre and south. Not included in these revolts were large parts of the centre, which were somewhat less developed, and parts of the south, not threatened by Greeks or Serbs, which did not participate until 1912.22 The diverse group of rebels issued diverse demands mostly local in character. The conservatives were principally interested in the return of traditional privileges, while the progressives demanded the removal of

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new restrictions on the Albanian cultural awakening and other modern reforms. But there were also nationalist demands, centered usually on unity of the Albanians. Some, but not all, demanded autonomy as well, while none went as far as independence. The Turkish government was surprised by the rapid spread of these uprisings and became increasingly desperate because of mounting additional challenges. The CUP was forced first to negotiate and then to offer a series of compromises to the Albanians. In August 1911 the CUP agreed to the Tepedelen agreement, concluded principally with the southern leaders, which promised the opening of schools and the teaching of the Albanian language, the assignment of officials with local knowledge, the restriction of military service to Albanian provinces, and a reduction in taxes.23 But the increasing power of the CUP and its underlying emphasis on centralisation worried Albanian nationalists who began talking about encouraging a general revolt. With the strengthening of the CUP as a result of a rigged election in February 1912, new clashes in Kosovo occurred and the Albanians presented new demands, still short of autonomy. By July Albanian rebels had taken control of most of Kosovo, and with unrest in the Ottoman army the government was once again forced into negotiations with the Kosovar Albanians representing both the tribes and the towns. Hasan Bey Pristine, acting as representative, presented 14 demands that became known as his 14 points. The government eventually conceded 12 of the demands, which addressed both traditional privileges, such as respect for customary law and the right to carry guns, as well as some national goals like the use of the Albanian language in state schools.24 The CUP offer once again split the Albanians, with some of the tribes pushing for the return of Abdul Hamid while the representatives of the towns insisted that the offer be accepted. The latter prevailed and, as a result, while still short of unity and autonomy, significant gains were made. These gains, however, in part helped precipitate the Balkan Wars, which ultimately saw Albania created as an independent state but saw Kosovar Albanians trade the relatively benign Ottoman rule for a much harsher Serbian one. Albanian developments provided a greater sense of urgency for military action on the part of surrounding Balkan states, which feared that unity and a stronger sense of national identity under the protection of the Ottoman Empire among the Albanians would weaken their claims. The Balkan states were also encouraged by the

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empire’s inability to deal effectively with Albanian rebels as this indicated increasing Ottoman military weakness.25 When the Balkan Wars began, some Ottoman commanders expressed concern about Albanian loyalties but the majority of Albanians fought on the side of the Ottomans as usual. Ottoman military failure saw some Albanians desert and simply return home. With the defeat of the Ottomans only a matter of time, Albanian leaders were desperate to prevent the loss of Albanian lands. Ismail Kemal recognised that this could only be guaranteed with the support of the West since the Ottomans were now prostrate. Following assurances of support from both the Austrians and the Italians, Kemal returned to Albania in November 1912, summoned a makeshift congress made up primarily of town representatives from the south, and proclaimed Albanian independence. The Balkan states at war naturally ignored the declaration but the Conference of Ambassadors held in London in December to deal with the results of the war supported the Albanians. Initially the conference would only go so far as to support autonomy under the Ottomans with great power protection, but once the empire lost Macedonia and then was removed from Europe entirely, Albania and the empire were without contiguous frontiers. With autonomy no longer a practical option, the conference supported independence, an independence granted essentially by default. As Kemal makes clear in his memoirs, the proclamation of independence was dictated by circumstances resulting from the Balkan Wars, which rendered impossible the continued attachment of Albanians to the empire. Independence was the result of the withdrawal of the Ottomans and their armies from the Balkans, rather than an expression of the desire and will of the majority of Albanian-speaking people. Since even the Albanian intellectual elites at the time were rarely supportive of the concept of an independent Albania, it is perhaps not surprising that when independence finally came on the eve of World War I, it came as a result of outside forces and events beyond the control, or even the influence, of the Albanians themselves. National independence is often the culmination of a national movement. In the Albanian case independence, required by the Balkan Wars, was in a way the beginning of the national movement. Independence saw the creation of a state but not a nation. And even following the declaration of independence, the Albanian nationalist movement remained essentially an intellectual movement, the growing

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attachment of intellectuals to the nationalist ideology, rather than a mobilising force that affected the masses. It would reach this latter stage only after World War II. While the post-World War I Zog period certainly contributed to the process by breaking down some of the internal barriers, it was the communist regime that consolidated the forging of an Albanian nation with its polices of forced conformity, social mobilisation and control, and state of siege nationalism.

Notes 1. Much of this was politically driven by the moderately nationalist regime of Sali Berisha although Berisha must be given credit for supporting a programme that sent Albanian historians abroad to find relevant material in foreign archives and bring this material home to share with colleagues. 2. For an example of this narrative see Stefanaq Pollo and Arben Puto, The History of Albania (London, 1981). 3. Pollo and Puto, The History of Albania, pp. 139 – 40. 4. See Oliver Jens Schmitt, Skanderbeg: Der neue Alexander auf dem Balkan (Regensburg, 2009). 5. Instrumental in the development of these categories and narrative is the work of George Gawrych, particularly his fine book The Crescent and the Eagle: Ottoman Rule, Islam and the Albanians (London, 2006). 6. Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans: Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1983), p. 84. 7. see Bernd J. Fischer, “Aspects of the Austro-Hungarian/Italian Rivalry in relation to the Albanian National Renaissance”, in Jusuf Bajraktari (ed.), Lidhja Shqiptare e Prizrenit, 1878–1881 (Prishtine, 2011). 8. Gawrych, The Crescent and the Eagle, pp. 82 – 3. 9. See Fischer, “Aspects of the Austro-Hungarian/Italian Rivalry in Relation to the Albanian National Renaissance”. 10. Denis P. Hupchick, The Balkans: From Constantinople to Communism (New York, 2002), p. 404. 11. Gawrych, The Crescent and the Eagle, p. 78. 12. Ibid., p. 80. 13. Ibid. 14. Artan Puto, “The Idea of the Nation during the Albanian National Movement (1878 – 1912)”, Ph.D. diss., European University Institute, 2009, p. 301. 15. See Sami Frasheri, Besa (Shkup, 2002). 16. Gawyrch, The Crescent and the Eagle, p. 163. 17. Artan Puto, “The Idea of the Nation during the Albanian National Movement”, p. 302. 18. See Sommerville Story (ed.), The Memoirs of Ismail Kemal Bey (London, 1920).

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19. Artan Puto, “The Idea of the Nation during the Albanian National Movement”, pp. 303 – 4. 20. Gawrych, The Crescent and the Eagle, p. 163. 21. Ibid., p. 170. 22. Leften Stavrianos, The Balkans Since 1453 (New York, 1965), p. 507. 23. Gawrych, The Crescent and the Eagle, p. 190. 24. Ibid., p. 195. 25. Stevan K. Pavlowitch, A History of the Balkans, 1804– 1945 (London, 1999), p. 197.

CHAPTER 6 HISTORY AND MEMORIES OF THE BALKAN WARS IN THE REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA: DEBATES OVER THE PAST Biljana Vankovska

The history of the Balkan Wars counts, but to make this more than a banal proclamation, it is necessary to examine how history counts and what history it is that counts. As for the first question it matters in two ways: one part of the legacy consists of inherited material and social structures within which actors exist and which affect the options they have as well as those that are excluded. In addition, the legacy consists of cognitive factors: the repository of assumptions (“knowledge”) and attitudes that the actors have inherited. This chapter examines the relationship between the “real” history (history as it actually was) and the cognitive history/histories of the Balkan Wars (history as it is perceived) in the Republic of Macedonia. It is the latter history rather than the former (if they do not agree) that is in the minds of actors and affects the values underlying their actions. The dire outcomes and legacies of the Balkan Wars are seen as some of the greatest national traumas – when the alleged “natural body” of Macedonia was but the spoils of war, divided by neighbouring states with the blessing of the European powers. Few historians would dispute that Macedonia was the major war theatre in 1912–13, and most would agree that there was no Macedonian entity. To put it bluntly, the

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dominant thesis is that there were no Macedonians at all. The collective memory of the Macedonian people as well as that of the Macedonian minorities in the neighbouring countries tell a different story. The “global upsurge of memory”1 has not by any means bypassed the Republic of Macedonia. The process takes different forms but the most visible is the attempt to seize the essence of history2 by erection of (often bizarre) monuments, mainly in the capital. Twenty years after gaining independence, the nation-building and re-writing of national history do not seem to be completed. The general atmosphere in which the Republic of Macedonia awaited the centennial of the Balkan Wars was quite bizarre: while the majority group (Macedonians) lamented over its “lost fatherland”, the other (Albanian) one celebrated a 100-year-old “imagined community”. This chapter deliberately centres on the historiography and memories of the Balkan Wars held only by the ethnic Macedonians. The reason for focusing on the attitudes of only 65 per cent of the general population is twofold: the cleavages between the Macedonians and Albanians are so deep (and continually grow deeper) that it is impossible to identify a common historical narrative for the relevant historical period (1912–13). Second, it is a unique challenge to shed light on the historical remembrance of a nation that according to the majority foreign scholars was practically non-existent a century ago. The contextualisation of the dominant perspectives on the Balkan Wars is about finding out where they come from and what their impact is on current developments. For that purpose, not only the available material evidence and expressions of historical memory have been consulted, but a series of interviews was carried out with two target groups: a group of the most influential historians were asked to sum up the achievements of the national historiography when it comes to the Balkan Wars, and another group (public intellectuals, writers, artists, journalists, etc.) was approached with questions related to the basic issue – how does Macedonian society remember these wars and what are the consequences of the dominant politics of memory?

To Whom to Tell the Story and How: The Macedonian Catachresis If, to quote Kissinger, history is the memory of state, then a range of intriguing questions arise with regard to the Macedonians, who had no

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state of their own, no archives and no specialised institutions for historical research until World War II. It is impossible to appreciate an institution adequately without an understanding of the historical process in which it was produced.3 The institutionalised world is experienced as objective reality because tradition gives it a character of objectivity; in other words, this is a man-made, constructed objectivity.4 According to Martin Luther King, we are not makers of history; we are made by history. The same is true for the historians and researchers as well as for the institutional milieu in which they work. At the beginning of Macedonia’s transition and independence, the first steps were directed towards denouncing everything that looked like fabricated historical narrative within the Yugoslav framework with supranational teleology. The endeavour ended in an equally fabricated narrative although in an opposite (national) direction. But the Macedonians discovered that they had already been portrayed by others as an “uncertain nation” or even as mythical “Yeti”. There was virtually no room for dialogue as equals or for affirmation of the Macedonian historical discourse. Some emphasised Spivak’s thought that any notion of the Other that presupposes governing with the Other is deeply embedded in the geopolitical power structures. Knowing the Other is not just epistemology – it is politics.5 The Macedonians were/are the Other in the eyes of the Western observers: In the context of the main issue – i.e. the Macedonian who tries to reflect on himself/herself – one could emphasize a few aspects. These are: first, the issue of the language (non/recognition of the Macedonian language by Bulgaria and its wish to impose a language dispute); the name issue – a similarly imposed dispute by Greece and the reference FYROM in UN, NATO, and EU; as well as the problem with the international code according to the UN and the trade code within EU administration; the issue of history – which is the true history of the Macedonian people; does Macedonia have history that is legitimized in a scholarly way (in accordance to the politics of history as discipline in the Western theoretical establishment) or it is a mere myth; the issue of ethnic origin and, consequently, the grand issues of fatherland and the relationship vis-a`-vis spatiality; the issue of the geopolitical position of Macedonia – does Macedonia belong

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to Europe; and where is the place of Macedonia on the coreperiphery axis?6 Any debate over the Balkan Wars sooner or later ends up with the ultimate question: how could one treat the Macedonians as historical agents in these wars (or any other events) if there was/is no such ethnic nation at all? Who were the people that inhabited the Ottoman Macedonia, and the territory of today’s state?7 In order to avoid another tiresome and futile debate, this analysis is built on several premises: the territory of today’s Macedonia was a war theatre; the local population (no matter how one defines it in ethnic terms) witnessed the horrors of the wars and took part in or suffered from the military activities; the memories have been transferred from one generation to another; and, from the moment official Macedonian historiography was established, the Balkan Wars were given certain academic and publicist accounts. Macedonian scholars are missing from international debates. Even in the publications devoted to their country, the Macedonian scholars are suspiciously absent (and silent in their reactions to such publications); by default, foreign experts elaborate the history and/or identity of the Macedonians.8 While Macedonian scholarship has been introverted, foreign scholars have used their advantages to explore the issue.9 Solid studies of Macedonian historiography and the politics of memory rightly emphasise all deficiencies but mostly the parochial self-isolation.10 Stefan Troebst11 argues that Macedonian historiography has preserved the same function that it used to fulfil during the communist era.12 A domestic scholar’s criticism is sharper: the historiography is selforiented; the alpha and omega of historical research is to find ‘ultimate proof’ of the existence of the Macedonian nation (Jovan Donev); hence the fierce debates over loyalty and ethnic allegiances of the leading personalities of the Macedonian revolutionary organisation (MRO) in the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century.13 But the logical response to the claims about narcissistic self-obsession is quite clear and reasonable. It may be summarised in a simple line: “I need a discourse of my own and I need a discourse for/about myself.”14 Macedonian historiography is a product of overall societal conditions, so it suffers from “children diseases” that cannot be bypassed by merely the political, academic or international community’s will. Scholars have

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been trying to tell the Macedonian version of the historical narrative in a way equal to those versions told by others. The Macedonians do exactly what Hobsbawm asserted: they not only “invent traditions” that encompass national symbols and national mythology but also a suitably tailored history. The elements of the real and imagined community are still in an unstable and volatile ratio. The interaction between time, space and the movement of peoples is refracted through various ethnic politics in the previous decades. Given the international constellations, the Macedonians still seek an answer to the question (imposed by others): “Are we an historical accident, a coincidence, or a result of national engineering?” While doing so, they are gradually entering into dialogue with others in order to tell the story “their way”, through Macedonian catachresis, in order to be understood and accepted.

The Balkan Wars in Macedonian Historiography: Coping With Others and the National Self Against the general expectation,15 the Balkan Wars do not figure significantly in historiography. Except for a few books, there are practically no scholarly debates. As late as 1988, the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences organised the first symposium on this issue (“The Balkan Wars from 1912/1913 and the First World War”). There are not many specialists on the Balkan Wars in Macedonia: the two major academic institutions (Institute for National History and the Department of History at the Faculty of Philosophy) have only two researchers who deal with this historical period. In the published works, the military and political aspects overshadow societal/spatial relations.16 The story goes that the Balkan Wars were an important episode of the people’s history but the origins of the (unresolved) Macedonian Question are to be found earlier during the Eastern Crisis. The crescendo was the Versailles conference that concluded World War I. The entire period is seen as critical because the chain of events had a decisive negative impact on the national awakening of the Slav-speaking population in Ottoman Macedonia. According to their national historiography, the MRO suffered internal weaknesses and clashes, while international support was lacking. The newly established Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian states (or rather, the churches that existed within the Ottoman administrative organisation) had already manifested their competing

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claims over Macedonia, which became an apple of discord, prior to the Balkan Wars. The Bucharest Treaty prescribed a de facto division of the spoils of war, i.e. the territory and its population. The following citation best illustrates the position of the national historiography: It is difficult to determine the most significant event, but with high degree of certainty one could prove that the most tragic developments in the centuries-long history of the Macedonian people are the Balkan wars and Macedonia’s partition in the Bucharest Treaty from 10 August 1913 . . . On the eve of the 100th anniversary of this event, tragic not only for Macedonia and the Macedonian people, but also for the peaceful future of the Balkan peoples, this scholarly monograph is an attempt to uncover the truth about the diplomatic tailoring of the territory of Macedonia on which the Macedonian people had been living for centuries, as well as the truth about possessiveness, secrecy and falsification of the evidence of the existence of a distinctive Macedonian people and Macedonian nation by the Great powers and the neighbouring states. In other words, it is all about the continuous negation of the Macedonian identity prior to and during the Balkan wars, which left lasting consequences up to the present day.17 Regarding participation, it is documented that the Macedonians supported the First Balkan War. Having joined the units of the Balkan allies they hoped for recognition of or autonomy for the “integral ethnogeographic territory” of Macedonia. The Second Balkan War proved that not only their hopes were hollow but even their sacrifices were meaningless. The post-communist revisionism did not tackle the existing historical narrative; the newest edition puts great emphasis on the participation of ethnic Macedonians in the military units of all warring parties, including the Ottoman military.18 The Macedonians were mobilised and fought not only with others but also against each other – thus the dominant perception of a fratricidal war. Yet the aspect of responsibility for the war crimes against the civilian (especially Turkish) population is completely missing.19 The interviewed historians agree that in terms of the material evidence on the wars, things are clear and complete. The problem is related to conflicting interpretations of the facts. One historian stresses

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that the general methodological problem is the inability (or unwillingness) to define the beginning of the creation of the Macedonian people as a self-aware ethnicity. Ethnic belonging of the actors remains the basic analytical tool. Historiography obviously centres on the representation of national-self related to past events. Few historians take a wider context into account, i.e. the fact that the war theatre was much bigger. Lack of any wider global and regional perspective leaves room only for a feeble and unconvincing narrative. Critical historians agree that the ethno-centric approach wrongly puts a (non-formed) Macedonian nation at centre-stage and depicts Ottoman Macedonia as an already defined fatherland of all Macedonians. This version collides with the grand narratives and experiences of the non-Macedonian inhabitants of today’s state. With respect to the academic legitimacy of the Macedonian historiography, some respondents complain over unfair treatment.20 The Macedonian historiography may not be of the worst quality but having been in a position to “fight” for legitimacy with the older historiographies, by default the scholars are in an inferior position. According to some, the only window of opportunity for their scholarly promotion is to explore minor historical peculiarities.21 According to a critical historian, the struggle for the “truth” of the ethnocentric historiographies, including the Macedonian one, is but a vicious circle: everybody is right, and yet nobody is wrong, which is a battle lost in advance for all participants. The majority of historians agree that this approach should be abandoned, but not all agree over the best way to do so. Some prefer discourse associated with constructivism and postmodernism, while the majority is more conservative. The latter’s argumentation reads: “How shall I legitimize myself in front of the other (who does not recognize my existence)?” Furthermore, in some respects the approach of Gellner, Bhaba, Anderson and Hobsbawm may be seen to give comfort to Macedonians as, by recognising the importance of subjective factors in the construction of nationhood (such as the role of the imagination and national narratives), they provide powerful counter-arguments to those who would dispute their nation’s legitimacy. Yet, at the same time the approach of these historians is unwelcome precisely because it repeats some of the arguments used by such critics. After all, the last thing that Macedonians wish to hear is that “the Macedonian nation is invented”, or “Macedonian history is nothing but a fabricated myth”.22

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The Balkan Wars, to use Anthony Smith’s phrase, do not qualify as “usable past”23 for Macedonian historiography. Nietzsche put it in a similar way: the state never has any use for truth as such, but only for truth which is useful to it. The fact that many Macedonians were forcibly conscripted or volunteered in the different armies speaks for itself – there were different ideas of what a future Macedonian polity should look like. The official truth is that Macedonia’s fate has been decided at diplomatic conferences, from San Stefano to Berlin (1878), and from Bucharest (1913) to Paris (1919), but never in the interest of the people concerned. Some of the MRO leading figures overtly appealed for Macedonia’s autonomy within Bulgaria, while the intellectuals were the only ones who were sending memorandums to the European elites ahead of the 1912 London conference seeking a “Macedonian state for the Macedonians”;24 however, they remained unheard. Yet there are indications that some people from Macedonia did influence their own destiny.25 History is often seen as a self-service from which one can stress one fact and disregard the rest that do not fit well into the wider narrative. In socialist historiography, the differentiation of the leaders of the MRO was made along the traditional division of left- and right-wing activists (the former, of course, were presented in a positive light), but since 1991 the question was redefined in terms of seeking their “true” Macedonianness. As many of them declared themselves to be of different origin for various reasons (enforcement or belief), today’s historians figuratively wage wars over their identity. Some are even trying to “judge” them or even the general population from today’s positions. The issue is emotional due to the ongoing international political claims over the “artificiality” of the Macedonian identity. Many historians are (privately) ready to agree with Poulton’s thesis that “who a Macedonian was (or was not) depends on whom you ask and to what historical era you are referring”.26 Yet the same applies to the notion of being Bulgarian, Greek or Serb at the end of the Ottoman era.27 What the Western authors name an “amorphous or floating mass” or “Macedonian salad” is best explained as the only possible form of nationalism under the harsh circumstances; i.e. self-awareness of the local population known as nostrism/nasˇism (from the word “nasˇ” meaning “ours”) and the defensive nationalism that followed after.28 With no state institutions to strengthen national belonging and in the

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cross-fire of competing churches, propaganda and military enforcement, it was safest and most normal to identify with the nearest local community, its culture and rituals.29 The fierce propaganda introduced the division of the population into Serbomane, Bulgaromane and Graekomane. So-called bellum omnium in omnes was an overture to the three wars that would have Macedonia as one of their main objectives and would become bellum omnium contra omnes. Mazower is right in saying that right after the Balkan Wars (and World War I), ethnic belonging became a matter of life or death for the population of Macedonia, so often in order to survive families would assign a different affiliation for each of their sons.30

The Past is (No) Foreign Country: Macedonian Intellectuals on the Balkan Wars 1912 – 13 In an era of expansion of memory, historians have lost the position of exclusive guardians of the interpretation of the past.31 The historians in Macedonia complain of the unprincipled competition of the quasiexperts and “popular historians” who have taken the central position in the public debate. Instead of comprehensive and boring elaborations of the past, the citizens rather consume popular history like fast-food. Some historians believe that they should refrain from taking part in the public debate even if it concerns new readings of the past. The others have been trying to make their voice heard even in the international political arena.32 The promoters of popular interpretations are easily identified among politicians, journalists, writers, artists, and even NGO activists – that is people that are influential as policy-makers and/or public opinionmakers. They have become alternative guardians of the historical memory of the Balkan Wars, too. Collective memories and myths reproduced and interpreted by them are in a dialectic relationship with the academic and/or “official” historiography. This is especially important in a society preoccupied by, if not obsessed with, historical themes, i.e. they dictate the discourse and divert public opinion from the more urgent and existential issues.33 Political opposition and the international power circles have coined a new term for the dominant politics of memory (so-called “antiquisation”) but here another question is more important: is there any interest left for the more recent events

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such as the Balkan Wars? How do Macedonians, especially their intellectual elite, cherish the memories that are only a century old? Is the history of the Balkan Wars a foreign country or not?34 Public personalities by and large share the dominant perception of the Balkan Wars and their consequences for the Macedonians/Macedonia. The major consequence was that the Macedonians became strangers in their shattered fatherland, while the process of national awakening was brutally suppressed. Regarding the character of the Balkan Wars they are unanimous: the Macedonians did not gain anything from either of them. To the contrary, there is even a dose of “nostalgia” for the Ottoman times when the Macedonians were subjugated to the despotic power but could live together in their imagined community. There is obviously a lot of romanticism and selective memory. Interestingly, the trauma is only occasionally related to human costs of the war but is mostly perceived as a collective tragedy and a lost opportunity for self-determination. Only few point out that this narrative is a part of national imagination: the Macedonians could not lose something they did not have at the time. In the words of an analyst, the Balkan Wars represent a watershed: the beginning of the shortest Macedonian century that started with these wars and ended in the establishment of full independence in 1991. According to him, since 1913, the divided people had been dreaming of unification in its “natural self”. Hence national tragedies are not to be marked, let alone celebrated. Unlike the Balkan Wars, the myth of the Ilinden Uprising has been widely cherished: the first Ilinden (1903) was only a beginning, the second one (1944) is related to self-determination within Yugoslavia and the third one (1991) to fully fledged statehood. Asked to reflect on how much the dominant perception of the Balkan Wars coincides with the historical events, and particularly with the way they are presented in the historiography, the majority find a high degree of concurrence. The respondents consider themselves well-informed, but the same does not apply to the wider public. There are opinions that the Macedonians have deliberately been made disinterested in their past: first, in Yugoslavia the history was levelled in order not to open wounds; and nowadays due to the volatile inter-ethnic relations and the complex regional situation, the international community takes over the role that used to belong to the communist elites – it imposes the attitude that the past is less important than the future. Some analysts identify two basic stances among the population. The majority is ignorant and indifferent

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to events from 100 years ago. It looks at them as if they are related to somebody else’s history: the past is a foreign country for them. The other part of the society (although a minority) is congruent around a nub that is still nameless because the veil of anonymity has covered the people whose fight and suffering remained unrecognised as if they never existed. These people are intrinsically interested in the past and desperately need to document the truth of what happened to their ancestors. The family narratives and oral folklore keep that urge alive: they still want to get recognition of the pain which was and still feels real, because if they find the answer to this pain, it will also be a cure. Some identify a vacuum and conclude that without proper contextualisation one cannot get a full picture of Macedonia before the Balkan Wars. Any Macedonian is confused when it comes to history given the deeply entrenched distrust of (any) state authority. The state was never “friendly”, or rather it was always alienated and under external guidance. The result is distrust and self-victimisation. A journalist argues: “The political elites have always been engaged in myth-making in order to cover their ineptitude or in order to create a mentality of an ‘unlucky, pitiable and incapable Macedonian’. But even the analysis of folklore and traditional songs shows that the half-educated audience has chosen to be in a role of a sufferer and victim rather than to be an active agent and a fighter.” Having been conscious of the handicaps of the historiography, the respondents are not very trustful in the “official truth”. Some have greater expectations from the process of re-writing history since 1991. This subtle distrust is probably the reason why most of the respondents emphasise the importance of collective memory, i.e. the narratives that have been transferred from one generation to another. Again, Macedonianness, i.e. the continuity of the people’s self-awareness, is the focal point. For a political scientist, collective memory is a modus vivendi for any people with a short, complicated and denied state/constitutional history such as the Macedonian one. Without collective memory the national consciousness could not have been preserved, especially in the absence of a state of one’s own to take over such functions. The political scientist asks: “Is it possible for written materials to have greater power than the words of those we love, respect and trust when they tell us – I am Macedonian, my father was Macedonian and his father was Macedonian too?” Almost all respondents share stories about

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their grandparents who made time-charts of their memories in accordance to who was the occupier or in whose state institutions their ancestors worked (“during Ottoman times”, “during Serbian or Bulgarian times”, etc.). For them, the existence of Macedonians, not only in the Republic of Macedonia but also in the neighbouring countries, is a bare fact that annihilates all the “evidence” of historiographies that claim otherwise. A poet puts this in a more emotional form: the reliance in our collective memory should be increased, because the general public should be convinced that the sufferings that our grandparents went through were not fiction but fact. He testifies: “One cannot be indifferent when s/he has lost her/his ancestors of two different generations, while the official historiography does not even mention them or classifies them as ‘others’ or mere statistics.” Along with the notion of a shattered and divided fatherland, there is a feeling of being castrated and deprived of any memory. Those whose relatives were refugees or war victims in the Balkan Wars say that the pain is the only thing they possess, along with memories of the trauma and the narratives of the witnesses of those events. In his words, today, more than ever, division and pain define the Macedonian ethos. The two Balkan Wars as well as a good deal of World War I were waged on Macedonian soil, but history has no remembrance of any Macedonian victims (be they civilians or soldiers). Even the graveyards that are well-preserved are named after the respective state army that took part. Within a project related to remembering World War I, a retired Macedonian ambassador proposed a symbolic name “Macedonia: necropolis of foreign soldiers”. The soldiers were buried under different state flags and symbols, i.e. remained anonymous and unaccounted for. The most illustrative material testimony is a soldier’s gravestone.35 Objectively few families have preserved any evidence or photos of their ancestors. Some point out that memories are mainly an intimate/ family category that is unreliable because it is an object of exaggeration, self-censorship or selective oblivion. Somewhere between the picture of the greatest national tragedy and the painful individual memories, there is a gross emptiness, i.e. the absence of any memorial that would relate to this period. This is evident even in the new museum of the Macedonian revolutionary battle with few exponents that would illustrate this period. It is questionable whether this is a result of subconscious embarrassment because of the failure to create a nation-state (as it is

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perceived), and especially the change of sides during the wars. One respondent clearly points at unpleasant issues that are neglected not only in the historiography but also in family narratives: only recently he found out that some of his ancestors were collaborators with the occupying forces. He concludes: “Probably we are unwilling to accept the fact that some of our ancestors used to declare themselves as Bulgarians, Serbs or even Greeks.” A professor of psychology points out a gap between the general picture of these events and the individual/ family memories that are shattered across the region (i.e. preserved in what is named emotional remembrance). In a 2011 survey, one question asked about events that had a strong influence on ethnic groups in Macedonia; few respondents (less than 6 per cent) chose an event prior to World War II.36 A leading researcher draws the conclusion that older historical experiences have been forgotten or pale in the face of more recent events (such as the 2001 conflict). An artist recalls that the Macedonians still have no complete picture of what happened 11 years ago and that memories even about war crimes have been buried quickly, mainly because of the “peace at home” and the international community’s persistence. A writer concludes that the collective memory is important but at the same time it is legitimate to ask to what degree it was “tailored”, or – what and why do we remember or decide to forget other events? (what events do we choose to remember or forget, and why?) A journalist is sceptical if it is possible to speak of the collective memory of a population that has been living in different societal, cultural and political settings since 1913. Experience shows that collective memory is like putty – it can be modelled and manipulated throughout time. Another journalist concludes: “Nationalism is always somewhat artificial. It does not call for better and deeper knowledge about events from the past; it takes advantage of some general points and in doses that are useful, no more and no less.” The quest for a scapegoat is a never-ending part of any nationalist agenda. In sum, in the view of some Macedonian intellectuals it is very important to claim that (our) history is no foreign country, while others accept the forward-looking tactics and diminish the importance of historical knowledge. A few even argue that war histories should not be explored at all; wars in general mean sufferings, death, destruction and narratives that try to identify who was right and who was wrong, de facto conserving the seeds of mutual hatred. Such cries are

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reminiscent of Nietzsche’s arguments against scientific– historical forms of knowledge in favour of ahistorical living.

How Do We Remember Them/Ourselves? The influence of the politics of memory is by default seen in the way history is written and passed on, but also through the influence of the other societal aspects (folklore, traditional stories and songs, literature and arts). The history textbooks are the most illustrative places to start with the analysis. The Macedonian narrative is devoid of pluralism, discontinuities, ambiguities, occasions, etc.37 It is reduced to a singlecause story dominated by politics, wars and (national) heroes. Presented in this way, the only logical end of the history itself is the creation of modern nation-states. The same applies for the 1912–13 time-span – the only difference being the anticlimax and failure to achieve statehood. The latest revisions of history concern two uprisings that had never been mentioned before: Tikvesˇ (June 1913) and Ohrid-Debar (September 1913). They are presented in the new museum of the Macedonian revolutionary struggle as acts of protest against the Balkan Wars’ outcomes. Other interpretations collide over their character: were they directed against the Serbian authorities and incited by the pro-Bulgarian activists or were they of “pure” Macedonian character?38 The most invariable part of the national remembrance of the Balkan Wars as well as of World War I is deeply embedded in the various forms of national/cultural heritage. Along with modern literature, a rich traditional literature, folklore and songs have been preserved. They refer to the “lost fatherland” whenever there is a mention of geographical sites (with the old Macedonian toponyms), battles or heroes. According to the ethnologist Kitevski, who has been working on these issues, it is almost impossible to distinguish between the songs devoted to the Balkan Wars and those about World War I because in the popular perception they created one long and tragic event. There are testimonies about soldiers that wandered for seven years not knowing about the wars’ outcomes and that had been mourned by their families. Thus some songs have a line “My dear son, this is your father who got killed on the front.” Other songs describe a scene of reunion between the wife and the husband who gets back from the war where she fails to recognise him: “My young beauty / I am your Jordan / from ordinary soldier / I have

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become a captain.” The popular literature evidences great differences between the pre-Balkan Wars uprisings and the wars that followed: there is a completely new rhetoric (about new weaponry, military ranks and medical organisation, etc.). However, the spirit of the poetry remains and projects onto the new events. Thus the older revolutionary song (“Your son, old woman, got married / to land of Macedonia / grey falcons were groomsmen / black ravens – priests”) got another form: “I am going to die / for Macedonia / for Macedonia / tormented country / evermore subjugated.” Most of the heroes in these songs are unknown people while in some of them leaders of the neighbouring countries figure significantly (“May be damned, my beloved, Danev and Pasˇic´ / who opened the second war / the second war that was fratricidal.”39) The politics of memory over the Balkan Wars can be traced in modern media such as websites of institutions, cities and municipalities.40 Such references are present especially in regions that suffered the most and where memories of such events and people were kept alive. An interesting example is the website on Mariovo where one finds out not only information on the consequences of the wars for the local population (names of people that emigrated to the United States or who were voluntarily or forcefully mobilised by the Balkan armies) but also traditional songs on the heroes and the treachery. The information on the village of Gradesˇnica, for instance, includes the lyrics of a popular song that reads:41 Shrill was Jana’s shout From her lofty lookout, By the silver rail: Strike, brethren, with shot Maple-pasha’s lot! ’Tis not Serbia here Nor a patch of Greece, Bulgaria resides here not, ’Tis Macedonia, our spot!42 This song, like many others, is flanked by controversies. Some say that the original did not contain the verse “This is not Bulgaria”. Bizarre online “wars” on similar topics have been going on between many Bulgarian and Macedonian bloggers or YouTube users.43 The

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Macedonians often refer to another popular song that originates from 1913, whose author was an old woman, Menda Eleninska from Papradisˇta village (documented by A. Kjulafkovski in 1956): Enemies, damn neighbours They have bloody quarrels opened The Serbs want it for themselves The Bulgarians even more. This is land of Macedonia ...... I can’t join you, my brothers, One enemy goes in front of me, brothers, In front of me and behind me, With knives Serbian and Bulgarian. Under their knives, brothers, they lay, Our country will they divide, Piece by piece between them. The cultural exchange and circulation of music and lyrics for centuries across the region made it possible for one creation to be accepted, revised and reclaimed by various local communities. Having been embedded with memories and sentiments, they have become parts of the cultural heritage and guardians of historical memories. A historian rightly notes that in the collective mind Macedonia is not and cannot be clearly defined because the name refers to different historical and political contexts: We never know about which Macedonia we sing songs. Are they about the geographic one or about the Republic? It is a clear sign that we have not yet come to terms with our past when it comes to “our Macedonia”. In our collective memory there is consciousness about the geographical bond of the people that lived together, which was the first step towards the opening of the process of nation-building. Unfortunately the Balkan Wars put to end that process, or better shifted it into another direction. The Balkan Wars as well as World War I have surely been no focal point of Macedonian literature. The novel Pirey (weed or couch grass)

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by Petre M. Andreevski published in 1980 is seen as a rare and influential example. The title represents a narrative by itself with deep symbolic meaning: “you may kick her, uproot her, or pull her out as much as you want – she would not die. All she needs is a small touch to the soil, and here it is again, renewed and grown up again. Nothing can destroy that weed! She is so alike our tribe. We are like a weed – no military can extinguish us.”44 Jon is a villager, indifferent about the ongoing wars and not much aware of the reasons and the military currents: “long-ago we were all the same shit, the same dung. But whatever horse-drawn carriage would cut off the shit in two, but then another one would do the same. So many carriages used to cross the dung so out of one we have become many pieces of shit. I have seen them all here and we all stink the same.”45 In another episode, Jon explains the war with a short sentence: “We have all moved one against another – we found ourselves on each side of the front, our people.” Yet in a relatively rich Macedonian literature one notices a paradox: despite the weight of these events, national literature and other forms of artistic expression largely bypass it. Analysts wonder how it is possible to wipe out such issues, yet the excuse is again found in the national/ political correctness of the Yugoslav period. The post-1991 period witnessed new literary currents. In his 1993 novel Mitko Madzˇunkov defines Macedonianness as a synonym for discord, while the Balkans is a different name for a lie; the people from the Balkans are different in the same way, and similar in a different way. According to him, the Balkans are a space where each new generation tends to start all over again, to be the one to lay the foundations of a new era, and that is why “new times know nothing about the old ones”.

Instead of a Conclusion: The Balkan Wars are in the Eye of the Beholder Unlike their neighbours, Macedonians do not bother to commemorate the Balkan Wars. Inversely, not many care to invite Macedonian scholars to their conferences devoted to the centennial (the Turkish universities being an exception). A few of those who attended such debates came back with identical impressions: the battle of interpretation and contextualisation goes on. Few mention the notion of dealing with the past and reconciliation. Probably the best illustration for this attitude is

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the fact that Macedonian university circles and even the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts (MANU) failed to organise a major international (even a regional) conference.46 If the past 100 years were a time of national fantasies for some neighbouring countries,47 then Macedonia went through 100 years of solitude and oblivion. The wars are indeed remembered as a national tragedy but their interpretation and remembrance did not provide a politically useful narrative as is the case in other states. During the Yugoslav phase, they were defined in a concise apodictic style: the First Balkan War was just, and the second one was unjust! Unlike the historiographical records, the collective remembrance is more vivid although marked with a dose of confusion. Ethnic Macedonians have created their national myth on the ground of three Ilindens (1903, 1944 and 1991) but the Balkan Wars remain buried in an historical “black hole”. The main reason they keep referring to their “greatest national tragedy” is a modern and pragmatic one. The “Macedonian Question” has transformed into a “name dispute”48 with Greece or a “dispute over common history” with Bulgaria. It bears the weight of an ultimate truth: the Balkan Wars have not been concluded yet as far as the Macedonians are concerned. A famous poet of the younger generation, Nikola Madzˇirov, puts it in the following verse: “This here is but a place that is actually there, a place where history never becomes past.” This is hardly a groundless perception: some historians think that each new war was re-opening the unresolved issues and that conflicts only perpetuate themselves.49 The conflict cycle has not been broken although it assumed a less violent form. The phrase “the Balkan Wars” needs clarification nowadays – one needs to emphasise the exact wars she/he is referring to. One hundred years ago the Ottoman Empire fell apart but the enormous price was paid by the civilians. Yugoslavia’s dissolution carried a sense of de´ja` vu. The Macedonians may have gained relative historical justice in 1991 but with the return of the crisis, Macedonia is again the focal point of many worrisome developments. Despite the dominant attitude that today’s developments are convincing proof that Europe has never been fair towards the Macedonian nation and that the roots of today’s problems lie back in the past, the author of this text believes it is rather the other way around. The unprecedented pressure on a small country and nation to change its name has an awakening effect on already forgotten “memories” of a time

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that is de facto not well remembered in the national pantheon. The weak or even non-existent politics of memory that would refer to the Balkan Wars speaks for itself: the majority do not want to remember the tragedy and sufferings, when families fought against each other and finally ended up as assimilated members of different Balkan nations. But to expect Macedonians not to be nationalists within these regional constellations is but a liberal fantasy. Yet there is self-censorship and concern over Macedonian interpretations of the past that may be condemned as irredentism by the neighbouring EU member states and the international community. The society of two million people is caught in a vicious circle of mutual accusations, rubbing salt into the wounds, differentiation among people with different allegiances and origins. The “name issue” is very much related to the question of who the Macedonians are, i.e. the question to which many do not want to hear an answer. As long as this “issue” is kept open, history cannot be a foreign country but rather the present time that creates conditions for a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Notes 1. According to Pierre Nora the main forms of this worldwide process involve elements such as critique of the official versions of history and the return to what was hidden away; search for an obfuscated or “confiscated” past; cult of “roots” and the development of genealogical investigations; boom in fervent celebrations and commemorations; legal settlement of past “scores” between different social groups; growing number of all kinds of museums; etc. See Pierre Nora, Lex lieux de me´moire, La Re´publique, Les France (Paris, 1993), vol. 3. 2. Jasna Koteska, “Troubles with History, Skopje 2014”, Artmargins Online, 29 December 2011, available at http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/2-arti cles/655-troubles-with-history-skopje-2014 (last accessed on 12 September 2012). 3. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (London, 1991), p. 72. 4. Ibid., p. 78. 5. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can Subaltern Speak?”, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, IL, 1988). 6. Branko Sarkanjac, Makedonski katahresis, kako da se zboruva za Makedonija (Skopje, 2004), p. 32.

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7. The analysis of the available statistical data leads to the conclusion that it is difficult to get an authentic picture of Macedonia’s population on the eve of the Balkan Wars. See Igor Despot, The Balkan Wars in the Eyes of the Warring Parties: Perceptions and Interpretations (Bloomington, 2012), p. 260. Also Marija Pandevska, “The Term Macedonian(s) in Ottoman Macedonia, On the Map and in the Mind”, Nationality Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, 40:5 (September 2012), available at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showAxaArti cles?journalCode¼cnap20. 8. Hugh Poulton, Who Are the Macedonians? (Bloomington, 1995); Victor Roudometof, The Macedonian Question: Culture, Historiography, Politics (Boulder, CO, 2000); Peter Liotta and Cindy Webb, Mapping Macedonia: Idea and Identity (Westport, 2004); Loring M. Danforth, The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World (Princeton, 1995). 9. Foreign researchers have opportunities to carry out field research and to interview well-informed people in Macedonia and in the region, before they come out with a Ph.D. thesis or an academic writing. Many of them have certain proficiency in the Macedonian language. The members of the intellectual elite are the best native informants for the Western researchers interested in the “voice of the Other”. Also the foreigners have at their disposal something that their Macedonian colleagues could only dream of – i.e. access to all archives of the neighbouring countries. 10. Ulf Brunnbauer, “Serving the Nation: Historiography in the Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) After Socialism”, Historein, 4 (2003 – 4), p. 170. 11. Stefan Troebst, “Historical Politics and Historical ‘Masterpieces’ in Macedonia before and after 1991”, New Balkan Politics, 6 (2000/1). 12. The nation-building process all over Europe witnessed the phenomenon of instrumentalisation of historiography, so it is nothing unique for postcommunist countries. See Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (eds), The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories (Writing the Nation) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 13. Sinisa Jakov Marusˇic´, “New Statue Awakens Past Quarrels in Macedonia”, Balkan Insight, 3 July 2012, available at http://www.balkaninsight.com/ en/article/new-statue-awakens-past-quarrels-in-macedonia (last accessed on 1 August 2012). 14. Branko Sarkanjac, ibid., p. 23. 15. In his key-note speech at the opening of the conference “100th Anniversary of the Balkan Wars”, held on 3 December 2012, the president of the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences, Prof. Kambovski, stressed that “Macedonia was the greatest victim of the Balkan Wars” because the Macedonian nation was not allowed to create a nation-state of its own. (“Собир во МАНУ – Македонија најголема жртва на Балканските војни”, Нова Македонија, 4 December 2012, available at http://www.novamakedonija.com.mk/NewsDetal.asp?vest¼124128 5056&id ¼ 9&prilog ¼ 0&setIzdanie ¼ 22746 (last accessed on 10 February 2013).

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16. Major academic works include: Gjorgji Abadziev, Balkanskite vojni i Makedonija (Skopje, 1958); Petar Stojanov, Makedonija vo vremeto na Balkanskite i Prvata svetska vojna (1912 – 1918) (Skopje, 1969); Jovan Donev, Golemite sili i Makedonija za vreme na Prvata balkanska vojna, nekoi megjunarodni politicˇko-pravni aspekti na odnosot na golemite sili kon Makedonija za vreme na Prvata balkanska vojna (Skopje, 1988). Recently two books were published; the first one gives quite a novel perspective from the position of Turkish historiography (the author is a scholar of Turkish nationality), while the other is hailed as a capital and lifetime work of the authors. See: Ismet Kocˇan, Bitka za Makedonija (Skopje, 2010); Vancˇe Stojcˇev and Aleksandar Stojcˇev, Bukuresˇkiot miroven dogovor i podelbata na Makedonija vo 1913 godina (Skopje, 2011). 17. Vancˇe Stojcˇev and Aleksandar Stojcˇev, ibid., p. xv. 18. V. Stojcˇev and A. Stojcˇev, ibid. The figures are derived from some older historical books (mostly from Abadziev’s works from 1958), but the interpretation there is different – they emphasise bravery, motivation and resoluteness to fight “for freedom”, the high military ranks held by the Macedonians, etc. 19. These issues are only shyly mentioned and never truly resonated into the public. See Ismet Kocˇan, ibid. 20. The author heard about a concrete experience of a full professor from the Institute of National History. The review of her paper consisted of just one word (“rubbish”) which qualifies more as censorship rather than academic critique. 21. In a half-joking manner, a historian mentioned tobacco production in Ottoman Macedonia as a topic that is neutral enough to gain one an invitation to any international conference. 22. Branko Sarkanjac, Po svoe (Skopje, 2009), p. 100. 23. Anthony Smith, “The ‘Golden Age’ and National Revival”, in Geoffrey Hosking and George Scho¨pflin (eds), Myths and Nationhood (C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 1997), p. 37. 24. Blazˇe Ristovski, Dimitrija Cˇupovski (1878– 1940) (Skopje, 1978). 25. Until recently few knew that a Macedonian (Simon Radev) was a member of the Bulgarian delegation at the Bucharest conference. His statue’s appearance among the decorations of the new building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs met with strong public distress so it was quickly removed. 26. Hugh Poulton, ibid. 27. At the beginning of the twentieth century the impoverished and uneducated population did not take national identification as something of greatest importance. Identifiers such as Serb, Greek or Bulgarian had interchangeable meaning (societal, political, educational, religious – and rarely ethnic). But the Western powers conceived them in their own way and imposed different substance upon them, which coincided with their national interests in the Balkans. 28. See further Andrew Rossos, Macedonia and the Macedonians: A History (Stanford, 2008).

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29. By the end of the Empire, Macedonians were described as a conglomerate of several nations without ethnic Macedonians. But the phenomena of “local patriotism” was described by many, such as Henry Brailsford. (Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future, London, 1906). A French war reporter for Journal in his reports from 1913 wrote, “Bulgarians were demanding these territories on the ground of their alleged ethnicity. But I have been there, and no one who has ever been there would deny the Slav origin of that population. That population is neither Bulgarian nor Serbian, or if you prefer, it is as much Bulgarian as it is Serbian.” Anri Barbi, Bregalnica. Srpsko-bugarski rat 1913 (Beograd, 1914), p. 2. Similar testimonies can be found in A. Амфитеатров, Страна раздора, Балканскиа впечатлелниа (Ст. Петерсбург, И. В. Раискои, 1903), available at http://www.scribd. com/fullscreen/55020157?access_key¼ key-27dpp1gjravs87ucufdw (last accessed on 5 August 2012). 30. The documentary “The Silent Balkans” explores the lives of ordinary people at the turn of the twentieth century, available at http://www.balkantale.com/ project_doc.php (last accessed on 1 October 2012). 31. Tchavdar Marinov, ibid. 32. Professor Zˇezˇov addressed the Greek president Papoulias in an open letter on 7 July 2012, available at http://kurir.mk/makedonija/vesti/77045-Pismood-profd-r-Nikola-Zezov-do-grckiot-pretsedatel-Papuljas (last accessed on 4 October 2012). He appealed to the Greek president to acknowledge the existence of the historical reality and the existence of the Macedonian national identity but also refers to the period of the Balkan Wars and Greece’s territorial appetites since the beginning of the twentieth century. 33. Nade Proeva, “Modern Macedonian Myth as a Response to the National Myths of the Neighbours (Albanian Panillyrism, Greek Panhellenism and Bulgarian Panthracism)”, Historical Review, Ljubljana, 64:1–2 (2010), p. 176. 34. The author interviewed over 50 leading intellectuals, journalists, NGO activists, university professors, actors, writers and poets. With permission some of the most interesting or the most illustrative attitudes have been quoted. 35. Liskovski Petko from the village of Dobrusˇevo, Bitola region, according to the data on the gravestone served in three armies, in the Turkish (1910– 12), the Serbian (1914 – 15) and the Bulgarian one (1916– 18). The photo is available at http://united_macedonia.blog.mk/tag/%D1%81%D1%80% D0%B1%D0%B8%D1%98%D0%B0/?afilter¼ status (last accessed on 17 September 2012). 36. Saso Klekovski (ed.), Megjuetnickite odnosi vo Makedonija (Skopje, 2011), pp. 11 – 12. Available at http://mcms.mk/images/docs/2011/megjuetnickiteodnosi-vo-makedonija.pdf (last accessed on 21 September 2012). 37. Irena Stefoska, “Some Aspects of History Textbooks for Secondary School: The Case of Macedonia”, in Sabrina P. Ramet et al., Civic and Uncivic Values in Macedonia: Value Transformation, Education, and Media, Palgrave, forthcoming.

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38. The controversies surfaced at the commemoration of Tikvesˇ Uprising. The narrative over the crimes committed by the Serbs reached unbelievable proportions (alleged mass slaughters, rape and burning of children in provisional ovens). See “Po devetdeceniskiot molk, Tikvesˇkoto vostanie konecˇno kje najde mesto vo istorijata”, Dnevnik, 19 June 2007, available at http://dnevnik.com. mk/?ItemID¼ EA8F138B2301F4478B67B45C489CC466 (last accessed on 5 October 2012). 39. From the conference paper’s presentation of Dr Marko Kitevski at the MANU conference on the Balkan Wars: “Македонскиот народ не сакал да ги опева Балканските војни”, Nova Makedonija, 4 December 2012, available at http:// www.novamakedonija.com.mk/NewsDetal.asp?vest¼ 12412845112&i d ¼ 16&prilog ¼ 0&setIzdanie ¼ 22746 (last accessed on 10 February 2013). 40. On the tourist site of Bitola one finds a brief reference, “The First Balkan War put a final end to the five-century long Turkish rule in Bitola and Macedonia. The Second Balkan War that followed immediately to the enlightenment of the liberation had a short life because one regime of enslavement was replaced by another. Although they presented as forces of liberation, soon afterwards the Serbian forces showed their true territorial aspirations (available at http://www.bitolatourist.info/index.php?option¼ com_content&view ¼ article&id ¼ 71%3A2010 – 04 – 12 – 10 – 55 – 39& catid ¼ 38%3A2010 – 04 – 08 – 22 – 56 – 58&Itemid ¼ 88&lang ¼ mk, last accessed on 5 October 2012). 41. Gradesˇnica vo Balkanskite vojni, see: http://www.itarpejo.org/index.php? option¼ com_content&view ¼ article&id ¼ 71%3A-o-&catid ¼ 8%3Am onograph-for-gradesnica&Itemid ¼ 13&lang ¼ en (last accessed on 5 October 2012). 42. The song originates from the Balkan Wars period and was published in a collection edited by Dusˇko Hr. Konstantinov in 1965. The translation was made by Ognen Cˇemerski. 43. For instance, Idividi Forum, http://forum.idividi.com.mk/forum_posts.asp? TID¼13484. 44. Petre M. Andreevski, Pirej (Skopje, 2009), p. 8. 45. Ibid., p. 68. 46. After two-year-long preparations for a major international event, MANU managed to set a modest national conference on the Balkan Wars centennial for December 2012. The call for papers was distributed a few times due to obviously low interest in participation. 47. Dubravka Stojanovic´, “One Hundred Years of Fantasies: The Balkan Wars 1912– 2012”, conference paper presented at the International conference The Balkan Wars 1912/13: Experience, Perception, Remembrance, 11–13 October 2012, Center for Balkan and Black Sea Studies / Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul, available at http://pescanik.net/2012/10/sto-godina-fantazije/ (last accessed on 15 October 2012).

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48. Biljana Vankovska, “David vs. Goliath: Macedonia’s Position(s) in the ‘Name Dispute’ with Greece”, Sudosteuropa, 58:3 (2010). 49. Igor Despot, “Balkan vec´ sto godina mucˇe isti problemi”, Novosti, 2 October 2012, available at http://www.novossti.com/2012/10/balkan-vec-sto-godinamuce-isti-problemi/ (last accessed on 5 October 2012).

CHAPTER 7 AFTER THE GOLDEN AGE? — THE JOURNALISM OF THE BALKAN WARS James Pettifer

The armies of the Balkan States are all equipped with modern rifles, but possession of such weapons does not imply thorough comprehension of their employment, and the infantry tactics of the two Balkan campaigns of 1912– 1913 are such as might be expected from imperfectly trained men possessed of great courage and powers of endurance.1 Was there ever a Golden Age without conflict in the Balkans? As classicists know, the nature of a Golden Age is difficult to define. This official British government note for army officers on the Balkan Wars (1912 – 13) published around the time of the outbreak of World War I in 1914 certainly does not suggest the Balkan Wars was a Golden Age for infantry soldiering. Yet compared to the world of the Somme and the Battle of Ypres that was to come, the official observations are prescient and well judged. The material prepared by the War Office for officers then was based on close study of the First Balkan War in 1912, in particular, and the carnage and d eath by disease in many places in the central and southern Balkans was a forewarning of what was to come on the Western Front and elsewhere only two years later after 1914. Yet the public appetite for the images of suffering and horror

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nevertheless remained. War sold newspapers and magazines. As Susan Sontag has written: Central to modern expectations, and modern ethical feeling, is the conviction that war is an aberration, if an unstoppable one. That peace is the norm, if an unattainable one. This, of course, is not the way war has been regarded throughout history. War has been the norm and peace the exception.2 In mid-Victorian England, peace under the Pax Britannica certainly did seem the norm, yet it is commonly seen as the beginning of the Golden Age of war reporting. In the case of foreign reporting of wars in which British Crown Forces were involved, during the previous three generations, there is, or at least seems to be, an accurate answer, based on exact chronology, and a single man. This was William Howard Russell of The Times whose reporting of the Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854 in the Crimean War set a standard that most historians feel has never been surpassed.3 The epitaph on his tombstone in St Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London describes him simply as “the first and greatest war correspondent”. This is how he has generally been seen since by students of his profession, and it was certainly the view of the main historian of journalism of that period, Philip Knightley, who in his book The First Casualty explores the history of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century war reporting and its practical effects on British and American politics.4 Russell also had a long career, unlike many war correspondents, with other highlights such as his work in the American Civil War after 1861.5 Before W.H. Russell, editors had been content to take material from soldiers involved in conflicts, who often understood little about news or newspapers, and were highly selective in what they wrote about, or just stole copy from local foreign newspapers. But the truth, in journalism, as always, was elusive. Philip Knightley was himself, after all, a distinguished practitioner on the London Sunday Times and author of other important books. He broke, with others, perhaps the greatest story of the Cold War in Britain, the treachery of Kim Philby, the Soviet spy in MI6. He has observed, though, in an article in Granta No.53 published in New York in 1996 that what was interesting for editors was not always true. In conflicts, myth and legend soon rival it, and governments always have propaganda on their minds.

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What of the wider intellectual background of the Golden Age of war reporting? In his great work The Arcades Project, the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin observes that the time of declining Romanticism was also the time of delight in national legends.6 This observation is I think, helpful in the study of the role of the foreign correspondent in constructing the understanding of the conflicts in the Balkans in the early twentieth century. At the height of Romanticism in literature and art, let us say for the sake of argument between 1780 and 1820, the elements of the national identities of nations such as Greece and Serbia were being formed. After the Romantic Movement went into decline, there was nevertheless a continual and growing appetite in western Europe for the national legends of anti-Ottoman struggles in the Balkans and elsewhere. Serbia and Greece were both expanding small nations in nineteenth-century south-east Europe, they were “Christian nations” receiving substantial backing in their ambitions from the main imperial powers, Britain and France, and the national legends were important to mobilise both local populations and keep foreign public opinion “onside” in support of nationalist and general anti-Ottoman objectives. The London and New York press thus played a major part in formulating the outlines of the “Eastern Question”, that of the future of the declining Ottoman Empire in the Balkans that so preoccupied the powers in the Concert of Europe after the Congress of Berlin in 1878. The Christian peoples of the Balkans were seen in much the same way in the media as the “captive nations” under Soviet rule in eastern Europe were seen in the United States after 1945. The general appetite for war itself, as a subject of interest and even entertainment among the nineteenth-century English governing elite should not be underestimated. War had not touched English shores for decades since the Napoleonic period and its horrors were largely forgotten, or even unknown to most of the middle and upper classes. Wars were small, infrequent, and took place a long way away, or at least well east of the River Rhine. Even the working men recruited into the Kiplingesque world of the British army in the defence of India often had little or no serious fighting to do most of the time, apart from very occasional major events such as the 1857 Mutiny. In this climate war became an exotic entertainment, and the colour and drama of ordinary Balkan life and the boundary of Orientalism on the Ottoman frontiers lent itself well to “instant” history. This became a popular mid and late

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Victorian genre, with very large and substantial books produced, with copious engraved illustrations, tracing the details of recent conflicts. One such on the Balkans is Edmund Ollier’s Illustrated History of the RussoTurkish War, published by the newly prominent firm of Cassell in London in 1896. This massive two-volume compendium of over a thousand pages of very small print in double columns might well be seen more as a reference encyclopaedia than a conventional history, and it is very hard to imagine anyone sitting down and reading it from beginning to end, then or now, but no doubt the publishers knew enough lateVictorian gentlemen who would find it a suitable “must have” addition to the already groaning military history shelves in country houses throughout the nation. Did such books, or the journalists books that spawned them, actually matter in any serious political sense? A good case could be made for saying they did, as they set the ideological parameters for the eventual resolution of the Eastern Question in both the popular and educated British mind. This was depicted as an issue likely to be resolved by war and military force, as duly turned out to be the case in the Balkan Wars in 1912– 13 and then after 1914. War re-entered modern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through the Balkans, a reality finally exemplified by Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo by Serbian nationalist student Gavrilo Princep. There is little place in this iconography for the diplomat or peaceful conciliator among the scimitar-wielding denizens of the Balkan region shown in the engravings, and their bigger neighbours (Ottoman Turkey and Tsarist Russia) with their massive formal (if often shambolic) armies who sought to control them. Ollier’s history has a clear and instantly familiar moral dimension, that of amused condescension at Ottoman decline and pride at the rise of western European power. In Ollier’s potted history of the early Ottoman Empire, the decline is blamed upon “Turkish Indolence and Sensuality”, with the “Sultans becoming mere sensualists and the Pasha’s slothful and corrupt.” In contrast, in this conflict at Plevna, and in the Balkan Wars just a generation later, the infantry of the small Christian nations were seen as vigorous and in Victorian eyes, virtuous if barbarian natural warriors, with a Homeric touch in their simple lives in the rugged mountains. An important, but often neglected, factor in assessing this journalism and popular historiography is the role of Edward Gibbon’s work on Rome and its decline and fall.

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For journalists like Crawfurd Price and authors like Ollier, who all had at least a vestige of a classical education at school or university, the Ottoman Empire was also a Gibbonian empire in terminal decline, and the concept of personal moral decadence and corruption occupies their subconscious mind and that of many other contemporary authors on the Eastern Question. Yet in Knightley’s fine and authoritative work, there is no mention of the reporting of the Balkan Wars at all, even though they fall, in 1912–13, well within his chronology of the last heyday period, between the American Civil War and World War I. From the point of view of the individual journalist on the ground, it indeed seemed an Age of Progress, if not necessarily Golden. During this time, military censorship was light or non-existent, technology for news transmission was constantly improving and there was an explosion of newspapers and new readers as mass literacy spread rapidly in Europe and the United States. Prior to the 1912–13 wartime period, Knightley does not mention the key Ilinden Rising period in Macedonia in 1903, with the arrival of IMRO, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation as a serious force on the Balkan scene, or the aftermath of the Greek struggle for Macedonia that in modern Greek historiography is usually seen as ending in 1908.7 Yet he gives a masterly survey of the role of correspondents in the earlier part of the “Golden Age” period in the Balkans between 1860 and the beginning of the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, the end of the “Golden Age”, in his view. Why was the Edwardian and Balkan Wars period much less interesting for him? The central thesis of Knightley’s history of the foreign correspondent post-Russell in the Crimea is of the increasingly difficult path the correspondent had to take in telling at least the main vestiges of the truth about what was happening, as the powers of governments and millionaire newspaper proprietors increased in the very late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The Balkan Wars correspondents and popular historians did not, though, experience these difficulties. In a sense, the subtitle of Knightley’s book reveals all, the war correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker from the Crimea to Vietnam. Yet in the majority of the wars of liberation of the small Balkan nationalities, the journalists did tell the truth. There was a fortunate conjuncture of public opinion and government opinion, where the earlier liberal anti-Ottoman agenda set by British

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Prime Minister W.E. Gladstone and his allies, in support of national Christian aspirations was very widely shared. Politicians were happy to acknowledge what the journalists wrote in helping change history. The power of the press was growing. As W.E. Gladstone himself observed, in his pamphlet Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East which was published in London in 1876, “It is not the smallest part of the service rendered by the ‘Daily News’ that it was probably the means of bringing into the field an American Commission of Enquiry.” Gladstone is referring to the outstanding coverage of the Bulgarian-Turkish conflict during and after the Batak Massacre period, by the American Daily News war correspondent J.A. MacGahan. His journalism mattered, exposed savage war crimes by the Ottomans and so brought historical understanding and progress, in the eyes of his Victorian readers and governments. The issue is also linked to questions of imperialism and nationalism. There were no British forces involved on the ground in the Balkan Wars, although their outcome was very important for a key British strategic ally in the eastern Mediterranean, Greece, and also involved more problematic friends (sometimes) Bulgaria and Serbia. The literate educated public had become very used to Balkan conflicts, with almost unending violence between the Ottoman Empire and the Greeks and Bulgarians and Serbs for the last two generations. Nineteenth-century (and much later) war reporting in the major British newspapers, particularly The Times, which then had a position of unparalleled influence in British society was almost entirely conditioned by a view of Empire and imperial interests. At a certain level, if there were no Crown forces on the ground, there was no story. This was not a new phenomenon then, and remains a factor in what we read today. Every contemporary foreign correspondent knows the routine of telephoning in to his or her foreign desk with an idea for a story, only to be grilled about whether there is or could be a British “angle” on it. Or not. If negative, it is rarely commissioned. It was, after all, the massive British popular enthusiasm for the Crimean campaign that sustained Russell, from liberals and the Left who were opposed to Tsarist absolutism and to the Tory Right who wanted to keep Russia out of Europe, and more intelligent military officers who had known the British Crown forces had needed urgent modernisation for two generations and welcomed Russell’s writing as an aid to their cause.

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But there was nevertheless a good d eal of fine reporting done in 1912–13. It was a time of innovation in the news profession, and not only in the English-speaking world. In Italy the banner for Italian colonialism was held by the Milan news magazine La Domenica del Corriere which made its reputation with the new colour typographic technology in the 1911–13 Italian campaign in Libya. This war is often overlooked in consideration of the Balkan Wars but it was important in the background in so far as it put intense pressure on Ottoman military resources and demonstrated to the Porte in Constantinople that poorly armed Ottoman soldiers stood no chance in warfare at all against new technological armies. The Italian navy swept onto the coast and the army pioneered the use of airships, aircraft and the Maxim gun that had been developed by Vickers in Manchester immediately prior to this conflict. La Domenica del Corriere depicted the results in images that owed a good d eal to the classical tradition, of hapless “barbarian” soldiers being annihilated by “advanced” opponents.8 Governments were beginning to understand better the power of the press in wartime. Since the time of the Crimean conflict, Britain and the United States had witnessed the arrival of the popular mass circulation newspaper, and the dominance of men such as Hearst, Pulitzer and Northcliffe came with it. These newspapers had a voracious appetite for news and sensation, more so if the two could be combined. The national legends of the small Balkan countries struggling to free themselves from the “Ottoman Yoke” were a fertile ground for reporting, where the reporter himself often became the hero of the hour by being able to endure the harsh Balkan travelling and general material conditions, the danger of infantry conflict, and bear witness to what was happening. Some of these accounts merged with the new literature in the school of Rider Haggard and his ilk and came close to adventure stories.9 The brutal world of death and suffering was reported, but also the colour and near pageantry of Balkan armies and the impossible quixotic ambitions of the declining Turkish imperial forces. Yet compared to the time of the Crimean War, their stories were short and often very compressed. A Russell dispatch from the Crimea might run to 8,000 words, and many are longer. They were printed in the newspaper with little cutting or editing, often the length of an article in a cerebral contemporary journal such as Standpoint today.

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Yet the Balkan Wars did offer many new and young correspondents the opportunity to make their names, as the material conditions of Balkan life made independent operation possible, and effectively living off the land, which was not possible in the wars on the British imperial frontiers. Here, in the Middle East, South Africa and India, inhospitable jungles, deserts and mountains where food and shelter was unobtainable made reporting difficult without official help. The veteran Victorian correspondent Melton Prior describes in his autobiography, Campaigns of a War Correspondent, the dependence journalists had on the British army’s goodwill in the coverage of Gordon’s Relief Nile Expedition in 1884 against the ‘fanatical’ Mahdi, where ‘correspondents were assigned to a position in their own camp, handy to headquarters’, and where a group of them ‘formed a joint mess and made a common lot of their animals, servants and provisions’.10 The Balkan Wars were very different, and remained the terrain of the man with his notebook, an individualist, with sketchpad, knapsack, binoculars, and little else. Technology development was important, exemplified by the arrival of first the telegram and then photography. The telegram produced an enormous improvement in the speed of transmission of news, but the cumbersome technology and considerable expense meant that reporters at the front cut down the length of what they wrote. The war that made the telegram and where the telegram “made” the war was the American Civil War. But the telegram enforced compression of the story narrative. Telegraph offices were also often a long way away from the front lines and the concept of a front line in all Balkan wars in any case is often nebulous. A dispatch from W.H. Crawfurd Price, the London Times correspondent in the Balkan Wars, is often as little as a quarter the length of a story from Russell in the Crimea 60 years before. Crawfurd Price nevertheless did produce after the conflict one of the most important and generally intelligent journalist’s memoir books on the conflict, The Balkan Cockpit: The Political and Military Story of the Balkan War in Macedonia, which, as its title indicates, focuses specifically on the effects of the fighting on the development of the Macedonian Question.11 Crawfurd Price writes in it – perhaps conscious of the damage authors like Fife Cookson could be said to have done to the “Russell tradition” in reporting – that he wishes to avoid “dry military and historical detail”. His book remains a valuable picture of the social and economic situation in the conflicts, and unusually for the genre,

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devotes significant space to the problems of women in coping with the disorder and violence in their wartime lives. Literary quality writing in the newspapers themselves nonetheless became very difficult and the amount of information reaching the reader was reduced. Colourful cliche´s flourished, and ide´e recu with them. The combination of fine descriptive writing, informed analysis and moral concern that drove Russell became technically very difficult, if not impossible. And mass taste was developing to change the definition of writing itself, and how visual images, whether engravings or photographs, were understood, as Walter Benjamin observed in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.12 The personal literary language informed by the traditions of Romantic period descriptive prose writing we find in Russell had all but disappeared 60 years after his heyday. Although newspapers had few or no photographs at the end of the nineteenth century, the onset of cheap popular illustrated magazines like The Illustrated London News and Punch began to change the climate. The visual image of national legends became open to deconstruction. Punch greeted the defeat of the Ottomans in the First Balkan War in 1912 with a single memorable engraved image, a beautiful young heroine with “Macedonia” on her neo-classical garb raising her arms to freedom, under the Punch headline “At Last!”.13 There was a dramatic change over a generation. This change was, of course over a period. Later, in the twentieth century, other new technology followed, above all the invention and perfection in Germany of the Leica camera, with a roll of film of over 30 images, making the work of a democratic, radical photographer like Robert Capa possible.14 So is it correct to see the post-1860, post-electric telegraph period as one of decline, certainly not a Golden Age, or even a silver successor? I would venture to suggest not. Although the newspapers offered less space and platform for correspondents, the journalist’s memoir book took its place. Publishers in London and, a little later, New York City, were eager to market the new heroes who witnessed and recorded bloody conflicts. The format changed over time. W.H. Russell had in a limited sense pioneered the “journalist’s book” but his Crimean War volumes are mainly bound volumes closely based on his dispatches. They do not aim to construct a political narrative. As the processes of imperial development grew, and modern government intelligence crept out of the closet, there was a new specialised readership for the hitherto largely

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absent genre of the journalists memoir of conflict. This took time to develop. Once again the aftermath of the American Civil War was important, as Americans sought to understand the devastating and violent conflict that had bled and divided their nation between 1861 and 1865. Wars, mostly small and short, continued to erode the Ottoman domains. Writing became for observers of the conflict a contribution to a wider intelligence process within the political elites, combining record of the processes of a conflict with analysis of the technical and leadership capacities of the armies involved. Ironically, this led to the return of the amateur-soldier or ex-soldier war correspondent, like Captain W.H. Trapmann of the Daily Telegraph in the anti-Ottoman war of the Greeks in Thessaly in 1897, and the return of military uniform as appropriate dress for the war correspondent. This world continued in various forms right up until the 1930s and the war in Spain, as the writings of authors like Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh (in Scoop) indicate. As early as 1879, as an example, the image of the front cover of an earlier late nineteenth-century war correspondent’s memoirs is illuminating. Colonel John Fife Cookson was a gentleman/officer turned diplomat and occasional journalist of the old school, and he was in essence what we would now call a defence attache´, a military observer for the British government, and his book contains a highly informative and professional account of the Battle of Plevna between Ottoman and Russian forces in 1877–8, and the first Gallipoli conflict after it. But by no stretch of the imagination could it be called normal journalism – it is a military intelligence work. The cover image shows the “noble savage” element in Balkan iconography, of men fighting for a new nation in traditional folk costume, the Byronic paradigm. Modern criticisms of Fife Cookson’s work as that of a conformist establishment man can be unbalanced. He was, after all, one of the first authors to candidly describe rape as a weapon in Balkan conflicts, noting in his book on the aftermath of the Battle of Plevna: the bodies of many Turkish woman and children were lying in the woods adjoining the village. I proceeded there with him and found this to be the case. The position of the bodies of the women, as well as the fact that they lay singly on the ground at intervals through the wood, satisfactorily showed what had been their fate before death.

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In his later life, Fife Cookson abandoned journalism and military activity and studies, and became a famous imperial adventurer and big game hunter, and the author of the substantial volume, Tiger Shooting in the Doon and Ulwar (1887). The boundary between the adventures of the correspondent and the adventures of the imperialist explorer was often narrow. Here Knightley is surely correct in his assertion that in the latter stages of the “Golden Age” there was probably less military censorship of an author’s work than at any time since, right up to the current wars of the post-9/11 period. Fife Cookson’s book contains considerable amounts of material that would nowadays probably be seen as of interest to an enemy and subject to major secrecy restrictions, but in the period of Ottoman decline and massive British imperial military strength secrecy about British military information on capacity, technical equipment and military methods of the Ottoman army seemed unnecessary. He was not alone in this field. Works in the mainstream anthropological travel writing tradition from this period often contain a good deal of hard military information, such as French traveller Guillaume Lejean’s (1824–71) voluminous work Voyages dans les Balkans 1857–1870 (Paris, 1871). He was particularly interested in naval activity in the Adriatic. The German travel writer and explorer Hugo Grothe gives a detailed analysis of the fighting between Ottoman forces and local insurgents around Scutari (modern Shkodra in Albania) in the Second Balkan War in 1913 in his travelogue Durch Albanien und Montenegro.15 The wider political background was in any case changing. Russia had all but disappeared from the popular and educated mind by the last decades of the century except as a colourful and antiquated ceremonial monarchy. The 1905 events in Russia should have sent a message to educated Europe and America that the Tsarist government might not have a long-term future, but it was not well understood, unlike Ottoman imperial decline. The Gibbonian paradigm was not applied to events in Moscow and St Petersburg and Tsardom. Instead narratives were entirely focussed on the emancipation of Balkan nations from the Ottoman Empire and in particular the enlargement of Greece, as classic works of their period such as Reuters correspondent W. Kinnaird Rose’s With the Greeks in Thessaly (1897) and Henry Nevinson’s Scenes in the Thirty Days War between Greece and Turkey (1898) show. The short duration of the Thessaly campaign encouraged the post-conflict book, as given

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telegram transmission problems, much news and material of interest never found its way to London news desks before the month-long war was over. This ideological inscription of Greek nationalism into mainstream British reporting reached its apogee in the Second Balkan War with its focus on the fate of Macedonia, and the literary aftermath. London Times correspondent Crawfurd Price was deeply and emotionally committed to the Greek irredentist project, in a general sense, and he was close to the Greek Royal family and on familiar terms with the King himself. He writes copiously about the heroism of the family as individual soldiers, emphasising that his happiest day as a correspondent was to be present in Salonika when news of the victory of the Greek army in Ioannina on 5 March 1913 arrives, thus: And so the Cretan gendarmerie played the Russian anthem, and the Greek Royalty went to the Russian Church; and as we left the church the guns boomed out a salute for the victories in Yanina: and then the Russian officials went to the Greek church; and at night there was a ball at the Russian Consulate for the Romanoff’s, and a torchlight procession in the streets for Yanina; and everybody in Hellas was rejoicing everywhere.16 The American historian David Roessel sees all these figures as “children of Lord Byron”, and inheritors of the Philhellene cultural tradition in England.17 This was certainly the main tradition, but the ideological world in England was less monolithic than Roessel would sometimes have us believe. By the Edwardian period neo-Hellenism was far from the only current in intellectual life. The Marxist socialist journalist and Fabian pundit H.N. Brailsford had published, in 1906 his book Macedonia Its Races and their Future, a seminal work that continues to be used in the present day based on the quality of its empirical research. Brailsford was what nowadays would be described as a fundamentalist socialist, and later became one of the main British defenders of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in his writings. In his work on Macedonia he sees the British and French support for Greek and Serbian ambitions as that of imperialists from a civilisation who would “first exploit a decaying empire before destroying it”.18 He had little time for the Philhellenic d reams of many of his

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contemporaries, writing, “It is a sorry transition to turn from this dream of a revived Hellenism which is to civilise the Near East once more, to the actualities of Greek politics.”19 It is possible to identify in Brailsford’s work most of the currents of opinion and d ebate that have informed scholarly and practical political controversy about the Macedonian Question ever since, e.g. whether the issue of Macedonia is only really an issue between Greece and Bulgaria, or whether it also includes Albania and Serbia. Yet the Philhellenic tradition was so closely integrated into warp and weft of Edwardian life that it triumphed in the Balkan Wars coverage. The minority views of Brailsford and the Fabians were very much minority views. The journalism of the Balkan Wars period was only drawing on a very well-established literary tradition, exemplified by Gladstone’s colleague Edward Augustus Freeman. He had written as long ago as 1877, in his article “Medieval and Modern Greece”, that “Free Greece must be extended far beyond its present absurd boundary. Wherever Hellenes form the mass of Christian people That Land must be Hellenised.”20 The importance of the pro-Greek journalists in pushing this ideological expansionist project in the Balkan Wars was increased as genuine literary production about the conflict was very limited, apart from the neoclassical rhetorical efforts of the poet James Elroy Flecker (1884–1915) who was married to a Greek woman and welcomed the victories in 1912 that vastly extended the size of northern Greece, to within only a few days march from Constantinople. He wrote: Peace and goodwill the world may sing But we shall talk of war! How fare my armies of the North?21 He later wrote of the Greek triumph at Yannina: Yet still victorious Hellas, thou hast heard Those ancient voices thundering to arms, Thou nation of an older younger day Thou hast gone forth as with the poet’s song. Surely the spirit of the old oak grove Rejoiced to hear the cannon round Yannina, Apollo launched his shaft of terror down On Salonika.22

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One of the similarly motivated and openly propagandist journalists of other newspapers in this period was war correspondent Captain A.H. Trapmann of the Daily Telegraph. The cover of A.H. Trapmann’s postwar book The Greeks Triumphant: Balkan War 1912–1913 speaks for itself on the general standpoint of the author towards the events he saw.23 Trapmann was a recent ex-army officer and like Fife Cookson forty years before, was clearly writing for a specialist audience. His book is still a useful source on the narrow military issues, as he had been a prominent young officer before the war in the British army and knew his subject well, but it can only be described as drenched by illdefined Philhellenism and a sycophantic and uncritical view of the Greek army and its Royal commander. Support for Greek aspirations in the anti-Ottoman struggle in Macedonia was of course the conventional wisdom of the time, but in Trapmann’s writing it is carried to propagandist heights, and he did not only confine his paens to the Greek monarch, thus: The Kaiser is a versatile Genius, King Constantine is a brilliant general. The Kaiser has learned the value of self-advertisement but the King of Greece needs no advertisement to call attention to his merits. The Kaiser is the Emperor of the German Empire, King Constantine is the servant of Greece. Let Greece never forget how well he has served her!24 The case of Henry. W. Nevinson’s war journalism is rather different. Nevinson was a great journalist, by the standards of any period, and his original work on the exposure of the continuing slave trade in West Africa in 1904– 5 shook Edwardian complacency to its foundations. But he was in many ways marginalised in the Balkan Wars. British newspaper coverage was dominated by the Daily Mail, which scooped material from the German Reichspost (although much of it was later exposed as largely fictional). Nevinson was also from the same milieu as Brailsford, perhaps less of a Marxist and more of a populist rebel in the Hazlitt and Cobbett literary traditions, but certainly not a man hidebound by inherited neo-classicism cum Hellenism from a school or college education based on class. He had an instinct for Bulgaria and its rights, as he saw them, to a good share of the collapsing Ottoman Balkans. He did not only sympathise with Bulgaria. His “ride to Koritsa”

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with Albanophile feminist traveller Ed ith Durham can be seen with some serious historical justification as the lynchpin for Koritsa (mod ern Korca) staying in Albania after its occupation in 1912 by Greek troops. He knew the d istinguished Lond on Time s correspond ent James Bourchier (1850–1920) the d oyen of Bulgarophiles in that period and one of the founders of the London Balkan League and Committee.25 Thus he chose to base himself in Bulgaria only to find the country “teeming with European and American correspondents” as his biographer puts it and it was difficult to find new stories or to stand out professionally.26 Nevinson’s main importance in the Balkan Wars was as a non-state political actor, using his high journalistic prestige to affect local history, rather than as a pure news reporter. In that he ushered in modernity, and some of the public arguments in which he became involved as a result of his close association with Edith Durham, particularly against policies of the British Foreign Office closely prefigure the journalistic and scholarly controversies that accompanied the ex-Yugoslav wars 80 years later after 1990.27 His mentor Bourchier had himself become a political emissary between the new Balkan states at the end of the war in 1913, and had turned himself into a quasi-politician and diplomat, acting mainly in the Bulgarian interest. He knew what a disaster the defeat of Bulgarian aspirations in Macedonia would bring in Sofia, and the decline of Bulgarian democracy that would lead to it becoming an ally of the central powers in both world wars. With these determined and principled Englishmen, the limits of war correspondents work seemed to have been reached by 1913, and a certain liberal anti-Ottoman agenda had run its course. Perhaps the last word should go to A.J.P. Taylor. The journalists and commentators of the Balkan Wars period did their job honourably but with very few exceptions such as James Bourchier of The Times, they did not see the wider significance of the struggle for power in Macedonia. But neither did the diplomats and politicians. The Oxford historian of the last generation, writing in The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848– 1918 observed: The members of the Triple Alliance were almost equally passive. Italy welcomed the Balkan storm: it compelled the Turks to give way in Libya, and peace between Italy and Turkey was made on 15 October, just when the Balkan War broke out. The Germans

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were in two minds about the Balkans all along. They had patronised Turkey and were deeply committed to maintaining Austria-Hungary as a Great Power. On the other hand, Germany was the greatest of the national states; and the Germans believed rightly that a victory for Balkan nationalism would bring them advantages, just as the victory of Italian nationalism had d one. They never understood the Austro-Hungarian terror of nationalism and supposed, at most, that it would prevent any new display of independence in Vienna.28 A single shot at Sarajevo in 1914 destroyed these comfortable assumptions, as posterity has seen it. Just a year after the Second Balkan War ended, World War I began.

Notes 1. “Notes on the Balkan Wars, 1912– 1913”, prepared by the General Staff (War Office, London, 1914), p. 16ff. 2. From Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London, 2003), p. 66ff. 3. See William Howard Russell, Russell’s Crimea, revised edn (London, 1858). 4. Philip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker from the Crimea to Vietnam (London, 1975). 5. See Ilana D. Miller, Reports from America William Howard Russell and the American Civil War (Stroud, 2001). 6. Walter Benjamin, “The Arcades Project”, ed. R. Tiedemann (New York, 2002). 7. See Nadine Lange-Akhund, The Macedonian Question, 1893– 1908 (Boulder and New York, 1998), on this key period. 8. See E. Folisi, La Domenica del Corriere nella Guerra di Libia (Udine, 2013). For information on the technological issues affecting weapons, see J.D. Scott, Vickers: A History (London, 1962), p. 38ff. The key date was the onset of manufacture of the Maxim gun at Vickers Crayford works after 1885. 9. Perhaps the best example of this tendency is the book by the American New York Tribune correspondent Albert Sonnichsen, Confessions of a Macedonian Bandit: A Californian in the Balkan Wars (New York, 1909, republished in 2007). It is a racy, exciting tale of personal immersion in the conflict. 10. Melton Prior, Campaigns of a War Correspondent (London, 1912), p. 208ff. 11. W.H. Crawfurd Price, The Balkan Cockpit: The Political and Military Story of the Balkan War in Macedonia (London, 1914). 12. In Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London, 1961). 13. Punch, London, 27 November 1912, front page.

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14. For a good general survey of the topic of changing press-government relations as war became more important in the late nineteenth century, see Paul Brighton, Original Spin: Downing Street and the Press in Victorian Britain (London, 2013). 15. H. Grothe, Durch Albanien und Montenegro (Munich, 1915). See also, for a similar approach, Karl Otten, Die Reise durch Albanien (Frankfurt, 1914, reprinted Zurich, 1989), with a focus on earlier events in 1912. 16. W.H. Crawfurd Price, op. cit., p. 204ff. 17. David Roessel, In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination (Oxford, 2002). 18. H.N. Brailsford, Macedonia: Its Races and their Future (London, 1906), p. 47. Issues of Brailsford’s later reputation are outside the scope of this chapter, but it is perhaps worth noting that in the most sustained analysis of Brailsford’s work published in Britain in the later twentieth century, Michael Foot’s essay “Knight Errant of Socialism”, in Debts of Honour (London, 1980), Foot asserts that Brailsford was ‘the greatest socialist journalist of the century’ but does not mention his Macedonian book – or Balkan commitment – at all in his consideration of his achievement. 19. Brailsford, op. cit., p. 209 ff. Similar sentiments were expressed by the British diplomatic correspondent, Charles Greig, British Vice Consul in Ottoman Manastir (modern Bitola) in his dispatches. See B. Destani and R. Elsie (eds), The Balkan Wars: British Consular Reports from Macedonia in the Final Ye ars of the Ottoman Empire (London, 2013). 20. Edward Augustus Freeman, Historical Essays (London, 1877), p. 382ff. 21. James Elroy Flecker, Collected Poems (New York, 1916), p. 204. 22. From Ode to the Glory of Greece Written to Commemorate the Victories of 1913, op. cit., p. 242. 23. A.H. Trapmann, The Greeks Triumphant: Balkan Wars 1912– 1913 (London, 1915). 24. Trapmann, op. cit., p. 263. 25. See Lady Grogan, The Life of J.D. Bouchier (London, 1921). 26. See Angela V. John, War, Journalism and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century: The Life and Times of Henry W. Nevinson (London, 2006), p. 130 ff. 27. See the important and extensive writings of Sabrina. P. Ramet on this subject, particularly Thinking about Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates about the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo (Cambridge, 2005) and Charles Ingrao and Thomas A. Emmett, Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies: A Scholar’s Initiative (Purdue, 2009). 28. A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 (Oxford, 1954).

CHAPTER 8 CROATIAN NATIONALISM AND THE BALKAN WARS Jasmina Knezovic

Although it is widely accepted that the Balkan Wars, and Serbia’s victories, were one of the driving factors in furthering Yugoslav sentiment among the Croatian public, the specific effects of the Balkan Wars on the Croatian public have been little researched. Examining the way the wars were received by the public in Croatia and Dalmatia shows how political goals were influenced by events abroad and helps us understand how the Yugoslav movement in Croatia and elsewhere gained momentum. This paper will, more specifically, outline the Croatian reaction to the wars in civil Croatia and Dalmatia, and compare the reactions to the First and Second Balkan Wars. Moreover, it will address the effects on the Croatian public and the development of political thought. It is hoped that this examination will illuminate the wider patterns of the debates that were to dominate Croatian politics for the years to come. Though some prominent Croatian historians such as Mirjana Gross, Jaroslav Sidak, and Igor Karaman have said that it is impossible to trace the effects of the Balkan Wars in Croatia with no real freedom of the press, the recent work of Ante Bralic and Igor Despot shows that this is not the case.1 Their studies provide the only two thorough examinations of Croatian newspapers and responses at the time of the Balkan Wars. Bralic’s 1999 article compares two Dalmatian

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newspapers, Hrvatska Kruna, a Party of Right one, and Narodni List, a Coalition one, and contrasts their stances towards the Second Balkan War.2 His article “Zadarski fin-de-siecle” gives a helpful impression of the issues confronting the citizens of Zadar leading up to and during the Balkan Wars, particularly the relations between Dalmatian Croats and Italians.3 Despot’s research has contributed to furthering our knowledge of the reception of the Balkan Wars in Croatia. In his 2009 article, “Croatian and Dalmatian Press on the Balkan Wars (1912 – 1913)”, Despot outlines the development of public opinion in the Croatian and Dalmatian press during the Balkan Wars.4 Despot and Bralic’s work with primary source material was an invaluable starting point for this article. This paper largely draws on their work and other primary sources, taking Despot’s research as my main starting point. I examine memoirs and writings of prominent youth of the time, such as Augustin Ujevic, Oskar Tartaglia, Josip Horvat, and Miroslav Krleza in addition to the papers and letters of politically relevant figures of the time, such as Ivan Mestrovic, Frano Supilo, and R.W. Seton-Watson. Combined with secondary sources, the biographies, diaries, memoirs, and newspaper articles of the time enable us to paint a picture of the attitude and atmosphere of the time. With them, we learn that Croatians joined the war effort, and the wars were generally, but not always (as the case of the Second Balkan War shows), well received, and inspired pro-Serbian and Yugoslav sentiment among cross-sections of society, particularly amongst Dalmatians and the youth. Thus, this paper will attempt to give a systematic overview of the Croatian and Dalmatian reactions to the Balkan Wars. First, it will outline how the public was informed, sketching the newspaper landscape in Croatia and Dalmatia at the time of the Balkan Wars, before outlining the responses to the wars in Croatia and Dalmatia. It will then briefly explore the reactions of German and Jewish minorities living in Croatia and Dalmatia, with a particular focus on how the Balkan Wars highlighted already tense Croat-Italian relations in the city of Zadar, the seat of Dalmatian government. It will then examine the differences in the reactions to the First and Second Balkan Wars before considering the effects the wars had on Croatian politics.

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How the Croatian Public Was Informed – the Newspaper Landscape When the First Balkan War broke out in 1912, the political and social life of Croatia under the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was bleak. One of the first things the newly appointed Ban, or governor, Slavko Cuvaj did when he came into power on 20 January 1912, was to dissolve the Sabor, the Croatian Parliament, where the Croat– Serb Coalition Party had won a majority of seats on 27 January.5 He rescinded the law on freedom of assembly and appointed police commissioners in towns.6 The Constitution was suspended on 4 April 1912 and a newspaper censorship law, deemed the most reactionary outside of czarist Russia, was enacted.7 It was these circumstances that led young workers and students in Croatia to emerge as Cuvaj’s main opposition, demonstrating against him and the monarchy on an almost daily basis.8 In May 1912, students organised a demonstration in Zagreb, followed by a university and secondary school strike throughout all of Croatia.9 Students in Bosnia and Dalmatia followed suit.10 In one of the most important events leading up to the Balkan Wars in Croatia, the Bosnian Croat student Luka Jukic attempted to assassinate Commissar Cuvaj on 8 June 1912.11 Although Jukic’s act was not mentioned in official newspapers, it was the talk of the season in both Croatia and Dalmatia.12 Whilst awaiting imprisonment, the 18-year-old writer, intellectual, and future politician August Cesarec, who also took part, wrote in a letter to fellow revolutionary Vladimir Cerina that “on 8 June 1912 Croatia entered Europe”.13 Many of the youth considered Jukic’s assassination attempt “the first real revolutionary action of Croatian national youth in its struggle against oppressive Austro-Hungarian imperialism”.14 At his trial, Jukic was sentenced to death by hanging, which led people to wave hangers at further demonstrations, while a dozen of Jukic’s collaborators, aged between 15 and 25 and including Cesarec, were imprisoned.15 After appealing the death sentence, Jukic received an alternative sentence of life imprisonment in October 1912.16 The widespread demonstrations in response to the trial, which came to a close just as the Balkan Wars began, illustrate the reactive atmosphere, especially among the youth, in Zagreb and Dalmatia at the time. With no formal meetings or elections being held in Sabor, newspapers served as mouthpieces for the opinions of Croatian political parties in

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Croatia and Dalmatia.17 Dalmatian newspapers, free from the Ban’s jurisdiction and strict censorship laws, enjoyed greater freedom in voicing their opinions about the Balkan Wars. During the wars, more than 30 political, social, and economic newspapers and magazines were published in Croatia.18 The most important of these daily papers included: the politically independent Obzor; the Independent Croatian Unification Party’s Hrvatski Pokret, the Frankist Party of Right daily Hrvatska, and (after the Party of Right split into two factions) the Starcevic Party of Right’s Hrvat.19 Other influential daily papers were the Serbian People’s Independent Party’s Srbobran (which also published the weekly Srpsko Kolo, a newspaper for peasants).20 (Srbobran’s aim was “to defend and protect from all hostile attacks what has been won by our forefathers’ blood, and guaranteed by imperial diplomas: the Serb name, language, church and school”.21 It was directed towards the Serb clergy and middle class, which despite their small numbers, played an important role in Croatian administration and economic life.22) Slobodna Rijec was the Social Democratic Party’s paper from Zagreb.23 The most important weekly, biweekly, and monthly papers included: the Croatian Peasant Party’s Dom, the satirical Kopriva, the clerical Party of Right paper Hrvatska Zastava Istine, the economic Hrvatski Lloyd, and the unionist Jutarnji List.24 In Dalmatia, most newspapers were not issued on a daily basis, but three times a week at most, with the exception to this being the consistently pro-Serb Sloboda from Split, which, since the start of the war, was issued daily in small numbers.25 Sloboda’s editor was the revolutionary youth leader and “first Catholic member of the Black Hand” Oskar Tartaglia.26 The Party of Right organs Hrvatska Kruna and Hrvatska Rijec were published in Zadar and Sibenik, while the clerical Party of Right Dan, in addition to the Croatian People’s Progressive Party’s Sloboda, came from Split.27 The main youth publications included the Party of Right Mlada Hrvatska and the Croat –Serb radical youth’s Naprednjak and Ujedinjenje.28 Ujed injene began was begun on 8 May 1913, by junior coalition members in Dalmatia, and was banned after one issue. Mlada Hrvatska, which marketed itself as a “Croatian democratic paper” was published in three languages – Croatian, Serbian, and Italian – and in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.29 Other Italian papers in Dalmatia included L’Avvenire from Split and Il Dalmata from Zadar.30 Risorgimento was the mouthpiece of the Partito Italiano democratico, established by Italian radicals in 1908.31 According to

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Bralic, Risorgimento was politically anticlerical, radical, and nationalist, appealing to a lower class of Italians working as shop and farmhands with uncertain economic standing.32 It portrayed the creation of Yugoslavia as inimical to Italy’s mission in the Adriatic. The Balkan Wars were the main topic for most of the papers in Croatia and Dalmatia. They included reports from the front, analysis of the monarchy’s foreign policy, and declarations of support for the Balkan League, as well as names of donors for the Red Cross of the Balkans.

Croatia and its Responses to War When the First Balkan War broke out, the vast majority of Croatian and Dalmatian publications supported it. Despot shows that the Party of Right Hrvatska Kruna and Hrvatska Rijec papers proclaimed their support of the Balkan League, while Coalition Party publications, such as Crvena Hrvatska, announced their approval of the war and its timing.33 Even clerical papers, such as Hrvatska Zastava Istine, openly cheered for the Balkan League.34 Many clerics saw the war as an opportunity “to not only banish the Turk from Europe, but also spread the Christian faith and reestablish a cross on the Hagia Sophia”.35 In the 7 January 1913 issue of Dom, the Peasant Party leader Stjepan Radic wrote that Ottoman Empire’s existence led to the creation of the Balkan League, concluding that each evil [the Ottoman Empire] is trumped by good [the Balkan League] and that oppressed people sooner or later find freedom.36 Unlike other political parties, the Social Democrats (in both Croatia and Serbia) protested against the war, citing economic reasons. They opposed war debt, and wished to prevent capitalism from penetrating into the Balkans.37 The Serbian Social Democratic Party deputy Dragisa Lapcevic, in the 7th National Assembly meeting on 20 October 1912, outlined the Social Democratic stance in his speech, saying: We are, gentlemen . . . for the elimination of the status quo on the entire Balkan Peninsula, for a democratic revolution . . . not only for our liberation and for putting up resistance against European capitalist countries, but . . . the only way to achieve our national unification and for the national unification of all Balkan peoples . . . We are, gentlemen against the war between the Balkan peoples not only because it would be bloody and terrible for us,

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Balkan peoples, because it would degrade and ruin us but because by its consequences it would have terrible effects.38 Thus, in addition to wanting to eliminate the bourgeois status quo in the Balkan peninsula, Social Democrats were against the territorial nature of the Balkan Wars, which came to a head during the Second Balkan War. Also, like other movements, they were for a unification of all Balkan peoples. The Social Democrats, however, were more forwardthinking in being suspicious of power and territorial struggles, which were to emerge and in their own words “cause endless friction”. Nonetheless, the overall media response to the initial outbreak of war was overwhelmingly positive and supportive of the Balkan League. The (Croatian Unification Party) paper Hrvatski Pokret, for example, sent its correspondent Slavko Voros to Serbia in October 1912. In a number of reports, published from 9 to 31 October, from the series titled “The Way to the Balkan Battlefield” he describes scenes from wartime Belgrade: Yesterday afternoon I met . . . the Serbian cavalry in the street . . . Riding on fine horses with well-formed beasts, as we see pictures presenting Turkish wars in the old days, these soldiers carry themselves calmly and the fact that they are going to war makes the scene mysterious and solemn. Music on horses, consisting of trumpets of various sizes, play while passing the War Ministry. That war music thrilled me strongly, pushing my blood towards my heart and back. There was weeping and joy and bitterness in those sounds, you could hear cannons roaring, war cries and delicate tone of the gusle encouraging soldiers on the battlefield . . . The space in from of the modern and beautiful [railway] station is full of men and women peasants seeing their sons off. I couldn’t see any tears in women’s eyes.39 Varos’ blatant romanticism is meant to evoke feelings of common Slavdom. His emphasis on Slavic imagery such as peasants, gusle, and the strong mother, in addition to Turkish flair, would surely have struck readers in Zagreb as exotic. Varos clearly believed that Croatians, sharing his own feelings upon hearing the “war music”, were not so impervious to this romanticism.40 As we will see, reports like these helped to

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mobilise positive public opinion towards Serbia and to inspire action for the war cause. Croatians contributed humanitarian aid by volunteering monetary and medical resources. A notable amount was collected for the Red Crosses of the Balkan countries, and the news of these actions would regularly be published on the front pages of newspapers. One of the first fundraising actions in Zagreb was reported: at today’s city council session at 4 pm, a proposition will be made that Zagreb, metropolis of the Croatian Kingdom, will assign from its funds a sum of 20,000 k (crowns) for the Red Cross of the Balkan nations. That proposition will of course be accepted. So far, it is the largest sum assigned by any city council. Zagreb would give more if its economy was better.41 By January 1913, a Zagreb Committee raised 95,750 crowns, and a Zadar committee raised 39,330 crowns, with Split, Dubrovnik, Osijek, and Sibenik also collecting donations.42 Croatian women engaged in the war effort as charity workers and medical volunteers. Croatian ladies’ societies also organised fundraising events. A prominent fundraiser was the writer Ivana Brlic´-Mazˇuranic´. In a letter to her mother dated 20 November 1912, Brlic´-Mazˇuranic´ wrote that only Serbian ladies of her native town Slavonski Brod had permission to collect funds, and since she wanted to demonstrate that Serbs were not the only Slavs in Slavonski Brod, she applied for fundraising permission, which was approved the same day, and collected 600 crowns.43 In Croatia, there existed around ten societies for collecting donations that were exclusively made up of female members.44 Croatian women also volunteered as nurses.45 Doctors were most active in their support of the Balkan League.46 From the beginning to the end of the wars, doctors from Croatia and Dalmatia volunteered in the Balkans, and unlike other, army, volunteers, were not stopped by the monarchy, which was fortunate as Serbia and Montenegro were in dire need of doctors.47 Already in mid-October 1912, the newspaper Srbobran appealed to doctors to volunteer, and, as Hrvatski Pokret shows, Doctors Figatner, Jambrisak, Hercog and Spisic from Zagreb, Stankovic from Varazdin, and Nenadovic from Pakrac left for Serbia soon after carrying the 300 crowns they raised at a meeting with them in

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addition to medicine worth 1,500 crowns donated by pharmacies.48 Some doctors (such as Dalmatians Novakovic, Parentna and Fabijanic) also volunteered in Montenegro while others (such as Bakaric, Matek and Butovac) travelled to Bulgaria.49 Newspaper reports sent back from doctors on the front tell of the poor sanitation standards in Serbia.50 Interestingly, as doctors, like others, had to formally request travel permission from the government, the most commonly cited reason by doctor volunteers wishing to travel to Serbia is surgical experience.51 In contrast to medical volunteering, it was not easy to become an army volunteer with Austria-Hungary watching. Still, a large number of Serbs from Croatia volunteered for the Serbian army, and were joined by around 200 Croats.52 In his memoirs, the British volunteer Joyce Cary remembers: “There was a Dalmatian battalion fighting for Montenegro, all Austrian subjects, all knowing that in every probability they could never go back to their own country.”53 Not all foreigners were accepted as volunteers, however, as was the case with famous writer-to-be Miroslav Krleza. At 18, Krleza left his military academy in Budapest and due to strict border controls, took a roundabout way to arrive in southern Serbia via Marseilles and Skopje. The army, however, rejected him without an explanation.54 Though not necessarily the reason explaining Krleza’s case, some volunteers were rejected on suspicions of spying for the monarchy, as the example of one Croatia unit arrested at the Zemun border illustrates.55 Artists of the time promoted Serbia and the Yugoslav cause in Croatia by raising money though events and exhibitions. In Zagreb, artists organised exhibitions and cultural events, donating their earnings to the Balkan Red Cross.56 For example, on 4 November 1912, Hrvatski Pokret reported: On Thursday, at the rehearsal of our Croatian singing society Kolo, its vice president Mr Prilepic announced that fundraising for the Red Cross of the Balkan Nations will soon be allowed, and Kolo must take part . . . everybody clapped and cheered. It was decided that the concert will be held on 7 November and the net income would be given to the Red Cross.57 One of Croatia’s most famous painters, Tomislav Krizman, donated all of his earning from the works exhibited in his gallery over the course of eight days.58 The Balkan Wars also resonated in Croatian

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works of literature. Hundreds of poems, written by everyone from student amateurs to well-known writers, were published in newspaper publications. They promoted the Balkan Wars and Slavdom. Stevo Galogaza’s study compares the works of Croatian authors to the works of countries fighting the war, concluding that Croatian authors nourish a more romantic sentiment towards the Balkan Wars.59 Galogaza writes: That [their romantic sentiment] makes perfect sense and nothing could be more natural. Antun Tresic, Rikard Katalinic, Ivo Vojnovic and all those down the line to poeta minors behold the conquest of Kosovo as a providential event, a day of glory, a day of strength, a day of joy, the greatest of all days, the brightest, the most beautiful, the most sacred day; a day of great nationalism and idealism.60 This nationalism and idealism of Serbian war heroes, past and present, was acknowledged by Antun Gustav Matos as well. In a 1913 Obzor article Matos notes/remarks: I am looking at four of my friends lying in front of me, and four wounds are opening on my body. I see a blonde head with Christlike bears belonging to my friend Branko Lazarevic, who has been the pride of younger Serbian literary criticism. Today, Lazarevic is dead, happy is the country which bore him, and the breasts which gave him milk. He was a critic and journalist, now, he is a hero. And my Vladeta Kovacevic, kin to a poet Rakic. He fell too, my God! . . . I am alive today, and they are lying dead, next to Milos and Lazar [legendary Serbian heroes from Ottoman times] . . . All these wounds burn, but not for the one who knows: those wounds are the best medication for a great, painful wound of Kosovo.61 This kind of endorsement by one of the most prominent Zagreb literary figures also influenced the young students, who were ready to accept Serbia as their soul brothers. In addition to the majority of the press during the Second Balkan War, the mobilisation of populations behind Serbian heroism is particularly evident in the actions of the youth. The Serbo-Croatian Radical Nationalist Youth, founded in August 1912, with a group developing into the Yugoslav Nationalist youth

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from September 1913, were the most fervent promoters of Serbia and the Yugoslav idea.62 They expressed themselves through countless articles, poems, brochures, and pamphlets. Often referred to as nationalist, progressive, and radical, they hoped that a South Slav state, or Yugoslavia, would rise, as a victorious Serbia expanded. The University of Zagreb became a bastion of Yugoslav nationalism.63 When war broke out, nationalist student leader and journalist Oskar Tartaglia hailed the revenge of Kosovo, like Matos did, and “called the Balkan War a Yugoslav war”.64 Notably, after the Battle of Kumanov, Tartaglia and fellow youth leader and poet Augustin Ujevic sent a telegram to Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pasic “on behalf of all the nationalist and progressive youth, congratulating Serbia on its victory and welcoming the looming liberation and unification of all Yugoslavs”.65 Students from different political parties gathered together during the wars in gestures of support. Waves of student led demonstrations, attended by various political affiliates supporting Serbia and desiring change in Croatia, regularly took place in/on the streets.66 According to Tartaglia’s memoirs: At the demonstration on February 1, 1913, all youth group representatives gave speeches (including the clericals, party of rightists, and the progressive youth). The atmosphere was combative. We protested day and night. In 36 hours I gave more than 18 speeches. Demonstrations in Zagreb became a daily occurrence, so that city officials sought military help, specifically three battalions to keep order on February 13, 1912.67 The youth’s desire for national, social, and political changes, which had found their expression in the unrest surrounding the Jukic trial, now found its outlet in the wholehearted support of the Serbian cause. Their protests took on a revolutionary character, but were also met by force. For example, the distribution of the second issue of Ujedinjenje, banned after its first May 1913 issue, which pointed out that one of the consequences of the Balkan Wars was the strengthening of CroatianSerbian nationalism, led to the arrests of Ujevic and Bartulovic. Ujevic was later exiled, and continued working for the Yugoslav cause abroad. Though many of the youth joined the Yugoslav movement, others went in a different direction. For example, in his book Zastave, Krleza

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(who was rejected as a volunteer in the Serbian army) writes of the panathletisism of the Yugoslav national youth and the monumental works of Mestrovic, explaining how they propelled his journey towards socialism as the only fresh idea that could bring about change.68 Noting the impact of the wars on him, he states: I experienced the Balkan Wars consciously, and the First World War was the third [Balkan War]. I experienced them like a massive moral shock. The fact that war exists at all. Those three wars were important for me – they shaped me as an individual.69 The Balkan War impacted youth in both Yugoslav and anti-Yugoslav directions.

Dalmatia and its Responses to War Unlike Croatia, Dalmatia was not administered by Hungary but under the Austrian government directly, and dominated by the Italians. Thus, it developed differently and deserves special treatment. Nevertheless, Dalmatians felt strongly as belonging with Croatia, which is exemplified by similar parties and the overriding aim of uniting with Croatia, and to a large extent, with the South Slavs. Dalmatia had a separate Sabor, or Parliament, in Zadar, which, out of solidarity with the Croatian Sabor, did not meet after it was suspended. Dalmatian deputies in the Reichstrat condemned Hungarian policy in Croatia, and Josip Smodlaka even declared in the Austrian parliament that “this [Balkan War] is our national, truly holy, war”.70 The political parties were similar to the ones in Croatia. In 1912, there were five main political parties in Dalmatia: the Croatian Party, the result of a 1905 fusion between the old Croatian People’s Party and the Party of Right; the Croatian People’s Progressive Party, led by Josip Smodlaka; the Party of Right, which was divided into clerical and non-clerical factions and had an influence in smaller towns and villages in addition to Sibenik; the Serbian Party, which was divided into two factions, a liberal Catholic one, and a conservative Orthodox one; and the Autonomist Party, an Italian party under the leadership of Zadar mayor Luigi Ziliotto.71 Although they composed the majority, Dalmatians were under Austrian rule and did not have direct problems with Hungarians,

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but Italians, who largely composed of the elite Italian minority. Even though they were the minority, the Italian party controlled the district government due to the curial voting system, which favoured the wealthy.72 There was widespread Slav, or Yugoslav, sentiment in Dalmatia. Branka Magas makes the point: “Insofar Yugoslavia had a Piedmont, it was Dalmatia”, continuing “the steps that led them in that [Yugoslav] direction involved turning Croatia against the Monarchy, and overcoming the Croat –Serb conflict within Croatia”.73 According to Bogdan Krizman, the nationalist Italian presence in Dalmatia is one of the reasons Dalmatians so widely joined the South Slav movement in such large numbers.74 Thus, it could be argued that Italian nationalism, like that of Hungarian nationalism in Croatia, influenced the development of Yugoslavism at the beginning of the century, which had a stronghold in Dalmatia. Intellectuals were already drawn to this idea. From its creation in 1908 in Split, the art society Medulic, with the famous painter Vlaho Bukovac as its president, promoted the Yugoslav idea in order to increase political awareness.75 In 1910, its most famous member, the talented sculptor Ivan Mestrovic created the Vidovdan, or Kosovo cycle, which, for many, symbolised the entire spirit of Yugoslav national awakening.76 In 1911, Mestrovic burst onto the burgeoning Yugoslav national scene with his controversial exhibition at the Rome Exposition. Expected to exhibit at the Austro-Hungarian pavilion, Mestrovic refused to do so unless a separate pavilion was provided for South Slav artists. As an act of protest, together with artists Racki, Krizman and Babic, he exhibited at the pavilion of the Kingdom of Serbia instead.77 Afterwards, Mestrovic would go on to become one of the most famous artists of his time and as a member of the Yugoslav Committee, was often called a “Prophet of Yugoslavism”.78 As the Balkan Wars represented Yugoslav hope and progress, South Slav Dalmatians responded with joy. In comparison to Croatia, Dalmatia displayed special enthusiasm for the wars. With the outbreak of the war, Dalmatians went from being “depressed to euphoric”.79 Serbian military victories were celebrated publicly in the streets. In November 1912, Ivo Vukic-Lapis wrote to R.W. Seton-Watson: Last Sunday 10,000 people in Split and 6,000 in Sibenik with mayors and deputies paraded the streets, sang and hailed Balkan

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armies and rulers.’80 Carrying Croat, Serb, and Slovene flags, the demonstrators at the Dalmatian mass rallies also protested against Austro-Hungarian efforts to protect Turkey and demanded Dalmatia’s union with Ban’s Croatia.81 In newfound cooperation, Serbs and Croats together organized demonstrations of support of the Balkan League and fundraisers.82 Political parties, too, came together to voice their support of the Balkan League. Dalmatian deputies, city mayors and district heads issued a proclamation stating that Serbia and Montenegro were waging a war for the liberation of a people that formed one nation with ‘Dalmatians of Croat and Serb name.83 Dalmatia collected money for the Balkan Red Cross before Croatia, and there were more volunteers from Dalmatia than Croatia proper in the Serbian and Montenegrin military forces.84 (Even though Dalmatia was outside of the Croatian Ban’s jurisdiction, the ruling Austrian authorities took measures to quell the support that swept through the region. After the demonstrations in support of the Balkan League took place in Split and Sibenik on 10 November 1912, Deputy Governor Mario Attems reacted by dissolving the municipal councils in the respected cities.85 Nonetheless, support manifested in demonstrations, volunteers, welcoming soldiers passing through, and newspaper articles continued.) Reasons for the difference in Croatia and Dalmatia’s responses include the Commissioner’s tighter control of much in Croatia, making it easier to enforce prohibitions of demonstrations and censorship of the press. Dalmatia was geographically closer to Montenegro and thus enjoyed access to the sea and other Balkan countries. Exiled youth from Croatia often came to Dalmatia, and there was a greater presence of a foreign minority – the Italians – in Dalmatia, who indirectly helped foster nationalism, in addition to the Serbian minority.

The Reaction of Minorities to the Wars Interactions between Italians and Dalmatians became increasingly tense leading up to and during the Balkan Wars, and Serbo-Croat relations changed for the better. In this section, the responses of the Serbian, Italian, German, and Jewish minorities to the wars will be considered, with a special focus

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on the Serbian and Italian communities in the town of Zadar. As the seat of the Dalmatian government, with a population of 14,000 at the time of the Balkan Wars, Zadar was home to bureaucrats, a significant part of whom were Italian and South Slav nationalists alike.86 Croats, Italians, and Serbs were the three main groups in Dalmatia, with Croats comprising the majority, followed by Italians in number, and then Serbs.87 Italians composed the ruling elite, and the official language of administration was Italian. 88 Like their Czech counterparts, South Slav Dalmatians began to vehemently oppose the use of Italian. Thus, an ongoing language issue was the centre of attention for both Italians and Croatians leading up to the wars. In 1908, the Austrian government finally decided to respond to the language issue in Dalmatia in an attempt to appease the South Slavs and decrease the radicalisation of their politics.89 In a letter to the Dalmatian governor Niko Nardello, Austrian minister Beck suggested solving the issue by recognising Croatian as the language of internal administration, while respecting the right of Italian in external affairs.90 The following year, at a 20 April 1909 meeting in Vienna attended by representatives from all Dalmatian political parties, it was concluded that the language decree would be implemented on 1 January 1912.91 Resisted by Italians, the language reforms only increased interDalmatian tensions.92 Croat –Serb relations in Dalmatia were not particularly strong leading up to the war. After 1905, and the implementation of “new course” politics heralded by the Croat –Serb Coalition Party via the Resolution of Fiume (Rijeka), political cooperation between Croats and Serbs in Zadar remained weak.93 Although Serb politicians signed the Resolution of Fiume, thereby supporting Croatian independence and the unification of Croatia and Dalmatia, the Zadar Serbs continued to support the local Italian government in exchange for privileges.94 Only with the Balkan Wars, however, did Serb –Croat relations in Dalmatia improve. Croats and Serbs cooperated in fundraising and holding demonstrations in support of the war, fuelled by the Yugoslav idea gaining popularity, much to the Italians’ chagrin. As the ruling class, the Italian population in Dalmatia was opposed to Slav emancipation and overwhelmingly supportive of the dual monarchy. As a result, they were against a Balkan League war victory, which might lead to a Serbian Piedmont and unite Dalmatia with

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Croatia-Slavonia. In this event, their privileged status in Dalmatia would be compromised. Zadar highlights the strained relationship between Italians and Dalmatian Croatians during the wars. Conflicts between South Slav nationalists and Italians, already tense with the implemented language reform, only increased with the wars. Newspapers were the place of polemics. On 13 November 1912, the paper Hrvatska Kruna reported that Italians jeered Montenegrin soldiers passing through Zadar. They were also reported to have cheered for the monarchy, the Turks and Croatian ban Cuvaj, which provoked Croatians.95 The same day, in the Italian paper Dalmata’s report of the protests, the editors stressed that they had nothing against welcoming the Balkan allies to Zadar, but were only opposed to shouting “Long live Croatian Zadar” (“Zˇivio hrvatski Zadar”) and singing “Our Beautiful” (“Lijepe nasˇa”).96 In response, Narodni list – which described the Italian protests as a clear example of Italians who hated everything Slav – denied Dalmata’s claims that “Long Live Croatian Zadar” was chanted, claiming that in the event that someone did shout it, it was not the reason for the demonstration.97 Hrvatska Kruna was more confrontational in its editorials, asking Dalmata (not Risorgimento, because it considered the paper too low-brow) how Italians could abuse Montenegrins when the Italian queen was Jelena of Montenegro.98 It also directly attacked the editor of Risorgimento Raimondo Desanti – who wrote that it is beneath an Italian in Zadar to look into the eyes of a Croat – asking why it is not beneath him to sit at a table and eat with a Croat, or accept “75 crowns monthly from a Croat”.99 With the end of the Balkan Wars, conflicts between Croats and Italians increased even more in the public sphere, characterised by polemics, physical brawls, and continued provocations.100 For the Italian minority in Dalmatia, the war highlighted incompatible political views and sour relations with the South Slav nationalists. These tensions encouraged South Slav cooperation for Dalmatian Croatians. Though not as strongly at the Italians, the German and Jewish minority communities in Croatia also responded to the wars. According to a 1910 census, German was cited as the mother tongue of 5.8 per cent of the population in Croatia and Slavonia.101 Many Germans were involved in agriculture and the civil service, and enjoyed political privileges.102 As a result, the German population in Croatia largely supported the status quo of the monarchy and its policies. For

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example, the German society Die Drau’s paper Drava wrote favourably about Ban Cuvaj, in contrast to all other Croatian political papers of the time.103 Nonetheless, some prominent Germans, such as Anton Schlegel, the editor of Agramer Tablatt, not only supported the war effort in Croatia, but propagated the Yugoslav idea in his paper, so that it was constantly censured.104 Croatia’s Jewish population, however, was less vested in the politics of the Balkan Wars. In 1910, the Jewish population in Croatia amounted to 1 per cent.105 The Zagreb paper Zidovska smotra reported news from the Jewish community during the Balkan Wars, such as reports about the first Jewish major in the Bulgarian army, brave Jews protecting Carigrad, and courageous Jews in the Serbian army.106 For example, on 27 March 1913, it was reported that Karlo Goldstein was caught trying to cross the border to join the Serbian army.107 In general, the paper Zidovska Smotra was largely concerned with the personal experiences and problems of the Jewish community, and did not politicise the war or write about stances or territorial issues.

Comparison of Reactions to the First and Second Balkan Wars To summarise, during the First Balkan War, apart from some official Austro-Hungarian government newspapers and a small group of clerics and political rightists, almost all of the Croatian public supported the Balkan League. Reasons for this support included: age-old antagonism towards the Ottomans; resentment of Austro-Hungarian commissioners ruling over Croatia; and the goal of South Slav unity. Balkan support was evidenced in Croatian newspapers, by the collection of monetary aid for the Red Crosses of the Balkan states, public displays of support in the form of demonstrations, and by medical and civilian volunteers who travelled to the battlefields. In contrast to the mainly supportive atmosphere of the First Balkan War, newspaper and public opinion in Croatia was more divided during the Second Balkan War. During the Second Balkan War the Croatian public was generally divided into two factions. One group – which included the Croat–Serb Coalition, the progressive and nationalist youth, and members of the Party of Right (gathered around the paper Hrvatska Rijec) – openly supported Serbia, while a smaller number of Austro-Hungarian oriented

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clerics and most members of the conservative Party of Right faction (gathered around the papers Hrvatska and Dan) supported Bulgaria. The Croatian Peasant People’s Party paper Dom and the Social Democrat Slobodna Rijec expressed their neutrality and disappointment.108 The independent Obzor regretted the conflict within the Balkan League as it weakened Slav solidarity.109 Party of Right and clerical papers thought Bulgaria was the victim of conspiracy between other Slav countries and Greece, Romania, and the Ottoman Empire. Narodne novine, Jutarnji list, Dan, and Hrvatska supported the foreign policy of the monarchy, while other newspapers mostly disagreed with the monarchy’s foreign policy and openly attacked it. Thus, the First Balkan War mainly induced enthusiasm among Croats, who expressed support for Serbia in the media and personally contributed to the war effort, while the Second Balkan War found considerable support for Bulgaria, especially among Croatian supporters of the monarchy. Even among those who supported Serbia, such as the Croat– Serb Coalition, the Second Balkan War was seen as a disappointment for wider South Slav dreams of unification stretching to the Black Sea.110 With the Second Balkan War, Croatia displayed a diversity of opinion surrounding the foreign policy of Serbia, the monarchy, and future South Slav unity. The widespread support for the First Balkan War gave way to divergence of opinion surrounding the second war. These varying views would continue until and after the creation of the First Yugoslavia.

How did the Wars Change Croatians? The wars impacted Croatians economically, socially, and politically. Croatia was already struggling economically before the wars, and the wars worsened the Austro-Hungarian economy. Seventy-five per cent of the monarchy’s exports were to the Balkans and 60 per cent of its imports were directly linked to the Balkans. In 1912, the prominent economic paper Hrvatski Lloyd reported that it could not recall the last time so many bankruptcies were declared in Austria-Hungary.111 In addition, Austria-Hungary was not one of the armament exporters to the Balkan states and so did not gain any benefits from the wars.112 A halt in industry and construction was felt in and around Zagreb.113 Slobodni Rijec headlines during 1913 were most frequently about unemployment, poverty, and hunger.114 Furthermore, Croatia also experienced a horticultural economic problem, according to an October 1912 article

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“Zagreb and the Bulgars” from Kopriva magazine.115 As the Bulgarians, who mainly worked in horticulture in Croatia, left to join Bulgaria’s warfront, there was such a lack of gardeners that the paper Hrvatska tried to convince the youth to fill it in a February 1913 article.116 On a more serious note, an outbreak of cholera, caused by the return of volunteers from Balkan battlefields in Slavonia and Syrmia, killed 231 people in Croatia after 550 had been infected.117

Effects on Croatian Politics In 1916, Lenin noted that “war does not change the direction in which politics developed prior to the war; it only accelerates its development”.118 The Balkan Wars, however, did change the direction of political development in Croatia. It also accelerated the South Slav movement there, particularly among the youth. The war induced enthusiasm among Croats from various political parties, ranging from the Party of Rightists to the most ardent Serbophobes.119 However, the Party of Right was arguably the most affected by this shift. The wars also changed the political stances of some members of the Party of Right. According to the Sibenik paper Napradnjak, after the Balkan War demonstration in Sibenik on 10 November 1912, the Peasant Party representative Mate Drinkovic commented that the Party of Rightists ceased being a “bridge of Austrian slavery politics in the Balkans” and became part of “a hard wall against her”.120 The Balkan Wars helped shape the youth’s role in the ongoing Yugoslav movement. Before the end of the First Balkan War, The Party of Right’s main organ Hrvatska admitted: This movement [from Serbophobism to Serbophilism] has been carried out in a large part of our public, especially in the souls of the young. It can be said that many of them, who in 1908–9 were in the anti-Serb legions, today with the same enthusiasm accepted a completely opposite opinion, and belong to the radical Serbophile element. . . After the victory of the Balkan League, many caught it [Serbophilism], mainly the youth, who are crazy for it.121 Although never a Serbophobe, the poet Augustin Ujevic provides a prominent example of a former Party of Right youth who left Dalmatia

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for Zagreb and soon become a leader of the Serbo-Croatian Progressive Radical youth and student revolutionary whose pro-Yugoslav views would only become more pronounced after the successes of the Balkan Wars.122 According to Dr Jaroslav Sidak, the Serbian and Montenegrin victories influenced the youth, in that the idea of Yugoslavism trumped every other idea, including socialism.123 It can be argued that with the reactions to the Balkan Wars, older politicians of the Croat –Serb Coalition saw the youth as instruments which could be utilised in the creation of Yugoslavia. In 1913, the former leader of the Croat –Serb Coalition and editor of the Rijecki Novi List Frano Supilo travelled to Vienna to give a speech to the youth there, which included future Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andric, praising their efforts.124 Supilo, as a member of the Yugoslav Committee, would go on to recruit other nationalist youth, such as Augustin Ujevic, as propagandists for the Yugoslav cause.125 Still, pro-South Slav political stances were not uniform among the youth. Some nationalist youth, like Ujevic, were more dedicated to the Yugoslav cause than ever, while others, particularly Party of Right youth members, flip-flopped between Yugoslavism and exclusive Croatianism after being disappointed and suspicious of Serbia’s attack on Bulgaria during the Second Balkan War.126 Ivo Banac points out that after the Second Balkan War, which pitted Bulgaria against the other Balkan states, the irreconcilability of the many separate South Slav interests became increasingly clear.127 Thus, the growth of unitarism did not affect all sections of Croat political life, even among the youth. The wars strengthened nationalism in all its different forms: Yugoslav and Croatian, exclusivist and integral, while those who supported a South Slav state were more convinced than ever of the need to create it. The wars, therefore, changed, intensified, and provoked political opinion. The Balkan Wars impacted the development of Yugoslavism in Croatia. Not only did they strengthen the youth’s resolve to unite with Serbia in a South Slav state, but they also inspired the first widespread popular support for the Yugoslav idea among the public. According to Dragovan Sepic, the Serbian Balkan War victories had a decisive effect on Croatian politics and political thought, and more than any other scientific argument, strengthened opinion on Yugoslavian, or Croato-Serb national unity.128 Even if some clerics and rightists did not openly support Serbia, the wars decreased the anti-Serbdom in far right Frankist circles. Serbo-Croat relations improved in Dalmatia, with the Balkan Wars forging closer ties

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between the Serbs and Croats in Dalmatia, as they increased Serbo-Croat collaboration while decreasing Serb–Italian collaboration.129 According to Ante Bralic, the Balkan Wars raised the self-consciousness of Croats and Serbs who thereafter reacted more vehemently to Italian provocations.130 The Croatian Party gained control in the Dalmatian Parliament during the wars, and would go on to espouse the Yugoslav idea after the wars. Even in the absence of pro-Yugoslav views, Croatian participation in the Balkan Wars suggests a feeling of common South Slav belonging, rather than a loyalty to the country (Austria-Hungary) in which they live. The Balkan Wars were seen as an inspiration or way of political liberation by many in Croatia. When anti-Austrian demonstrations were held in Sibenik, its mayor Krstelj told the protesters that he hoped that the liberation of Dalmatia would be brought upon by Slavic and Balkan bayonets.131 Thus, Croatian reactions were related to domestic politics. Those who wanted change to take place outside the monarchy hailed Serbia as a liberator and wrote favourably of her during the Second Balkan War, blemishing Bulgaria’s name instead. Those motivated by a desire for a Trialist solution within the monarchy, and against a Yugoslav one, were suspicious of Serbia, so supported Bulgaria instead. In 1914, as they remained engaged in a struggle against AustriaHungary, and inched towards World War I, Ivo Andric observed, “All of Croatia is unpleasantly snoring. Only poets and assassins are awake.”132 But the Balkan Wars had already begun to wake the nascent forces of nationalism in Croatia. It was the revolutionary generation that matured with the Balkan Wars, who would go on to be involved in the Great War ahead.

Notes 1. Sidak et al., Povijest hrvatskog naroda g. 1860– 1914 (Zagreb, 1986), p. 285. 2. Ante Bralic´, “Narodni list i Hrvatska kruna o drugom balkanskom ratu”, Radovi Zavoda za povijesne znanosti HAZU Zadar, 41 (1999), pp. 277– 98. He finds that the Coalition-linked Narodni List covers the Balkan Wars more and cheers for Serbia from the very beginning, while Kruna is less interested but supportive of Bulgaria. 3. Bralic´, “Zadarski fin-de sie`cle – Politicke i drusˇtvene prilike u Zadru i Dalmaciji uoči Prvoga svjetskog rata”, Casopis za suvremenu povijest, 3 (2007), pp. 731 –75.

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4. Igor Despot, “Tisak Hrvatske i Dalmacije o Balkanskim ratovima (1912 – 1913)”, Historijski Zbornik, 1 (2009). Much of this article has now been incorporated into his recent book, The Balkan Wars in the Eyes of the Warring Parties: Perceptions and Interpretations (Bloomington, 2012), which provides an accessible and comprehensive overview of various economic, social, and political aspects of the Balkan Wars. 5. Sidak et al., Povijest hrvatskog naroda, p. 288. With the Sabor’s dissolution, the Coalition never convened. 6. Ivo Goldstein, Croatia: A History (London, 1999), p. 105. 7. Mira Kolar-Dimitrijevic, Skrivene Biografije Nekih Nijemaca i Austrijanaca u Hrvatskoj 19. i 20. Stoljece (Osijek, 2001), pp. 82 – 6. 8. Branka Magas, Croatia through History: The Making of a European State (London, 2007), pp. 459 – 60. 9. From a contemporary diary, we see that schoolgirls also attended protests, as Zora Ruklic writes about composing songs and chants in class before being picked up by flag-waving university students to demonstrate in the streets of Zagreb together in Zora Ruklic, Iz dnevnika jedne djevojcice (Zagreb, 1938). 10. Magas, Croatia, p. 460. These events led to the suspension of constitutional rule and the appointment of Ban Cuvaj royal commissar. 11. Sidak et al., Povijest, pp. 282 – 3. 12. After hearing about it in Split, thousands took to the streets to demonstrate in a show of support. More in Tartaglia, Veleizdajnik, pp. 56– 7. 13. Stanko Dvorzak, “Knjizevni odravi Jukiceva atentata”, Rad JAZU, knj.313, (Zagreb, 1957), pp. 284 –5. 14. Josip Horvat, Pobuna Omladine (Zagreb, 2006), p. 166. 15. Magas, Croatia, p. 460. 16. Sidak et al., Povijest, p. 286. 17. By 1911, all parties in Ban’s Croatia, including Tomasic’s revived National Party, adopted an essentially identical program of uniting Dalmatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina with Ban’s Croatia, and achieving maximal autonomy from Hungary in Magas, 459. 18. Igor Despot, “Tisak Hrvatske i Dalmacije o Balkanskim ratovima (1912 – 1913)”, Historijski Zbornik, 1 (2009), p. 109. 19. Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Cornell, 1984), p. 262. 20. Nicholas J. Miller, Between Nation and State: Serbian Politics in Croatia Before the First World War (Pittsburgh, 1997), p. 93. 21. As quoted from Srbobran editor and politician Pavle Jovanovic in Mato Artukovic, Ideologija srpsko-hrvatskih sporova, Srbobran 1884– 1902 (Zagreb, 1991), p. 21. 22. Magas, Croatia, p. 348. 23. Iz Novog i Starog Zagreba (Zagreb, 1968), vol. 5, p. 280. 24. Bozidar Novak, Hrvatsko novinarstvo u d vadesetom stoljecu (Zagreb, 2005), pp. 71 – 89.

CROATIAN NATIONALISM 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

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Despot, “Tisak”, pp. 110 – 11. Tartaglia, Veleizdajnik, pp. 24 – 5. Bralic, “Zadarski fin-de-siecle”, pp. 745 – 6. Despot, “Tisak”, p. 110. Banac, The National Question, p. 99. Bralic, “Zadarski fin-de-siecle”, pp. 745 – 6. Magas, Croatia, p. 402. Bralic, “Zadarski fin-de-siecle”, pp. 751 – 2. Bralic cites a number of articles stressing the importance of closing shop for an afternoon siesta and the rising rent prices as evidence for this. Despot, “Tisak”, p. 114. Ibid. Hrvastka zastava istine, 2 January 1913 in Despot, p. 114. Dom, 7 January 1913 in Despot, p. 114. For more on the Social Democrats, see Fedora Bikar, Razvoj odnosa izmedu demokracije i pokusaji uskladivanja njihovi koncepcija u nacionalnom pitanju od 1909 do 1941 (Zagreb, 1965). Dragisa Lapcevic, Rat i srpska socijalna demokratija (Belgrade, 1925), pp. 61– 6. Hrvatski pokret, 9 October 1912. Ibid. Hrvatski pokret, 4 October 1912. Hrvatska, 2–4 January 1913, in Despot, “Balkanski Ratovi (1912 – 1913) i Hrvatska Javnost”, MA diss., University of Zagreb, 2008, p. 130. Ibid., p. 131. Despot, Warring Parties, p. 207. Ibid. Despot, “Balkanski Ratovi i Hrvatska Javnost”, p. 127. “The Montenegrin army has no Red Cross . . . There is one medical student to each battalion, who is expected to look after the first field work. Of course, these were no good at all”, in Joyce Cary, Memoir of Bobotes (London, 1960), p. 88. Srbobran, 6 – 8 October 1912 and Hrvatksi pokret, 4 – 5 November 1912 in Despot, “Balkanski Ratovi i Hrvatska Javnost”, p. 127. Rijecki Novi List, 5– 6 November 1912 and Srbobran, 29 January 1913, in Despot, p. 127. Hrvatski pokret, 18 November 1912 in Despot, p. 128. Ibid., p. 131. Ibid., p. 48. Cary, Memoir, p. 158. Miroslav Krleza, Moj Obracun s njima (Sarajevo, 1983), p. 150. Crvena Hrvatska, 16 October 1912, “Around one hundred of Croatian volunteers from Croatia joined the Serbian army. They are fighting under the Croatian flag. A unit of Croatian volunteers which was on its way to Serbia was

178

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

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stopped and arrested in Zemun. There are Hungarian volunteers (around 80) in the Turkish army. They were not stopped”. Despot, “Balkanski Ratovi i Hrvatska Javnost”, p. 132. Hrvatski Pokret, 4 November 1912. Hrvastki pokret, 6 November 1912 in Despot, “Balkanski Ratovi i Hrvatska Javnost”, p. 132. Stevo Galogoza, Pokret, 4 April 1913. Ibid. Matos, “Zivi i mrtvi”, in Obzor, 3 November 1913. Horvat, Pobuna Omladine, p. 43. Magas, Croatia, p. 460. Tartaglia, Veleizdajnik, p. 27. Ibid., p. 24. Horvat, Pobuna Omladine, p. 19. Tartaglia, Veleizdajnik, p. 19. Miroslav Krleza, Zastave (Zagreb, 2000). Krlezˇa, Deset Krvavih godina (Novi Sad, 1990), p. 97. Magas, Croatia, p. 460. Bralic, “Zadarski fin-de-siecle”, p. 739. Ibid., p. 737. Magas, Croatia, p. 436. Bogdan Krizman, Hrvatsko-srpski politicki odnosi (Zagreb, 1989), p. 23. Norka Machiedo Mladinic, “Oskar Tartaglia, od jugoslavenskog nacionalista do zrtve komunisticke represije”, Casopis za suvremenu povijest, 3 (2003), p. 905. Andrew Wachtel, Making A Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford, 1998), p. 55. Ivan Mesˇtrovic´, Uspomene na politicˇke ljude i dogaaje (Zagreb, 1993), p. 20. Banac, National Question, p. 205. Despot, “Balkanski Ratovi i Hrvatska Javnost”, p. 55. R.W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs, Correspondence 1906– 1941 (Zagreb, 1976), vol. 1, pp. 117 – 19. Magas, Croatia, p. 460. Bralic, “Zadarski fin-de-siecle”, p. 767. Magas, Croatia, p. 460. Despot, “Balkanski Ratovi i Hrvatska Javnost”, p. 57. Bralic, “Zadarski fin-de-siecle”, p. 740. laden Ante Friganovic, “Hrvati, Srbi i Talijani u gradovima sjeverne Dalmacije 1910– 1991”, Drustvena istrazivanja, 9 (1994), p. 122. According to a 1910 census: of the 35,907 citizens in Zadar county, 23,651 cited Croatian as their mother tongue; 11,552 Italian, 447 German, and 227 other. The three nationalities were 59.9 per cent Croatian, 32.1 per cent Italian, 5.9 per cent Serbian, in Mladen Ante Friganovic, “Hrvati, Srbi I Talijani”, pp. 121 – 4.

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88. Bralic shows that the social structure of Italian speakers tells us that Italians belonged to the middle and upper classes. For more detail, see Bralic, “Zadarski fin-siecle”, pp. 734 – 5. 89. Ibid., p. 760. 90. Ibid. 91. Magas, Croatia, p. 460. 92. Bralic, “Zadarski fin-siecle”, p. 763. Croats were critical of Croats who continued to use Italian, and there were reports of Italians attacking Croatian speakers in the streets of Zadar, such as literary and political figures Vladimir Nazor, Ante Tresic´-Pavicic, Milan Begovic i Rikard Katalinic-Jeretov. 93. Ibid., p. 766. 94. Magas, Croatia, p. 460. 95. Bralic, “Zadarski fin-siecle”, p. 768. 96. “Il baccano di ieri a sera”, DAL, 91 (13 November 1912); “Poche parole al ‘Narodni list’, DAL, 92 (16 November 1912); “Hrvatskom krunom”, “Dalmata” uopc´e nije htio raspravljati jer je “zarazˇena mahnitosˇc´u”, “Il linguaggio”, DAL, 93 (20 November 1912), in Bralic, “Zadarski fin-siecle”, p. 767. 97. Ibid., p. 768. 98. “Sˇto je talijanasˇima visˇe sveto?”, Hrvatska Kruna, 104 (16 November 1912). 99. “Kakvu svjedodzˇbu dava sebi Desantis!”, HK, 11 (5 February 1913), in ibid., p. 770. 100. For more, see Bralic, “Zadarski fin-siecle”, pp. 771 – 3. 101. Kolar-Dimitrijevic, Skrivene Biografije, p. 46. 102. Despot, “Balkanski Ratovi i Hrvatska Javnost”, p. 121. 103. Ibid., p. 121. 104. Kolar-Dimitrijevic, Skrivene Biografije, pp. 78 – 84. 105. Ivo Goldstein, Zˇidovi u Zagrebu 1918– 1941 (Zagreb, 2004), p. 16. 106. Zidovska Smotra, 20 November 1912, 4 August 1912 and 6 December 1912, in Despot, “Balkanski Ratovi i Hrvatska Javnost”, pp. 109– 11. 107. Despot, “Balkanski Ratovi i Hrvatska Javnost”, p. 111. 108. Igor Despot, “Croatian Public Opinion Toward Bulgaria During the Balkan Wars”, E´tudes Balkaniques, 4 (2010), p. 154. 109. Ibid. 110. Mirjana Gross, “Studenski pokret 1875–1914”, in Jaroslav Sidak (ed.), Spomenica u povodu 300 godisˇnjice Sveucˇiliste u Zagrebu (Zagreb, 1969), pp. 451–79. 111. Hrvatski Lloyd, 11 January 1913. “From January 1 until 20 December about 460 cases of insolvencies occurred in Austria-Hungary with massive liabilities of around 182 million crowns . . . In the critical months of October – December no less than 214 cases of insolvencies were filed with the total loss of some 80 million crowns. 160 of these cases occurred in Hungary only, with a total loss of 73.5 million.” 112. Despot, Warring Parties, p. 214. 113. Hrvatski Lloyd, 3 January 1914.

180 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

119. 120. 121. 122.

123. 124. 125. 126.

127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132.

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Slobodna Rijec, 22 September 1913. Kopriva, “Zagreb and the Bulgars”, October 1912. Hrvatska, 19 February 1913. Slobodna Rijec, 19 November 1913, in Despot, “Balkanski Ratovi i Hrvatska Javnost”, p. 182. “Lenin Collected Works”, vol. 22, Marxists Internet Archive, available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/mar/25.html/ (last accessed on 12 May 2013). Gross, “Studenski pokret”, p. 461. Naprednjak, 10 November 1912. Hrvatska, 1 – 2 April 1913. In exile in Belgrade, Ujevic spoke at a rally in the name of the “academic youth”. The Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Foreign affairs was notified that the Zagreb student spoke aggressively against the Monarchy, claiming that Croats and Serbs are one people with two names. Jaroslav Sˇidak, Hrvatsko pitanje u Habsbursˇkoj monarhiji (Belgrade, 1964), p. 192. Josip Horvat, Frano Supilo (Belgrade, 1961), p. 253. Ibid., pp. 267 – 8. According to the Party of Right’s Mlada Hrvatska, October 1913, “As Serbs are Serbs and only Serbs, we, even if we are Slavs, are remaining to be Croats and only Croats. If the Croats and Serbs are the same in the matter of language, they are not only in the state way, meaning the peoples’ thought, if we are of the same tribe, we are not the same as a nation. Serbs are sticking to that principle and establishing themselves as good Slavs by making an alliance with non-Slavic Romanians and Greeks against the Slavic Bulgarians, and tomorrow, if the situation changes, they might as soon make an alliance with the Hungarians and the Italians against the Croats.” Banac, National Question, p. 104. Dragovan Sˇepic´, Italija, saveznici i jugoslavensko pitanje: 1914– 1918 (Zagreb, 1970), p. 337. Bralic, “Zadarski fin-de sie`cle”, p. 759. Ibid., p. 767. Milan Zivanovic, “Dvije demonstracije u Splitu I Sibeniku 1912 godine”, Radovi Instituta JAZU u Zadru (Zagreb, 1957), p. 343. Ivo Andric, “A.G. Matos”, Vihor, 1:5 (1 May 1914), pp. 89– 91.

PART III THE BITTER INHERITANCE

CHAPTER 9 MACEDONIA — THE CRISIS AFTER THE PARIS PEACE CONFERENCE Melina Grizo

Introduction “[The] Settlement after the Second Balkan War was not one of justice but of force. It stored up inevitable trouble for the time to come.”1 That was the opinion about the terms of the Treaty of Bucharest given by Sir Edward Grey, one of those European diplomats who, quite belatedly, attempted to settle the Balkan crisis of 1912–13. The purpose of this chapter is to evaluate the “inevitable trouble’’ that the settlement after the Balkan Wars produced in Macedonia. Therefore, after outlining “the trouble’’ – the new Yugoslav rule in Macedonia and the Bulgarian revisionism, we will concentrate on the response of the European diplomacy, divided between the efforts to contain the crisis and to stimulate it. In particular, we will investigate the nature of the conflict prevention and evaluate it in the context of the post-Versailles system of international relations. The analysis reveals that the crisis was kept far from the mechanisms of collective security and that it was contained with the basic methods of diplomacy. Therefore, it is striking that the prevention of the Macedonian crisis resembles the methods employed during the Eastern Question, as well as the instruments of preventive diplomacy that were “discovered’’ and carefully categorised

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only after World War II and lived their true momentum even later than that – in the course of the efforts to contain the Balkan crisis of 1990s.

The Macedonian Crisis Until the Paris Peace Conference The Macedonian problem emerged late in the nineteenth century as part of the Eastern Question, the latter being described as “a name given to the ensemble of problems posed in front of the great powers because of the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and in the eastern Mediterranean beginning with the second half of the XVIII century’’.2 The emerging Balkan national states (Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria) anticipated the further partition of “Turkey in Europe’’ and formulated foreign policy programmes in which their visions of further territorial gains were elaborated. The geographic region of Macedonia, situated in the centre of the Turkish Balkan possessions, soon became a point of their interest. Since 1870, the newly formed Bulgarian Exarchate began its expansion in Macedonia, thus challenging the undisputed position of the Greek Patriarchy. The expansion of the Bulgarian church was followed by establishment of Bulgarian schools. As the Greek and Serbian states followed suit, the three vilayets of Salonika, Monastir and Kosovo became a point of great activity. Each of the three Balkan national states argued that the population of Macedonia belonged to their own “nation”, advancing arguments on its ethnicity based on statistics, analyses of the customs of the population, or belonging to a certain church. As Turkey exploited their rivalries through encouraging further c onflict among them, the Macedonian problem gradually expanded ever since its beginnings in 1870s. At the end of the century, the ecclesiastical and educational activities were deemed insufficient. Therefore, armed groups that were affiliated to each of the three states began to clash, turning the three vilayets of Macedonia into an increasingly unstable region. As the great powers’ diplomacy in that period did not favour the further partition of Turkey in Europe, the multilateral conflict persisted until 1912.3 In this year, the Balkan states changed their tactics. Until that moment, they fought each other on the diplomatic level in the European capitals and at the Turkish Porte. In 1912, they formed an alliance, declared a war on Turkey and managed to end its European possessions in

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a period of few weeks. Unable to reach an agreement on how to divide the newly acquired territories, they began the Second Balkan War when Serbia and Greece defeated Bulgaria. In the course of these dramatic and largely unexpected events, the great powers could not change much.4 Although in the case of the Albanian territories (divided among Greece and Serbia) the Ambassadors’ Conference in London managed to negotiate the formation of an Albanian state,5 in the case of Macedonia it was largely the success on the battleground that defined the borders. The provisions of the Bucharest Treaty of 1913 regulated the partition of the three former vilayets of Macedonia among victorious Greece and Serbia, which gained larger portions and Bulgaria who lost the Second Balkan War and therefore gained a considerably smaller territory. Bulgaria remained bitterly disappointed by this outcome, as its position in Macedonia had been strong for several decades. Therefore, in the forthcoming Great War, it chose the side of Germany and lost again. During the Paris Peace Conference, the Treaty of Neuilly was signed, mostly confirming the borders established in 1913.6 Bulgaria remained embittered and, as World War II was approaching, it chose the side of Germany again. For these reasons, it is evident that for the profile of the Macedonian problem the formative period happened in 1912–13, rather than in 1919.

The Macedonian Crisis After the Paris Peace Conference In 1919, the new political map of Europe was drawn and many borders changed at the expense of the defeated states. The solutions reached during the Peace Conference managed to produce two opposite camps in the international relations – states that wanted status quo, among which the first was France, but also Britain on one side, and defeated states searching revision of the peace terms, including the borders, such as Germany, Austria, Hungary and, surprisingly, Italy. The Soviet Union was soon to join this camp.7 This situation influenced eastern Europe, as well as the Balkans, where beside Greece8 and Romania, a champion of the postwar status quo was Serbia – a French ally that managed to lead the creation of a new state unofficially known as Yugoslavia.9 This balance of power left Bulgaria as the only defeated state in the Balkans – isolated and revisionist. Therefore, although it is obvious that for the international relations in the Balkans the formative

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period happened during the Balkan Wars in 1912–13 rather than in 1919, the consequences of the decisions of 1913 developed in the context of a completely new international order in Europe. “The inevitable trouble’’ that the Macedonian crisis posed in international relations had its origin in the internal conditions in each of the involved states. World War I changed nothing in the Serbian attitude with regard to its pre-war gains in Macedonia. On the contrary, in the new conditions, the state policies largely remained on the positions taken long before the wars of 1912– 18. Therefore, Yugoslavia followed an official policy that Macedonia was Southern Serbia, a land that was in the core of the Serbian medieval state, populated by Serbs and liberated in 1913 from the Turks.10 The region was unofficially named South Serbia and, after 1929, Vardarska banovina. After World War I, the Serbian state system was introduced once again – it relied heavily on the police forces and army. Soon, the number of Serbian schools and cultural institutions was rising in Macedonia and the authority of the Serbian church was established. As a part of the assimilation of the population, systematic settling of Serbs from other parts of the Kingdom was begun. Ironically, after the long Turkish rule, this state introduced the first modern political system in Macedonia, modelled after the French. Yet, the institutions of parliamentary monarchy, political parties and the efforts to modernise at least the new provincial capital Skopje failed to bring much benefit to the population of this region that remained socially and economically backward throughout the following decades.11 Different proposals for granting minority rights in favour of the Bulgarian minority in Yugoslavia were advanced during the Peace Conference.12 Autonomy for Macedonia within Yugoslavia was also considered, but the final versions of the peace treaties failed to envisage any regulations on protection of minorities for this region. Although, to the great satisfaction of Belgrade, the supervisory role of the League of Nations in this issue was avoided, the conflict over Macedonia continued to cause disturbances throughout the interwar period.13 Yugoslav Macedonia remained a region of crisis, the most prominent security question and a cause of unstable bilateral relations with Bulgaria. For the latter state, forgetting the Macedonian problem was impossible. Bulgarian public opinion considered the Paris peace settlement unjust and supported its revision. Numerous refugees from

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Greek and Yugoslav parts of Macedonia, settled in Sofia, maintained this sentiment.14 However, as the only Balkan state that lost World War I, Bulgaria conceived its official foreign policy along the programme of peaceful revision of treaties, in accordance to the Article 19 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Still, it was clear from the beginning that the outcome of this programme was mainly theoretical, as the consent of the neighbouring states to revision was unlikely. Apart from this official position, Bulgarian policy with regard to the Macedonian desiderata changed depending on the government in question. The first postwar Government of Stamboliski attempted to overcome the international isolation through improving relations with Yugoslavia.15 He made serious efforts to suppress the Macedonian organisations and the Macedonians murdered him in revenge. However, after the coup d’e´tat in 1923, the attitude of the Bulgarian governments changed. Therefore, although in the period 1923–34 the Bulgarian official position was prudent and favouring the peaceful revision of treaties, all governments supported the Macedonian organisations more or less openly.16 Therefore, the maintaining of the Macedonian crisis was not due to the official Bulgarian policy, but to the tolerance that the Bulgarian governments manifested toward the repeated cross-border raids of the Macedonian organisations from Bulgaria to the territory of Yugoslavia. In the entire period until 1934, when the Government of Zveno dissolved them, they managed to control the politics in the district of Petrich, close to the Yugoslav border and to levy taxes and organise trafficking of opium in it.17 Their cross-border raids heavily disturbed the stability of Yugoslav Macedonia and managed to keep the bilateral relations between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria permanently unstable. Apart from the support of important political centres in Bulgaria, international political actors also figured among their supporters – including powers of the rank of Italy or the Comintern.18 It is striking that in the interwar period the complicated, multilateral nature of the Macedonian crisis largely disappeared. Until the Balkan Wars, Macedonia was a Turkish possession that became a point of irredentism of the rising national states Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece. After World War I, it was the Yugoslav Macedonia that was in the focus of Bulgarian revisionist activity. Although Bulgaria also had a bilateral issue with Greece with regard to Macedonia, this normally did not amount to the extent of crisis as the bilateral issue between Bulgaria and

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Yugoslavia.19 The common border between the latter two states was probably the most contested one in interwar Europe. It has been asserted that in the period 1919– 34 there were 467 attacks of the ontinuous IMRO’s bands in Yugoslav Macedonia.20 That posed a c security threat for all Yugoslav governments. The variety of solutions conceived, announced and employed in practice to contain the crisis is impressive. Among these solutions, the most dramatic were the occasional plans of the Yugoslav governments to embark on a military intervention against Bulgaria. At least in the first postwar years, military intervention was not conceived solely as a reaction to the real security threat posed by the cross-border raids, but it was also a tool for pressuring Bulgaria to comply with the harsh provisions of the Treaty of Neuilly, c oncerning the reorganisation of the army and the payment of reparations.21 This policy that showed little interest for the newly established mechanisms of collective security was justified with the conduct of the Yugoslav ally France that in 1923 occupied the Ruhr in order to force Germany to pay the reparations. In the case of the Balkans, however, due to the insistence of the British and French diplomacy, Belgrade’s plan to occupy a few districts in Bulgaria, which emerged the same spring, was abandoned.22 On this occasion, the Head of the Military Inter-allied Commission of Control in Sofia, General de Fourtou reported to Mare´chal Foch that if Yugoslavia occupies Bulgarian territory, the consequences would be different to those in the region of the Ruhr: “The fire will be enflamed again on the Balkans.”23 A similar situation occurred after the coup d’e´tat in Bulgaria against the pro-Yugoslav Prime Minister Stamboliski in 1923. During a prolonged Parliamentary session, the opposition required military intervention in Bulgaria, or at least a military demonstration on the Bulgarian border with a pretext that the declaration of mobilisation by the new Bulgarian government was contrary to the provisions of the Treaty of Neuilly.24 Yet, the government remained passive, due to the French pressure. Namely, Mussolini intervened in France in favour of the new Bulgarian government. In addition, Italy and Britain insisted in Belgrade against the military intervention.25 Faced with such diplomatic pressure, the government in Belgrade understood that military intervention may cause its subsequent international isolation. The conflict between the two states was prevented.

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Another example occurred in 1924. As the cross-border raids of IMRO were increasing, the Yugoslav government conceived a plan to direct its army across the Bulgarian border and occupy the strongholds of IMRO, neighbouring the Yugoslav border. It was supposed to remain there until the moment the crisis would be solved in the spirit of the peace treaties and the reconciliatory Nish Agreement, signed by the murdered Stamboliski. Therefore, the Prime Minister Pashich (Pasˇic´) sent a warning circular note to the European capitals. Quickly, Poincare´ warned the Bulgarian diplomatic representative in Paris that in case of such a course of events, nobody would prevent the Yugoslav army.26 On the British side, MacDonald also intervened in favour of Yugoslavia.27 Bulgaria was advised to abandon the Macedonian desiderata and destroy IMRO. Another conflict was prevented. Although, largely due to the insistence of France and Britain and its own calculations to avoid the subsequent isolation, Yugoslavia never embarked on a military intervention in Bulgaria; on a few occasions it expressed its discontent through closing the borders. Such was the example of 1927 when the bands of IMRO organised diversions on the Skopje – Belgrade railway and assassinated the Yugoslav General Kovachevich. The government closed the borders to Bulgaria and warned Sofia of possible consequences. In response, the government of Bulgaria declared a state of emergency in a few districts bordering Yugoslavia. The British and French acted as intermediaries again.28 It is interesting to observe that throughout this period of permanent crisis, the two states maintained official diplomatic relations. In 1921, in the wake of the most violent cross-border raids of IMRO, a decision was reached to raise the diplomatic ranks from the level of charge´s d’affaires to the level of ministers plenipotentiary.29 The diplomatic representatives had the delicate task of maintaining the official positions of their government in the other capital. Diplomatic notes were exchanged, including demarches and even ultimatums. They concerned complaints of the Yugoslav governments on the level of Bulgarian disarmament, payment of reparations and, most of all, the general lack of control over Macedonian agitation. Official Sofia normally denied its involvement and blamed its small army and deplorable conditions in which the Macedonian refugees in Bulgaria lived for their involvement in the crossborder activities. Joint representations of Yugoslavia, Greece and Romania addressed to the Bulgarian government were also frequent.30

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In the spring of 1921, the three states sent joint protests to Sofia with regard to the lack of implementation of the military clauses of the Treaty of Neuilly and the activities of the bands of IMRO.31 Collective notes with similar content were sent to the European capitals as well. However, these multilateral actions should not mask the dominant postwar dynamics of the Macedonian crisis – after the war, it became a predominantly bilateral Bulgarian –Yugoslav issue. The politicians from both sides of the border seemed to retain the hostile attitudes. On the Yugoslav side, one may observe comments referring to “state dishonesty’’32 of Bulgaria. The Prime Minister Pashich refused to meet the Bulgarian Prime Minister Stamboliski, claiming that before any meeting took place, Bulgaria was supposed to prove its loyalty for 10–15 years.33 Few politicians attempted reconciliation. Stamboliski, for example, claimed that he was “neither a Bulgarian, nor a Serb, but Yugoslav (South Slav)’’.34 His attempts to calm the spirits are well-known: “When you take Macedonia, take the Macedonians, as well. They are Slavic Irish.’’35 As a result, he was murdered by the Macedonians and it was a matter of general knowledge that high political circles in Bulgaria were involved in the coup d’e´tat.36 Yet, one may also observe some developments with reconciliatory potential. Apart from the habitual diplomatic channels, high-level meetings were organised between the political leaders of the two states. Negotiations were also initiated, both on political and expert level, and even international agreements concerning mutually acceptable solutions for the Macedonian crisis were signed. Already in May 1921, the Bulgarian Minister of Interior, Alexander Dimitrov, visited Belgrade and assured the Yugoslav government that the cross-border raids would be suppressed.37 As in 1922 the raids continued, the Yugoslav government prepared a warning communique´ for Sofia.38 The Bulgarian government responded with a proposal for the formation of an international commission of inquiry,39 but, to the great satisfaction of Belgrade, the Council of the League of Nations refused it. Namely, the involvement of the League might have posed the question of her poor administration in Macedonia, as well as the minority issues.40 When in November 1922 Stamboliski visited Belgrade, he demonstrated acceptance of the Yugoslav dominance in Macedonia under a condition that the refugees were permitted to return home. On this occasion, he advanced a proposal for a mixed Bulgarian–Yugoslav commission to investigate and regulate the

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raids of IMRO. In March 1923, the so-called Nish Agreement, detailing various aspects of the solution for the Macedonian crisis, was signed.41 Although in the subsequent years the intensity of the crisis did not diminish, another great opportunity for reconciliation occurred when, on Belgrade’s initiative, a mixed Yugoslav –Bulgarian commission of experts continued the work on the basis of the agreement of 1923. In 1930, the so-called Pirot Agreement, regulating the thorny question of border’ supervision, was concluded on a political level. In addition, it was decided that in the cases of IMRO’s incidents, a mixed commission with wide competences would be formed. With some delay, the agreement was ratified.42 The developments that had occurred since the beginning of the 1930s came to culmination when the group “Zveno’’ came to power in Bulgaria in 1934. The new government invested great effort to suppress IMRO and succeeded in destroying this organisation. In itself, this meant improvement in the bilateral relations with Yugoslavia. Cultural diplomacy was supposed to maintain the momentum and exchange of youth organisations followed. The President of Bulgarian “Heroes” visited Belgrade43 and, when the members of the Yugoslav youth organisation “Soko’’ visited Sofia, they were received enthusiastically.44 In this final phase of the crisis, meetings between the two kings were organised, first in secret and later officially. These events, happening before the signing of the Balkan Pact, as well as after it had been concluded, were strongly encouraged by French and British diplomacy. During each of these meetings, the Macedonian crisis was on the agenda.45 However, the years of hostility could not be forgotten. Despite belated efforts on both sides, as is well-known, in 1934 the Balkan Pact was signed – against the Bulgarian revisionism.

European Diplomacy and the Macedonian Crisis As demonstrated above, in the postwar containment of the Macedonian crisis, a crucial role was played by the European powers. All of them had been involved in the Eastern Question in the Balkans and remembered their failure to predict and prevent the Balkan Wars crisis at its early stages. After World War I, the peace treaties gave no reason for the belief that international relations in the Balkans would remain stable. Therefore, France and Britain, the champions of status quo policy, firmly

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decided to prevent and contain any crisis and maintain the borders of 1919. This was a challenging task. France was a Yugoslav ally and initiator of the eastern European chain of treaties known as the Little Entente. Therefore, understandably, she was constantly engaged in the policy of conflict prevention of the Macedonian crisis. As shown above, on numerous occasions, French diplomats reacted in the two capitals to prevent further complications. However, while protecting its ally Yugoslavia, this state was careful not to aggravate the position of Bulgaria and thus encourage its revisionism. Already during the crisis of 1921, the French diplomat Picot announced in Plovdiv that “the time has come for France to take the place of Bulgaria’s old ally Russia”.46 France was also concerned by the rising influence of the Comintern in Bulgaria. In the autumn of 1922, the French embassy in Sofia learnt about secret meetings of the Bulgarian, Soviet and Turkish military where Bulgarians required the Soviet support for territorial modifications in the Balkans. The subsequent French intervention to c alm the Yugoslav – Bulgarian tensions was due to the efforts to prevent the rise of this influence.47 The Foreign Office was also concerned that the destabilisation of the region might influence the precarious status quo in Europe. Nevertheless, unlike France, it did not have “pets” or “foes” in this crisis.48 British interests were confined to maintaining peace by advice and moderating counsels. One may argue that after 1923 and the Treaty of Lausanne, Britain was the postwar “honest broker’’ in the region – warning Bulgaria on the consequences of tolerating IMRO and pressing Yugoslavia to improve its administration in Macedonia in order to keep this region stable.49 Yugoslavia did not follow this policy, but, even if it did, building loyalty through development was a strategy that would require years to bring results and the crisis was immediate. Numerous episodes show that the British diplomacy was aware of the crisis potential. In 1926, after the British learnt that Yugoslavia was prepared to respond to the new attacks of IMRO by invading Bulgaria “to punish the offenders”, the Foreign Office instructed its diplomatic representatives in Sofia and Belgrade to restrain both sides. The British reminded Belgrade of the outcome of the Greek invasion of Bulgaria in 1925. In addition, Bulgarians were warned on the risks of tolerating IMRO.50 On many occasions, it was exactly the same episode of mediation that was repeated.

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The two Allies Britain and France sometimes joined forces to prevent a crisis. In 1927, after several raids and assassinations, when Yugoslavia closed the borders to Bulgaria and warned Sofia of possible consequences, the French and British acted together as intermediaries and the crisis passed.51 In addition, both Britain and France were inclined to help Bulgaria reduce the harsh conditions of the Treaty of Neuilly. Therefore, after the Locarno Treaty was concluded, Bulgaria followed the example of Germany and requested the removal of the Allied military control. Indeed, in August 1927 the Ambassadors’s Conference decided in favour of the Bulgarian request.52 In addition, the Bulgarian request for a loan was supported by Britain, under a condition that the Government of Cankov (Tsankov), responsible for the coup d’e´tat of 1923 would withdraw in favour of a new one.53 However, both of these states refused Bulgarian demands concerning the protection of rights for the Bulgarian minority in Yugoslavia. Namely, they fully supported the Yugoslav position that there was no Bulgarian minority in South Serbia. In addition, they firmly believed that minority rights would gravely contribute to the escalation of crisis. Although in a few situations Italy joined the diplomatic demarches of France and Britain,54 this state was a bitter enemy of Yugoslavia ever since the Adriatic borders were drawn at the Paris Peace Conference.55 Long before Mussolini adopted the policy of opened revisionism, Italy was one of the major supporters of IMRO. It encouraged Bulgarian revisionism and it stood behind the difficulties of the Yugoslav– Bulgarian reconciliation. For example, as Mussolini supported the coup d’e´tat of Cankov and the Macedonians in 1923, the Italian representative in Belgrade wrote to Rome that “the Yugoslav dream about the hegemony over the Balkans is over’’.56 Italy was standing in the way of the French and British Balkan policy with much greater success than Comintern, which in 1924 almost managed to use Macedonian discontent for its own aims of revolution – a course of action that caused great alarm to Paris and London.57 Yet, conflict prevention went further than the simple calming of the acute crisis. Bilateral negotiations were encouraged, although the desired participation of Bulgaria in the Balkan Pact in the mid-1930s sadly failed, therefore greatly diminishing the apparent success of Britain and France in containing the crisis. In that sense, we may recall the events from 1925, when Chamberlain attempted to initiate a Balkan Locarno

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and agreed on that issue with Mussolini. Among the reasons for the Yugoslav refusal of this initiative, the conflicts with Bulgaria over the raids of IMRO were the first to be mentioned.58 In January 1926, after the new Government of Ljapcev, a Macedonian from Resen, was formed in Bulgaria, the British opened the issue of a Balkan Locarno again, but without success.59 In 1929, when after a Macedonian provocation the Yugoslavs refused to ratify the Pirot Agreement, in an already established triangle, Bulgaria addressed Britain and France to require an international commission to settle the opened issues between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. The British and French urged the Yugoslav Foreign Minister Marinkovic in favour of the ratification. It was their insistence that made Marinkovic agree to ratification – in his own confession to Sir Eric Drummond.60 Even in the course of the preparation of the Balkan Entente, France and Britain were encouraging negotiations. In August 1933, French diplomacy encouraged both the Prime Minister Mushanov and King Boris to negotiate with Yugoslavia.61 On the British side, apart from the Foreign Office, even King George V advised the Bulgarian King toward close relations with Yugoslavia.62 When the meeting occurred indeed, King Boris assured King Alexander that he had no responsibility for the actions of the Macedonians. King Alexander answered: “that can be believed in Paris and London, but between two Balkan rulers there can be no mistake in the knowledge on the history of komitadji”.63 Yet, this was not at all an accurate comment – Paris and London, it seems, knew a lot on Balkan issues, including the fact that Bulgaria was not prepared to give up its Macedonian desiderata. The well-known historian A.J.P. Taylor commented that the Conference of Ambassadors working during the Balkan Wars was, in appearance, a striking demonstration of the Concert of Europe.64 In the postwar containment of the Macedonian crisis, it is impossible to detect anything resembling the Concert of Europe, even in the appearance. The international system of two alliances, emerging in the decades before World War I was also absent. In the post-Versailles Europe, the international system of collective security existed. The newly established League of Nations was a formal international organisation founded with an aim to implement the new political principles of collective security and collective action toward the aggressor. The protection of minority rights, co-relative of the principle of self-determination, was among its competences. Yet, surprisingly, this body refused to be

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involved and rejected the numerous demands on minority protection of the Macedonian organisations. Bulgaria was also interested to attract the attention of the League with regard to this issue, but in vain.65 As we mentioned above, in 1922 the Council of the League refused its demand for an international commission of inquiry into the border incidents. In 1928, Italy was encouraging Bulgaria to open the minority question in the League of Nations again. This time, the main Bulgarian argument was supposed to be that the population of Macedonia was not Serbian at all. According to it, only if the Belgrade regime in Macedonia disappeared might the terrorist raids disappear as well.66 At the same time, had this issue ended up on the agenda of the League of Nations, the border disturbances performed by the bands of IMRO would have weakened the Bulgarian position. As the initiative failed, Bulgaria could safely rely only on Article 19 of the Covenant on the peaceful revisions of the treaties, but this was a clearly unlikely solution for her desiderata. For the Yugoslav side, raising the issue of the security threat in front of the League of Nations was risky for two reasons. First, Italy, a Yugoslav enemy, supported the Bulgarians and it would insist against the Yugoslav claims. Secondly, any League of Nations inquiry commission may have drawn the attention of the League organs to the opening of the issue of minority protection. Therefore, some politicians, such as Jovan M. Jovanovic, prudently criticised the Government of Pashich for his intention to internationalise this problem in the League of Nations in 1922.67 This comment reveals the essence of both the reality of the postwar Europe and Yugoslav– Bulgarian relations: this sort of crime is an internal thing . . . The Belgrade Government should send the necessary forces to clean the territory from the foreign bands and to destroy their nests in Custendil and Dupnica. In case it proves to be necessary to enter the Bulgarian territory during the expulsion of bands, it should be done. However, opening this question through diplomatic means – that was a grave mistake which, in the interest of the unity of the state should be avoided by all means.68 In other words, the raids of the IMRO bands clearly hurt the sovereignty of the Yugoslav state. The recourse to the system of collective security

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would, theoretically, support Yugoslav sovereignty and impose sanctions on Bulgaria. However, posing the question at such an international forum may also open the most undesirable issue – the legitimacy of Yugoslav rule in Macedonia. The serious opening of its legitimacy or revision of borders was not likely, but the rules on minority rights as a corollary of the principle of self-determination may have been imposed. Even more so, because the conduct of administration in the south was remarkably bad. Therefore, she stayed away from the League of Nations and accepted the more traditional diplomatic means – the interventions of the allied states – France and Britain. Comparison with other cases when the League of Nations was involved in Balkan international politics may be useful. A commission appointed by the League of Nations supervised the exchange of minorities69 and its Financial Committee approved the Bulgarian claim to a loan to settle refuges in 1926. In 1925, the Permanent Court of International Justice, established with the Covenant of the League of Nations, gave its opinion on the thorny issue of the Yugoslav – Albanian border.70 The Macedonian crisis whose main components were minority rights and the security threats seemed to correspond with the agenda of the League of Nations. There were, elsewhere in the Balkans, two major incidents of violating borders: the Corfu crisis of 1923 and the Petritch incident of 1925. In both of these cases, the incidents began due to the actions of unofficial armed persons – just like in the case of the bands of IMRO. During the Corfu crisis (and the subsequent Italian intervention in Greece), the League of Nations was powerless, but in the case of the Greek occupation of Petrich under General Pangalos, Greece was due to pay a sum to Bulgaria.71 These cases showed that the League of Nations may be efficient only if no state with a power to veto had an interest in the issue. In the Macedonian crisis, it was clear in advance that France and Italy would keep opposite sides, therefore making the intervention of the League of Nations impossible.72

Conclusions The above analysis attempted to concentrate as much as possible on the diplomatic means employed to contain the Macedonian crisis. For that reason, we neither elaborated the wider issue of maintaining the status

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quo in the Balkans, nor the intricacies of international relations in Europe. Our analysis shows the following: There is no doubt that the origin of the Macedonian crisis can be found in the late stages of the Eastern Question and in the decisions of the Treaty of Bucharest. It is also clear that both France and Britain were fully aware of the failure of European diplomacy in 1912 to contain the crisis and they remained active with regard to this issue throughout the postwar period. Yet, the importance of 1913 remains there. Even though in 1914 Bulgaria sided against Serbia and its entente allies, it is the Bulgarian defeat in 1918 that determined the postwar situation. That is true both with regard to international law (the peace treaty provisions) and international relations. Therefore, all of the involved actors observed the Macedonian crisis in the context of the fragile postwar Europe. It is this order that determined the interests of the states toward observation of the status quo or revisionism. It is interesting that the involvement of the League of Nations on this issue remained minimal. The crisis was completely contained with traditional diplomatic methods, completely outside the new framework of collective security and minority protection. It is necessary, however, to attempt to observe these methods against the background of the wider trends in the history of the international relations. It is evident that in this period there was neither a revived Concert of Europe, nor anything similar to the pre-war system of international relations based on the European alliances. Yet, the apparent avoiding of the instruments of collective security opens the question of the nature of the diplomacy that was actually employed. In the Balkans, both Yugoslavia and Bulgaria seemed to prefer negotiations, although, with few exceptions, none of them was ready for concessions. On many occasions, both sides showed a willingness to deviate from the status quo policy – Bulgaria through its more or less apparent revisionism and the encouraging of IMRO and Yugoslavia through the willingness to defend its territorial possessions by military means. In both of these choices, recent history and political culture played a role. Among the European powers, France and Britain were the most eager to protect the status quo. Nevertheless, if they did not act through a concert, alliance or collective security – how did they act? Firstly, it should not be forgotten that they did form a part of the pre-war entente powers and that they remained allies after the war (without Russia).

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Secondly, the nature of the collective security mechanisms was specific. It implied that, for example, in the Council of the League of Nations the winning states had permanent seats, while the losing states did not even become members for many years. In this way, these states were in a position to decide where and when the collective security mechanisms should or should not be applied. It was shown above that they did not consider these mechanisms suitable for the containment of the Macedonian crisis, due to the Italian–French divide on the issue. Therefore, they confined themselves to the basic methods of diplomacy, understood purely as negotiating among states. This traditional diplomatic activity had been employed by the European powers already in the Eastern Question and it had already permitted them to influence many crises. It encompassed a high level of involvement in the regional politics through maintaining a quality diplomatic service that was wellinformed, c onstant c ommunication between the foreign affairs ministries and the chain of embassies, ability to detect early signs that a crisis might arise, to mediate, encourage negotiations and warn the party that was likely to disturb the peace on the consequences. Therefore, we may conclude that being an obvious deflection from the principles of collective security, this diplomacy is also an argument in favour of those who claim that the history of international relations has an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary development. Interestingly, after World War II, the international system anchored around the United Nations proclaimed the new principles of preventive diplomacy. To this day, the methods of preventive diplomacy are a growing field of research and practice and yet, many concepts that it has introduced, such as early warning mechanisms, mediation and encouraging negotiations, seem to recall times past. It is even more interesting that this toolbox of preventive diplomacy mechanisms lived its true momentum throughout the Balkan crisis since the 1990s. Sir Edward Grey might not be surprised.

Notes 1. Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-five Years: 1892–1916 (London, 1925), vol. 1, p. 263. 2. Le Petit Mourre: Dictionnaire d’histoire universelle (Bordas, 2004), pp. 967 and 1344 and further.

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3. All standard accounts on Balkan history encompass an analysis of the major events concerning the Macedonian problem. See, for example, Mark Mazower, The Balkans: A Short History (Modern Library Chronicles, 2002), pp. 98 – 106. Nevertheless, the titles in English on modern history of Macedonia are extremely rare. See, for example, Duncan M. Perry, The Politics of Terror: The Macedonian Liberation Movements 1893 – 1903 (Durham and London, 1988), pp. 1 – 30. 4. The European diplomacy during the Balkan Wars has been subject of much research. The classical account is: E.C. Helmreich, The Diplomacy of the Balkan Wars 1912– 1913 (Cambridge, MA, 1938). 5. Unlike in the case of history of Macedonia, it is possible to obtain a few titles on Albanian history in English. See, for example: Miranda Vickers, The Albanians: A Modern History (London and New York, 2006). 6. More on the Paris Peace Conference in: J. Ivo Lederer, Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference (New Haven and London, 1963). 7. See: Histoire des Relations Internationales (Paris, 1958), vol. 3, pp. 415– 596. 8. On the specific position of Greece in the first postwar years, see: Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 92– 9. 9. The official name was “Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes” until 1929, when it was renamed “Kingdom of Yugoslavia”. In the further text, we will refer to it as “Yugoslavia” – the unofficial name that was widely used in the diplomatic correspondence since the beginning of the inter-war period. 10. The historical arguments in favour of the Serbian rule in Macedonia, in P. Popovic, Serbian Macedonia: A Historical Survey (London, 1926); T.R. Georgevic, Macedonia (London, 1918). 11. A balanced modern account by a Serbian historian: Jovanovic Vladan, Jugoslovenska drzava i Juzna Srbija 1918– 1929 (The Yugoslav State and Southern Serbia 1918– 1929) (Beograd, 2002). There is a valuable and recent account on this problem in German: Nada Boskovska, Das jugoslawische Makedonien 1918– 1941. Eine Randregion zwischen Repression und Integration (Vienna, 2009). 12. On the Macedonian question at the Paris Peace Conference see: Lederer, Yugoslavia, pp. 239 – 40, p. 248. 13. Determining the nationality of the Macedonian population has been called “the philosopher’s stone’’ of Balkan nationalism and “the most baffling puzzle of modern identity on the entire peninsula’’. See the account of Misha Glenny, The Balkans 1804 – 1999: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers (London, 1999), p. 156 and further. Many historians insist on the Bulgarian nationality of this population. See, for example, Kostadin Paleshutski, Makedonskiot Vpros v Burzoazna Yugoslavia 1918 – 1941 (The Macedonian Question in the Yugoslavia Bourgoise) (Sofia, 1983). The historiography of the Republic of Macedonia argues in favour of the distinct Macedonian nationality. See, for example, Istorija na Makedonskiot narod (History of the Macedonian People) (Skopje, 1969), vol. 3. An interesting account in English concerning this issue: Andrew Rossos, “The British Foreign Office and

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14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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Macedonian National Identity 1918 – 1941’’, Slavic Review, 53:2 (Summer 1994). R. Crampton, A Short History of Modern Bulgaria (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 87, 92. John D. Bell, Peasants in Power: Alexander Stamboliski and the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union 1899– 1923 (Princeton, NJ, 1977), pp. 184– 207 and 208 –41. Crampton, A Short History of Modern Bulgaria, pp. 96– 114. There were numerous Macedonian organisations, but the one that was performing the cross-border raids and assassinations was the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO). See, V. Popovski, L. Zila, Makedonskoto prasanje vo dokumentite na Kominternata (The Macedonian Question in the Documents of the Cominterne) (Skopje, 1999), vols 1 and 2; and C.J. Lowe and F. Marzari, Italian Foreign Policy 1870– 1940 (London, 1975). Classical account in English: Ladas Stephen, The Exchange of Minorities: Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey (New York, 1932). A recent title: E. Kontogiorgi, Population Exchange in Greek Macedonia: The Rural Settlement of Refugees 1922–1930 (Oxford, 2006). V. Jovanovic, The Yugoslav State, p. 194. W.N. Medlicott et al. (eds), Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919– 1939, First Series, Vol. 22 (London, 1980), Document No. 113: Sir A. Young to Earl Curzon, Belgrade, 21 April 1921 (No. 206 C 8553/7967/92), pp. 137–8. W.N. Medlicott et al. (eds), Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919– 1939, First Series, Vol. 22, Document No. 124: Earl Curzon to Lord Hardinge (No. 211 Telegraphic C 8592/6412/7), Foreign Office, 29 April 1921, p. 154 and Document No. 136: Sir A. Peel to Earl Curzon (No. 173 C 10162/6412/7), Sofia, 12 May 1921, pp. 167 – 8. Emil Aleksandrov (ed.), Istoria na Blgarite, vol. 4: Blgarskata diplomacia ot drevnosta do nasi dni (History of the Bulgarians, vol. 4: Bulgarian Diplomacy since Ancient Times until Today) (Trud, 2003), p. 362. SBNS (Minutes of the National Assembly), XIV regular meeting, 18 June 1923, pp. 626, 627, 634. SBNS, XIV regular meeting, 18 June 1923, p. 628. E. Aleksandrov (ed.), History of the Bulgarians, p. 373. F.O. 371/10797, C/6696/6696/92, No. 150. Conf. 12781 Annual Report for 1924, Kingdom SCS, Sir A. Young to A. Chemberlain, Belgrade, 12 May 1925. Kenneth Bourne and D. Cameron Watt (eds), British Documents on Foreign Affairs, Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print, University Publications of America. See: Christopher Seton-Watson (ed.), From the First to the Second World War, Part II, Series F, Vol. 7: Doc. 219 (C 157/42/7) Mr. Dodd to Sir A. Chamberlain, Sofia, 5 January 1928, pp. 289– 91 and Doc. 222 (C 169/42/7) Sir a Chamberlain to Mr Dodd, Foreign Office, 16 January 1928, pp. 295 –6. V. Jovanovic, The Yugoslav State, p. 150.

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30. Romania was c oncerned because of the activities of the Dobrudjan organisation. After World War I, IMRO organised cross-border raids in Greece, as well. However, their frequency and scale cannot be compared with the ac tivities performed on the Yugoslav territory. 31. W.N. Medlicott et al. (eds), Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919– 1939, First Series, Vol. 22, Document No. 104: Sir A. Peel to Earl Cuirzon (No. 129 C 7960/6412/7), Sofia, 14 April 1921, pp. 125 – 6. 32. ASANU (Archive of the Serbian Academy on Science and Art), No. 10081, Macedonian problem. 33. V. Jovanovic, The Yugoslav State, p. 150. 34. V. Jovanovic, The Yugoslav State, p. 151. 35. V. Jovanovic, The Yugoslav State, p. 151. 36. W.N. Medlicott et al. (eds), Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919– 1939, First Series, Vol. 25, Mr Erskine to Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, No. 138, Sofia, 14 June 1923, Document No. 427, pp. 713 – 18. 37. W.N. Medlicott et al. (eds), Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919– 1939, First Series, Vol. 22, Document No. 166, Sir A. Young to Earl Curzon, no. 275 (C 11773/6412/7), Belgrade, 2 June 1921, p. 201. 38. V. Jovanovic, The Yugoslav State, pp. 150 – 1. 39. D. Todorovic, Jugoslavija i balkanske drzave 1918– 1923 (Yugoslavia and the Balkan States 1918– 1923) (Beograd, Narodna Knjiga, Institut za savremenu istoriju, 1979), p. 166. 40. Todorovic, Yugoslavia and the Balkan States, p. 169. 41. Politika (Politics), 5358 (24 March 1923). 42. Kenneth Bourne and D. Cameron Watt (eds), British Documents on Foreign Affairs, Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print, University Publications of America. See: Christopher Seton-Watson (ed.), From the First to the Second World War, Part II, Series F, Vol. 8, Document 37 (C 2162/197/7) Mr Kennard to Sir Austin Chamberlain, Belgrade, 20 March 1929, pp. 43– 5 and Doc. 120 (C 1699/82/7) Mr Waterlow to Mr A. Henderson, Sofia, 27 February 1930 and Inclosure (Doc. 121), pp. 169 – 71. 43. “Nj. V. Kralj Boris odlikovao je pretstavnike naseg sokolarstva” (“His Majesty King Boris has given medals to the representatives of our Sokols’’), in Politika, 9737 (1 July 1935). 44. “Slovenske manifestacije u Sofiji” (“Slavic Manifestations in Sofia’’), in Politika (15 July 1935). 45. Vasil Guzelev et al. (eds), Car Boris III v britanskata diplomaticeska korespondencia 1919– 1941 (Tzar Boris III in the British Diplomatic Correspondence 1919– 1941), vol. 1: 1919– 1934 (Sofia, 2005), “Sv. Kl. Ohridski’’. See Documents No. 128, 129, 130, 135, 136, 137. 46. E. Aleksandrov (ed.), History of the Bulgarians, p. 362. 47. E. Aleksandrov (ed.), History of the Bulgarians, p. 365. 48. Dimitris Livanios, “A Loveless Entanglement: Britain and Bulgar-Yugoslav Relations, 1924– 1943’’, Balkan Studies, 39:1 (1998), p. 132.

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49. D. Livanios, A Loveless Entanglement, pp. 129, 131. This opinion seems to be shared by Zivojin Lazic, Head of Public Security. See: Radnik (Worker), 81 (1923), p. 3. 50. D. Livanios, A Loveless Entanglement, p. 128. 51. F.O. 371/12864, C4652, Annual Report on Bulgaria, dated 17 June 1928; V. Jovanovic, The Yugoslav State, p. 156; Emil Aleksandrov (ed.), History of the Bulgarians, p. 392. 52. E. Aleksandrov (ed.), History of the Bulgarians, p. 389. 53. E. Aleksandrov (ed.), History of the Bulgarians, pp. 387 – 8. 54. F.O. 371/12864, C4652, Annual Report on Bulgaria, dated 17 June 1928. 55. I. Lederer, Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference, pp. 54– 78, 246– 309. 56. Vinaver Vuk, Jugoslavija i Francuska izmedju dva svetska rata (Yugoslavia and France between the World Wars) (Institut za savremenu istoriju, 1985), p. 55. 57. On the weak Yugoslav – Bulgarian efforts to counter the Communist threat, F.O. 371/10797, C/6696/6696/92, No 150, Conf. 12781. Annual Report (1924), A. Young to A. Chemberlein, 12 May 1925. 58. E. Aleksandrov (ed.), History of the Bulgarians, p. 386. 59. E. Aleksandrov (ed.), History of the Bulgarians, p. 387. 60. D. Livanios, A Loveless Entanglement, p. 129. 61. E. Aleksandrov (ed.), History of the Bulgarians, p. 402. 62. E. Aleksandrov (ed.), History of the Bulgarians, p. 402. 63. E. Aleksandrov (ed.), History of the Bulgarians, p. 404. 64. A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848– 1918 (Oxford, 1991), p. 494. 65. D. Livanios, A Loveless Entanglement, pp. 132 – 3. 66. V. Jovanovic, The Yugoslav State, p. 157. 67. V. Jovanovic, The Yugoslav State, p. 151. 68. V. Jovanovic, The Yugoslav State, p. 151, f. 21. 69. S. Ladas, The Exchange of Minorities, pp. 49 – 74. 70. J. Swire, Albania: The Rise of a Kingdom (London, 1929), pp. 441– 2. 71. James Barros, “The Greek-Bulgarian Incident of 1925’’, in Joel Larus (ed.), From Collective Security to Preventive Diplomacy (New York, London and Sydney, 1965), pp. 57 – 91. 72. J. Barros, The Greek – Bulgarian Incident of 1925, pp. 57– 91.

CHAPTER 10 BETWEEN FACTS AND INTERPRETATIONS: THREE IMAGES OF THE BALKAN WARS OF 1912—13 Enika Abazi

A century after the Balkan Wars of 1912 – 13 there is a widely held opinion that they represent an important moment in the political history of the Balkan states. Images of the Balkan Wars were revived during the brutal dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In many of the books, articles and reports written at this time the ghosts of past Balkan wars were paraded uncritically before a watching world. The “spiciest” examples, mainly taken from the Carnegie Report of 1914, reprinted with a new introduction (Kennan 1993), were repeatedly reproduced, especially those concerning ethnic hatred, ethnic cleansing, massacres, violence against women and children, torture of prisoners, deportation of civil populations, destruction of towns and villages, and the plight of refugees. The purpose of invoking the 1912 – 13 Balkan Wars for a present-day audience was to bridge the two extremes of the twentieth century in order to “better understand the roots of Balkan passions” (Kennan 1993, 13, Kaplan 1993) as if the old Balkan Wars had guaranteed the subsequent tragedy in the 1990s. The very “repetitiveness” of the practices associated with the wars of 1912 – 13 appeared to reveal legacies that still influenced the ways in

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which politics, behaviour, and affairs of states and people are conducted in the Balkans. The Balkan “blight”, endlessly produced and reproduced, keeps alive a “Balkanist” discourse, in Maria Todorova’s terms (1997, 17–20). On the one hand, at the beginning of the wars of the 1990s, this discourse legitimised humanitarian and military interventions, and the recognition of seceding republics (Kissinger 1999). On the other, it “re-Balkanised Southeast Europe and revived old Western stereotypes about the Balkans and Balkanisation” (Simic´ 2013, 114), thus hardening ideas about the Balkan barbarian “other” as inherently violent, backward, uncivilised and unable to transform (Hannsen 2006, 152). The same ideas can be traced back to the writings of travellers, diplomats, poets and journalists since the early nineteenth century. In both cases, writers were “intrigued by and attracted to the simple, yet passionate, Balkan Romantic Other” (Hannsen 2006, 151, see also Todorova 1997, Goldsworthy 1998, Hammond 2002). This does not mean, however, that the manner in which the wars of 1912 –13 occurred should still have a “presentist” historical attraction; nor should they be a reference point for understanding contemporary events in the region, or for defining strategies and policies towards it. The Balkan Wars have remained a significant subject in the history of the region. Therefore, they deserve a more profound investigation and above all a more analytical approach. This paper does not seek to establish more “reliable” facts about the events on the battlefield and elsewhere, or to argue for the “objective” truth about the “real” causes of war. Instead, I am intrigued by the question, which is more relevant now than ever, of how and why these wars have become a symbolic representation of the region. There are many points at issue: for instance, the supposed continuation of legacies of the past into the present; the ways in which specific accounts of atrocities are interpreted; the ways in which these wars have become the benchmark for “Balkanisation” in the modern world; the degree to which Western observers have equated these wars with the civilisational characteristics of the region; and, last but not least, the relationship between wartime atrocities, moral indignation and the course of international policy. There have been three main approaches to this subject: a realist approach that is focused on power relationships; an idealist or pacifist approach that is based on opposition to war; and a revisionist, humanist

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approach that emphasises “history from below” or the daily life of ordinary peoples. These three accounts will be discussed below in three separate sections. In each case, I do not simply review the facts or the interpretations of the old Balkan Wars. I rather seek to articulate the insights of the former as they relate to the latter. The outcomes of this complex process will be analysed throughout the paper, moving from an overall reflection on how the facts about the wars are selected to a conceptual interpretation of the constitutive factors of dominant narrative and related discursive practices. Ultimately, the discussion is intended to show the extent to which writings about these wars can create and represent another, unsuspected reality.

In the Name of War: The Realist Account The first account of the Balkan Wars may be considered “realist” because of the emphasis on the power struggles and secret diplomacy between European chancelleries and the Balkan states in the context of the “Eastern Question”. In this account the central problem of both European and Balkan politics is power. The use of force is taken as unavoidable in a condition of anarchy where states seek to maximise their power and minimise the ability of others to jeopardise their existence. Among other things, nationalism can be used as a means of mobilising a mass army to increase the military power of the state (Posen 1993). Hence, the First Balkan War of October 1912–May 1913 was fought to force the declining Ottoman Empire to leave the region after almost 500 years, thus providing new strength to competing Balkan states. The Balkan Wars cannot be separated from the broader context of the political, economic, social and cultural conditions arising when nationstates were created across central and eastern Europe. These conditions created a burning feeling of national resentment and a climate extremely favourable to the production of all-encompassing ideological solutions, which led the local intellectual elites to consider nationalism a viable strategy for overcoming their problems (Greenfeld 1992). As an ideology, nationalism started with German romantic resentment in reaction to the universalism underpinning French enlightenment, thus giving birth to pan-Germanism. Paradoxically, the German reactions induced a similar resentment, giving birth to pan-Slavism (Sundhaussen

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1973). Other national elites reacted not only to pan-Germanism but also to pan-Slavism. This was the case with developing forms of NeoHellenism and other competing, mutually exclusive Balkan national ideologies, which from the start were aimed at discovering a glorious ancestry. In the process widespread interest was generated in the exaltation of one’s own national culture and history together with the “scientific” ideal of nation-building. Such movements have been institutionalised in the Balkans, as we see in the case of Albania (Doja 2014), during periods when the need was felt for a project that could specify tasks of “national” importance. This would confirm that there really existed a nation, and that in its pretensions to independent statehood the nation had a continuity of territorial possession and an historical legality or at least cultural legitimacy. The historical inaccuracy of the pretentions is not acknowledged in these projects and it is ideologically stabilised by the idea of the uniform Ideal National State. The nation-building process was inherently painful and destructive. The nation had to be created first in the minds and hearts of the peoples, and the state had to “liberate” and “cleanse” national territory of the polluting “others”. Political violence in the Balkans was shaped by the way in which Balkan states’ elites adopted the ready-made European ideologies of state and nation, while using nationalism as a means in their struggle for power (Jelavich and Jelavich 1977, 216–21). More than anything else, mass violence and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans stemmed from underlying patterns associated with the evolution of the modern European states becoming “national” and working with varying degrees of success to homogenise their societies. This is “the nefarious underside of Western societies since the Enlightenment and the French Revolution”, and as Mark Biondich put it: In the Balkan setting, nationalism has drawn on European models and intellectual stimuli beginning with the Enlightenment. As such, and notwithstanding attempts to typologize the phenomenon, Balkan nationalism has never been unique or original, but merely reflected European trends. . . In the diverse Balkans, where nations were dominated by empires, nationalism characteristically took the form of protest against empire, be it the Ottoman or Habsburg, and developed in a region of remarkable ethnolinguistic multiplicity. This became problematic insofar

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as political and national frontiers were typically incongruent. Nationalism was thus by definition a revolutionary force everywhere in Europe, not least of all in the Balkans. (Biondich 2011, 11) After the expulsion of the Ottoman Empire, political violence continued as an expression of the struggle for power and dominance among the Balkan states. If the First Balkan War was targeted at the division of the spoils of territories once under Ottoman rule, the rush to create the “Great Nation” produced the Second Balkan War of June– July 1913 (Jelavich 1991, Glenny 1999, Hall 2000). What changed were the warring parties, but not the struggle for power. From a realist perspective, both wars were an expression of the same power game. War in this realist logic constitutes a legitimate tool of politics and is even considered as unavoidable in the condition of anarchy. It remains questionable, however, whether the Balkan Wars were an internal byproduct of great power rivalry, or were caused by a combination of both internal and external factors. The Congress of Berlin in 1878, for instance, made decisions of lasting importance for the Balkans. As Stavrianos argues: For the Balkan peoples, then, the Berlin Treaty meant not peace with honour but rather frustration of national aspirations and future wars. The direct and logical outcome of the Berlin settlement was the Serbian-Bulgarian war of 1885, the Bosnian crisis of 1908, the two Balkan wars of 1912– 13, and the murder of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in 1914. (Stavrianos 2000, 393, 412) Following the realist argument, states try to maximise their power unilaterally by developing their military strength, or by creating alliances with other states to counterbalance the most powerful. Hence, the newly created states in the Balkans, competing for the supremacy of each one’s “great” nation, built alliances with each other and with the great powers of the continent (Hanotaux 1914, Albrecht-Carrie´ 1973, Jelavich 1991). In international politics the use of alliances to gain power to counter adversaries and consolidate states’ existence is considered normal. This is a multidimensional process where states use others as they are, in turn, used by the fittest in the system. It is understandable, therefore, that the new Balkan states were also used by

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the European powers and the result has not been always as expected. In this context, each Balkan state was looking for association with one or another European power (Seton-Watson 1937, 555), mainly through intensive secret diplomacy to which Henry Kissinger attributes a causal role in starting wars (Kissinger 1995). Ultimately, the Balkan states became both actors in the European balance of power as well as players in a secondary balance of power between themselves. The First Balkan War came as a surprise to the European chancelleries, although ultimately welcomed and hailed with enthusiasm: at least the old “Eastern Question” would be resolved. However, Arnold Toynbee argued that this was in fact a “Western Question” (Toynbee 1922), as it was in French, British and Russian interests to weaken Ottoman power and to use the Balkan states as a barrier against German and AustriaHungarian penetration into the Balkans and Asia Minor. The European powers cleverly exploited the nationalist aspirations of Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece in respect of the Ottoman Balkan territories, so as to entangle them in a proxy war. Austria-Hungary, for instance, had no special authority to intervene in the division of these territories between the Balkan states that invoked the right of conquest to compensate their enormous sacrifices. However, the proposal for an independent Albania, presented by Vienna, aimed at stripping the Montenegrins, Serbians, and Greeks of the main results of their victories. In turn, while the other European powers were already conceding the principle of an autonomous Albania to Austria-Hungary, it was obvious that this Albania would be restricted in size in order to reconcile Austrian preferences with the rights of the victorious Balkan powers. If Austria-Hungary was more or less supported in its ambitions by Germany and Italy, the Balkan states had France, Britain and Russia as their natural supporters. As Asquith, the British Prime Minister proclaimed on 9 November 1912: “The victorious shouldn’t be deprived of such an expensive victory” (quoted in: Kolev and Koulouri 2005, 98).1 The decline of Ottoman power in the late nineteenth century opened the way to the competition of European powers for control and influence in the Balkans as elsewhere. If we consider the situation from a realist perspective, this was essential from the viewpoint of preparation for the impending European war. Indeed, according to several historical accounts, from the end of the nineteenth century onward the European rivalries grew more bitter and finally exploded in 1914, with the Balkan Wars

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being only a verifying test (Bridge 1972, Crampton 1979, Rossos 1981, Jelavich 1991, Hall 2000). As Leon Trotsky wrote from the Balkan front in March 1913, these wars “have not only destroyed the old frontiers in the Balkans”, they have also “lastingly disturbed the equilibrium between the capitalist states of Europe” (Trotsky 1980, 314). According to neorealist predictions (Waltz 1979), as long as the equilibrium fails to be established war has to be expected, and as Richard Hall put it: The Balkan Wars of 1912 –1913 occurred because of the determination of the Balkan states to resolve their issues of national unity in the face of the weakness of the Ottoman Empire and the opposition of the Great Powers. By 1912 the Great Powers, who had maintained peace in the Balkan Peninsula since 1878 through the mechanism of the Berlin settlement, lacked the determination to enforce it when confronted by Balkan unity. Because of this failure they would find themselves at war within two years. (Hall 2000, 21) Such a realist account of the Balkan Wars illustrates the endemic result of anarchy, in which destruction and violence are simply a common – but not deliberate – by-product of states’ quest for survival. In this regard any wars, be they in the Balkans, Europe or elsewhere, are all the same regarding their causes and outcomes. Accordingly, the ethical and moral questions of war should be subordinated to the superior logic of “patria” and “national interest” as the principal raison d’eˆtre for all states in the international system. This account of war tends to lose sight of the social consequences of conflict. Worse, they are considered to be natural. To avoid the pitfall of realist accounts of war, a systematic analysis of war’s social impact is necessary. That is why idealist ideas came into being and encouraged a movement in the name of peace from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Therefore, social effects became an important part of the narratives of war.

In the Name of Peace: The Idealist Account The period from 1856 to 1909 can be considered as the “epoch of highest repute” (Best 1980, 129) for the pacifist movement. At its core was the idea of “an unconditional rejection of all forms of warfare” (Brock and

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Socknat 1999, ix), an assumption that was based on the moral and ethical values of human society. At the heart of pacifist ideas and practice, as Brian Orend put it, was the conviction that “there are no moral grounds which can justify resorting to war. War . . . is always wrong” (Orend 2000, 145–6). This period also witnessed a number of conventions and declarations that attempted to codify the reason for states to engage in war ( jus ad bellum), to impose limits of conduct in wartime ( jus in bello), and to create institutions to manage and arbitrate the disputes among states, like the Court of Arbitration established in Hague in 1899 (Schindler and Toman 2004, 22–34). Even though “pacifism and just war ideas are incommensurable (the former banning war and the latter justifying limited war)”, they “share a common starting point: a moral presumption against the use of force” (Cooper 1991, 16). In principle, it can be argued that the pacific movement must have encouraged a social, legal and politically idealist account of war, entirely different in focus and purpose from the predominant pessimist and cynical realist approach. In a realist account the relationship between war and civilians as a subject of war is either ignored or considered as collateral damage, which must be minimised but which is unavoidable. By contrast, in the new approach, the centrality of civilians must be shown in the narrative of war and strong media coverage must be carefully given to this narrative, which is expected to result in the abolition or the control of war. The international survey of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1913 and the Report published in 1914 on the Balkan Wars provides an excellent example of writing about war from a moral and legal idealist point of view. Contrary to some interpretations, the aim of the Carnegie Report was not the study of the causes of the Balkan Wars, which remains the primacy of a realist perspective. Rather, the overall purpose of the Carnegie Report owed much more to the ideas of the endowment’s founder, Andrew Carnegie. His aspiration was above all to “hasten the abolition of international war, the foulest blot upon our civilization” (Finch 1944, 214). Nicholas Murray Butler, the director of Endowment at that time, perfectly in compliance with Carnegie’s own ambitions, clearly stated the purpose of the Report: to inform public opinion and to make plain just what is or may be involved in an international war carried on under modern

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conditions. If the minds of men can be turned even for a short time away from passion, from race antagonism and from national aggrandizement to a contemplation of the individual and national losses due to war and to the shocking horrors which modern warfare entails, a step and by no means a short one, will have been taken toward the substitution of justice for force in the settlement of international differences. It was with this motive and for this purpose that the Division of Intercourse and Education of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace constituted in July, 1913, an International Commission of Inquiry to study the recent Balkan wars. (Carnegie 1914, Preface) Founded in 1910 the Carnegie Endowment was a non-governmental organisation zealously engaged in the pacifist movement. Its objectives were the promotion of international public awareness, by providing evidence and information about the effects of war on civilian population, and support of international laws and organisations for the arbitration and peaceful settlement of disputes among states. The best way to support these goals was to give compelling examples. Indeed, it can be argued that the purpose of Carnegie Endowment was not to point to the Balkans as an exceptional case, but to find a specific case in the Balkan Wars in order to expose the wrongdoings of secret diplomacy and power games leading to wars. This would induce sufficient indignation either to prompt humanitarian intervention or to encourage the creation of international legislation on the treatment of civilians in war and on the limitation of the political and socioeconomic implications of war. Given the connection of the Carnegie Endowment to the pacifist movement, it is not surprising that the Carnegie Commission operated as an effective and active advocate of the idealist means used by pacifist movements to either abolish or control war. There was, for instance, a high degree of consensus among the members of the Commission about the facts to be collected and the ideas to be disseminated. The membership of the Carnegie Commission represented a network of professionals with recognised expertise in the legal aspects of war and in the Balkans, seriously involved in the activism of the pacific movement.2 The Report was intended to act as a means of teaching and helping states to better identify their own interest, in favour of moral norms rather than political violence and war.

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The empirical evidence published in the Report of 1914 was based on fieldwork observations, reports of torture from civilian witnesses and victims, and the inspection of destroyed villages, religious sites and mass graves. This was a new method of inquiry in international relations, apparently influenced by the ethnographic methods used in sociology and anthropology. However, accounts of violence in war were converted into a normative account of war, reported as instances of violations of laws and customs of war.3 This clearly shows the idealist way in which the story of the 1912 – 13 Balkan Wars was put in writing and offered to the public in order to further the pacifist agenda. Pacifist activists saw that making public the tragic story of war was an important means of persuasion. The most obvious way to advance this approach was through the exposure of war to close scrutiny by civilian reporters. A public debate was expected to replace secret diplomacy and pressurise governments to give up their engagement in wars. The expectation was to move from a world of the “initiated” to a “pedagogy of public opinion”, which is considered to be crucial for the pacification of international society (Dzovinar 2008, 14). The mechanism at work seems to be the ancient Greek political model of Polis, where the exercise of power is a property of the body of citizens rather than of a small oligarchy (Vernant 1981, 42– 5; 97– 9). The community of citizens would be empowered to control war, while the best way to achieve this purpose was to make public the necessary information in a welldocumented and convincing form. Following this logic, the collection of this “evidence” was the main objective of the Carnegie Endowment’s International Commission of Inquiry. Abundant evidence of the “atrocities” in the First and Second Balkan Wars was reported by the press (Sipcanov 1983). The Carnegie Report itself was released in both French and English versions. A press release was sent in May 1914 to no less than 1,250 newspapers around the world, advertising the publication of the Report in print and copies of it were sent upon request. The main purpose of this press release was not to miss the “psychological moment, both here [in the Balkans] and abroad” (quoted in Akhund 2012).4 However, by publicising atrocities of the Balkan Wars “as a lasting testimony to the kind of hell-on-earth that only humans can create”, the Report added nothing to war reporting since the mid-nineteenth century (Moorcraft and Taylor 2008, 4). This kind of

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reporting was exemplified by the Times correspondent William Howard Russell sending first-hand dispatches from the front line of the Crimean War (1853–6), which engaged public sensitivities and triggered the fall of Lord Aberdeen’s government. This clearly showed how the political establishment might become aware that provoking public anger and dissent could have unintended consequences and may, in turn, impose changes to state policies. The Carnegie Report, like other war reports, arguably promoted a specific reading of the painful “truth” resulting from wars – a “truth” about barbarism and the reign of violence. The Report appeared in several countries as an exceptional document of the time providing a new definition for international affairs and contributing to the foundations of modern international cooperation. As part of an organised strategy to document the atrocities and outrages of war, which was designed to persuade a sceptical international public about the irrationality of war and to show political responsibility for the prolonged hostilities in the Balkans, the Report succeeded in promoting the peace movement. Arguably, the Report encouraged efforts for codifying international behaviour and especially enabled international humanitarian law for settling international disputes through arbitration and conciliation. Hence, the ideas advanced in the Report played a crucial role in creating the shared understanding toward a practice of war control. These ideas were finally embodied in the Charter of the League of Nations and the Kellogg– Briand Pact outlawing war, both signed in Paris in 1920 and 1928 respectively. Nevertheless, the Carnegie account of the Balkan Wars cannot be separated from a broader historical and political context in which the communist movement and its activism against war emerged as another kind of pacifism, which favoured but one war, the proletarian revolution, as the only means to liberate the oppressed peoples and human society as a whole from war (Cooper 1991, 28). In this context, many socialist groups and political movements within the Balkans, even though often alienated and overlooked, also strongly opposed the official policies of the Balkan governments leading to war, along similar lines to the activism of European pacifist movements. Sometimes their pacifism and antimilitarism originated from different ideological motivations, not necessarily related to a nature of war as a type of governmental coercion of the working class for the benefit of capitalist elites.

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On the eve of the outbreak of war, the Social Democrats were one of the most well-organised political groups that mobilised activity against the war in most of the Balkan countries (Kolev and Koulouri 2005, 45– 7). The Congresses of the Serbian Social Democratic Party and the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers Party both took place in 1912 under the banner of the struggle against war and the call for a peaceful settlement of national problems. In September of the same year, they organised rallies and mass meetings against the war in Belgrade, Sofia, Thessaloniki, and Bucharest that showed the solidarity between all Balkan socialists (Damianova 1989, 69). During the years of war, sections of the socialist parties in the Balkans worked as a joint political force for peace and opposed the war policies and the political violence of their governments (Stavrianos 1964, 182– 90, Haupt 1972, 56 –82). They even went so far as to propose a joint solution to the separate national problems by peaceful and democratic means. They opted for the idea of a Balkan federation or alliance presented as the general solution to the political and social problems of south-east European countries. The media of the time covered the idea of a Balkan Alliance supported by the meetings of Serbian and Bulgarian youth, cultural workers and intellectuals. According to Ivan Vazov, a Bulgarian poet of the time: The Balkan Alliance is a word which I wish from all my heart to take on human form (body and blood) and become a reality as soon as possible. And why hasn’t it become a reality yet? There are many reasons for that: mistakes from our histories (both Serbian and Bulgarian), our past, ancient and recent; lack of mature political thought among those who direct the fate of our two nations, weakness for mutual conflicts and rivalry, typical only of the Slavs. As one can see, there are many obstacles for carrying out this idea. We should arm ourselves with courage for mutual concessions; we should have the courage to forget all selfish national concerns and to think only of one thing: that both the Bulgarian and the Serbian people will be free, mighty and great only in a fraternal march forward in firm political alliance5. Likewise, the Serbian Social Democratic Party deputy Lapcevic delivered a speech to the Serb National Assembly on 7 October 1912 defending

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the idea of peace because “the war between the Balkan peoples . . . would be bloody and terrible for us, Balkan peoples, because it would degrade and ruin us”.6 Calling attention to the historical contextualisation of the idealist accounts of the Balkan Wars does not mean, however, we must offer comfort to a realist approach. It simply means that idealism did not necessarily prove to be the best way to deal with war in international relations. The extent to which the Carnegie Report might have influenced the dynamics of Balkan wars did not escape even Andrew Carnegie, who seems himself to not have entirely approved the outcome of the Commission inquiries, commenting at that time that the Report could exacerbate antagonisms (Akhund 2012, 6). Baron d’Estournelles de Constant, the President of the Carnegie Commission, also sought to defend his collective against the accusations of pacifism of which he was clearly aware: Let us repeat, for the benefit of those who accuse us of “bleating for peace at any price”, what we always maintained: war rather than slavery, arbitration rather than war, conciliation rather than arbitration. (Carnegie 1914, 1) It is certainly not enough to assume that the greater the legitimacy and morality of ideas, the greater is the likelihood that the states will exert their power on behalf of the values and practices promoted by these ideas and will establish the corresponding international institutions and legal regimes. In international relations, ideas are only turned into policies when they best fit the interests of policymakers in reaction to a combination of constraints engendered by domestic politics and the power configuration of the international system. Neither the pacifist ideas in favour of prohibition or control of war nor the revolutionary ideas against war are a guarantee of the emergence of international peace order. In an anarchical world, one idea is not necessarily shared by all political actors. In addition, the competing idealist alternatives of pacifism, all claim to provide sound arguments regarding what is needed to be done for an order of peace in international relations. However, in one case or the other the burden still remains once again with the political decision-makers who have to take on the ideology that best suits their power interests.

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Finally, any underlying ideas about a world without war may be deemed rational. Yet, putting them into practice is likely to prove very difficult and even impossible. The relationship between ideas and reality, especially the interdependence of facts, social exigencies, actors’ interests and a new international order is much more complicated than the simple distinction between the transformational power of ideas and the real transformation of the international order. More than anything else, the outbreak of both World Wars I and II can be seen as the failure of the pacifist movements for the codification and the abolition of war. Beyond the activism and faith of both pacifism and communism, the idealistic account if contrasted with a humanist narrative of war may still help us to understand the negative symbolic representation that is constructed by default from this specific exposition of the Balkan Wars. This will be discussed in the final part of this paper.

In the Name of People: A Revisionist Approach A revision of both realist and idealist accounts can lead to a “history from below”, thereby providing an alternative narrative of the Balkan Wars. At the beginning of the last century, contrary to the atrocities and hatreds that feature so prominently in both realist and idealist accounts of war, the humanitarianism of ordinary people in Balkan societies was not reported extensively in the West. It was also largely absent from the many publications dealing with the conflicts accompanying the dissolution of Yugoslavia. However, different observations suggest that people’s life and their interaction in a given social context (e.g. war, cooperation) relate to their collective representations that can be seen, following Wendt’s logic (1994, 385–90), as a reliable source in the evaluation of perceptions, shared understandings and expectations. They can help better understand the course of common action that can be different from state behaviour. In addition, this shows ordinary groups to be real rather than ideological entities, and this distinction can have an impact on the narrative of war. In this view, it is particularly important that some recent publications have brought back the experience of war as discussed by soldiers and ordinary people of different nationalities in handwritten letters, or exposed in photographs and drawings, which show both the commonality of suffering and feelings of camaraderie among formally recognised enemies.

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In addition, these publications have documented the role of woman in wartime from both the perspective of idealised woman (as mother or heroine) and that of actual heroine at or behind the front lines (as nurses, mothers and wives) (Kolev and Koulouri 2005, 68–73, Biondich 2011, Dimitrova 2013). These images and accounts consciously and unconsciously challenge the stereotypes of enduring enmities, as well as the preconceived ideas of the relationship between human behaviour and ethnicity. They counter the association of violence and destruction with cultural, religious and ethnic stereotypes, and suggest that human beings appreciate human values and feel compassion for those sharing the same suffering, regardless of the prejudices that may have depicted the other as culturally and ethnically different. In fact, after desperate fighting and destruction, many of the survivors managed to overcome hatred and distrust. As a war correspondent observed, “often the enemies of yesterday were shaking hands. Short episodes like these were repeated frequently” (Berri 1913, 252). After all, Balkan peoples must have been peacefully coexisting with each other for long periods in the past. Even though the published evidence is still limited, it is difficult to conclude that the culture of violence is what most characterises the peoples of the Balkan. By contrast, as I have already indicated in the two previous sections, the Balkan Wars are presented exclusively in terms of atrocities, making it difficult to think outside of this particular conceptual universe. The effort to avoid the ambiguity between aims and means was stated explicitly by the investigators of the Carnegie Commission. However, exposing the wars’ brutal horrors and ignoring the power dynamics at European and Balkan levels, let alone the presence of humanitarianism in practice, is highly problematic. This amounts to inverting the usual order of objective investigation, in which description becomes prescription that precedes explanation. This is especially troublesome as it makes it notoriously difficult to distinguish between facts and the propaganda of nationalist, militarist, pacifist, or communist ideology. As a result, there is a considerable risk of investigators being forever stuck at the stage of identifying the “other” based on pre-conceived beliefs and perceptions that become oddly prescriptive. On the one hand, prescriptive representations help to shape the image and to create the reputation of discussed subject. This can be well illustrated by both realist and idealist representations of wars in which

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atrocities and hatred are, therefore, formulated according to a binary discourse on civilisations that juxtapose the barbarism and backwardness of Balkan peoples and nations against a civilised Europe. This is the case with the Carnegie Report in which Balkan peoples were depicted as “not far from us, [they] were then, and are still, unlike Europe, more widely separated from Europe than Europe from America; no one knew anything of them, no one said anything about them” (Carnegie 1914, 3). The complex meaning of the Balkan Wars is assumed to only be grasped in the context of a “typification” of differences between Europe and the Balkan “other”. On the other hand, recurrent exposition and highlight of a particular war image instead of another might consciously or unconsciously have reinforced the prejudices towards the Balkans. Uncivilised temperament and behaviour appears as if it is inherently embedded in the social identity of the Balkan peoples. This is an essentialist approach, which assumes a tendency to autocratic and corrupted societal relations in the region, and questions its ability to embrace modernity and to achieve development and prosperity for its constituents. The construction of all war narratives is, of course, profoundly political, favouring certain ideas and judgements over others. What is more important is that such narratives can by no means be reduced to restatements of simple objective archival facts. As Nietzsche warned, “objectivity” is not a “contemplation [Anschauung] without interest” (Nietzsche [1887] 2007, [12]87). The main problem with the accounts of the Balkan Wars is not about the objectivity and quantification of facts. Instead, the main problem rests upon the interpretation of facts and “truths”. As Edward Hallett Carr put it, “the belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which is very hard to eradicate” (Carr 1961, 12). Accordingly, the way in which the facts of the Balkan Wars are interpreted and offered to the public may become an excellent test case of competing accounts of war and peace. Wherever and whenever historical facts are written, specific interests are always being served. The importance of facts, events, personalities and practices in history gain meaning and are (re)interpreted in the context of particular political interests. The way that the facts of the Balkan Wars are interpreted helps us to understand how this might have strengthened the “Balkanist” discourse. In this context as in others, the role of ideas and

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discourse in the construction and reconstruction of social action must first be clarified. Competing political interests and cultural values both in the Balkans and in Europe must be seriously taken into consideration, if we aim to go beyond explanations based on rationalist interests, pathdependent history, and cultural framing preferences. What seems to have helped the creation and revival of the stereotypes and prejudices about the Balkans is the fact that “facts” become a source of trouble due to the flux of ideas at work among Western scholars and politicians who dominate “virtually all historical references in the media, including the highbrow press” (Banac 1992, 143). Unfortunately, even though not always explicitly stated, up to now Western scholarship and politics merely tell us how the world should imagine and accordingly treat the Balkans. Emanating ideas and beliefs from this discourse serve as causal patterns that guide the selection of means to achieve some ends, and ultimately define friends and foes and accordingly the respective attitudes and actions. In principle, the prejudice seems to have been successful in constructing the distorted essential identity of the Balkans in a way that has remained unchanged for any time in spite of substantial changes. In practice, this is what has induced uncompromising, inflexible, constant and causal beliefs that seem to guide political actions towards the Balkans, as if past events may still constrain the political behaviour of national and international actors in current times. Consequently, the barbarism in the 1912–13 Balkan Wars has been overemphasised again by some Balkan commentators in relation to later conflicts in the region. The casual reader of the international press over the past decades has been left in little doubt that the wars in former Yugoslavia were endemic, perpetual and brutal (Kaplan 1993, Cohen 1993, Glenny 1996, Gallagher 2007, Hislope 2007). The argument, if one can call it that, has been advanced most prominently by former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in a Washington Post editorial that the US Senate ordered reprinted in the Congressional Record of 23 February 1999.7 Balkan peoples, we are told, have no experience of and essentially no belief in Western concepts: Ethnic conflict has been endemic in the Balkans for centuries. Waves of conquests have congealed divisions between ethnic groups and religions, between the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic faiths; between Christianity and Islam; between the heirs of the

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Austrian and Ottoman empires. These conflicts have been fought with unparalleled ferocity because none of the populations has any experience with – and essentially no belief in – Western concepts of toleration. Majority rule and compromise that underlie most of the proposals for a “solution” never have found an echo in the Balkans. (Kissinger 1999) Again, the division of the Balkans from the European West is articulated to help constitute a space of moral superiority for the West. But such a way of writing and talking about the Balkans seems to yield to a reality that reflects European hypochondria rather than a sound concern about what was happening there before and after the Balkan Wars. Contrary to what we are taught to believe, there is not the historical past, neither the enumeration of the cultural traits nor the cultural inventory of collective memories that shape and essentialise the identity of the “backward” Balkans. This is rather a function of the continuous maintenance of an imaginary social boundary defined by a long sociocultural interaction with the “civilised” Europe. In this way, as we know from a transactional perspective (Barth 1969), a careful examination of the social organisation of the established boundaries between the “backward” Balkans and the “civilised” Europe, clearly shows they are the implication or the result rather than the signifier of both Balkan and European identities. They actually derive from a deliberate process of negotiations to establish structures “comparable to potential governance structures” that define the “sets of acceptable contracting partners” (Somer 2001, 146). By contrast, in the case of both Europe and the Balkans, the quest of a cultural inventory of collective memories seems to have inspired and encouraged the need to develop an “ethno-cultural” approach, as shown specifically in the case of Albania (Doja 2014), which must emphasise the essential and immutable character of one’s own people’s culture, traditions, language, religion, myths, history, and so on. Often these past collective memories are used and misused in favour of given interests in the context of ideologies aimed at projecting identity boundary and hegemony by glorifying the past as a means of gaining ascendency and legitimacy in the present. The evidence of humanitarianism during the Balkan Wars may not currently be sufficient to challenge the constructed image of the Balkans. Yet, it is noteworthy that scholars from the region are working to reveal

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such evidence, and some of it has already been published in Western academic presses (Banac 1992, Todorova 1997, Goldsworthy 1998, Hatzopoulos 2003, Kolev and Koulouri 2005, Michail 2012), which may successfully challenge the dominant constructed image of the Balkans.

Conclusion The pervasive essentialising discourses that surround the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 appear unusual and difficult to grasp, if one schematically employs traditional categories developed in both scholarship and politics when dealing with this question. In turn, an analysis of three separate accounts, distinguished along the lines of realist, idealist and revisionist approaches, linked to a careful examination of their historical contextualisation in ideological perspective, produces a more sophisticated understanding. While analysing the history and the politics of the Balkan Wars the aim of this paper was to frame the argument in such a way as to focus on a critical reassessment of different accounts and move away from the close association of Balkan wars with the essentialisation of the Balkans. Against the discursive practice of accounts that might have created a distorted perception of the Balkans and that may have been used as a justification for policies of neglect or disdain towards the pressing problems of the region, I argue instead for considering the Balkans as an integral part of European history and politics. In methodological terms, I engaged with a comparative analysis of ideas rather than with a search for a positive proof. I adopted a critical approach to conceptions of history and politics by focusing on political processes and power relations that define events and their place in social relations. The alternative historical evidence from the Balkan Wars is provided to assess new insights to understanding the politics of history. The aim of this paper was not to write the history of this wars, but instead examine in what way the representations and the implications of the Balkan Wars might have defined the European imagination of the Balkans. Eventually, this approach might not be exhaustive and certainly a number of questions remain open. However, if this paper has managed to provoke at the very least a non-stereotyped discussion throughout a set of reflections on what essentialising concepts and representations can do, it will hopefully constitute an encouragement for further, deeper enquiries in this direction.

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Notes 1. Andre´ Che´radame, L’Illustration, no. 3650, 8 February 1913, p. 115. 2. The commission was headed by Paul-Henri d’Estournelles de Constant, a French senator, winner of the 1909 Nobel Prize for Peace, a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration from 1900, and French representative at both Hague Peace Conferences of 1898 and 1907 (Barce´lo 1995). He knew the region very well as he had served as a diplomat from 1876 to 1882 in Montenegro and the Ottoman Empire (Jolly 1960–77). The members of the commission were also jurists involved in the pacifist movement and experts of the region. Justin Godart was a French lawyer and senator known for his pacifist engagement and as a specialist of Armenian and Balkan issues. Joseph Redlich was an Austrian politician and Professor of Public Law at the University of Vienna. Walther Schu¨cking was a German Professor of Law at the University of Marburg, known as a fervent defender of The Hague Peace Conferences. Francis W. Hirst was Editor of the Economist from 1907 to 1916 and an activist of the international conciliation movement in London having published even a book on the law of war (Hirst 1906). Henry Noel Brailsford was a British journalist, correspondent of the Manchester Guardian (Leventhal 1985, pp. 92–112) and author of a well-known book on the Macedonian question (Brailsford 1906). Paul Milioukov was a Russian historian, politician and diplomat serving for some time in Bulgaria. Samuel T. Dutton was a Professor at Columbia University and represented Carnegie Endowment at the International Commission. 3. By 1907, instances of violations of laws and customs of war had been codified in the Hague Regulations and were subject to legal proceedings referring to Articles 46 – 56 (Merryman and Elsen 2002, p. 28). 4. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Prudhommeaux to Haskell”, 12 May 1914, no. 202 (box 522), and “Butler to d’Estournelles de Constant”, 12 December 1913, no. 201 (box 521), p. 10. 5. Balkanski rat u slici i recvi, 6 (24 February/9 March 1913), quoted in Kolev and Koulouri 2005, p. 43. 6. Lapcevic, Rat i srpska socijalna demokratija, pp. 61 – 6, quoted in Kolev and Koulouri 2005, p. 46. 7. Congressional Record, vol. 145, no. 28, p. S1762-S1763.

References Akhund, Nadine, “The Two Carnegie Reports: From the Balkan Expedition of 1913 to the Albanian Trip of 1921”, Balkanologie, 14:1–2 (2012). Albrecht-Carrie´, Rene´, A Diplomatic History of Europe since the Congress of Vienna, revised edn (New York, 1973). Banac, Ivo, “The Fearful Asymmetry of War: The Causes and Consequences of Yugoslavia’s Demise”, Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 121:2 (1992), pp. 142 – 58.

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Barce´lo, Laurent, Paul d’Estournelles de Constant, prix Nobel 1909. L’expression d’une ide´e europe´enne (Paris, 1995). Barth, Fredrik, “Introduction”, in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Boston, MA, 1969). Berri, Gino, L’Assedio di Scutari. Sei mesi dentro la citta accerchiata (The Siege of Scutari. Six months inside the surrounded town) (Milano, 1913). Best, Geoffrey, Humanity in Warfare: The Modern History of the International Law of Armed Conflicts (London, 1980). Biondich, Mark, The Balkans: Revolution, War, and Political Violence Since 1878 (Oxford, 2011). Brailsford, Henry Noel, Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future (London, 1906). Bridge, Francis Roy, From Sadowa to Sarajevo: The Foreign Policy of Austria-Hungary, 1866– 1914 (London, 1972). Brock, Peter, and Thomas Paul Socknat (eds), Challenge to Mars: Essays on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945 (Toronto, 1999). Carnegie, Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, DC, 1914). Carr, Edward Hallett, What is History? (London, 1961). Cohen, Lenard J., Broken Bonds: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia (Boulder, 1993). Cooper, Sandi E., Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815 –1914 (New York, 1991). Crampton, Richard J., The Hollow Detente: Anglo-German Relations in the Balkans, 1911– 1914 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1979). Damianova, Jivka, “La Fe´de´ration contre l’alliance militaire: les socialistes balkaniques et les guerres balkaniques 1912 –1913”, Le Mouvement Social, 147 (1989), pp. 69 – 85. Dimitrova, Snezhana, “The Balkan War Evidences – Another War Heritage: A Study of Soldiers’ Notebooks, Letters and Drawings”, Paper read at The Balkan Wars 1912– 13 International Conference, Regensburg Institut fu¨r Ostund Su¨dosteuropaforschung and Tirana Institute for Southeast European Studies, Tirana, 11– 12 June 2013. Doja, Albert, “From the Native Point of View: Folkloric Archaism in Albanian Studies”, History of the Human Sciences, 27:4 (2014). Dzovinar, Ke´vonian, “L’enqueˆte, le de´lit, la preuve: les ‘atrocite´s’ balkaniques de 1912– 1913 a` l’e´preuve du droit de la guerre”, Le Mouvement Social, 222:1 (2008), pp. 13 – 40. Finch, George A., “James Brown Scott, 1866 – 1943”, American Journal of International Law, 38:183 (1944), pp. 188 – 215. Gallagher, Tom, The Balkans in the New Millennium: In the Shadow of War and Peace (New Jersey, 2007). Glenny, Misha, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War (London, 1996). ——— The Balkans: Nationalism, War and Greats Powers 1804–1999 (London, 1999). Goldsworthy, Vesna, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven, 1998). Greenfeld, Liah, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1992). Hall, Richard C., The Balkan Wars 1912– 1913: Prelude to the First World War (London, 2000). Hammond, Andrew, The Debated Lands: British Travel Writing and the Construction of The Balkans (Warwick, 2002).

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Hannsen, Lene, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (London, 2006). Hanotaux, Gabriele, La guerre des Balkans et l’Europe (1912– 1913), 2nd edn (Paris, 1914). Hatzopoulos, Pavlos, “All That is, is Nationalist: Western Imaginings of the Balkans since the Yugoslav Wars”, Journal of Southern Europe & the Balkans, 5:1 (2003), pp. 25 – 38. Haupt, Georges, Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International (Oxford, 1972). Hirst, Frencis W., The Arbiter in Council (London, 1906). Hislope, Robert, “From Expressive to Actionable Hatred: Ethnic Division and Riot in Macedonia”, in Jenkins J. Craig and Esther E. Gottlieb (eds), Identity Conflicts: Can Violence Be Regulated? (New Brunswick, NJ, 2007), pp. 149– 66. Jelavich, Barbara, Russia’s Balkan Entanglements, 1806– 1914 (Cambridge, 1991). Jelavich, Charles, and Barbara Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804– 1920, vol. 8: A History of East Central Europe (Seattle, 1977). Jolly, Jean, Dictionnaire des parlementaires franc
ais: Notices biographiques sur les ministres, de´pute´s et se´nateurs franc
ais de 1889 a` 1940, 8 vols (Paris, 1960–77). Kaplan, Robert D., Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New York, 1993). Kennan, George F., “Introduction”, in The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict (Washington, DC, 1993). Kissinger, Henry, Diplomacy (New York, 1995). ——— “No US Ground Forces for Kosovo: Leadership Doesn’t Mean That We Must Do Everything Ourselves”, Washington Post, 22 February 1999. Kolev, Valery, and Christina Koulouri, The Balkan Wars (Thessaloniki, 2005). Leventhal, Fred M., The Last Dissenter: H.N. Brailsford and His World (Oxford, 1985). Merryman, John Henry, and Albert Edward Elsen, Law, Ethics, And The Visual Arts, 4th edn (New York, 2002). Michail, Eugene, “Western Attitudes to War in the Balkans and the Shifting Meanings of Violence, 1912– 91”, Journal of Contemporary History, 47:2 (2012), pp. 219 – 39. Moorcraft, Paul, and Philip M. Taylor, Shooting the Messenger: The Politics of War Reporting (Washington, DC, 2008). Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morality: Essay III, trans. by Carol Diethe, ed. by Keith Ansell-Pearson: Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge, 2007 [1887]). Orend, Brian, War and International Justice: A Kantian Perspective (Waterloo, ON, 2000). Posen, Barry, “Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military Power”, International Security 18:2, pp. 80–124. Rossos, Andrew, Russia and the Balkans: Inter-Balkan Rivalries and Russian Foreign Policy, 1908–1914 (Toronto, 1981). Schindler, Dietrich, and Jiri Toman (eds), The Laws of Armed Conflicts: A Collection of Conventions, Resolutions, and Other Documents, 4th edn (Boston, 2004). Seton-Watson, R.W., “The Little and Balkan Entente”, The Slavonic and East European Review, 15:45 (1937), pp. 553 – 76. doi: 10.2307/4203275. Simic´, Predrag, “Balkans and Balkanisation: Western Perceptions of the Balkans in the Carnegie Commission’s Reports on the Balkan Wars from 1914 to 1996”, Perceptions, 18:2 (2013), pp. 113 – 34.

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Sipcanov, Ivan, Les correspondants de guerre pendant les guerres balkaniques de 1912– 1913 (Sofia, 1983). Somer, Murat, “Cascades of Ethnic Polarization: Lessons from Yugoslavia”, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 573:1 (2001), pp. 127– 51. Stavrianos, Leften Stavros, Balkan Federation: A History of the Movement towards Balkan Unity in Modern Times (Hamden, 1964). ——— The Balkans since 1453 (London, 2000). Sundhaussen, Holm, Der Einfluss der Herderschen Ideen auf die Nationsbildung bei den Vo¨lkern der Habsburger Monarchie (Mu¨nchen, 1973). Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans (New York, 1997). Toynbee, Arnold J., The Western Question in Greece and Turkey (London, 1922). Trotsky, Leon, The Balkan Wars 1912– 13 (New York, 1980). Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Les origines de la pense´e grecque (Paris, 1981). Waltz, Kenneth J., Theory of International Politics (New York, 1979). Wendt, Alexander, “Collective Identity Formation and the International State”, American Political Science Review, 88:2 (1994), pp. 384 – 96.

CHAPTER 11 THE BALKAN WARS EXPERIENCE: UNDERSTANDING THE ENEMY Helen Katsiadakis

This paper examines the perception the Greeks had of their rivals before, during and in the aftermath of the 1912– 13 conflict in the Balkans. It investigates the attitudes and behaviour of the state apparatus and policy-makers, the diplomatic corps and the military – both regular and irregular – and the dynamics of change in perception that followed the geographic and ethnological upheaval in the area. For the Greeks, the Balkan Wars were the climax of a process of national revival that began at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, during the period called Greek enlightenment, when Greek-speaking intellectuals conceived the idea of a Greek nation-state on the model of France. Initially, its territorial demarcation was hazy. As Giannis Kalpouzos remarks in his recent extremely well-documented novel Holy Demons in the City, capturing the first glimpses of national formation among the hellenising, largely anticlerical, middle class of the Ottoman capital – adventurous, confident and freethinking: I interrupted him and asked him which is this [secret] society and who else belonged in it. All he told me was that it is called “Society of the Phoenix” and that I should ask no more. It is best

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not to know. Those who are concerned with what is best for Greece will tell me when the time comes. He would not let me ask much, and when I asked he avoided answering. He told me neither which was the Greece they intended to liberate, nor how he started sending the information to Kyr Nikita, nor who went to the dungeon to speak to him.1 During most of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was the only conterminous state of Greece and its only rival. This rivalry persisted even after the pacification of the region in 1832 and the establishment of diplomatic relations, because of what Elli Skopetea has called the “live border”, the border zone, where banditry was endemic and which served as the breeding ground for the irredentist outbreaks of the nineteenth century.2 Throughout this period of domestic and international turmoil, national expansion without the Greek regular army firing a single shot was the rule and not the exception. In the successive crises of the Eastern Question, Greece profited without direct involvement in the uprisings; with the exception of the Cretan crises of 1866, 1878 and 1897. Great powers, although animosity against some of them occasionally became acute, were never considered possible enemy targets. For instance in the case of Great Britain and the Greek claim for the annexation of the Ionian Islands in 1864, although there was a lot of anti-British sentiment, no-one dreamed of using the Greek army to evict the British from the islands. Besides, this annexation was not typical of the manner in which Greece expanded in the nineteenth century, in the sense that it happened after a period of domestic unrest in the islands, in which agents of the Greek state played no overt part and to a large extent because it conformed with the British strategic requirements in the area.3 In areas under Ottoman rule on the other hand, in the Balkan mainland and in Crete, irredentist outbreaks provided the Greek state an opportunity for covert interference. in the successive crises of the Eastern Question (1854, 1877– 8, 1884), Greece profited without direct involvement in the uprisings. The 1866 and 1897 cases, both cases directly connected with the Cretan question, were exceptions. Crete, like most of the Aegean islands, had taken part in the Greek Revolution and bitterness at the exclusion of the island from the Greek state persisted

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among the Christians and the anti-Turkish feelings were most strong there. So, occasionally, especially when the Ottoman authorities became very oppressive, spirits flared up in the island. In 1866 and 1878 the Greek state supplied limited financial support and shipments of weapons in the hope that, at some point, the great powers would intervene to improve the fate of the Christians. In 1897 Greece ventured a step further authorising a naval expedition to occupy Crete. The government had been misled, not only by public pressure, but also by a misreading of the situation on the ground by a very experienced but impetuous diplomat, the Consul in Chania, Nikolaos Gennadis.4 Until the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Ottoman and Greek diplomats served as a channel of communication, being familiar with the society of the country in which they served, as quite often they shared the common tradition of the Ottoman Greek Phanariots and were familiar with its social elite.5 Gennadis was typical of a new generation of diplomats, many of who were scions of families with a distinguished role in the Greek War of Independence. This new generation had been brought up in the nationalistic ideology and believed that the rights of the nation-state should be served at all costs. As it were, in 1897 the Greek government authorised the dispatch of an expeditionary force to Crete to occupy the island in the name of King George. The Porte responded instantly by invading and occupying Thessaly that they had been forced to abandon by treaty 16 years before – an episode that cost bankrupt Greece, neither the loss of Thessaly nor the deterioration of Crete’s status since it became autonomous despite the setback, but the payment of a huge war indemnity and the imposition of an International Commission of Financial Control. For some years rearmament could not be financed and the Ottoman Empire was out of reach of nationalist aspirations. Up to that point, Greek defence and foreign relations strategy had just one target. The national awakening of the Slav-speaking populations to the north had preoccupied only the intellectual and Church circles, as the Patriarchate was losing its hold over areas that went over to the Exarchy. After 1897, Christian populations that had been looking toward Greece for support against Ottoman oppression increasingly turned to the Exarchy and the local bands that offered this protection more effectively. The Greek consuls in the region were the

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first to respond to the pleas of the Patriarchist prelates and began sending alarming reports to Athens. Thereafter their role became decisive both as advisors of the state and as agents on the ground. Lambros Koromilas, appointed Consul General in Salonica in 1904, was a man of action and did not hesitate to meet the challenge once the enemy was identified. Moving between Athens and Salonica until his final removal in 1907, he masterminded the Greek offensive during the years 1904– 8, known as the Macedonian struggle with a mixture of youthful spirit and relentless determination.6 Identifying the new enemy did not happen overnight: IMRO activity in Macedonia was gradually identified as a “threat” in the first years of the twentieth century only after the local mostly rural populations felt the pressure of Exarchists to join their church. Only gradually did the demoralised state officials and public opinion in Greece and Constantinople come to see the rival local Christian community leaders and IMRO agents and bands as a major threat, and eventually as the “real” threat. Educational and religious activity that the Patriarchate and Greek state had been financing for three decades had failed, mainly because the church-goers listened to the priest speak a language they did not understand and children were taught a language they could not use in daily life. Intellectuals and consular agents, such as Ion Dragoumis and Pinelopi Delta, understood the problem and were among the staunchest supporters of vernacular Greek, because they believed it could be taught and understood in the linguistically contested areas of Macedonia. But the Church and the Greek state stood by their support for the purity of the language, even if it was a dead language.7 Having failed in a peaceful infiltration of the disputed areas and alarmed by the scale of the 1903 Ilinden uprising, many Greeks, especially among the restless junior army officers, opted for armed intervention. The role of this group too was decisive in later years. Greek bands appeared, at first uncoordinatedly, then under a centralised authority – the Macedonian Committee set up in Athens. Not everyone was well qualified for the task. Officers who volunteered to form and lead bands were quite often out of touch with local conditions, did not speak the language, were unaccustomed to hardships and were mislead by faulty maps. Locals on the other hand knew the terrain but were nationally unreliable, changing sides for various reasons.

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The Greek Consuls and Greek Orthodox Prelates who also knew the terrain, with the aid of teachers, priests and local band leaders and Greek volunteer officers, set up a decentralised network that operated between 1904 and 1908 to limit the influence of the IMRO bands. The practices followed by all parties were often brutal, as Gounaris has shown in his article.8 Although it was coordinated and financed from outside and although the dogmatic and religious matters that supposedly divided the two opposing factions were neither understood nor relevant to the local communities, it was very much a local power struggle, in which the warring factions knew and understood each other; they were fellowvillagers, often members of the same family. In many cases yesterday’s enemy was today’s ally or even partner. As Gounaris concluded: “it was a civil war between fellow villagers, whose petty-politics and social cleavages of every kind had been indissolubly mingled with the high politics of the Macedonian Question”.9 The Macedonian Struggle was a school for violence, where common criminals mingled with adventure-seeking captains from Crete and Mani, schoolteachers (male and female), priests and prelates, Greek career officers, middle-class professionals and scions of the Athens aristocracy. It was organised and financed by middle-class nationalists living in the major cities of Greece and the Empire, it flourished amid the lawlessness of the rural areas, but it did not spread to the interior of the cities themselves. Yet it was so fierce that it left a persistent legacy of mistrust and violence among the local communities that pervaded national opinion for decades. Another area where national rivalry emerged, but which was spared the hardships of lawlessness, with the exception of rare outbursts, was the commercial cities of the diaspora. The cities of Eastern Roumelia, Plovdid in particular, which is the subject of a very interesting book by Spyros Ploumidis, are indicative. Assimilation of ethnic minorities into a homogenous nation-state is part of the nineteenth-century liberal ideology that was at the basis of state formation. It is normally achieved through the slow processes of public education and conscription. Much more violent methods of persecution however were the rule in the Balkans in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Educational centralisation was the basic tool of homogenisation in Bulgaria and Eastern Roumelia after its annexation in 1885, which the

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Greek religious, communal and Greek diplomatic authorities successfully resisted until the crisis of 1906.10 In 1902, with the first signs of serious tension between ethnic groups in Macedonia, the Greek communities in Bulgaria became the target of Bulgarian nationalist sentiment. After the suppression of the 1903 Ilinden uprising and as destitute agrarian refugees from Macedonia (estimated at 30,000 by 1906) flocked into cities with thriving commercial communities such as Plovdiv, they turned against the more prosperous Greek ethnic communities culminating in the 1905 and 1906 outbreaks in Plovdiv.11 The Greek officialdom failed to perceive that the emergence of new nation-states in the region was the recurrence of the very same principle that had led to the emergence of its own state. It pursued its irredentist policy indiscriminately in areas that were well out of the bounds of its territorial aims, including the communities of the Ottoman Empire diaspora. For example not only did it support the interests of the Greek community of Plovdiv, it also hindered the assimilation of its thriving commercial class into the Bulgarian nation-state, by encouraging friction on matters of church influence, education and conscription. The Consulate General under fire for insisting on upholding the privileges of the communities that existed under Ottoman rule, whereas the whole principle behind the formation of the successor states – including Greece and Bulgaria – was that of a homogenous nation-state, a modernising principle that was incompatible with the traditional notion of community allegiance. This trend was upset in mid-1908 by the domestic and international turmoil that followed the outbreak of the Young Turk revolution. This was the first major episode in a long process aiming to transform the Ottoman Empire into a modern Turkish nation-state. One of its immediate consequences was that it completely upset the irredentist agenda. In a nation-state, such as the one the Young Turks aspired to, ethnic privileges and the entire millet system were an anachronism. On the inter-communal level, the revival of the constitution and the amnesty granted by the Sultan created a short-lived euphoria, ended the armed conflict in Macedonia and, as Nikolaos Vlachos has shown in his very thorough work on the Eastern Question, although the Christian Church leaderships continued to vie for influence, a political understanding among the Christians was achieved in order to present a united front, for instance in the Ottoman Parliament in the spring of

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1912.12 Consular reports to Athens show first-hand knowledge of the new conditions in local communities in their struggle to preserve their privileges and of the fact that church leaders too, whether they disagreed or even clashed over matters of dogma and influence, acknowledged the priority of the “Turkish” threat. In the new context, the Ottoman Turk once again became the principal enemy and remained so until the outbreak of the First Balkan War. The anti-Greek sentiment in the major cities of the Empire, inflamed by a new pro-union crisis in Crete and the commercial boycott against Greek merchants and property alerted the Greek authorities to the dangers that the Greek minority was facing not primarily in the European provinces, but mainly in the Ottoman capital and the Asiatic cities. The Central Government, the Minister at Constantinople, the Consular authorities throughout the Empire, and the military and naval attache´s in the Ottoman capital had a network of informants and were fully aware of the prevailing spirit at all the levels of Ottoman society and state apparatus. Most important, for instance, was the information on the spirit of the mob in Smyrna during the anti-Greek boycotts or the information passed on to Athens by the naval attache´ at Constantinople regarding the condition of the Ottoman fleet and of the garrisons on the islands, when the Italian naval force appeared in the Aegean in April 1912.13 Though priorities had changed locally, at central government level not much happened throughout this four-year period by way of direct relations of Greece with either Bulgaria or Serbia. There was no direct communication during the Bosnian crisis of September 1908, there was very little during the Libyan crisis of September 1911. Most of the dispatches that the diplomatic representatives sent to Athens were either accounts of conversations with other members of the corps diplomatique or reports on articles that appeared in the local press. There was no military attache´ in either Sofia or Belgrade. On the initiative of the Macedonian politician Stefanos Dragoumis,14 who formed an interim government in January 1910, the representation in Sofia was upgraded with the appointment there of the Secretary General of the Foreign Ministry, Dimitrios Panas. Panas was neither more familiar with the political and social atmosphere of Sofia than his predecessors nor was he able to restore full confidence between Athens and Sofia, since lack of confidence was rooted in the recent conflict in Macedonia and in the

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unpredictability regarding the Cretan crises. But he managed to bring about two symbolic events with little political significance, just to indicate that some degree of confidence had been restored: the visit of a group of Bulgarian students to Athens in April 1911 and the visit of the Greek Crown Prince to Sofia in February 1912. The popular animosity that had been previously expressed in the press had subsided while, with undisguised envy, the Athenian newspapers often praised Bulgaria for its accomplishments, particularly in military training and education. However, at the top government level a rapprochement was fraught with obstacles. It required a new breed of politicians who were not committed to the traditional policies of nineteenth-century Greek state building and who were willing to depart from practices cultivated by church and Ottoman Christian communities. Not that Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos understood Ottoman or Bulgarian politics better than his predecessors like George Theotokis, the Corfiot leader who dominated the political scene in the first decade of the twentieth century, or that he minimised the danger of a Bulgarian bid for the entire region of Macedonia. What set Venizelos apart from his predecessors was that, unlike them, in the face of a crisis, he was prepared to make compromises and was willing to take a calculated risk. Unlike Greek – Bulgarian relations, the Greek state considered Greek– Serbian relations of secondary importance. Serbia was considered a regional rival, but not a potential enemy. Throughout the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century, with direct encouragement from Athens, local church authorities had tried to define spheres of church influence in Macedonia, both as a prelude to a territorial definition and as an obstacle in their struggle against the control of the Exarchists.15 These were not easy negotiations and a general trend emerged, with the level of Greek –Serbian mistrust fluctuating depending on the climate between Athens and Sofia. This is the context in which the myth of traditional Greek –Serbian friendship was born.16 For the time being, however, Greece saw no urgency in upgrading the level of its diplomatic representation in Belgrade. Yet, the low level of diplomatic representation was not without consequences; it accounted for the failure of the Greek government to understand the importance of the Serbian–Bulgarian treaty of March 1912 and to seek a timely agreement with Belgrade. On the very eve of the Balkan Wars another player appeared to claim lands also contested by Greece. For a long time, the Greeks believed that

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by cultivating a close relationship with Albanian chiefs in the south they could contain their nationalist movement. But to their surprise, in July 1912, the chiefs of southern Albania demanded autonomy for a clearly defined region and the Greek authorities realised their blunder.17 In the vacuum created by the withdrawal of the Ottoman forces from the European provinces of the Empire, an independent Albanian state emerged, which opened a new security issue for Greece in the north-east. Furthermore the new state was becoming a bridgehead for Italy on the eastern coast of the Adriatic. The secret article of the Greek – Serb treaty that divided Albania into spheres of influence was directed against Albania itself, but also against Italian and Austrian interests. The Albanian question was not the only new issue that emerged as a consequence of the war. The 1912–13 wars cast the old players in new roles altering the priorities of Greek foreign policy. The turning points in this new context were the occupation of Thessaloniki by the Greek army at the end of October 1912, the presence of Venizelos in London for the peace negotiations in December, the Greek – Serbian treaty of June 1913 and the defeat of Bulgaria by the combined Greek and Serbian offensive in July. In this new context, the role of the various agents and their influence on the course of events changed. During the war, foreign relations, both as regards relations with allies and enemies and more importantly as regards the great powers became the exclusive responsibility of the Prime Minister. King George, who had boasted in the past that he was his own diplomat, had abandoned this prerogative to Venizelos already in 1910, when he had first come to power. Several attempts by his successor King Constantine18 to revert to previous practices, for instance to dictate the terms of the treaty with Bulgaria on the battlefield, were successfully checked by Venizelos.19 The role of the second political centre of the Greek Orthodox world, the Patriarchate, the seat of the Orthodox millet, was dramatically reduced, as the areas ceded to the Balkan states were no longer within its political jurisdiction. By the same token, its representatives had no role to play in areas of disputed ethnicity, as they had done before the war. When the new borders were drawn, political authority fell within the exclusive jurisdiction of the nation-states. Before the wars, the consuls had played an important role as agents of Greek irredentism. When the First Balkan War broke out and as the

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army was establishing its authority over the conquered territories, the government immediately expanded its civil administration into the new territories by recruiting civil servants from all its departments. Interestingly, before the de jure annexation, in the transitional period of co-administration exercised by military and civil authorities, the consuls were appointed prefects in the towns in which they had been serving. When they returned to their diplomatic duties elsewhere, their role became that of representing the interests of Greek citizens and of supporting the Greek diaspora worldwide; but their term in Macedonia ensured them a distinguished career.20 As for the military, the operations gave them the opportunity to prove their efficiency and to exonerate their profession from the disgrace of 1897. For 15 years after their disgraceful defeat, the Greek military had been waiting for the day when they would honour their commitment to the national idea. While some, Ioannis Metaxas for instance, used their family connections to gain court favours and further their career hiding their humiliated nationalism in diary entries,21 more adventurous junior officers (such as Pavlos Melas and Sarantos Agapinos) risked their lives by leading guerrilla groups in Macedonia. Others held the Crown responsible for the sad state of the army, formed a secret military league and staged a bloodless coup in August 1909 that overthrew the weak government in office at the time and prepared the political scene for the advent of Eleftherios Venizelos to power in Athens in October 1910. To a man the officers welcomed the opportunity for action in Macedonia, Epiros and the Aegean when the war broke out. For the first time since the establishment of the Greek state, the regular armed forces proved their effectiveness on the battlefield. However, because of their knowledge of the terrain former guerrillas were enlisted in the early days of the war and practices of the Macedonian Struggle made their reappearance. The first war, but mainly the second, involved acts of destruction and atrocities toward civilians that violated the Hague Conventions. Under the pretext of defence, retaliation or security, both the victorious and the retreating regular troops and irregulars, often encouraged by their officers, settled old scores and perpetuated ethnic hatred by committing acts whose motives were anything but nationalistic, must often personal, financial differences.22 On the state level, the wars brought about dramatic changes. Old rivals such as the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria were defeated and

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embittered against Greece. Gaining mastery in the northern and central Aegean and acquiring full sovereignty over Crete meant that Greece became a local naval power in its own right – a rival not only of the Ottoman Empire, but also of Italy that had occupied the Dodecanese at the southern exit of the Sea. In the past, on account of its anti-Austrian nationalistic performance and the glorious history of its unification, Italy had many admirers in Greece, not least because many professionals had studied in Italian universities. The idea of a Greek – Italian friendship had been sustained by a visit of the young monarch Vittorio Emanuele III to Athens in 1907 and by the participation of Italian “volunteers” in the First Balkan War in the mountains above Janina. But this feeling gave way to suspicion, because of conflicting aims in the Aegean and Albania. In the postwar reality, Greece emerged as a successful small power but with a set of new dilemmas. One of them was how to deal with so many old and new rivals on its new extensive continental and maritime border. To deal with this new reality Greece had to put an end to its irredentism and readjust its strategy to maintaining a balance between conflicting interests. It is the strategy Venizelos applied, for a time, in his relations with the great powers throughout and after the Balkan Wars and above all in his relations with the Balkan states, insisting that Bulgaria should not be stronger than Greece and Serbia combined. However, this new equilibrium strategy was only feasible after 1923.

Notes 1. Giannis Kalpouzos, Άgioi Daίmone6 ei6 thn Pόlin (Athens, 2011), p. 243. 2. Elli Skopetea, To “prόty po basίleio” kai h megάlh idέa, όcei6 toy eunikoύ problήmato6 sthn Ellάda, 1830– 1880 (Athens, 1988), p. 28. It is the territory described by Pavlos Kalligas’ in his pioneering novel Thanos Vlekas, with irregulars and bandits evading pursuit of law enforcement units by crossing into the other territory. The borderline populations were quite accustomed to the movements both of the bandits and of the forces pursuing them. 3. Robert Holland and Dianna Markides, The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for Mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean 1850– 1960 (Oxford, 2006), p. 61. 4. Nikolaos Gennadis began his career as Greek Consul at Serres, in Macedonia. As Consul at Adrianople during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877– 8, he was instrumental in averting a breakdown of order in the city in the face of the advancing Russian forces. He then served in Smyrna and Plovdiv, where his

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

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anti-Bulgarian behaviour became a source of embarrassment for his superiors. As Consul in Chania, where he was placed in 1896, he was an ardent supporter of the insurrection. He ended his fiery career as consular agent in Cairo, where he died in 1912. Ilber Ortayli, “Greeks in the Ottoman Administration in the Tanzimat Period”, in Dimitri Gondicas and Charles Issawi (eds), Ottoman Greeks in the Age of Nationalism: Politics, Economy, and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1999), pp. 161 – 2. One of the most vivid portraits of Koromilas is given by one of his collaborators Athanasios Souliotis-Nikolaidis in his Memoirs published in O Makedonikό6 Agώna6. Apomnhmoneύmata (Thessaloniki, 1984), pp. 292 –3. Dragoumis and Delta belonged to a circle of young intellectuals who adhered to the ideas of linguistic nationalism and attempted to reform the Greek educational system by introducing the teaching of the living language to primary schools. They founded the “Educational group” in 1910 and published their views in the Bulletin of the Educational Group. Basil Gounaris, “Preachers of God and Martyrs of the Nation: The Politics of Murder in Ottoman Macedonia in the Early 20th Century”, Balkanologie Revue d’ e´tudes pluridisciplinaires, 9:1–2 (De´cembre 2005), pp. 35– 6. Gounaris, “Preachers of God”, p. 43. Spyridon Ploumidis, Eunotikή symbίvsh sta Balkάnia. Έllhne6 kai Boύlgaroi sth Filippoύpolh, 1878– 1914 (Athens, 2006), p. 144. Ploumidis, Eunotikή symbίvsh, pp. 322 –32. Nikolaos B. Vlachos, Istorίa tvn Kratώn th6 Xersonήsoy toy Aίmoy 1908– 1914 (Athens, 1954), vol. 1, p. 194. Helen Gardikas Katsiadakis, Greece and the Balkan Imbroglio: Greek Foreign Policy, 1911– 1913 (Athens, 1995), p. 69. Stephanos Dragoumis (1842 – 1923) was the son of a Macedonian politician and man of letters. He began his political career as a member of the liberal party of Charilaos Trikoupis, in whose administrations he served as Minister in several posts. After the death of Trikoupis he pursued an independent career. Although he was one of the principal members of the Greek Macedonian Committee and a staunch anti-Bulgarian, he recognised the need for strengthening the position of Greece in the Balkans by upgrading its diplomatic representation in the Balkan capitals. A number of policies that Eleftherios Venizelos pursued when he became Prime Minister of Greece in 1910 originated in initiatives launched a few months earlier, by Dragoumis, during his term as PM between January and October of that year. Dragoumis served the Venizelos administration as Governor General in Crete (1912) and Macedonia (1913), but joined the royalist camp during World War I. Nikolaos B. Vlachos, To Makedonikόn v6 wάsi6 toy Anatolikoύ zhtήmato6, 1878– 1908 (Athens, n.d.), pp. 180– 2.

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16. Loukianos Chasiotis, Ellhnoserbikέ6 sxέsei6 1913– 1918. Symmaxikέ6 proteraiόthte6 kai politikέ6 antipalόthte6 (Thessaloniki, 2004), p. 16. 17. Katsiadakis, Greece and the Balkan Imbroglio, pp. 103 – 4. 18. King George was assassinated in Salonica on 5/18 March 1913. 19. Katsiadakis, Greece and the Balkan Imbroglio, pp. 234 – 7. When Constantine next intervened in matters of foreign policy, in 1915, he created a major constitutional crisis that split Greece into two. 20. Georgios D. Dimakopoulos, “H dioikhtikή orgάnvsi6 tvn katalh wuέntvn edawώn (1912– 14). Genikή episkόphsi6,” H Ellάda tvn Balkanikώn polέmvn 1910–1914 (Athens, 1993), p. 213. 21. Ioannis Metaxas, To prosvpikό toy hmerolόgio, ed. by Chr. Christidis (Athens, 1951– 2). 22. Tasos Kostopoulos, Pόlemo6 kai eunokάuarsh. H jexasmέnh pley rά miά6 dekaetoά6 eunikύ6 ejόrmhsh6 (1912 – 1922) (Athens, 2007), pp. 35 – 46.

CHAPTER 12 SOME CONCLUDING THOUGHTS James Pettifer

The Balkan Wars have been seen by historians in many different ways, but in the general public perception there is one constant, that of the setting for the murder of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914, and the outbreak of World War I. This is certainly an understandable perception, but one that tends in the popular historiography to elide the Balkan Wars into the later conflagration. The chapters of the book with their new research from historians of the younger generation, in the main, indicate the diversity of the national political and military agendas that were at work, and the specificity of the historical experience in 1912–13 in the region. In her keynote paper, Sabrina P. Ramet outlines her view of the main currents in the diplomatic history and the role of the various peace and diplomatic conferences in the periodisation and structuring of this history. The general view of the Balkans that pertained between the world wars and in the period after the Versailles Treaty and the foundation of the League of Nations was one where the perennial and difficult issues of Balkan history and the power of territorial and other disputes between small emerging Balkan nations to act as the catalyst for wide international conflict had been superseded. This was seen as a result of the establishment of a new international order through the establishment of the League of Nations, and the end of the Ottoman Empire and

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the Habsburg Empire with their repression of local nationalisms. The chapters of Robert Evans and Tom Buchanan indicate the nature of this difficult and contested inheritance. The sweeping and optimistic assumptions of the new liberal internationalists turned out to be ill founded. As Bernd Fischer’s and Enika Abazi’s contributions show, the long-term consequences of the diplomacy of the Balkan Wars period with its neglect of the Albanian national question was to leave a legacy of problems and difficulties that would emerge in the World War II period, only to be “superseded” again, it appeared, by the Cold War division of the region between Warsaw Pact and NATO member countries, with the second Yugoslavia in an uncertain central position. The Albanian issue, in the form of the recognition of the independence of Kosova, remains unresolved in some countries today. The end of communism also heralded another period of seeping optimism about the general regional destiny of south-east Europe, with the so-called “Hour of Europe” announced from the European Union leadership in Brussels, only for the region to descend into the devastating conflicts of the break-up of Yugoslavia after 1991 that did not end until ten years later, in 2001. The chapters of Melina Grizo, Biljana Vankovska and Helen Katsiadakis are focussed on the aftermath of the Balkan Wars and World War I as they affected Greece and the issue of Macedonia, written from different national assumptions and starting points, but sharing a sense of the unresolved issues with the future of Macedonia that would in time reappear during the Axis Occupation of Greece and the Greek Civil War period (1943–9). The chapters of Jasmina Knezovic and Eric Weaver explore this context as it was manifested in different Habsburg heritages, those of the emerging state of Croatia and the long-established, but at the same time, post1912, new nationalism in the South Slav world in Hungary. The importance of the Balkan Wars for the understanding of epidemics and medical practice in modern warfare is seen in Christian Promitzer’s contribution. In my chapter on the journalism of the period, I trace how public perceptions of the conflict were formed by well laid down traditions of Victorian war journalism, and how the boundaries between reporting and military intelligence gathering had changed since the socalled “Golden Age” of nineteenth-century war reporting. In this sense, the Balkan Wars were balanced between present and past in the way they were conducted and the wider political and

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diplomatic consequences of the conflict. Some armies, perhaps most, had a technical and material modus operandi that a Byzantine or medieval general might recognise, with the use of bullock carts for ponderously slow transport and the mass of very numerous and patriotic but largely untrained peasants in an army like that of Serbia. Although motor vehicles did exist and were deployed in some places, the dominant resource was the horse. The role of railway development is important; the Habsburg leaders believed their railway lines running south into the Balkans with their capacity to move large masses of infantry very quickly, by the standards of the time, would guarantee an easy and trouble-free victory over a future war involving the Serbian forces. This was not to be, as later events after 1914 showed. The perception that once the “decadent” empires were out of the way, an enlightened new order based on recognition of democratic national rights would prevail was shown to be wrong and very overoptimistic. The recent historiography of the Balkan Wars, from many different countries and by historians of many different approaches and ideological assumptions all tends to reinforce the view that excessive optimism about periods of peace and stability in the region can bring its own dangers.

INDEX

Adrianople (Edirne), 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 30, 85, 86, 87, 236n4 Aegean Sea, 8, 232, 235, 236 Agapinos, Sarantos, 235 Agramer Tablatt, 171 aircraft, 3, 15 Albania, x, xi, 3, 4, 5, 9, 13, 29 – 30, 31, 32, 34, 42n50, 50, 54, 58, 59, 102 – 13, 185, 196, 206, 220, 234, 236, 240 Albanian National Assembly, Vlora, 9 Albanian nationalism, 102 –13 Albanians (ethnic), 12, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 102 – 13 Alexander, King of Yugoslavia, 194 Alsace-Lorraine, 34, 37 American Civil War, 140, 143, 148 Anatolia, 80 Anderson, Benedict, 121 Andreevski, Petre M., 131 Andric, Ivo, 174, 175 Arabs, 4, 105 “Armenian massacres”, the (1894 – 6), 5 Armenians, 4 Asquith, Herbert, 29, 34, 208 Athens, 9, 93, 233, 234 Austria (Republic of), 34, 35, 185 Austria (within Dual Monarchy), 49, 50, 52, 166 – 8, 169

Austria-Hungary, ix, xi, 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 24, 25, 30, 31, 32, 34, 47– 64, 76, 86, 87, 90, 105, 112, 154, 156–75, 208, 234 Austro-Prussian war (1866), 38, 77 Autonomist Party (Dalmatia), 166 L’Avvenire, 159 Baghdad, 5 Balkan League, 7, 10, 12, 30, 160, 161, 162, 168, 169, 172 Balkan Pact (1934), 191, 193, 194 Balkan region, 3, 4, 11, 24, 28, 30, 141–2, 145, 149, 160, 172, 184, 188 Balkan stereotypes, 204, 218, 219 Balkan War, First (1912 – 13), 8 – 10, 13– 16, 28– 9, 120, 139, 147, 158, 160, 171– 2, 205, 207, 208, 212, 232, 234, 236 Balkan War, Second (1913), 13–16, 31, 87, 90, 120, 149, 150, 154, 157, 161, 164, 171– 2, 174, 183, 185, 207, 212 Balkan Wars, origins, 4 – 8, 27–8 Batak Massacre (1876), 144 Battenberg, Prince Alexander, of Bulgaria, 25 Batum, 24

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Bejta, Azem, 32 Belgium, 37 Benjamin, Walter, 141, 147 Berchtold, Count Leopold, 57 Berisha, Sali, 113n1 Berlin, Congress and Treaty (1878), 5, 23, 24 – 8, 38, 122, 141, 207, 209 Bessarabia, 24 Bhabha, Homi, 121 Bismarck, Otto von, 24 Black Hand, 159 Boletin, Isa, 110 Boris III, Tsar of Bulgaria, 194 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 6, 24, 49, 51, 54, 63, 158, 232 Bosnian crisis (1908), 6, 207, 232 Bourchier, James, 153 Brailsford, Henry Noel, 136n29, 150 – 1, 152, 155n18, 222n2 Bralic, Ante, 156, 160, 175, 177n32, 179n88 Bratislava, 58 Bregnalica River, battle at, 92 Brest-Litovsk, 34 Brlic´-Mazˇuranic´, Ivana, 162 Bucharest, 214 Bucharest, Treaty of, 1913, 10, 31, 91, 92, 120, 122, 183, 185, 197 Bukovac, Vlaho, 167 Bulgaria, aircraft, 15 casualties and fatalities in Balkan Wars, 82, 90 – 1 and Central Powers, 11, 153, 214 and cholera, 76 – 94 Congress of Berlin, 25 and Eastern Rumelia, 25, 230 independence and nationalism, 4, 184, 214 loss of territory, 1913, 10, 31, 185 and Macedonia, 6, 9, 11, 26, 27, 28, 35, 119, 122, 123, 127, 129, 153, 183 – 98, 231

military strength, xi, 8, 10, 13, 15, 28, 78 – 9 opposition to Balkan Wars, 13, 214 and origins of the First Balkan War, 7, 27, 28, 232– 3 and origins of the Second Balkan War, 9 – 10, 31, 172, 185 and Paris Peace Conference (1919), 185, 186 regional ambitions, xi, 6, 208 and Russia, 10, 11, 24, 25 San Stefano Treaty, 24, 26 war with Serbia, 1885, 25, 207 “Bulgarian atrocities” (1875), 5, 38, 144 Bulgarian Central Military Archive, 78 Bulgarian First Army, 81–2 Bulgarian Second Army, 85, 86– 7 Bulgarian Third Army, 82 Bulgarian Fourth Army, 86, 87, 92 Bulgarian Fifth Army, 87 Bulgarian League of Doctors, 88, 89 Bulgarian minority in Yugoslavia, 186 Bulgarian orthodox church (Exarchate), 6, 26, 119, 184, 228, 229, 233 Bulgarian Social Democratic Party, 214 Burgenland, 36 Buria´n, Count, 50, 57 Butler, Nicholas Murray, 210 Buxton, Charles Roden, 16 Buxton, Noel, 14, 16 Byron, Lord George, 148, 150 Camarada, Demetrio, 105 Cankov (Tsankov), Aleksandar, 193 Capa, Robert, 147 Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, 1914 report, 12, 77, 203, 210–12, 215, 217, 218, 222n2 Carr, E.H., 218 Cary, Joyce, x, 11, 13– 14, 163 Cassell, publishers, 142 Celewicz, Ambros, 84 Cerina, Vladimir, 158

INDEX Cesarec, August, 158 Chamberlain, Austen, 193 Chania, 228, 237n4 Chataldzha (C¸atalca), defence lines of, 8, 10, 13, 78, 80, 81, 82, 86, 87, 88 China, 11, 143 cholera, 8, 15, 76– 94, 173 Cholera (novel), 88 Clemenceau, Georges, 37 Coalition Party, Croatia, 157, 158, 160, 169, 171, 172, 174 Comintern (Communist International), 192, 193 Committee of Union and Progress (see also Young Turks), 5, 6, 109, 110, 111 Constantine I, King of the Hellenes, 152, 234 Constantinople (Istanbul), 5, 8, 10, 15, 24, 34, 79, 80, 108, 151, 232 Corbett, Percy, 22 Corfu Crisis, 1923, 196 C¸orlu, hospital, 81, 83 Court of Arbitration, The Hague, 210, 222n2 Crete, 6, 150, 227 – 8, 233, 237n4 Crimean War, 5, 77, 140, 143, 145, 147, 213 Croatia, 11, 47, 51, 52, 55, 56, 63, 156 – 75, 240 Croatian Party (Dalmatia), 166 Croatian Peasant People’s Party, 159, 172, 173 Croatian People’s Progressive Party (Dalmatia), 166 Croatian Unification Party, 161 Croats, 35, 55, 169 – 71 Cromer, Earl of, 29 Crvena Hrvatska, 54, 160 Csa´th, Ge´za, 63 Cuvaj, Slavko, 55, 158, 170, 171, 176n10 Cvijic´, Jovan, 51 Cyprus, 5, 24

245

Czechoslovakia, 35, 36, 38, 48, 64 Czechs, 78, 83, 89 Dagˆlar, Oya, 77 Daily Mail (UK), 152 Daily News (US), 144 Daily Telegraph (UK), 148, 152 Dalmata, Il, 159, 170 Dalmatia, 49, 54, 63, 156– 75 Damascus, 5 Dan, 159, 172 Danzig, 37, 38 Dardanelles, 7, 28 Delta, Pinelopi, 229, 237n7 Demir Hisar (Siridokastro), 87, 92, 93 Desanti, Raimondo, 170 Despot, Igor, 156, 157, 160 Dicey, Edward, 22 Die Zeit, 52 Dimitrov, Alexander, 190 Dobrujda, 10 Dodecanese islands, 7, 236 Dom, 159, 160, 172 Domenica del Corriere, La, 145 Dragoumis, Ion, 229, 237n7 Dragoumis, Stefan, 232, 237n14 Drava, 171 Drummond, Sir Eric, 144 Dubrovnik, 54, 162 Durakovic´, Indira, 76– 7, 78 Durham, Edith, x, 153 Durres, 28, 30 Dutton, Samuel T., 222n2 Eastern Question, the, ix, x, 141, 142, 143, 183, 191, 197, 198, 205, 227, 231 Eastern Rumelia, 25, 26, 230 Edward VII, King, 6 Egypt, 5 Epiros, 235 Erickson, E.J., 14, 82 d’Estournelles de Constant, Baron, 12, 215, 222n2

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ethnic and religious violence, 3, 5, 12, 29, 30, 32, 39, 148, 160–1, 203, 206, 212 – 13, 217, 219– 20, 230 – 1, 235 European Union (EU), 20, 117, 133, 240 Evans, Sir Arthur, x Ferdinand, Tsar of Bulgaria, 7, 8, 84 Fife Cookson, J., 146, 148, 149, 152 Flecker, James Elroy, 151 Foch, Marshal Ferdinand, 188 Fourto, General de, 188 France, 5, 24, 27, 30, 34, 36, 37, 39, 141, 150, 185, 188, 189, 191 – 4, 196, 197, 198, 208, 226 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke, 48, 50, 61, 62, 142, 207, 239 Franz Joseph, Emperor, 53 Frasheri, Abdul, 106, 108 Frasheri, Sami, 108, 109 Freeman, Edward Augustus, 151 Gallipoli, 86, 87, 148 Galogaza, Stevo, 164 Gellner, Ernst, 121 Gennadis, Nikolaos, 228, 236n4 George I, King of the Hellenes, 7, 9, 150, 228, 234 George V, King of the United Kingdom, 194 German minority in Croatia and Dalmatia, 157, 170 Germany, 5, 11, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 78, 147, 153 – 4, 185, 193, 205, 208 Gibbon, Edward, 142, 143, 149 Gibbs, Philip, 15 Gladstone, W.E., 4, 5, 144, 151 Godart, Justin, 222n2 Go¨mbo¨s, Gyula, 36 Gordon, General Charles, 146 Gounaris, Basil, 230

Great Britain, ix, 5, 11, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34, 35, 36, 39, 139– 54, 185, 188, 189, 191– 4, 196, 197, 208, 227 Greco-Turkish War (1897), 8, 148, 149, 228, 235 Greece, and Albania, 9, 233– 4 army, 235 and cholera, 92–3 dissatisfaction with outcome of Balkan Wars, 10, 31– 2 ethnic violence, 235 gains from Balkan Wars, 3, 9, 151, 235, 236 independence and nationalism, 4, 141, 184, 226 –7 and Macedonia, 6, 9 – 10, 26, 27, 28, 31, 119, 123, 127, 129, 143, 150 – 1, 152, 184, 185, 228–31, 233, 235 nineteenth-century expansion, 227, 228 and origins of First Balkan War, 7, 232 – 3 Petritch incident (1925), 196 relations with Bulgaria, 232– 3 relations with Serbia, 233 role of navy, 8, 28, 236 and Second Balkan War, 31, 185 Greek minority in Ottoman Empire, 232 Greek Orthodox Church, 6, 26, 104, 119, 228, 229, 230, 233, 234 Greene, Graham, 148 Grey, Sir Edward, 28, 30, 35, 183, 198 Gross, Mirjana, 156 Grothe, Hugo, 149 Gu¨lhane School of Medical Practice, 91 Habsburgs, 11, 47– 51, 54, 56, 61– 4, 77, 240 Haggard, H. Rider, 145 Hall, Richard C., 16, 80, 89, 92, 209

INDEX Hamid, Sultan Abdul, 5, 6, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111 Hasenclever, Andreas, 20 Herbert, Audrey, 30 Hirst, Francis W., 222n2 Hitler, Adolf, 36, 38 Hobbes, Thomas, 21, 38 Hobsbawm, Eric, 119, 121 Hope, James, 30 Horvat, Josip, 157 Hranilovic´ von Cvetassin, Oskar, 56 Hrvat, 159 Hrvatska, 172, 173 Hrvatska Kruna, 157, 159, 160, 170, 175n2 Hrvatska Rijec, 159, 160, 171 Hrvatski Lloyd, 159, 172 Hrvatski Pokret, 159, 161, 162, 163 Hrvatski Svijet (New York), 52 Hungarian Interior Ministry, 50, 56, 57 – 61 Hungarian Republican Party, 53 Hungarians (Magyars), 35, 36 Hungary, 11, 20, 34, 35, 36, 38, 47 – 64, 166, 185, 240 Horthy, Admiral Miklo´s, 36 Ilinden (1991), 124, 132 Ilinden Uprising (1903), 27, 124, 132, 143, 229, 231 Ilinden Uprising (1944), 124, 132 Illustrated London News, 147 Illyrians, 49 IMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation), 6, 118, 119, 122, 143, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 229, 230 Independent Croat Unification party, 159 India, 11, 30, 141, 146 Inter-Allied Commission of Control, 188 International Sanitary Council, 79

247

Ionian islands, 227 Italian minority in Dalmatia, 159– 60, 166, 167, 168– 71, 179n88 Italo-Turkish War (1911), 7, 8 Italy, ix, xi, 7, 8, 9, 25, 30, 34– 5, 36, 42n50, 105, 112, 153, 160, 185, 188, 193, 195, 196, 198, 208, 232, 234, 236 James, Lionel, 14 Janina (Ioannina/Yannina), 9, 150, 151, 236 Jaszi, Oscar, 51 Jelena, Queen of Montenegro, 170 Jerusalem, 5 Jews, 4, 6, 157, 170– 1 Jobbik, 20 Jovanovic, Jovan M., 195 Jukic, Luka, 158, 165 Kalpouzos, Giannis, 226 Kant, Immanuel, 20, 21, 22, 38 Karaman, Igor, 156 Karavelov, Liobe´n, 26 Karlovci, 56 Kars, 24 Kellogg– Briand Pact (1928), 213 Kemal, Mustafa (Atatu¨rk), 5 – 6 Kemal Bey, Ismail, 108–9, 110, 112 Kinnaird, Rose W., 149 Kirk Kilisse (battle and fortress), ix, 78, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86 Kissinger, Henry, 116, 208, 219 Knightley, Philip, 140, 143, 149 Kopriva, 159, 173 Koromilas, Lambros, 229 Kosovo (Kosova), 20, 30, 32, 33, 34, 111, 164, 165, 167, 184, 240 Kraus, Rudolf, 76, 82, 84, 86, 87, 96n33 Krausz, Samuel, 58 Krizman, Bogdan, 167 Krizman, Tomislav, 163, 167 Krleza, Miroslav, 157, 163, 165– 6

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Krobatin, Alexander von, 52, 74n81 Kumanovo, town and battle, 8, 59, 92, 165 Kurds, 4 Kyustendil, cholera hospital, 87 Lamington, Lord, 29 – 30, 31 Lapcˇevic´, Dragisˇa, 160 Lausanne, Treaty of (1923), 19, 34, 192 League of Nations, 186, 187, 190, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 213, 239 Lebanon, 107 Lejean, Guillaune, 149 Lenin, V.I., 173 Libya, 7, 15, 145, 153, 232 Lithuania, 37 “Little Entente”, 36, 192 Locarno, Treaty of, 193 London Balkan League, 153 London Conference (1912– 13), 9, 112, 122, 185, 194 London, Pact (or Treaty) of (1915), 34 – 5 London Treaty (1913), 9, 23, 28 – 34, 38, 234 Lucian, Patriarch, 56, 57 Lule Burgas (Lu¨leburgaz), battle and fortress, 8, 13, 78, 81 Luka´cs, La´szlo´, 57 MacDonald, James Ramsay, 189 Macedonia, xi, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 24, 26, 27, 28, 85, 88, 93, 112, 115 – 33, 143, 146, 147, 150, 152, 153, 183 – 98, 229 – 30, 232, 233, 235, 240 Macedonia, Republic of, 115 – 33 Macedonian Academy of Arts and Science, 119, 132 Macedonian Committee (Athens), 229, 237n14 MacGahan, J.A., 144 Mackinder, Halford, x, 22

Magas, Branka, 167 Manchester Guardian, ix, 222n2 Marincovic´, Vojislav, 194 Markovic´, Milan, 52 Marriott, J.A.R., x Mason, David, 28 Matos, Antun Gustav, 164, 165 Mazower, Mark, 123 Medulic (art society), 167 Melas, Pavlos, 235 Mesˇtrovic´, Ivan, 157, 167 Metaxas, Ioannis, 235 Metternich, Klemens von, 37, 38 Milan I, King of Serbia, 25 Milioukov, Paul, 222n2 Mlada Hrvatska, 159 Mollov, Vasil, 81, 82, 83, 86– 7, 88, 89, 90 Monastir, ix, 9, 184 Montenegro, ix, x, xi, 4, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 24, 28, 30, 32, 34, 103, 162, 163, 168, 170, 177n47, 208, 222n2 Morgenthau, Hans, 19, 23 Morley, Viscount, 29 Mu¨hlens, Hermann, 94 Mu¨llern, Karl von, 87 Mu¨rzsteg Programme, 6 Muskete, 52 Muslims, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 29, 30, 55, 79, 104 –5, 110, 219 Mussolini, Benito, 188, 193, 194 Naprednjak, 159, 173 Nardello, Niko, 169 Narodne Novine, 172 Narodni List, 157, 170, 175n2 NATO, 33, 34, 117, 240 Neuilly, Treaty of (1919), 34, 185, 188, 190, 193 Nevinson, Henry, 12, 13, 16, 149, 152, 153 Nicholas (Nikola) I, King of Montenegro, 9

INDEX Nicholas II, Tsar, 6, 31 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 122, 218 Nikolic´, Tomislav, 20 Nish (Nisˇ) Agreement (1923), 189 Nora, Pierre, 133n1 Novi Pazar, Sandzˇak of, 24, 32 Novi Sad, 59 Novo Vreme, 13 Nuradunghian, Gabriel Effendi, 79 Obzor, 159, 172 Ohrid– Debar Uprising (1913), 128 Ollier, Edmund, 142, 143 Orahovats, Petar, 85 –6 Orend, Brian, 210 Orhanie (Botevgrad), 91 Osijek, 162 Oslobodenje, 52 Ottoman Empire (see also Committee of Union and Progress; Young Turks) Albanians, relations with, xi, 4 – 5, 28, 102 – 13 attempts to reform, 4, 5, 6, 104, 106, 109 before the Balkan Wars, 4 casualties and fatalities due to Balkan Wars, 14, 16, 82, 91 cholera, 77, 78 –80, 82, 85, 86, 87, 91 Congress of Berlin, 24 – 5 decline of, 4, 5, 7, 24, 106, 141, 143, 149, 184, 208 First Balkan War, 8 – 9 14, 28 – 9, 78 –9, 112, 185, 205, 207, 235 and Germany, 5 loss of territory, 3, 4, 9 military capability, 7 – 8, 14 – 15, 28, 112, 145 and minorities, 4, 5 refugees, 1912, 79 rule over the Balkans, 3, 4, 5, 24, 102, 122, 142, 145, 160, 184, 187, 205, 227, 228, 231 Second Balkan War, 10, 14, 31

249

violence against minorities, 5, 144, 232 Ottomanism, 106, 110 Oxford, ix, x Panas, Dimitrios, 232 Pangalos, General Theodoros, 196 Partito Italiano Democratico, 159 Party of Right, 156, 159, 160, 171, 172, 180n126 pan-Germanism, 205– 6 pan-Slavism, 49, 50, 53, 58, 62, 64, 205 Pancsova (Pancˇevo), 59, 60 Paris treaties (1919 – 20), 13, 18, 23, 34– 7, 122, 185–7, 191, 193 Pasha, Enver, 6 Pasic (Pasˇic´), Nikola, 165, 189, 190, 195 Pejacsevich, Count, 56 Permanent Court of International Justice, 196 Peter I, King of Serbia, 7 Petritch Incident (1925), 196 Petrov, Toshko, 80, 81, 83, 85, 88 Philby, Kim, 140 Pijemnont (Piedmont), 51 Pirot, 92 Pirot Agreement (1930), 191 Pleven (Plevna), 91, 142, 148 Ploumidis, Spyros, 230 Plovdiv, 84, 91, 192, 230, 231, 237n4 Poincare´, Raymond, 189 Poland, 37, 38 Poulton, Hugh, 122 Price, W.H. Crawfurd, 143, 146, 150 Princip, Gavrilo, 142 Prior, Melton, 146 Prishtina (Pristina), 33 Pristine, Hasan Bey, 111 Prizren, League of, 106, 107 Progressive Radical Youth (Serbo-Croat), 174 Prussia, 77

250

WAR IN

THE BALKANS

Punch, 9, 17n15, 147 Puto, Arben, 103 Puto, Artan, 103 Rada, Girlolama de, 105 – 6 Radic´, Stjepan, 55, 160 Radoslavov, Vasil, 8 Ravel Accords (1908), 6, 109 Red Cross, xi, 4, 7, 10, 24, 31, 35, 36, 38, 48, 64, 88, 91 – 2, 185, 189 Redlich, Joseph, 222n2 Rees, Sir J.D., 30 Reichspost, 152 Reuters, 149 Rhineland, occupation of, 37 Rijeka (Fiume), 35, 169 Risorgimento, 159 – 60, 170 Roessel, David, 150 Romania, xi, 4, 7, 19, 24, 31, 35, 36, 38, 48, 64, 88, 91, 92, 185, 189 Rome Exposition (1911), 167 Rugova, Ibrahim, 33 Ruhr, 1923 occupation, 188 Russell, W.H., 140, 143, 144, 146, 147, 213 Russia, ix, x, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 34, 58, 63–4, 105, 142, 144, 148, 149, 150, 158, 197, 208 Russo-Turkish war, 1877, 148 Ruthenes, 63 Ruthenia, 36 Saarland, 34, 37 St Clair Stobbart, Mabel, 11, 17n23 St Germain, Treaty of (1919), 34 St Petersburg, 10, 85 Sakazov, Janko, 13 Salonika (Thessaloniki, Salonica), 6, 9, 10, 87, 92, 93, 150, 151, 184, 214, 229, 234 San Stefano, 79 San Stefano, 1878 treaty, 24, 26, 122 Sarajevo, 48, 54, 62, 142, 154, 237

Sazonov, Sergei, 10 Schelgel, Anton, 171 Schleswig-Holstein, 37 Schmitt, Oliver Jens, 103 Schu¨ling, Walter, 222n2 Scutari (Shkode¨r), 9, 13, 28, 30, 31, 149 Second Socialist International, 13 Sepic, Dragoman, 174 Serb– Bulgarian War (1885), 7, 207 Serbia, and Albanians, 12, 28, 32, 33 and Austria-Hungary, 48, 49, 50, 51 – 2, 58, 59, 62, 63 casualties and fatalities due to Balkan Wars, 92 and cholera, 85, 92 dissatisfaction with outcome of war, 31 and ethnic violence, 12, 32 expansionist aims of, xi, 6, 49– 50, 51 – 2, 165, 169, 208 gains from Balkan Wars, 3, 150 independence and nationalism, 4, 24, 141, 150, 161, 164, 184, 214 and Kosovo, 20, 32, 33 and Macedonia, 6, 9, 26, 27, 28, 31, 119, 123, 127, 129, 150– 1, 184, 185 medical volunteers for, 162– 3 opposition to Balkan Wars, 13, 214, 215 and origins of First Balkan War, 7, 28, 232 and Russia, 11 and Second Balkan War, 31, 150, 185 Slavic volunteers for, 163, 166, 168 war with Bulgaria (1885), 25, 207 and World War I, 32, 63 Yugoslav incorporation of Macedonia, 183– 98 Serbian Danube Division, 85 Serbian Orthodox Church, 26–7, 53, 56, 59, 60, 119, 166, 186

INDEX Serbian Party (Dalmatia), 166 Serbian People’s Independent Party, 159 Serbians (outside Serbia), 47, 49, 50, 51 – 4, 55, 56, 59, 61, 63, 159 Serres, 87, 93 Seton-Watson, R.W., 157, 167 Se`vres, Treaty of (1920), 34 Sˇibenik, 54, 159, 162, 166, 168, 173, 175 Sidak, Jaroslav, 156, 174 Skanderbeg, 102, 103, 105 Skopetea, Elli, 227 Skopje, ix, 9, 12, 163, 186, 189 Slavonski Brod, 162 Slobodna Rijec, 159, 172 Slovaks, 58, 63 Slovenes, 35, 47 Smith, Anthony, 122 Smodlaka, Josip, 166 Smyrna, 7, 232, 237n4 Social Democrats, Croatia, 160, 172 Social Democrats, Hungary, 53, 59 Social Democrats, Serbia, 160, 214 socialism, ix, 13, 53, 59, 64, 122, 155n18, 160, 214 Sofia, ix, 10, 28, 31, 81, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 93, 153, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 214, 232, 233 Sontag, Susan, 140 South Slavs, ix, 11, 47 –64, 156 –75 Split, 54, 159, 162, 167, 168, 176n12 Srbobran, 159, 162 Stamboliski, Alexander, 187, 188, 189, 190 Stoyanov, Ljudmil, 88 Straits, the (Dardanelles, Bosphorus), 28, 34 Stresemann, Gustav, 42n51 Suez Canal, 5 Supilo, Frano, 157, 174 Syria, 5, 80 Tallia´n, Baron, 57 Tartaglia, Oskar, 157, 159, 165

251

Taylor, A.J.P., 153, 194 telegraphy, 146, 149 Tepedelen Agreement (1911), 111 Theotakis, George, 233 Thessaly, ix, 228 Thompson, Kenneth, 22 Thrace, ix, 3, 8, 11, 14, 26, 78, 79, 80, 85, 87, 91 Tikvesˇ Uprising, 1913, 128, 137n38 Times, The, ix, 140, 144, 146, 150, 153 Tisza, Istva´n, 52, 53, 63, 64 Todorova, Maria, 203 Toynbee, Arnold, 208 Trapmann, W.H., 148, 152 “trialism”, 50 – 1, 175 Trianon, Treaty of, 1920, 34, 35, 36 Trikoupis, Charilaos, 237n14 Troebst, Stefan, 118 Troshev, Konstantin, 78 Trotsky, Leon, 12, 59, 209 Turkey, 34, 231 Ujedinjenje, 159, 165 Ujevic, Augustin, 157, 164, 165, 173, 174, 180n122 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 141, 185, 192 United Nations (UN), 117, 198 United States of America (USA), 11, 52, 129, 141 Uzunko¨pru¨, 86 Vasa, Pasho, 107 –8, 109 Vatev, Dr Stefan, 89 Vazev, Ivan, 214 Venizelos, Eleftherios, 8, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237n14 Versailles, Treaty of (1919), 34, 35, 37, 38, 48, 120, 183, 239 Vienna, Congress of, 37, 38 Vikic-Lapis, Ivo, 167 Vittorio Emanuele III, 236 Vlachos, Nikolaos, 231

252

WAR IN

THE BALKANS

Vlora, Declaration of (1912), 102 Vocovics, Lazar, 59 Vojinics, Istva´n, 56, 57, 60 Vojvodina, 35 Voros, Slavko, 161 Wangenheim, Freiherr Hans von, 78 Waugh, Evelyn, 148 Wekerle, Sandor, 57, 61 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 5, 152 Wilson, President Woodrow, 34 Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy, 18n23 World War I, x, 3, 11, 16, 34, 63, 93, 94, 126, 139, 143, 154, 166, 175, 185, 186, 239 World War II, 36, 184, 240 Yanulov, Iliya, 93 – 4 Yemen, 8

Young Turks (see also Committee of Union and Progress), 4, 5, 6, 10, 28, 231 Yugoslav Nationalist Youth, 165, 166, 173 Yugoslav War (1991– 5), 33, 48, 124, 153, 203, 216 Yugoslavia (including Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), xi, 33, 35, 39, 48, 64, 240, 186– 98, 199n9 Yugoslavism, 47– 64, 156– 78 Zadar, 157, 166, 169, 170, 178n87, 179n92 Zagreb, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, 165, 171, 172 173 Zastava, 60 Zidovska Smotra, 171 Zilliotto, Luigi, 166 Zog, King of Albania, 113