Nations, Identities and the First World War: Shifting Loyalties to the Fatherland 9781350036437, 9781350036468, 9781350036444

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
1. Nations, Identities and the First World War: Introduction
Part 1: The Fatherland of the Other
2. Patriotism and the Enemy: Political Identity as a Weapon
3. From Propaganda to National Identity Construction in Turkey
4. The Italian Case: The Ambiguities of a Nationalist Cultural Mobilization
5. How the Great War Changed the Mental Map of the Prussian Poles
Part 2: The Limits of Nationalization
6. Popular Nationalism, State Forms and Modernity
7. Questions of Nationalization in the Habsburg
8. The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the Limits of Nationalization in Southeastern Europe
9. The Layering of Belgian National Identities during the First World War
Part 3: Minorities in and at War
10. Minorities in and at War: Exposure, Persecution, Reaction
11. Creating ‘Fatherlands’ in the Balkans
12. Nationalism and Racism in Franco-German Controversies about Colonial Soldiers
Part 4: Town and Nation
13. An Urban Geography of the World at War, 1911–1923
14. Paris under the Bombs: Urban Experiences between Localism and National Identity
15. The Transformation of the Serbian National Capital through War and Occupation
Index

Citation preview

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Also available from Bloomsbury British Culture and the First World War: Experience, Representation and Memory, by Toby Thacker The Great War: Myth and Memory, by Dan Todman Nationalism in Modern Europe: Politics, Identity, and Belonging since the French Revolution, by Derek Hastings

Nations, Identities and the First World War Shifting Loyalties to the Fatherland Edited by Nico Wouters and Laurence van Ypersele

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 in Great Britain 2009 by the Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Nico Wouters, Laurence van Ypersele and Contributors, 2018 Nico Wouters and Laurence van Ypersele have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. Cover image: Belgian refugees on the roads. (© Photo12/UIG/Getty Images) 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: 978-1-3500-3643-7 PB: 978-1-3501-4621-1 ePDF: 978-1-3500-3644-4 eBook: 978-1-3500-3645-1 Series: Bloomsbury Ethics, 1234567X, volume 6 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors 1

Nations, Identities and the First World War: Introduction Nico Wouters and Laurence van Ypersele

Part 1 2 3 4 5

Patriotism and the Enemy: Political Identity as a Weapon John Horne From Propaganda to National Identity Construction in Turkey Erol Köroğlu The Italian Case: The Ambiguities of a Nationalist Cultural Mobilization Marco Mondini How the Great War Changed the Mental Map of the Prussian Poles Jens Boysen

Part 2 6 7 8 9

The Fatherland of the Other

The Limits of Nationalization

Popular Nationalism, State Forms and Modernity John Breuilly Questions of Nationalization in the Habsburg Monarchy Laurence Cole The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the Limits of Nationalization in Southeastern Europe Nikolai Vukov The Layering of Belgian National Identities during the First World War Barbara Deruytter

Part 3

Minorities in and at War

10 Minorities in and at War: Exposure, Persecution, Reaction Peter Gatrell 11 Creating ‘Fatherlands’ in the Balkans Emilia Salvanou 12 Nationalism and Racism in Franco-German Controversies about Colonial Soldiers Christian Koller

vii viii

1 15 17 39 57 75 95 97 115 135 155 175

177 197 213

vi Part 4

Contents Town and Nation

233

13 An Urban Geography of the World at War, 1911–1923 Pierre Purseigle 14 Paris under the Bombs: Urban Experiences between Localism and National Identity Élise Julien 15 The Transformation of the Serbian National Capital through War and Occupation Jovana Knežević

235

Index

297

255 277

List of Figures 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

German Propaganda addressed to Flemish Soldiers Bread queue in Vienna Table with a corpus of popular songs about the war Belgian refugees in Brussels The Belgrade University destroyed by the Austro-Hungarian guns Cover illustration La Vie parisienne Parisian map of bombardments and plaques Cover illustration by René Jouenne (1919) Drawing by Quesnel, Le Pêle-mêle, 28 April 1918

15 95 161 175 233 267 269 270 272

Notes on Contributors Jens Boysen holds a master’s degree in history, Slavic studies and politics at Goethe University Frankfurt/Main and Dublin, a postgraduate master’s degree in European affairs at the College of Europe in Warsaw-Natolin and a doctorate degree of the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen (2008). He is currently Research Fellow at the Technical University in Chemnitz. His research interests include the history of Central and Eastern Europe (in particular the relations of Prussia/Germany with its neighbours), the history of (modern) civil–military relations, policies on war and peace in Imperial Germany, the First World War and the Weimar Republic, the history of political thought (nationalism, socialism, conservatism), borderland studies/regionalism (including national minorities) and the problems of historical remembrance. John Breuilly is Emeritus Professor of Nationalism and Ethnicity at the London School of Economics. His principal academic interests are in the interdisciplinary study of nationalism and the history of modern Europe, especially that of Germany. He is a co-editor of the journal Nation and Nationalism and President of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism. Recent book publications include Austria, Prussia and the Making of Modern Germany, 1806–71 (2011) and, as editor, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism (2013). He is currently writing a book on how nationalism as a political ideology was diffused across the world and working on a revised edition of 19th Century Germany: Politics, Culture and Society, 1780–1918 (first edition, 2001). Laurence Cole studied modern history at the University of Oxford and the European University Institute. He has taught at Birkbeck College, London and the University of Birmingham. He was Lecturer then Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of East Anglia, before becoming Professor of Austrian History at the University of Salzburg in 2013. He was co-editor of European History Quarterly from 2004-2011. Publications include: Military Culture and Popular Patriotism in late Imperial Austria (Oxford, 2014); (ed. with Christa Hämmerle and Martin Scheutz), Glanz – Gewalt – Gehorsam. Militär und Gesellschaft in der Habsburgermonarchie (1800 – 1918) (Bochum, 2011); (ed.) Different Paths to the Nation. Regional and National Identities in Central Europe and Italy, 1830 – 1870 (Basingstoke, 2007); (ed. with Daniel L. Unowsky), The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the late Habsburg Monarchy (Oxford-New York, 2007). Barbara Deruytter is currently researcher at the University of Ghent for the project ‘Singing in times of war: A social history of norms and identification among the lower and middle classes during the First World War’. For this research, she uses a large

Notes on Contributors

ix

corpus of pre-existing national songs and new songs about the war that circulated in occupied and liberated Belgium (1914–20). Peter Gatrell teaches history at the University of Manchester and is affiliated to the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute. His books include The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford University Press, 2013); Free World? The Campaign to Save the World’s Refugees, 1956–63 (Cambridge University Press, 2011); (ed., with N. P. Baron) Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945–1950 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History (Pearson Longman, 2005); (ed., with N. P. Baron) Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918–1924 (Anthem Press, 2004); and A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during the First World War (Indiana University Press, 1999). His latest book (ed., with Liubov Zhvanko) is Europe on the Move: Refugees in the Era of the Great War, 1912–1923 (Manchester University Press, 2017). He is currently writing a book on migration in and to Europe since 1945, to be published by Penguin Press and Basic Books. In 2011 he was elected Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences. John Horne is Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Oxford University and emeritus Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, where he was Professor of Modern European History until 2015. He is a Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy and member of the International Research Centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne. He is the author and editor of a number of books and ninety chapters and articles, many relating to the history of the First World War. Among these are: (with Alan Kramer) German Atrocities, 1914. A History of Denial (New Haven, Yale, 2001), translated into German (2003) and French (2005); (ed.) A Companion to World War One (Oxford, Blackwell-Wiley, 2010); (ed.) Vers la guerre totale: le tournant de 1914–1915 (Paris, Tallandier, 2010); and with Robert Gerwarth (ed.) War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2012). He has also published (ed.) Our War: Ireland and the Great War (Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, 2008). Élise Julien is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Political Studies (Sciences Po) and a researcher at the Septentrion Institute for Historical Research (IRHiS), both in Lille. Her research interests include the First World War and its memories (especially in France and Germany) as well as its historiography. She is a Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Mission interministérielle du Centenaire in France and a Member of the Editorial Board of 1914–18 – Online International Encyclopedia of the First World War. Some of her publications include Paris, Berlin: la mémoire de la guerre, 1914–1933 (Rennes 2010), (with Arnd Bauerkämper eds.) Durchhalten! Krieg und Gesellschaft im Vergleich 1914–1918 (Göttingen 2010); Der Erste Weltkrieg (Kontroversen um die Geschichte), Darmstadt 2014); (with Emmanuel Debruyne, James Connolly, Matthias Meirlaen, eds.) En territoire ennemi. Les occupations de la Grande Guerre et leurs héritières, 1914–1954 (Villeneuve d’Ascq 2018); (with Mareike König eds.) Rivalités et interdépendances, 1870–1918 (Histoire franco-allemande) (Villeneuve d’Ascq 2018).

x

Notes on Contributors

Jovana Knežević is graduate of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and recipient of a diplome from Sciences Po-Paris. She received her PhD from Yale University. She has been at Stanford since 2006, first as Acting Assistant Professor in the Department of History and now as Associate Director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. She is a historian whose research and teaching interests focus on belligerent occupation and the social and cultural history of the First World War; urban history; and the Habsburg Empire, the Balkans and Yugoslavia. She is author of several book chapters and articles on the Habsburg-occupied Serbian capital of Belgrade during the First World War and gender and war, most recently a chapter on ‘Gender and Occupation’ in the collected volume Gender and the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2017). Christian Koller is the Director of the Swiss Social Archives (Zurich) and Adjunct Professor of Modern History at the University of Zurich. His areas of research include the history of nationalism and racism, the history of colonial armies, historical semantics, labour history, sports history, social movements, and memorial cultures. Some key publications are Fremdherrschaft: Ein politischer Kampfbegriff im Zeitalter des Nationalismus (Frankfurt/New York 2005); Rassismus (Paderborn 2009); (ed. with Wulf D. Hund and Moshe Zimmermann) Racisms made in Germany (Berlin 2011); Die Fremdenlegion: Kolonialismus, Söldnertum, Gewalt, 1831–1962 (Paderborn 2013); (with Fabian Brändle) Goal! A Cultural and Social History of Modern Football (Washington, DC 2015); (ed. with Michael Jucker at al.) Masse, Märkte und Macht in der Geschichte des Sports (Zurich 2016). Erol Köroglu is Assistant Professor of modern Turkish literature at the Bogazici University Turkish Language and Literature Department. His PhD from Bogazici University is also available in English (Ottoman Propaganda and Turkish Identity: Turkish Literature during World War I; 2007). The Turkish version was reprinted two times and was awarded with the Afet Inan History Award of History Foundation in 2004. His main research interest is the cultural history of nineteenth and twentieth centuries Turkish literature. He also studies the emergence of the novel in Turkish, Turkish nationalist movements and narrative theory and has published extensively in English and Turkish. Marco Mondini obtained his PhD in contemporary history at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. He is currently Adjunct Pofessor in Military History at the University of Padua, researcher at the Istituto Storico Italo Germanico-FBK in Trento and an associate fellow at the UMR Sirice (CNRS – Paris Sorbonne). He is member of the Historial de la Grande Guerre di Péronne (France) and section editor for 14–18 Online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War. Some of his publications include Il Capo. La Grande Guerra del generale Luigi Cadorna (Bologna 2017); (as editor) La guerra come apocalisse (Bologna 2016); La Guerra italiana. Partire, raccontare, tornare 1914–18 (Bologna 2014); (with M. Rospocher) Narrating War. Early Modern and Contemporary Perspectives (Berlin- Bologna 2013).

Notes on Contributors

xi

Pierre Purseigle is Associate Professor in Modern European History at the University of Warwick and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is Co-Founder and President of the International Society for First World War Studies and Editor-in-Chief of First World War Studies. He graduated from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Lyon, and the University of Toulouse and went on to teach at the universities of Oxford and Birmingham. Between 2013 and 2016, he held a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at Yale University and Trinity College, Dublin, as well as the Marcel Bataillon Visiting Chair at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Emilia Salvanou is a historian of modern and contemporary history. She is currently appointed Lecturer at the Hellenic Open University of Greece and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her academic interests include memory studies and historical culture, migration and refugee studies, historiography and theory of history. She has published papers on issues of memory and migration. Her book The Shaping of Refugee Memory: The Past as History-Writing and Historical Practices (2017) is available in Greek. Laurence van Ypersele is Ordinary Professor of Contemporary History at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium). She is also board member of the Historial de la Grande Guerre of Péronne (France). Between 2012 and 2014 she was the president of the WWI Commemorations Committee of the Walloon Government. She coordinates the research network project ‘Memory and Experience of WWI in Belgium’ (Memex) (four PhDs and one postdoctoral researcher). Her main academic interest is on the Belgian memories of the First World War. Recent books include Le roi Albert, histoire d’un mythe (Labor, 2006); Questions d’histoire contemporaine: conflit, mémoires et identités (P.U.F., 2006); (with E. Debruyne) Je serai fusillé demain. Les dernières lettres des patriotes belges et français fusillés par l’occupant. 1914–18 (Racine, 2011); (with E. Debruyne and C. Kesteloot) Brussels, Memory and War, 1914–2014 (La Renaissance du Livre, 2014). Nikolai Vukov holds a PhD in anthropology (2002, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) and a PhD in history (2005, Central European University). He is Research Associate at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and Visiting Professor at the Universities of Sofia and Plovdiv. He is also a fellow at the ‘Teaching Europe’ joint program of the Center for Advanced Studies in Sofia and New Europe College (Bucharest). He has published extensively on monuments and museum representations in Eastern Europe after 1945; communist rule and post-communist transition; history, memory and commemorations of the dead after the Two World Wars in Bulgaria. His most recent publications are: Bulgarian Refugees before, during and after the First World War. In: Europe on the Move: Refugees in the Era of the Great War (edited by P. Gatrell and L. Zhvanko), Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017; and Museum beyond the Nation? (co-edited with S. Kazalarska and I. Mishkova) Sofia: Gutenberg, 2016. Nico Wouters is Director of the Belgian Centre for War and Society (Belgian State Archives), Guest Professor at Ghent University, Honorary Research Fellow at Kent University, Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Belgian History and Editorial Board

xii

Notes on Contributors

Member of the Low Countries Historical Review. His research interests include the Second World War, (state sponsored) politics of memory, comparative history and oral history. Recent publications include (as editor) Transitional Justice and Memory in Europe (1945–2013), (Antwerp/Cambridge, 2014); Mayoral Collaboration under Nazi Occupation: Belgium, the Netherlands and France (1938–46) (Basingstoke/New York 2016); (with Berber Bevernage, eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of State-Sponsored History after 1945 (Basingstoke/New York 2018).

1

Nations, Identities and the First World War: Introduction Nico Wouters and Laurence van Ypersele

The First World War drew in nation-states, multiethnic empires and colonial empires and forced these radically different entities to tackle unprecedented military, political, socio-economic and cultural challenges in just over four years. We all know that the outcome was the end of multinational empires, the birth of new nation-states and the triumph of modern strands of nationalism that would come to dominate the century. The notion of ‘fatherland’ during and after the First World War was the overarching topic of an international conference in Brussels in October 2015, of which this volume is the published result.1 This academic conference took place in the middle of a context of centenary commemorations of the First World War that, it might be interesting to note, remained predominantly nationally oriented in all of the countries involved.2 Between 1914 and 1918, millions of men and women were taken out of their traditional environments where communal ties were often still dominant and were thrown into completely new situations that challenged traditional feelings of loyalty, empathy and mutual interconnectedness. In their efforts to organize some kind of total mobilization for the war effort, states faced the enormous challenge to somehow assimilate pre-existing multi-layered identities based on attachment not only to the family, locality or region (the so-called small fatherland), class and religion but also to sub-nationalist movements that could potentially counteract the state’s efforts. Discussing how these traditional identities shifted among different social groups during the First World War, to ultimately take the shape of a national identification that overruled all other ones, essentially also implies assessing the impact of the First World War and how it accelerated, ruptured or confirmed processes of nation-state formation that were ongoing in the decades before 1914. One view, going back to Eugen Weber and Ernest Gellner, sees the First World War not so much as a rupture but more as an accelerated confirmation of developments already well underway, in which traditional communal nationalisms took the next natural step towards more abstract nationalisms. An opposing view, exemplified by, among others, the work of Tara Zahra, stresses that popular indifference to the nation was the norm before 1914. This view defends the notion that class and profession, political ideology perhaps, but certainly also religion, family and region mattered much more for collective

2

Nations, Identities and the First World War

identities than notions of fatherland or nation, certainly in Central and Eastern Europe (Zahra 2008). This vision implies that the First World War was truly a tectonic shift that overhauled traditional socio-economic, political and religious cleavages and forcibly imposed ethnicity and nationality as the dominant basis for collective identification. It seems to imply that, in particular for Central and Eastern Europe, the First World War compressed decades of developments into just a few years. In many regards, the era before 1914 was a period of intensified internationalization in economic cooperation, cultural and intellectual exchanges, and also internationalist political movements and supranational organizations. The popular support, and in some cases even outright enthusiasm, for the war in August 1914 was therefore a remarkable rupture in many ways. Jean-Jacques Becker demonstrated how large parts of the French population went to war with a form of determination that indicated a deeply rooted sense of belonging to one ‘fatherland under threat’ (J.-J. Becker 1977). Overnight, governments of national union between former political, religious and ethnic-lingual opponents emerged in most countries. The latter even happened in states that had been struggling with emerging anti-state nationalisms such as Great Britain or Belgium. Home Rule for the Irish was approved by unionists and nationalists alike (although its implementation was postponed until the end of hostilities). In Belgium, the refusal of the German ultimatum by King Albert I neutralized the strong cleavages between Catholics and non-Catholics as well as Flanders and Wallonia with surprising ease, at least for the moment (van Ypersele 2006). Even more interesting are the multiethnic empires where, despite growing nationalist tensions before 1914, the idea of the fatherland under threat seemed to have an equally strong appeal. The mobilization of Czechs and Polish soldiers did not offer any major problems, and different national groups within the Austro-Hungarian Empire were quick to express their loyalty to Empire, the sovereign and the army (Fejtö 1993). This popular support for the war was far from universal or straightforward (Winter 2014). It was much stronger in urban regions than in rural areas, for example. And the determination to go to war was not absolute or without any consideration regarding the potential consequences. Nobody went to war in August 1914 with the perspective, let alone intention, to engage in a four-year total war. Nevertheless, the importance of this popular support and determination must not be downplayed. It showed the truly massive mobilizing force that the idea of the fatherland under threat could have. What remains remarkable is that, to a certain extent at least, this happened without significant push or pull, propaganda or coerciverepressive efforts from states. Ordinary people themselves spontaneously seemed to put aside their pre-war political, social and cultural divisions. This is remarkable because, for most of them, these everyday divisions were much more concrete and deeply rooted than any abstract tensions with people from other countries or nations. When this early strand of massive self-mobilization unravelled in the winter of 1914–15, states recognized that they needed to institutionalize the huge potential of popular identification with the national cause. Reorganizing societies into a state of continuous mobilization therefore meant somehow controlling processes of emotional attachments to a community of values and collective identities that until then had been fluid, ambiguous and contradictory.

Introduction

3

It goes without saying that this was a huge challenge for each regime. During the war, all belligerents and their respective systems of government struggled with semipermanent governmental instability, tensions between civil and military leadership, frantic efforts to reform institutions and bureaucracies and attempts to pacify the social unrest that always seemed to lurk just beneath the surface (A. Becker 2010). The challenges of total war forced regimes to create new models of statehood that could ‘remobilize’ their respective societies after 1914. For outright insurrection, military desertion in particular, coercion (repression) could be used. However, the problem of broader popular disengagement from the war effort was far worse. Ultimately this would only be solved through some system of continued persuasion (Horne 1997). The outcome of the war indicates that democratic, representative regimes (such as France, Great Britain, Italy and the United States) were better equipped to deal with these challenges than autocratic or authoritarian regimes (such as Germany or Russia). Liberal parliamentary democracies were able to do several things better: sustain broader democratic support, create propaganda that was far better aligned with everyday realities of populations, organize higher institutional flexibility and ultimately employ a more effective process of grassroots mobilization. Despite the fact that in these liberal countries as well, state control over private actors and the market increased significantly, the basics of capitalism were left intact (Supple 2014). Economic research shows, for example, that the controlled yet flexible British market economy proved more adaptive and well suited for sustaining war production than the rigid and ultimately inefficient German system (Broadberry and Howlett 2005). Sustaining broad popular consent was arguably the most important factor. The First World War propaganda wanted to win the hearts and minds of peoples and quickly developed as a modern, diversified and massive instrument. For the first time in history, for example, the visual image – posters, postal cards, pictures – replaced text. Propaganda was aimed at both legitimizing the war (with a discourse of the purely defensive war and the inevitability of victory) and demonizing the aggressive enemy. Internal contradictions, for example, where the enemy was demonized as the ultimate danger yet at the same time downgraded as incompetent, posed no problem. In times of war, such internally contradictory narratives tended to be overlooked (Leyens and Yzerbit 1997). National superiority – in military capacity, economic capabilities, but also (and especially) moral values and norms – was the underlying element that tied it all together (Glick and Fiske 2001). It would be wrong, however, to equate state propaganda completely with a devious manipulation of the hearts and minds of passive populations. Recent research shows that it makes more sense to consider the First World War propaganda as a product of a broader redefinition of the meaning of the war within belligerent societies themselves (Brandt 2000; Huss 2000; Horne and Kramer 2001; Prochasson and Rasmussen 2004; Carruthers 2011; Bremm 2013). Populations were by no means passive or complacent recipients. It is more fruitful to consider war propaganda as an instrument to guide and consolidate preexisting social perceptions. War propaganda explicitly aimed to enhance internal national cohesion by exploiting pre-existing prejudices and stereotypes about other national groups. As such, the First World War propaganda was a mirror that reflected deeper needs within belligerent societies: the perceived values, beliefs, fears and hopes of populations.

4

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Indeed, research shows that considerable parts of national propaganda narratives in fact emerged from below, in diverse layers of society (Brandt 2000), and that successful propaganda occurred when populations recognized their own aspirations and actively supported the discourses that were being projected (Huss 2000). Brandt’s research on German propaganda towards soldiers, workers and citizens in general shows how different stakeholders, from journalists and writers to the Red Cross administration, actively supported, distributed and enhanced state narratives. Huss’s research on French propaganda postal cards basically demonstrates the same thing, namely that the success of propaganda depended much more on the self-propagandistic mechanisms within a community of millions of ordinary Frenchmen than that of some all-powerful state machine. The absence of significant anti-war movements within national belligerents throughout the First World War was certainly not exclusively caused by state censorship or systematic repressive military terror. We are dealing here with an interiorization of national identification from microperspectives and the notion of ‘cultures of war’. This implies looking at how populations themselves formed attitudes that enabled the state’s efforts of military and socioeconomic mobilization (Audoin-Rouzeau and A. Becker 2000). Social backgrounds fundamentally influenced how people responded to these new contexts. The study of Snezhana Dimitrova (2002) on Bulgarian soldiers, for example, shows the differences in motivations and reactions depending on class. Using war diaries, she demonstrated that officers (mostly from an urban background) were preoccupied with reflections of death and drew inner strength and confidence from the idealized love for their wives, while ordinary soldiers and petty officers (mostly from rural backgrounds) were less emotional and dramatic about their situation but were mostly preoccupied with the organization of their farms and with winning the war to ensure the future material well-being for their families. Such in-depth research hints at the different collective emotional and psychological reactions and, as such, the multitude of individual motivations people can create to legitimize their loyalties. Nicolas Mariot’s research confirmed the different emotional landscapes and subsequent legitimizing of loyalties in the military service among intellectuals on the one hand and people of lower education on the other (Mariot 2013). Such research implies, by the way, that the encounter between different social classes did not necessarily lead to a mutual rapprochement. On the contrary, the groups studied by Mariot ended up with a more outspoken consciousness of their specific class identities, yet – significantly enough – still under the framework of a strengthened national identity. The affective identity tied to the family was essential as well. Recent research, for example, shows how important the family could be in pushing ‘their’ soldier towards honourable behaviour on the front, creating a reaction in the soldier, who wanted to do good by his family by meeting high military expectations (Pignot 2012; Vidal Naquet 2014). The affective framework of the family could therefore be a building block of identification with the national military cause. But this could also create conflicts of loyalties. The families of Belgians and Frenchmen sentenced to death by the German occupier, for example, expressed an ambiguous sentiment: on the one hand accusing the father who, through his sacrifice, abandoned the wife and children but on the other hand also a certain pride and support for the heroic sacrifice for the fatherland and

Introduction

5

the glory this national martyrdom brought on the entire family. Final letters between family and the convicted often show the difficult reconciliation of these contradictory emotions (Debruyne and van Ypersele 2011). People therefore looked within their own multi-layered identities to sustain their everyday motivation and ultimately also to legitimize their loyalties. But states had to earn the latter as well. They had to remain credible and convince populations that they were able to deliver. Faith in the capabilities of bureaucraticinstitutional and military leadership was essential for legitimacy and popular support. This ‘good governance’ in a time of total war meant, of course, providing sufficient basic needs (food, clothing, housing, security). But more importantly, perhaps, it also meant persuading people that the road towards the ultimate end-victory was in good hands and would ultimately be worthwhile by creating some future, new and more just social status quo. This way, the perspective of an end-victory could make the hardships and sacrifices bearable. The ‘one final push’ towards the end-victory with the perspective of a renewed social status quo was an essential mechanism for continued self-mobilization and popular war support. When people no longer believed the endvictory was credible or would help to better their own specific situations, loyalties could quickly evaporate. States therefore had to offer their populations a project that was aligned with their own aspirations. According to Richard Bessel, German socio-economic and military mobilization was remarkably successful all in all but collapsed at the moment everyday reality became too far removed from the project the state was trying to sell. Material deprivation and having to resort to the black market and other illegal activities to survive, for example, collided too strongly with the ‘psychological mobilization’ of the Germans: ‘Successful psychological mobilization has a limited shelf life, and it needs to be followed by some fulfilment of expectations’ (Bessel 2006: 451). In contrast with the German example, the remobilization campaigns of 1917–18 in France and Britain had a much stronger ‘inclusive emphasis on democracy’ (Horne 1997: 15). German remobilization remained exclusive rather than inclusive, accentuating authoritarianism rather than a perspective of a renewed future social renegotiation. The internal collapse came at the moment that German military rulers overruled political leaders and pushed society too far: ‘It was not so much that the mobilization failed as that the project for which Germans were mobilized ultimately was beyond their capacity to realize’ (Bessel 2006: 451). Liberal democracies had an advantage here as well. Liberal parliamentary regimes could fall back on deeper legitimacy and broader political participation (Horne 1997). These regimes (France, Great Britain, Italy) also had statesmen who were able to create and maintain a certain level of political unity and assert civilian power over military power (J.-J. Becker 2014). It was no coincidence that the Russian regime, with little legitimacy and with ill-equipped institutional capabilities, was the first major power to implode. Austria as well faced a mission impossible in 1917 when they had to remobilize the Slav units who increasingly formed networks of countermobilization against the Dual Monarchy, the state and the army (Cornwall 1997). The idea of the ‘enemy within’ was a strong mobilizing factor as well, connected as it was to the psychological need for scapegoats in order to cope with enormous sacrifices that were being made daily. The legal protection or even the very notion of a legal

6

Nations, Identities and the First World War

minority was not strongly developed in most states before 1914. The First World War had the paradoxical effect of enhancing legal protection of minorities while at the same time creating the contexts of escalating mass violence against these groups. The war strengthened collective consciousness about ‘the other’, and during the war itself this had often detrimental effects for the groups involved, certainly those ethnic minorities perceived as close to the enemy. Right from the outset of the war, for example, most belligerent countries were quick to create forms of camp systems for interning subjects of enemy states. Germans were interned in France and Australia; English, French or Belgian citizens in Germany; Germans, Turks and Austrians in Russia (A. Becker 2014). Distrust between national citizens themselves was also reinforced. Whatever the loyalties of ethnic, religious or political minorities, they would quickly undergo the unavoidable pressure of stigmatization, by fellow citizens as well as state authorities (Panayi 1993; Gatrell 1999; Lohr 2003; Von Hagen 2007). Within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poles and Czechs were placed in what we would now call concentration camps. In the Russian Empire, the authorities exploited the context of war to deport unwanted minorities, such as Chechens and Jews, approximately 7 million even (Gatrell and Nivet 2014). This was easy to defend; Russian authorities simply claimed that these ‘internal refugees’ had fled enemy military actions or reprisals. The most tragically emblematic case is obviously the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire, who fell victim to the implementation of a genocidal programme after April 1915. Demands for absolute national loyalty were not the monopoly of the state but were perhaps even more the result of dominant public pressures from within societies. During the First World War, the limits between public and private spheres blurred. War widows, for example, were closely monitored by their social environments, which demanded of them a perpetual mourning. Of the wives of soldiers, local communities demanded an equally well-kept matrimonial fidelity in the absence of the husband. States and local communities found each other here: in Great Britain, as in Germany, wives who were caught being unfaithful to their soldier-husbands were deprived of financial support (Grayzel 2002). In occupied Belgium, every form of close relationship with the enemy was severely condemned, by local communities but even more so by the elites. The higher classes strongly condemned social behaviour that for lower classes might also be considered a necessary strategy for survival, such as occasional prostitution for the Germans or voluntary (i.e. not forced) labour for the Germans. People who went too far would be labelled as ‘bad’ citizens or even as traitors to the state after the war, both by rituals of social stigmatization and through ostracization and sometimes by state-sponsored measures. Such disloyal citizens were, for example, deprived of any access to food supply services, no matter how necessary for survival this was in the first post-war years (Nath 2013). With such strong grassroots dynamics of social control, it goes without saying that deep distrust or outright hostility against foreign (enemy) subjects, minorities or other suspect parts of the population was endemic. Belligerents actively tried to use this. In occupied Belgium the Germans implemented a policy that supported the demands of Flemish nationalists in order to divide the unitary state. The Germans offered a Flemish university in 1916 and then supported the administrative separation of the country in 1917, thus planting the seeds of divisions that would continue to grow long

Introduction

7

after the Great War (Vrints 2002; Wils 2014). The Irish had delivered volunteers to fight for the British cause with the explicit hope that this demonstration of loyalty would grant them some political reward once the war was over (Horne 2008). As the war ground to a stalemate, however, Irish nationalists gradually distanced themselves from the national British cause, and the Easter Uprising of 1916 would mark a definitive rupture. In 1915 Czechoslovaks in exile or in prison in Russia formed a voluntary company, and by 1916 these companies had grown to such proportions that they became true ‘legions’, deployed on the Italian, French and Russian fronts (Gatrell 1999). Even more importantly, belligerent states tried to ‘sell’ projects of territorial expansion and national independence after the war to different minority groups, in order to win them over. This policy of grand promises and secret pacts did more than simply create false expectations and post-war frustrations. It effectively helped to create a dominant framework of national identification that previously had been secondary at best. In any case, countries with stronger means to organize grassroots national integration of different social groups ultimately had the major advantage during the war. Here a multinational empire such as the Habsburg one was challenged to the extreme. But overseas empires basically faced the same problem. The Australian and Canadian deployment alongside the British enhanced their separate sense of national identity. Although the enrolment of minority groups and coloured colonial subjects in the armies of the colonial powers (France and Great Britain notably) was made necessary by the demands of the war, military leaders did this reluctantly. Once deployed, these groups were systematically and overtly treated as inferiors by states. Colonial subjects who were drafted as soldiers or workers were discriminated against and humiliated, segregated and used as cannon fodder. In short, this led to measures of segregation within the military organization during the war and unfulfilled promises of future empowerment and rights after the war. The end result was that groups that before 1914 had had no strong specific national identity were almost pushed to develop one. The impact of these experiences was enormous and, in hindsight, quite foreseeable. The experience of being treated as a separate category of subjects planted the seed of national identification in the hearts and minds of thousands of men, and it was this war experience that birthed anti-colonial nationalism in the overseas empires after 1918 and ultimately the waves of decolonization and national independence after 1945. Overall, the First World War would enhance rather than solve the problems for minorities. The momentum of a so-called Wilsonian moment based on the right of self-determination of peoples provided a brief window of hope in 1917–18 (Manela 2007), but the hard national revendications of states during the negotiations of the Versailles Peace Treaty, as well as the many unfortunate (or lack of) border settlements after the First World War, quickly closed that window. Several large ‘wars after the war’ continued to rage until roughly 1923. To any intelligent observer, the new map of Europe in 1919 was nothing more than a visualization of future ethnic and political problems. Austria and Hungary were reduced to relatively small countries (Hungary lost 70 per cent of its territory) while most new nation-states held significant minority groups (Hungarians and Saxons in an enlarged Rumania, German-speaking groups in Czechoslovakia and Poland etc.). The Greek-Turkish War (1919–22) might be the

8

Nations, Identities and the First World War

clearest example of how the dynamic of homogenization and outright cleansing of nation-states would continue, ending as it did with the exchange of 1 million Christians leaving for Greece and half a million Muslims for Turkey (Turkey went from 20 per cent to 2 per cent Christians [Bozarslan 2008: 334]). The genie had been let out of the bottle with the universal doctrine that a homogeneous nation-state was an ideal situation as well as a right. Post-war commemorations reflected these continued struggles for national identification after 1918 as well. The tens of thousands of monuments to the dead erected after the war had to absorb trauma and mourning first and foremost, but they simultaneously also had to merge local identities, religious representations, social tensions and the (sometimes radically new) national status quo (A. Becker 1988; Winter 1995; Kidd and Murdoch 2004; van Ypersele 2010; Claisse 2013; Scates and Wheatley 2014). The symbolic image of the Unknown Soldier tried (among other memorials) to nationalize mass death, but many of the local monuments to the dead in Europe had to combine that message with a rather multifaceted picture of the nation. Many Breton monuments, for example, simultaneously celebrate the Bretonian identity and the Bretonian sacrifice for France. New nation-states, such as Czechoslovakia, needed to ‘nationalize’ their dead most urgently. This unavoidably led to ambiguity, for example, in monuments that proclaimed a Czechoslovakian fatherland with a representation of soldiers in an Austrian uniform. And in Poland, the Unknown Soldier was not a victim of the 1914–18 war but, rather, a soldier who fell in 1919 in the war that aimed to reconstitute the country. This ambiguity was even more tragic in those territories annexed after the war against the wishes of their populations, such as the eastern cantons in Belgium. For these people, the real fatherland was often reduced to the Heimat, the ‘little fatherland’ directly connected to the locality and region where one’s forebears lived. To summarize, loyalty to the fatherland during the First World War proved cemented in different layers of powerful affective spaces. The fatherland not only could mean attachment to one’s family and forebears, one’s village or town, one’s professional position or private company or one’s religion, ethnicity and nationality, but it also could mean feelings of distrust or outright hostility against the other. These different pre-war identities determined to a large extent how different groups legitimized their particular mobilization, loyalty and national identification. Because of the enormous sacrifices being made by everyone on a daily basis, loyalty to the final victory became an essential mechanism of mobilization. This final victory was carried by the military and the state and would ultimately be a predominantly national victory. National states could clearly use the enormous pressure of war to overrule and assimilate different layers of affection within a dominant framework of national identification, and the modern nationalisms that emerged out of the war were the result of a fundamental and forced renegotiation of relations between elites and the masses (Wimmer 2013). Combining the macro with the micro often comes down to tapping into new sources or critically assessing traditional source materials. Indeed, studying ‘popular nationalism’ is often a question of being able to tap into the right empirical sets of data (Breuilly 2012). And the chapters in this volume often demonstrate how enriching

Introduction

9

as well as challenging interpreting data can still be. Were choices by non-Germanspeaking households to send their children to German-speaking schools in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for example, pragmatic and opportunistic; or does it tell us something about a (lack of) sense of belonging and self-identification? How do we interpret the many shapes and forms that popular dissent or opposition took during the First World War: as opposition to acute material deprivation, as a lack of faith in a certain military strategy, as specific political opposition, as new emerging realms of a politics among the masses or as expressions of some kind of loyalty to certain larger overarching ideas? It remains very much the creative use of the right sources that can show us the glimpses of how elitist constructions of state discourses interacted with the myriad ways of active reception by social groups. To explore these issues, this volume is organized into four thematic parts, each with an opening overview chapter followed by more in-depth case studies. John Horne opens the first section, ‘The Fatherland of the Other’, with a reflection on the different meanings and uses of the notion of fatherland, through the prism of the active use of ‘dissident patriotisms’ within enemy societies. Erol Köroglu uses the case study of the Ottoman Empire to discuss how propaganda seemingly directed by an Ottoman-Turkish intelligentsia towards enemy states was actually directed at the future new Turkish citizen and was meant to consciously replace the notion of the multiethnic, multilingual and multi-religious Ottoman citizen with a new national Turkish national identity. Marco Mondini uses a case still often overlooked in works on the First World War, namely Italy. He analyses the ambiguity in Italian propaganda campaigns, where the campaign aimed at potential allies in enemy societies was at odds with doubts and fears of state and army officials. The latter rightly feared that opening Pandora’s box, for example, through the creation of some large Slavic nation-state after the war, would not necessarily be in Italian interests. John Breuilly opens the second section of the volume, ‘The Limits of Nationalization’, with a reflection on how the type of state could impact national loyalty. Arguing that different forms or stages of nationalism existing prior to 1914 responded differently depending on the type of state, Breuilly proposes to fine-tune our conceptual framework by distinguishing between national sentiment, nationalist ideology and nationalist politics. Laurence Cole then analyses how loyalty to state and monarchy eroded in the multinational Habsburg monarchy during the war. Among other factors, he points to the large impact of what he calls ‘negative nationalism’: the eroding loyalties of groups who were perceived as unreliable by, notably, the military and who subsequently fell victim to internal repressive measures. Nikolai Vukov develops the same lines of thought for Southeastern Europe. He distinguishes five factors, namely the Balkan wars, modernity and modernization, transnationalism, population displacements and public commemorations, and argues that all of those factors contained the potential to limit or curb growing national identification and nationalism but, in the context of the First World War, ultimately did the opposite. In the third chapter in this section, Barbara Deruytter uses a more outspoken microperspective to look at occupied Belgium. She uses a corpus of popular and official songs to analyse how the Walloon and Flemish sub-identities among the middle and

10

Nations, Identities and the First World War

lower classes could converge in an overarching Belgian identity with, among others, king and national independent neutrality as main tropes. Her chapter is a prime example of how untapped sources can offer us new angles and insights in the study of popular sentiments of patriotism and national identities. The ‘climax of Belgian nationalism’ in 1918 appeared anything but durable and merely seemed to hide the real evolution underneath the surface, namely a deepening of the ethnic-linguistic division. The third section deals with the essential issue of minorities. In his introductory chapter to this section, Peter Gatrell uses an ambitious larger chronological perspective to deeply analyse the issues briefly touched upon in this introduction. He looks at how discriminatory and repressive measures legitimized by the war, the socio-economic national context and the position of minorities – as well as different ideas of national homogenization – could yield different results and help explain the paradoxical effects of legal protection or other beneficial outcomes on the one hand and mass violence on the other. The Greek and Balkan cases are obviously right at the heart of these issues. Emilia Salvanou offers a fascinating and in-depth look at how refugee policies and policies of nationalization impacted specific minority groups and how these groups fared in the Lausanne Treaty. Christian Koller looks at another essential case and one that still is often overlooked, that of colonial soldiers. He looks at parallels in French policies and German ones and outlines the clear racial ideology that underlined French imperialism. Koller also demonstrates the impact of unattended expectations by colonial subjects after the war. The fourth and final section deals with the urban theatre of war and the interaction between urban- and national-based identities. In his introduction to this final section, Pierre Purseigle proposes new ways to use the urban angle to study the First World War and specifically the issue of nationalization. He shows how a focus on the everyday experience of violence and urban types of victimization can offer new insights on, among others, issues of civil society-state relationships and the emergence of certain types of transnational solidarity. Élise Julien develops an essential micro-case, namely Paris. This capital city was practically positioned at the front, and its particular situation – the constant threat of shelling, for example – further helped to merge the urban narrative with that of the French nation as a whole. Despite this, Julien clearly demonstrates how on an urban level, increasing social divisions and tensions put a severe strain on these discourses of national victimization or heroism. In the final chapter of the volume, Jovana Knezevic deals with another capital city at war, but one in an entirely different situation. Belgrade ceased to function as a capital city during the war, first because of the massive destruction and population displacement as a result of the Habsburg siege, and second because of a Habsburg project of political, social and cultural transformation for this city. After 1918, a deeply transformed city was confirmed as capital of the newly created Yugoslav state, but it remained very much a focal point of Serbian nationalism and state aspirations. We hope the methodological and geographic diversity of these chapters combined will further deepen our knowledge about ongoing debates regarding the role of the First World War in the formation of the modern nation-state.

Introduction

11

Notes 1 War and Fatherland. Nations, Identities and the First World War, organized on 14–15 October 2015 in the Brussels Egmont palace by the Belgian Centre for War and Contemporary Society (State Archives) and supported by all Belgian universities. 2 Despite the several diplomatic reconciliatory commemorative initiatives among the national leaders of former enemies, Europe remained absent, both in concrete policy actions and as a supranational idea (Wouters 2016).

References Audoin-Rouzeau, S., and A. Becker (2000), 14–18. Retrouver la guerre, Paris: Gallimard. Becker, A. (1988), Les monuments aux morts. Patrimoine et mémoire de la Grande Guerre, Paris: Errance. Becker, A. (2010), ‘Faith, Ideologies, and “War Cultures”’, in J. Horne (ed.), A Companion to World War I, 234–47, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Becker, A. (2014), ‘Captive Civilians’, in J. Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 3: Civil Society, 257–81, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Becker, J.J. (1977), 1914, comment les Français sont entrés dans la guerre: contribution à l’étude de l’opinion publique, printemps-été 1914, Paris: Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques. Becker, J.J. (2014), ‘Heads of State and Government’, in J. Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 2: The State, 9–32, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bessel, R. (2006), ‘Mobilizing German Society for War’, in R. Chickering and S. Förster (eds), Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918, 437–53, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bozarslan, H. (2008), ‘Empire ottoman, Turquie, monde arabe: de la fin de la guerre à la fin de l’empire’, in S. Audoin-Rouzeau and Ch. Prochasson (eds), Sortir de la Grande Guerre. Le monde et l’après 1918, 329–47, Paris: Tallandier. Brandt, S. (2000), Vom Kriegsschauplatz zum Gedächtnisraum: Die Westfront 1914–1940, Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft. Bremm, K.-J. (2013), Propaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg, Stuttgart: Theiss. Breuilly, J. (2012), ‘What Does It Mean to Say that Nationalism Is “Popular”?’ in M. Van Ginderachter and M. Beyen (eds), Nationhood from Below: Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century, 23–43, Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan. Broadberry, S., and P. Howlett (2005), ‘The United Kingdom during World War I: Business as Usual?’ in S. Broadberry and M. Harrison (eds), The Economics of World War I, 206–34, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carruthers, S.L. (2011), The Media at War, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Claisse, S. (2013), Du Soldat Inconnu aux monuments commémoratifs belges de la guerre 14–18, Brussels: Académie royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. Cornwall, M. (1997), ‘Morale and Patriotism in the Austro-Hungarian Army, 1914–1918’, in J. Horne (ed.), State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War, 173–93, Dublin: Trinity College.

12

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Debruyne, E., and L. van Ypersele (2011), Je serai fusillé demain. Les dernières lettres des patriotes belges et français fusillés par l’occupant. 1914–1918, Brussels: Racine. Dimitrova, S. (2002), ‘Ma guerre n’est pas la vôtre’, in J. Maurin and J.-C. Jauffret (eds), La Grande Guerre 1914–1918, 80 ans d’historiographie et de représentations, 281–317, Montpellier: Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier III. Fejtö, F. (1993), Requiem pour un empire défunt. Histoire de la destruction de l’AutricheHongrie, Paris: Seuil. Gatrell, P. (1999), A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gatrell, P., and Ph. Nivet (2014), ‘Refugees and Exiles’, in J. Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 3: Civil Society, 186–215, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Glick, P., and S.T. Fiske (2001), ‘Ambivalent Stereotypes as Legitimizing Ideologies: Differentiating Paternalistic and Envious Prejudice’, in J.T. Jost and B. Major (eds), The Psychology of Legitimacy: Ideology, Justice and Intergroup Relations, 358–66, New York: Cambridge University Press. Grayzel, S. (2002), Women and the First World War, Harlow : Pearson Education. Horne, J. (1997), ‘Introduction: Mobilizing for “Total War”, 1914–1918’, in J. Horne (ed.), State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War, 1–18, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horne, J., ed. (2008), Our War: Ireland and the Great War, Dublin: RTE. Horne, J., and A. Kramer (2001), German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Huss, M.-M. (2000), Histoire de famille: cartes postales et culture de guerre, Paris: Noêsis. Kidd, W., and B. Murdoch, eds (2004), Memory and Memorials: The Commemorative Century, Cornwall: Ashgate. Leyens, J.Ph., and V. Yzerbit (1997), Psychologie sociale, Brussels: Mardaga. Lohr, E. (2003), Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Manela, E. (2007), The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mariot, N. (2013), Tous unis dans les tranchées? 1914–1918, les intellectuels rencontrent le peuple, Paris: Seuil. Nath, G. (2013), Brood willen we hebben! Honger, sociale politiek en protest tijdens de Eerste Werledoorlog in België, Antwerp: Manteau. Panayi, P., ed. (1993), Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America and Australia during the Two World Wars, Oxford: Berg. Pignot, M. (2012), Allons enfants de la patrie: Génération Grande Guerre, Paris: Seuil. Prochasson, Ch., and A. Rasmussen, eds (2004), Vrai et faux dans la Grande Guerre, Paris: La Découverte. Scates, B., and R. Wheatley (2014), ‘War Memorials’, in J. Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 3: Civil Society, 528–56, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Supple, B. (2014), ‘War Economies’, in J. Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 2: The State, 295–324, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van Ypersele, L. (2006), Le roi Albert, histoire d’un mythe, Brussels: Labor. van Ypersele, L. (2010), ‘Mourning and Memory, 1919–1945’, in Horne, J. (ed.), A Companion to World War I, 576–90, London: Wiley-Blackwell.

Introduction

13

Vidal-Naquet, C. (2014), Couples dans la Grande Guerre. Le tragique et l’ordinaire du lien conjugal, Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Von Hagen, M. (2007), War in a European Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914–1918, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Vrints, A. (2002), Bezette stad. Vlaams-nationalistische collaboratie in Antwerpen tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog, Brussels: Algemeen Rijksarchief. Wils, L. (2014), Onverfranst, onverduitst? Flamenpolitik, Activisme, Frontbeweging, Kalmthout: Pelckmans. Wimmer, A. (2013), Waves of War: Nationalism, State Formation, and Ethnic Exclusion in the Modern World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winter, J. (1995), Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winter, J., ed. (2014), The Cambridge History of the First World War, 3 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wouters, N. (2016), ‘The Centenary Commemorations of the Great War in Belgium: History and the Politics of Memory’, Low Countries Historical Review, 131 (3): 76–86. Zahra, T. (2008), Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Part One

The Fatherland of the Other

Figure 1 “Flemings, you can come over. The Germans won’t shoot”. German Propaganda addressed to Flemish Soldiers on the Belgian front (War Heritage Institute, N° Inv WHI : B.1.73.3.1).

2

Patriotism and the Enemy: Political Identity as a Weapon John Horne

The title of this book suggests that ‘fatherlands’ played a vital role in the First World War and hence that patriotism, the sentiment associated with them, was equally important. My topic is how states regarded the wartime identities (and so the patriotisms) of their enemies and in particular how they tried to use the minority or dissident patriotisms of those enemies as a weapon. But as well as addressing this issue, I think it important to reflect on what ‘fatherlands’ meant more generally in this period and on why they were so significant for the politics of the Great War.

Fatherland, nation, empire before 1914 While it might be tempting to equate it with the nation-state, ‘fatherland’ captures an older sense of community. So, in fact, does ‘nation’ – from the Latin natione (by or from birth), meaning a group of people with a common origin. At root, ‘fatherland’ suggests the relationship of humans with the territory from which they come and the sense of allegiance that this engenders. With hindsight, we know that the First World War confirmed the nation as the major form of state and expression of fatherland in Europe because it brought down the dynastic empires that prevailed before 1914 in Eastern and Central Europe and the Middle East (Austria-Hungary, tsarist Russia, the Ottoman Empire).1 It favoured the same process in the colonies as shown when colonial intellectuals demanded that Wilsonian national self-determination (intended for Europe at the Peace Conference) should apply to Europe’s overseas empires (Manela 2007). But was this process inevitable, with or without the war? The nation-state only fully triumphed after the Second World War. In article 15 of its 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations declared that ‘everyone has the right to a nationality’, which it assumed would be embodied in the nation-state. Even then, two Security Council members (Britain and France) still had colonies, while a third, the USSR, disguised the internal predominance of Russia by a multinational state in which

18

Nations, Identities and the First World War

class overrode nation. It also exercised informal empire over Eastern Europe, while within a decade the European Economic Community had begun to integrate Western European nations. The nation-state has thus been framed by other loyalties even in its period of dominance since 1945 and has had other fatherlands, not least those of its minorities, which have on occasion been the source of division. Before 1914, however, the notion of ‘fatherland’ was less firmly linked to the nationstate. True, the connection was well established in Western Europe, which had the oldest nation-states. In pre-revolutionary France, patrie already denoted identification with the state, to which the Revolution added the sovereignty of the people instead of the crown (Bell 2001: 1–21). But even in France, patrie also connoted a petite patrie (the German Heimat) – or the locality of one’s ancestors – and from 1870 the Third Republic proved able to accommodate subordinate regional and linguistic identities (Applegate 1990; Gerson 2003). Across the Channel, ‘Britain’ provided an overarching identity that subsumed (while never removing) English, Welsh and Scottish patriotisms (Colley 1992). But this was not true of Ireland, which generated a dissident nationalism so that the UK (rather like Spain with Catalonia) faced a fractured identity on the eve of the Great War. This plunged British politics into turmoil and split Ireland itself between a nationalist majority and a settler minority. The latter, dominant in the industrial northeast, wished to maintain the union, which it did at the price of partition in 1921 (Bartlett 2010: 267–376). Both Britain and France had also acquired empires that included settler colonies – Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa in the British case; Algeria in that of France. The British Empire dominated geopolitics beyond Europe, whereas the French Empire was more modest though still important in Africa and Southeast Asia. Both empires engendered local variants of imperial patriotism among ‘white’ settlers, which coexisted with multiple allegiances on the part of the indigenous peoples. The latter ranged from ethnic and religious identities on the one hand to forms of imperial loyalty on the other. By 1914, anti-colonial nationalism was a force among the indigenous elites and more broadly in India (Chandra et al. 1989; Stora 1991; Bellich 2009).2 But empire, nation and fatherland were by no means mutually exclusive identities in the British and French empires before 1914. In Central Europe, Italian and German unification in the mid-nineteenth century had resulted in nation-states in which national politics and nationalism contended with even stronger regional patriotisms. In Italy, the formation of the nation-state was by no means complete by 1914, not only because Italian speakers remained under Austrian rule but also because the neglected south was only partly integrated into the kingdom (Gentile [1997] 2009; Patriarca 2010: 57–132). In Germany, the precedent of the decentralized medieval Holy Roman Empire (abolished by Napoleon in 1806) allowed Bismarck to present the new state, which he declared after victory over France in 1870–1, as a Second (German) Empire. In reality, it was a hybrid – an imperial federal nation-state – in which Prussia provided some 60 per cent of the population as well as the imperial monarchy, which, unlike in Spain, Britain or even Italy, had real power. Minority kingdoms (Saxony, Bavaria), duchies and even self-governing cities such as Hamburg survived, but the lower house of the federal parliament (the Reichstag), elected by universal male suffrage, became a powerful forum for the

Patriotism and the Enemy

19

national – and nationalist – politics that developed in the new state down to 1914. The Reich also had minorities potentially claimed by other nations (Danes, Poles, AlsatianLorrainers), while a larger German-speaking population than in the equivalent Italian case remained outside the nation, scattered across East-Central Europe (Wehler [1973] 1985; Winkler [2000] 2007). From the 1880s, Italy and Germany both proclaimed their modern national vocation by also acquiring overseas empires, albeit far smaller ones than those of Britain and France. In Eastern Europe, however, the link of fatherland to nation was even more problematic and much more contested. Less developed economies, elites more resistant to popular politics and populations in which ethnic and religious identities overlapped even more than elsewhere continued to favour multinational empires. Romanov Russia ruled over non-Russian peoples in both Europe and Asia. The Habsburg Empire, after being stripped by Italian and German unification of its central European role, had reorganized itself as the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary and refocused on the Habsburg domains in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. It took the form of a German and Magyar condominium over a number of Slavic peoples, including Poles, Czechs, Croats and Serbs. The Ottoman Empire had seen its hold over Southeastern Europe eroded by growing Russian influence and the formation of nation-states in the Balkans, notably Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania. By the early twentieth century, the relationship between fatherland, religion and empire that underpinned the sovereignty of tsar, emperor and sultan faced acute economic and social change as well as political and cultural challenges that arose from a deepening of mass politics. From this flowed an incipient demand for popular sovereignty. Democracy, social class and gender all challenged the empires: trade unions organized workers, while socialists, feminists and others demanded wider suffrage. But nationality was the biggest challenge of all, because it potentially reframed the imperial fatherlands in terms of national sovereignty, incorporating democracy, class, gender and much else in direct opposition to dynastic authority. Yet the response played out differently in three very different empires as their centuries-old dynasties sought to adjust to this challenge. The starkest contrast was between the Ottomans and Habsburgs. The Ottoman Empire suffered a humiliating setback in Europe when it lost Bosnia-Herzegovina to Austria-Hungary in 1908 and Macedonia and most of Thrace to the Balkan states in the First Balkan War in 1912. This sparked the Young Turk revolution in 1908, which in turn accelerated the conversion of the ethnic and religious communities of the empire into potentially exclusive nationalities. The Young Turks tried to spin a national Turkish identity (and even a Turkic, or ‘Turanian’, imperial identity) from the throes of the Ottoman world. With liberal as well as authoritarian strands, the Young Turks were not inevitably destined to clash with the Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians. But the massacre of Armenians in Adana province in 1909 and defeat in the Balkans in 1912, which prompted a flood of refugees and the reciprocal expulsion of Greeks from Anatolia, augured ill for the future of the empire even before the Young Turks entered the Great War on the side of the Central Powers. Yet ‘Turkey’ was still an imperial power ruling over multiple fatherlands, from a tiny corner of Europe to Anatolia to the Arab Middle East, though Britain had occupied Egypt since 1882 (Rogan 2015: 1–52).

20

Nations, Identities and the First World War

There was no such upheaval in Austria-Hungary, despite the fact that there, too, the logic of nationalizing fatherlands had become part of the politics of the empire and had in several ways resulted in deadlock. The Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy remained in the grip of the Magyars, who feared that full democracy would subordinate them to control by Slav (especially Serb and Croatian) minorities. The Austrian half of the monarchy had introduced universal male suffrage in 1907, but at the price of some national groups (Czechs, Ukrainians, Poles) vying with each other and even holding politics hostage to boycott and blockage in the name of further national rights. Even German-speaking Austrians, traditionally an imperial people, spawned a populist nationalism in Vienna and elsewhere. Yet the cohesion of the imperial army and bureaucracy and the legitimacy of an empire that declared rights and freedoms equal for all its subjects meant that the business of state continued while reform proposals proliferated. These included ‘trialism’, a federal empire based on devolved powers for Germans, Magyars and South Slavs urged by the imperial heir, Franz Ferdinand. Before 1914, only small minorities saw the imperial loyalty shared by the Habsburg fatherlands as incompatible with the nationality principle (Schorske 1980: 116–80; Cornwall [1990] 2002; Judson 2016). As for tsarist Russia, it had also undergone military defeat and revolution in 1905, both of which had forced it to adopt limited political reform. Unlike the Ottoman Empire, however, its underlying strength and industrializing economy favoured rapid recovery to a relatively strong international position. And unlike in the Habsburg Empire, there existed an ethnic Russian national majority, which meant that tsardom was less exposed to national than other kinds of social and political dissent, though the former certainly existed with historic Polish demands for autonomy and an emergent Ukrainian nationalism. Future unrest would (as in 1905) be class based at its core, national at the edges. But the Russian patriotism on which tsardom depended was expressed after 1905 in secular politics as well as by loyalty to the tsar and the Orthodox church (Figes 1997: 157–252; Lieven 2015). Historians still debate the role of national tensions in each empire in causing the war. The Ottoman crisis was palpable, but since the Young Turks only joined the war in late October 1914, they did not contribute directly to its onset. There was no such crisis in the Habsburg or Romanov empires, yet both were key to the diplomatic clash that led straight to the war. In both of them, nationality and nationalism were more urgent in foreign than domestic policy, especially regarding a Southeastern Europe deeply destabilized by Ottoman decline. In pursuit of their goal of controlling Istanbul and the Straits, which carried two-thirds of their trade, the Russians had championed Balkan nationalism since the 1870s, clothing it in the creed of ‘Pan-slavism’ (Bobroff 2006; Reynolds 2011: 22–106). The Habsburgs, by contrast, tried to neutralize dissident nationalities that had shaken off Ottoman rule and seemed to pose a threat by absorbing them (Bosnia-Herzegovina) or containing them by diplomacy and war (Serbia). Both were traditional tools of empire – the British managed the frontiers of India in just this way. Thus, faced with the final collapse of Ottoman power in the Balkans, Russia championed Serb nationhood while Austria-Hungary sought to destroy it. The murder of Franz Ferdinand by Bosnian nationalists (with shadowy Serb support) in the capital

Patriotism and the Enemy

21

of the newly consolidated Habsburg province gave Vienna just the excuse it needed. Serbia was not the only expansionist nation, nor was Franz Ferdinand the only political leader to be assassinated in this period. But because Russia and Austria-Hungary (unlike the Ottoman Empire) belonged to the alliance system, a regional quarrel over a limited issue upset the European balance of power and prompted a general war. Quite why Austria-Hungary and Russia should have insisted on seeing the quarrel as one not of tactical self-interest but of survival is part of the enigma that still surrounds the outbreak of the war. But in each case, the decision makers in July 1914 felt that backing down over Serb sovereignty threatened their own diplomatic ‘honour’ and thus their existence as a great power. In this sense, the tension between fatherland, nation and empire contributed to the outbreak of the Great War.

Nation and empire during the First World War It also proved central to the war itself. The July Crisis surprised many. Although Germany urged Austria (its junior partner) to attack Serbia, a diplomatic settlement seemed possible until the last minute. The outbreak of war was, if not accidental, relatively contingent. But once it began, many assumed it had been plotted by the enemy and was thus inevitable. The effect was paradoxical. The great powers all had multiple goals in their foreign policies, but none had a precise reason for fighting this war beyond defending the coalition on which its security and status depended. This was true even of those in Germany who hankered for a war with Russia, which they felt ultimately to be inevitable.3 Aside from Austria-Hungary’s wish to destroy Serbia, the great powers had no precise war aims. These were a result, not a cause, of the outbreak of war. The July Crisis was about national and imperial survival. This helps explain both the patriotic support for the war and the demonization of the enemy. Though far from the enthusiasm of later myth, national and imperial patriotisms were real because they responded to this sense of existential crisis in Germany, France and even Britain, as they also did in Russia and Austria-Hungary (Becker 1977: 269–363; Jahn 1995; Verhey 2000: 72–114; Pennell 2012: 22–56; Sanborn 2014: 22–3; Cabanes [2014] 2016). Military mobilization, moreover, enrolled the nation or empire in arms on the basis of mass conscription. Millions of reservists (up to middle age) joined local or regional regiments as their families bade them farewell. All of society seemed to be going to war. Familiar from the Balkan wars, this scenario now engulfed most of Europe (Horne 2013). The UK had no conscription, but voluntary enlistment – including ‘pals’ battalions’ from local workplaces and sports clubs – had the same effect. Irish nationalists and unionists channelled their opposed causes, which had brought the country to the brink of civil war, into the British army (Jeffery 2000: 5–36; McCartney 2005: 57–88; Gregory 2008: 70–111; Pennell 2012: 143–62). The Germans incorporated regional armies (Saxon, Bavarian, Württemberger) into a Prussian-dominated whole while the army of the Dual Monarchy famously acted as a multilingual entity, a truly imperial organization (Deák 1990: 165–89). Mobilization was not just a mass phenomenon but one that expressed the relationship of fatherland to nation and empire as a potential

22

Nations, Identities and the First World War

blood sacrifice, underwriting national and imperial unity from below. In mythic form, the patriotic solidarity of August 1914 would exert its power long into the future.4 The initial war of movement, with invasions and counter-invasions, confirmed this existential dimension. First, it produced the highest military death rates of the war, quickly making the sacrifice real. Then, except in Britain, the enemy violated frontiers, triggering floods of refugees from Belgium, northeast France, East Prussia, Russian Poland, Austrian Galicia and Serbia. Even southeast England had an invasion scare (Pennell 2008; Gatrell and Nivet 2014). If all sides believed that a malevolent enemy had plotted the war, the accusation of ‘atrocities’ against civilians now turned him into a barbarian. Belgium exemplified this. A neutral state, it blocked the mutual invasion of France and Germany, both of which needed its territory to field their vast armies against each other. Germany’s plan to defeat France before turning with Austria-Hungary to destroy Russia meant that it was German forces that violated Belgian neutrality. As they did so, they believed falsely that Belgian civilians were waging a major guerrilla war against them. The massacres and arson that constituted their brutal response were condemned as war crimes and enabled the Allies to cast the war as one of patriotic resistance to German militarism. Atrocities occurred during other invasions, but the Germans never shook off this charge (Horne and Kramer 2001; De Schaepdrijver 2004: 15–101; Watson 2014). As deadlock set in by late 1914 in the west and late 1915 in the east, the Central Powers held swathes of enemy land, so that occupation reinforced the sense of violated patriotism, especially in the Allied camp. By the end of 1915, the Austro-Italian and Macedonian fronts had double-locked Europe into a mutual siege, while Ottoman entry into the conflict opened up the Middle East as a secondary but significant military theatre. The war became a struggle of attrition between the two camps. No definitive solution was apparent beyond the mobilization of ever-greater human and material resources in order to gain the edge over the enemy on the battlefield. In effect, the destructive needs of each belligerent (and the coalition to which it belonged) placed a premium on the productive capacity on which it could draw, both at home and internationally. At the same time, the cost of the war in military casualties rose inexorably, making the ‘blood sacrifice’ of military service ever more real and a compromise outcome impossible to negotiate. British naval power guaranteed the Allies access to the empires, to the United States and to the global economy while denying all these to the enemy. The latter, with dwindling resources, exploited ever more harshly the parts of Europe they occupied, especially once Germany failed to counter-blockade the Allies by submarine warfare. Life became hard everywhere, but by 1917 the imbalance between the two camps was clear. Living conditions fell sharply in the Central Powers and also in Russia, which was isolated from its allies, and the conflict showed no sign of ending. Military weariness and hardship at home tested popular support for the war to the full. In this context, fatherlands and patriotism became critical, along with the ability of states and regimes to preserve their legitimacy. Despite exceptional powers, the wartime state could only achieve so much in societies where mass politics made a degree of consent essential (Horne 2010). Patriotism was protean; it assumed many forms, and therein lay its strength. It framed the wartime cultures that expressed

Patriotism and the Enemy

23

what nation or empire stood for and defined the enemy. In France, for example, opposing republican and Catholic versions of the nation that had bitterly contested each other during the Dreyfus Affair now coexisted as they mobilized behind the war. If conservatives took Italy to war in 1915 in search of an authoritarian political and social order, they had to contend with nationalists and radicals for whom the war was the final act of the Risorgimento, completing unification and democratization (Gibelli 1998: 15–80). In Germany, Social Democrats, Catholics, Pan-Germans and other nationalists all supported the war as one of national self-defence but disagreed deeply on how expansionist Germany should be – and on whether it should become the hegemon in a new Europe (Fischer [1961] 1967). In Ireland, unionists and nationalists sought opposite results from a war that both supported – before radicals showed with the 1916 rising in Dublin that nationalism could also be enrolled against the war as well as for it (Townshend 2005; Horne 2008; Foster 2014). Nor was it just a matter of political programmes or even cultural values. Patriotism and loyalty were lived emotions that helped sustain the mounting toll of military, economic and psychological attrition. The affinity with place and sense of community on which they drew were part of the make-up of the soldiers at the front, however much they might criticize propaganda. Patriotism (including local patries) also framed the self-mobilization of civilians and the different sacrifices made by various groups – workers, peasants, bourgeois and so on. For example, death at the front was socially uneven, since many urban workers were safe in war factories while the peasants, who made up much of the infantry in most armies, bore its brunt. Yet scarce food was easier to find in country than town, producing urban resentment against peasant ‘hoarders’. As the social relations of sacrifice grew more bitter, they were judged according to the assumed equality of a common patriotism (Ziemann [1999] 2006; Chickering 2007: 364–407; Bourlet and Lagadec 2013; Purseigle 2013: 37–131).5 Wartime patriotism was thus not only protean but also performative. It was not impervious to setbacks and low morale. But individuals and groups enacted it perhaps more than they defined it. It supplied criticism and even protest, for example, of the hated war ‘profiteer’. It also provided a language of renewal in the second half of the war. More than ever, propaganda, the press and political organizations (some old, some newly formed) targeted civilians and soldiers (the latter through ‘patriotic instruction’) as nations and empires tried to remobilize their peoples for victory (Horne 1997a). Inevitably, what patriotism meant, and what the fatherland was felt to be, changed in the process. In Britain, Lloyd George promoted post-war ‘reconstruction’ (an early version of the welfare state) as the corollary of a democratic war effort for which conscription had finally been introduced. The vote was extended to all men in 1918 in recognition of their war service and to some categories of women (Wilson 1986: 799–827). In France, primary school teachers and a host of patriotic bodies campaigned for victory (symbolized by the return of Alsace-Lorraine), while Clemenceau as premier from November 1917 harked back to the Jacobin war effort of the French Revolution – reserving his scorn for pro-peace socialists, whom he dismissed as anti-patriots (Horne 1997b). In Italy, military defeat at Caporetto in November 1917, followed by Austrian occupation of part of the Veneto, stimulated popular patriotism as the war at last

24

Nations, Identities and the First World War

became one of national defence while also intensifying socialist pessimism and rural and working-class dissent (Gibelli 1998: 251–313). German opinion split under the strain of the last two years of the war – with Social Democrats, the Catholic Centre and liberals urging full democracy and limited territorial gains while the radical nationalist Fatherland Party garnered support for the military dictatorship and expansion (Mai 1987: 116–39; Chickering 1998: 160–7). The tsar’s failure to harness a real if limited Russian patriotism to political reform resulted in the March 1917 revolution. This was Russia’s last chance to remobilize as Kerensky tried to combine democracy and patriotism on the model of the French Revolution – before popular disillusionment enabled the Bolsheviks to take Russia out of the war (Sanborn 2014: 205–38). Patriotism thus became dynamic and unstable in the last two years of the Great War. Crucially, it found increasing expression in terms of the nation and the nation-state. For nothing better expressed the claims of soldiers for recognition of their sacrifice than a national community in which they were a source of sovereignty. As Clemenceau remarked of the French poilus, ‘they have rights over us’, meaning the nation. This was true more widely and explains the granting of full male suffrage during or after the war in much of Europe. The nation also provided an ideal for the home front, including the self-mobilization of women, labour, business and others. In this sense, the war as an existential struggle forged or strengthened fatherlands. But it also raised key issues of power and authority because of the sacrifices involved. Whose sacrifice and for which community? Those questions seemed best answered by the nation in which the people (however defined) were the source of sovereignty and (at least in theory) the agents of their own destinies as well as the beneficiaries of the hoped-for victory. The French sociologist Marcel Mauss wrote in an unpublished study of ‘The Nation’ just after the conflict that: The war became a crisis, a life-and-death struggle between nations […] One people against another people! It is something more grandiose but also more horrible than a vague military expedition by one tribe against the far-off, isolated camp of another or than a war between kings. It is more justified, at least in defence, but also more dangerous. (Mauss 2013: 173, 351)

Where the nation-state already existed it tended to become more inclusive, and national patriotism (in its different variants) strengthened its hold over regional allegiances. Thus, even if the strain of war prompted anti-Prussian feeling in parts of Germany, the Republic that emerged from defeat was more centralized than the Bismarckian Reich. Where dynastic empires had gone to war, however, imperial loyalty – and, so, the imperial model – broke down under the effects of an attritional struggle (Leonhard 2014: 525–48). But it did so along the different fault lines already evident before the war. In the Ottoman case, radical nationalist Young Turks controlled the war effort, with fatal consequences for minority groups in Anatolia. In Russia, tsardom faced demands for a socially and nationally more inclusive war effort that it could not satisfy and that turned both Russian and non-Russian patriotism into a danger for the principle of dynasticism – leading the Provisional Government to solve what Joshua Sanborn has called ‘imperial problems’ with ‘national solutions’ (Sanborn 2014: 211–16).

Patriotism and the Enemy

25

The fact that Habsburg rule enjoyed the loyalty of multiple fatherlands was initially a source of resilience (long underestimated by historians), as the minority nationalities contributed to the war effort on all three fronts (Serbia, Russia and Italy). But by late 1916, the strain (including large numbers of prisoners of war in Russian camps) meant that renewed national devolution became a tempting solution for the empire’s problems. Yet the last emperor, Charles I, hesitated over a new form of ‘trialism’ in 1917–18, even as mounting military and economic difficulties, which made the empire’s dependence on Germany humiliatingly evident, fanned demands for independence by minority nationalities as looming defeat broke the empire apart (Cornwall [1990] 2002: 167–96; Rachamimov 2002). Whether in other conditions the multinational empires might have fared better is impossible to know. Irrespective of their political model, they were ill equipped in economic and social terms to sustain the kind of war the conflict turned into, which few had anticipated. Had this not been the case, they might conceivably have survived; the USSR ended up by 1940 with roughly the same dimensions as the Tsarist Empire, including half of Poland. But nationhood recast the ‘life-and-death struggle’ of the war as the destiny of a community to which the state was responsible, and that was difficult to reconcile with dynastic imperialism. Consequently, nationality and nation-states became a defining issue in Europe in 1917–18. If the Dual Monarchy wrestled with nationalist disaffection, Germany sought to turn it to its advantage. This was clear in Belgium and Poland. In the former, patriotism (of different hues) had inspired resistance to the occupation; the primate, Cardinal Mercier, entitled his rallying call of late 1914 Patriotism and Endurance. The Germans, however, sought to divide and rule by encouraging a separatist Flemish nationalism, setting up a Council of Flanders in 1917. Although this attracted only a small ‘activist’ minority, it shows how ubiquitous the language of nationality had become, as does the parallel case of Poland. There, by November 1916, Germany and Austria-Hungary planned a nominally autonomous constitutional monarchy, though in reality it was to be under German tutelage. In both cases, as more widely in 1918, nationality was one tool among many used by the German military as it enlarged its temporary land empire in Europe in pursuit of both final victory and longer-term hegemony (Fischer [1961] 1967: 444–72; De Schaepdrijver 2004: 251–85). Meanwhile, American entry into the war (and Russia’s departure) recast the Allies’ war effort as one waged by democratic states for which national self-determination provided a postwar programme through the creation of Poland, the break-up of Austria-Hungary, the remaking of the Balkans and (as declared by the Fourteen Points in January 1918) the formation of the League of Nations.6 The situation was more contradictory beyond Europe. The defeat of Ottoman Turkey allowed an imperial carve-up of the Middle East by the British and French. Yet this was limited in theory by the status of the new colonies as future nations under the League of Nations mandate system (Pederson 2015). The picture was further complicated by Britain’s wartime promises of national independence to the antiOttoman Arab Revolt and of a ‘national home’ in Palestine to world Jewry (Fromkin 1989: 207–28, 253–301). In the ‘white’ British dominions too, participation in the war favoured a distinct national identity, especially in Australia and Canada, though one

26

Nations, Identities and the First World War

not yet eroding imperialism.7 But in India, the loyalty to the Raj of the elites and of the more than 1 million soldiers who volunteered for the war was undercut by the nationalist opposition of the Congress movement (Chandra et al. 1989: 159–69). In the French case as well, native military service generated demands for some forms of citizenship in the colonies (especially Algeria), which corroded colonial hierarchies of power (Fogarty 2008). Albeit less obviously than in Europe, the war showed that imperial loyalty was vulnerable. It showed that patriotism might be politicized by nationalists and converted into protest movements such as those in 1919 that reacted to the dashing of reform hopes in Egypt and India, let alone into the anti-colonial revolts promoted by the Bolshevik Comintern from 1920 as part of the world revolution.

Patriotism and the enemy If the war showed patriotism to be protean by the forms it took and performative by the emotions and actions it aroused, it also demonstrated that it was a tool that could be used to attack the enemy. For patriotism was Janus-faced. Both inclusive and exclusive, it served to designate the enemy as the polar opposite of the fatherland and nation. One version of this was the ‘enemy within’ – the spy, ‘alien’ or domestic minority that threatened the war effort. In virtually every belligerent state in 1914, those with enemy-sounding names were attacked, enemy nationals were interned and a veritable spy-mania swept society before the ‘enemy within’ assumed more permanent forms (Panayi 2014). For example, the German Army, suspecting the loyalty of AlsatianLorrainers, made conscripts from that region serve away from France on the Eastern Front (Kramer 1997: 110–14). The Russian Army persecuted Jews and other national minorities as it attacked in 1914 and also when it retreated before the Austro-German offensive in the summer of 1915, driving more than 3 million refugees (many of them subjects of the tsar) into internal exile, before the Duma forced it to stop (Holquist 2010; Sanborn 2014: 74–87). Most dramatically, the Young Turks crossed a new threshold as they went to war against a Russia that had sought to use the Armenians against them. In 1915 this led them to plan the mass expulsion and elimination of the Ottoman Armenians in what contemporaries understood to be the attempted ‘extermination’ of a people. Almost at the outset, secular nationalism placed genocide at the heart of the war (Bloxham 2011; Sanborn 2014: 87–91; Rogan 2015: 159–84). By the same token, however, mobilization against the ‘enemy within’ pointed to the possibility of using the enemy’s internal opponents to undermine his war effort and oppose him. In this sense, the mutual siege of Europe was no different from siege warfare through the ages in which encouraging treachery inside the enemy camp constitutes a third tactic alongside assault and starvation. In the Great War, such a tactic turned on the vulnerability of the various powers to their own internal enemies, actual or perceived. It might be limited to propaganda or might extend to military aid. Apparent from the start, it assumed substantial proportions by 1917–18, at least judged by intent. The two camps varied in their ability to use patriotism and nationalism against the enemy, but, significantly, each targeted empires with their multiple fatherlands and overarching dynastic loyalties.

Patriotism and the Enemy

27

Since all its opponents had empires of one kind or another, it is no surprise that Germany sought to turn its opponents’ imperial vulnerabilities against them. As war broke out, the German Foreign Ministry and Supreme Command (the Oberste Heeresleitung, OHL) improvised a radical and far-reaching programme to foment dissidence and revolt in the British, French and Russian empires, with the aim of disrupting their war efforts and even precipitating their downfall in favour of Germany as a new world power. As the fighting bogged down, it became even more urgent to promote discord in the enemy camp. Germany’s ‘revolutionary programme’ is most familiar from the declaration of jihad by its Ottoman ally in November 1914 (Sultan Mehmet V being caliph of the Muslim world), summoning British and French Muslim subjects to oppose the war, and also from Germany’s support for the Irish Easter rising in 1916. The foreign ministry brought a key nationalist, Roger Casement, to Berlin from the United States before sending him in a submarine with a shipload of arms to southern Ireland – where Casement was captured (and hanged for treason) and the arms scuttled. In fact, the German campaign was far-reaching and targeted many aspects of empire (Fisher ([1961] 1967: 120–54; De Wiel 2008; Jenkins 2013). The difference between appealing to religion, seen as a traditional force – even perhaps a spiritual fatherland – and to modern political nationalism was not as great or contradictory as it might seem. For the two were not entirely separate, and anyway it made sense to use both of them against all three Allied empires. Certainly the appeal to Islam drew on a Western vision of religious fundamentalism that went back to Max von Oppenheim (among others), the orientalist who advised Kaiser Wilhelm on Germany’s pre-war bid to become protector of the Muslim world and who directed the initial attempt to arouse Islam. The kaiser wrote on 29 July, two days before the European conflict began, that in the event of war: England must … have the mask of Christian peaceableness torn publicly off her face … Our consuls in Turkey and India, agents etc., must inflame the whole Mohammedan world to wild revolt against this hateful, lying, conscienceless people of hagglers; for if we are bled to death at least the British shall lose India. (Fisher [1961] 1967: 121)

The supreme commander, Moltke the Younger, called as early as 5 August 1914 for Germany to ‘awaken the fanaticism of Islam’, and the German authorities actively supported jihad, sending propaganda via Islamic clerical circles and seeking to subvert British and French Muslim prisoners of war in German camps (Jenkins 2013: 412). At the same time, Germany sponsored dissident nationalism in the colonial world – especially in India – as it also did in Europe. Max von Oppenheim set up an ‘Intelligence Bureau for the East’ in late 1914, along with an Indian Committee in Berlin. Drawing on expatriate nationalist intellectuals from Bengal and the emigrant Indian community in the United States, the Germans sought to undermine Indian support for the British war effort with propaganda and arms (Fraser 1977). A revolutionary generation of Irish nationalists made their own propaganda (Foster 2014: 145–77). But the Germans tried to recruit Irish prisoners of war as well as supply arms to the rising. Indeed, Ireland fitted the model of colonial as well as European nationalism. Whereas

28

Nations, Identities and the First World War

moderate nationalists supported the war in 1914–16 in the hope of ‘dominion home rule’ like that in Australia or Canada, the rebels saw British rule in Ireland as akin to that in Africa or Asia. James Connolly, a socialist leader of the rising, declared that ‘[Britain] stifles the ancient culture of India, strangles in its birth the new-born liberty of Egypt, smothers in the blood of ten thousand women and children the republics of South Africa […] connives at the partition of China, and plans the partition of Ireland’ (qtd in Horne 2008: 3–14). German (and Ottoman) plans were not without effect. German-backed Indian nationalists fomented a mutiny in a Muslim Indian regiment in Singapore in January 1915, ending with 200 executions. The Germans recruited 3,000 Muslim prisoners of war from French North Africa for the Ottoman cause. The British and French feared the appeal of jihad to their Muslim subjects, and the French decided against sending indigenous Algerian soldiers to Gallipoli (Harper and Miller 1984; Kitchen 2015: 183– 213; Horne 2016). Yet in the colonies, as in Ireland, the goal of subversion far exceeded German and Ottoman power to carry it out, and its impact remained small. By contrast, three quarters of a million Indian soldiers (not all Muslim) laboured and fought overseas, the bulk of them against the Ottoman Empire in Mesopotamia and Palestine, where they assured the final victory in 1918. Irish Catholic and nationalist soldiers in the British Army remained loyal until the end. In India, as in Ireland, real opposition to the war came from within, as ‘home rule’ was frustrated – with repression of the rising and the attempted imposition of conscription fanning further revolt in Ireland. It was this failure to match war service with adequate recognition of patriotic aspirations that fuelled the demand for independence, which the Allies refused to consider in Paris in 1919. The ‘white’ dominions, by contrast, enjoyed national representation at the peace conference and signed the treaties.8 The British, for their part, proved more successful at countering jihad than the Germans in promoting it when (with some reluctance) they courted nascent Arab nationalism. Exploiting pre-war tensions between Istanbul (especially the Young Turks) and the hereditary Bedouin chiefs who controlled the holy sites of Islam in Arabia, including Mecca, the British (with French support) fomented an Arab uprising from June 1916 against Ottoman forces in the Hejaz, supplying arms, funds and air and naval power (from Egypt and the Red Sea). Like their enemies, they recruited enemy prisoners (in this case, Arab officers imprisoned in Egypt), and in the person of Colonel T. E. Lawrence from British military intelligence in Cairo they had recourse to their own remarkable orientalist. The revolt challenged Ottoman religious supremacy (Mecca and the hajj pilgrimage were soon in Allied hands) while also promising (albeit vaguely) an extended Arab fatherland in the form of a Hashemite kingdom to replace the Ottoman Middle East. The contradiction with secret Anglo-French plans to carve up the region between them was postponed until after the war, and the Arab revolt (despite provoking some disquiet among Indian Muslims who still saw the sultan as their spiritual protector) played a significant, if secondary, military role in the Palestine campaign of 1917–18 while shaping Arab hopes for the future (Rogan 2015: 275–309; Johnson 2016: 174–203). The German ‘revolutionary programme’ was most successful where it touched Germany most closely – in East-Central Europe. Indeed, this provided the most fertile

Patriotism and the Enemy

29

terrain more generally for subversive appeals to minority patriotisms, precisely because each of the great powers in contention was a multinational empire (Russia and AustriaHungary) or had an imperial dimension (Germany). From the start, those in Germany who saw the war as an inevitable reckoning with Russian demographic superiority and future power sought to push the Russian border back by replacing the western, non-Russian marches of the Tsarist Empire with a set of buffer states, some national but all of them under formal or informal German control. If jihad played a role in the Caucasus, the appeal to the minority nationalisms to which tsardom was vulnerable was the main tool for this military and diplomatic purpose – in Russian Poland, Ukraine, Finland (part of the Russian Empire) and Georgia – along with a parallel effort to stoke social unrest (Fischer [1961] 1967: 132–73). Thus, when Woodrow Wilson in late 1916 formulated national self-determination as a basis for peace and reordering the postwar world, the German foreign ministry launched a League of Russia’s Foreign Peoples as one way to answer his call (Fischer [1961] 1967: 145–6). Nor was this solely a question of realpolitik. In the existential ideology of wartime, German intellectuals and cultural leaders as well as politicians decried the individual democracy and crass commercialism of France and Britain in the name of Kultur, which they saw as the cultural and political expression of Deutschtum (German peoplehood) and also of other peoples who might find liberation through their own national culture within a German-led Mitteleuropa (middle Europe) and wider German continental order. In short, the Germans had their own distinctive ways of framing the appeal to the potentially refractory fatherlands of the enemy while also justifying their own ‘civilizing mission’ over less cultured peoples (Mommsen 1997: 21–38; Chickering 1998: 134–40).9 The same was true in rather different ways for the other two powers in East-Central Europe. As the Russian armies swept through Austrian Galicia in September 1914 (amidst attacks and looting directed at the Jewish population), the commander in chief, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, declared, in a manifesto distributed in all the languages of the Dual Monarchy, that the tsar brought liberty and the ‘fulfilment of national desires’ to the peoples of Austria-Hungary. It was followed by propaganda targeted at Czechs and Ukrainians (Ruthenes) (Zeman 1961: 53). But the retreat in 1915 (conducted brutally, we have seen, against ethnic minorities) deprived Russia of the chance to translate pan-slavism into wartime practice. By contrast, AustriaHungary made limited appeals to enemy minorities, owing to its own potential vulnerability to national disaffection (exacerbated by floods of refugees from Galicia and the Italian front, with the attendant fear of espionage and the ‘enemy within’). This was despite the fact that Czechs, Slovaks and South Slavs (Croats, Slovenes and the imperial Serbs) at first supported the war effort with their own patriotism (and hopes for post-war ‘home-rule’), and the minority of radical nationalist leaders went into exile (Judson 2016: 391–441). Poland illustrates the complexities faced by all three powers in subverting the enemy by national minorities. Germany and Austria-Hungary promised a nominally independent Poland in late 1916 for many reasons: to reinsure themselves against dissident Polish patriotism and raise more troops, to respond to Wilsonian ‘selfdetermination’ and to remove any Polish element from a future Russia. Yet reconciling

30

Nations, Identities and the First World War

independence with imperialism – and, for the Germans, hegemony – was next to impossible. The conservative leader of one strand of Polish nationalism, Roman Dmowski, rejected nominal independence because for him the Germans were the historic enemy, and he continued to side with the Russians and then, in exile, with the Western Allies. The Austrian Pole, Josef Pilsudski, leader of a more pluralist nationalism for which Russia, not Germany, was the enemy, had been able to raise Polish units (the Sokol) in the Austrian army but found his nationalism curbed. He also refused an Austro-German Poland in 1917 and was imprisoned (Zamoyski 2009: 289–94). The revolutionary Russian government from March 1917 conceded Poland’s national independence, but, since the country was almost entirely in enemy hands, this had little effect. Indeed, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians now used a potent mix of social and national revolution to undermine Kerensky’s Russia. In addition to sponsoring the Bolsheviks as the only group promising to take Russia out of the war (most dramatically by returning Lenin from exile in Switzerland), they also appealed to national regiments on the Eastern Front with both written and oral propaganda in order to fan defeatism and mutiny. This experience convinced both the German and Austrian armies of the value of ‘front propaganda’, which had hitherto been practised in only a limited, episodic way (Cornwall 2000: 40–73). The Russian Revolution, along with the internal strain that became manifest in 1917 in Germany and especially Austria-Hungary, proved to be a turning point in the use of enemy national minorities as a weapon of war in Central and Eastern Europe. Not only did Russia’s fate show that collapse and defeat were possible but Russian withdrawal also transformed the geopolitical realities of the conflict. Enemy minorities acquired a new importance, especially for the Western Allies, and the potential responsiveness of the target groups became real, if still unpredictable, and thus endowed with a new strategic value. Up to that point, Britain and France had not singled out dissident patriotisms. Apart from French efforts to target the Francophile elements in AlsaceLorraine, this was less relevant for propaganda against Germany than topics such as social protest and falling living standards (though the discontents of Bavarian and other regional patriotisms were addressed in 1918) (Bruntz 1938: 118–29). Austria-Hungary was not only a minor enemy by comparison with Germany – but also one that, once reformed, might stabilize post-war Europe. Conjuring up the genie of national revolt also risked undermining tsarist Russia (Soutou, De Castelbajac and De Gasquet 1995). However, with Russia gone and Serbia defeated (and occupied) since the end of 1915, Austria-Hungary could redeploy most of its effort on a single front against Italy, as the near-collapse of the latter at Caporetto in late October 1917 dramatically showed. Hence, both Italy and Austria-Hungary gained a new importance for the Allies. It was vital to shore up the multi-front siege of the Central Powers, despite the end of the Eastern Front, and to threaten Germany from the rear as it attempted to win the war on the Western Front in 1918, before American military might and Allied economic superiority prevailed. In part this was a matter of propaganda. What contemporaries began to call ‘psychological warfare’ reached a peak on all fronts in the final twelve months of the conflict, exploiting new technologies (notably mass leafleting from the air) as well as

Patriotism and the Enemy

31

more traditional means of infiltrating material via neutral countries and targeting enemy prisoners of war. ‘Front propaganda’ as it had been practised on Russia in 1917 acquired a particular importance (Cornwall 2000: 1–15). But the prominence of the nationalities question had even more to do with the major diplomatic initiatives by which Britain, France and Italy (which had long been committed to it) now sought the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy and its replacement by successor nation-states. Urged since 1916 by certain intellectuals and political leaders in Britain and France (notably the editor of the influential Times newspaper, Henry Wickham Steed, and the academic R. W. Seton-Watson, through his New Europe periodical), the cause was taken up by governments and translated into the recognition of Czechoslovak, Polish and Southern (or ‘Jugo’) Slav leaders in exile as well as into backing for their military formations (Czech legions on the western and Italian Fronts, Haller’s Polish army in France). Crucially, the transfer of sovereignty was sealed by military sacrifice (Zeman 1961: 177–216). As the primary antagonist of Austria-Hungary in 1918, Italy played an especially important role in this process, albeit one replete with tensions between Italian and ‘Yugoslav’ versions of national self-determination on the Adriatic, not to mention nascent Italian imperialism in the Balkans. By the secret Treaty of London in 1915 (later publicized by the Bolsheviks), Italy had been promised gains at the expense of Slavs in linguistically mixed Dalmatia and also had designs on Albania, which it promoted with an army on the Macedonian front. Yet such was the need to defeat AustriaHungary after Caporetto that the Italian government masked all this by championing the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy in the name of its nationalities. Rome hosted the inter-allied Congress of Oppressed Nationalities in early April 1918, and, as Mark Cornwall has shown, the Italian Army took the lead (along with British and Yugoslav representatives) in developing a sophisticated campaign of ‘front propaganda’ (in the so-called Padua Commission), which bombarded the Austro-Hungarian troops in all their languages with promises of national liberation (Cornwall 2000: 112–256). Meanwhile, the collapse of Russia led not so much to an end to war in the East but rather to its transformation into multiple, ongoing forms of conflict, as the civil war began in Russia and nationalist organizations scrambled to carve out new nation-states in the Baltic states, Ukraine and the Caucasus. Yet it also left the German military in undisputed control of the former Eastern Front, with a temporary hegemony that extended beyond the points reached by the Axis powers in 1942–3 (e.g. in the north Caucasus). By the treaties of Brest-Litovsk, signed with Bolshevik Russia in March 1918, and Bucharest, signed with Romania in May, the OHL imposed the hegemonic settlement on the East towards which (in different forms) it had striven during the war. While it paid lip service to the principle of ‘national self-determination’, the nominal independence (under ‘national councils’) of Poland, Lithuania and Courland belied their dependency on Germany, while Estonia was also eventually prized away from Russia. The Bolsheviks had to concede an independent Ukraine, which the OHL sought to bind by indirect control to Germany. Likewise a significantly reduced Romania (which had entered the war on the Allied side in 1916) became a German economic dependency with the Treaty of Bucharest. The OHL thus imposed a form of military imperialism on the non-Russian western territories of the Tsarist

32

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Empire, which incorporated some of the language but little of the reality of sovereign nationality. Although in the end ephemeral, it looked remarkably solid to much of German opinion in the final nine months of the war (Fischer [1961] 1967: 475–509, 515–23). Fatherlands (and patriotism) turn out to be a fruitful theme through which to trace the transformation of international politics and political cultures during the Great War. Rather than assuming the triumph of nationalism and nation-states, they oblige us to reckon with the fact that even when the latter prevail, they never do so in isolation from the regional and local fatherlands that are their seedbed or from a transnational sphere structured by formal or informal empire or other kinds of power arrangement. Wartime mobilization, military sacrifice and civilian suffering drew on the affective and ideological relationship with the fatherland, just as they did on loyalty to the state and regime conducting the war. We still know too little about the cultural content of those relationships – about what patriotism and loyalty of various kinds consisted of and about how different they were in diverse colonial settings compared to the dynastic empires and established nation-states of Europe – let alone in occupied countries such as Belgium or Serbia (Roshwald and Sites 1999). But on them turned the capacity of societies to sustain a war whose existential logic and industrialized killing no one had anticipated. In this sense, the war forged or deepened ‘fatherlands’ even as it submitted the states of which they were part to the most extraordinary stress-test. In the process, the nation-state emerged strengthened, because the ultimate victors – the Western Allies – included the oldest nation-states, even when these had acquired powerful colonial empires, and because the nation proved an effective ideological and emotional economy for acknowledging mass military sacrifice and translating it into political agency and state legitimacy. To maintain that the First World War was principally a contest between empires ignores what proved in reality to be one of its most important dynamics and consequences (Gerwarth and Manela 2014: 1–16). The difficulty of enacting the same transaction in the colonial domain (outside the virtual nation-states of the British dominions) proved a troubling legacy of the Great War, but it was one that was addressed both peacefully and violently after the Second World War. The very potency of patriotism and its national potential made minority or dissident fatherlands a source of wartime weakness for most states and thus an obvious target for the enemy. This was true from the outset but acquired particular resonance as the strains of the conflict told in 1917–18. Logically, belligerent states deliberately targeted religious and secular identities in their enemies that might weaken their ability to conduct the war. It seems unlikely that propaganda on its own could achieve much, whether aimed at the front or civil society, although those involved – such as Lord Northcliffe with his Enemy Propaganda Agency in Britain in 1918 – made big claims for their success in bringing down Germany and Austria-Hungary. The defeated powers also found one of their chief scapegoats in the assumed power of enemy propaganda. Rather, the changing fortunes of war, the growing credibility of the Allied promise of national liberation in Europe and the militarization of nationhood by combat and sacrifice (including in units serving with the enemy) enabled wartime claims for nationhood to be realized post-war, whether through the peace settlement,

Patriotism and the Enemy

33

continued fighting or a combination of the two. In the case of the vanquished – Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Turkish Republic and an Italy that lost out to the new Yugoslavia – defeat and the loss of peoples and territories fuelled an equally powerful sense of nationhood and (in the Italian and German cases) new projects for a revanchist imperialism (Gerwarth 2016). This last point reminds us that the ‘triumph’ of the nation in Europe after 1918 did not – and could not – abolish the stratum above the individual state, whether this was organized by empires or new formations such as the League of Nations. The argument that the successor nations were themselves mini-empires in view of their minorities is unconvincing. As we have seen, nation-states often contain subordinate, potentially disruptive regional and ethnic elements, but they manage (or fail to manage) these with the brutal use of the tools of ethnic nationhood – citizenship and sovereignty. However, the new Europe of nation-states had to contend with the ideologically organized imperialisms of Soviet communism, Italian fascism and – fifteen years later – German national socialism, just as they also participated in the League of Nations (an essentially European body once the United States had failed to ratify it), which foreshadowed very different ways of organizing the continent in the second half of the century. Meanwhile, the emergent challenge of nationhood beyond Europe, in addition to a new form of aggressive colonialism in Japan, impelled the British and French to try to give greater coherence to their overstretched imperial domains. The wartime propaganda campaigns point to one further conclusion, namely, that the dissident fatherlands they targeted would indeed be a built-in feature of the new nation-states in Europe. But it was precisely the tools of nationhood, as well as the legacy of the war, that turned these into such lethal sources of conflict. For the Great War, and especially the ‘front’, had changed the sense of community for which the sacrifice was being made – had made patriotism the base of new or expanded claims for popular sovereignty and nationhood, including that of dissident nationalities. Where multiethnic dynastic empires collapsed, fatherlands floated loose as the potential sources of group loyalty and state legitimacy. Yet each fatherland now contained potential dissident patriotisms within it. Collectively, they also created a continental minority with no single fatherland: Europe’s Jews, who quickly became the scapegoat for ethnic tensions in the East (Levene 1993: 26–40). And all of the contending nationalisms were undercut by the alternative allegiance to the fatherland of revolution promoted by the Bolsheviks. In the ‘greater war’, which prolonged the violence until 1923 in Turkey, Russia, Eastern Europe, Germany, Italy and Ireland, the ‘frontier’ became the new ‘front’, the boundary that defined the space of the fatherland as the full force of contending patriotisms was unleashed, including a wave of pogroms across Eastern Europe (Gerwarth and Horne 2012: 1–18). When combined with the radicalized ideologies of communism, fascism and national socialism, conflicting national identities would stoke the ‘fires of hatred’ until, by the end of the 1940s, the intricate web of fatherlands that had characterized the continent before 1914 had been brutally reduced and overlain by the more homogeneous nation-states that we recognize today (Naimark 2001).

34

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Notes 1 The literature on nations and nationalism is enormous. Pioneering works on the constructed nature of nationalism that remain relevant for the First World War are Anderson (1983); Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) and Hobsbawm (1983a,b). For a stimulating recent collection, see Baycroft and Hewitson (2006), esp. 1–13. Despite its obvious importance to the history of the First World War, there seems to be no overall study of the place of nationalism and nation-states in the conflict. 2 For the Swadeshi movement (1903–8), which was more than an elite affair, see Chandra et al. (1989: 124–34). For colonial intellectuals, see Anderson (1983: 9–36). 3 On the importance of Germany’s predisposition to a pre-emptive war against Russia, see Mombauer (2001: 182–226). 4 The fullest study is Verhey (2000: 187–205), on Germany. 5 For the social relations of sacrifice in the Austrian capital, see Healy (2004); also Winter and Robert (1997: 55–132). 6 Despite reservations by key political figures in Britain and especially France (including Clemenceau), the discourse of a democratic and national crusade became prominent among the Western Allies, each of which had its own advocates for a League of Nations. For the cult of Woodrow Wilson in which it resulted, see Rossini ([2000] 2008). 7 For an exemplary study of the Canadian case, see Vance (1997). 8 India signed the Treaty of Versailles, but did so in the persons of the British Secretary of State for India and a maharaja from Rajasthan – little more than two months after the suppression of protesting nationalists in the Amritsar massacre. 9 For Kultur as an ideology of occupation, see Liulevicius (2000: 113–50).

References Anderson, B. (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Applegate, C. (1990), A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat, Berkeley : University of California Press. Bartlett, T. (2010), Ireland: A History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baycroft, T., and M. Hewitson, eds (2006), What Is a Nation? Europe 1789–1914, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Becker, J.-J. (1977), 1914: Comment les Français sont entrés dans la guerre, Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques. Bell, D. (2001), The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bellich, J. (2009), Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World 1783–1939, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bloxham, D. (2011), ‘The First World War and the Development of the Armenian Genocide’, in R.G. Suny, F. Göçek and N. Naimark (eds), A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, 260–75, New York: Oxford University Press. Bobroff, R. (2006), Roads to Glory: Late Imperial Russia and the Turkish Straits, London: I.B. Tauris.

Patriotism and the Enemy

35

Bourlet, M., and Y. Lagadec, eds (2013), Petites Patries dans la Grande Guerre, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Bruntz, G. (1938), Allied Propaganda and the Collapse of the German Empire in 1918, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cabanes, B. ([2014] 2016), August 1914: France, the Great War and a Month that Changed the World Forever, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chandra, B., M. Mukherjee, A. Mukheerjee, S. Mahajan, and K.N. Panikkar (1989), India’s Struggle for Independence, London: Penguin. Chickering, R. (1998), Imperial Germany and the Great War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chickering, R. (2007), The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Colley, L. (1992), Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Cornwall, M., ed. ([1990] 2002), The Last Years of Austria-Hungary: A Multi-National Experiment in Early Twentieth-Century Europe, Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Cornwall, M. (2000), The Undermining of Austria-Hungary: The Battle for Hearts and Minds, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Deák, I. (1990), Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918, New York: Oxford University Press. De Schaepdrijver, S. (2004), La Belgique et la première guerre mondiale, Brussels: Peter Lang. De Wiel, J.A. (2008), The Irish Factor, 1899–1919: Ireland’s Strategic and Diplomatic Importance for Foreign Powers, Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Figes, O. (1997), A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution, New York: Viking. Fischer, F. ([1961] 1967), Germany’s Aims in the First World War, London: Chatto and Windus. Fogarty, R. (2008), Race and War: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Foster, R. (2014), Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890–1923, London: Allen Lane. Fraser, T. (1977), ‘Germany and Indian Revolution, 1914–18’, Journal of Contemporary History, 12 (2): 255–72. Fromkin, D. (1989), A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914–1922, London: André Deutsch. Gatrell, P., and P. Nivet (2014), ‘Refugees and Exiles’, in J. Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 3: Civil Society, 186–215, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gentile, E. ([1997] 2009), La Grande Italia: The Rise and Fall of the Myth of the Nation in the Twentieth Century, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Gerson, S. (2003), The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth Century France, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Gerwarth, R. (2016), The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923, London: Allen Lane. Gerwarth, R., and J. Horne (2012), War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gerwarth, R., and E. Manela, eds (2014), Empires at War 1911–1923, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibelli, A. (1998), La Grande Guerra degli Italiani 1915–1918, Sansoni: Milan.

36

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Gregory, A. (2008), The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harper, R.W.E., and H. Miller (1984), Singapore Mutiny, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Healy, M. (2004), Vienna and the Fall of the Hapsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1983a), ‘Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, 263–307, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1983b), Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E., and T. Ranger, eds (1983), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holquist, P. (2010), ‘Les Violences de l’armée russe à l’encontre des Juifs en 1915: causes et limites’, in J. Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre totale: le tournant de 1914–15, 191–219, Paris: Talandier. Horne, J. (1997a), ‘Introduction’, in J. Horne (ed.), State, Society and Mobilisation in Europe during the First World War, 1–18, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horne, J. (1997b), ‘Remobilising for “Total War”: France and Britain, 1917–1918’, in J. Horne (ed.), State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War, 195–211, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horne, J., ed. (2008), Our War: Ireland and the Great War, Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. Horne, J. (2010), ‘Public Opinion and Politics’, in J. Horne (ed.), A Companion to World War I, 279–94, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Horne, J. (2013), ‘Guerres prémonitoires? Visions croisées des conflits balkaniques (1912–1913): France et Grande-Bretagne’, Francia, 40: 455–64. Horne, J. (2016), ‘Une expédition coloniale? L’expérience des soldats français aux Dardanelles’, in J.-Y. Le Naour (ed.), Front d’Orient: les soldats oubliés, 15–33, Marseilles: Gaussen. Horne, J., and A. Kramer (2001), German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Jahn, H. (1995), Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Jeffery, K. (2000), Ireland and the Great War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jenkins, J. (2013), ‘Fritz Fischer’s “Programme for Revolution”: Implications for a Global History of Germany in the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 48 (2): 397–417. Johnson, R. (2016), The Great War and the Middle East: A Strategic Study, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Judson, P. (2016), The Habsburg Empire: A New History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kitchen, J. (2015), ‘The Indian Army Fighting for Empire’, in J. Kitchen (ed.), The British Imperial Army in the First World War: Morale and Identity in the Sinai and Palestine Campaigns, 1916–1918, 183–213, London: Bloomsbury. Kramer, A. (1997), ‘Wackes at War: Alsace-Lorraine and the Failure of German National Mobilization, 1914–1918’, in J. Horne (ed.), State, Society and Mobilization, 105–21, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leonhard, J. (2014), Die Büchse der Pandora: Geschichte des Ersten Weltkrieges, Munich: C.H. Beck.

Patriotism and the Enemy

37

Levene, M. (1993), ‘Frontiers of Genocide: Jews in the Eastern War Zones, 1914–1920 and 1941’, in P. Panayi (ed.), Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America and Australia during the Two World Wars, 26–40, Oxford: Berg. Lieven, D. (2015), Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia, London: Allen Lane. Liulevicius, V.G. (2000), War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mai, G. (1987), Das Ende des Kaiserreichs. Politik und Kreigführung im Ersten Weltkrig, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Manela, E. (2007), The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism, York: Oxford University Press. Mauss, M. (2013), La Nation, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. McCartney, H.B. (2005), Citizen Soldiers: The Liverpool Territorials in the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mombauer, A. (2001), Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mommsen, W. (1997), ‘German, Artists, Writers and Intellectuals and the Meaning of War, 1914–1918’, in J. Horne (ed.), State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War, 21–38, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Naimark, N. (2001), Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Panayi, P. (2014), ‘Minorities’, in J. Winter (ed.), Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 3: Civil Society, 216–41, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patriarca, S. (2010), Italian Vices. Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pedersen, S. (2015), The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pennell, C. (2008), ‘“ The Germans Have Landed!” Invasion Fears in the South-East of England, August to December 1914’, in H. Jones, J. O’Brien and C. SchmidtSupprian (eds), Untold War: New Perspectives in First World War Studies, 95–116, Leiden: Brill. Pennell, C. (2012), A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Purseigle, P. (2013), Mobilisations, Sacrifice et citoyenneté. Angleterre-France, 1900–1918, Paris: Belles Lettres. Rachamimov, A. (2002), POWs and the Great War: Captivity on the Eastern Front, Oxford: Berg. Reynolds, M. (2011), Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rogan, E. (2015), The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920, London: Allen Lane. Roshwald, A., and R. Stites, eds (1999), European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment and Propaganda 1914–1918, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rossini, D. ([2000] 2008), Woodrow Wilson and the American Myth in Italy: Culture, Diplomacy and War Propaganda, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sanborn, J. (2014), Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schorske, C. (1980), Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, New York: Alfred Knopf.

38

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Soutou, G.-H., G. De Castelbajac and S. De Gasquet (1995), Recherches sur la France et le problème des nationalités pendant la première guerre mondiale (Pologne, Lithuanie, Ukraine), Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne. Stora, B. (1991), Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale (1830–1954), Paris: La Découverte. Townshend, C. (2005), Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion, London: Allen Lane. Vance, J.F. (1997), Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning and the First World War, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Verhey, J. (2000), The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watson, A. (2014), ‘“Unheard of Brutality”: Russian Atrocities against Civilians in East Prussia, 1914–1915’, Journal of Modern History, 86 (4): 780–825. Wehler, H.-U. ([1973] 1985), The German Empire, 1871–1918, Leamington Spa: Berg. Wilson, T. (1986), The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War, Cambridge: Polity Press. Winkler, H.-A. ([2000] 2007), Germany: The Long Road West: 1789–1933, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winter, J., and J.-L. Robert, eds (1997), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zamoyski, A. (2009), Poland: A History, London: Collins. Zeman, Z.A.B. (1961), The Break-Up of the Habsburg Empire, 1914–1918: A Study in National and Social Revolution, London: Oxford University Press. Ziemann, B. ([1999] 2006), War Experiences in Rural Germany 1914–1923, Oxford and New York: Berg.

3

From Propaganda to National Identity Construction in Turkey Erol Köroğlu

For a scholar writing about Ottoman war propaganda between 1914 and 1918 with a focus on the literary production in Turkish, it often remains a real challenge to reserve a sub-chapter for the Ottoman propaganda aimed at a public within enemy territory – in particular, those parts of society, populations or groups with a problematic relationship with the national identity of the enemy state and therefore potentially susceptible to ‘outside’ propaganda. Some concrete examples would be Muslim and/or Turkic peoples of tsarist Russia, as well as Asian and African Muslim people in British and French colonial territories. Indeed, my own scholarly work was mostly aimed at Ottoman-Turkish propaganda for the inner ‘domestic’ audience, not for ‘other’ or ‘outside’ audiences (Köroğlu 2003, 2004 and 2007). This would be an acceptable challenge, however, if the Ottoman-Turkish case was a ‘conventional’ one, meaning a case like the British, German or French one in which huge, well-funded and well-developed propaganda machines were being directed mainly towards the inner public and allies but also towards groups within enemy territories. Indeed, my previous research confirmed that a full-fledged Ottoman war propaganda was an impossibility due to the material conditions. In the warring developed countries of Europe, widespread efforts were directed towards the generation of propaganda that would support the war in accordance with governmental policies. However, in the underdeveloped and multiethnic Ottoman Empire, which had not yet transformed into a modern nation-state, the Ottoman-Turkish intelligentsia could not produce propaganda sufficient to support the battlefronts and the home front. As the war unfolded, Turkish cultural agents abandoned their initial attempts at propaganda and turned instead to the formation of a national culture, which was necessary for the existence of such a mechanism in the long term. Thus, as I will discuss in detail below, the Ottoman-Turkish intelligentsia, who could not support the war effort, used the conditions created by the war to eliminate deficiencies in national culture.

40

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Ottoman war propaganda: Destined for failure The quality and quantity of German and English propaganda during the war dwarfed that of the Ottoman Empire, which was in many regards an underdeveloped country, with its semi-colonized, multiethnic structure and economic, cultural and social infrastructure typical of a non-industrialized nation. Due to these unfavourable conditions, Ottoman war propaganda was condemned to failure. Throughout the war years, the Ottoman Empire never managed to establish an effective propaganda mechanism. Some attempts were made, but none yielded satisfactory results. Ahmed Emin Yalman, a famous and liberal journalist, described this situation succinctly in his book, written in English and published in 1930: Educational war propaganda was extraordinarily neglected in Turkey. The main activity in this regard was negative. Everything was done to hinder the spreading of the truth. The positive work coexisted in publishing the illustrated and popular War Review and a series of books. Writers were occasionally invited to the various fronts, and asked to write poems and books. An artificial system of trenches, and small models of service stations immediately behind the front were set up in Constantinople to give the public an idea of war conditions. A few information bureaus based on German models were also started. The Germans were much more active in this regard. There were German exhibitions of war literature and pictures in Constantinople, Konya, Aleppo, Bagdad, etc. And other German organizations both secret and public, were busily engaged in educating the Turks as to the course of the War, – or its course as interpreted by German propaganda. (Yalman 1930: 230)

The problem of the lack of propaganda began to be discussed in the Ottoman press by various writers as early as 1915. These debates lead us to specific questions today: Why did propaganda efforts die after 1915, even though at the beginning of the war it seemed as if a lively, spontaneous and patriotic propaganda effort, depending particularly on nationalist writers, was evolving? Can this be explained by the individual or collective laziness of the cultural agents? Is it true, as nationalist writers of the period claimed more or less openly, that Ottoman-Turkish intellectuals were all cosmopolitan individualists with no national identity? Or did the lack of propaganda derive from reasons that are more material? The last question in particular still remains relevant and can be answered affirmatively. The most visible reason is the strict censorship that the regime applied since 1914, along with the generally repressive attitude of the government towards freedom of thought. The strict censorship made life very difficult for writers. The government preferred to consider the intelligentsia as one of the many untrustworthy elements of society, which it had to keep under control, rather than a partner in the mission to convince and guide the masses. By the time the government understood that this approach was very wrong, since it deprived the public sphere of any psychological outlet, it was too late (the government abolished censorship in 1918).

From Propaganda to National Identity in Turkey

41

This situation points to a second cause, going further back than 1918, which made it impossible to establish a propaganda mechanism: the behavioural characteristics of the Committee of Unity and Progress (CUP), which was in power throughout the war.1 In addition to all the economic weaknesses, there was also the absence of politicaladministrative cadres and of appropriate policies that could have directed Ottoman public opinion towards a common aim throughout the four-year-long war. The governing CUP administration, notwithstanding the Enver-Talat-Cemal triumvirate (or because of it), was a coalition with rather loose ties between its constituent parts and encompassing different ideologies not in harmony with each other. It included many kinds of Islamist, Westernist or Turkish nationalist and even separatist ideologies. This triumvirate tried to keep these very different currents together by means of compromises or, when the need arose, by means of force. The CUP, including even its leadership, had not managed to lose its pre-1908 Revolution habits and attitudes, when it had operated illegally and had not been able to normalize its power. This situation created a pyramidal factionalism running from top to bottom. Rather than a modern political institution, the CUP looked like a conglomeration of factions with different agendas and perspectives. The conflicts created by this factionalism were among the most important reasons for the incapacity to form a coordinated propaganda mechanism. Nevertheless, the third and most important reason for the incapacity to organize an efficient propaganda effort was the unfavourable infrastructure conditions of the Ottoman Empire, from which derived also the presence of censorship and of Unionist factionalism. As I discuss below in detail, there were huge problems in material conditions – such as population, health, a low growth rate, an unstable economy dependent on foreign countries and credits, the lack of an industrial structure, the backwardness of transportation and communication, the lack of a unified national education system and related illiteracy, and the backwardness of the publishing sector – which prevented the formation of a national culture, on which any propaganda effort depended. All these causes made of the Ottoman Empire an anachronistic belligerent, not just in the real war but also in the ‘war of words’. First of all, the Ottoman Empire in 1914, just before entering the First World War, had a problem of population. The empire had a total area of approximately 2 million square kilometres (Yalman 1930: 78; Eldem 1994b: 4) and a population of between 20 and 26 million.2 This population was multiethnic and had varying degrees of ethnic concentration; 40–45 per cent of the total was made up of Turks living mostly in Anatolia, 35–40 per cent were Arabs, while the rest was made up of groups such as Kurds, Armenians, Greeks and Jews (Yalman 1930: 78; Eldem 1994b: 4).3 During the same period, developed European countries had populations twice or three times as large as that of the Ottoman Empire. Before 1914, the rate of increase of population in the Ottoman Empire was less than 1 per cent. According to researchers, this rate, which was lower than the world average, was due to unfavourable health conditions, war and revolts. Another reason was the extraordinarily long time men served in the army (Eldem 1994b: 23). Between 1880 and 1914, the world economy as a whole grew. The yearly growth rate of the Ottoman economy was 2.2 per cent. While this rate was satisfactory for developed countries, it was a bit low for a developing country. The Ottoman economy

42

Nations, Identities and the First World War

displayed characteristics similar to those of the world economy during this period, with stable price and monetary conditions and slight growth. Nevertheless, its dependence on other countries increased, the financial health of the state deteriorated and economic policies were devoid of coherent objectives (Eldem 1994b: 235). Even if a certain conversion into a capitalist economy did occur as a result of contact with external markets, the Ottoman economy was still based primarily on agriculture, with 80 per cent of the population employed in this sector (Eldem 1994b: 17). The Ottoman economy, which suffered from financial mismanagement and a consequent need of foreign credits vital for the state budget, was also not ready for the First World War from the point of view of its level of industrialization, especially seeing that the world had just come out of a period of intense technological innovation. The Ottoman Empire had only 269 companies employing more than five workers in 1913. By 1915 this number had increased by only a fraction, to 282 companies. A total of 55 per cent of the companies operating in the food, construction, leather-working and printing sectors were located in Istanbul. Most were small, and 81 per cent were private. According to approximate numbers, 16,975 people were employed in the industrial sector in 1913, and this decreased to 14,060 by 1915 because of the war (Yalman 1930: 92). Throughout the war, with the exception of the defence industry, all industrial sectors shrank. While before the war only 3,000 people were employed by the defence sector, this number rose to more than 10,000 by the end of the war (Eldem 1994a: 81). The greatest deficiency of the Ottoman transport infrastructure was in its railroad network. The railroad was to be the most important means of transportation during the First World War. By 1914 all industrialized countries had completed their railroad networks, both from a military and an economic point of view. Germany had a 64,000-kilometre network covering an area of 540 thousand square kilometres, France a 51,000-kilometre network covering an area of 536 thousand square kilometres, India a 55,000-kilometre network covering an area of 3,160,000 square kilometres, and the United States a 388,330-kilometre network covering an area of 7,739,524 square kilometres (Erickson 2001: 16). In contrast to all this, the Ottoman Empire, with an area of approximately 2 million square kilometres, had a railroad network of only 5,759 kilometres. In addition, most Ottoman railroads were foreign owned, and most of their employees were not Turkish. The Ottoman armies had to rely on animals for their transportation needs throughout the First World War. Unfortunately, the animal population was also quite limited in number and was under the constant threat of contagious diseases such as the bubonic plague. In 1913, there were only 250 veterinary surgeons (Erickson 2001: 88–9). The communication network of the empire was also very limited, even though the country was not unfamiliar with the telegram, which was the main communication medium of that time. The first telegraph line had been set up in 1854 during the Crimean War. Just before the First World War there was a network of 50,000 kilometres (Eldem 1994b: 113). During the war, this network would prove to be insufficient, with censorship adding to the inefficiencies that arose for technical reasons. The phone, which was another communication medium of the time, was definitely a novelty. It had begun to be used extensively in Europe in 1877, but in the Ottoman Empire its

From Propaganda to National Identity in Turkey

43

use began only in 1909, and then only by the state bureaucracy. In 1911, the Istanbul Phone Company, which had been created with British and American capital, began to put up a phone network, which by 1914 had 4,159 subscribers (Eldem 1994b: 114). The underdevelopment in this sector had adverse effects during the war: while someone in Istanbul could communicate with Berlin, Vienna or Sofia, no phone communication was possible between Istanbul and the various battlefronts (Yalman 1930: 90). The difficult material circumstances present in the Ottoman Empire meant that public education, which is of vital importance for the formation of a national culture and the existence of an environment receptive to wartime propaganda, also did not develop sufficiently. The Ottoman modernization process had begun at the end of the eighteenth century in the military field, and the greatest part of these reforms consisted in the creation of modern military schools. In a sense, the modernization of the Ottoman Empire had begun in the field of education. Unfortunately, by 1914 education had become one of the fields in which the efforts to modernize had been least successful. In relation to the fact that Ottoman reforms had always been a topto-bottom effort, the reform of education began at the university level and proceeded down towards the elementary level. Since reform of Ottoman elementary schools would have required enormous financial resources, it was always neglected.4 The low literacy rate was also an obstacle confronting efforts to support the morale of soldiers in the Ottoman Army and civilians on the home front. There is no precise data concerning the literacy rates, but it is thought that in the period 1914–18 it was less than 10 per cent (Zürcher 1988: 230). Another reason for the incapacity of wartime Ottoman governments to put together an effective propaganda network was the lack of development in the publishing sector. Printing presses reached the empire some 100 years after being invented by Gutenberg, and then via non-Muslim communities. For religious reasons, presses were not used to print books in Turkish until 1729. After this date, the Turkish publishing sector began to develop very slowly and during the two centuries between 1729 and 1928 managed to print only about 30,000 books (Alpay 1976: 47–8). Like education, the publishing sector was languishing as the war began, despite some efforts to nurture it. The strong propaganda mechanism that had formed in Europe and was operating under the control of the state ensured that much of the literary and cultural output during the war years was in accordance with the requirements of propaganda. In contrast, the situation in the Ottoman Empire was considerably less favourable. This situation, about which the Ottoman cultural sphere was aware, could not be eliminated even when efforts were made to do so.

Positioning Turkism according to Miroslav Hroch’s ‘nation-building process’ approach At this point we have to deal with the position of Turkish nationalist ideology, which was the main producer of cultural works related to the war, at times of a propagandist nature but mostly directed at the formation of a national identity within Ottoman society. According to the teleological national historiography, which became dominant

44

Nations, Identities and the First World War

especially during the Republic, there had been since late Ottoman times those who were for a nation-state and those who were against it. But this is an extreme simplification of a complex historical process. Can we in fact analyse the interaction of the four dominant ideologies of the late Ottoman period, that is, Ottomanism, Islamicism, Westernism and Turkism? Can these ideologies be separated neatly from each other, as Republican national historiography has always done? Can Turkism be defined as pro-nationalist and the other three ideologies as anti-nationalist? Simply giving negative answers to these questions does not overcome the reductionist nationalist/anti-nationalist binary opposition of the teleological approach. In contrast, Miroslav Hroch’s ‘nation-building process’ approach makes possible an analysis from a different point of view, giving more importance to the historical process (Hroch 1985, 1996). According to Hroch, the nation-building process derives from specific social settings and is based on certain objective preconditions. The most important of these objective conditions are a common memory concerning the past, linguistic and cultural ties establishing social communication and a citizenship conception based on rights and equality between the individuals forming a nation. The fact that Hroch calls the result of these circumstances ‘national movement’ and makes a distinction between it and ‘nationalism’ creates a means of moving beyond the teleological historiography approach. All patriots within a national movement, both nationalist and not, contribute to the elimination of the deficits they see in the field of national existence. Hroch, on the basis of a comparative study of the European national movements, establishes that there are three main phases. In the first phase there is the formation of national consciousness at a scholarly level; in the second phase a new type of activist transforms this scholarly effort into ‘patriotic agitation’ aiming to waken an ethnic group; in the third phase the national movement becomes a mass movement, and a social structure forms. Once all the ideologies arising from the 1908 Revolution are evaluated within a common national movement, and when this is termed the ‘Turkish nation-formation process’, Hroch’s approach helps to clarify certain points, although it cannot enlighten others. The first point established within a common national movements pattern, by the nation-formation process, is the existence of a crisis of legitimacy. The common anxiety of all post-1908 dominant ideologies, the problem of the ‘survival of the state’, was the main crisis of legitimacy in Ottoman-Turkish society. The search for a solution to this problem by all four main ideologies was sometimes in conflict, sometimes in a state of cooperation and compromise, but it supported the existence of a national movement not limited to nationalism. The Ottoman-Turkish national movement followed a pattern similar to Hroch’s three phases during its evolution between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the 1920s. Thus it can be stated that the period until 1908 was dedicated to a scholarly study of national identity, the years 1908–23 were years of patriotic agitation, and the years from 1923 to the 1940s were when a national society was built. Nevertheless, this evolution, more or less in accordance with Hroch’s phases, is not without its problems. Because Hroch’s approach is formulated on the basis of small European national movements, it is based fundamentally on a ‘dominant nation-ethnic minority’ binary opposition. The Turkish national movement, however, was much more complex: Turks

From Propaganda to National Identity in Turkey

45

were the dominant nation within an imperial structure, and they had to be cautious lest they inflamed the separatist nationalisms of the subject ethnic groups. This caution, plus all sorts of political, economic and social crises, meant that none of the phases of the development of the Turkish national movement were ever complete. That was why the post-1908 national movement, which should have been one of patriotic agitation, by drawing from a theoretically complete national identity reservoir, had in reality to also complete some things that should have been prepared during the previous phase. Once the First World War began in 1914, requirements such as propaganda, which could be expected only from the cultural sector of a fully formed national society, required that things typical of the third phase be done in this phase by the national movement. Because of these excessive demands, the cultural agents of the national movement could not be sufficiently effective. This was one reason why the propaganda activities of wartime intellectuals remained limited and listless. In relation to this, for some time the national movement could not execute even its main function of spurring patriotic agitation, although especially from 1917 onwards, with the foundation of the Yeni Mecmua (The New Magazine), it would start doing the things required by Hroch’s first phase and contribute in the long period to the formation of a cultural infrastructure.

The concept of ‘ten year war’ If we adopt Hroch’s three-phased national movement development pattern in order to understand the representation of the war in Turkish literary production between 1914 and 1918, we have to start from the post–Balkan war sociopolitical context. Turkist public opinion formation efforts, which gained momentum after the Balkan war in 1912, were supported at the governmental level. As a consequence of the losses in this war, a pan-Turanist nationalism, aiming to unite the empire with Turks living under the Russian yoke, was born, and the First World War was seen as a means of reaching this goal. The CUP government and the nationalist cultural sphere, which had quickly grown closer after the Balkan war, had made a coordinated effort, in the three-month period between the beginning of the war in Europe in August 1914 and the Ottoman Empire’s entry in November 1914, to convince the public that it was necessary to enter the war. The ‘ten year war’ concept with reference to the Balkan war’s sociocultural impact, which recently has begun to be accepted by Turkish historiography, is important here. This concept is something different from a simple description, since the stress on the length of the period as an homogeneous time frame is different from the dominant approach. What it means is that the period between the 1912 Balkan war and the end of the Independence War in 1922 represents one long process. Modern Turkish historiography had up to now considered the Balkan war, the First World War and the Independence War as separate events, without taking into account the fact that each was the reason for the next. The continuity seen clearly between the Balkan war and the First World War – in the fields of politics, economics and military organization – is even more visible at a sociocultural level.

46

Nations, Identities and the First World War

We can focus on the concepts of Turan and mefkûre in order to see the continuity in social psychology and public opinion. These concepts were introduced during the pre–Balkan war period by Ziya Gökalp, the main ideologist of the CUP, and were fundamental in stirring up patriotic agitation among the masses, which was done especially by Turkish nationalism that strengthened during and immediately after the Balkan war within the cultural sphere. Ziya Gökalp had formed these concepts on the basis of his studies of Western sociologists and philosophers and had developed them through the years, according to his own thoughts and his sociological approach that derived from the events of the time, but with the effect of the Balkan war, they would reach the public opinion in a simplified form. Turan mefkûresi, born out of the union of these two concepts, was seen as a way to compensate for the territorial losses of the empire in Europe caused by the Balkan war; it guided public opinion towards acceptance of a phantasm that would compensate for all the material and moral losses by achieving unification with Turks living under the Russian yoke. It is appropriate to focus on the concept of ‘fatherland’ (vatan in Turkish) here. I think the ambiguous nature of the ‘fatherland’ concept is a crucial element in the national identity construction process in general and the Turkish nationalism of the early twentieth century in particular. The first ideologues and leaders of the early Turkish nationalism like Ziya Gökalp tried to utilize the ambiguous and/or complicated nature of the old Ottoman imperial fatherland and frontiers. Let me offer one of his manoeuvres on this issue, offered in a pre-war 1914 article. At the end of his article, Ziya Gökalp focuses on the fatherland concept and puts forward the example of intersecting groups. There are two nations: the one deriving from nationhood and the other deriving from religion. Turan mefkûresi is also important as a way of seeing the differences in the various conceptions of vatan, which best reflect the conflicts of the period concerning Turkish nationalism. In this period there were many understandings of nationalism based on the opposing views: realist-idealist, romantic-political, voluntarist-historicist and organic-civic. Due to the losses in the Balkans, these conceptions were in conflict, especially on the concept of vatan. Ziya Gökalp formulated the first and foremost of vatan conceptions. He wrote the article ‘Türk Milleti ve Turan’, published in the sixty-third issue of Türk Yurdu, dated 16 April 1914, in response to a question asked by a Turkish youth from Kazan to another Turkist and implying that in the future the Turks would create a community made up of different nations. Ziya Gökalp’s claim is that, thanks to good communication and to unity in language based on the Turkish spoken in Istanbul, first of all a common culture (hars) and then a common civilisation (medeniyet) would be created, around which Turks would unite. At the end of his article he repeats the famous lines of his Turan poem and defines Turan. From this definition we can see that the Turan that Ziya Gökalp has in mind is a geographical place inhabited by people having a common language (Ziya Gökalp and Mehmet Ali Tevfik 1914a: 240). Turan is a utopia and points to unification: Turan will include only Turkish speakers, Turks; all others will be excluded. In this article Turan is a utopian ideal, but it has a political aspect too. Ziya Gökalp was the ideologist of the party and had overall responsibility for cultural affairs. Consequently, we can consider his definition of this concept as the definition

From Propaganda to National Identity in Turkey

47

commonly accepted by CUP members. That is why in his ‘Millet ve Vatan’ (1914b) he underlines the choices that could guide the policies of the CUP concerning the First World War. At the end of the article Ziya Gökalp comes back to the fatherland concept and puts forward the example of intersecting groups. There are two nations: the one deriving from nationhood, and the other deriving from religion. There is, in fact, a homeland of Islam, which is the beloved land of all Muslims. The other one is the national home, which, for Turks, is what we call Turan. The Ottoman territories are that part of Islamdom which has remained independent. A portion of these is the home of the Turks and is at the same time a portion of Turan. Another portion of them is the homeland of the Arabs, which is again a part of the great Arab fatherland. The fact that the Turks have a special love for the home of the Turks, Turan, does not necessarily mean that they forget the Ottoman land, which is a small Muslim homeland, or the great land of all Muslims. For national, political and international ideals are different things, and all are sacred ideals (Ziya Gökalp and Mehmet Ali Tevfik 1959: 78–9). Mehmet Ali Tevfik, another nationalist writer of the period, did not agree with Gökalp’s definition because it was too restrictive. The roots of this disagreement are to be found in the concept of manevî yurt (spiritual homeland), which Mehmet Ali Tevfik himself had developed and was trying to spread. This concept can be summarized using the author’s own words: ‘A homeland is not made up of physical territory, it is a spiritual fiction and consists of an attachment to historical glorious moments’ (1912: 21). Mehmet Ali Tevfik put forward this concept by making references to French sources. This is important because in this way his definition, which was the main support of a national mefkûre, acquired a basis in French voluntary nationalism. Intellectuals with a nationalist approach towards the history of a nation first prepared the literary works that would be the basis of the will of the nation and later compiled the school texts, which were to be used by the national public education system to instil in society a sense of a common will. In this way there was movement away from the organicist approach of German nationalism and towards an intellectual current that aimed for a conscious process of invention and imagination. Mehmet Ali Tevfik criticized the definition given by Ziya Gökalp as restrictive and demeaning. In his article ‘Yarınki Harp’ (Tomorrow’s War), which he completed on 4 May 1330 (1914) and published first in the newspaper Tanin and later the same year in his book Turanlının Defteri (Notebook of a Turan Dweller), he criticized Ziya Gökalp’s organicist approach for giving too much importance to the matter of language and then put forward his own historicist approach. If one accepted Ziya Gökalp’s definition, one would have to resign oneself to the fact that the losses due to the recent wars – of Tripolitania, Crete and all the other territories in the Balkans – were definitive. Instead, according to Mehmet Ali Tevfik, ‘Every land in which Turkish blood has been spilt is part of the Turkish homeland, because every single drop of blood has given us rights over those lands, which in our hearts have become sacred’ (1914: 140). Consequently, if a war started in the near future, Turks would have to fight their enemies in the Balkans and try to recapture these lands. Mehmet Ali Tevfik’s irredentist approach seeking redress was not practical in the concrete political circumstances of the years 1913 and 1914. After the great Balkan

48

Nations, Identities and the First World War

defeat it had suffered, the Ottoman Empire was in no state to recapture in the short term the lands it had lost. Consequently, Turkish nationalism faced two alternatives: (1) it could put together a patriotic framework to be applied to the lands still controlled by the empire, that is, Anatolia and the Arab lands; or (2) in addition to and even before this, it could put forward the idea of creating a great Turkish Empire that would include the Russian lands inhabited by Turks. These two alternatives imply an acceptance of the losses incurred in the Balkans and are thus more realistic, according to Mehmet Ali Tevfik. Or, rather, the starting points of both are more realistic. All the same, the first alternative of a nationalism tied to the remaining territories of the empire is by nature defensive, while the second Turanist alternative, aiming for the unification of all Turks, is of an offensive nature and also romantic and dreamlike. We have already seen that the second alternative was preferred during 1913–14. Consequently, the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War with the aim of uniting with all Turkish groups. The conflict between the various understandings of Turkish nationalism, focusing on the conception of vatan, within the nationalist current was relatively light until entry into the First World War because the newly born Turkish nationalist movement was trying to expand its following by using factors such as the sympathy towards it that had formed within public opinion in the post–Balkan war period and the support of the CUP. Nevertheless, this conflict, which did not manifest itself in peacetime because the CUP government was still in the honeymoon of its absolute political power and trying to form a symbiotic relationship with Turkism, surfaced when the First World War created a crisis. The conflict between an aggressive pro-CUP and pan-Turanist nationalism and a defensive patriotic nationalism, which concentrated on Anatolia, manifested itself from the very beginning of the war and in the years 1915–18 increased, forming the basis of the Ottoman-Turkish cultural sphere’s approach to war. In part, the patriotic agitation by the Turkist movement was successful in the post– Balkan war period because of relatively favourable material conditions. In addition to the governmental contribution and the increase in its audience, there also was the fact that the Turkist movement in those days saw patriotic agitation as the most appropriate action at that time. The catastrophe of the Balkan war had passed, and the only thing left to do was evaluate the events and to try to extract lessons from them, which could instruct and direct public opinion. In contrast, the First World War was a crisis whose end and societal effects were unknown. Like all belligerent countries, the Ottoman Empire had also thought that the war would be short-lived. But as the unprecedented dimensions and nature of the war made themselves clear, it had become impossible to form a propaganda mechanism based on the Turkist cultural sphere, which the government had thought would work effortlessly. The failure to form an effective Ottoman-Turkish propaganda mechanism during the First World War was due to not only material conditions but also a failure on the part of politicians and cultural agents to understand the new situation created by the war. The Turkist movement would begin a strong pro-war campaign in August 1914, but later, as the war made itself felt, this campaign would weaken until February 1915 and would then end when the Gallipoli Front was established. The ambitious but catastrophic beginning of the war, under the leadership of Enver Pasha, would create a conflict between those among the intelligentsia who supported the CUP government

From Propaganda to National Identity in Turkey

49

and those who were critical. The supporters gained the upper hand, but because of the mistaken intervention of the government and the extremely strict censorship, the wrongness of which would be understood later, an effective propaganda effort could not be established. Nevertheless, the government did initiate some propaganda efforts. One of the most important of these was the publication of Harp Mecmuası (The War Magazine). This magazine aimed to produce and publish photographs that would show the grandeur of the state and the army, which would convince people that everything was all right and would raise the spirits of both the soldiers at the front and the civilians on the home front. Harp Mecmuası became the most important and successful example of Ottoman visual propaganda, even more than the Donanma Mecmuası (The Navy Magazine), which had been published before the war and was a semi-official publication. The first issue of Harp Mecmuası appeared in October 1915. There is no information concerning its publishers and editors. Most probably it was a joint effort between the General Staff and party headquarters. This sixteen-page magazine was printed on high-quality paper. Given the circumstances of the time, it could not have been printed by a private company; in those days, newspapers were printed on only one or two sheets of lowquality paper, because of the lack of paper and, up to a point, the lack of printable news that would make it through censorship. Harp Mecmuası did not have any such problem; it was mainly made up of photographs, with the articles looking as if they had been added to embellish the photographs. Another propaganda effort was the trip of intellectuals to Gallipoli in June 1915, which had been organized at a moment when the battle at the front had stabilized. The aim of such visits to the battlefront, which would never again be organized in this way, was to ensure that writers would use their impressions of the front to produce propaganda works addressed both to soldiers at the battlefront and to civilians at the home front. Not only was it impossible to repeat such trips but also the writers who participated in this single trip found it very difficult to immediately transform their impressions into cultural output. They managed to create works about the battlefront only in the medium term, only through their own efforts and only in a disorderly and unproductive way, which is a good example of the difficulties facing the propaganda effort. The state’s efforts in this field could not acquire a systematic nature, even as late as 1917, by which time the war had gone on a long time and the lack of propaganda had become noticeable. Instead of resolving problems such as the lack of paper and the low purchasing power of the civilians, as well as repression and censorship that made cultural production very difficult, the government ordered famous writers to write books, for which it was paying exorbitantly. For example, one writer was paid what could be called a fortune for a small poetry book, then it was printed using the best quality paper and material and finally, thinking that civilians would not be able to afford it (since they were not even able to buy food), the government itself bought all copies of it at an exorbitant price and distributed it free of charge among the army. Ziya Gökalp, who since the beginning of the war produced work that was closer to the interests of society and further away from politics, initiated an important change concerning the cultural sphere in the summer of 1917. Ziya Gökalp, who at one time

50

Nations, Identities and the First World War

followed a sectarian Unionist policy and did not trust those who were not Unionist, founded Yeni Mecmua (The New Magazine), which included anti-Unionist writers and gave precedence not to propaganda but to the formation of national culture. This magazine was published with the support of the CUP; although it included works that satisfied short-term propaganda requirements, it was mainly dedicated to national identity construction work, which would have effects only in the long term.5 Yeni Mecmua’s Çanakkale Nüsha-yı Fevkalâdesi (Gallipoli special issue), published in May 1918 to commemorate the Gallipoli Sea Battle of 18 March 1915, should be mentioned here. This issue makes it clear that Ziya Gökalp’s followers in Yeni Mecmua had an understanding of the war that was very similar to Ziya Gökalp’s. The special issue was published after the advances in the Caucasus Front, consequent to the 1917 Russian Revolution, so in a sense it was a propaganda work; nevertheless, the writers, by retrospectively analysing in 1918 both the Gallipoli Battle and the rest of the OttomanTurkish First World War experience, with a Gökalpian approach, were focusing on this experience’s effects on the formation of a nationally defined society and of a nation-state. This effort, which began with Yeni Mecmua and went on during the National Struggle of 1919–22 and during the Republic after 1923, was an important step in the national identity construction process. All the same, favourable developments in 1918 in the Caucasus Front, even though things were going very badly in all other fronts, inflamed the internal conflicts within Turkish nationalism for a last time, and very vehemently. By then the Anatolianists could not stand the damage wrought by the war and by irresponsible expansionist dreams and were agitating that Turanist policies be abandoned, stating, ‘let’s care for our own home’. Until the Mudros Armistice, the Turanism of Ziya Gökalp and of the other Unionist nationalists close to him had the upper hand on Anatolianists, but after the armistice pan-Turanism would quickly be replaced by a more restricted Turkish nationalism. If we take the 1918 Mudros Armistice as an axis, Turkish culture in that period was very different from that in 1914. The economic deficits and difficulties of the war years not only made the revitalization and enrichment of the cultural world impossible but also impoverished it with respect to both quality and quantity of cultural output. All the same, by 1918 the cultural sphere had a much more national character compared to the pre-1914 period. Ziya Gökalp and his close followers had tried to describe this field on a theoretical level, and they had begun the process of forming a national culture, which was to continue after 1918. This process was unable to satisfy the need for practical propaganda felt during the war, for either the battlefronts or the home front. In a rather egoistic, even if necessary, way it used the opportunities provided by war for its own purposes. In short, culture, which could not serve the war effort, was nonetheless able to use the war for its purpose of building a national identity.

Propaganda for ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ audiences The complicated or even confusing fatherland idea discussed above was also the main basis of Ottoman propaganda towards the two enemy minority groups: Muslim and/ or Turkic peoples of tsarist Russia as well as Asian and African Muslim people from

From Propaganda to National Identity in Turkey

51

British and French colonies. On the one hand, all Muslims would revolt against their infidel colonizers all over the world in order to form a pan-Islamic unity, and on the other, there would be a new pan-Turkic or Turanist empire after the collapse of tsarist Russia. This dual fantasy was also the main propaganda tool used to convince the Ottoman public to enter the war as an ally of Germany. There were some very interesting and funny propaganda examples from this era. For instance, Ottoman agents in the Syrian province disseminated a very shocking piece of information among the people about the German kaiser’s alleged conversion to Islam. People believed for a while that the kaiser was circumcised and then visited Kaaba, therefore becoming Hadji William, William the pilgrim, in order to become the saviour of Islamdom. Of course, this absurd propaganda anecdote is just a part of a much more complicated jihad propaganda effort that was mainly planned in Germany. There are more important and serious efforts about the proclamation of jihad, although the end result was not very successful. Many pamphlets and documents were written in Turkish and Arabic and were translated into different languages in order to be disseminated by various ways. These pamphlets had similar arguments about the Ottoman sultan’s right to be the caliph of Muslims all over the world and about the duty of the Muslims to accept the caliph’s call for jihad against the imperialist and colonizing Russia, France and Britain (Zürcher 2016). Let me give some details about one example, the jihad propaganda efforts of a very famous Islamist poet, Mehmet Akif. Akif went on a trip to Germany that was organized at the beginning of the war as a result of Germany’s request to Enver Pasha for religious scholars. Germany had taken prisoner around 100,000 Muslims who had been fighting for the Entente powers, and the Germans wanted to direct propaganda towards them. Akif and other Turkish propaganda agents were accompanied by Sheikh Salih El Tunusi. The trip began with utmost secrecy in December 1914. The religious scholars were welcomed in Germany and even received by Germany’s Supreme Commander, Paul von Hindenburg. To make allies of the prisoners of war, the Germans had built mosques, found imams, and published newspapers in their languages. Akif gave speeches in the mosques to the prisoners and prepared propaganda bulletins, which were dropped on enemy lines on the front. He even went personally to the front to make speeches by megaphone to Muslim soldiers fighting in the enemy trenches. The propaganda bulletins he prepared were taken by the Germans as far as Java. These efforts had some practical results, for there were some who deserted from enemy lines and sought refuge among the Germans. As a result, the British and French had to redeploy their Muslim soldiers (Köroğlu 2007: 137–46). Additionally, some Muslim prisoners of war were persuaded to go to Turkey and fight for the caliph’s army. There were several thousands of such people, but the end results were very disappointing both for those prisoners and the Turkish military commanders (Kon 2013: 219–95). There was no communication between the prisoners and the Turkish commanders due to the linguistic barrier. Except for these limited efforts, it is difficult to find propaganda works that were directly prepared for the enemy lines in languages other than Turkish. Yet I will discuss here a propaganda play for the Turkish public: Halife Ordusu Mısır ve Kafkasya’da (The Caliph’s Army in Egypt and the Caucasus), which was published in 1915. The author,

52

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Muhyiddin Baha, constructs a fantasy in which all Muslim and Turkic people and soldiers in the British and Russian armies feel sympathy for the Turks and eventually start mutinies against their own armies. This didactic and schematic play opens with Turkish university students discussing the outbreak of war in Europe. All of them would be reserve officers when the general mobilization is declared. One of those students worries about the calamities that the war will cause and the ultimate annihilation of Western civilization. His friends, however, evaluate it as a divine opportunity for revenge and think that ‘the war that burns Europe will illuminate Asia’. Then they chide their friend who is worried for Europe, asking, ‘will we abandon our enslaved brothers in India, Egypt, Iran, and the Caucasus and instead of them, will we worry about the ones who enslaved them? Shall we have pity on the oppressor instead of the oppressed?’ Meanwhile, the play refers often and in a similar vein to an important injury in the Ottoman public opinion, namely the defeat in the Balkan wars. One character, for instance, compares the new war and the Balkan war: Don’t mention that damned war to us! … It wasn’t our war; it is not the war of youth but senility, not the war of a nation but treachery. This new war will be fought by Muhammed’s umma, Oguz Khan’s nation; and history is full of this umma’s, this nation’s heroism.

The attitude of integrating Islam umma and Turkish nation, which is evident in this passage, will be repeated continually through the play, and Turk and Islam will be mentioned as synonyms or identical twins, as if there is no conflict or problem between them. Actually, this attitude had been invented even before the war, by the late Ottoman Turkists such as Ziya Gökalp, as it was evident in the passage by him that was discussed above. We see lots of formulations in this play that are congruent with Ziya Gökalp’s flexible definition. One of the young students/reserve officers, for instance, says that great ruler who thought that even the entire world would not be enough for one sultan [Selim II] first decided to gather the complete Islamic universe under the banner of the Caliphate. Tomorrow the Muslims of three continents who will run to fight under the flag of jihad will impose the great principle of Islamic unity of which Sultan Selim first laid the foundations

The play progresses, always mentioning the umma and the nation together. Muslims all over the world wait for the banner of the caliph: Turks, Circassians and Georgians in the Caucasus; Arabs in Egypt; and (Muslim) Hindus in India … (Köroğlu 2016: 143–5).

Conclusion This play is an absurd fantasy, and undoubtedly it would not work as a propaganda piece to attract and persuade the Turkic and Muslim enemy soldiers to unite with the Ottoman Army. Yet propaganda works such as this play helped to form a belated ethnic

From Propaganda to National Identity in Turkey

53

Turkish identity among the Muslim people of Anatolia after the end of the Great War. Some people in Anatolia – such as Laz of the Black Sea region, Kurds and Circassians – were ethnically and linguistically divergent but were still Muslim, and the nationalist propaganda and literature offered them a new national identity in place of the old imperial Ottoman identity. Of course, it was not a voluntary and inclusionary identity; on the contrary, it was repressive, assimilationist and exclusionary. Muslim Arabs revolted against the Ottomans in 1916, and they were outside the frontier at the end of the Great War. Yet the wartime pan-Islamic and pan-Turanist propaganda for the local public created among the Turkish people and the elite an immediate and non-problematic demand for unification under the ethnic Turkish identity. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had Kurdish and Circassian allies during the independence war between 1919 and 1922, and he was very respectful towards those identities as long as he needed their assistance. He emphasized the acceptance of Turkish identity by those people and implemented coercive and violent assimilationist policies towards them after the foundation of the new regime in 1923. The frontier became the new front, and the battle was against ‘us’ now, in order to create a utopian and fantastic unity in the fatherland. It will be appropriate to once again emphasize here, at the end of this chapter, the specificity of the Ottoman Empire’s First World War propaganda effort. The overall propaganda campaign during the war was not successful, due to the conditions discussed above. All the same, there were some efforts towards Muslim and/or Turkic publics in the enemy territories, especially under the rubric of jihad propaganda. Yet most of the propaganda about ‘outside’ audiences was written and published in Turkish for Ottoman-Turkish citizens. Thus the propaganda that was seemingly for the enemy was actually propaganda for the Ottoman public. The ethnic and/or religious ties in this propaganda literature actually functioned to shape a new Turkish citizen for the coming republican regime. At the beginning of the First World War, the goal of constructing a nation-state around the Sunni Muslim and ethically Turkish assimilationist identity was not facilitated or supported by the multiethnic, multilingual and multi-religious Ottoman citizen. So, all propaganda efforts, both towards ‘us’ and ‘others’, actually worked only to construct the new national identity, and it ultimately was successful.

Notes 1 The CUP, or İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti in Turkish, was founded as a secret revolutionary Ottoman Muslim organization during the late nineteenth century in Istanbul. Yet it became very influential among the state officials and military people who were against the despotic rule of Sultan Abdulhamid II and was the main actor behind the 1908 Revolution against the sultan. The CUP and its leadership, mainly consisting of military pashas Enver and Cemal and civilian Talat, gained full control of the state in 1913, after the Raid on the Sublime Porte. The CUP formed the increasingly despotic war government until the end of the First World War. For more details, see Ahmad (2010) and Zürcher (2010).

54

Nations, Identities and the First World War

2 Yalman (1930: 78) takes into account also the areas that had not been included or only partially included in the census of 1884 (such as Baghdad, Basra, Hicaz, Yemen and Lebanon, with populations made up mostly of Arabs) and reaches the approximate number of 25 million. In contrast, Eldem (1994b: 4) calculates it as 26,387,000. Based on The World Almanac and Encyclopedia, 1914, published in New York in 1913, Erickson (2001: 15) states that the Ottoman population was equal to 22 million and adds that, according to contemporary British Intelligence sources, this number should be 20 million. 3 For detailed studies of pre-1914 Ottoman population, see Karpat (1985) and Behar (1996). 4 If we exclude private, foreign and non-Muslim schools, during the academic year 1912–13 there were in the Ottoman lands 12,814 primary schools (596,460 students and 19,212 teachers), 153 secondary schools (27,461 students and 1,518 teachers), seventeen normal schools (1,518 students and 141 teachers) and seventeen higher education institutions (6,677 students and 368 teachers) (Yalman 1930: 82; see also Alkan 2000). Even these low numbers were only reached during the constitutional period, which began in 1908. The budget of the Ministry of Education, which was approximately 200,000 Ottoman liras in the period 1904–8, increased to 660,000 in 1909, to 940,000 in 1910 and to 1,230,000 in 1914. Also, given the ‘favourable’ impact of the shrinking empire, it could be said that the education budget of 1914 was actually ten to twelve times greater than earlier levels (Akşin 1998: 347). 5 Yeni Mecmua was first published on 12 July 1917, as a weekly. The sixty-sixth and last issue was published a few days before the Mudros Armistice, on 26 October 1918. Since it was published with the support of the CUP, it could be considered a very privileged magazine. Better quality paper was used in its central pages, which contained photographs illustrating the articles on history and art history. This was a great privilege in a period when even normal paper could not be found easily.

References Ahmad, F. (2010), The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics, 1908–1914, New York: Columbia University Press. Akşin, S. (1998), Jön Türkler ve İttihat Terakki, 2nd edn, Ankara: İmge. Alkan, M.Ö., ed. (2000), Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e Modernleşme Sürecinde Eğitim İstatistikleri 1839–1924, Ankara: T.C. Başbakanlık Devlet İstatistik Enstitüsü. Alpay, M. (1976), Harf Devriminin Kütüphanelerde Yansıması, İstanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayınları. Behar, C. (1996), Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nun ve Türkiye’nin Nüfusu, 1500–1927, Ankara: T.C. Başbakanlık Devlet İstatistik Enstitüsü. Eldem, V. (1994a), Harp ve Mütareke Yıllarında Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nun Ekonomisi, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları. Eldem, V. (1994b), Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nun İktisadi Şartları Hakkında Bir Tetkik, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları. Erickson, E.J. (2001), Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War, Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press. Hroch, M. (1985), Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe, New York: Columbia University Press.

From Propaganda to National Identity in Turkey

55

Hroch, M. (1996), ‘From National Movement to the Fully-Formed Nation: The NationBuilding Process in Europe’, in G. Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation, 78–97, London and New York: Verso. Karpat, K.H. (1985), Ottoman Population 1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Kon, K. (2013), Birinci Dünya Savaşı’nda Almanya’nın İslam Stratejisi, İstanbul: Küre. Köroğlu, E. (2003), ‘From Propaganda to National Identity Construction: Turkish Literature and the First World War, 1914–1918’, PhD diss., The Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Köroğlu, E. (2004), Türk Edebiyatı ve Birinci Dünya Savaşı (1914–1918): Propagandadan Milli Kimlik İnşasına, İstanbul: İletişim. Köroğlu, E. (2007), Ottoman Propaganda and Turkish Identity: Literature in Turkey during World War I, London: Tauris. Köroğlu, E. (2016), ‘Propaganda or Culture War: Jihad, Islam and Nationalism in Turkish Literature during World War I’, in E.-J. Zürcher (ed.), Jihad and Islam in World War I: Studies on the Ottoman Jihad on the Centenary of Snouck Hurgronje’s ‘Holy War’ made in Germany, 135–51, Leiden: Leiden University Press. M.A. Tevfik (1912), ‘Yine Manevi Yurt’, Türk Yurdu, 25 (18 October 1328/31 October 1912), transliterated ed., vol. 2: 18–21. M.A. Tevfik (1914), Turanlının Defteri, Dersaadet [Istanbul]: Kütüphane-i İslâm ve Askerî. Yalman, A.E. (1930), Turkey in the World War, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ziya Gökalp (1914a), ‘8. Türk Milleti ve Turan’, Türk Yurdu 62 (20 March 1330/2 April 1914), transliterated ed., vol. 3: 238–40. Ziya Gökalp(1914b), ‘Millet ve Vatan’, Türk Yurdu, 66 (15 May 1330/28 May 1914), transliterated ed., vol. 3: 301–03. Ziya Gökalp(1959), Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization: Selected Essays of Ziya Gökalp, trans. and ed. Niyazi Berkes, London: George Allen and Unwin. Zürcher, E.-J. (1988), ‘Little Mehmet in the Desert: The Ottoman Soldier’s Experience’, in H. Cecil and P. Liddle (eds), Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced, 230–41, London: Leo Cooper. Zürcher, E.-J. (2010), The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Ataturk’s Turkey, London: Tauris. Zürcher, E.-J., ed. (2016), Jihad and Islam in World War I: Studies on the Ottoman Jihad on the Centenary of Snouck Hurgronje’s ‘Holy War made in Germany’, Leiden: Leiden University Press.

4

The Italian Case: The Ambiguities of a Nationalist Cultural Mobilization Marco Mondini

The Italian media strategy and the First World War Italy is still a marginal case in the international history of the First World War, despite the peculiarities, or perhaps because of the many contradictions, inherent in it (Janz 2010: 195–216; Mondini 2014a).1 In particular, Italian cultural mobilization is a neglected subject. This chapter aims to provide an overview of the genesis of a war culture in Italy between 1914 and 1918 and, specifically, analyse the Italian war propaganda against the enemy. The paradoxes enveloping the history of the ‘Italian war’ begin with the political and cultural background to the Kingdom of Italy’s commitment and the oddness of its timing (Mondini 2014b). Alone among European powers, Italy declared her neutrality and waited nearly one year before taking the field. At the time, Italy’s entrance into the war was hailed by the largely conservative government-aligned press as the last campaign of the Risorgimento, an act that would finally enable all Italians (including the Italian-speaking community still living in the southern provinces of AustriaHungary) to participate as a single nation-state. But among the politicians in power in 1914–15, Mazzini’s romantic and democratic ideal of nationhood or Cavour’s inspired political design counted for less than the desire to ensure that Italy gained control over the upper Adriatic and a place at the council table of the major European powers. Before fighting the country’s former allies, Prime Minister Antonio Salandra and his minister Sidney Sonnino extracted multiple promises: that Italy might annex all the border provinces partly or wholly occupied by Italian-speaking communities – which contemporary nationalist parlance referred to as irredenti, ‘those still to be redeemed’; that the territory of Bolzano, inhabited by 250,000 Austro-Germans, would be ceded to Italy; and the assurance of an expansion of Italy’s eastern military frontier to incorporate many areas where the majority language was Slavonic. They meanwhile abandoned the city of Fiume to its fate: though inhabited by a culturally and linguistically Italian population, in the unrealistic Allied plans of 1914 it was destined to be the port of a much-reduced yet still existing Habsburg monarchy (Varsori 2015).

58

Nations, Identities and the First World War

The contradictions of the nationalistic stance of the political-military leadership had a counterpart in the ambiguities of the cultural mobilization. Italy had her own brand of ‘cultural mobilization’: part media zeal, part organized state propaganda. From the months of neutrality onwards, the government enacted a series of censorship laws to muzzle the publishing sector. With the exceptional wartime powers of legislation, civil and military authorities were able to shut down any daily or periodical or book that spread military information and could ban suspect theatre and cinema productions. Theoretically, freedom of speech was guaranteed, but between 1915 and 1918, successive governments managed to reduce all press dissent to virtually zero, by means of intensive censorship and the confiscation of aberrant publications. The aim was not so much to prevent leaking of classified information (to which newspapers in fact had no access) as to ensure that the media only maximized consensus and did not sow doubt as to people’s patriotic solidarity. ‘Enemies at home’ were to be hounded and marginalized; confidence in the final outcome was to be bolstered (Fiori 2001: 79–82). The Avanti began as anti-interventionist but soon applied its own self-censorship, relegating war news to an inside page. As it happened, most of the media joined the interventionist campaign of their own accord against the Triple Alliance, regardless of state coercion and before the country went to war. With few exceptions, the daily press acted as a sounding board for pro-war cultural mobilization, anticipating political decisions and military options (Ventrone 2003: 47–97). On 24 May 1915, the Italian Press Association, represented by its president Signor Barzilai, placed itself at the government’s service as an agency subordinate to army needs and politics, with a view to bolstering the people’s morale and consensus. It volunteered that envoys to the front be subject to full military control and military discipline. Thus the seal was set on militarization of the press, which for the most part had arisen spontaneously (Licata 1972: 114ff ). Far from acting as an independent ‘fourth estate’, war correspondents, including the top names among the national press, were often little more than mouthpieces of the official line as dictated by bulletins from Luigi Cadorna, a general who patently frowned on the bourgeois press and cared little for public opinion. In 1915, Cadorna’s aversion to ‘media strategy’ became a rule among the military, as did the obsession with military secrecy (one of many instances of his paranoia). Shortly before Italy declared war, the generalissimo had the war minister relay the warning that civilian interference in his handling of the war would not be tolerated: ‘I feel that the press […] can make do with daily communiqués and bulletins’; in the future they might be granted ‘the occasional visit to battlefields where a limited number of journalists would be duly flanked by officers who would undertake only to show them what could have no effect on the course of future operations’.2 The Italian Army thus took the field without any specific service to gather information, control the media or run propaganda and counter-propaganda, despite the patent lesson of a year of war in Europe fought on the wicket of news manipulation and although the direct enemy – the joint AustroHungarian army – had one of the most efficient such services: the Kriegspressequartier, manned by some of the empire’s most brilliant minds (Dzambo 2003; Mondini 2009). The High Command’s information and press office began on a restricted and amateur basis, aiming to keep journalists away from the front rather than to manage or exploit

Nationalist Cultural Mobilization in Italy

59

them. For months on end, Italian and foreign correspondents saw nothing at all; their articles on the unstoppable advance of Italian troops were based on anodyne official bulletins fleshed out with liberal doses of imagination (Murialdi [1996] 2006: 116–21; Vanzetto 2008: 803–19). It was not until the first setbacks scotched optimistic forecasts of a short war that newspapers and reporters were (prudently) enlisted in the moral crusade and that the pathological policy of withholding all news was ended – but not before it had enraged even the super-patriotic editor of the Corriere, Luigi Albertini (L. Albertini to N. D’Atri, 26 May 1915, in Albertini 1968: 391). But the privileged few allowed into the war zone would still see and understand little. Correspondents were restricted in their movements, telephone and telegram contacts were precarious, news of offensives was long held back even from accredited journalists; this, and the general reluctance to grant permits to the front lines, raised an insuperable obstacle throughout the war. ‘Go and make sure for yourself ’ was not the practice, commented Arnaldo Fraccaroli. What with faint-hearted newsmen and the policy of filtering information for public consumption, those who wrote up the epic battles on the Italian front rarely visited the sites, still less witnessed them at first-hand (Riosa 2007: 18). The result was a handful of facts padded with heroics. Skirmishes became epoch-making battles, slight advances strategic breakthroughs, bloodbaths turned into glorious sacrifices; even defeats and the most dire of reverses were portrayed in reassuring formulas and with verbal dexterity (‘tactical withdrawal’, ‘significant losses’) – a repertoire upon which later wars would draw (Bergamini 2009: 54–70). The acknowledged master of such narrative was Luigi Barzini, probably Italy’s most famous war correspondent, whose dispatches from the front were stylistically brilliant. Stout-hearted fearless soldiery, athletic young officers sportingly leading the attack and enemies forever fleeing in defeat were cast against a picturesque landscape, which Barzini would often make the true protagonist of his reportage. Snowy peaks jutting skywards were the ideal setting for what was (aesthetically) the only war worth recounting: that of the tiny bands of Alpini and Kaiserjäger engaged in epic struggle among the glaciers; or fighter pilots, latter-day knights, daring the skies – all of them far removed from the ugly slaughter in the mud of the trenches (Bricchetto 2003, 2006). Sui monti, nel cielo e nel mare (By mountain, air and sea) was the significant title of a popular ‘snap-book’ in which Barzini gathered his star despatches; it provided engaging frescoes where one looks in vain for the dreary saga of trench warfare: ‘azure skies stretching far away’, ‘craggy peaks merging into the shimmering depths of space’ and heroic aviators dying serenely after a duel with the enemy – which gave the public the illusion of a nice clean war (e.g. Barzini 1916: 188, 203, 220). The contrast between such Barzini-isms (barzinate, as all media hype came to be known) and the grinding anonymity of real combat could hardly be more glaring. It was not just the edifying images in which the front line was served up to the readership on the home front but also, above all, an issue of language. Barzini’s bright, flowery prose, effectively effacing the violence and the mass slaughter, had nothing to do with ‘soldier talk’, the jargon cobbled together out of neologisms, crude dialect and folklore terms that soldiers used to describe their experience of the front. Barzini, Fraccaroli and company played their part by working up their accounts with romantic, spectacular, patriotic, stylistic features verging on advertising hype, which was socially agreeable and fit the standard

60

Nations, Identities and the First World War

image and narrative clichés of war, however much the rodomontade might seem (then and, more so, today) an implausible caricature. Of course, their ‘patriotic mission’ was aimed not at the soldiers but at the civilian audience, who were to be protected from chagrin at the early bloodbaths and the exhausting prospect of a long war. On that front, Italy’s newspapermen behaved no worse than their counterparts on the Western Front, who were busy constructing those war story myths that the French poilus would scornfully dub bourrage de crâne (Charle 2004: 222–8). As on the Western Front, so in Italy that gap between ‘trench talk’, with its harsh neologisms, and the polished tones of the media reflected the unbridgeable gap between the front line (those who witnessed fragments of the real thing and were overwhelmed by it) and the home front (those who could only imagine and nearly always misunderstand) (Roynette 2010). There is nonetheless little doubt that this collective rhetorical travesty of war reporting was to the taste of the home audience. In the course of the war, sales of dailies and periodicals soared, launching the mass communications industry: the Corriere della Sera rose from 350,000 copies in 1913 (an excellent result for its time) to an average circulation of 500,000/600,000; La Stampa reached 200,000 (from 90,000), Il Resto del Carlino 150,000 (from 60,000) and a local daily like the Venetian Il Gazzettino (a favourite with Comando Supremo propaganda for distribution to the troops) went from 30,000 to 150,000 copies (Forgacs 1990). More than one-sixth of the whole population was called up, and the war dragged on, increasing the thirst for news among those left at home. Small wonder, then, that private correspondence should soar and the information industry should excel itself. But Italy was still a semiilliterate nation: going by the optimistic literacy figures of the 1911 census, nearly half of the population and well over half in southern and rural areas had only limited access (through other people) to what the papers were saying, even though precisely that segment had provided most of the ‘cannon-fodder’ and was hence most eager for news and reassurance. The need for a huge and only vaguely literate audience to ‘bridge the distance gap’, play down the danger and seek what comfort they could explains why the public version of 1915–18 was partly or even largely a thing of images (De Luna 2007: 87). As pedagogue Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, that acute observer and propagandist officer, would recall, Italians of that age were deluged by ‘pamphlets, leaflets, posters, post-free postcards and illustrated newspapers’, which were the real communications line between the battle front and the home front (Radice 1922: 34). They painted a collective image of the war that was firmly anchored in the principle of edificatory improvement of reality.

The Italian narration of the war (and the influence of military power) Brutality was banned from war illustrations, while the magazines with the biggest circulation soon came to confine the stark essence of warfare – fighting and death – to a minimal part of their copy. That violence disappeared had little to do with organized censorship: at least in the early years of the war, the army and government’s ability to filter out unwelcome pictures was extremely limited (Tomassini 1995). What counted

Nationalist Cultural Mobilization in Italy

61

for more was the inability of photographers and illustrators to see wartime events with their own eyes. It was not a relative invisibility, such as hampered the authors of written accounts (whose field of knowledge was restricted to the narrow world spectrum they had known), but absolute invisibility: reproduction of the essence of warfare was hidden from the visual reporter’s sight (Schoentjes 2010). For one thing, it was no easy task to immortalize the excitement of an attack or a bombardment, despite improvements in technology. Furthermore, professional civilian photographers were restricted in many ways from access to the front. Above all, it was the professionals themselves who refused to try and capture the unportrayable, systematically censoring their own work. The photographer could no more reproduce the extreme violence of the battlefield than could the fighting man’s letter home describe it, or the journalist report it (D’Autilia 2005: 169–76). In any event, in the Italian instance, the Comando Supremo imposed a near monopoly that settled the issue: the military photographic service enlisted professionals and amateurs (like Luigi Marzocchi) of known ability whose huge output swamped the civilian market, ramming home a bland anonymous official version of the war that consisted of posing officers, soldiers and artillery divorced from the scene of action (Greco 1995; Mignemi 2003: 110–25). The upshot of these restrictions and filters was that the allegedly veridical photographic evidence (so harped on by the media employing it) tended to perpetuate an acceptable face of reality: a ‘social construct’ depicting war, eschewing the lurid or depressing in favour of the uplifting (and usually false) (Servetti 2003). Between May 1915 and November 1918, the Sunday paper Domenica del Corriere published more than 3,500 ‘war’ photos, of which a mere fifty or less show combat and barely more than 150 portray prisoners, wounded or (enemy) dead (Tomassini 1996). Likewise its competitor L’Illustrazione Italiana did not include one single photo showing a death until summer 1916, when the first triumphal snapshot depicted victims (Austro-Hungarians, needless to say) at the battle for Podgora (‘La battaglia di Gorizia’ 1916). Instead, the inner-page photo features (attributed to the odd ‘special correspondent’ or combatant, usually an officer) would show great detail of units marching far behind the front, patrols of well-dressed smiling infantrymen enjoying an outing in mountain pastures, spectacular artillery columns winding down narrow roads or around mountainous outcrops, sentries immortalized in improbable lookout posts (against a picturesque backdrop of snowy peaks) and Alpine troops on harmless skiing manoeuvres or posing theatrically against vertical rock-faces (Mondini 2008). The main front-cover photos of commanding officers and soldiers ‘at the front’ were supplied by High Command, together with a batch of inside-page reproductions, in this way keeping a discreet control over how the war was represented. More direct official army propaganda was entrusted to the photographic industry: from June 1916 onwards, a number of volumes (they would run to eighteen in all) carried collections of the Photographic Unit, each devoted to one theatre of war, or one specialist branch, the idea being to put on record the ‘valour, daring and resilience of Italian organisation’ (Italy 1916). The first volume, War in the Mountains, depicted a welter of inaccessible glaciers, emplacements dug out of the everlasting snows, gleaming peaks, breathtaking landscapes and military strongholds amid the ice; the second volume, The Karst, presented a sequence of observation posts, positions captured, official observers,

62

Nations, Identities and the First World War

sentries, and so on throughout the others. The only thing missing, as usual, was actual fighting. Drawing on aerial photography, the High Command publications were a marvellous display of the wartime photographers’ taste for the picturesque, which, if not a typically Italian trait, was prompted by the spectacular landscapes on the Alpine front (De Rossi 2014; Keller 2015). The effectiveness of that peculiar (and misleading) perspective lay in its viewing the scene of conflict with a tourist’s eye. Instead of dwelling on the troops’ discomfort in their filthy trenches up on the Karst, the illustrated press and ‘lifelike’ newsreels diverted the public’s gaze onto the spectacular backdrop of glaciers and inviolate summits, over which the two armies faced each other in the sporting spirit of climbers in peacetime years. To the upper-middle classes, such icons of the Alps were already familiar by the end of the nineteenth century, and they were thus deliberately used by the wartime culture industry, but now the lower classes too were being shown images of sublime immaculate nature, which would henceforth find a permanent place in the canons of Italian mass tourism (Urry 2002; Wedekind and Ambrosi 2007: 57–92). The exact circulation of those issues is hard to ascertain, but the reproductions were sumptuous, the price was distinctly low for a photographic product (only 3 lire per issue) and the publisher chosen to market them was no less a name than Treves, so they may be presumed to have been very popular. What was invisible (or unbearable) to the photographer’s eye – soldiers engaged in active combat – was a common theme of painted illustrations, a genre that enjoyed a revival of popularity during the war years. Mechanical reproduction of reality might not be able to give the public what it wanted (faces and action, pathos and spectacle), but illustrators certainly could fill the information gap. Half of the covers designed by Beltrame from 1915 to 1918 showed scenes of combat, as did some of the most evocative front pages of L’Illustrazione Italiana and at least seventy (out of 700) of its inside illustrations and etchings (Tomassini 1996: 42, tables 3 and 4). Like the photographer – indeed more so – the illustrator did not really take part in military life, still less the experience of fighting. Beltrame’s claim to have visited the sites so as to be able to reproduce action and settings from real life was a boast lacking all substance (the painter obtained a fortnight’s pass to the war zone but took good care not to visit the front line). As usual, he would work from photographs, enlarging imaginatively on views of landscape (Pallottino 1996; Ginex 2007). It was their very divorce from the real setting that enabled illustrators to draw on traditional figurative traditions of battle painting in their scenes of action: they could focus on the intrepid individual man-at-arms and his splendid exploits. As with Beltrame’s backgrounds, so the foreground too would be realistic, nearly always avoiding the symbolism of winged victory or bombastic metaphor: this was a legacy of nineteenth-century social painting, which traditionally targeted the popular public that was expected to decode pictures with ease and appreciate simplicity. It also reflected a traditional priority among newspaper illustrators whose success lay in giving the illusion of reality (Pallottino 1988: 195–239). In short, the illustrated periodicals of the ‘image industry’ produced a consistent stream of celebratory pictures and captions that may be simplified and grouped under three headings: hymning the fighting man’s courage; building a picture of the enemy; and hailing the virtue of the Italian people solidly behind their army (Colombo 2009: 127–32).

Nationalist Cultural Mobilization in Italy

63

Official propaganda: The ambiguous nationalism of power After 1866 and the annexation of Venice by the Italian Kingdom, Italians became a small minority in the Dual Monarchy. Nevertheless, in 1914–18, about 100,000 Austrian subjects from the districts of Trento, Trieste and from the Künstenland identified themselves as ‘Italians’ and served in the Common Army and in the Landwehr, mainly on the Galician front (Sondhaus 1990). Of course, Italians were not just any nationality like the others, at least according to the perception of the Imperial military authorities. Despite the indisputable loyalty of the Italian soldiers and officers on the Eastern Front, and the fact that the Italian Kingdom was still neutral at that point, already during the winter 1914/5 the Austrian government planned the deportation of about 100,000 Italian-speaking civilians from their southern border. Moreover, it enforced a brutal militarization of the region and a firm surveillance of the Italian (or partially Italianspeaking) units, usually employed in dangerous rearguard operations, with heavy losses, during the battles of summer and autumn 1914 (Überegger 2006).3 Actually, only a small number of Italian-speaking subjects chose desertion or joined the Italian Army. Ultimately the so-called volontari irredenti (volunteers from the Trento or Trieste area) were no more than 2,500 strong, and almost all of them were young students or political activists who escaped from Austria before the Italian Kingdom entered the war in May 1915 (Todero 2005; Quercioli 2006). Their number included some charismatic leaders such as Cesare Battisti, a socialist member of Austrian Parliament, a refugee in Italy in the summer of 1914 and, since then, one of the most important activists in favour of the war against Austria. Soon after his arrival, Battisti asked to join the Italian Army or, at least, to collaborate with the High Command to plan a strategy of psychological and propaganda warfare towards the national minorities of the Austrian Empire. Battisti was an alert observer and a perceptive intellectual, as well as a representative of a national community, the Italians of Tyrol, where the Kaisertreue (however strong before 1914) was quickly decreasing, due to persecution by Austrian military authorities. Therefore he knew very well the potential of a propagandistic strategy designed to exploit the national conflicts, above all among the hegemonic nationalities in the Army’s officer corps (German-Austrian and Magyar) and the Slavic troops (Mondini 2016). However, the Italian Army’s High Command, as well as the Italian government, rejected Battisti’s suggestion from the very beginning. Actually, even in 1915, among the ranks of military élite, only a few officers believed that a national propaganda effort against the enemy could work. On the contrary, many generals despised any sort of propaganda strategy (and especially propaganda that might to spread indiscipline and disobedience) as a ‘dishonourable weapon’ (Marchetti 1960). This peculiar gap in the military culture of the old generation of Italian senior officers was already clear before the First World War. The future general Eugenio de Rossi, an uncommonly clever and brilliant career infantry officer who served as intelligence officer before the First World War, blamed in his war memoirs the inefficiency of the Italian military intelligence (which was indeed a small, underfinanced office with only a few groups of unprepared junior officers). On the eve of the war, these officers adhered to the principle that a gentleman in a uniform could not associate himself with something

64

Nations, Identities and the First World War

reserved for spies, traitors and rioters.4 General Carlo Porro, the deputy chief of staff of the Italian Army between 1915 and November 1917, testified to the truthfulness of this bizarre situation. In March 1918, he was questioned by the committee of inquiry about the defeat at Caporetto, particularly about the role of the military intelligence during the war.5 According to his deposition, at the beginning of the war, the Ufficio Informazioni was the most forgotten branch of the Italian General Staff: it was underfinanced, underestimated and regularly not consulted on the most important matters.6 Moreover, just before the war, the Ufficio Informazioni was subordinated to the operations section (Reparto Operazioni). In theory, this was a reasonable measure: the Reparto Operazioni was the core section of a modern High Command, which allowed intelligence officers to work together with the planners. Unfortunately, under Cadorna, the General Staff (after May 1915, the Comando Supremo) was not exactly organized as a modern High Command (Bencivenga [1930] 2014). Rather, the centre of Cadorna’s Command was his personal secretariat, consisting of a very small group of super loyal officers, like the chief secretary Roberto Bencivenga or the young and brilliant Ugo Cavallero, who were always in competition with other offices to secure the approval of Cadorna (the Chief, as he came to be known) and tried to keep at bay external influences (Mondini 2014b: 110–20). As a consequence of this mixture of mediocrity and mistrust, the Ufficio Informazioni at the General Staff in Rome – and, after the mobilization, at the Comando Supremo in Udine – was usually entrusted to undistinguished or even incompetent senior officers. This led to, for instance, the disastrous lack of reliable information about the size and the formation of the Austrian Army in Tirol and on the Isonzo front, as well as to the failure of the Italian offensive in 1915 (Cappellano 2002). However, even General Luigi Cadorna admitted in 1918 that, at the beginning of war, he did not trust the military intelligence and that he believed that his Ufficio Informazioni could be of help mainly as a counterespionage service within the country’s borders or for spying on suspect ‘austriacanti’ (supporters of the Austrian regime) in the occupied zone (he obsessively feared priests and former officers, even if Italian-speaking). Finally, during his deposition he restated that he ‘discouraged any propagandistic action aiming to undermine the disciplinary bond, to incite to desertion or to take advantage of ethnical discords’ within the Austrian Army, since personally he considered this activity disloyal, opposite to international war laws and even dangerous.7 Actually, Cadorna was obsessed (and he was not the only one) with the danger of desertion: basically, he mistrusted his own army, ‘a crowd’, as he declared, ‘composed of dull peasants, socialists workers, antimilitaristic students’ who were undisciplined and untrained to love their country.8 He honestly thought that, with the exception of career officers, the majority of his army was ‘morally corrupted by at least twenty years of pacifism spread thanks to a weak, excessively liberal government’ and prone to disobey and desert.9 So we should not be surprised that, according to his regulation in May 1915, the Ufficio Informazioni of the Comando Supremo was not engaged in any propaganda or counter-propaganda and that Colonel Giovanni Garruccio, since October 1915 the inefficient and servile chief of the bureau, long rejected the suggestion by other information officers to create a systematic structure for propaganda against the enemy, with the explicit purpose to exploit the conflicts between nationalities and to incite disobedience in the Austrian ranks.10

Nationalist Cultural Mobilization in Italy

65

However, not every information officer in the army agreed with this anachronistic (and ineffective) military culture. Tullio Marchetti, a brilliant senior officer coming from a South-Tyrolian Italian-speaking family, was appointed in autumn 1914 as the head of the Ufficio Informazioni of the First Army, deployed on the northern border between Venice, Lombardy and the Austrian province of Trentino. Just before Italy’s entrance into the war, Marchetti created a wide network of people to collect information, using refugees (between summer 1914 and spring 1915, more or less 1,500 Italian-speaking Austrian subjects, among them many students and intellectuals, who had fled Trentino seeking refuge in Italy), shopkeepers, mayors, post office employees and many other Italian nationalist militants beyond the border; after 24 May 1915, he reinforced his network to identify and track the movements of Austrian units (Marchetti 1960: 50– 64). Moreover, he began independently to arrange initial local propaganda activity that aimed to take advantage of the ethnic tensions among the Austrian-Hungarian troops or, more simply, of the low morale of some units deployed in Trentino. Thanks to the work of informers, to his deep knowledge of the internal situation of the Dual Monarchy and his assiduous reading of international papers, Marchetti argued that especially the regiments with a majority of Slavic-speaking conscripts were an ideal target to test the possibility of encouraging soldiers to desert.11 With the authorization of the commander of the First Army, but without an explicit order by the Comando Supremo, at the very beginning of 1916 Marchetti prepared some flyers and tracts addressed, particularly, to Czech, Slovakian, Polish and Rumanian soldiers. According to a long report drafted at the end of war, the Ufficio Informazioni of the First Army had identified these ‘Slavic nations’ as the ‘most dissatisfied, disorderly and nationalistic’ among the nationalities of the Common Army, whereas German-speaking and Magyar units were strongly ‘loyal to the emperor’ and the ‘southern Slavs’ (Croatians and Slovenians) hated Italians deeply.12 In order to prepare texts that could be read by every ‘Slavic soldier’, Marchetti got ‘some series of Cyrillic types’, entrusted the editing of the texts to a civil typography firm in Verona, which printed them in multiple languages (but initially, only in German, Italian and Czech), and ordered that they be thrown into the Austrian trenches by air or spread through a network of spies and Italian collaborators beyond the enemy lines.13 This operational autonomy, and the lack of control by the superior Ufficio Informazioni in Udine, should not come as a surprise. Even if Cadorna’s style of command was rigidly centralized, not only was the organization of his High Command anachronistic (e.g. there were no periodic staff meetings or briefings with the army commanders) but also the First Army was an eccentric unit indeed in the context of the Italian Army between 1915 and 1916. Since the barycentre of the Italian strategy was far east, on the Isonzo front, Cadorna and his adjutants were infrequently there, which allowed the army of Trentino to enjoy great autonomy. Moreover, the army of Trentino was led by Roberto Brusati, a well-reputed general and (moreover) the brother of the king’s first-aide-de-camp. This all enabled Tullio Marchetti to work almost in complete autonomy for several months, even if, periodically, letters sent by the central Ufficio Informazioni of the Comando Supremo asked him to reduce his activities (judged ‘excessive and too expensive’) and to focus on duties established by service regulation (basically: surveillance in the war zone, counterespionage, interrogatories of prisoners and censorship of mail from the front

66

Nations, Identities and the First World War

to homeland). But General Brusati always defended Marchetti. Finally, the central Ufficio Informazioni tried to stop the propaganda activity of peripheral offices, which was more and more embarrassing for the inefficient and disorganized men in charge of the military intelligence in Udine (and, above all, for the chief, Colonel Garruccio).14 A letter sent by the Ufficio Informazioni of Comando Supremo to the subordinate offices on 1 August 1916 prescribed limiting the launch of propaganda flyers to the enemy trenches (an operation described as a waste of resources); specifically, the order prescribed avoiding any incitements to rebellion and desertion, which were deemed inappropriate, both because the Austrian intelligence might respond in kind and because any instigation to disobey military discipline went against the rules of a correct war.15 However, after the summer 1916, the influence of the Ufficio Informazioni at the High Command in Udine decreased quickly, above all as a result of its inability to foresee the big Austrian offensive in Trentino in the spring-summer of 1916 (the socalled Strafexpedition). In many respects, the Strafexpedition was a turning point. The Orlando government fell, the Austrian Army invaded an old Italian province and, for the first time, Italians realized the meaning of a total war (several small towns were entirely destroyed; about 100,000 Italians were evacuated and dispersed through the whole country, thereby creating the phenomenon of refugees). Paradoxically, the chief of staff did not fall (even if the surprise of the Austrian offensive was essentially his fault), but the trauma of the almost-strategic defeat pushed the Comando Supremo to consider any weapon and new ways of combat. According to several memoirs by former intelligence officers and to the deposition of General Porro, General Luigi Cadorna was gradually persuaded of the opportunity to implement the weapon of propaganda; Marchetti successfully convinced the chief of staff to put aside his mistrust of these ‘non conventional weapons’ (Cadorna was well known for his pathological disregard for intellectuals, the press and each aspect of politics), go beyond his traditional contempt for deserters and ‘traitors’, suspend his racial disdain towards the southern Slavs (quite common in Italian culture) and support the effort to use the ethnic rivalries, above all regarding any disagreements the politically disadvantaged national communities (Croatians, Slovenians, Czechs, Slovakians, Poles, Rumanians) had with the two leading communities, German-Austrians and Magyars.16 Eventually the Comando Supremo overcame some objections of the powerful minister of Foreign Affairs, Sidney Sonnino, who strongly opposed this propagandistic strategy. It was not only a cultural issue: Sonnino did not believe in the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy, and he feared that the construction of some national states in the Balkans could block the dream of an Italian imperial area in Mediterranean theatre, a project surely shared by many leading representatives of the Italian military society (Mondini 2014b: 300–10). In any event, the effective propaganda strategy, aimed at both spreading discord among the enemy ranks using the national conflicts and dissolving the discipline and the Kaisertreue, started systematically in autumn 1916, after the death of Francis Joseph. Actually, only at the end of that year did the Comando Supremo launch his first guidelines for the propaganda, ordering all the subordinate intelligence offices to systematically collect political or economic information that could be used to prepare ‘bollettini notiziari che dipingano le condizioni interne del nemico’ (bulletins describing the bad internal

Nationalist Cultural Mobilization in Italy

67

situation in enemy countries).17 In Marchetti’s opinion, several factors contributed to the increasing success of Italian propaganda. First was the death of the old emperor, a symbol of cohesion among the peoples of the empire; second was the fall of Gorizia (the only strategic success of the Italian Army until 1918); and third was the increasingly precarious economic situation and, above all, food supply in the Dual Monarchy (the Winter 1916–17 marked the beginning of structural food shortages in the cities and finally among the soldiers too). After a structural reorganization of the military intelligence, the work of the so-called ITO Offices (Informazioni Truppe Operanti [Information Operative Troops]) was dedicated to two main aims: first, what Marchetti defined as ‘the awakening of national awareness’ in order to undermine the unity of Dual Monarchy (‘supporting this awakening, damaging the Austrian-Hungarian State in his weak point, increasing to our own advantage the conflicts among the races, is our task’); and second, the exploitation of the gradual decline of the endurance of some military units, especially since the winter of 1917–18 (Mondini 2009: 27–9). As regards the arrangement of an efficient narrative designed to break up the loyalty and solidarity among the different components of the Dual Monarchy, in the beginning, flyers and texts were elaborated by the Military Intelligence Office, especially that of the First Army; supervision was provided by Tullio Marchetti and by Cesare Finzi (alias Cesare Pettorelli Lalatta), a resourceful junior officer destined to have a brilliant career in the military intelligence branch, of which he is considered to be a pioneer (Pettorelli Lalatta 1934). At the beginning of 1918, a new office was founded, the Commissione centrale di propaganda sul nemico (Central Committee for the Propaganda against the Enemy), led by the famous art critic, historian and journalist Ugo Ojetti. Ojetti recruited a small group of academics, linguistics, journalists and writers, in addition to a lot of ‘patriotic activists’ selected from among prisoners and deserters from the Austrian-Hungarian Army (for the role of Ojetti, see Nezzo 2003). This office was a peculiar consequence of the new season of Italian cultural mobilization after the danger of Caporetto in autumn 1917 and the new management of the army: the leadership of an office now perceived as strategic for the war effort was committed to civilians-intellectuals (which would have been inconceivable under the command of Luigi Cadorna). Ojetti and his entourage refined the outputs but did not change the themes already established for the anti-Habsburg propaganda: surely, the subjects of propaganda were more refined (for instance, some tracts retraced all the glorious history of the ancient kingdoms of Poland or Bohemia in order to highlight the historical injustices of the Hapsburgs) and detailed (some pamphlets calculated exactly the financial costs of the war and proved how the burden was paid especially by Czechs), but the core was always a Manichean vision, with Austrians playing the role of evil (Ojetti 1964: 499–508). Basically, texts and flyers were based on the data collected about the worsening of internal situation of the Dual Monarchy (Healy 2004). Actually, the military needs and the effect of the allied blockage gradually involved a brutal decay of the public life: food shortages, urban riots and widespread social conflict all reached critical levels. And the Italian Intelligence was informed in detail about this, thanks to a large network of informers (especially in border zone of German Austria) and to familiarity with Austrian newspapers (Cappellano 2002). Text and flyers aimed to blame the Habsburg, or ‘tyrannical’ Austria and Hungary

68

Nations, Identities and the First World War

(if targets were the national Slavic minorities), for a wasteful continuation of the war and for all the suffering of the civilians. After 1916, when Italy declared war on the German Empire, Germany quickly became the main culprit for the war: a fat, evil personification of Prussian militarism became a main character in Italian propaganda flyers. Germany was said to be using the Habsburgs as scapegoats for a wasteful war that could bring only suffering to ‘innocent’ Slavic, Czech or Polish people (Mondini 2009: 30–5). Moreover, the propaganda agents were clever to capitalize upon the pride of the historical past (or, sometimes, the invented historical past) and the dream of an independent state – for instance with the Czechs – or the desire for a reunification in a larger national community – for instance with Poles (tracts and flyers began to mention a generic free state of Poland in spring 1918) or Romanians.18 The peoples of the Dual Monarchy should not fight for the German ambitions or for Magyar stupidity, the propaganda urged, but should join the Allies to overthrow the Habsburg tyranny and build a free Europe where every nation could obtain (or, better, re-conquer) its own identity as a state. According to a final report drafted by Ojetti about the activity of his Committee, on average every flyer or text had a circulation between 25,000 and 500,000 in every language. At the end of the war, we can estimate that about 13 million pieces had been published and spread by the Italian propaganda machine among the Austrian-Hungarian soldiers between 1916 and 1918 (Ojetti 1918). Since January 1918, the Entente officialized among its war goals the selfdetermination of the so-called oppressed nationalities, according to the definition of the Rome Pact in April 1918 (Rauchensteiner 1994; Cornwall 2000). As a consequence, the strategy to establish ‘national armies’ recruited from among deserters or prisoners from the Austrian-Hungarian Army accelerated. Actually, since the beginning of 1917, the Intelligence Office of the First Army had identified the Czechs as a preferred target for the strategy of incitement to desertion: according to Marchetti’s report, ‘especially the Czech-Slovak race is clever, patriotic, brave, by instinct anti-German: we have to take advantage of this energy … ’.19 The infiltration of the ranks of Czech and Slovakian troops was generally considered a success by Italian intelligence, even if the use of deserters and the project for the constitution of Czechs units did raise some doubts among many Italian officers. In September 1917, a collective rebellion on the front line in Trentino was planned and managed by the Intelligence Office of the First Army as a big chance for a surprise offensive against Trento: Italian intelligence was able to contact the commander of the 5th Bosnian battalion (Captain Ljudevit Pivko, a nationalist Slovenian) and to plan, thanks to the collaboration of other officers (all Czechs), the surrender of all units, but the chance was basically wasted because of mistrust and inactivity among Italian commanders in that area (Pettorelli Lalatta [1926] 1967). Nevertheless, the so-called dream of Carzano proved the reliability (and the usefulness) of nationalism among Czech troops: the Italian Army began a systematic recruitment among Czech prisoners to integrate a ‘Czech Legion’ into the Italian Army as an active fighting unit, despite the enduring scepticism of many high officers (the Minister of War, General Alfieri, declared that Czech legionnaires were, in the end, only traitors and rebels).20 The defeat of Caporetto and the bad condition of Italian Army in winter of 1917–18 accelerated the organization of an autonomous national Czech fighting unit (‘Czech–Slovak Military Corp’, under the authority of National

Nationalist Cultural Mobilization in Italy

69

Czech-Slovak Committee in Paris), officialized in February 1918. The desertion and the recruitment of Czechs and Slovaks continued: in summer 1918, a Czech Legion of about 18,000 soldiers fought on the Italian front, integrated into the Italian Army as an active division and with Czech junior officers and captain, Italian senior officers as battalion and regiment commanders and an Italian lieutenant general as divisional commander (Zbynek 1963: 150–7; Bullock 2009). Actually, the new ‘national strategy’ of the Entente did not persuade all the political (and military) Italian élite. Sidney Sonnino remained basically adverse to every political argument in favour of the ‘oppressed nationalities’ (Riccardi 1992). Despite the deep changes in international relations, he was tied to his war aim (shared by a large majority of right-wing Italian politicians): establishing a hegemonic area in the northern Mediterranean Sea through the annexation of the Italian-speaking regions (and some Slavic provinces) of the Habsburg Empire. But he was not sure at all that the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy was desirable and, moreover, was afraid (not unduly) that the birth of a united Slavic state would compromise the great power ambitions of the Italian Kingdom in the Mediterranean theatre; he was culturally hostile to President Wilson’s self-determination politics (Burgwyn 1993). Sonnino was a good example of the basic ambiguity that marked the cultural mobilization during the Italian war: a successful nationalist propaganda was enforced as a valuable weapon against the enemy, even if the government and some milieux of the same army were doubtful or even hostile.

Abbreviations ACS

= Archivio Centrale dello Stato

AMGR

= Archivio Museo Storico Italiano della Guerra

AUSSME = Archivio Ufficio Storico Stato Maggiore Esercito in Rome

Notes 1 In the precise recent overview of the First World War (Winter 2013–14), the only article doing justice to the cultural, political and military peculiarities of the Italian situation is Labanca (2013). 2 ACS, Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri (PCM), Guerra Europea, b. 120 bis, f. 19. 7. 7, Corrispondenti di guerra al seguito dell’esercito, 8/05/1915. 3 The issue has already been analysed in literature for other regions of the Empire; see Judson (2006). 4 See the memoir of Eugenio Rossi, a former information officer and then an infantry general: Rossi (1927). 5 AUSSME, H 4 (Inquiry on Caporetto), b. 2, f. 3 (Deposition of General Carlo Porro). 6 Ibid., letter from General Porro to the President of the Committee (16/01/1919). Affidavit, attached later to Porro’s dossier. 7 AUSSME, H4, b. 1 (Deposition of General Luigi Cadorna), f. 1, s.f. 1, second draft typewritten, 13–14.

70 8 9 10

11

12

13 14

15

16

17

18 19 20

Nations, Identities and the First World War Ibid., 3–4. See also Cadorna (1950: 89–96). AUSSME, H4, b. 1, f. 1, s.f. 1, 7. AUSSME, F4 (Comando Supremo 1915–19), b. 49, f. 3, Comando del Corpo di Stato Maggiore – Norme generali circa il funzionamento e la costituzione del Comando Supremo mobilitato (April 1915). According his memoir, the first deserters from the front of the First Army were some Czech soldiers who surrendered in September 1915. Another thirty Czech infantrymen were captured after combat on Mont Palone and were asked to collaborate with the Italian Army. See Marchetti (1960: 104–5). This information is confirmed by an official report by the command of 5th Alpini regiment: AMGR, Fondo Marchetti, serie 2.1, f. 2.1.1 (new inventory), from 5th Regiment to 3rd Army Corps, 24 July 1915. AMGR, Fondo Tullio Marchetti, b. 1, f. 3, Propaganda sulle truppe nemiche e costituzione e impiego dei reparti cechi, jugoslavi, romeni, polacchi. (probably 1922), 2. This text, a typewritten draft, was compiled after the war as a sort of final report, just before Tullio Marchetti retired from active service. Ibid., 2–3 and attachment 1–2 (12 March 1916 and 3 June 1916); see also AMGR, Fondo Propaganda, 1.1., b. 1, f. 2, flyers for deserters (July 1916). AMGR, Fondo Tullio Marchetti, b. 5, f. 4, Funzionamento del Servizio Informazioni, Ufficio Informazioni del Comando Supremo to 1st Army – Chief of Staff (15 December 1915); see also Gooch (2014: 130–1 and 152–3). AMGR, Fondo Tullio Marchetti, b. 5, f. 4, Funzionamento del Servizio Informazioni, Ufficio Informazioni del Comando Supremo to 1st Army – Chief of Staff (1 August 1916). AUSSME, H 4, b. 2, f. 3 (Deposition of General Carlo Porro), notifications to general Porro – special session 19 June 1918 (second draft), 19–20; AMGR, Fondo Tullio Marchetti, b. 1, f. 3, Propaganda sulle truppe nemiche e costituzione e impiego dei reparti cechi, jugoslavi, romeni, polacchi, 2–6; Marchetti (1960: 212–15). AMGR, Fondo Marchetti, b. 1, f. 3, Propaganda sulle truppe nemiche e costituzione e impiego dei reparti cechi, jugoslavi, romeni, polacchi, 7; serie 2.1, f. 2.1.3 (new inventory), First Army – office of the Chief of Staff, 3 January 1917. AMGR, Fondo Propaganda, 1.1., b. 1, f. 3/2m flyer Soldaten! (text in Polish, Czech, Romanian, German). AMGR, Fondo Propaganda 1.1, b. 1, f. 1, Propaganda sulle truppe nemiche e costituzione e impiego dei reparti czechi, jugoslavi, romani, polacchi, 4. AMGR, Fondo Propaganda 1.1, b.1, f.1, Propaganda sulle truppe nemiche e costituzione e impiego dei reparti czechi, jugoslavi, romani, polacchi, 7–9 and attachment 6–8).

References

Secondary Sources Albertini, L. (1968), Epistolario 1911–1926, Milan: Mondadori. Barzini, L. (1916), La guerra d’Italia (gennaio–giugno 1916): sui monti, nel cielo e nel mare, Milan: Fratelli Treves.

Nationalist Cultural Mobilization in Italy

71

Bencivenga, R. ([1930] 2014), Il period della neutralità. Dall’agosto 1914 alle prime operazioni del 1915, Udine: Gaspari. Bergamini, O. (2009), Specchi di guerra. Giornalismo e conflitti armati da Napoleone a oggi, Rome and Bari: Laterza. Bricchetto, E. (2003), ‘Percorrendo il fronte da occidente ad oriente. Luigi Barzini inviato speciale sul fronte alpino’, in E. Franzina (ed.), Una trincea chiamata Dolomiti: 1915–1917. Una guerra, due trincee = ein Krieg, zwei Schützengräben, 168–78, Udine: Gaspari. Bricchetto, E. (2006), ‘Raccontare la guerra sull’arco alpino’, in H. Kuprian and O. Überegger (eds), Der erste Weltkrieg im Alpenraum. Erfahrung, Deutung, Erinnerung = La Grande Guerra nell’arco alpino, 145–63, Innsbruck: Wagner. Bullock, D. (2009), The Czech Legion 1914–1920, London: Osprey. Burgwyn, H. (1993), The Legend of the Mutilated Victory: Italy, the Great War and the Paris Conference 1915–1919, Westport, CT: Greenwood. Cadorna, L. (1950), Pagine polemiche, Milan: Garzanti. Cappellano, F. (2002), L’imperial regio esercito austro-ungarico sul fronte italiano (1915–1918), Roverto: Museo Storico Italiano della Guerra. Charle, C. (2004), Le siècle de la presse, Paris: Seuil. Colombo, F. (2009), La cultura sottile. Media e industria culturale in Italia dall’Ottocento agli anni Novanta, Milan: Bompiani. Cornwall, M. (2000), The Undermining of Austria-Hungary: The Battle for Hearts and Minds, New York: St. Martin’s. D’Autilia, G. (2005), L’indizio e la prova. La storia nella fotografia, Milan: Mondadori. De Luna, G. (2007), ‘Il Novecento in copertina’, in Giovanna Ginex (ed.), La Domenica del Corriere, 83–101, Milan: Fondazione Corriere della Sera. De Rossi, A. (2014), La costruzione delle Alpi. Immagini e scenari del pittoresco alpino (1773–1914), Rome: Donzelli. Dzambo, J., ed. (2003), Musen an die Front! Schriftsteller und Künstler im Dienst der k.u.k Kriegspropaganda 1914–18, Munich: Adalbert Stifter. Fiori, A. (2001), Il filtro deformante. La censura sulla stampa durante la prima guerra mondiale, Rome: Istituto storico italiano. Forgacs, D. (1990), Italian Culture in the Industrial Era 1880–1980, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ginex, G. (2007), ‘L’arte dell’illustrazione nelle pagine de “La Domenica del Corriere”’, in Giovanna Ginex (ed.), La Domenica del Corriere: il Novecentro illustrato, 17–77, Milan: Fondazione Corriere della sera. Gooch, J. (2014), The Italian Army and the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greco, A. (1995), ‘Il servizio fotografico nell’esercito italiano’, AFT. Rivista di storia della fotografia, 22: 8–12. Healy, M. (2004), Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Italy (1916), La guerra: dalle raccolte del reparto fotografico del Comando supremo, 1: In alta montagna, Milan: Treves. Janz, O. (2010), ‘Zwischen Konsens und Dissens. Zur Historiographie des Ersten Weltkriegs in Italien’, in A. Baurkämper and E. Julien (eds), Durchhalten! Krieg und Gesellschaft im Vergleich 1914–1918, 195–216, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

72

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Judson, P.M. (2006), Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperia Austria, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Keller, T. (2015), Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Labanca, N. (2013), ‘The Italian Front’, in J. Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World, vol. 1, 266–96, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘La battaglia di Gorizia’, L’Illustrazione Italiana, 20/08/1916: 150–1. Licata, G. (1972), Storia e linguaggio dei corrispondenti di guerra, Milan: Miano. Lombardo Radice, G. (1922), ‘Dopo Caporetto’, in G. Lombardo Radice (ed.), Nuovi saggi di propaganda pedagogica, Turin: Paravia. Marchetti, T. (1960), Ventotto anni nel servizio informazioni militari, Trento: Museo del Risorgimento. Mignemi, A. (2003), Lo sguardo e l’immagine. La fotografia come documento storico, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Mondini, M. (2008), Alpini. Parole e immagini di un mito guerriero, Rome and Bari: Laterza. Mondini, M. (2009), ‘L’arma delle parole. La propaganda verso il nemico nell’Italia della Grande Guerra’, in M. Mondini (ed.), Parole come armi, 11–42, Rovereto: Museo della Guerra. Mondini, M. (2014a), L’historiographie italienne face à la Grande Guerre: saisons et ruptures, in ‘Histoire@Politique’. Online at www.histoire-politique.fr. Mondini, M. (2014b), La guerra italiana. Partire, raccontare, tornare 1914–1918, Bologne: Il Mulino, 2014. Mondini, M. (2016), ‘Battisti l’Italiano. Tra mobilitazione interventista e guerra (1914–1916)’, in L. Dal Prà (ed.), Tempi della storia, tempi dell’arte. Cesare Battisti tra Vienna e Roma, 231–43, Trento: Castello del Buonconsiglio. Murialdi, P. ([1996] 2006), Storia del giornalismo italiano, Bologne: Il Mulino. Nezzo, M. (2003), ‘Prodromi di una propaganda di guerra. I rapporti Ojetti’, Contemporanea, 2: 319–42. Ojetti, U. (1918), Relazione sui lavori della commissione centrale di propaganda sul nemico, Reggio Emilia: Istituto Veneto di Arti Grafiche. Ojetti, U. (1964), Lettere alla moglie 1915–1919, Florence: Sansoni. Pallottino, P. (1988), Storia dell’illustrazione italiana: libri e periodici a figure dal XV al XX secolo, Bologne: Zanichelli. Pallottino, P. (1996), ‘Cinematografo Beltrame. Le copertine della domenica: epico film del Novecento’, in F. Barbieri and A. Cera (eds), Achille Beltrame, 1871–1945. La sapienza del comunicare, 21–7, Milan: Electa. Pettorelli Lalatta, C. ([1926] 1967), L’occasione perduta. Carzano 1917, Milan: Mursia. Pettorelli Lalatta, C. (1934), I.T.O (Informazioni truppe operanti): note di un capo del servizio informazioni d’armata (1915–1918), Milan: Agnelli. Quercioli, A. (2006), ‘I volontari trentini nell’Esercito Italiano’, in P. Dogliani and G. Pécout (eds), La scelta della patria, 21–46, Roverto: Museo Storico della Guerra. Rauchensteiner, M. (1994), Der Tod des Doppeladlers. Österreich-Ungarns und der Erste Weltkrieg, Graz, Vienna, and Cologne: Styria. Riccardi, P.L. (1992), Alleati non amici. Le relazioni politiche tra l’Italia e l’Intesa durante la prima Guerra mondiale, Brescia: Morcelliana. Riosa, A., ed. (2007), Arnaldo Fraccaroli. Corrispondenze da Caporetto, Milan: Fondazione Corriere della Sera. Rossi, E. (1927), La vita di un ufficiale italiano sino alla Guerra, Milan: Mondadori.

Nationalist Cultural Mobilization in Italy

73

Roynette, O. (2010), Les mots des trachées. L’invention d’une langue de guerre 1914–1919, Paris: Colin. Schoentjes, P. (2010), ‘Les veritables écrivains de guerre ont-ils rarement dépeint ce qu’ils avaient vu?’, in P. Schoentjes (ed.), La Grande Guerre: un siècle de fictions romanesque, 17–43, Geneva: Droz. Servetti, L. (2003), ‘Prima della TV: fotoreporter di guerra’, in L. Cicognetti (ed.), La guerra in televisione. I conflitti moderni tra cronaca e storia, 83–104, Venice: Marsilio. Sondhaus, L. (1990), In the Service of the Emperor: Italians in the Austrian Armed Forces, New York: Columbia University Press. Todero, F. (2005), Morire per la patria. I volontari del ‘Litorale austriaco’ nella Grande Guerra, Udine: Gaspari. Tomassini, L. (1995), ‘Immagini della Grande Guerra. Tra pubblico e privato, I’, AFT. Rivista di storia della fotografia, 22: 35–47. Tomassini, L. (1996), ‘Immagini della Grande Guerra. Tra pubblico e privato, II’, AFT. Rivista di storia della fotografia, 23: 39–49. Überegger, O. (2006), Heimatfronten. Dokumente zur Erfahrungsgeschichte der Tiroler Kriegsgesellschaft im ersten Weltkrieg, Innsbruck: Universitätsverlag Wagner. Urry, J. (2002), The Tourist Gaze, London: Sage. Vanzetto, L. (2008), ‘Buona stampa’ , in M. Isnenghi and D. Ceschin (eds), Gli italiani in guerra, vol. 3: La grande guerra: dall’intervento alla vittoria mutilata, 803–19, Turin: UTET. Varsori, A. (2015), Radioso maggio. Come l’Italia entrò in guerra, Bologne: Il Mulino. Ventrone, A. (2003), La seduzione totalitaria. Guerra, modernità, violenza politica (1914–1918), Rome: Donzelli. Wedekind, M., and C. Ambrosi, eds (2007), Alla conquista dell’immaginario. L’alpinismo come proiezione di modelli culturali e sociali borghesi tra Otto e Novecento, Reviso: Antilia. Winter, J., ed. (2013–14), The Cambridge History of the First World, 3 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zbynek, Z. (1963), Der Zusammenbruch des Habsburgerreiches 1914–1918, Munich: Oldenburg.

5

How the Great War Changed the Mental Map of the Prussian Poles Jens Boysen

Landscape before and after battle: Central Europe and the Great War The emergence or, as habitual Polish language usage has it, ‘rebirth’ in 1918/9 of a Polish state was part of a more general revolution of the (geo)political landscape of Central and Eastern Europe after the First World War, that is, of that part of Europe where – in spite of ‘Western’ memorial patterns – the war had had its most wideranging and devastating impact in terms of the area affected by military actions, the number of civilians killed, dispersed or deported and the degree of social, political and economic turmoil brought about by this unexpectedly long and constantly widening clash of nations (Strachan 2010). The Eastern Front having for a long time been an almost ‘forgotten front’1 – due to both the domineering memory of the Western Front of the First World War and the shadow cast by the Eastern Front of the Second – has in recent years come to be researched more intensely by international historiography just as well as other seeming ‘side’ theatres-of-war such as the Isonzo and Balkan fronts (e.g. Jordan 2008; McMeekin 2011; Lyon 2015). Nevertheless, the significance of the Eastern Front for the overall history of the Great War and its aftermath still appears to be underrated; one important element here is the building after (and partially already during) the war of new, or ‘renewed’, political entities set to replace the old order. One prominent example here was Poland, which had ceased to exist as an independent state in 1795; its ‘resurfacing’ in 1918 was brought about by a highly complex chain of events that nobody could have foreseen and that thus mirrored the aforementioned escalating and uncontrollable nature of the Great War. Nevertheless, post-1918 national historiography in Poland (as well as in the other newly created states in Central and Eastern Europe) has tended to portray this as a ‘natural’ and thus virtually irresistible and ‘just’ outcome of the First World War. And with a view to agency, Polish historians have ever since been telling a story of Polish politicians, diplomats and soldiers working towards independent statehood consciously, methodically and according to a more-or-less long-harboured plan that was carried by all Poles who were in turn

76

Nations, Identities and the First World War

understood as a coherent transnational community with an allegedly unified cultural and historical consciousness and political will that inspired the activists’ thinking and actions (e.g. Kumaniecki 1924; Piszczkowski 1969; Pajewski 1978). However, while it is not surprising that Polish (and other) historians should have been tempted to use their craft as a tool of nation building in the new states (Hadler 2002: 163–4), there is good reason to question this seemingly organic continuity of political identity, beliefs and goals. During the 100 years between the Congress of Vienna and the outbreak of the First World War, the political semantics – and the very meaning – of the Polish nation were very complex and underwent fundamental changes that only rather late produced a ‘modern’ approach to nationhood. But even so, the idea – as some ‘writer-prophets’ of the time had suggested2 – of the Poles before 1914 looking forward to a major war as an opportunity for gaining independence, was at best extremely simplifying, certainly uninformed and at worst downright cynical, as the Poles of the day knew one thing for sure: their home regions would likely become battlefields, and Poles in different uniforms would be set to fight each other. During the Great War, the notion of ‘total war’ – not invented but made famous by the 3rd German Supreme Military Command’s (OHL) head administrator (Generalquartiermeister) from 1916 until 1918, Erich Ludendorff 3 – established itself in the general public of all nations touched by the war as a result of the maelstromlike character that the war adopted by absorbing practically all human and material resources of the warring nations and bringing practically all spheres of public life under centralized governmental control to a degree unknown to pre-war societies, whether more or less ‘democratic’.4 Regardless of other more specific parameters and of any moral assessment, the war visibly propelled all those societies farther along the path of what Max Weber and others had described as a virtually irresistible process of ‘cold’ rationalization feeding an overpowering state and reducing individuals – including members of the functional elites – to mere ‘cogs’ in a ‘steel-hard casing’ (Weber 2002: 123–4). Indeed, during the First World War, this development – so detrimental in particular to the German idealistic tradition that many great German minds of the time truly believed to be defending against Western materialism (Mommsen 1997) – made itself felt in an ambivalent way. Initially, the war had seemed to many citizens (in fact, mostly bourgeois intellectuals) to offer a way out of a ‘stifling’ and ‘senseless’ peacetime condition, and this in turn had lent to governments huge leeway in pursuing their alleged fight for a better life for their nations (Furedi 2014: 5–8). But with the war lasting longer and longer, and peoples paying an ever higher price for their leaders’ ambitions, that very degree of internal mobilization made the stakes extremely high and the stateturned-war machine very difficult to control. This way, everything headed towards a make-or-break outcome: only total victory – which had total war as its precondition – would be able to justify the war effort and ‘save’ the respective government in the eyes of the public. In turn, defeat would be more punitive than it had been in any other war before, not – or at least less – because of actual prosecutable deeds (with the notion of ‘war crimes’ back then and still today being fairly vague and thus open to differing interpretations [Simpson 1997]) but because the level of expectations created by a war driven just as much by popular hatred as by steel and fuel. Thus neither side seriously pursued a compromise as long as there seemed to be a chance of winning;

The Great War and the Prussian Poles

77

this is true in particular of the Entente Powers, whose main goal was victory, not peace (Nachtigal 2013: 54–5). As a result, everybody had to take all kinds of incalculable risks into account – what Clausewitz had called ‘frictions’; however, effectively this hurt mostly the Central Powers, who, despite many victories at the operational level and the breakdown of the Russian front in late 1917, found themselves exhausted economically and saw their populations starved by the British blockade – facts for which no appeal to heroism and strong nerves was able to compensate. But yet another part of the aforementioned increasing loss of control on part of the warring countries, especially Russia and the Central Powers, was the growing significance gained by the issue of national minorities, particularly the Poles. While their situation had not been a cause for the war, it became an increasingly significant dimension of the war-related political deliberations, as at different stages all belligerent parties began to ‘tap’ this or other minorities as political and material resources for their continued warfare. By doing so, they effectively called into question the prewar order: whoever won would have to privilege and perpetuate ‘their’ minorities as political building blocks. As a consequence, the pattern of European spatial organization that had prevailed more or less since 1815 – anchored in the Pentarchy’s balance of power that favoured large territorial blocks – would shift dramatically towards a new order that claimed to be the implementation of the ‘self-determination of peoples’ and a much improved international system. The fact that the main losers of the war (Russia, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire) were ‘empires’ (for overviews, see Leonhard and Hirschhausen 2010; Bartov and Weitz 2013), that is, dynasty-centred large states comprising many nationalities, languages and religions that Allied propaganda declared to be ‘prisons of the stateless peoples’, seemed to add to the legitimation of the Allied warfare as a just cause (Mamatey 1972). Notably, after the United States entered the war on the Allied side in July 1917, this ideological justification of the war was greatly intensified, and it enhanced, among other things, the opportunity for political leaders of the ‘suppressed’ stateless nations – especially, but not only, in Austria-Hungary – to claim national independence. As a result, at the end of the war the defeated countries experienced different degrees of political decomposition, largely depending on the degree to which they were ethnically mixed and thus confronted with (older or more recent) claims by ethnic groups other than the titular nation for independent statehood, which in turn entailed accordingly larger or smaller losses of territory, including the resources they contained. Like the proponents of the ‘Young Europe’ movement in the 1820s and 1830s – but arguably with less credibility – the leaders of the new ‘democratic nation-states’ claimed that they would naturally form a stable and peaceful neighbourhood, in sharp contrast with the allegedly ‘oppressive’ and ‘war-prone’ empires. This dichotomous picture can no longer be maintained today, for not only had the empires before 1914 repeatedly found ways to preserve or restore peace but also democracies have vastly contributed in the twentieth century to those violent and ‘inhumane’ trends of policy habitually associated with dictatorships (Mann 2005; Ther 2011). Indeed, a trait that democracies and dictatorships have in common but that usually distinguishes them from empires is the potential for ‘populist’ appeal to public concerns and opinions, which facilitates emotional perception and responses to real or fabricated threats and

78

Nations, Identities and the First World War

thus allows governments to mobilize public opinion against any perceived enemy – unless a very advanced level of critical distance can be maintained, for which there was little room in interwar Europe. But first and foremost, the new states of (East)5 Central Europe were neither actual nation-states (comprising significant ethnic/national minorities, e.g. in Poland about one-third of the population) nor – at least not for very long (the only exception being Czechoslovakia) – democracies. Instead, right from the beginning, that is, in the post-war that lasted from 1918 until at least 1921, they turned out to be no more capable and willing to hold peace and seek lasting international cooperation than the so badly reputed empires. In fact, despite its ‘progressive’ outlook, this second wave of national state building was marked by its origins in war much more than the first wave was in the late nineteenth century, that is, the unifications of Italy and Germany. In any case, Germany in particular did not fit easily into any black-and-white pattern. Not only have many wartime and post-war representations deliberately ignored or denied its rather advanced state of political culture, societal differentiation and modern organization (e.g. Kroll 2013; Retallack 2013; Ziemann 2013) but also, quite differently from Russia and Austria-Hungary, it essentially was not an empire but an ethnic nation-state,6 albeit with certain ‘imperial’ traits such as a number of national and ethnic minorities.7 In 1900, ethnic Germans – or, to be more accurate, Germanspeakers8 – accounted for some 92 per cent of the entire population (Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt 1903), and in no way did the minorities constitute any serious threat to national security. While there were repeatedly serious tensions with some minorities – not least with the Poles – ideas of secession or other types of separatism were very little developed as a political concept, not to mention the complete impossibility of their implementation in peacetime. Indeed, as should become visible shortly after, only war could bring about the material and mental conditions favourable to any separatist moves. Tellingly, among German institutions before 1914, the Prussian Army tended to ignore the minority issue save for practical problems such as military communication, providing church services and spiritual welfare for non-German speakers (notably non-Protestants) etc. (Boysen 2008b: 57–99). Existing pre-war worries and fears regarding minorities were to be found – in Germany as well as in other countries of the time – primarily among civil servants, journalists and academic teachers, and such fears had their main roots in the uneasy perception of minorities as ‘odd’ elements within the political and cultural fabric of the so-long-desired nation-state. The fact that governments – for example, in Germany since the 1870s – began to be influenced by such views fostered the conceptualization and implementation (as far as this was actually possible under the rule of law) of assimilatory policies of integral nationalism (see Alter 1985: 44), the effects of which would be tested in more than one way by the war. In any case, for the developments that led to the outbreak of hostilities in summer 1914, national minorities played at best a minor role – if so, then mainly with a view to Austria-Hungary and the challenge posed to its integrity by Serbia – but none whatsoever as an issue between Germany and Russia. In the wake of the war, then, differently from the ‘real’ empires, the German Reich did not disappear but merely underwent systemic/constitutional change as a result of the November revolution and Allied demands. In territorial terms, Germany was deprived

The Great War and the Prussian Poles

79

in 1919 of large parts of its border regions, precisely because these were ethnically mixed and claimed by the competing ‘new’ neighbouring nations that were in turn buttressed by the Western great powers for postulated reasons of ‘historical justice (Boysen 2016: 157–9)’ – but in fact at least just as much for geostrategic advantage. For several reasons, no other territorial losses (including the highly ‘sensitive’ region of AlsaceLorraine) were so heavily resented by the Germans – more or less across all political party affiliations – as those on the eastern border with Poland, which created the (in) famous Polish corridor separating East Prussia from the rest of the Reich. Two further, rather easily understandable, reasons for this were, on the one hand, the loss of large agricultural production areas needed by the population of Germany’s eastern cities such as Berlin, Breslau and Königsberg and, on the other hand, the considerable deterioration of Germany’s border geography, which would create serious calamities with respect to both the management of immigration (Sammartino 2010) and the capacity for effective defence (Strohn 2011: 63–86). Of a more emotional nature was the rejection of the Poles as ‘profiteers’ from the German defeat, as ‘little Allies’, that is, helpers of the Western Powers in downgrading and hampering Germany from any future resurgence (which was actually quite true), and – a factor harking back to the pre-war era – as a nation that was regarded as unequal in civilizational terms and thus as owing a lot of its ‘modern’ organizational abilities to the impact of German culture and statehood.

Imperial Germany’s Poles: Between Prussian state and Polish kulturnation Ethnic Poles – or, actually, Polish speakers – were by far the largest minority in the German Reich. According to the already quoted statistics, they accounted in 1900 for about 3 million people, which was about 5.5 per cent of the population. Even if one included in this group the linguistically close Kashubs and Masurians (which, however, at least in the case of the latter would misrepresent their self-perception), at most some 6 per cent would be counted. By their vast majority, Polish speakers had come under Prussian rule as a consequence of the partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795 and again when in 1815 Prussia had regained a part of those territories, now as the provinces of West Prussia and Posen (Poznań), the latter referred to in Polish as Greater Poland (Wielkopolska). In contrast, the Polish speakers of (Upper) Silesia had not been Polish subjects since the late Middle Ages but had belonged to Bohemia and, later, Austria and finally had joined Prussia following the Silesian wars of the 1740s. Their group consciousness was (and is until today) focused mainly on their home region rather than whichever nation-state. By the nineteenth century, most Silesians came to speak a hybrid language based on Polish but considerably modified by German influences. Moreover, practically the entire population, no matter what their language, was Catholic, which erased one major point of difference that existed between Germans and Poles in most other parts of the borderland. As a consequence of their unusually complex identity and allegiances, the Silesians before 1914 avoided being drawn into the ‘peoples’ struggle’9 evolving farther north, in Posen and West Prussia (Kamusella 2007; Bjork 2009).

80

Nations, Identities and the First World War

That process evolved in earnest only after the unification of Germany in 1871. In the preceding decades as well, there had repeatedly been tensions, including military clashes. Nevertheless, after 1815 by and large, the Polish population, at least its nonaristocratic parts, adapted to a considerable degree to Prussian rule and by 1870 rendered acculturation and even assimilation a tangible option. Some Polish historians have tended to identify a ‘hundred years war’ in the ‘modern’ ethno-nationalist sense between Germans and Poles on Prussian soil between 1815 and 1914. Such a perception, however, is only possible by broadly neglecting the fundamental societal and cultural changes that occurred during that long period, on either side of the national divide, which completely changed the outlook and nature, in particular, of what was referred to as the ‘Polish nation’. In fact, the long nineteenth century – almost exactly the period without Polish statehood – saw a far-reaching change of the nature (i.e. the self-perception and organizational patterns) of that term and, crucially, the number of Polish speakers actually feeling concerned by this discourse. And for quite a while, it was uncertain which kind of national allegiance they would finally adopt. Principally, what slowly evolved in the course of the nineteenth century was the essentially German idea of Kulturnation, meaning a national community defined primarily by common language, history and cultural heritage and thus existing independently of and pre-empting concrete forms of statehood (in contrast with Staatsnation).10 This concept was adopted by all the stateless nations of Central Europe. It served the double purpose of justifying the endeavour for statehood by a subjective and thus infallible principle on the one hand and of overcoming – at least as a tendency – traditional class divisions by employing everybody for the higher goal of national independence, on the other. In the Polish case, this meant that the time-honoured dominance of the nobility (szlachta) was over time undermined by the loss of statehood; moreover, a large part of this upper class vacillated repeatedly between conservative loyalty, political conspiracies and armed risings as eruptions of impatience and nationalism. After 1815, King Friedrich Wilhelm III and those aristocratic circles that sought to push back the (limited) results of the reform era offered their Polish peers access to the Prussian nobility, including the officers corps. Most Polish nobles now living in Prussia – many of whom had been officers in the Duchy of Warsaw during the Napoleonic Wars – declined that offer, especially because the Prussian nobility’s service ethos was alien to them. Some of them even supported the anti-Russian rising in 1830/1. Consequently, measures were taken in the 1830s by civilian and military authorities to weaken the Polish nobility’s economic base and political influence. In this context, not by accident were former military reformers who held both liberal and nationalist views particularly hostile towards the ‘innately disloyal’ Polish nobles (Kozłowski 2004: 54– 78, 85–92). Over the following decades, that policy underwent repeated changes, for example, after the revolution of 1848/9. In any case, however, it targeted the societal elites of the Poles, viz., the aristocracy and the Catholic clergy – which maintained networks into the other parts of historical Poland. In all these events, the lower classes, mostly peasants, were not involved as equal and conscious actors but, rather, obeyed the instructions of their noble masters. For most of the period under consideration, their national consciousness was undecided

The Great War and the Prussian Poles

81

and, in any case, was of a cultural rather than political nature (Trzeciakowski 2003). To a large degree, Prussian state authorities succeeded in integrating the Polish peasants by securing them three crucial benefits. First, their economic position improved in comparison with the ‘old Polish’ time; they also received primary education in their mother tongue; and finally the Protestant king respected their Catholic faith. Not least the Prussian Army, providing regular training in the Landwehr (militia), was helpful in accommodating them into the new state culture (Boysen 2013a: 79–82). Only after the failed rising of 1863/4 against Russia did Polish intellectuals develop a more constructive approach known as Organic Work (praca organiczna), which sought to instil in Poles the idea that hard work was the precondition for intellectual and material self-improvement, which alone would enable the Polish people to prevail in an age of accelerating change and would possibly allow them to one day become independent again (Hagen 1972; Davies 2001: 148–51, 175–7). This was a decisive break with both the szlachta’s costly ‘romantic insurgency culture’ and that stratum’s claim for societal leadership; now, teachers, entrepreneurs and other ‘realists’ were to educate the Polish youth, in a spirit similar to Max Weber’s later definition of politics as ‘the strong, slow drilling through hard boards with both passion and a sense of proportion’ (Weber 2008: 207). In Prussia this concept became known as ‘Posen positivism’, named after the provincial capital on which the Polish national movement centred. Here it could draw on the advances made in the nineteenth century by the Prussian educational system and on the German bourgeoisie’s performance-oriented culture, which would both become major factors in Germany’s stupendous industrial take-off after 1871. Indeed this Polish turn towards the (common) people (in Polish, lud) as carriers of nationhood and the adoption of middle-class values brought about what might be called ‘methodological Germanization’ aimed at avoiding actual Germanization. Initially, ‘Prussian Poland’ was disadvantaged vis-à-vis its Russian and Austrian counterparts, as its capital, Posen/Poznań, lacked the prestige and clout of Warsaw and Cracow that were acknowledged centres of political and cultural life, not least based on their universities (although the one at Warsaw officially had to work in Russian). The Prussian government would never allow a university to be established in Posen, so as not to create a rallying point for Polish nationalism. Instead, in 1903 the Royal Posen Academy (Königliche Akademie zu Posen) was opened; there, lectures of a popular rather than academic character presented mostly the German perspective on regional issues (Schutte 2008). However, Organic Work proved to be particularly applicable in that westernmost core region of historical Poland. There was an ambivalent perception of the relative weight of German-Prussian influences versus an older, genuine regional tradition of economic innovation. In any case, economic and civilizational ‘Westernness’ before as well as after the First World War became a hallmark of selfperception in the Posen region (and has remained so until today). The 1860s were a turning point for Prussian state policy on Germany, which in turn would have consequences for the policy on the Poles. Bismarck’s decision to end the tradition of sharing power with Austria, and to take on an offensive policy that aimed to unify Germany under Prussian leadership and without Austria, led to the wars of unification, in all of which Prussian Poles served dutifully. The employed national

82

Nations, Identities and the First World War

rhetoric, but principally the victories of 1864 and 1866, induced the majority of the hitherto oppositionist liberals to join forces with the royal government, and the German liberal bourgeoisie was crucial for fuelling patriotic spirit for the decisive battle with France that led to the foundation of the Reich in 1871. This nation-state comprised the entire Prussian territory, including Polish-inhabited areas. Notwithstanding their aforementioned military bravery, the Polish minority, represented by their deputies to the Prussian and German parliaments, displayed a negative attitude towards this development as they could – according to statements by Polish deputies in the North German (1867) and later the German Reichstag (1871) – be loyal Prussian subjects without becoming Germans. In this context, they referred to a transnational ‘Polish nation’ as their mental map – something that Bismarck denied them the right to do; to him they were just ‘Polish-speaking Prussians’ (Odenwald-Varga 2009: 123–4). It must be noted, though, that at this point almost all Polish deputies still belonged to the nobility. Among the Polish peasant population, acculturation towards the GermanPrussian type of civilization was still going on. After the foundation of the German Reich, this began to change, as the Prussian policy on the Poles came under the increasing influence of bourgeois nationalism. The crucial background to this was a massive labour migration of Poles, but principally of Germans from the eastern provinces to the rocketing industrial areas of central and western Germany, which led to a statistical increase of Polish population in the East. The Kulturkampf of the 1870s against the Catholic church was perceived as hitting especially the Poles, understandably because in their home regions the denominational divide coincided with the ethno-national one. Actually, this was not the main reason for this policy; Bismarck used the modernist zeal of the National Liberals for breaking conservative resistance to the new order and forcing the Catholics into declarations of national loyalty. In the East, however, this decision to do away with the long-practised – and quite successful – tolerance for the Catholic creed and the simultaneous beginning of the gradual exclusion of the Polish language from Prussian schools was to change the Poles’ relationship with the state for the worse, as their very identity hinged on those two dimensions of life. Since 1886, a special ‘colonization fund’ had provided money for buying Polish landed estates and distributing them to German settlers; this aimed, in a fashion mirroring the ambivalence of German national liberalism, at both reducing Polish land ownership and creating a more effective economic structure. Other laws were designed to better control the activity of Polish associations. However, the Poles developed their own banking system and rural cooperatives and after a while managed to buy Polish estates and give them to Polish peasants whose lives, as a result, became more modern but more ‘national’ as well. So the new antagonistic policy of the Prussian government effectively strengthened Polish nationalist influences over the hitherto loyal peasants. Those developments took place in what the Germans came to call, harking back to the days of German medieval settlement, the ‘Eastern marches’ (Ostmark). In this context, the ‘East’ became increasingly synonymous with an underdeveloped area inhabited by backward tribes calling for German – seen as West European – initiative in order to ‘elevate’ it culturally (kulturelle Hebung) and so make it part of ‘actual’ Europe.11 Next to political or literary statements of cultural superiority that would enable the Germans to fulfil this historical vocation, there were other voices

The Great War and the Prussian Poles

83

that pointed to modernization processes on the part of the Poles, which enabled them to compete with the Germans despite the latter’s privileged position of titular nation and allowed them to build complex cultural and economic ‘civil-society’ structures that neutralized any governmental measures aiming at limiting their development.12 In a way, this was a statement of liberal capitalism superseding the boundaries of nationality, and it was not without irony that this modernization took place owing to the basically (i.e. beyond the political-ideological hackling) favourable conditions offered to the Poles by being Prussian-German citizens (Jaworski 1986). Even in the relative economic and civilizational backwater that their home regions were within the Reich, the advances of the belle époque between 1870 and 1914 in technology, medicine, education, public management and other fields determining the quality of life made themselves felt equally with the Poles and other ‘marginal’ groups. Some scholars have described the situation of the Poles within the German Reich as a ‘colonial’ one, by drawing on contemporary discourses and certain administrative trends that might suggest an association on part of the German authorities – in analogy to Britain and other colonial powers – between their overseas colonies and their ‘internal peripheries’ (Conrad 2010: 144–202; Kopp 2012; Healy 2014; for the concept of ‘internal peripheries’, see Nolte 1991). While those phenomena did exist, the Polish minority’s condition was fundamentally different and better than that of colonized peoples in the overseas territories. They often succeeded in invoking civic rights in court, building their own associations and organizing a sort of ‘parallel society’. The often-quoted related policy of internal colonization could indeed be used in an ‘ethnic’ sense, but it was originally designed by liberal-reformist academics (Kathedersozialisten) and likewise applied to purely German-inhabited backward regions such as Mecklenburg and Pomerania (Nelson 2009: 68–9). Against this background it is not easy to draw the mental map of the Prussian Poles on the eve of the First World War. As indicated, the spatial memory of the pre-partition time (as it was widely a class-bound aristocratic memory) was not simply handed down in the nineteenth century. Rather, after the notion of nationhood had attained a popular character around 1900, the lower classes – mostly peasants – increasingly became carriers of political discourse, even though their allegiances remained complex and did not exhaust themselves in mere ‘Polishness’.13 What certainly did develop was a feeling of cultural distinctiveness from the Germans, growing self-esteem and demands for an end to existing discrimination; still, one cannot speak before 1914 of any widespread separatist attitude. The most tangible ‘transnational’ connection was without doubt family relationships, notably across the border with Congress Poland,14 as the border divided the historical region of Greater Poland. So this was not in the first place a political feature; it could be turned into such, though, depending on the evolution of the big politics framework. Two events may be mentioned here that occurred during the final decade before the war in the neighbouring ethnic Polish regions of Congress Poland and Galicia, with a view to their perception by the Prussian Poles. In Russia, the 1905 revolution had mobilized ‘old’ and ‘new’ nationalisms in reaction to decades of (attempted) russification in non-Russian borderlands (Weeks 2010; Gasimov 2012). Next to the already long-lasting Polish pursuit of independence (or at least autonomy), more

84

Nations, Identities and the First World War

recently evolved national movements such as the Lithuanian and Ukrainian ones voiced their concerns and political claims. While those ‘younger’ nationalisms were potential allies, they were also potential rivals to Polish nationalism, as the latter implied the claim to senior leadership and even imperial rule over those other peoples – an issue that would become crucial at the end of the Great War. Those events also saw the beginning of the long-standing rivalry between political leaders Józef Piłsudski and Roman Dmowski, which would dominate the interwar period. Piłsudski, a petty nobleman from Polish Lithuania, fought Russia as the main oppressor. Already in 1904 he had sought to exploit the Russo-Japanese war to tear Congress Poland away from Tsarist rule. After partaking in the rebellion of 1905 with armed columns of his (National-)Socialist party PPS, he left Russia in 1908 and began to cooperate with the Austro-Hungarian military intelligence. In contrast, Dmowski was a Warsaw-based right-wing intellectual who identified Germany as the main danger to Polishness, due to its civilizational energy; as a countermeasure, he developed a ‘modern’ nationalism very much modelled on the German one. Strategically, he advocated seeking Polish autonomy within the Russian Empire in a spirit of ‘Slavic brotherhood’, which implied sharp hostility towards Germany and Austria-Hungary (Ferenczi 1984). In 1910, an ‘all-Polish’ convention of nationalist organizations was held in Cracow in order to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the battle at Tannenberg/Grunwald, where the Polish-Lithuanian army had defeated the Teutonic Knights. The organizing committee asked Polish newspapers in Prussia to spread the word and underlined the character of the meeting as straddling both borders and social classes (Karwat 2002). The speeches held and the memorial dedicated on this occasion bore a clearly antiGerman character, which led to tensions between Vienna and Berlin. Even though they managed to limit the participation of Prussian Poles, the Germans had no choice but to tolerate the strong local influence of the Austrian Poles as a feature of their only reliable ally’s domestic politics. As long as the two governments cooperated closely on the international arena, no serious problems should stem from that, at either peace or war. The Prussian Poles had observed the events of the Russian Revolution, and despite German administrative efforts, a number of delegations from Prussia had participated in the Cracow convention. Probably, at that time most of them had attained a fairly stable national consciousness, and they were aware that in many respects it was much harder for them to express their ethno-cultural identity than for their Austrian and Russian brethren. Yet only few of them – essentially nationalist organizations and associations of hot-headed students – dreamt and spoke of secession and of a general war as an opportunity for this. As said initially, most Poles, certainly the older ones, feared that war, and thus the European war fever that spread after 1911–12 spawned mixed feelings with them (Boysen 2008b: 277–82).

The Prussian Poles and the war: Minimum loyalty and maximum uncertainty When the war finally came, the Poles everywhere joined the ranks of their sovereign’s army; so in Germany, Poles of military age became Prussian15 soldiers (again), until

The Great War and the Prussian Poles

85

1918 altogether some 400,000 men. Like everybody else, they could not predict the exact nature of the ensuing conflict; what guided them, apart from fulfilling their civic duty, was the wish to defend their families and the hope for a short war. At that moment, few if any of them would have thought about long-term political developments. They probably perceived it as a positive fact that in August 1914, according to the Schlieffen Plan, most units of the German Army were sent to the Western Front, as this avoided encountering Russian Poles on the battlefield. However, when the Central Powers in May 1915 opened their eastward offensive at Gorlice-Tarnów and pushed the Russian front back, a growing number of troops from either the Western Front or newly raised units were deployed in the East, and so quite a number of Poles must have served there, too. After the occupation of Congress Poland in summer 1915, it is likely – though no reliable numbers are available – that Polish-speaking soldiers were sent there to facilitate military administration. In fact, especially soldiers from educated Polish families sought this option of obtaining a less dangerous task than fighting at the front (Boysen 2013b: 140). On the whole, the formal conduct of the Prussian Poles in the army ranks left little to desire; there was, however, a wave of increased desertion of Polish and other soldiers with a minority background (Danes, Alsace-Lorrainers) in late 1914 and early 1915. The main motive for this seems to have been indeed a lack of readiness to die for Germany, not sensu stricto political considerations. Tellingly, most Poles who deserted later refused to fight for the Allied side either (Boysen 2008a; Watson 2011). Later recollections of Polish war veterans were often of an anti-German character and emphasized a self-ascribed (positive) otherness of the Poles; but it is uncertain to what extent the outcome of the war and the nationalist culture of the interwar period (not only in Poland) made it appear expedient to the authors to display that sort of attitude. Moreover, those authors had by majority a middle-class background.16 Less class-bound was another attitude that might be found at least with some Polish soldiers, viz., a feeling of solidarity with the occupied Belgians that was based notably on the common Catholic denomination (and a simplistic portrayal of all Germans as Protestants).17 Again one can argue here about how ‘political’ such a perception was; in any case, it fuelled the same aforementioned feeling of otherness, which in the later stage of the war could well feed into scenarios of a post-German future. As concerns the home front, judging from contemporary statements in the Polish press, diaries etc., there was less enthusiasm among Poles in the German Reich than in Austria-Hungary and, at least during the initial phase in 1914, in Congress Poland (Szlanta 2013: 423–5). This mirrored the pre-war development of a loyal but distanced position vis-à-vis the German state. The Polish elite groups conveyed the same attitude: fulfilling all legal obligations but nothing more. Poles rarely flew flags after German victories, their press reported about the war as if it happened on a distant continent and the German Red Cross had a hard time collecting any gifts for those in need. Instead, from 1915 onwards the archbishop of Gnesen and Posen organized, with great public support, a regional help network for the Poles in war-torn Congress Poland. Also, he managed to connect his own initiative with an equivalent one run under the auspices of the archbishop of Cracow. So, notwithstanding the common fate of German and Polish soldiers in the Prussian Army and the shared economic hardships at the home

86

Nations, Identities and the First World War

front, the Prussian Poles – or at least many of them – turned to their ethnic kin across the border as their preferred community of fate (Boysen 2013b: 135–8, 143). And once more – in tune with Polish tradition – the Catholic church proved to be the primary transnational linkage. Apart from the aforementioned endogenous factors, though, Germany and the other ‘partitioning powers’ – Austria-Hungary and Russia – had themselves contributed to a situation that facilitated such shifts in identifications and allegiances. In August 1914, when the situation in the East was fairly chaotic, they had in a rash manner appealed through their supreme commanders to the Poles for support in exchange for political concessions. Although there was no immediate effect of those appeals and the situation at the Eastern Front soon became regular in a military sense, the very fact of calling on the Poles as potential allies returned the ‘Polish question’ to the European agenda and granted Poles the status of a (nascent) subject of international law. One particularly worrying aspect of this from the German perspective was that both Russia and Austria-Hungary – as empires – had schemes for uniting all ethnic Poles under their suzerainty and thus could offer the Poles autonomy for all Polish-inhabited territories. The German Reich – being principally a nation-state – obviously could neither include all Poles within its borders nor give parts of its eastern provinces away to a Polish state (even an allied one). This was one of many reasons why the German government was so sceptical regarding the Austro-Polish solution: a rather large state of ethnic Polish character would presumably have a magnetic attraction for Prussian Poles. Indeed, Polish attitudes in Prussia came to be growingly influenced by German policy on Congress Poland. In the course of time, the German government came to change its attitude towards the way the political landscape of Europe should be reorganized. First, regarding Western Europe and notably Belgium, Reich chancellor Bethmann Hollweg presented already in early September 1914 a draft plan (Septemberprogramm) that suggested the construction of a large economic zone under German leadership; this was intended primarily to counter Britain’s global economic posture with a continental bloc.18 In the East, things looked different. There had been no substantial pre-war plans for this region, which to the German leadership was actually a mere side theatre; according to the Schlieffen Plan, after defeating France the German Army should simply ‘push Russia back’ in such a way as to remove the pressure from the Central Powers’ eastern borders. Only the failure at the Marne and unexpected successes in the East in 1915, which led to the occupation of Warsaw on 5 August 1915, had redirected Germany’s strategic thrust eastwards (which benefited the Austrian position). Probably the most famous theoretical concept for a new Central European bloc was presented in 1915 by the well-known liberal politician Friedrich Naumann. In his work Mitteleuropa he outlined an economic community under a flexible and mild German leadership with Germany and Austria-Hungary at its core but comprising a number of adjacent countries, including a new Polish state. As a fundamental basis for this Naumann saw a cultural proximity of the peoples of Central Europe, embodied by the ‘type of the Central European man’ who was to be ‘the carrier of a manifold, strong and substantial culture growing around Germanness’ (Naumann 1915: 101). In reality, any approach to the issue revealed specific problems. To complicate things further, the Austrians favoured the ‘Austro-Polish’ option of

The Great War and the Prussian Poles

87

uniting Congress Poland with Galicia as part of the Habsburg Empire. Nevertheless, until late 1916 Bethmann Hollweg pursued a separate peace with Russia that would not only have broken up the Entente and freed German forces but also would have ‘rid’ Germany of the ‘unsolvable’ Polish question by handing Congress Poland back to Russia (Lemke 1977: 178–252; Boysen 2014). But the Tsar’s stubborn refusal to leave his Western allies made this plan unworkable. Thus, when the joint decision was made by Germany and Austria-Hungary to instead erect a new Kingdom of Poland by means of the two emperors’ proclamation of 5 November 1916, this step was part of a wholly new policy approach focused on the borderlands of the Russian Empire – next to Poland, primarily the Baltic provinces – that were to be detached from the Russian centre and shaped into a chain of semi-dependent buffer states under German leadership, a concept known as border state policy (Randstaatenpolitik).19 While the Central Powers – almost inevitably, given the Allied blockade – exploited the natural and human resources of the occupied territories, this policy by the German and Austro-Hungarian governments of creating a state explicitly built on Polish nationality was bound to have repercussions on the Prussian Poles. Even if initially they did not endeavour to join that new entity (which anyway was off limits as long as the Central Powers prevailed), they increasingly felt and voiced, especially through their Reichstag deputies, a stark contrast between that pro-Polish policy across the border, on the one hand, and the maintenance in Germany – despite some minor changes – of existing discriminatory legislation against the Poles, on the other. Therefore the proclamation of 5 November 1916 met with very limited enthusiasm in Prussian Poland – much to the disappointment of German and Prussian authorities. These repeatedly uttered recognition for the dutiful performance of the ethnic Polish soldiers and civilian population, but the prospect of substantial changes to, or even a lifting of, the laws in question was offered, at best, for the post-war era (Boysen 2013b: 141–2). In any case, the Poles would remain faithful to their official Prussian-German nationality. However, the longer the war lasted, the more the mobilization of the ‘Polish question’, notably by the Central Powers, worked towards a blurring of its internal and external dimensions, and thus of the borders of 1815. Everything would depend on the outcome of the war: if the Germans managed to hold continental Europe, the Poles (and other peoples) would have to accommodate themselves to their hegemonic rule, including the continued legal separation of Prussian and other Poles. If the Germans lost control, however, the nationalisms that had been fanned would catch fire and likely prolong the war in a different way.

Polish only: The transition from war to post-war As said earlier, the majority of the Prussian Poles had not held any separatist views before the war. Only beginning in late 1916 and 1917 did their nationalism grow stronger, in light of both the described German policy in Congress Poland and the awakening interest among the Western Powers in the ‘Polish question’, which promised to enhance the Allies’ self-crafted image of fighting for the freedom of small nations. The main Polish contact with the Western Powers, since 1917 notably the United

88

Nations, Identities and the First World War

States, was the Polish National Committee, a group of self-empowered representativesin-exile of the ‘entire’ Polish nation, led by Roman Dmowski and the famous pianist Ignacy Paderewski (who had financed the Grunwald Memorial unveiled in Cracow in 1910). Their activity and growing prominence encouraged the National Democrats and other right-wing groups in Prussia to organize themselves in (initially) a clandestine20 manner and to influence the wider Polish public towards a more nationalist, independence-oriented stance. This showed soon in public manifestations in Posen/ Poznań, for example, in February 1917 dedicated to the commemoration of Tadeusz Kosciuszko’s death 100 years before, or on 3 July that year on the anniversary of the 1791 constitution. Although such festivities were legally restricted to the Kingdom of Poland, it turned out to be politically impossible to prevent them from taking place on German territory too, all the more so as the German government urged the Prussian authorities to tolerate them as a sign of German-Polish reconciliation (Boysen 2013b: 147–8). This was interpreted rather as a sign of weakness, however, which further encouraged the Polish underground forces to pursue plans for taking control in the Prussian East after a likely German defeat. When the untenable German position on the Western Front became public in August 1918, this triggered a process of demoralization and ultimate war fatigue among both the civilian population and the soldiers and finally led to the November revolution. At the same time, Polish nationalist activists used this situation to politically mobilize their kin by expressing explicit secessionist goals for the first time. In the Reichstag in October 1918, Polish deputies declared themselves representatives of the ‘Polish nation’ as it had been acknowledged by the Western Powers and claimed vast parts of the Prussian eastern provinces for the new Polish state.21 Only now were the bulk of the Prussian Poles persuaded to attach themselves to that policy of separatism and secession; this seemed to make sense of the sacrifice made during the war (the same kind of ‘redemption’ that the warring parties had been hoping for) and also opened the path towards a privileged position in a post-war Europe shaped by the Western Powers. Throughout summer and autumn 1918, civilian and military conspirators in Posen exploited the November revolution and the visible disorientation of the Prussian authorities to prepare a ‘national revolution’ in the province of Posen, although the politically leading National Democrats hoped to gain control of the region without the use of force, through Allied support (Boysen 2015). After the armistice of 11 November 1918 left Prussia’s eastern provinces under German control, however, violence-focused circles, which were connected with Piłsudski’s government in Warsaw, became more influential and on 27 December 1918 finally managed to stage an anti-German rising in the city of Posen and its surroundings. This event carried away – and caused the deaths of – many young Poles who both felt a flush of patriotism and were eager to make up for the war experience they had not been able to get in the Great War.

Notes 1 See the contributions to a German review of the state of the art preceding the actual centennial commemoration wave: Groß (2006).

The Great War and the Prussian Poles 2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

89

Most famously, so had done Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz in his Book of Pilgrimage (Litania pielgrzymska 1832; see Siwicka 1997). The idea persists still today with some nationalist Polish historians and journalists. He published Der totale Krieg himself in Munich in 1935 (Ludendorff 1935). In it he emphasized in particular the need for ‘spiritual unity’ of the nation as a precondition for any physical and material preparations. His predecessor Carl von Clausewitz, whose seminal work Vom Kriege (von Clausewitz 1832–4) Ludendorff discarded as ‘outdated’, had spoken of ‘absolute war’, which meant a similar kind of allencompassing national mobilization but rather as a theoretical ideal that could likely not be fully executed in real life. Both men, however, had in mind as the ‘carrier’ of war a spiritually unified people able to develop a common purpose and zeal, which in Ludendorff ’s case was marked by a racist undertone. Making this notion, I hold that there was not any substantial ‘systemic’ difference between the major warring parties (‘democracies’ vs. ‘autocracies’) that might be seen as origin of the war; suffice it to say that not only Germany’s Hindenburg and Ludendorff but as well Britain’s Lloyd George came to be called ‘dictators’. Moreover, pre-war tensions were essentially due to power competition, not differences in political culture. The pre-1914 world was not only largely integrated economically and technically (O’ Rourke and Williamson 2002) but also – from the European perspective – based on a common cultural/civilizational background. German historians and geographers traditionally regard the German-speaking countries as belonging to Central Europe (Mitteleuropa) and accordingly single out the area east of Germany as ‘East Central Europe’. Authors in that area, however, tend to exclude the Germans from ‘their’ region and refer to themselves as ‘Central Europe’. Thus, it is important to employ the correct name German Reich instead of the misleading German Empire, which term can at best refer to Germany’s overseas territories until 1919. While national minorities are defined as parts of larger nations and often relate to, and are supported by, a ‘motherland’ beyond the border, ethnic minorities are as a rule fully comprised by the ethnically alien ‘host state’ and must pursue their political interests as part of that larger unit. On Germany’s ‘imperial’ dimension, see, for example, Ther (2004). Until 1911, the Royal Prussian Statistical Bureau and the Imperial Statistical Office used language as the marker for nationality; this approach was at the time accepted by both the Germans and minority representatives; see Belzyt (1998: 3–5). This is a rather imperfect translation of the German Volkstumskampf, a term used by journalists and political interest groups that grossly exaggerated the mostly peaceful, if not very cordial, relations between the Prussian subjects of the day. No more accurate was the Polish equivalent still used today by some historians: battle for the survival of Polishness (walka o przetrwanie polskości). Nobody ever died in this conflict before late 1918. A classical definition of those two – idealized – types of states was given by Meinecke (1908). Meinecke admitted, though, that in political reality, both types often overlapped. For an interesting postcolonial approach to the issue of German colonial ideas from a Polish perspective (although not all conclusions drawn there are shared by this author), see Surynt (2008).

90 12 13 14 15

16 17 18

19 20

21

Nations, Identities and the First World War Arguably the best informed treatment of the ‘Polish question’ in Imperial Germany was Bernhard (1907). See also Orlowski (1996: 313–14). See Struve (2014) on the example of Galicia; equivalent studies on the Prussian Poles are still scarce. This term (in Polish kongresówka) referred to the founding of the Kingdom of Poland at the Congress of Vienna in 1815; it is used as identical with ‘Russian Poland’. In Imperial Germany there were four contingents to the German army: the Prussian, Saxon, Bavarian and Württembergian ones. The Poles almost all served in the Prussian contingent. See, for instance, the books by two military physicians as typical representatives of the intelligencja: [Jedlina-]Jacobson (1934) and Iwicki (1978). Interestingly, this perspective can be found in a rare recollection by a Polish worker (miner): Wojciechowski (1971). On this and other, notably German and French, plans for economic and possibly political integration with long aftermaths in the twentieth century, see Stevenson (2012). Interestingly, Piłsudski pursued an almost identical concept in the 1920s and 1930s, then known as ‘prometheism’; see Noack (2014). Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Poles have used the term ‘conspiracy’ (konspiracja) for any kind of illegal political activities directed towards regaining independence. Therefore, unlike in other languages, this term bears no pejorative undertone. Speech made by the Polish Reichstag deputy Count Stychel on 23 October 1918, in: Stenographische Berichte des Reichstags, vol. 314, 194. Session, 6196–6197.

References Alter, P. (1985), Nationalismus, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Bartov, O., and E.D. Weitz (2013), Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Belzyt, L. (1998), Sprachliche Minderheiten im preußischen Staat 1815–1914. Die preußische Sprachenstatistik in Bearbeitung und Kommentar, Marburg: Herder Institut. Bernhard, L. (1907), Die Polenfrage. Das polnische Gemeinwesen im Preußischen Staat, Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot. Bjork, J. (2009), Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Boysen, J. (2008a), ‘Nationale Minderheiten (Polen und Elsass-Lothringer) im preußischdeutschen Heer während des Ersten Weltkriegs 1914–1918’, Nordost-Archiv N.F., 17 (2008): 108–36. Boysen, J. (2008b), Preußische Armee und polnische Minderheit. Royalistische Streitkräfte im Kontext der Nationalitätenfrage des 19. Jahrhunderts, Marburg: Herder-Institut. Boysen, J. (2013a), ‘Faktoren von Integration bzw. Abstinenz polnischer Adliger und Nichtadliger gegenüber dem preußischen Heer nach 1815’, Militär und Gesellschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit, 17 (1): 65–84 [ed. Andreas Gestrich and Bernhard Schmitt, Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam].

The Great War and the Prussian Poles

91

Boysen, J. (2013b), ‘Zivil-militärische Beziehungen in den preußischen Ostprovinzen Posen und Westpreußen während des Ersten Weltkriegs’, in A. Eisfeld, G. Hausmann and D. Neutatz (eds), Besetzt, interniert, deportiert. Der Erste Weltkrieg und die deutsche, jüdische, polnische und ukrainische Zivilbevölkerung im östlichen Europa, 127–51, Essen: Klartext. Boysen, J. (2014), ‘War Aims and War Aims Discussions (East Central Europe)’, in U. Daniel, P. Gatrell, O. Janz, H. Jones, J. Keene, A. Kramer and B. Nasson (eds), 1914–1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, doi: 10.15463/ie1418.10275, last modified: 2014–10–05 (accessed 25 March 2017). Boysen, J. (2015), ‘Simultaneity of the un-Simultaneous: German Social Revolution and Polish National Revolution in the Prussian East, 1918/19’, in K. Weinhauer, A. McElligott and K. Heinsohn (eds), Germany 1916–23: A Revolution in Context, 229–50, Bielefeld: transcript. Boysen, J. (2016), ‘Imperial Service, Alienation, and an Unlikely National “Rebirth”: The Poles in the First World War’, in G. Barry, E. Dal Lago and R. Healy (eds), Small Nations and Colonial Peripheries in World War I (History of Warfare, 109), 157–76, Leiden: Brill. Conrad, S. (2010), ‘Between the Poles: Mobility and Nation in Germany’s “Real Colony”’, in S. Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany, 144–202, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, N. (2001), Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland’s Present, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ferenczi, C. (1984), ‘Nationalismus und Neoslawismus in Rußland vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg’, Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte, 34 (1984): 7–127. Furedi, F. (2014), First World War: Still No End in Sight, London: Bloomington. Gasimov, Z., ed. (2012), Kampf um Wort und Schrift. Russifizierung in Osteuropa im 19.-20. Jahrhundert, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Groß, G.P. (2006), Die vergessene Front – der Osten 1914/15. Ereignis, Wirkung, Nachwirkung, Paderborn: Schoeningh. Hadler, F. (2002), ‘Drachen und Drachentöter. Das Problem der nationalgeschichtlichen Fixierung in den Historiographien Ostmitteleuropas nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg’, in C. Conrad and S. Conrad (eds), Die Nation schreiben. Geschichtswissenschaft im internationalen Vergleich, 137–64, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Hagen, W.W. (1972), ‘National Solidarity and Organic Work in Prussian Poland, 1815– 1914’, The Journal of Modern History, 44 (1): 38–64. Healy, R. (2014), ‘From Commonwealth to Colony? Poland under Prussia’, in R. Healy and E. Dal Lago (eds), The Shadow of Colonialism on Europe’s Modern Past, 109–25, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Iwicki, J. (1978), Z myślą o Niepodległej … Listy Polaka, żołnierza armii niemieckiej, z okopów I wojny światowej 1914–1918, Wrocław : Ossolineum. Jaworski, R. (1986), Handel und Gewerbe im Nationalitätenkampf. Studien zur Wirtschaftsgesinnung der Polen in der Provinz Posen (1871–1914), Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht. [Jedlina-] Jacobson, W. (1934), Z armją Klucka na Paryż. Pamiętnik lekarza Polaka, Toruń: Druk Toruńska. Jordan A. (2008), Krieg um die Alpen. Der Erste Weltkrieg im Alpenraum und der bayerische Grenzschutz in Tirol, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.

92

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, Berlin: Puttkammer & Mühlbrecht, ed. (1903), Statistik des Deutschen Reichs, Band 150: Die Volkszählung vom 1. Dezember 1900 im Deutschen Reich. Available online: http://www.verwaltungsgeschichte.de/fremdsprachen.html (accessed 7 March 2017). Kamusella, T. (2007), Silesia and Central European Nationalisms: The Emergence of National and Ethnic Groups in Prussian Silesia and Austrian Silesia, 1848–1918, Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Karwat, J. (2002), Od idei do czynu. Myśl i organizacje niepodległościowe w Poznańskiem w latach 1887–1919, 194–95, Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie. Kopp, K. (2012), Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kozłowski, J. (2004), Wielkopolska pod pruskim zaborem 1815–1918, Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie. Kroll, F.-L. (2013), Geburt der Moderne. Politik, Gesellschaft und Kultur vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg, Berlin: be.bra Verlag. Kumaniecki, K.W. (1924), Odbudowa Państwowości Polskiej. Najważniejsze dokumenty 1912 – styczeń 1924 [The Reconstruction of Polish Statehood: Newest Documents from 1912 until January 1924], Warsaw and Cracow : Księgarnia J. Czerneckiego. Lemke, H. (1977), Allianz und Rivalität. Die Mittelmächte und Polen im Ersten Weltkrieg, Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Leonhard, J., and U. Von Hirschhausen, eds (2010), Empires und Nationalstaaten im 19. Jahrhundert, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Ludendorff, E. (1935), Der totale Krieg, Munich: Erich Ludendorff. Lyon, J. (2015), Serbia and the Balkan Front, 1914: The Outbreak of the Great War, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Mamatey, V.S. (1972), The United States and East Central Europe, 1914–1918: A Study in Wilsonian Diplomacy and Propaganda, Port Washington and London: Kennikat Press. Mann, M. (2005), The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McMeekin, S. (2011), The Russian Origins of the First World War, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Meinecke, F. (1908), Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat. Studien zur Genesis des deutschen Nationalstaates, Munich and Berlin: Oldenbourg. Mickiewicz, A. (1832), Book of Pilgrimage (Litania pielgrzymska), cited in Dorota Siwicka (1997), Romantyzm 1822–1863, 104, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN. Mommsen W.J. (1997), ‘German Artists, Writers and Intellectuals and the Meaning of War, 1914–1918’, in J. Horne (ed.), State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War, 21–38, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nachtigal, R. (2013), ‘Kriegszielplanung und Kriegszielpolitik Österreich-Ungarns, Deutschlands, Russlands und Englands’, in A. Eisfeld, G. Hausmann and D. Neutatz (eds), Besetzt, interniert, deportiert. Der Erste Weltkrieg und die deutsche, jüdische, polnische und ukrainische Zivilbevölkerung im östlichen Europa, 27–55, Essen: Klartext. Naumann, F. (1915), Mitteleuropa, Berlin: Georg Reimer. Nelson, R.L. (2009), ‘The Archive for Inner Colonization, the German East and World War I’, in R.L. Nelson (ed.), Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expansion to the East: 1850 through the Present, 65–93, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Noack D.X. (2014), ‘Die polnische Bewegung des Prometheismus im globalgeschichtlichen Kontext 1918–1939’, Österreichische Militärische Zeitschrift, 52 (2): 187–92.

The Great War and the Prussian Poles

93

Nolte, H.-H. (1991), Internal Peripheries in European History, Göttingen-Zürich: MusterSchmidt. Odenwald-Varga, S. (2009), ‘Volk’ bei Otto von Bismarck. Eine historisch-semantische Analyse anhand von Bedeutungen, Konzepten und Topoi, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Orlowski, H. (1996), ‘Polnische Wirtschaft’ Zum deutschen Polendiskurs der Neuzeit, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. O’Rourke, K.H., and J.G. Williamson (2002), ‘When Did Globalisation Begin?’, European Review of Economic History, 6 (1): 23–50. Pajewski, J. (1978), Odbudowa państwa polskiego 1914–1918 [The Reconstruction of the Polish State 1914–1918], Warsaw : Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. Piszczkowski, T. (1969), Odbudowanie Polski 1914–1921. Historia i polityka [The Reconstruction of Poland 1914–1921. History and Politics], London: Księgarnia Polska Orbis. Retallack, J. (2013), ‘The Authoritarian State and the Political Mass Market’, in S.O. Müller and C. Torp (eds), Imperial Germany Revisited: Continuing Debates and New Perspectives, 83–96, New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Sammartino, A.H. (2010), The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914–1922, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Schutte, C. (2008), Die Königliche Akademie in Posen (1903–1919) und andere kulturelle Einrichtungen im Rahmen der Politik zur ‘Hebung des Deutschtums’, Marburg: Herder Institut. Simpson, G.J. (1997), ‘War Crimes: A Critical Introduction’, in T.L.H. McCormack and G.J. Simpson (eds), The Law of War Crimes: National and International Approaches, 1–30, The Hague, London and Boston, MA: Kluver Law International. Stevenson, D. (2012), ‘The First World War and European Integration’, The International History Review, 34 (4): 841–63, doi: 10.1080/07075332.2012.690202 (accessed 20 March 2017). Strachan, H. (2010), ‘The First World War as a Global War’, First World War Studies, 1 (1): 3–14, doi: 10.1080/19475021003621036 (accessed 20 March 2017). Strohn, M. (2011), The German Army and the Defence of the Reich: Military Doctrine and the Conduct of the Defensive Battle 1918–1939, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Struve, K. (2014), ‘Polish Peasants in Eastern Galicia: Indifferent to the Nation or Pillars of Polishness? National Attitudes in the Light of Józef Chałasiński’s Collection of Peasant Youth Memoirs’, Acta Poloniae Historica, 109: 37–59. Surynt, I. (2008), ‘Postcolonial Studies and the “Second World”: Twentieth-Century German Nationalist-Colonial Constructs’, werkwinkel, 3 (1): 61–87. Available online: http://ifa. amu.edu.pl/werkwinkel/pdfs/werkwinkel3/06-surynt-k.pdf (accessed 21 March 2017). Szlanta, P. (2013), ‘Der Glaube an das bekannte Heute, der Glaube an das unsichere Morgen. Die Polen und der Beginn des Ersten Weltkriegs’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Neue Folge, 61 (3): 411–32. Ther, P. (2004), ‘Deutsche Geschichte als imperiale Geschichte. Polen, slawophone Minderheiten und das Kaiserreich als kontinentales Empire‘, in S. Conrad and J. Osterhammel (eds), Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914, 129–48, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Ther, P. (2011), Die dunkle Seite der Nationalstaaten. ‘Ethnische Säuberungen’ im modernen Europa, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Trzeciakowski, L. (2003), Posłowie polscy w Berlinie 1848–1928, Warsaw : Wydawnictwo Sejmowe.

94

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Von Clausewitz, C. ([1832–4] 2003), Vom Kriege, repr. Erfstadt: Area. Watson, A. (2011), ‘Fighting for Another Fatherland: The Polish Minority in the German Army, 1914–1918’, English Historical Review, 76 (522): 1137–66. Weber, M. (2002), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. S. Kalberg, Los Angeles: Roxbury. Weber, M. (2008), ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in J. Dreijmanis (ed.), Max Weber’s Complete Writings on Academic and Political Vocations, 155–207, New York: Algora. Weeks, T.R. (2010), ‘Russification/Sovietization’, in Europäische Geschichte Online (EGO), ed. Institut für Europäische Geschichte (IEG), Mainz 2010–12–03. Available online: http://www.ieg-ego.eu/weekst-2010-en URN: urn: nbn:de:0159–2010101141 (accessed 17 March 2017). Wojciechowski, J. (1971), Życiorys własny robotnika [1934], Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie. Ziemann, B. (2013), ‘The Impossible Vanishing Point: Societal Differentiation in Imperial Germany’, in S.O. Müller and C. Torp (eds), Imperial Germany Revisited: Continuing Debates and New Perspectives, 37–50, New York and Oxford: Berghahn.

Part Two

The Limits of Nationalization

Figure 2 Bread queue in Vienna’s fourteenth district in September 1915 (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, PCH 17.983A(B)).

6

Popular Nationalism, State Forms and Modernity John Breuilly

Introduction In this chapter I will outline two pairs of ideal types by which to classify the states involved in the First World War in order to enable a comparison of the attitudes of subjects towards their governments as war approached, during the war and in its immediate aftermath, with a particular focus on the character and significance of national loyalty. The first pair contrasts nation-states and multinational states.1 The other pair distinguishes between modern and non-modern states. The criteria for modernity include the existence of an extensive, largely literate electorate that votes for a powerful (if not sovereign) parliament in competitive elections informed by mass media and where there is significant state provision or regulation of public goods such as health, old age and elementary education. I confine myself to ‘statist’ criteria, leaving aside non-state indices such as level of urbanization or industrialization. The more criteria for modernity one introduces, the more difficult it becomes to contrast two types rather than present a continuum.2 These distinctions yield four classes: modern nation-states, modern multinational states, non-modern nation-states and non-modern multinational states. Armed with these distinctions I consider two questions: 1. Did a nation-state affect the degree and type of popular support in a different way from a multinational state? 2. Did modern states, national or multinational, enjoy different degrees and types of popular support than non-modern states? I confine myself to Europe, along with the Ottoman Middle East and non-European Russia. These are significant limitations. First, there was an extra-European imperial dimension to the war, especially important in relation to Britain and France but also playing a role for Germany. The centenary commemorations in the UK have seen important publications and broadcasts on non-European soldiers and workers from the

98

Nations, Identities and the First World War

French and British empires. These have ranged from the Western Front to Mesopotamia and East Africa and include research into how experiences of war promoted new political identities and projects, especially nationalist ones. Second, there is the participation of non-European states, most notably the entry of the United States into the war in 1917. Third, there are states and regions that did not take a part in the war, such as China, but on which the war had a significant impact, including promoting nationalism. This chapter is not based on original research, and the distinctions are necessarily broad and confined to the perspectives opened up by my two ideal types. The intention is not to provide a detailed historical account but to outline a framework and some hypotheses that might help with the writing of such accounts. A major problem in considering the significance and limits of nationalism is the tendency for the term to expand to cover a wide range of phenomena. At its most narrow, nationalism refers to the organized activity and ideas of intellectual and political elites; at its widest to sentiments and attitudes of broad social strata. There is also the problem of hindsight. We know that the war was followed by a wave of new state formations in Central Europe and the Middle East to which the label ‘nationstate’ was attached and which each generated their own statist nationalism. We know also that the watchword ‘national self-determination’, which justified the establishment of these states, in turn sparked demands across the globe for more such states to be formed. Finally, we know that in the states that regarded themselves as losers in the war there followed irredentism, fascism and the proliferation of ethno-nationalist conflicts. It is necessary to work with clear, limited and diverse definitions of nationalism in order to avoid conflating these very different kinds of nationalism and projecting their new post-war forms back into the pre-war and wartime periods. I define as nationalism the idea that membership in a nation should be the primary focus of political identity and loyalty, in particular expressed through the attainment of national autonomy. This definition requires qualification and elaboration. After 1918 the principal nationalist goal was national self-determination, meaning a sovereign state in which nationality and citizenship were fused. Before 1914, however, other notions of autonomy – such as federalism or cultural autonomy – were often the principal nationalist goal, which somewhat detached nationality from state citizenship. Although nationalists – before, during and after the war – thought of their nations in different ways, they generally meant a ‘whole society’ occupying a specific territory. The same society could be claimed by competing nationalists, as when Turkish nationalists insisted that Kurds were really just one kind of Turk. In defining a nation, some nationalists stressed ‘objective’ criteria such as language or descent; others its subjective, imagined or willed character; yet others were more vague and more eclectic. Nationalist intellectuals and politicians shifted from one meaning to another according to how these different meanings best suited their interests (Breuilly 2016). I distinguish between nationalism as ideology, as politics and as sentiment (Breuilly 1994). These are closely connected, as when an elite ideological movement engages in politics and mobilizes popular support.3 Nevertheless, there is no fixed relationship between these. I will relate these three aspects of nationalism to the four types of states. After advancing some general arguments, I will briefly relate these to a few examples, especially those considered in more detail elsewhere in this book.

Popular Nationalism, State Forms and Modernity

99

Forms of nationalism and their limits in modern nation-states I classify Germany, France and Britain as modern nation-states. One should qualify this by noting that they are also imperial states with a national core and colonies forming the peripheries. This is much more clearly the case for Britain and France than for Germany, as the former two have a large number of such formally defined colonial possessions. The main tension in the German case is not so much between national core and colonial periphery as between national core and imperial aspirations. Furthermore, for some in Germany, that aspiration was focused on Europe rather than the wider world. Max Weber (who advocated overseas imperialism) argued that the Mitteleuropa dream could endanger national identity by merging Germany into a larger entity. The problem was less obvious for Britain and France because their empires were located beyond Europe. In all these cases there is a tension between nationalism as an ideology of the core and ideologies that justify empire in such terms as civilization, religion or race. By the start of the twentieth century these three states had turned peasants and other plebeian groups into Frenchmen, Germans and Britons – to expand the terms of Eugene Weber’s seminal study (Weber 1976). With the exception of Ireland there was no significant nationalist opposition, and the passing of Britain’s Home Rule Act in 1914, even if suspended for at least one year due to the outbreak of war, appeared to have stabilized the situation. There were nationalist rejections of Home Rule (Irish and Unionist), but as political movements these were overshadowed by the agreement between the British government and the Irish National Party. As popular sentiment, Irish nationalism did not seem significant in the summer of 1914. High numbers of Irish Protestants and Catholics volunteered for the British Army. No significant political group or social class in the three states opposed entry into the war, even if they had done so earlier when war was in prospect. The French socialist parties and the German Socialist Party voted in parliament for war credits. There was a dissenting voice in the Independent Labour Party, but most of the British labour movement, especially the trades unions, supported the war. It was a challenge to revolutionary socialists both then and later to explain this apparent victory of nationalism over working-class interests and values. Lenin initially refused to believe that the German Socialist Party – avowedly Marxist, revolutionary and the model for other socialists – had voted for war credits. However, one must be careful to note what ‘the victory of nationalism’ meant in August 1914. I distinguish between motivational and structural nationalism (Breuilly 2012b). Generally historians treat as nationalism only the first, focusing on ideologicalcum-political movements that make an elaborate concept of the nation the centrepiece of their values and goals. This gives rise to studies of groups such as the Pan-German League and Action Française. By structural nationalism I mean political ideologies that take the nation-state frame for granted and explicitly focus on non-nationalist values such as social justice or individual freedom. However, when the nation-state itself is seen as mortally endangered, those expressing such values can quickly become defenders of the nation. Compared to the socialist and labour movements or liberal and political Catholic movements, explicitly nationalist movements were small and

100

Nations, Identities and the First World War

unimportant. Motivational nationalism is constantly present; structural nationalism only reveals itself at times of crisis. Take the German Socialist Party as an example. Its commitment to a reformist route to power based on winning a parliamentary majority increasingly tied it to the nationstate structure within which that strategy was pursued. For a host of reasons – fear of repression, hopes that the war would compel democratic and other reforms, concern that Russian victory would set back the cause of international, not merely German socialism, strong party discipline that publicly presented as unanimous a contested decision – the party appeared to strongly support the war. Nevertheless, its concept of the ‘nation’ was radically different from that of the Pan-German League, and before the war it had even mobilized massive anti-war demonstrations and condemned various imperialist and armaments policies. To develop this distinction between motivational and structural nationalism I adopt Michael Freeden’s distinction between thin and elaborate political ideology (Freeden 1998). Freeden argues that nationalism, as well as ideologies such as feminism or green politics, is thin while ideologies such as liberalism, conservatism and socialism are elaborate. Nationalism as thin ideology is an identity claim: we are a nation. This might assume an elaborate form in terms of how history, language, culture and race extend the claim beyond basic ‘us and them’ distinctions. Yet even elaborate identity claims do not provide political norms. A complete or elaborate ideology does. Adding ‘right wing’ or ‘radical’ or ‘fascist’ to the term nationalism provides such norms, as does adding terms such as liberal or socialist. In modern nation-states, national identity claims have been integrated with a wide range of such elaborations, which are channelled into political competition for control of the state. Furthermore, such aspects of modernity as state welfare provision and mass party political competition mean that broad strata of the population see themselves as members of a nation defined in such terms. This frequently involves a strong distinction between government and state, with parties drawing on worker or peasant support expressing opposition to the government in the name of the ‘true’ nation. As the war proceeds and as various popular norms and interests are violated – declining living standards, intensified work demands, increasing casualties, state repression – so the initial basis for popular support is undermined by a sense that the national cause has been betrayed by the government and the class interests it serves. National ideas can then justify and motivate opposition to the government. In 1914, the shared assumption that the nation was threatened from outside overlaid such differences.

The modern multinational state: The Habsburg Empire The Habsburg Empire was multinational. I would also argue that it was modern, especially in its western or Austrian half, with extensive franchises for elections to parliaments holding significant power, an expanding system of modern bureaucracy, provision of mass elementary education and other public goods (Deàk 2015).

Popular Nationalism, State Forms and Modernity

101

The Habsburg Empire managed to hold the line for much of the war.4 If nationalism, especially among subordinate national groups (e.g. Czechs in the western and Romanians in the eastern halves), meant opposition to the multinational state, it appears to have been very limited. Indeed, it would appear that the most important promoters of nationalism were the shift from positive to negative state action and the emergence of international tensions, such as between Italians and Croats and Slovenes after Italy entered the war on the side of the Allies in May 1915.5 The distinction between motivational and structural nationalism I used for modern nation-states applies also to the Habsburg Empire. The Austrian Socialist Party took a similar position to that of its German counterpart, that is, a commitment to the existing state that had shaped it as an oppositional party, while campaigning for the transformation of the dynastic regime into democratic, socialist republic. It was this commitment, alongside the recognition that national differences were increasing, not diminishing, as orthodox Marxism predicted, that stimulated the innovative work of Karl Renner and Otto Bauer. They sought to detach sentiments of national attachment to language and culture from statist concerns with war and peace and economic policy (Bauer 2000; Nimni 2005). This raises issues masked in modern nation-states. The formation of a widespread sense of national identity (nation formation) is not the same as the rise of nationalist ideology and politics. This is where the recent historiography on ‘national indifference’, mainly focused on the late Habsburg Empire, is suggestive (for an introduction, see Zahra 2010). It stresses the work of nationalist elites and questions the nationalist assumption (often projected back from after 1918) that nationalism was a wellestablished political sentiment for most Czechs and Romanians, Slovaks and Croatians. However, I stress political; there is a danger that in denying the political significance of national identity one also denies the consciousness of national identity and a positive identification with aspects of cultural nationality.6 It is difficult to deny that there was a widespread sense of national identity among Germans and Czechs, especially in more urban and literate groups. One reason is state modernity. Especially in the western half of the empire there had been an increasing elaboration and institutionalization of national identity – in censuses, schooling and voting arrangements (Gammerl 2009; Göderle 2016). As the modern state increasingly penetrated into everyday life, it had to come to terms with what one might call everyday culture, even if its ways of codifying and institutionalizing such culture were themselves creative acts.7 The outcome was to stabilize the emergent mass politics of the empire. It helped that this politics was territorially bounded. Unlike the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Empire suffered no external interference in domestic politics, for it was not regarded as a weak entity on the verge of collapse. Consequently, these increasingly distinct national parties accepted the imperial state as the framework within which they operated. As Laurence Cole shows in this volume, loyalty to the state at the outbreak of the war could be combined with, not opposed to, assertions of national identity. There are interesting exceptions, notably Polish and Serb nationalism, but I suggest that this is because these movements were not confined to the Habsburg Empire. Polish nationalism took other forms in Germany and Russia and had been given extensive

102

Nations, Identities and the First World War

public support in France and Britain. Serb nationalism crystallized around the Serb state. Thus nationalist movements and political organizations extended well beyond the Habsburg Empire in these cases. What converted national movements confined and tied to the imperial state into nationalist movements seeking independence during the First World War? Apart from the fraying of popular consensus and hence loyalty to the regime evident in all the combatant states, it was the intrusion of just such external influences. First, the prospect of state collapse, which appeared increasingly likely from 1916, compelled people to think of alternatives. Second, proposals for alternatives framed in national terms were brought forward. Sometimes this was the work of the regime itself or its German ally, as with the decision to create a satellite Polish state. Eventually, proposals from the Allies were more important, envisaging first a federalized version of the empire and then its transformation into a series of nation-states. However, one must not exaggerate the importance of these latter proposals until the very eve of defeat and collapse.8 It was also important that state elites anticipated nationalist opposition and, in their efforts at repression, stimulated such opposition, though this mattered more in the non-modern multinational states that had less efficient forms of power. A combination of state power, positive ties between the Habsburg regime and various national groups and the acceptance of the dynasty as a legitimate player in international politics made the pursuit of national sovereignty appear impractical, even unimaginable. All three elements were disappearing as military repression and material deprivation increased negative attitudes towards the empire, and the Allies finally came to regard the empire as illegitimate. What is crucial is that, as this was happening, there were already well developed, if small and weak, ideological/political national movements that could rapidly shift national identity claims from political loyalism plus demands for cultural autonomy and/or federal reform to the new goal of national self-determination proclaimed by Woodrow Wilson. Nationalism in the Habsburg Empire was strong as sentiment and ideology but not as political movement, precisely because the modern state had nurtured such nationalism rather than because nationalism had been separately forming in opposition to that state.

Non-modern nation-states In his chapter in this volume, Nikolai Vukov makes the point that war (the two Balkan wars as well as the First World War) for the small Balkan states was a nation-making experience. However, these states lacked mass literacy or mass political competition; they were monarchies with limited penetration into everyday life. In Serbia in 1864, just over 4 per cent of the population was literate. By 1903, after statist modernization that included schooling, the literacy rate had jumped to 55 per cent in the cities but only 24 per cent in rural areas (Malešević 2017). Literacy was equally low in Bulgaria, and many ‘literate’ Bulgarians were so in Turkish, also calling themselves ‘Greeks’ in reference to their confessional identity (Reynolds 2011: 12). These features were typical of all the Balkan states (Mishkova 2010). If one considers that mass nationalist sentiment requires mass national communication among the majority who cultivate

Popular Nationalism, State Forms and Modernity

103

the land, one would conclude that the formation of an everyday national culture and a popular politics accepting the nation as its political frame was largely absent, certainly before the Balkan wars. Nationalism was the affair of factionalized state elites located in the capital city and other urban centres (Malešević 2017). The Balkan wars and First World War raise different issues. The Serb state mobilized more than 255,000 soldiers for the First Balkan War and as many as 300,000 soldiers for the second (Hall 2000). These numbers are astonishing for a state of just 3 million people. Such mobilization must have affected much of the population. Recruiting and training soldiers, the new world of military comradeship, violent conflict with enemy soldiers: this will surely generate new identities and commitments. However, very little of what one might call ‘nationalism from below’ research has been conducted for these small states. Vukov argues that the war had a doublesided impact on nationalism. It could create and mobilize nationalist sentiments through such processes as conscription and propaganda about the dangers posed by neighbouring states. However, it could also dampen any national enthusiasm when people anticipated and subsequently experienced the suffering that war brought with it: mass deaths and injuries, material deprivation, military occupation and population displacement. Trying to work out how these combined and how far expressions of nationalist values were organized from above or mobilized from below remains a challenging research task. My own reading of secondary literature in English and Vukov’s chapter is that nationalism in the Balkans was far more important as a statist elite politics than as a popular mobilizing sentiment where local and religious values were more prominent. Certainly we cannot assume findings like those established by similar research on modern nation-states. These non-modern states did not establish routine mass politics and create mass public opinion to anything like the same extent, and politics was much more confined to small elites. Furthermore, these states were not stable as territorial or institutional entities but expanded rapidly with victories and contracted, even temporarily disappeared, with defeat. As Vukov shows, they also were multiethnic, no matter how much national identity and loyalty was stressed, which complicates the issue. In one sense, this institutional, territorial and ethnic instability enabled new kinds of mass mobilization, as people were thrown out of their normal and very diverse social worlds through conscription and flight from – or capture by – invading and occupying forces. As Peter Gatrell’s chapter in this volume shows, displacement and statelessness became mass experiences during and after the war. Such people can be mobilized in various ways. For example, prisoners of war might be organized into ‘nationalist’ formations, but only because the state that imprisoned them now saw them as a military asset. However, this seems to me to be much more a case of ‘organization from above’ as compared, for example, to the way in which nationalism was nurtured in and mobilized from below within the Habsburg Empire, or at least among well-established ‘counter-elites’ such as those representing Czech and Romanian nationalism. It is thus debatable whether war experienced as waves of conquest or occupation – or, as in Serbia, both in quick succession – actually promotes popular national identity ‘from below’, though clearly it did generate strong nationalist commitments within state elites.

104

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Non-modern multinational empires Key features of these states are dominance of peasant agriculture, high levels of illiteracy and restricted political participation. Even though Russia after 1905 and the Ottoman Empire after 1908 introduced elements of parliamentary and constitutional arrangements, power was concentrated into the hands of the Romanov monarchy and the narrow though factionalized elite of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, often misleadingly called Young Turks), respectively. Two key contrasts between non-modern states and modern ones are that the former exhibit indirect and multiple levels of power as one moves from centre to periphery and lack secure control over borders even when not at war with neighbouring states. This was especially marked in the Ottoman Empire (McMeekin 2015). The Balkans had largely been lost to the competing and expanding small Balkan states by 1914. The Arab provinces and eastern Anatolia were unstable, with cooperation between local groups (whether defined in national, ethnic, religious, linguistic or other ways) and external powers, especially Russia in eastern Anatolia and Britain in Arab lands. By contrast, the absolutist legacy of the Romanov Empire – conjoined with a service nobility that wielded much local power, along with a higher degree of industrial development and military power – made Russia a more cohesive state and society, although much of its western and southern territories were occupied by distinct religious and linguistic groups with weak loyalties to the centre.9 Complex divisions within the population, especially in borderland regions, have often been seen as the source of nationalist opposition to the central state. However, given that all significant modernist theories of nationalism stress the importance variously of direct state/society links (Breuilly 1993; Malešević 2013), extensive patterns of social communication (Deutsch 1966; Anderson 1991) or the rise of commercial agriculture and manufacturing (Gellner 2006), one wonders what could be the basis of such nationalism in these non-modern empires. Those who nevertheless insist that nationalism was significant in these cases have to present an alternative to the modernist view. One might argue that political elites in the ethnic core of the state might develop a strong ‘imperial nationalism’ – Russian in the Romanov Empire, Turkish in the Ottoman Empire – based on political and economic interests as well as ethnic identity. Conversely, nationalism in the colonial peripheries might be understood as based on a combination of enduring, long-standing ethnic identity (Slav, Arab etc.) and reaction against imperial exploitation. Such interpretations appear to dispense with the need for any ‘modernist’ approach. The temptation to argue like this is compounded by the problem that nowadays ethnic conflict and nationalist politics are frequently collapsed into one another, conditioned by perceptions of the collapse of Yugoslavia in Europe and ‘failed states’ in Africa and the Middle East. Yet closer analysis suggests that ethnic conflict and popular nationalism are distinct phenomena. Furthermore, one must not confuse claims made by political and intellectual elites about ethnic groups or national minorities with how the members of these categories actually behave.10

Popular Nationalism, State Forms and Modernity

105

Instead of clear divisions between an alien centre and a national periphery, there is a complex interaction between local, factional and small-scale politics, central government that is torn between collaboration with local elites and efforts to impose more direct control, and external powers that aim to exploit local forces to pressure or undermine the central government. This is a well-known story in the interactions between rival empires.11 What is novel by the late nineteenth century is the idea that one is not merely mobilizing local factions but that these are representatives of whole groups. It is the interventions of modern states in which national, class and other such kinds of identity have become seen as ‘natural’ that transform the politics of nonmodern empires. Such groups were not only labelled in ethnic or national terms. Both Britain and Russia appealed to ‘Christians’ within the Ottoman Empire, while the Ottoman Empire, with encouragement from Germany, did the same with Muslims, elaborating ideas of pan-Islamism and jihad.12 Bolsheviks called out to oppressed and exploited classes, linking this to the idea of ‘national liberation’. All modern political ideologies require a mass concept – race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, class, gender – even when superimposed upon a highly elitist and factionalized politics. In some cases this was a ‘thin’ ideology of identity, while in others – usually not labelled ‘nationalist’ – such identity was placed within an elaborate ideological frame. Once such political ideologies impacted on the stability, even the existence, of an imperial state, this created incentives for local elites to appropriate these mass ideologies, using the categories furnished to them by outsiders. Take, for example, Article 61 of the Berlin Treaty of 1878: Article 61. – The Sublime Porte engages to carry out without further delay the ameliorations and reforms which are called for by local needs in the provinces inhabited by Armenians, and to guarantee their security against the Circassians and the Kurds. It will give information periodically of the measures taken for this purpose to the Powers, who will watch over the execution of them.

Three ‘whole groups’ are thereby identified, and this identification is used to justify interference in Ottoman eastern Anatolia. In similar fashion the Habsburg Empire justified intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In a different way, Serb and other Slav intellectuals in Vienna and other urban centres elaborated a Slav ethnography that was used to map whole populations. Even when it was recognized that the resultant ethnographic maps had a shaky grasp on reality, the idea of an immature or inchoate nation could justify interventions designed to speed up a ‘natural’ process, whether reforming language scripts, establishing schools, supporting nationalist history writing or conscripting young men. These efforts might be undertaken by states, but often indirectly, using agents such as missionaries, consuls, merchants or teachers. The effects are difficult to interpret. Local political and military action shifts in rapid ways. Ideological claims have little purchase on the forms of collective action. One moment Russia supports Armenians, the next moment Kurds, as does the Ottoman Empire. These efforts (often themselves varied, incoherent and contradictory) interact

106

Nations, Identities and the First World War

with local factions that claim to be Armenian or Kurdish and that shift alliances with central governments and each other. The impact of war intensified these patterns in areas where central military and state control could not be exercised. At times it released extraordinarily destructive forms of violence, most notably the Armenian genocide of 1915. I am not suggesting that the group markers invoked – language, ethnicity, religion (both across the Christian/Muslim divide and within those broad categories), class, race – were inventions. They often overlapped with divisions between ways of life: nomads against sedentary agriculturalists, peasants against town dwellers, mosque against church congregations. However, they rarely took the form of elaborate ideology but, rather, were thin identity claims. Knowing that one is a Christian or peasant does not automatically translate into support for particular political movements, ideas or goals. Such identity claims were often small scale, not linked to large imagined communities.13 Marx wrote of French peasants that they constituted a class in the same way that potatoes in a sack constituted a sack – a class in itself but not for itself. So, analogously, one can conceive of an ethnicity, race, nation or religious community as being in but not for itself. The simultaneous destruction of Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman imperial power – along with their most powerful ally, Germany – meant that ethnic, linguistic and religious categories could be ideologically converted into nations ‘for themselves’ and deployed by the Allies to form and legitimate successor states. In East and Central Europe, the United States, with Wilson’s doctrine of national self-determination, created a focus for national claim making, while the many émigré academics in the US delegation to Versailles provided an elaborate array of strategic, historical and linguistic arguments through which to express such claims. These varied regionally. In the Habsburg Empire, modernity had imparted elements of genuine mass cultural national identity to dominant and subordinate ethnic groups. In other cases such as Serbia, there was a nation-state identity at the centre, but it was less clear that there was popular national identity. In yet other cases there was neither elite political nor popular cultural identity but just Hroch’s stage one of elite cultural identity. The concept of an ‘Arab’ nation, let alone state, had little substance. There were variations in nation-state formation, which must be distinguished from nationalism and nation formation, if by a nation-state we mean a legal entity explicitly recognized as such internationally by being admitted to membership of the League of Nations. Some nation-state formation was by separation (Czechoslovakia), others by contraction (Hungary), still others by amalgamation of lands previously under the rule of more than one state (Romania, Yugoslavia) and yet others by a complex combination of separation and amalgamation (Poland). In the peculiar case of the Soviet Union, its western and southern regions, once borders were secured following civil and interstate war, were mapped out as a series of non-Russian national republics, each named after its ‘titular’ nation. This procedure was later extended to Soviet Central Asia. Consequently, the Europe and Middle East of post-1918 ‘nation-states’ was highly diverse, and nationalist ideology, nationalist politics and popular national sentiment worked differently in every case. All we can do is establish some general principles, such as degrees of modernity, which might enable us to go beyond just describing these differences. This I try to do in the next section.

Popular Nationalism, State Forms and Modernity

107

The successor states One can broadly distinguish five zones to which the principle of national self-determination (NSD) was or was not applied after the war: the victorious Allies, Germany; the Habsburg Empire; the Ottoman and Romanov empires; the wider world. 1. In the territories of the victorious Allies, claims to NSD were ignored, as Irish, Vietnamese and other observers at Versailles noted. Indeed, French and British empires expanded, even if devices such as the League of Nations mandate paid lip service to the idea that some dependencies were putative nation-states, not colonies. 2. In the defeated modern nation-state of Germany, the power of the national idea was evident not merely in the massive, nationalist resentment of the peace terms – a feeling shared across the political spectrum – but was manifested also in the widespread sense among the victorious powers that such a sentiment could not be ignored. France might cherish ideas of occupying indubitably German territories in western Germany but had little or no support from its Allies and had to give up the idea, especially after organized and popular resistance to the Ruhr occupation. 3. Germany could be stripped of its non-German territories, but the national idea was too entrenched both in Germany and the political culture of the Allies to permit the partition of what remained. This is another instance of ‘structural nationalism’, where there was consensus across the political spectrum. Even Friedrich Ebert – a leading socialist and first president of the Weimar Republic, a man bitterly opposed to the Hohenzollern regime and right-wing nationalism – welcomed soldiers returning from the Western Front to Berlin, declaring that they marched ‘undefeated’ from the battlefield. In this way he unwittingly contributed to the ‘stab in the back’ legend that the Nazis deployed against the ‘Versailles criminals’, that is, those parties (socialist, Catholic, left liberal) which had signed the armistice and negotiated the peace treaty. 4. Then there were the defeated modern multinational states. A range of national movements had developed in the pre-war Habsburg Empire. In the more modernized western half, one sees the formation of a widespread sense of national identity, if not nationalist commitment, especially among Czechs and Germans. However, Germans were culturally dominant while Czechs were subordinate.14 Something similar, if less developed, can be found in the eastern half of the empire, for example, in the relationship between Magyars and Transylvanian Romanians. 5. Applying NSD therefore produced two different outcomes. The Austrian Germans and Magyars were forced into rump states: Austria and Hungary. A strong sense of identity, which had not expressed itself as a demand for a nation-state when dominant in an empire, was now redirected as bitter nationalist resentment of the peace settlement.15 The major difference was that Austrians could look to attachment (Anschluß) to Germany as a nationalist goal, whereas Magyars had no such external focus.

108 6.

Nations, Identities and the First World War

By contrast, Czechs, with their well-developed sense of national identity and a political movement with an elaborate nationalist ideology, could expect to dominate ‘their’ nation-state, even if they had to work with Slovaks, regarded patronizingly by many Czech nationalists, as well as accommodate a resentful German minority. 7. Transylvanian Romanians faced a different situation in that they were merged with the Romanian state formed in 1878 from the Ottoman provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia. Transylvania was a more modern society than this core Romania, which created major problems of integration. 8. This analysis of the kind and strength of nationalism and its links to the degree of modernity could be extended to other cases. It helps account for tensions in Yugoslavia (or, to give its original name until 1929: Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes) between Croats and Slovenes (previously located in the Habsburg Empire) and Serbs (centred on the nineteenth-century state that, like Romania, had separated from the Ottoman Empire). It would be interesting also to analyse post-war Poland in this way, given the differences between the Poles of the former Prussia, Russia and the Habsburg Empire. It is a line of inquiry that has tended to be blocked by national historiography. 9. Again, it might be worth comparing new nation-states formed ‘purely’ from Habsburg territories (Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia) or ‘purely’ from Ottoman territories (Turkey, Bulgaria, Albania) or a combination of Habsburg and Ottoman territories (Serbia, Romania). If the contrasts I have drawn between nationalization processes in the two multinational states for the prewar and wartime periods have any validity, this should have consequences for how those processes work out in the post-war states. One might, for example, extend Vukov’s interesting points in this volume about commemorations of the war from the Balkan states into southeast Europe more generally. 10. Then there are the non-modern multinational states. Here I consider the Ottoman Empire just in relation to its Turkish and Arab territories, having considered the Balkans region already. During the war, the Ottoman regime under the control of the CUP appealed to Muslims and Turks – two target groups that, especially in its Arab provinces, were in conflict with each other. However, I have argued that popular identification with large-scale imagined communities, whether of language, race, ethnicity, class or religion, had little scope for development in non-modern societies. This lack of large-scale group consciousness and action applied to appeals made by and against the Ottoman regime. Calls for jihad addressed to populations in eastern Anatolia and the Russian Caucasus region had as little success as similar calls to Arab subjects confronting British and French armies and to Muslim soldiers in those armies (see Reynolds 2011 for Anatolia and Russia). Equally, the pan-Turkism fantasies of CUP leaders fell on deaf ears in the Caucasus region. 11. Instead, as with Austrian Germans and Hungarian Magyars, it was the conversion of imperial into national consciousness that was most potent. This had begun to form with resentments brought into Anatolia by Muslim, largely Turkish, populations forced out of the Balkans before and during the war. It

Popular Nationalism, State Forms and Modernity

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

109

crystallized around the Ottoman Army during the war. It turned into explicitly anti-Ottoman, Turkish nationalism following defeat. It is therefore no accident that the man who dominated this shift – Mustafa Kemal, later known as Ataturk (‘Father of the Turks’) – was a military hero in the defence of Gallipoli in 1915 against Allied invasion. By contrast, Arab national identity was weak in the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, just as the strongest and most elaborate forms of Slav nationalist ideology were worked out in the Habsburg Empire and ‘exported’ to the Ottoman Balkans, so was much Arab nationalist doctrine formed in more modern regions such as Egypt, Lebanon and Syria and ‘exported’ to the peninsula, where it was taken up by elites whose power was based on pre-modern, localized networks. (For a sketch of the intellectual and political history, see Kedourie 1961, 1971; Dawisha 2003). It was with such elites and networks that the British authorities were compelled to work. It is in this sense – namely the lack of territorially extensive political networks – that Iraq might be regarded as ‘artificial’, rather than in the sense that one might have found some more ‘natural’ extended state boundaries but for the manipulations of France and Britain (Pursley 2015). The situation was different in the Soviet Union. This was the only multinational state to survive defeat, even if there were major territorial changes after 1917. Yet, despite the Bolshevik commitment to class as opposed to national identity, Lenin took up the idea of national liberation; indeed, there is strong evidence that Woodrow Wilson’s proclamation of national self-determination in January 1918 was a direct response to a speech given by Trotsky just a couple of days earlier (Knudsen 2013: chaps. 1, 2). This global call for national liberation was not just a ploy to spark resistance within the empires of the Allies, although that was a motive. The Bolsheviks had elaborated a national – not nationalist – ideology of nationality as an objective reality based on language, ethnicity and common history. They linked this to a stage view of history that justified supporting ‘bourgeois’ nationalists, as with the Kuomintang in China, even at the (short-term) expense of communism. Lenin also considered it necessary to combat ‘great Russian chauvinism’, which he saw as a counter-revolutionary force undermining the attraction of the Soviet Union to non-Russians. Accordingly, the early Soviet Union created ‘titular’ republics on its western and southern borders, whereby each of these republics was named after its core nationality: Georgia, the Ukraine, Moldova etc. This was later extended to Soviet Central Asia and buttressed by further sets of ethnographic categories that were institutionalized, in particular for the largest republic of Russia, which lacked its own ‘national’ institutions (Martin 2001). Debate over these events has focused on tensions between appeals to class and nation and the relative significance of republican institutions (including communist parties) in relation to centralized Soviet ones such as party, secret police, army and ministries. I suggest that one should also explore how far any widespread sense of national identity developed in relation to the degree of modernity. However, this is complicated by the most dramatic modernization

110

Nations, Identities and the First World War

taking place under Stalin’s rule, associated with massive urban and industrial growth and population movement (especially of Russians into non-Russian republics), in the form not of market differentiation but of a command economy. There remains a major research challenge to link this kind of modernization to nationalism in the Soviet Union, while avoiding the projection of nationalism back from the collapse of the USSR and the conversion of the republics into the successor ‘nation-states’. 17. A final development, beyond the remit of this chapter, was the global impact of Wilson’s declaration of national self-determination and Lenin’s of national liberation (Manela 2007).16 Mass movements in Egypt, China, India, the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina and elsewhere raised demands for national self-determination. Again it would be interesting to link this to indices of modernization. Egypt, for example, was a more advanced as well as centralized state and society compared to the Ottoman Arab provinces. The movements in China were strongest in those coastal regions and cities which had been most affected by western imperialism.17 One might be able to extend these points to the location of the greatest support for Gandhi’s first non-cooperation campaign of 1919, the Javanese centre of protest in the Dutch East Indies or the major cities of the Vietnamese part of French Indochina.

Concluding points I suggest that nationalism was not a major disruptive force before the outbreak of the war unless yoked to state power. In the modern nation-states this meant that governments were able to mobilize existing mass national sentiment as well as the powerful forces of an advanced economy. In small, non-modern nation-states, especially in the Balkans, nationalist elites used state power to exploit weaknesses and divisions between the major powers but did not have the resource of mass national sentiment to mobilize. In the modern multinational state of the Habsburg Empire, a sense of national identity had become widespread in some cases, but it did not then take the form of political nationalism, being confined to moderate demands for cultural and/or federal autonomy and being combined with political loyalty to the empire. In the non-modern multinational states, it was politically not even this important, except among certain imperial elites starting to respond to rapid state decline. The war intensified these forms of nationalism. There were efforts by contending states to foment nationalism, as well as religious, ethnic and class differences, within the territories of their enemies. This had limited success in the face of repressive state power. It did, however, promote elite nationalist organizations that were subsequently in a position to exploit military defeat and the policies of the triumphant Allies. What followed shaped further forms of nationalism. Given that no ‘pure’ nationstates could be created, those formed always contained national minorities that looked to their ‘own’ nation-state for aid. This was compounded by the imposition of bilateral treaties on the successor states, committing them to protect minorities. There was an

Popular Nationalism, State Forms and Modernity

111

acceptance and practice of population transfer based on national labels, as with the Treaty of Lausanne and the Greek/Turkish swaps (though the ‘Greeks’ were Greek Orthodox rather than Greek speakers, and the ‘Turks’ were Muslims rather than Turkish speakers). These, plus the resentments of defeated nationalities, fomented new, more extreme, popular and intensely felt forms of nationalism, most obviously in the rise of fascism. The problem is that attaching some vague umbrella label of ‘nationalism’ to all these varied phenomena and constructing a lengthy history that plots its continuous rise obscure the ruptures and differences and prevent us from linking different concepts of nationalism to different conditions. I have argued in this chapter that distinguishing between national sentiment, nationalist ideology and nationalist politics – and relating these forms of nationalism to different types of state – enables us to make those links. I conclude that the major political and ideological force was statism and that it was the victory – itself highly contingent – of the three modern national-imperial states and the entrenchment of the ethno-national principle as a key device for ordering the post-war world that together made nationalism look more uniform, significant and enduring – before and during the war – than really was the case.

Notes 1 I prefer multinational to non-national or multiethnic. Non-national is a negative term and only applies to mono-ethnic states smaller than nation-states (e.g. Bavaria and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies before German and Italian unification respectively). There were no such significant cases in 1914. Multiethnic might be regarded as more accurate to describe subjects who shared an identity based on common descent but did not endow this with national meaning. However, ethnicity is a problematic term which narrowly covers (assumed) common descent and becomes incoherent when one adds other criteria such as language (Brubaker 2004). See also Chandra (2006), Brubaker (2012). Furthermore, other identities can underpin political loyalties supporting or opposing the state such as royalism/republicanism or Christian/Muslim. Given that the focus here is on nationalism, the key contrast is between multinational empires and nationstates. 2 However, in looking at particular events, such issues become important, for example, the greater capacity for popular political mobilization in cities compared to countryside. 3 Miroslav Hroch has turned these three kinds of nationalism into three stages in the development of nationalism (Hroch 1996). However, I would argue that this is not the only possible sequence (Breuilly 2012a). 4 See the chapter by Laurence Cole in this volume, to whom I am indebted for advice on this section, including points about the modernity of the Habsburg state and its military capability. 5 These points are argued in persuasive detail by Laurence Cole. Judson (2016: chap. 8) stresses the negative impact of the military distrust and persecution of Slavic nationalists as actual or potential traitors.

112 6

7

8

9

10

11 12 13

14 15

16 17

Nations, Identities and the First World War I am not arguing that these forms of national identity were not political. They were, insofar as they contended for influence over the authoritative, public allocation of resources (e.g. for schools), but they did not oppose the multinational empire in pursuit of political independence. This was similar to the process in nation-states, but we need to distinguish between cases where the state seeks to repress and where it seeks to promote certain forms of national identity. The British promotion of aspects of Scottish identity bears comparison with the Habsburg promotion of aspects of Czech identity. See John Horne’s chapter in this volume. This is brought out strongly by Judson, who also argues that the nationalist ‘groping’ towards new states was helped by drawing on Habsburg institutional practices (Judson 2016: 430). For surveys of nationalism in these two multinational empires, see the chapters by Miroslav Hroch (Habsburg and Ottoman empires to 1914), Aviel Roshwald (Middle East 1876–1945) and Theodore Weeks (Romanov and Soviet empires) in Breuilly (2013). Brubaker (2004) makes a useful distinction between category and group. A category is a collective unit consisting of people sharing certain characteristics such as level of educational attainment or age. A group only exists when such a category is transformed by common experiences and collective actions. One could present the rivalry between, say, Rome and Persia in the third and fourth centuries AD in such a way. For a study that is sceptical of the effectiveness of such appeals in eastern Anatolia, see Reynolds (2011). Anderson’s famous phrase about the nation as imagined community applies, as he makes clear, to all large-scale groups which have to be imagined because they cannot be directly, personally experienced. It is the form of imagining that distinguishes these from each other. Contra Anderson, it is not clear, at least in terms of his own argument, why national imagining should be more often generated by ‘printcapitalism’ than class or religious imagining. But without that print-capitalism, it seems likely that such large-scale group imagining will not happen. I am grateful to Laurence Cole for drawing to my attention a fine recent article which explores this issue for the western Habsburg Empire: Osterkamp (2016). The exception was the minority Pan-German movement led by Georg Schonerer. Pan-Germanism in the pre-war Habsburg Empire meant joining a nation-state (Germany), whereas in Germany it meant establishing a powerful overseas empire. The 1920s saw a revival of the großdeutsch interpretation of modern German history. Manela explores the Wilsonian impact. We need another study entitled The Leninist Moment. Sun-Yat-Sen grew up in the cities of Canton and Shanghai as well as Tokyo and Hawaii, and only political upheaval found him in Beijing towards the end of his life.

References Anderson, B. (1991), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Bauer, O. (2000), The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Popular Nationalism, State Forms and Modernity

113

Breuilly, J. (1993), Nationalism and the State, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Breuilly, J. (1994), ‘Culture, Doctrine, Politics: Three Ways of Constructing Nationalism’, in J. Bermendi, R. Maiz and J. Nuñez (eds), Nationalism in Europe: Past and Present, 127–34, Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Breuilly, J. (2012a), ‘Constructing Nationalism as an Historical Subject’, in P. Kolár and M. Rezník (eds), Historische Nationsforschung im geteilten Europa 1945–1989, 15–27, Cologne: SH-Verlag. Breuilly, J. (2012b), ‘What does it mean to say that nationalism is popular?’, in M. v. Ginderachter and M. Beyen (eds), Nationhood from Below: Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century, 23–43, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Breuilly, J., ed. (2013), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Breuilly, J. (2016), ‘Nationalism, Self-Determination and International Relations’, in J. Baylis, S. Smith and P. Owens (eds), The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brubaker, R. (2004), Ethnicity without Groups, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brubaker, R. (2012), ‘Religion and Nationalism: Four Approaches’, Nations and Nationalism, 18 (1): 2–20. Chandra, K. (2006), ‘What Is Ethnic Identity and Does It Matter?’, Annual Review of Political Science, 9 (1): 397–424. Dawisha, A. (2003), Arab Nationalism in the 20th Century: From Triumph to Despair, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Deàk, J. (2015), Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Deutsch, K. (1966), Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality, New York: Wiley and MIT. Freeden, M. (1998), ‘Is Nationalism a Distinct Ideology?’, Political Studies, 46: 748–65. Gammerl, B. (2009), ‘Subjects, Citizens and Others: The Handling of Ethnic Differences in the British and Habsburg Empires (Late 19th and Early 20th Century)’, European Review of History, 16 (4): 523–49. Gellner, E. (2006), Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell. Göderle, W. (2016), Zensus und Ethnizität. Zur Herstellung von Wissen über soziale Wirklichkeiten im Habsburgerreich zwischen 1848 und 1910, Göttingen: Wallstein. Hall, Richard (2000), The Balkan Wars 1912–1913: Prelude to the First World War, London: Routledge. Hroch, M. (1996), ‘From National Movement to the Fully-Formed Nation: The Nation-Building Process in Europe’, in G. Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation, 78–97, London: Verso. Judson, P. (2016), The Habsburg Empire: A New History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kedourie, E. (1961), Nationalism, London: Hutchinson. Kedourie, E. (1971), ‘Introduction’, in E. Kedourie (ed.), Nationalism in Africa and Asia, London: Cass. Knudsen, R.A. (2013), ‘Moments of Self-Determination: The Concept of “SelfDetermination” and the Idea of Freedom in 20th- and 21st-Century International Discourse’, PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science. Malešević, S. (2013), Nation-States and Nationalisms: Organization, Ideology and Solidarity, Cambridge: Polity.

114

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Malešević, S. (2017), ‘The Mirage of Balkan Piedmont: State Formation and Serbian Nationalisms in the 19th and Early 20th Century’, Nations and Nationalism, 23 (1): 129–50. Manela, E. (2007), The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, T. (2001), The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union 1923–1939, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McMeekin, S. (2015), The Ottoman Endgame, London: Allen Lane. Mishkova, D. (2010), ‘On the Space-Time Constitution of Southeastern Europe’, in S. Rutar (ed.), Beyond the Balkans: Towards an Inclusive History of Southeastern Europe, 47–66, Zurish and Berlin: Lit. Nimni, E., ed. (2005), National Cultural Autonomy and Its Contemporary Critics, London: Routledge. Osterkamp, J. (2016), ‘Cooperative Empires: Provincial Initiatives in Imperial Austria’, Austrian History Yearbook, 47: 128–46. Pursley, S. (2015), ‘Lines Drawn on an Empty Map’: Iraq’s Borders and the Legend of the Artificial State’, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/21759/lines-drawn-on-anempty-map_iraq’s-borders-and-the. Reynolds, M. (2011), Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, E. (1976), Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernisation of Rural France 1870–1914, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zahra, T. (2010), ‘Imagined Non-Communities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis’, Slavic Review, 69: 93–119.

7

Questions of Nationalization in the Habsburg Monarchy Laurence Cole

Introduction At the start of October 1914, the eminent historian and renowned expert on AustriaHungary, Robert Seton-Watson, wrote to the British Foreign Office and suggested that a crucial moment had arrived in the development of the South Slav question, which he saw as the ‘key to many future developments’. Carefully outlining the history of the region and refuting possible Italian claims to territories therein, Seton-Watson gave his view of the reasons for the war’s outbreak: ‘It is notorious that the murder of the Archduke was not the work of the Serbian government but the result of a spontaneous movement within the Monarchy. This movement is traceable to the rapid growth of national feeling among the Croats and Serbs of AustriaHungary’ (Seton-Watson 1976: 180–2). Seton-Watson pinpointed the ‘corrupt’ rule of the Croatian governor, Count Khuen-Héderváry, as being the root cause of a broader development that the Foreign Office (for which Seton-Watson later worked) saw continuing as the war developed. Around three-and-a-half years later, at the start of March 1918, the weekly report for the British War Cabinet from the Intelligence Bureau cited evidence of the spread of anti-state sentiments among the Slav populations as a whole: ‘Only the day before, the Czech agrarian deputy, Mgr. Zahradnik, […] declared in parliament, “for me, there is no Austrian fatherland, but only the fatherland where I was born”: and this is thoroughly characteristic of the other Slavs’ (National Archives, CAB/24/43). The resulting ‘state crisis’ of the Habsburg Monarchy was thus seen as a result of a process of nationalization and the abandonment of the ‘Austrian idea’ (National Archives, CAB/24/43; see further, Hanak 1962).

I would like to thank Mark Cornwall and Borut Klabjan for letting me read draft versions of articles, and Matthias Egger for his comments on a first version of this article.

116

Nations, Identities and the First World War

The supposition that wars accelerate processes of social, economic and political change has been a commonplace of scholarship, although the causal relationship between war and nationalism has more often been assumed rather than closely investigated (for discussion, see Hall and Malešević 2013). From the perspective of nationalism studies, war is often viewed as a moment for the ‘forging’ of nations, as the titles of diverse works imply (Colley 1994; Tanner 1997). Moreover, for historians of central, east-central and southeastern Europe, nationalism has been identified as a central element in accounting for the downfall of multinational empires, above all with regard to explanations for the timing of collapse (Roshwald 2001). At first sight, the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1918 seems to confirm the assumption that nationalism intensified as a result of the war, and this is certainly what nationalist politicians claimed at the time. Edvard Beneš, later president of the Czechoslovak Republic, produced a classic assertion of this argument in Bohemia’s Case for Independence, published in 1917. Appealing to governments and public opinion among the Allied powers, he claimed that the actions of Czech troops during the war – including desertion – showed their growing national spirit and opposition to Austro-Hungarian oppression. Beneš thereby sought to align the Czecho-Slovak national movement with the constitutional traditions of the Allied countries: ‘The national spirit of the Czecho-Slovaks is as free and as democratic as that of the British nation, which has succeeded after many constitutional struggles in gaining selfgovernment and individual freedom’ (Beneš 1917: 81). Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of 8 January 1918 picked up on such arguments for national self-government. While not yet calling outright for the break-up of the Habsburg Monarchy, Wilson’s programmatic statement implied that the nationalist momentum was unstoppable. Moreover, the peacemakers meeting in Paris from 1919 onwards – with the British delegation advised by Seton-Watson and others – worked on the basis that failure to accommodate national demands was one of the key reasons for the outbreak of war in 1914 (Nuñez Seixas 2002). Where numerous contemporary actors asserted that the war strengthened the spread of national ideas in the Habsburg Monarchy, their claims subsequently went on to shape much of the historiography after 1918 (Kożuchoswki 2012; Deak 2014). A nationalized view of the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy prevailed in ‘liberated’ successor states such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia as well as in countries such as Romania and Italy, which celebrated the ‘return’ of ‘redeemed’ territories. At the same time, such views were reflected in reverse in the defeated remnants of the Habsburg state, with many in disoriented Austria and revisionist Hungary blaming the ‘treachery’ of the non-dominant nationalities for the collapse. Within the international historiography, former Hungarian liberal politician and sociologist Oscar Jászi in 1929 set up a paradigm of ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ forces, which long shaped the terms of the debate on the collapse of Austria-Hungary, especially – but not only – in the United States, which became (and remains) an important centre for research on the Habsburg Monarchy (Jászi 1929). Jászi’s focus on nationalism as the primary disintegrating force encouraged many subsequent scholars to concentrate their research on this area, while neglecting integrative forces and factors encouraging loyalty to the dynasty and state (Cole and Unowsky 2007b). For example, Italian historian Leo Valiani’s

Nationalization in the Habsburg Monarchy

117

pioneering analysis of the interplay between national independence movements and the diplomatic manoeuvres between European states and the United States. during the First World War accepted Jászi’s suggestion that the centrifugal force of nationalism gathered decisive momentum during the war (Valiani 1966). In practice, however, Valiani and other historians assumed the power of nationalism, without demonstrating how far and how effectively national ideas spread among the various peoples of the Habsburg Monarchy (e.g. Zeman 1961; May 1968). In this sense, earlier work on Austria-Hungary in the First World War was problematic for two main reasons. On the one hand, there was a lack of detailed empirical research on the national sentiments among the general population; the claims of national leaders, who were consciously appealing to the Allied powers seeking to undermine Austria-Hungary, were often accepted at face value. On the other hand, insufficient attention was paid to the question of what precise difference the war made to nationalization processes. In short, it is still necessary to ask whether the First World War did actually stimulate and accelerate national identification or simply created new political circumstances and opportunities for populations that were already nationalized (Hall and Malešević 2013). Simplifying a complex historiographical field, it can be suggested that recent historical research has substantially revised earlier views of the Habsburg Monarchy in three respects. Firstly, more nuanced interpretations of national identification processes in Austria-Hungary suggest that, by 1914, national forces were not as powerful as once assumed, with secessionist tendencies existing on the margins, not in the mainstream (Cohen 2007). Secondly, other recent research argues that the nature and extent of loyalties towards state and dynasty have been underestimated (Cole and Unowsky 2007b). Thirdly, historians such as Pieter Judson, Jeremy King and Tara Zahra maintain that many members of the ordinary population long remained ‘nationally indifferent’. They thereby suggest that nationalization did not occur automatically and, moreover, that the vehemence of national rhetoric among nationalist activists partly resulted from the relative failure of nationalization projects. However, the exact role played by the First World War in this process is explored somewhat unevenly (compare King 2002: 147–52 and Judson 2006: 219–32; fuller discussion in Zahra 2008: 79–105). In sum, while new work has sought to move decisively beyond previous national master-narratives, important issues remain regarding the question of nationalization in the Habsburg Monarchy during the war period. In the first place, there is still considerable work to be done on the ‘everyday history’ of the years 1914–18, despite recent studies on Vienna, Bohemia, Tyrol and Styria (Šedivý 2001; Healy 2004; Überegger 2006; Moll 2007, 2014; Kuprian and Überegger 2014; Kučera 2016). At the same time, the question of ‘nationalism from below’ and the precise implications of ‘national indifference’ are matters of ongoing discussion, because lack of engagement with nationalist political parties and associations did not necessarily equate to a lack of awareness about nationality (Cole 2012). Furthermore, if scholars have justifiably questioned the ‘success’ of nationalism at the popular level, the relevant scholarship has in turn indicated that imperial loyalties worked within certain limits (Cole and Unowsky 2007a). Finally, work on societal militarization, on the military and state administration prior to and during the First World War, has pointed to the repressive

118

Nations, Identities and the First World War

aspects of the Habsburg state and the role of military-led policies in provoking alienation from or opposition to the state (Überegger 2002; Kronenbitter 2003; Gumz 2009; Cole et al. 2011). All this work thus raises anew questions about continuities in politics and society pre- and post-1914 that are relevant to assessments of loyalty and the viability of the multinational state. It also remains to be seen how the various new findings are to be reconciled. Proceeding in necessarily selective fashion, this chapter explores the contours of nationalization and imperial loyalties by looking at three issues. Firstly, it considers what kind of state the Habsburg Monarchy was and how far it was capable of gaining support from its subjects. Secondly, the discussion considers to what extent the war intensified processes of nationalization. Finally, the conclusion considers what role nationalization played in the erosion of loyalty to the dynasty and state (and here it must be emphasized that national identification and dynastic loyalty were not necessarily opposites or mutually exclusive).

National identification and imperial loyalties before 1914 In assessing the nature of the Austro-Hungarian dualist state in 1914, the most recent scholarship paints a substantially different, more nuanced picture than that pertaining a few decades ago (for an impressive new synthesis, see Judson 2016). In general terms, historians maintain that the Habsburg Monarchy qualifies as a ‘modern’ multinational state, with a mass electorate choosing parliaments in competitive elections informed by mass media (cf. the chapter by John Breuilly in this volume). Although, in the respective halves of the Habsburg Monarchy, the parliaments of Austria and Hungary were not sovereign, it was accepted – and expected – that governments command a parliamentary majority. Widespread political mobilization occurred as the franchise was gradually expanded in the Austrian half of the state (where universal manhood suffrage came into effect in 1907), while a series of constitutional provisions and provincial agreements (or ‘compromises’) sought to regulate relations between the main national groups (around eleven in number, comprising Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Ruthenes/Ukrainians, Slovaks, Romanians, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Italians, to use the main categories of spoken mother tongue in the official census records) (in overview, Haslinger 2012; see also Gammerl 2010). At the same time, the role of the state and public institutions grew as the ‘long nineteenth century’ progressed, providing a degree of social security, extensive elementary schooling, a series of secondary and tertiary educational institutions, and a burgeoning network of roads and railways (Deak 2015). Qualifications to this picture include the fact that the Hungarian electorate remained much more limited than in Austria, though the role of parliament was arguably more important (Gerő 1997). There too the legal provisions on language use did not prevent implementation of a nationalization programme (‘magyarization’), which restricted language rights and schooling provision but was only partially successful (Puttkamer 2003). Furthermore, the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, occupied in 1878 and annexed in 1908, possessed a special status, directly ruled from Vienna and without

Nationalization in the Habsburg Monarchy

119

proper political representation until 1910 (Okey 2007). Nevertheless, in terms of constitutions, rule of law and economic development, the Habsburg Monarchy was a modern multinational state, even if considerable variations existed across its diverse territory (Cohen 1998; Judson 2016). How far was this state capable of gaining the political loyalty of its subjects? While more work needs to be done in this area, particularly for the Hungarian half of the state, there is considerable evidence for the existence of widespread state and dynastic patriotism in the late Habsburg Monarchy. Alongside the development of national movements, various dynastic rituals and monarchical jubilees fostered a sense of loyalty to Austria-Hungary, often by making connections between specific members of the Habsburg dynasty and particular regions of the dual state, such as with the notable popularity of Empress-Queen Elisabeth in Hungary (see contributions in Cole and Unowsky 2007a). In this respect, national politics often linked into imperial events and rituals, using the symbols and language of dynastic loyalty as a means of advancing national claims and/or asserting dominance in a particular crownland (Unowsky 2005). In particular, broad sections of the male population in imperial Austria identified with the dynasty and state on the back of their experience of military service, as the rapid expansion of military veterans’ associations in imperial Austria in the last third of the nineteenth century testifies (universal male conscription was introduced in 1868) (Stergar 2012; Cole 2014). By 1912, almost 2,800 veterans’ associations had been founded in imperial Austria, with a membership several hundred thousand strong. While a key function of these groups was mutual insurance against ill health and funeral costs, their patriotic role and constant presence at public ceremonies became ever more important. Lower-middle-class and peasant veterans functioned as important mediators of dynastic loyalty and pro-Habsburg sentiment across imperial Austria (Cole 2014: 108–267). In this sense, one can speak of a form of ‘structural patriotism’ developing contemporaneously with national mobilization. In sum, by 1914 a process of mass politicization was firmly entrenched, which included a mobilization of national movements and the formation of a ‘patriotic milieu’, especially in the Austrian half of the state (Cisleithania). Most historians agree that in 1914 the number of citizens actively wanting or expecting the Habsburg Monarchy to collapse was, relatively speaking, very small (Cohen 1998, 2007; Bellabarba 2014).

Nationalization and the First World War In turning to the issue of how far the war intensified – or instigated – processes of nationalization among various sections of the population, an obvious starting point is popular reactions to the outbreak of war in 1914. However, as Gerhard Hirschfeld has noted, in contrast to research on other European countries, there has been relatively little detailed empirical research on the state that started the conflict (Hirschfeld 2011). General works have often assumed, based on the initially enthusiastic reactions of prominent intellectuals, that a ‘spirit of 1914’ existed in Austria-Hungary, and there seems little doubt that many among the educated Austrian-German middle classes, youth movements and church and state elites greeted the war’s outbreak with a burst

120

Nations, Identities and the First World War

of euphoria (Evans 1988; Rauchensteiner 1993: 100–3; Watson 2014: 61–6). These sentiments were shared by much of the Hungarian political elite as well (Gerő 2014). In Zagreb, capital of the Kingdom of Croatia in the Hungarian half of the empire, prowar demonstrations took place, with a markedly anti-Serb tone (Rauchensteiner 2013: 152). A sense of solidarity even extended initially to social elites in the port city of Trieste, where Italian National-Liberals had otherwise been at loggerheads with state officials about infringements of the municipal council’s autonomy. When the coffins of the murdered heir to the throne and his wife were paraded on their way to the rail station for the journey back to Vienna, an ‘anti-Slavic front’ was in evidence between patriotic loyalists and Italian National-Liberals; similar sentiments found expression in Pola/Pula and other parts of Istria (Winkler 2000: 324–5; Wiggermann 2004: 315–19). Nevertheless, new work suggests that much of the wider population was sceptical or fearful about the coming of war. Petronilla Ehrenpreis’s study suggests that the German-language Viennese papers did not express a frenzied lust for war but instead asserted the need for firm action in order to resolve the Habsburg Monarchy’s problematical relationship with Serbia. After the latter’s rejection of the AustroHungarian ultimatum, most papers hoped for a localization of the conflict and then viewed the subsequent escalation as a catastrophe. Though headlines and front pages predictably expressed patriotic solidarity, the inside pages described a variety of emotions among the population. Away from the cheering crowds encouraged by state officials and captured by photographers, trepidation and uncertainty fed into a public mood that already contained a good deal of fatalism (Ehrenpreis 2005: 31–65). Significant factors in the shaping of public opinion – or, more precisely, the presentation thereof – were censorship and restrictions on demonstrations, as the state apparatus intervened in draconian fashion against potential signs of ‘disloyalty’. In particular, this prevented the organization of socialist anti-war meetings or demonstrations, in contrast to Germany (Watson 2014: 66). Beyond the initial show of solidarity between state and municipal elites in Trieste, there were numerous arrests of workers who made comments critical of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as Borut Klabjan argues. Punitive measures were also enacted against those who made positive comments about the Serbs or negative predictions about Austria-Hungary’s prospects in the war. Moreover, denunciations against other individuals and attacks on Slav organizations or businesses in the aftermath of the assassination indicated the tensions and potential divisions behind the patriotic rhetoric (Klabjan, forthcoming). Elsewhere, ‘patriotic’ sentiments also combined with xenophobic actions, as some people took the opportunity to vent resentments against other ethnic groups. Several Czechs were beaten up in Upper Austria, resulting in one dead and several wounded in Linz (Rauchensteiner 2013: 150); elsewhere, such violence was repeated in different form upon Italy’s entry into the war in May 1915, which saw attacks throughout the Austrian Littoral on Italian national associations or cafés frequented by national politicians (Wedrac 2014). On balance, the degree of positive support and outright enthusiasm for war varied. In August 1914, public expressions of solidarity by town mayors in places such as Klagenfurt, Prague and Zagreb were accompanied by spontaneous actions to help the departing troops, as newspapers eagerly reported. Yet an undercurrent of seriousness

Nationalization in the Habsburg Monarchy

121

and doubt was evident among those swilling around the train stations, while ‘caution’ was the watchword for many Czech politicians. Above all, as Mark Cornwall suggests, where there was enthusiasm for war, this was short lived (Cornwall 2015a). Ongoing work on the province of Salzburg reinforces this picture. While sections of the NationalLiberal bourgeoisie and the leader-writers for the Christian Social press vociferously displayed active enthusiasm, the situation in the Salzburg countryside was decidedly more mixed, not unlike in other crownlands such as Silesia and Galicia (Watson 2014: 68–9). In most places in Salzburg, departures for the front occurred within a ritualized framework similar to the patriotic festivities and celebrations that had internalized the acceptance of patriotic duty over the preceding decades (Haas 1995). For many participants, festive send-offs thus helped to ‘normalize’ the moment of departure, as the chronicle in Tamsweg suggests (cited in Blinzer and Heitzmann 2008: 350–1): The departing troops were accompanied to the station to the ringing sounds of music from the civic riflemen’s corps and by a great crowd of people from the surrounding area. There, the imperial anthem was sung by everyone present before the boarding of the train. The mutual farewells followed, in the confidence of a successful outcome in the conflict against our enemies.

Such confidence, it should not be forgotten, was at this point in time being expressed before it became clear that a European and worldwide war was no longer avoidable (the majority of people only took in this emerging reality from 3 to 4 August onwards). Reading between the lines, however, there is a clear sense that some chroniclers either felt obliged to put a positive gloss on what was actually an ambivalent situation or projected their own (more enthusiastic) feelings onto others (especially when the chronicler concerned was a teacher or civil servant). Interestingly, one local paper, the Tauern-Post, described the above-mentioned scenes in Tamsweg in a rather different way, saying that everywhere there were anxious faces to be seen as 800 reservists departed on 1 August and that the mobilization had ‘torn holes into family life’; fathers found the departure hard to deal with (Tauern-Post, 8 August 1914). In other places, the departure clearly proved traumatic, as several chronicles testify: ‘The 31 July became an unforgettable day for Oberndorf and Göming. From the early hours, trains left with the mobilizing troops. The guard troop under Captain Edelmann saluted the comrades on their way, the horn player blew for prayer, and in between there occurred family scenes that are impossible to describe’ (cited in Dopsch and Roth 1998: 277). The chronicler does not go into individual detail, but the wrenching pain of farewell comes out firmly in the local record from Lofer: ‘Although a few of the unmarried men sang songs […], the departure of the greater part of those summoned was very hard and the tears flowed profusely. […] Lofer has experienced few such sad days as 1 August 1914’ (Chronik der Gemeinde Lofer: 36–7). Nevertheless, the majority of the population at the start of the war generally accepted that it should fulfil its ‘patriotic duty’. This was reflected in a call-up and mobilization of troops free of any major problems (Watson 2014: 90–2). Several places in Austria saw greater numbers of militia reservists reporting for duty than had been expected, but the number of volunteers – a phenomenon that requires more research – seems to be

122

Nations, Identities and the First World War

have been comparatively modest; those who did volunteer came overwhelmingly from the social elites and civil servants (Rauchensteiner 2013: 149–50; Watson 2014: 92–3). However, the real test came as the initial offensive failed to achieve its objectives in Serbia and as Austria-Hungary faced invasion from Russian forces in the East, which made clear that the war would not be over quickly. Generally speaking, the main offensive capability of the Austro-Hungarian Army was already severely reduced by the end of 1914, although its defensive and counteroffensive operations enabled it to hold out until 1918 (Tunstall 2010; Rauchensteiner 2013; Wawro 2014). In addition to the events on the battlefield, nationalization in the Habsburg Monarchy – as a situationally evolving process – was directly influenced by other significant turning points, of which only a few can be mentioned here: Italy’s entry into the war in May 1915; the accession of Emperor Karl in Austria-Hungary after the death of Emperor Franz Joseph at the end of November 1916; the recall of the Austrian parliament in spring 1917 (having been suspended since March 1914); the revolutions in Russia in 1917 and the latter’s subsequent withdrawal from the war (for accounts of the war, see the new synthesis in Watson 2014; overviews by Zückert 2011; Cornwall 2012; Haslinger 2014). In short, the interaction between individual experiences of war and broader geopolitical developments potentially affected national orientations and allegiances to the Habsburg state in different ways for different ethnic groups, according to time and circumstance. For example, with the Ukrainian national movement split between ‘Old Ruthene’, ‘Russophile’ and ‘Austrophile’ wings, motivations to fight against Russia in the East varied, as did the degree of mobilization. Thus, women like Pavlyna Mychailyshyn and Hanna Dmyterko, who already came from a nationalized milieu, joined the Ukrainian Legion formed in Lemberg/L’viv/Lwów in order to fight on the Austro-Hungarian side for the national liberation of Ukrainian-speaking territories from Russia; they were emboldened, too, by the vision of an independent state, which of course went beyond the aims of the Habsburg government (Leszczawski-Schwerk 2011). By contrast, other Slav-speakers were potentially less motivated to fight against Russia and to identify with this aspect of the Austro-Hungarian war effort. For Slovenes and Croats, for example, the fight against Russia appealed much less than the war against Italy, which turned the conflict into a defence of home territory. Slovene peasant writings expressed the desire to take revenge on the Lahi (Italians) or polentarji (polenta-eaters) for having brought the brutality of war so threateningly close to home (Verginella 2015). In assessing nationalization during the First World War, it is therefore necessary to differentiate between three possible causes for the formation or intensification of national sentiment: firstly, alignment between national interests and the objectives of the Austro-Hungarian government; secondly, alienation from the state, due to the deprivations caused by the war and/or treatment by state actors (above all, the army); thirdly, active engagement with a national programme that envisaged autonomy or independence. At the same time, the evaluation of what difference the war made to popular attitudes to the nation also raises methodological questions. Much testimony from the ordinary population only arose from the circumstances of the war, meaning that it is not always possible to discern how far the individual in question was already nationalized prior to 1914.

Nationalization in the Habsburg Monarchy

123

There are, of course, numerous examples of the war affirming or intensifying national sentiments already formed before its outbreak. For members of the Polish Socialist Party in Austrian Galicia, adhesion to a national programme was well established before 1914, and the workers and craftsmen who joined the Polish Legion mobilized by Józef Piłsudksi with support from the Austro-Hungarian Army were continuing an established tradition of national activism (Watson 2014: 97–9). From a different direction, Giuseppe Bresciani, a young barber from Riva del Garda in Italian Tyrol/Trentino, readily embraced the anti-Habsburg recruitment efforts of his Russian captors in 1916 because – having been taken prisoner in the early part of the war – he came from a nationalist family that had already demonstrated pro-Italian sentiments in 1866 (two uncles had fought with Garibaldi’s free-shooters) (Fait 1991). Bresciani’s case raises a further methodological issue, because his conscription into the Habsburg Army actually masked his strong national identification with Italy. His story is similar to that of Second Lieutenant Antonio Budinich from Lussinpiccolo/ Mali Lošinj, off the coast of Istria, who referred to himself in his memoirs as ‘an enemy of Austria’ but nevertheless served in the Austro-Hungarian forces and rejected the idea of desertion. Aside from feeling a sense of duty to those serving under him, Budinich feared repercussions for his family if he changed sides, having seen how, when on leave in Lussingrande/Veli Lošinj, ‘three or four fanatically Austrianist individuals (austriacanti) had the life of the place and every single person under control’ (Budini 2013: 132, 177–9). In addition, both of these individual histories have implications for the question of how much weight to give to the statistics on those volunteers who left Austria-Hungary to fight on the Italian side. For Trentino, for example, Alessio Quercioli gives a figure of 687 volunteers in the Italian Army, compared to the approximately 60,000 who fought on the Austro-Hungarian side (Quercioli 2008). Precise numbers for the Austrian Littoral (comprising Trieste, Istria and Görz and Gradisca) are harder to obtain, but in the summer of 1914 more than 60,000 troops entered the AustroHungarian ranks, including 32,500 from Trieste and district. Immediate post-war estimates for ‘Italian volunteers’ from the Littoral arrived at a figure of 1,600–1,700, but this number was almost certainly inflated by double counting and the inclusion of some who were in fact Italian citizens; the true figure was probably a couple of hundred less (Todero 2008). Most volunteers came from the educated middle classes and were members of national associations, meaning that they had already ‘become national’ prior to the war. What had altered was the situational possibility of changing sides since the outbreak of hostilities, although – as the example of Budinich indicates – not everyone who sympathized with an anti-Habsburg nationalist programme availed themselves of the opportunity to do so. If nationalist volunteers were a small minority, national identification among the majority of the population was influenced by the intensified interaction during the war between different ethnic groups on the one hand and between individuals and the more interventionist state on the other hand. Rudolf Kučera’s careful analysis of the experience of Czech soldiers indicates how the war diminished the space for individuals to remain nationally ambivalent (Kučera 2013). This was partly a result of the numerous losses experienced by the Habsburg Army in the first six months of the war, as army units were hastily merged or reformed, and partly due to the diminishing linguistic

124

Nations, Identities and the First World War

competence of an officer corps that was likewise severely devastated. Kučera points to the experience of the carpenter Vojtĕch Berger in the bilingual (Czech/German) 91st infantry regiment. Although Berger was tending towards a Czech orientation before the war’s outbreak, he spoke both languages equally well and volunteered to join a linguistically mixed platoon. Initially, the greatest dividing line within the army was between officers and men; maltreatment by officers was a source of aggravation in many units, as the diaries of many Slovene soldiers also testify (Novak-Popov 2010). Increasingly, soldiers resented the inadequacy of food and clothing supplies. As the deprivation worsened and the heavy-handedness of the Austrian-German-dominated officer corps increased, differences became nationalized. Repeated insults from officers towards Czech soldiers played a significant part in Vojtĕch Berger’s increasing selfidentification as Czech, which even led him to refuse to speak German during a hospital stay (Kučera 2013). Many of these insults involved accusations of ‘unreliability’ or ‘treachery’, with such insinuations being deliberately fostered by army commanders, in a reverse mirror image of the claims made by Edvard Beneš and other exile politicians about Czech ‘resistance’ to Austro-Hungarian oppression. Although almost 90,000 former legionnaires were officially recognized in post-1918 Czechoslovakia, the number remains small in comparison to the total of 1.4 million Czech and Slovak soldiers mobilized in the Austro-Hungarian armed forces over the course of the war (Zückert 2006: 111). Moreover, motivations varied considerably among soldiers captured on the eastern or southwestern fronts who later joined the legions fighting against AustriaHungary. In practice, some soldiers certainly did feel a national motivation, but other factors often played a more significant role: pressure from the governments of the captor states, incentives to return home, the prospect of better treatment (including food and clothing), ideological reasons (after 1917, sympathy with the Russian Revolution), or the opportunity to escape the monotony of imprisonment (Rachamimov 2002: 115– 22). While the myth-making surrounding the legionnaires was successful in the long run, there was in fact little substance to the claims about treachery on the actual field of battle. A recent study by Richard Lein meticulously dismantles many of the legends surrounding the supposed desertion of the 28th infantry regiment in April 1915 and alleged treachery among the 35th and 75th infantry regiments in the battle near Zborov in the summer of 1917. Rather than soldiers abandoning Habsburg colours at the first opportunity, the respective collapses of the frontline were due to a variety of material and operational shortcomings: already diminished troop contingents, poorly trained or inadequate numbers of reservists, weakly built defensive positions and an underestimation of the opponent by the Austro-Hungarian commanders (Lein 2011). Nevertheless, as Christian Reiter has suggested, while there is no substantial evidence for mass desertion, treachery or deliberate collusion with the Russians, some Czech soldiers – such as those in the 36th infantry regiment at Sieniewa in May 1915 – may well have been less motivated than those in other units, given that (partly for national reasons) many did not identify strongly with the war against Russia (Reiter 2012, 2014). Here too, therefore, nationalization worked in complex ways. For every Giuseppe Bresciani, ready to take the chance on changing sides for national reasons, there were

Nationalization in the Habsburg Monarchy

125

men like Giacinto Giacomolli, a peasant from Saccone, who saw action in Galicia at the start of the war and also endured a lengthy spell in captivity. Unlike Bresciani, Giacomolli consciously rejected the chance to join legionnaire units being recruited by the Italian Army in Russia (Antonelli 1995: 119–26). Such examples are instructive because the experiences of Trentine soldiers are among the best researched areas of the First World War in Austria-Hungary. For many, a raised – or even new – consciousness of national belonging was part of the war experience. For example, Livio Bais, a peasant from Terragnolo in Trentino born in 1884, testified to the absorption of Austrian patriotic rhetoric when noting down a song from the start of the war: ‘For Serbia I do depart/Farewell, my beauty/ And my heart/I leave to you. // For my fatherland/I’m off to fight/I’m a soldier/I serve the Emperor […] // But do not weep, oh parents/Because we’ll be the victors against Russia/We are Trentines/We fight hard/Not even death/Can make us tremble’ (cited in Cole 2014: 314). However, contact with other soldiers, especially when wounded or in captivity, created a new level of awareness of nationality within the context of the multinational army. Thus, Biasi reflected in captivity: ‘finding myself alone of Italians, I have nothing else to do but write’ (Antonelli 2008: 123). Similarly, Pietro Pompermaier, who was hospitalized in October 1914, noted in his diary: ‘in my room, we are 57 sick belonging to all the nations, we Italians are only three’ (Antonelli 2008: 122). This national awareness might take on a political component, but – as the writings of many soldiers testify – for the most part it centred on a longing for the homeland, Trentino (Rasera and Zadra 1987). As Qunito Antonelli’s thorough study of the diaries and letters of Trentine soldiers suggests, wartime experiences created disillusionment with and resentment towards those in authority, especially officers. This might lead to infractions of military discipline but rarely to revolt, desertion or a form of nationalism embracing Italian independence. Religious sentiments remained important for many, while the ‘feeling of being daily victims of the authoritarianism of German and Hungarian officers almost never transmuted into the adoption of an Italophile, irredentist stance’ (Antonelli 2008: 132; emphasis in the original). Interestingly, the diary of Erich Mayr, from Brixen in the southern part of Germanspeaking Tyrol, likewise suggests a strong attachment to the home region above all else. From an impoverished petty bourgeois family, Mayr showed a firm sense of patriotic duty towards emperor and fatherland, influenced by his unbroken Catholic faith. Showing a firm consciousness of ‘German-ness’ as well, Mayr employed pejorative descriptions when referring to Italy’s entry into the war in 1915. For example, he composed a poem about his desire to return from the Galician front to his homeland in order to force out the ‘treacherous Italian’ (den tückischen Welschen) (Brandauer 2013: 182). Such sentiments were based on well-established stereotypes current before 1914, influenced by the mid-century wars of Italian independence. Hence the effect of the First World War was to intensify these sentiments, above all when Mayr began to recognize the probability of defeat in early October 1918: ‘I was almost in tears due to longing for home and a further pain gouged and dug into me. Our watchmanmountain and all the surrounding peaks and valleys will perhaps be ceded to the hereditary Italian enemy in a few months – foreign, Italian property. The lofty summits, consecrated with Tyrolean blood, red and true, fought for with German courage’

126

Nations, Identities and the First World War

(Brandauer 2013: 386). In Mayr’s case, however, this strand of German identification was not overtly politicized. His main point of reference was the homeland, his ‘dear little country Tyrol’ (Tiroler Ländle), the dreamy longing for which permeates his entire wartime writings (Brandauer 2013: 67).

Conclusion In conclusion, nationalization in the Habsburg Monarchy during the First World War evidently worked in complex ways. Overall, the experience of war certainly contributed to a process of national differentiation, but for a number of reasons this did not directly or immediately translate into outright support for nationalist programmes and desires for independence. In the first place, in some spheres, such as educational provision and charitable and dynastic-patriotic work, national activism was enhanced – and legitimized – by the war, with the result that the state and the war effort were supported by civil society (Hsia 2014; Watson 2014: 4). This was true of women’s patriotic activism in Vienna, with their voluntary campaigns to send small gifts to soldiers at the front, and of educational and charitable work across Bohemia (Healy 2004; Zahra 2008; Hämmerle 2014). Secondly, the weight attributable to national motivations in creating disillusionment with the Austro-Hungarian state needs to be carefully placed in relation to issues of welfare provision, economic scarcity and social disruption. For example, Iris Rachamimov’s study of the experience of Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war on the Eastern Front assesses letters written mainly in the German, Czech and Polish languages, in which POWs expressed views about the relief effort in Russia. Rachamimov divides the complaints into four main categories: maltreatment of certain army ranks or social classes; national discrimination (other nationalities being treated better than one’s own); neglect by the state (apparent indifference towards the prisoners’ fate); and mismanagement of the relief effort. Of the 472 letters examined for the period January to November 1917 and for which complaints could be clearly categorized, only 16.5 per cent had a firmly national motivation, slightly more than grievances deriving from perceived maltreatment on the basis of rank or class. By far, most complaints related to mismanagement (36 per cent) or state indifference (19 per cent) (Rachamimov 2002: 191–213). Even if Austro-Hungarian relief efforts were more extensive than usually assumed (Egger 2014), it seems likely that the subjective experience of POWs was one of neglect. More than national ideas, this fuelled resentment towards the authorities. In similar fashion, Mark Cornwall has looked at the effects of propaganda efforts by the so-called Padua Commission, set up by the Italian Army with advisors from Britain, on troops fighting on the southwestern front. Cornwall focuses specifically on the 42nd Honvéd Infantry Division (part of the Hungarian Territorial Army), a predominantly Croat unit whose reliability in 1918 ‘had been increasingly shaken by the material and ideological crisis in the hinterland’ (Cornwall 2000: 287). This unit, like others, was increasingly hit by desertions from the spring of 1918 onwards, though only a minority went over to the Italian side (the majority melting away into the hinterland). Cornwall finds that, of forty-three desertions to the Italian 4th Army

Nationalization in the Habsburg Monarchy

127

between mid-May and mid-June 1918, only eight instances could be attributed to reasons falling under the heading of ‘nationalism’ (including propaganda appealing to national sentiments and those who joined Czech or Serb legions). Anti-Austrian sentiments played a role for a further four soldiers, but the majority deserted due to war-weariness, ill treatment and, above all, hunger (Cornwall 2000: 301). In relativizing the import of national motivations, both these sets of findings dovetail with earlier arguments by Péter Hanák on censored letters in the First World War. Hanák maintained that socio-economic factors and the yearning for peace moved ordinary people to consider a break with the Habsburg state (Hanák [1973] 1998). This was especially the case after 1917, when the impact of the Russian Revolution raised the temperature of political debate and intensified demands for reform. In this sense, as historians have argued for Czech society, what growing numbers of people – and, eventually, the majority – rejected was the war itself, above all because of the ever mounting losses of life and the increasingly desperate situation with regard to food and heating supplies (Kučera 2016). In terms of its prominence in causing disillusionment with the Habsburg state and in mapping out a definite alternative to it, therefore, the process of nationalization had a more limited impact among the ordinary population than was once assumed. Nonetheless, this has to be placed within the wider context of the crisis of legitimacy that the Austro-Hungarian government was facing. In other words, the more crucial development was that loyalty towards state and dynasty had also reached its limits and began to erode decisively over the course of 1918. Widespread socio-economic deprivation began to bite from 1916 onwards, when harvest levels were only half those in 1914 (Rettenwander 1997: 194–220; Moll 2014: 85–115). After the assassination of Austrian prime minister Count Karl Stürgkh in October 1916 and the death of Emperor Franz Joseph the following month, the advent of the new ruler, Emperor Karl, potentially created the conditions for a new start or ‘remobilization’ akin to that occurring in other belligerent states around this time. The recall of the Austrian parliament had raised popular expectations about peace, meaningful political reform and an end to economic scarcity, yet the strikes and unrest evident in 1917 and early 1918 indicated that the regime was failing to deliver (Healy 2004: 31–86; Moll 2014: 134–82). Above all, the repressive actions of the Habsburg state and its rigid categorization of national groups according to perceived reliability – a form of ‘negative nationalization’ from above – played a decisive role in the process of state dissolution. This was visible across a range of areas, and the process was driven principally by the army. In this respect, militarization constituted a continuation of developments evident before 1914, such as the use of treason trials against people suspected of being a ‘danger to the state’ or the primacy given to military planning in border areas of the state (Cornwall 2015b; Fontana 2016). Efforts by the army and bureaucracy to ‘denationalize’ society and politics had profound repercussions in the arrest of thousands of ‘suspect individuals’ in the early phase of war and also created conflicts between the military and civilian administrators (Hsia 2014: 305). These policies had devastating consequences in areas inhabited by South Slavs (such as southern Styria and the Littoral), where a mood of anxiety and suspicion prevailed.

128

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Martin Moll provides ample documentation of the wave of persecution unfolding in August and September 1914 in Styria, where – abetted by denunciations from the local citizenry – gendarmes arrested 950 people in the period up until the end of the year, including numerous Slovene clergymen accused of ‘Serbophilia’ (Moll 2007: 251–300). In Galicia, faced with Russian invasion, a situation of extreme violence unfolded, with the army playing the leading role. Precise figures are difficult to ascertain, but at least several thousand were summarily executed for suspected collusion with the enemy (Watson 2014: 155, gives an inflated figure of 25,000–30,000, based on claims made in the Austrian parliament in 1917 but not empirically substantiated; these figures are considerably modified by Leidinger et al. 2014: 85). Whatever the true number, the eyewitness memoirs of Franz Arneitz from Carinthia, serving with the 7th infantry regiment, leave no doubt as to the brutality involved. Arneitz recalled the fate of three girls arrested and accused of spying, although they claimed they had simply returned to their house to fetch money left in a cupboard: ‘On their knees, they begged the major to let them free, but he remained cold and said: “Clear off with the rabble (Bagage). I’ve already given my order!” The three girls were hauled like calves to the next tree and hoisted up. I felt weighed down, as I watched these innocents being hanged’. Arneitz reflected sadly on the fact that these girls were Austrian citizens and that ‘the state, to which they belong, deals with them so terribly. The officers’ motto is: “Better ninetynine innocents die, than let one guilty person escape”’ (Arneitz 2016: 30). Such policies were accompanied by the long-term internment of political suspects and harsh treatment of refugees from war-torn areas, who in effect became prisoners of their own state (Stibbe 2014; Livio 2017). In those areas directly designated war zones, military courts proved particularly draconian in the implementation of the general law book on crimes and offences. As Oswald Überegger has shown, the workings of this instrument proved especially harsh in Italian-Tyrol, where the military used its provisions to pursue a persistent campaign against those suspected of ‘disloyalty’, within both the army itself and the local population (Überegger 2002). At the same time, Germanization policies with regard to place names in the war zones on the southwestern front reinforced a symbiosis between radical German nationalism and sections of the military high command (Wiggermann 2004: 333–7). In the final analysis, therefore, the ‘limited nationalization’ of members of the ordinary population mattered less to the Habsburg Monarchy’s gradual dissolution in the autumn of 1918 than did the waning of the state’s legitimacy and dynastic loyalty. In returning to the three strands of recent research outlined at the start of this chapter, it is necessary to affirm that a sense of national identity remained for many citizens potentially compatible with acceptance of the Habsburg state, even deep into the war (contrary to what earlier research implied). Yet, although there was not necessarily a mass national clamour to join another state (such as Italy) or to form a new independent one (e.g. among Slovaks), the other side of the coin is that support for the status quo had drained away. If loyalty is defined as an implicit contract between ruler and ruled based on mutual obligations, then this relationship gradually broke down as the war progressed, and rapidly so during 1918. The key point here is to acknowledge that, in any given province, dynastic loyalty was often linked to national issues and expectations about maintaining or challenging a position of ethnic

Nationalization in the Habsburg Monarchy

129

dominance. When this logic offered ever diminishing returns, national politicians were prepared to remove the Habsburgs from their frame of reference. For example, Czech leaders were already taking this step in 1917, while Germans in Styria were moving towards doing so by the spring of 1918, when they felt the government was insufficiently curbing Yugoslav activism (Moll 2014: 150–1; Watson 2014: 474–7). This reflected the shift in the relationship between people and state in territories with South Slav populations, as Yugoslav agitation – simultaneously national and ‘supranational’ – was initially led by Anton Korošec, a parliamentary deputy from southern Styria, who helped formulate the May 1917 declaration in favour of South Slav autonomy within a restructured Habsburg state (Moll 2014: 147–54). As Mark Cornwall has argued, many of those involved would still have preferred a Yugoslav option under Habsburg auspices for security reasons (as well as traditional ties), but this option became increasingly unrealistic as concrete reforms failed to appear and the Habsburg Army’s position quickly deteriorated after the failure of the June 1918 offensive on the Piave River (Cornwall 2012). With the state increasingly unable to meet popular expectations about peace, food supplies and living costs, the changing dynamics of the international political situation presented alternative options for national elites in centres such as Prague, Cracow, Trieste and Ljubljana. The gradual military and economic collapse opened up a power vacuum into which nationalist social and political elites could step, now also openly endorsed by Allied policy (cf. Hiers and Wimmer 2013). While the degree of popular nationalization was not as widespread as once supposed, Habsburg loyalism had surely run its course. In this sense, the fact that the war created new circumstances for national elites and political parties proved to be of greater significance than the degree to which the population as a whole identified with a national programme or thought in national terms (Moll 2007: 537–40).

References Archives/Newspaper Chronik der Gemeinde Lofer, Gemeindearchiv Lofer. National Archives CAB/24/43, Intelligence Bureau, Department of Information, Weekly report on Austria-Hungary, XXVIII. 2nd March, 1918. Tauern-Post.

Literature Antonelli, Q., ed. (1995), Emilio Fusari – Giacinto Giacomolli – Fioravante Gottardi, Trento: Museo Storico in Trento. Antonelli, Q. (2008), I dimenticati della Grande Guerra: la memoria dei combattenti trentini (1914–1920), Trento: Il Margine. Arneitz, F. (2016), Meine Erlebnisse in dem furchtbaren Weltkriege 1914–1918: Tagebuch eines Frontsoldaten, edited by A. Kuchler, Vienna: Kremayr & Scheriau. Bellabarba, M. (2014), L’impero asburgico, Bologna: Il Mulino.

130

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Beneš, E. (1917), Bohemia’s Case for Independence, London: George Allen. Blinzer, C., and K. Heitzmann (2008), ‘Tamsweg im Ersten Weltkrieg’, in K. Heitzmann, A. Heitzmann and J. Heitzmann (eds), Tamsweg. Die Geschichte eines Marktes und seiner Landgemeinden, 350–62, Tamsweg: Pfeifenberger Verlag. Brandauer, I., ed. (2013), ‘Der Krieg kennt kein Erbarmen’: Die Tagebücher des Kaiserschützen Erich Mayr (1913–1920), in collaboration with the South Tyrolean Culture Institute, Innsbruck: Wagner. Budini, A. (2013), Le memorie di guerra di papà, Trieste: Beit. Cohen, G.B. (1998), ‘Neither Absolutism nor Anarchy: New Narratives on Society and Government in late Imperial Austria’, Austrian History Yearbook, 29: 37–61. Cohen, G.B. (2007), ‘Nationalist Politics and the Dynamics of State and Civil Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1867–1914’, Central European History, 40: 241–78. Cole, L. (2012), ‘Differentiation or Indifference? Changing Perspectives on National Identification in the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy’, in M. Van Ginderachter and M. Beyen (eds), Nationhood from Below: Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century, 96–119, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cole, L. (2014), Military Culture and Popular Patriotism in Late Imperial Austria, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cole, L., and D.L. Unowsky, eds (2007a), The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy, Oxford and New York: Berghahn. Cole, L., and D.L. Unowsky (2007b), ‘Introduction: Imperial Loyalty and Popular Allegiances in the Late Habsburg Monarchy’, in L. Cole and D.L. Unowsky (eds), The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy, 1–10, Oxford and New York: Berghahn. Cole, L., C. Hämmerle, and M. Scheutz, eds (2011), Glanz–Gewalt–Gehorsam. Militär und Gesellschaft in der Habsburgermonarchie (1800 bis 1918), Essen: Klartext. Colley, L. (1994), Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Cornwall, M. (2000), The Undermining of Austria-Hungary: The Battle for Hearts and Minds, London: Macmillan. Cornwall, M. (2012), ‘Austria-Hungary and “Yugoslavia”’, in J. Horne (ed.), A Companion to World War I, 371–85, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Cornwall, M. (2015a), ‘The Spirit of 1914 in Austria-Hungary’, Prispevki za novejso zgodovino, 55 (2): 7–21. Cornwall, M. (2015b), ‘Traitors and the Meaning of Treason in Austria-Hungary’s Great War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 25: 113–34. Deak, J. (2014), ‘The Great War and the Forgotten Realm: The Habsburg Monarchy and the First World War’, Journal of Modern History, 86: 336–80. Deak, J. (2015), Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dopsch, H., and H. Roth, eds (1998), Laufen und Oberndorf. 1250 Jahre Geschichte, Wirtschaft und Kultur an beiden Ufern der Salzach, Laufen-Oberndorf: Eigenverlag der Stadt Laufen and Marktgemeinde Oberndorf. Egger, M. (2014), ‘Kriegsgefangene’, in H. Kuprian and O. Überegger (eds), Katastrophenjahre. Der Erste Weltkrieg und Tirol, 439–60, Innsbruck: Studienverlag. Ehrenpreis, P. (2005), Kriegs- und Friedensziele im Diskurs. Regierung und deutschsprachige Öffentlichkeit Österreich-Ungarns während des Ersten Weltkriegs, Innsbruck: Studienverlag.

Nationalization in the Habsburg Monarchy

131

Evans, R.J.W. (1988), ‘The Habsburg Monarchy and the Coming of the War’, in R.J.W. Evans and H. Pogge Von Strandmann (eds), The Coming of the First World War, 33–55, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fait, G., ed. (1991), Una generazione di confine. Cultura nazionale e Grande Guerra negli scritti di un barbiere rivano, Trento: Museo Storico in Trento. Fontana, N. (2016), La regione fortezza. Il sistema fortificato del Tirolo: pianificazione, cantieri e militarizzazione del territorio da Francesco I alla Grande Guerra, Rovereto: Museo Storico Italiano della Guerra. Gammerl, B. (2010), Untertanen, Staatsbürger und Andere. Der Umgang mit ethnischer Heterogenität im Britischen Weltreich und im Habsburgerreich, 1867–1918, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Gerő, A. (1997), The Hungarian Parliament 1867–1918, New York: Columbia University Press. Gerő, A. (2014), ‘Die politische Elite Ungarns und der Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges. Politische Haltungen und kulturelle Motivationen’, in M. Mesner, R. Kriechbaumer, M. Maier and H. Wohnout (eds), Parteien und Gesellschaft im Ersten Weltkrieg. Das Beispiel Österreich-Ungarn, 93–105, Vienna: Böhlau. Gumz, J.E. (2009), The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914– 1918, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haas, H. (1995), ‘Krieg und Frieden am regionalen Salzburger Beispiel 1914’, Salzburg Archiv, 20: 303–20. Hall, J., and S. Malešević (2013), ‘Introduction: Wars and Nationalisms’, in J. Hall and S. Malešević (eds), Nationalism and War, 1–28, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hämmerle, C. (2014), Heimat/Front: Geschlechtergeschichte/n des Ersten Weltkriegs in Österreich-Ungarn, Vienna: Böhlau. Hanak, H. (1962), Great Britain and Austria-Hungary during the First World War: A Study in the Formation of Public Opinion, London and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hanák, P. ([Hungarian version 1973] 1998), ‘Vox populi: Intercepted Letters in the First World War’, in The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest, 179–212, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Haslinger, P. (2012), ‘How to Run a Multilingual Society: Statehood, Administration and Regional Dynamics in Austria-Hungary, 1867–1914’, in J. Augusteijnt and E. Storm (eds), Region and State in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation-Building, Regional Identities and Separatism, 111–28, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Haslinger, P. (2014), ‘Austria-Hungary’, in R. Gerwarth and E. Manela (eds), Empires at War, 1911–1923, 73–90, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Healy, M. (2004), Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hiers, W., and A. Wimmer (2013), ‘Is Nationalism the Cause or Consequence of the End of Empire?’ in J. Hall and S. Malešević (eds), Nationalism and War, 212–54, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hirschfeld, G. (2011), ‘“The Spirit of 1914”: A Critical Examination of War Enthusiasm in German Society’, in L. Kettenacker and T. Riotte (eds), The Legacies of Two World Wars: European Societies in the Twentieth Century, 29–40, Oxford and New York: Berghahn. Hsia, K. (2014), ‘Who Provided Care for Wounded and Disabled Soldiers? Conceptualizing State-Civil Society Relationship in First World War Austria’, in J. Bürgschwentner, M. Egger and G. Barth-Scalmani (eds), Other Fronts, Other Wars? First World War Studies on the Eve of the Centennial, 303–28, Leiden and Boston: Brill. Jászi, O. (1929), The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

132

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Judson, P.M. (2006), Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Judson, P.M. (2016), The Habsburg Empire: A New History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. King, J. (2002), Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Klabjan, B. (forthcoming), ‘The Outbreak of World War I in Habsburg Trieste’, in M. Cornwall (ed.), Sarajevo 1914: Spark and Impact. Kożuchoswki, A. (2012), ‘An Unintended but Planned Suicide: Nationalities, the Monarchy and the Great War in the Inter-War Historiography’, in Vienna Army History Museum (ed.), Der Erste Weltkrieg und der Vielvölkerstaat, 243–51, Vienna: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum. Kronenbitter, G. (2003), “Krieg im Frieden”. Die Führung der k.u.k. Armee und die Großmachtpolitik Österreich-Ungarns 1906–1914, Munich: Oldenbourg. Kučera, R. (2013), ‘Entbehrung und Nationalismus. Die Erfahrung tschechischer Soldaten der österreichisch-ungarischen Armee 1914–1918’, in B. Bachinger and W. Dornik (eds), Jenseits des Schützengrabens. Der Erste Weltkrieg im Osten: Erfahrung – Wahrnehmung – Kontext, 121–37, Innsbruck: Studienverlag. Kučera, R. (2016), Rationed Life: Science, Everyday Life, and Working-Class Politics in the Bohemian Lands during World War I, New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Kuprian, H., and O. Überegger, eds (2014), Katastrophenjahre. Der Erste Weltkrieg und Tirol, Innsbruck: Studienverlag. Leidinger, H., V. Moritz, K. Moser, and W. Dornik (2014), Habsburgs schmutziger Krieg. Ermittlungen zur österreichisch-ungarischen Kriegsführung 1914–1918, St. Pölten, Salzburg and Wien: Residenz. Lein, R. (2011), Pflichterfüllung oder Hochverrat? Die tschechischen Soldaten ÖsterreichUngarns im Ersten Weltkrieg, Vienna: Lit Verlag. Leszczawski-Schwerk, A. (2011), ‘Amazonen, Emanzipierte Frauen, “Töchter des Volkes”. Polnische und ukrainische Legionärinnen in der österreichisch-ungarischen Armee im Ersten Weltkrieg’, in L. Cole, C. Hämmerle and M. Scheutz (eds), Glanz–Gewalt– Gehorsam. Militär und Gesellschaft in der Habsburgermonarchie (1800 bis 1918), 55–76, Essen: Klartext. Livio, A. (2017), ‘The Wartime Treatment of the Italian-Speaking Population in AustriaHungary’, European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire, 24: 185–99. May, A.J. (1968), The Passing of the Habsburg Monarchy 1914–1918, 2 vols, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Moll, M. (2007), Kein Burgfrieden. Der deutsch-slowenische Nationalitätenkonflikt in der Steiermark 1900–1918, Innsbruck: Studienverlag. Moll, M. (2014), Steiermark im Ersten Weltkrieg. Der Kampf des Hinterlandes ums Überleben 1914–1918, Graz: Styria. Novak-Popov, I. (2010), ‘Slowenische Tagebücher aus dem Ersten Weltkrieg’, in V. Rašp (ed.), Isonzofront 1915–1917. Die Kultur des Erinnerns, 117–35, Vienna and Ljubljana: Založba. Nuñez Seixas, X.M. (2002), ‘Das Europa der Nationen? Nationalitätenprobleme und europäische Öffentlichkeit zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen (1918 bis 1939)’, in J. Requate and M. Schulze-Wessel (eds), Europäische Öffentlichkeit. Transnationale Kommunikation seit dem 18. Jahrhundert, 144–69, Frankfurt a.M.: Campus. Okey, R. (2007), Taming Balkan Nationalism: The Habsburg ‘Civilizing Mission’ in Bosnia, 1878–1914, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nationalization in the Habsburg Monarchy

133

Puttkamer, J. von (2003), Schulalltag und nationale Integration in Ungarn. Slowaken, Rumänen und Siebenbürger Sachsen in der Auseinandersetzung mit der ungarischen Staatsidee 1867–1914, Munich: Oldenbourg. Quercioli, A. (2008), ‘“Italiani fuori d’Italia”. I volontari trentini nell’esercito italiano 1915–1918’, in F. Rasera and C. Zadra (eds), Volontari italiani nella Grande Guerra, 201–14, Rovereto: Museo Storico Italiano della Guerra. Rachamimov, A. (2002), POWs and the Great War: Captivity on the Eastern Front, New York and Oxford: Berg. Rasera, F., and C. Zadra (1987), ‘Patrie lontane. La coscienza nazionale negli scritti dei soldati trentini 1914–18’, Passato e presente, 14/15: 39–73. Rauchensteiner, M. (1993), Der Tod des Doppeladlers: Österreich-Ungarn und der Erste Weltkrieg, Graz: Styria. Rauchensteiner, M. (2013), Der Erste Weltkrieg und das Ende der Habsburgermonarchie 1914–1918, Wien: Böhlau. Reiter, C. (2012), ‘Die Causa Infanterieregiment 36. Zur Problematik der Tschechen in der k.u.k. Armee im Ersten Weltkrieg’, in Vienna Army History Museum (ed.), Der Erste Weltkrieg und der Vielvölkerstaat, 215–42, Vienna: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum. Reiter, C. (2014), ‘“Panslavistische und antimilitaristische Wühlarbeit?” Friktionen bei tschechischen k. (u.)k. Truppenkörpern im Kriegsjahr 1914’, Études Danubiennes, 30 (1–2): 45–59. Rettenwander, M. (1997), Stilles Heldentum? Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte Tirols im Ersten Weltkrieg, Innsbruck: Wagner. Roshwald, A. (2001), Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–1923, London: Routledge. Šedivý, I. (2001), Češi, české země a Velká válka: 1914–1918, Prague: Lidové noviny. Seton-Watson, R.W. (1976), R.W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs: Correspondence 1906– 1941, vol. 1: 1906–1918, edited by the British Academy and the Institute of Croatian History, University of Zagreb, London and Zagreb: British Academy and University of Zagreb. Stergar, R. (2012), ‘National Indifference in the Heyday of Nationalist Mobilization? Ljubljana Military Veterans and the Language of Command’, Austrian History Yearbook, 43: 45–58. Stibbe, M. (2014), ‘Enemy Aliens, Deportees, Refugees: Internment Practice in the Habsburg Empire, 1914–1918’, Journal of Modern European History, 12: 479–99. Tanner, M. (1997), Croatia: A Nation Forged in War, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Todero, F. (2008), ‘I volontari del Litorale Austriaco’, in F. Rasera and C. Zadra (eds), Volontari italiani nella Grande Guerra, 183–99, Rovereto: Museo Storico Italiano della Guerra. Tunstall, G. (2010), Blood on the Snow: The Carpathian Winter War of 1915, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Überegger, O. (2002), Der andere Krieg. Die Tiroler Militärgerichtsbarkeit im Ersten Weltkrieg, Innsbruck: Wagner. Überegger, O., ed. (2006), Heimatfronten: Dokumente zur Erfahrungsgeschichte der Tiroler Kriegsgesellschaft im Ersten Weltkrieg, 2 vols, Innsbruck: Studienverlag. Unowsky, D.L. (2005), The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 1848–1916, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Valiani, L. (1966), La Dissoluzione dell’Austria-Ungheria, Milan: Il Saggiatore.

134

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Verginella, M. (2015), ‘Il nemico e gli altri nelle fonti Slovene della Grande Guerra’, in T. Catalan (ed.), Fratelli al massacro. Linguaggi e narrazioni della Prima guerra mondiale, 69–93, Rome: Viella. Watson, A. (2014), Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914–1918, London: Allen Lane. Wawro, G. (2014), A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire, New York: Basic Books. Wedrac, S. (2014), ‘Triest 1914/15: Italiener, Slawen und der Mythos der österreichischen Regierungsverschwörung’, Études Danubiennes, 30 (1–2): 103–18. Wiggermann, F. (2004), K.u.k. Kriegsmarine und Politik. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der italienischen Nationalbewegung in Istrien, Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Winkler, E. (2000), Wahlrechtsreformen und Wahlen in Triest 1905–1909: Eine Analyse der politischen Partizipation in einer multinationalen Stadtregion der Habsburgermonarchie, Munich: Oldenbourg. Zahra, T. (2008), Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands 1900–1948, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zeman, Z.A.B. (1961), The Break-Up of the Habsburg Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zückert, M. (2006), ‘Memory of War and National State Integration: Czech and German Veterans in Czechoslovakia after 1918’, Central Europe, 2: 111–21. Zückert, M. (2011), ‘Imperial War in the Age of Nationalism – The Habsburg Monarchy and the First World War’, in J. Leonhard and U. von Hirschhausen (eds), Comparing Empires: Encounters and Transfers in the Long Nineteenth Century, 500–17, Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht.

8

The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the Limits of Nationalization in Southeastern Europe Nikolai Vukov

A recurrent theme in the interpretation of the First World War is that in many respects the war enabled the final stage of modern nationalism and, being an expression of the nationalization processes in numerous states and communities worldwide, acted to further deepen these processes, giving them a continuing national dimension in the war’s aftermath. The collapse of several great empires during and after the war and the formation of many new nation-states are indicative of this, reinforced by postwar political, social, economic and cultural developments. While examples of this can be found across Europe and on other continents too, the region of Southeastern Europe presents a particularly interesting case – firstly, because of the special place that the region occupied in this global war. The war started in the Balkans, and the first military operations took place in the peninsula (on the border between Serbia and Austro-Hungary). Furthermore, it lasted longest in this part of Europe, armed conflict concluding only with the end of the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–22. Indeed, in Southeastern Europe, the war commenced earlier than 1914, since the two Balkan wars were a prelude and a ‘local test’ of the forthcoming world conflict (Mulligan, Rose and Geppert 2015). Secondly, the region is particularly interesting because of the accelerations in the ongoing nationalization processes around the turn of the century. The Great War was a catalysing moment for the Balkan states and their attempts to achieve national autonomy, unification and consolidation. Opening a new page in the ‘entangled histories of the Balkans’ (Daskalov and Marinov 2013), the war is of key importance in understanding the complexities of national formation that have occurred in the area since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The aim of this chapter is to shed light on the role of the Great War in nationalization processes in Southeastern Europe, highlighting particularly the ‘limits of nationalization’, which the war revealed as impossible to overcome. Focusing on factors that had a strong impact on the relationship between state, nation and loyalty, the chapter will analyse the double-sided nature of nationalization in Southeastern Europe – how it was both stimulated and inhibited by the war. On the one hand, there was popular enthusiasm for defending the dignity of the nation-state, enabling

136

Nations, Identities and the First World War

national unification or taking revenge for injustices inflicted by neighbouring states and competing nationalities; on the other, there were difficulties in mobilizing citizens for military action, insuperable obstacles to ‘unifying’ the different ethnic, religious and cultural groups under an overarching ‘national’ umbrella and also inadequate legitimacy of the ‘big national narratives’ confronted by the scale of war losses and the traumatic memories of this world conflict. This chapter will tackle factors such as the Balkan wars, modernity and modernization, transnationalism, population displacements and public commemorations, and it will propose the interpretation of the Great War as a ‘limit’ that concluded a stage of nationalization processes but that also opened new paths for their continuation and reassertion.

The Balkan wars as a ‘limit’ of nationalization The double-sided meaning of the ‘limit’ was well outlined already in the beginning of the Great War, particularly with respect to the impact of the two Balkan wars, which predated the emerging world conflict and to a large extent determined the choices that states in the region made between the two warring sides in the war (Hall 2000; Kiessling 2002; Afflerbach and Stevenson 2007). The Balkan wars played a key role in shaping visions of ‘achieved’ or ‘unachieved’ national unification in the different states in the peninsula; they contributed to strengthening irredentism and led to retribution for territories lost or defence of territories gained – and thus to political programmes that promoted the continuing fight for the cause of the nation. However, the Balkan wars resulted also in a weariness among the population that fought on the front (both the war fronts and the home front), gruesome recapitulations of the high price paid in death tolls and wounded returnees, disillusionment about the worthiness of yet another military conflict, hostilities towards neighbouring states and their populations and, not least, hostility towards their own national(ist) elites for throwing their citizens into a bloodbath. Having been preceded by the six months of conflict of the two Balkan wars, the First World War was directly affected by their legacy in the region – visibly expressed in the collision of the states’ appeals for renewed mobilization and the popular response indicating challenged loyalties (see in this respect the point of ‘structural patriotism’ and its link to national mobilization in L. Cole’s contribution in this volume). Hence the major challenge to the states in the region (irrespective of their being victorious or defeated in the Balkan conflicts) was to overcome this legacy and advance policies of nationalization, despite the signs of their inevitable limitations. To outline the contours of this process, one must note that in all the existing states of the region, as well as those that were about to appear on the European map, there were continuous struggles not only for national independence but also for unification of ethnonational groups within the territories of one state. ‘National unification’ was a leading factor in both the internal and foreign policies of the Balkan states and determined most of their political activities in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth; moreover, although promoted vehemently by intellectuals, it was not merely an elitist construction but received broad support among the population. While for Bulgaria it was marked by continuous efforts to overcome the ‘injustices’ of

The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire

137

the Berlin Congress of 1878 and to integrate territories that contained a substantial Bulgarian population (particularly in Thrace and Macedonia), in territories under Ottoman rule there was intensification of the armed struggle, expansion of the chetnik movement and uprisings aimed at territorial cessions and independence from the ailing empire. Serbia’s ultimate goal throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth was to reclaim ‘national lands’ from the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, just as Romania was contesting territories from Austro-Hungary and Russia in order to fulfil its national-unification agenda. Grounded in different ideological programmes and visions developed by nation-minded intellectuals, these national liberation and unification processes forged among the national groups and states in the Balkans a shared ‘commitment to the nationalist project, homogenization of their societies, and ideology of irredenta’ (Biondich 2011: 62). Accumulated in the course of decades, the determination about national unification intensified particularly after Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia in 1908 and the visions of political and territorial reshuffling that emerged in different parts of the peninsula – expressed in proclamations and political manoeuvres of elites in the different Balkan states but supported by significant parts of their populations. Bulgaria proclaimed its independence and started preparing for a military campaign against the Ottoman Empire, while Serbia shifted its foreign policy: incapable of achieving expansion to the north, it cast its eyes on territories within the Ottoman domain. In any case, authorities in Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Monte Negro were well aware that none of these countries separately had sufficient resources to wage a successful war with the Ottoman Empire and that they had no other choice than to launch it together (Vukov 2015a). As in many subsequent cases in the area, the task of carrying out processes of nationalization was largely dependent on the neighbour states. Enthusiasm for the proclamation of the First Balkan War was nurtured both by the perception that it was a historical mission, which would unite the Christian people in the Balkans against a common enemy, and that it would close five centuries of historical breach. The latter is particularly striking because the religious aspect was still – for the bulk of the populations concerned – much more important than any national project. This enthusiasm was additionally strengthened by a series of military victories that the Balkan allies won against the Ottomans, which exercised a strong psychological effect and enhanced expectations about the results of the nationalization campaigns. Understandably, not all of the allies could achieve these expectations – as witnessed by a new configuration of allies for a Second Balkan War and military actions that led to Bulgaria’s defeat. The other Balkan states saw the Second Balkan War as an opportunity to enlarge their territory and to bolster the rightfulness of their pretensions. With victories in the Second Balkan War, Greece, Serbia and Romania managed to expand territorially with the coveted lands of Thrace, Macedonia and southern Dobrudja and to enhance their power and prestige. Still, despite the declared intentions and the substantial territorial rearrangements in the region, the unification of national groups in their respective nation-states did not take place, leaving the door open for many further cases of territorial contestation, political tension and conflict in the peninsula (Vukov 2015a). The close link between national groups and territories automatically transformed claims of national unification into demands for land acquisition,

138

Nations, Identities and the First World War

ambitions for territorial enlargement and cases of irredentism. States in the region promoted such demands and ambitions, which ultimately helped to stir nationalist feelings among both the national elites and the population at large. The policies of uniting ethnic and cultural groups within one nation-state were hindered by the lack of clear-cut definitions about such groups in the ethnically, religiously and culturally mixed regions in Southeastern Europe as well as by the expressions of nationalism that these policies instigated. An eloquent illustration is the Ottoman state, which after the Balkan wars gradually adopted an Islamic Ottomanism, but the end of the Second Balkan War showed also the contours of ethnic and cultural nationalism all over the peninsula. Measures for national and regional assimilation carried out by Serbian and Greek authorities in Macedonia, by Bulgarians in the Rhodope Mountains and by Romanians in southern Dobrudja were largely comparable and showed a trend towards nationalization that was common to all states in the region. Such measures clearly reveal sensitivity about in-/exclusiveness of membership in the nation – an idea that resonated already with the establishment of the national states in the peninsula but that started to gain momentum during the Balkan wars. The new frameworks of national identification sharpened attempts to coerce (whether by attempted expulsion or assimilation) ethnic and religious minorities in the respective Balkan states and led to substantial population waves from the redistributed territories, the most numerous being Muslims flowing into the Ottoman Empire and Bulgarians returning to their nation-state (Neuburger 2004; Biondich 2011). These frameworks were about to be contested and violently rearranged during the Great War, and in this respect too, the Balkan wars represented a movement that had to be coped with and negotiated within a new military conflict. More importantly, the end of the Balkan wars did not satisfy the territorial appetites of either the victorious or defeated states, as could be seen in home affairs and the international arena, in the political and the cultural spheres, in the propaganda rhetoric and in practice. In the years before the outbreak of the First World War, in all the Balkan nation-states, various military societies, paramilitary groups and clandestine organizations were formed or strengthened. The most notorious one – ‘Unification or Death’ or the ‘Black Hand’ – was formed in May 1911 in Serbia with the primary goal of incorporating all Serbs living under imperial rule into the extended borders of an enlarged Serbian Kingdom. As John-Paul Newman remarks, the Black Hand took as inspiration the secret German and Italian societies of the nineteenth century that had been instrumental in realizing German and Italian unification (Newman 2015: 123). By no means an exception in just Southeastern Europe, such societies and organizations promoting militarism and irredentism in furtherance of the nationalization agenda (understood as ethnic consolidation and territorial expansion) proliferated in all countries after the Balkan wars: in vanquished Bulgaria; in victorious Greece, Serbia and Romania; and in newly established Albania. Enhanced militarism and a predisposition to violence were realities in the Ottoman state too. To sum up, in both victorious and defeated state entities in the region, the Balkan wars left a very steady legacy of tension and unresolved disputes or unleashed nationalization ambitions. The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First Balkan War and the redistribution of its European territories made the Habsburg Empire

The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire

139

the primary target for reclaiming national territories in the years afterwards (on the Habsburg Empire and the nationalization policies within its territories, see L. Cole’s contribution in this volume). For its part, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy underscored its opposition to granting autonomy in some of its territories, which stirred up guerrilla and terrorist actions in these lands. In response, a series of terrorist attacks on Habsburg officials occurred before the outbreak of the First World War (Newman 2015: 126). Although these conspiratorial nationalist movements did not have widespread support, it was notable that a member of one such revolutionary youth group – ‘Young Bosnia’ – assassinated the heir to the Habsburg throne, starting the First World War. Emphasizing all this, the Balkan wars can be regarded as a launching point for the ambiguous ‘limits to nationalization’ in Southeastern Europe during the First World War in several respects: (1) showing the possibilities of accomplishing the nationalization agendas for some of the states in the region but also revealing the limitations that these would inevitably face by both the Great Powers and the immediate neighbour states; (2) completely exhausting the political, military and human capacity of the states in the area but also indicating that in a new major conflict the diminished forces would gather up again and would continue to pursue the nationalization ideal; and (3) drawing goals for the unification of national groups in one state but also showing that some of these goals would prove elusive, due to international power politics, the competing agendas of other nation-states in the peninsula and the utopian nature of the national projects, which were impossible to realize in practice. Most of the states in the region found the First Balkan War to be a ‘limit’ in that they managed to achieve through it most of what they had dreamt of before and in that, by throwing off the centuries-long Ottoman rule, they could distribute most of its European territories to the nationstates that came in its stead. This ‘limit’– which largely encompassed what was wished for – was immediately crossed with the Second Balkan War, when appetites and new nationalization plans appeared on the agenda. This line was about to be crossed yet again in the Great War, when the appetite for retribution and the persistent dream of national unification were translated into actions within the unprecedented world conflict. For most populations in the region, involvement in the Great War was not met with euphoria or enthusiasm for a new military trial but was seen as unavoidable in many respects. It seemed to be a logical mission to undertake in light of the unresolved issues left by the Balkan wars and in light of the nationalization agendas that had remained unfulfilled. The Great War was about to be a testing ground for all this.

Modernity and modernization as a ‘limit’ A second major factor that needs to be emphasized with regards to the limits of nationalization in Southeastern Europe is related to modernity – understood not only along the lines of emerging modernization and transformations of traditional ways of life but also as marking a new stage in the social contract and a new relationship between citizens and their sovereign (see Breuilly 1993, as well as J. Breuilly’s chapter in this volume). While the First World War found most of the states in Southeastern

140

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Europe embracing modernizing tendencies (including urbanization, the development of new industries and communication technologies etc.), it also proved to be a checkpoint for the political realm and the founding principles that formed the basis of the citizens’ loyalty to their ruler and to the state in general. Fighting for the fatherland to a large extent also meant fighting for the sovereign, an expression of unquestioned subordination to his will for defending a particular cause. With all its multifaceted dimensions, national unification was usually a cause promoted by the rulers in respective nation-states or within empires, and support for this idea was also support for the expressed royal will – which clearly indicates a modernized role of the traditional monarch in a nationalization project. The First World War was thus instrumental not only in achieving national unification but also in shaping the contours of the respective state and monarchic powers in the region – and in showing the perilous consequences of their losing the authority to negotiate and control. The Great War marked a turning point in citizens’ relationship to the nation-state and its ruler – from a largely automatic status of obedience and mobilization in response to royal appeals, through the fatigue and disillusionment over the course of military action, to a state of disappointment and disclaim of state policies in the final phases of the war. While this has been most starkly expressed in the cases of the defeated states in Central and Southeastern Europe (Bulgaria, Hungary and the Ottoman Empire), it is visible in the victorious states as well, where victory parades and celebratory overtones were coupled with mourning rituals for the dead, popular resentment in newly acquired territories, political contestations etc. The Great War thus played a key role in developing new, modern notions of citizenship – ones related not only to ethnic and cultural belonging under a nationalizing paradigm but also to the extraction of resources from the idea of civic participation – as expressed on the front line, in the rear, through political expression etc. Indeed, this key role was an acceleration and confirmation of pre-1914 continuities, but it formed a new stage in the relationship between citizens and their state. Seeking to achieve a nationalizing policy in territories over which they would be able to reign, sovereigns in the region were stymied by the ideas of the Volk’s participation not merely as subjects and enactors of the royal will but also as citizens who could directly get involved in the political process. No doubt this was a long and complicated process, of which the Great War was only an episode, but it was a critical and decisive one indeed. It found a voice in the various anti-war protests at the onset of the conflict, in the riots during the war (both at the frontlines and in the rear), in the numerous cases of desertion and in the overall denial and protest against the futility of this military enterprise. Aside from being a natural human reaction against bloodshed, atrocity and economic deprivation in the name of a meaningless cause, these acts of protest were also indicators of the split in political loyalty, a new perspective for interpreting the citizen’s position in the political realm. This split had European and worldwide dimensions in general, but it was particularly well expressed in Southeastern Europe, where two of the great empires met their end over the course of the war and its aftermath and where the nationalization policies of different ethnic groups and nation-states strongly contributed to the length and exhaustion of the war effort. The course of the war showed, however, a change of attitude (from popular enthusiasm to resignation and bitterness, economic and emotional

The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire

141

exhaustion etc.), in which identification with the national cause was unavoidably taken over by popular mass movements and adopted different (social) narratives and goals. Speaking of modernity, we may wish to remind ourselves that authors such as Ernst Gellner interpret the national identity as something functioning in the context of ongoing industrialization and modernization. Gellner pays special attention to the role of the intelligentsia, which is somewhat separated culturally from its usual milieu and tries – through the ideology of nationalism – to meet the structural challenges of the newly emerged industrial society (Gellner 1983). Although this disparity between the intelligentsia and the population is well illustrated by rising nationalism in Southeastern Europe, most societies in the region do not confirm entirely Gellner’s notion of nationalism as a necessary result of modernizing tendencies and industrialization. States in the region were economically and politically backward in the nineteenth century, at least compared to the rest of Europe, and this conditioned the rapid spurt of modernization and industrialization, in order to catch up with the more ‘civilized’ Western world (Daskalov 1997, 1998; Todorova 2005). This confirms Gellner’s second line of interpretation on how elites in backward regions used nationalism as part of their effort to emulate the more ‘advanced’ nation-states. In any case, the belated industrialization shaped decisively the imagining of national identities – it was accomplished most often through symbols that were part of the previous undisrupted rural everyday life (Detchev 2010: 37). The first two decades of the twentieth century were hence a period of economic liberalization and political modernization for most of the states in the region, and this brought forth explicit modernizing tendencies that impacted the policies and practices of nationalism. One of the most eloquent expressions in this respect was the growth of national armies in the Balkans, which were modern and trained in line with the existing military standards in the rest of Europe. Both the Balkan wars and the First World War showed the existence of powerful national armies that were ready to fight for the national ideals and were testimonies of the states’ modern standing in the ranks of other European nations. Certainly, modernization tendencies as a track to nationalism found expression in many other spheres – in printed communications, the media and the access of the printed press to the public; in the work of different philologists, historians, ethnographers etc. who constructed images of the nation, its history, language and cultural identity (Anderson [1983] 1991); in the institutions and state policies (tax system, employment, education etc.); and in social routines and everyday life (Brubaker 2004; Mishkova 2009). Emerging well before the establishment of independent states in the region, these became instrumental in the policies followed by the nation-states and in their attempts to build in their citizens the sense of national identity and loyalty. Thus, if we follow the observations of Michael Billig with regards to Western societies, after the creation of a given national state, nationalism became an addition to everyday life, something that was taken for granted by the population (Billig 1995). These symbols and practices represented one and the same every day, continuous and intimate reminder for the ordinary citizens of the nation-state about their affiliation to the nation and about their core identity. Within what can legitimately be termed as ‘invented traditions’, one can see an irreversible trend of subordinating the existing

142

Nations, Identities and the First World War

cultural practices and social relations to the homogenizing models promoted by the nation-state and its institutions – a modernizing trend that – like other modernization processes – took place in the Balkans within compressed time limits (Mishkova 1995; Daskalov 1997). From such a perspective, modernity can be understood as offering another perspective to the limits of nationalization in Southeastern Europe. While proposing a ‘civilizational’ model to import from Western Europe and to modernize the societies in the region along the recommended political, economic and social transformations, modernization also catapulted these societies into a situation of abrupt change, where traditional practices and social relationships had to be maintained while still embracing the external, institutionalized and homogenizing policies of the nation-state (Smith 1998)]. At the end of the First World War this process was far from complete, and, while being exposed to the benefits of modernity, societies in the region (as elsewhere) also had to suffer its perils: modern armies became associated with death and destruction; the state’s control of its citizens became unavoidable (particularly in cases of conscription and military duty); educational and cultural institutions strove to coin a steady and uniform pattern of national identity. Labelled until today as the ‘first modern war’, the Great War showed the other side of modernization: technological progress leading to human destruction; political dedication to a modern sovereign leading to mass mobilization; and social and cultural advancement leading to unidimensional identities under nationalizing labels. The war was an ultimate point to these modernization tendencies, but it was not an endpoint to any of them. In the post-war period, many of them were taken up again and sought to find new ‘modern’ forms and expressions.

Transnationalism as a ‘limit’ In addition to the Balkan wars and modernization, the issue of transnationalism is a third major factor that deserves attention in relation to the limits of nationalization. The First World War occurred at a moment when communication and transnational contacts were intensifying, and the war itself contributed to the mobility of populations and the strengthening of international connections. While military arrangements and diplomatic negotiations before and during the war were themselves indicators of such cross-border initiatives, the major turning point for the emerging transnationalism were the anti-war and peace movements and the activities of women’s organizations (Fell and Sharp 2007; Sharp and Stibbe 2011). These not only provided an alternative view to existing notions of patriotism and nationalism but also challenged the masculine and militarist outlook of nationalization agendas. Although many of these movements varied significantly (left- or right-wing inclinations, moderate or radical, pro-nationalist or pro-cosmopolitan), their programmes of reshaping the existing social and political status quo were largely shared. We can see the emergence and quick development of these movements in most European countries during the war and afterwards. The societies of Southeastern Europe were not an exception. In all of them, existing or newly created women’s organizations heeded the anti-militarist

The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire

143

stance and maintained a civic platform that in many cases counteracted nationalizing state policies and insisted on links and ideologies that surpassed national confines. In an arena of continued military actions, the idea of breaking through the national framework and promoting unification and shared ideas across national borders was a necessity. Being important counter-movements to the nationalization policies during the war years, the pacifist and gendered approaches to war gained momentum during the peace negotiations and in the processes of cultural demobilization in the interwar years (Horne 2005). Internationalism – as outlined by Glenda Sluga – was a key strand in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century thinking, and it was stimulated by developments in communication and trade and by the exchange of ideas and cultures (Sluga 2013: 11–44; Sharp, Acsády and Vukov 2017). This found expression in the establishment of international court regulations and international laws, in the enhancement of trade across state boundaries and in the harmonizing of transport and tariffs but also very palpably in the emergence of various organizations that promoted international cooperation often underlined with visions of world peace and a world community or brotherhood. While being seen by many as an evolutionary stage that would gradually supersede the nation-state, internationalism was sometimes viewed with suspicion, accused of cosmopolitanism and a lack of rootedness in national traditions. It is one of the paradoxes of the twentieth-century social and intellectual history that the decades before and during the global war saw in parallel both the most extreme forms of nationalism and the first important steps towards building international community of nations. An eloquent illustration of the latter was the upsurge of feminist activism at the beginning of the century, which found expression in several important international women’s organizations: the International Council of Women (founded in 1888) and the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance (founded in 1904). Extremely active before the outbreak of the First World War, they worked across national boundaries to improve the situation of women. With the onset of the world conflict, they began to emphasize stopping the war and building a sustainable peace (Rupp 1997). These ideas resonated also at the international women’s congress in The Hague in 1915, but in the whirlpool of nations’ involvement in military campaigns, maintaining women’s collaboration across enemy lines was problematic. Still, until the end of the war, feminist movements were closely related to pacifism and promoted the ideals of international peace and anti-militarism as a corrective to the male-dominated militant discourse. Although in the patriarchal societies of Southeastern Europe some of these ideas had a relatively narrow resonance, they were about to gain momentum in the last phase of the war and at its aftermath. Certainly feminist movements were not the sole form of political and civic activism that tried to curb the nationalist agendas; suffice it to note the socialist and the socialdemocratic traditions that pervaded most of Europe at the time and were a major voice of opposition against the world conflict. For Southeastern Europe, the socialist movements formed a steady tradition in most states of the peninsula (particularly in Serbia and Bulgaria) and in the first decade of the twentieth century started to play an important role in both domestic and international affairs (Haupt 1972; Kruse 1993).

144

Nations, Identities and the First World War

The socialist movements were about to gain further power in the course of military campaigns, when socialist ideas were promoted among soldiers at the war front and when social unrest and popular protests in the rear were often instigated by socialist activists. The October Revolution in Russia, and the enormous impact that it had internationally in the context of a global war, additionally stimulated these movements, providing them with an example to emulate. The Soldiers’ uprising that actually led Bulgaria to put down arms after the breakthrough at Dobro Pole in September 1915 was partly influenced by socialist propaganda along the frontlines, as was also the case with many other fronts in Europe (Vukov 2016). Emerging as a competing force to nationalism, socialism was gaining stronger popular significance by the end of the war and was a major factor in restraining nationalization policies in the post-war decades. The calls for internationalism became particularly strong in the immediate postwar years when, in the context of ongoing demobilization, the need to overcome national hostilities was indeed pressing. After the armistices of autumn 1918, the major international women’s organizations again demonstrated a firm commitment to post-conflict reconciliation and to a swift restoration of international relations. In the series of congresses that took place during the 1920s, the major feminist organizations repeatedly used their influence to protest against the disastrous consequences of the war and the continuing injustices caused by the peace treaties. The network of feminist organizations provided the best vehicle by which the defeated states could maintain links on an international level within the international isolation into which they had fallen after the war. The feminist congresses became occasions for protesting the redrawing of national borders, the waves of refugees and the terrible economic conditions caused by the post-war reparations. Still, despite the sympathy expressed to representatives of women’s organizations from the defeated states, hostility along national lines was visible even at such international forums, and only in the late 1920s did the isolation of defeated states begin to dissipate. The perils of nationalization, demonstrated in the extreme during the war, were unable to prevent the national framework from dominating in international relations. The establishment of the League of Nations could only partly curb the continuing nationalism after the war. No less perplexing was the situation with the socialist movements, which, fascinated by the October Revolution, underwent gradual splits into branches over the choice of whether or not to follow the Soviet model. Truly, in the post-war years, the banner of internationalism was promoted most vehemently by communist and social-democratic movements across Europe, but it remained entrapped in the national histories of the various European states, and in opposing the nationalizing tendencies within their own nation-states, different branches of the movement got national shades as well (Linden 1988). For the countries of Southeastern Europe, internationalism turned into a doubleedged sword as a limit to nationalization. While before the war – in each of the states in the region –voices for reducing nationalist rigor were largely viewed as betrayal to the national cause, during the war, collaborating with enemy nations became even more unacceptable (Sharp, Acsády and Vukov 2017). Appeals to put down arms, even when coupled with social riots and hunger protests, fell on deaf ears, and in not one of the states in the Balkans could feminism or socialism take a leading

The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire

145

role in withdrawing the country from the war (except, only partly, with the Soldiers’ uprising in Bulgaria). On a general public level, internationalism was seen as a possible limit to nationalization, but either very vaguely and as alien to the local traditions or pragmatically downgraded as limited solely to ending the battles and playing successfully in the territorial contests with the neighbours. In this respect, the region of Southeastern Europe did not differ much from the rest of the states on the continent, as both here and elsewhere internationalism could not go much beyond the national framework. What made the region different was that, both during and after the war, internationalism almost exclusively meant partnership with West European countries (or, for the socialist movements – with the Soviet state), minimizing any closer contacts and collaboration with neighbouring states. In truth, both feminism and communism offered new visions that, if not actually dissolving, at least moderated the scope of the national frameworks in the Balkans. Within a context of enhanced nationalization of the public sphere, politics and culture, these two major internationalist trends proposed links and partnership that did not submit to national criteria. Understandably, these visions did not find fertile ground in societies of the region – and the reason for this was not merely these movements’ novelty and lack of experience. For the traditional and patriarchal culture that prevailed in the societies of Southeastern Europe, feminism’s call for the empowerment of women was a threat, shaking the grounds of patriarchal order and threatening the stability of the social order. No less a threat was attributed to the socialist movements, which were accused of ruining the existing societal foundations, instigating chaos and polluting the social body with alien ideas. Although unable to curb nationalization tendencies, both feminism and social-democratic movements had a strong symbolic role as limits to nationalization, which explains the strong reaction against them in the region’s nation-states during the war. In a context of rigid national frames and enhanced policies of nationalization, feminism and socialism were legitimately viewed as threats to the unity of the national body and as a contagion with which the states of the region had to cope, or at least oppose and try to prevent. It was not a surprise that, in the face of the war’s destruction, women and socialists were also blamed for being one of the reasons for the war – simply because they were global and ‘international’ (Sharp 2007).

Population displacements as a ‘limit’ to nationalization A fourth factor related to the limits of nationalization in Southeastern Europe is population mobility and the resettlement of large groups of people during the war and afterwards, with related shifts in state belonging and national identification. In Southeastern Europe, this process had already intensified during the Balkan wars and entered into a new and even more dramatic phase during the Great War. The military campaigns and battles in different parts of the peninsula, the substantial territorial rearrangements that took place over the course of the two Balkan wars and the remapping of the region after the peace treaties in 1913 resulted in masses of people who fell victim to military actions, suffered oppression, fled to different locations

146

Nations, Identities and the First World War

and resettled in new areas (see the contributions of P. Gatrell and E. Salvanou in this volume). The armed conflicts of the Balkan wars and the post-war territorial status quo produced mass waves of refugees, forcing various groups to resettle in different parts of the peninsula and compelling nation-states to mount huge efforts on behalf for their accommodation, settlement and integration. These population shifts conditioned states’ involvement in the forthcoming world conflict; they had an enormous impact on the efforts of national mobilization at the onset of the conflict, in maintaining the ideals of national unification during the war and in consolidating the national community for keeping the spirit until the war end. During the mobilization stage, refugees and minority groups in newly gained territories were both involved in the preparation of the military campaigns and used in war propaganda for testimony about the need for national unification, national defence or the accession of territories outside state boundaries. This continued in the military, where soldiers from different territories who held different regional identities had to fight together for the national cause of a state that they had often not yet embraced (e.g. ethnic Turks fighting in the Bulgarian Army, Slovenes and Croats in the AustroHungarian Army, Bulgarians in the Greek Army etc.). While in some instances this helped to shape group identities along the proposed national paradigm, in others it produced a counter-effect of resignation among the different nationalities and tensions and oppositions that continued to resonate after the war and after the peace treaties were signed. The policies of accommodating war refugees and nationalizing ethnic and cultural groups within a dominant national narrative characterized state efforts during the entire interwar period. Although formally completed with international agreements and population exchanges in the 1920s, the integration of resettled and minority groups within the respective state territories as a result of the Balkan wars and First World War continued to pose a major challenge (and major opportunities too) for nationalization policies for decades afterwards. Aspiring to their own ‘national unification’, all states in the region faced the challenge of incorporating territories into the state but also had to deal with population groups that could not subscribe to the respective national labels. As a result of the Balkan wars, every state in Southeastern Europe had acquired new territories, which it had to administer and mold to the state’s policies of national identity. In order to preserve the status quo after the Second Balkan War and keep territorial acquisitions, Serbia, Greece and Romania initiated speedy processes of nationalization aimed at building a solid identity of affiliation to the new state among all their peoples. Thus, for example, existing Bulgarian institutions (schools, churches and monasteries) were closed and destroyed in the newly acquired territories, and the Bulgarian population in these territories faced political, economic and physical intimidation, cultural assimilation and pressure to declare as Serbs, Greeks or Romanians. Similarly in Bulgaria, animosity towards ‘brigand neighbours’ meant that any reference to the immediate enemies in the Second Balkan War was coupled with hostility. Unlike these other states, however, Bulgaria was actually flooded in 1913 with around 250,000 refugees from all neighbouring states (who had often endured extreme pressure, violence and economic deprivation) who had to receive subsistence, accommodation and settlement. A large part of this male population entered the ranks of the national army in the world

The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire

147

conflict and perished in the war fronts. A similar view of neighbouring states was taken in the most southeastern part of the peninsular, in the Ottoman Empire, where the loss of vast territories led thousands of Turks and Muslims from different parts of Macedonia and Thrace to leave native places that now were the domain of Christian states. Like other refugees, this new population also would face significant problems in settlement and adjustment, and a large portion of its male representatives would be swiftly mobilized and thrown into the carnage of the world war. Conscription and war have a special place in the history of human mobility in the area during the First World War and played a key role in the processes of nationalization that occurred in the different states of Southeastern Europe. In the course of the war, the nations and states in the peninsula fought on various fronts and in support of different sides in the conflict. Thus, for example, within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, units from Bosnia and Herzegovina fought not only in territories of Serbia, Monte Negro, Albania, Galicia, Bukovina, Russia and the Carpathians but also in Romania, Tirol and Isonzo. Greek soldiers fought together with French and British soldiers in Greece, and after that in Serbia, whereas Bulgarian troops came into direct conflict with Serbs, Greeks, Romanians and Russians, to stand up in Doyran against a list of other nationalities that fought on the side of the Allies. Romanian soldiers held battles in almost all possible directions, mainly in Dobrudja, Transylvania and Moldova. Romanians from Transylvania were also included in the Austro-Hungarian Army and fought on the Eastern Front, similarly to Montenegrins, who were also sent there, in order to avoid entering battles with their co-nationals (see details in Luthar 2016). The war stretched across the entire peninsula and included several large fronts, where armies and nationalities fought in different configurations. While mobilizations and the military campaigns could serve as a strong tool in construing the collective body of men fighting together for a cause, they also showed the impotence of imperial rule to hold different nationalities under one military flag, as well the limitations of national state policies, which often brought together men with diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds, belonging to different communities and maintaining divergent perspectives towards unification with the respective nation-states. The difficulties of integrating the various groups within the national policies of the states in Southeastern Europe continued with even greater sharpness after the world war, when – in the context of the peace treaties and the new territorial distributions that they dictated – new waves of refugees and displaced people started crossing state boundaries (Ballinger 2003; Dragostinova 2006). While the defeated countries of Hungary and Bulgaria faced the greatest challenges, numerous other population resettlements continued to take place around the borders throughout the region and continued to bring uneasiness in the policies of nationalization for at least a decade afterwards. In the 1920s, these policies were the object of various bilateral agreements and exchanges of population, such as the Ankara agreement of 1925 regarding refugees from Eastern Thrace to Bulgaria, the Mollov-Kafandaris agreement of 1927 between Greece and Bulgaria, the mutual exchange of population between Greece and Turkey during the war of 1919–22 etc. (Ladas 1932; Hirschon 1989; Dragostinova 2009). For at least a decade after the end of the war, all states in the region had to take measures that would facilitate the process of ethnic ‘unmixing’ along the newly drawn territorial and

148

Nations, Identities and the First World War

administrative lines of the respective state entities. Carried out in a systematic manner by the respective state administrations, these policies usually found popular expression too. The fervent and aggressive expressions of nationalism that usually accompanied these population resettlements were a clear indication that the immediate link between state territory and national identity would continue to keep its primary significance. Integrating different ethnic and religious groups into the state policies of nationalization not only posed a challenge indeed, but it also further solidified attempts to unite and homogenize societies in the region in ethno-national, religious, linguistic and cultural terms. While on the one hand the population removal and resettlements showed the futility of the nationalization agenda and that homogenization under a ‘national’ label was an unattainable goal, on the other hand it clearly showed the inability of states in the region to go beyond the nationalization paradigm. Striving to unify the prevailing ethno-cultural group within the its own territory, each of the countries in the region disregarded the presence of other ethnic groups and rarely mentioned them as holding a separate identity, thereby casting a veil of forgetting around the continuous practices of intercultural communication that had for centuries been a landmark of the region. In such a way, the First World War apparently led to a more outspoken consciousness about the ideal homogeneous state, national citizenship, ideas of who belonged to the nation and who did not and a clearer recognition of groups that formed national minorities. The conditions of the peace treaties and the various cases of population removal had yet another effect on the nationalization processes the region: in the post-war years they stimulated new eruptions of nationalism – in the defeated states attempting to revise or reverse the peace treaties (Detrez 2015) and in the victorious states striving to preserve the thus-established status quo. In each case, the displacement of large population groups from their native places and their resettlement in other states was a fact – a direct result of the nationalization tendencies of which the world conflict was among the sharpest peaks.

Commemorations as a ‘limit’ Finally, the limits to nationalization in Southeastern Europe can be clearly outlined through the policies of commemoration followed by the different states in the region. Despite its nature as a transnational event, the First World War was commemorated largely within the confines of national cultures, and its memory directly reflected some of the impulses that had contributed to its onset. The bloody harvest of human destruction placed societies worldwide in a situation where they had to cope with the losses, take care of the dead and ensure proper commemoration that would both be adequate to the post-war realities and manoeuvre between the processes of cultural demobilization and remobilization characteristic of the war’s aftermath. Repatriation of the remains of the dead, commemorative rituals, battlefield visits, monument building and state ceremonies were both a logical response of post-war societies to the mass human destruction and important practices that could appease the trauma and ensure continuity across the deep caesura carved by the war. Similar practices were widespread across Europe and on a world scale, but several characteristics need

The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire

149

to be outlined as specific for the commemorative practices in the region (Bucur 2004; Dimitrova 2005; Hariton 2016). Having been stipulated in the different peace treaties, care for the soldiers who had fallen in different regions (often outside the confines of the respective nationstate) was identified as a responsibility of the states where these soldiers were buried. The first monuments to the fallen in the war were erected either at the battlefields (where they were simple memorial signs, usually collective and with no individual name identification) or in the home towns and villages of the soldiers. Already in the first years of the war’s aftermath, different organizations for the care of the dead and honouring their memory were formed in each state in the region. Particularly notable was the one in Romania – Society ‘Cultul Eroilor’ (founded in 1919 and functioning under the patronage of Queen Marie), which developed a systematic policy of building hundreds of monuments in interwar Romania. Like similar organizations in the Balkans, it received a budget from the state but also relied on donations, mostly from former combatants and widows. In all states of the region, major public organizations were involved in commemorative activities, particularly the pillars of nation-building policies and practices: the army, the church and school institutions. Their involvement directly reflected the military, religious and educational overtones in commemorating the dead for the nation. This was visible in the choice of the official days for honouring the war dead, in the presence of military and religious symbolism in the rituals and in the overall organization of the ceremonies, which involved mayors, military authorities, priests, teachers and their pupils etc. Each special day of mourning and memory was linked with a day in the religious calendar (e.g. Ascension Day for Romania, Great Souls’ Day for Bulgaria etc.) and was supplemented with dates noting important war battles – such as the day of Serbia’s victory at Dobro Pole. The rituals of mourning – as Silviu Hariton remarks – were thus ones of communion but also of initialization into nationhood (Hariton 2016: 142). They continued the pre-war heritage of nationalism, militarism and religion, translating it through new forms of public remembrance that emerged in the post-war context. An eloquent example for tracing lines of continuity with the pre-war policies of nationalization was the set of attempts to construe national unity through the collective representation of the nation’s dead. Because the First World War had come so soon after the two Balkan wars, three wars in just a seven-year period, there had been insufficient time to commemorate the dead in the two Balkan wars; very often the monuments that were raised after 1918 in Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece commemorated those who had fallen in all three military conflicts. Symbolizing the role played by local communities in the struggle to unify or liberate the nation, many of these monuments bore visual elements identified as part of the national tradition – the coat of arms, the bravery cross, the lion, the eagle, the crown of medieval kings etc. (Vukov 2015b). They all had the purpose of emphasizing the ‘national identity’ of the dead and their belonging to a continuous and eternal community of the living and the dead, with clearly outlined ethno-cultural characteristics. Powerful expressions of this unity also included monuments to the Unknown Soldier, which were built during the 1920s in the capitals of most Balkan states. Following the primary examples of this monument

150

Nations, Identities and the First World War

type in London and Paris (on the development of the cult of the Unknown Soldier and the monuments of this type, see Mosse 1990; Inglis 1993), these monuments sought to (re)construct symbolically the torn national body through the symbolic unification and re-embodiment of all known and unknown fighters for the nation. It is no surprise that these attempts to represent through monuments the ‘transcendental unity of the Nation’ (Karnoouh 2013: 144) mobilized a range of symbolic actions, involving references to national territories (e.g. in interring soil from all major battlefields or from lands inhabited by co-nationals) and sacred chronologies (e.g. in using images and verses having links to ancient, medieval or national-liberation traditions), as well as state unity (as in the case of the monument in Belgrade, whose structure sought to symbolize the joined presence of eight main ethno-cultural groups in Yugoslavia). Behind these attempts to demonstrate national-cum-state unity, however, there lay many indications about limits of nationalization – which state policies would conceal or admit only reluctantly. For a large part of the local population in the territories that were ceded by peace treaties to Yugoslavia, Romania and Greece, the end of the war did not automatically signal ‘victory’. As Claude Karnoouh points out, in these countries, monuments dedicated to the people who died for their homeland, could not be built anywhere, given that a significant part of the citizens had fought on adverse sides and, beyond that, in some regions there were strong national minorities who did not recognize their belonging to the new state-states after 1920. (Karnoouh 2013: 143)

Thus, for example, in Yugoslavia the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs from Voivodina, and in Romania the Saxons and the Svábs, as well as a large part of the Romanian and Hungarian population in Transylvania, fought on the side of the Austro-Hungarian Army, and this conditioned their systematic exclusion from the lists of the dead. The situation of the Bulgarian population in Greece, Serbia, Macedonia and Dobrudja was similar: Bulgarians were dropped from the commemorative lists of the respective states, and their sacrifices were forgotten over time. Exclusion or marginalization along the lines of religious affiliation was very much the same. While post-war monuments and commemorations utilized religious symbolism, and particularly of the cross as a symbol of sacrifice, this also isolated the non-Christian communities and left unrepresented a large part of the Jewish and Muslim populations in these countries (Bucur 2004: 169–70). Together with the civilian victims, different societal groups (women, medical officers, social democrats etc.) also remained unrepresented in the monuments and commemorative ceremonies developed in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. Public commemorations also showed some of the limits of nationalization that had characterized the pre-war period and that bedevilled societies and states in Southeastern Europe long after the end of this world conflict. And this is evident not only in the exclusion and marginalization that characterized local and state commemorative practices as they strove to consolidate the national body. Despite the overwhelming practices of enlisting and honouring all who fell in the fight for the homeland and despite the various symbolic forms that were constructed to identify

The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire

151

even the nameless and the disappeared without a trace, it was obviously impossible to include all, to remember all, to pay due attention to every lost human life. The nationstate was indeed the most powerful and inclusive framework for remembering the fallen and for ‘making sense’ of their experiences, but it did not have unlimited potential. Within a decade after the war, private and predominantly local commemorations of the dead would be overshadowed by state ceremonial initiatives, and the modest memorial forms would be supplemented by grand mausoleums and monuments glorifying the nation. In place of the previous trauma and bitterness with the war, in the 1930s there would gradually develop memorial forms and ritual initiatives that would concentrate on the nation’s glory and would maintain an affirmative discourse of the nation’s military effort. In this respect, the states in Southeastern Europe did not depart much from tendencies that evolved in other parts of the continent. However, the various ways in which those states coped with the enormity of death and how they turned it gradually into a resource of national regeneration again reveals some of the specificities in the nationalization policies in the region. Beyond the enormity of death and the trauma of the war experience, states in the region found ways to reassert the unity of their nation. Playing upon popular emotions, they again mobilized the population and the public institutions – this time promoting the idea of what the dead had actually died for. Certainly this was not a smooth process, and it did include tensions and conflicts on local and national levels. But in this process the nation-states managed to prevail again. By commemorating those who had fallen in the Great War, they actually succeeded in expounding, in the words of J. Gillis, their ‘politics of national identity’ (Gillis 1993). In this move, ironically, commemorations demonstrated the prevailing force of the idea of nationalization – one that managed to overcome the rupture caused by the world conflict and that reinstated itself in the practices of collective remembrance of the nations’ dead in its aftermath.

Conclusion I indicated several so-called limits to the nationalization processes that occurred in Southeastern Europe before, during and in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. By paying attention to the role of the Balkan wars, modernity and modernization, transnationalism, population displacements and public commemorations, I have sought to emphasize that – in the context of the evolving world conflict, each of these five factors turned out to be a ‘limit’ to nationalization, albeit in a somewhat ambiguous and double-sided manner. Each of them was both an obstacle to and a stimulus for the nationalization processes, an ultimate point in the agenda for national unification but also a pathway for continuing war efforts, territorial contestation and inter-state policies of national homogenization. Each factor had the potential to curb, and possibly prevent, the onset of world conflict: the Balkan wars, if they had calmed down the nationalization rage in the region; modernization, if it had led to a more civic and responsible relationship of mutual trust between the population and the sovereign; transnationalism, if it had succeeded to impose internationalist visions of gender, class and peace; and the population movements and commemorations, if they had helped

152

Nations, Identities and the First World War

remind about the tragedies of displacement and human destruction that accompany all wars. While these five factors were raised as considerations during mobilization for the Great War in all countries of the region, each of them also played towards its opposite: the Balkan wars became merely a prelude to another conflict to redress previously unresolved issues; modernization was taken up to demonstrate the ‘modern’ military potential of each state; transnational ideas were gradually translated to suit the cause of the nation; the displaced population groups became yet another impetus for nationalization policies; and commemorations of the dead emphasized national contours in the post-war years. Thus, instead of calming down the nationalist rigor and curbing the military efforts in the world conflict, each of these actually appeared as a key tool in (re)mobilization tendencies and in the transfer of the nationalizing experience to post-war realities. From such a perspective, the Great War did not merely ‘conclude’ a stage in the nationalization processes in most states of Southeastern Europe; it actually opened new directions for their continuation and reassertion and facilitated the transfer of the nationalizing experience in the decades that followed.

References Afflerbach, H., and D. Stevenson, eds (2007), An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture before 1914, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Anderson, B. ([1983] 1991), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London and New York: Verso. Ballinger, P. (2003), History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans, Princeton, NJ and Woodstock: Princeton University Press. Billig, M. (1995), Banal Nationalism, London: Sage. Biondich, M. (2011), The Balkans: Revolution, War, and Political Violence since 1878, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Breuilly, J. (1993), Nationalism and the State, 2nd edn, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Brubaker, R. (2004), Ethnicity without Groups, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bucur, M. (2004), ‘Edifices of the Past: War Memorials and Heroes in Twentieth-Century Romania’, in M. Todorova (ed.), Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory, 158–79, New York: New York University Press. Daskalov, R. (1997), ‘Ideas about, and Reactions to Modernization in the Balkans’, East European Quarterly, 31 (2): 141–80. Daskalov, R. (1998), ‘Developments in the Balkans Periphery Prior to World War II: Some Reflections’, Suedost-Forshungen, 57: 207–44. Daskalov, R., and Ch. Marinov (2013), Entangled Histories of the Balkans, Leiden: Brill. Detchev, S. (2010), ‘Intimizirane na izobretenoto: natsionalna darjava, natsionalna identichnost i simvoli na vsekidnevieto, 19–21 vek’, in S. Detchev (ed.), V tarsene na balgarskoto. Mreji na natsionalna intimnost (XIX–XXI vek), 5–126, Sofia: Institut za izsledvane na izkustvata. Detrez, R. (2015), ‘Refugees as Tools of Irrendentist Policies in Interwar Bulgaria’, in H. Vermeulen, M. Baldwin-Edwards and R. Van Boeschoten (eds), Migration in the Southern Balkans: From Ottoman Territory to Globalized Nation States, 47–62, Cham, Heidelberg, Dodrecht, New York and London: Springer.

The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire

153

Dimitrova, S. (2005), ‘“Taming the Death”: The Culture of Death (1915–18) and Its Remembering and Commemorating through First World War Soldier Monuments in Bulgaria (1917–44)’, Social History, 30 (2) (May): 175–94. Dragostinova, Th. (2006), ‘Competing Priorities, Ambiguous Loyalties: Challenges of Socioeconomic Adaptation and National Inclusion of the Interwar Bulgarian Refugees’, Nationalities Papers, 34 (5): 549–74. Dragostinova, Th. (2009), ‘Navigating Nationality in the Emigration of Minorities between Bulgaria and Greece, 1919–1941’, East European Politics and Societies, 23: 185–212. Fell, A., and I. Sharp, eds (2007), The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914–19, Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Gellner, E. (1983), Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell. Gillis, J., ed. (1993), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hall, R. (2000), The Balkan Wars 1912–13: Prelude to the First World War, London: Routledge. Hariton, S. (2016), ‘War Commemorations in Inter-War Romania: Cultural Politics and Social Context’, in O. Luthar (ed.), The Great War and Memory in Central and SouthEastern Europe, 137–61, Leiden: Brill. Haupt, G. (1972), Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International, 1889–1914, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hirschon, R. (1989), Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Horne, J. (2005), ‘Kulturelle Demobilmachung 1919–1939: Ein sinnvoller historischer Begriff ?’, in W. Hartwig (ed.), Politische Kulturgeschichte der Zwischenkriegszeit 1919–1939, 129–50, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Inglis, K.S. (1993), ‘Entombing Unknown Soldiers: From London and Paris to Baghdad’, History and Memory, 5 (2) (Fall/Winter): 7–31. Karnoouh, C. (2013), ‘Commemoration, Mourning and National Identity: Yesterday’s and Today’s Memory of the Great War’, in A. Şerban (ed.), Series, Multiples, Realisms, 148–59, Bucharest: NNI. Kiessling, F. (2002), Gegen den ‘gorssen’ Krieg: Entspannung in den internationalen Beziehungen 1911–1914, Munich: Oldenbourg. Kruse, W. (1993), Krieg und nationale Integration: Eine Neuinterpretation des sozialdemokratischen Burgfriedensschluses 1914/15, Essen: Kartext Verlag. Ladas, S.P. (1932), The Exchanges of Minorities – Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, New York: Macmillan. Linden, M. van der (1988), ‘The National Integration of European Working Classes (1871–1914)’, International Review of Social History, 33: 285–311. Luthar, O., ed. (2016), The Great War and Memory in Central and South-Eastern Europe, Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill. Mishkova, D. (1995), ‘Modernization and Political Elites in the Balkans before the First World War’, in Eastern European Politics and Societies, 9 (1) (Winter): 63–89. Mishkova, D. (2009), We, the People: Politics of National Peculiarity in Southeastern Europe, Budapest and New York: Central European University Press. Mosse, G.L. (1990), Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mulligan, W., A. Rose, and D. Geppert, eds (2015), The Wars before the Great War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neuburger, M. (2004), The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

154

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Newman, J.-P. (2015), ‘Civil and Military Relations in Serbia during 1903–1914’, in W. Mulligan, A. Rose and D. Geppert (eds), The Wars before the Great War, 114–28, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rupp, L.J. (1997), Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sharp, I.E. (2007), ‘Blaming the Women: Women’s “Responsibility” for the First World War’, in A.S. Fell and I.E. Sharp (eds), The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914–1919, 86–109, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sharp, I., and M. Stibbe, eds (2011), Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918–1923, Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill. Sharp, I., J. Acsády, and N. Vukov (2017), ‘Internationalism, Pacifism, Transnationalism: Women’s Movements and the Building of a Sustainable Peace in the Post-War World’, in I. Sharp and M. Stibbe (eds), Women Activists between War and Peace: Europe, 1918–1923, 96–150, London: Bloomsbury. Sluga, G. (2013), Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Smith, A. (1998), Nationalism and Modernism, London and New York: Routledge. Todorova, M. (2005), ‘The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism’, Slavic Review, 64 (1): 140–64. Vukov, N. (2015a), ‘The Great Expectations: Political Visions, Military Preparation, and National Upsurge in Bulgaria at the Onset of the Balkan Wars’, in W. Mulligan, A. Rose and D. Geppert (eds), The Wars before the Great War, 129–47, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vukov, N. (2015b), ‘Memory and Monumental Representation of the Great War: The Balkan Projections’, in A. Luleva, I. Petrova and S. Barlieva (eds), Contested Heritage and Identities in Post-Socialist Bulgaria, 32–59, Sofia: Gutenberg Publishing House. Vukov, N. (2016), ‘Commemorating the Dead and the Dynamics of Forgetting: PostMortem Interpretations of World War I in Bulgaria’, in O. Luthar (ed.), The Great War and Memory in Central and South-Eastern Europe, 162–871, Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill.

9

The Layering of Belgian National Identities during the First World War Barbara Deruytter

Introduction The song ‘Where does my dear fatherland lie?’ (Waar ligt mijn duurbaar vaderland? or Où donc est-ma patrie) was one of the ‘national songs’ presented to Belgian soldiers at the Yser front in the bilingual Songbook of the Belgian Soldier (1916). The song provided several answers to the question from its title. Typical local regions were mentioned, as well as the country’s main rivers such as the Meuse and the Schelde, which served as a pars pro toto for the Dutch- and French-speaking regions. However, the chorus of the song concludes that these regions could never hold the fatherland because ‘The fatherland is not that small’, it is ‘[…] much larger / the whole country / the land of Belgians / where king Leopold reigns / where the people honour the crown’ (Quoidbach 1916). The song ‘Where does my dear fatherland lie?’ thus explicitly dealt with questions of national belonging and identity and, more specifically, with the different layers of (sub)national and national identities typical in (young) states with developing nation-building processes. The song was indeed of an older, nineteenthcentury making yet was particularly relevant between 1914 and 1918, when the need for national unity in a context of German occupation made relations between different layers of national identity – Flemish, Walloon and Belgian – a primary concern. The strength of sub-national (often regional) identifications in Europe had been growing significantly in the decennia prior to the First World War (Augusteijn and Storm 2013). In Belgium, like in many other countries, the war was a watershed moment for nationalisms, making it an interesting case for researching the impact of the war on layered national identities. Belgian historians generally consider the war as the birth moment of the idea of incompatibility between the Flemish and the Belgian national identity (Stengers and Gubin 2002; Wils 2014). This is explained by both the pre-war period, which saw growing Flemish consciousness as result of an ongoing struggle for Flemish language rights since the 1840s, and specific policies enacted by the Germans during their occupation of Belgium from 1914 until 1918 in which they aimed to use the Flemish movement to fragment the country into separate Walloon and Flemish components (the German Flamenpolitik; see Wils 2014).

156

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Although little research has been done on the national sentiment of the lower and middle classes, most scholarship seems to assume that for most of the Dutch – as well as the French-speaking citizens before the First World War, the Flemish or the Walloon fatherland and the Belgian fatherland were the same, or that the sub-national identities – if not completely overlapping with Belgium – were an intrinsic and supporting part of the Belgian identity. Because of the language situation in Belgium – in which French dominated official life – the Walloon identity did not develop as strongly in the prewar era and was less marked off from the (frenchified) Belgian fatherland. Although Flemish and Walloon sub-nationalisms generally put themselves in the larger frame of the Belgian fatherland, there was ongoing debate, on the eve of the First World War, on the nature of the ‘the Belgian nation’. The idea of one Belgian nation that transcended the language divide was increasingly confronted with the idea that there was no such thing as ‘the Belgian people’ but only two separate races – Flemings and Walloons – caught in an artificial state (Stengers and Gubin 2002: 123).1 The war itself placed further stress on the issue of layered identities in Belgium. The German invasion and occupation of the largest part of Belgium caused patriotic feeling to climax, but at the same time both the occupation of the country and the experience of Flemish soldiers at the front also created the circumstances for the alienation of the Flemish fatherland from the Belgian fatherland (De Schaepdrijver 2000; Stengers and Gubin 2002). The German Flamenpolitik campaign used propaganda to promote the ‘artificiality’ of Belgian unity (De Schaepdrijver 2000: 17) and sought to destroy any Belgian nationalism by supporting language-based identities (Wils 2014).2 Although the large majority of the population stayed loyal to the idea of Belgium during the war, parts of the Flemish Movement and, on a smaller scale, the Walloon Movement collaborated with the German occupier (Delforge 2008).3 The German Flamenpolitik played into the pre-war Flemish demands, causing an internal breach within the Flemish Movement and eventually leading to the administrative separation of the country into ‘Flemish’ and ‘Walloon’ parts in 1917. The presence of a largely French-speaking Belgian officer corps at the Yser front led some Dutch-speaking soldiers (possibly 5,000) to embrace anti-Belgian thoughts (Vandeweyer 1998: 1210–16; Vanacker 2000). For a (currently unquantified) part of the people who identified as Flemish, the war thus shifted the hierarchy between Flemish and Belgian loyalties, as they would come to feel ‘first Fleming and then Belgian’ (Wils 2014: 248). In this context, Belgian patriots, local governments in Belgium, the Catholic church and the Belgian government in exile in Le Havre were concerned to foster the image of a well-balanced harmony between the layered identities of the Belgian nation-state. The Flemish who collaborated politically with the Germans (the so-called activists) were never able to gain popular support in occupied Belgium during the war because of the strength of Belgian patriotism and the adversity of the German occupier (Elias 1970; Stengers and Gubin 2002; Vrints 2002; De Schaepdrijver 2006; Wils 2014). Nevertheless, after the war the Flemish Movement would continue to develop into a larger popular movement, and anti-Belgian thought gained ground. Historical debate on the impact of the war on Belgian nationalism has mainly been tackled from the longer-term perspective, namely from the decisive impact that the war (and more specifically the Flamenpolitik) had on the development of an anti-

Belgian National Identities during the War

157

Belgian Flemish nationalism (for a recent overview of this question see De Groen 2014). My question focuses on the war period itself: how were national and subnational identities in the period 1914–20 imagined and layered (Flemish, Walloon and Belgian) under the unifying as well as disintegrating forces of the war? I want to tackle this question from below. We know very little about what ‘Belgium’, ‘Flanders’ and ‘Wallonia’ actually meant for the man and woman in the street. National sentiments and mentalities have primarily been researched using middle- or upper-class sources and were extrapolated to the larger population (Van Ginderachter 2009; Beyen and Van Ginderachter 2012). This also holds true for wartime nationalism in Belgium, which has mostly been documented for the higher middle class, elites and political militants, often using ego-documents and literary sources. This chapter follows the suggestion by Belgian historian Antoon Vrints (2012) to look at how nationalism was socially functional for broader layers of society. I will use a rich source, namely the many hundreds of songs that circulated in Belgium during and shortly after the war, to analyse popular mentalities (1914–20). These songs are particularly interesting for two reasons. First, popular, commercial songs as well as traditional and national songs have often played a crucial role in mobilizing populations for ‘total war’ (Murdoch 1990; Cleveland 1994; Sweeney 2001; Genton 2005; Hanheide et al. 2013; Mullen 2015). If the rally to the flag was (at least in the first half of the war) largely a matter of self-mobilization of the population (Horne 1997), this was especially true in Belgium, where the very absence and isolation of the Belgian central state (with the government in exile in Le Havre) further strengthened the process of self-mobilization of civil society into Belgian war patriotism (De Schaepdrijver n.d.). The many hundreds of songs, sung by lower- and middle-class people in occupied Belgium during and shortly after the war, can be considered as what Jay Winter (1999, 2014) has termed ‘propaganda from below’.4 They created a feeling of national unity and social cohesion (based on belonging and a shared purpose) by establishing a common patriotic narrative about Belgium in the war, vilifying the German occupier and propagating the ‘right’ patriotic behaviour. At the same time, wartime songs in Belgium also clearly highlighted the limits of mobilizing minds for war in an environment showing signs of war-weariness, national indifference and tensions between different social groups. Popular wartime songs can therefore be considered more generally as social practices by which social norms were negotiated and the chaotic reality of war was structured into shared narratives. If private diaries in Belgium attest to the individual effort of people of middle-class and elite backgrounds to attribute meaning (often in the form of ‘sacrifice’) to the occupation (De Schaepdrijver n.d.), popular songs attest to a similar, collective sense-making process of mostly lower- and middle-class people. Songs are especially interesting for researching mainstream opinions, as songs sung and transmitted in public settings tended to voice dominant opinion of the group (Top 1985: 50; Mullen 2015: 145). Second, songs attest not only to the bottom-up creation and reception of national sentiments, narratives and mentalities but also to top-down nation-building processes (and the rich web of cultural production, interaction and activity in between). Because songs powerfully blend emotion, discourse and group ritual, they have been used by states, as well as a multitude of civil society organizations, to spread ideas and strengthen group identities. National hymns and a

158

Nations, Identities and the First World War

canon of national songs that set the tone for patriotic performances and were spread by institutions (such as schools and the army) were supposed to shape the national identities of populations (Hoegaerts 2014). Songs thus attest par excellence to the complex top-down and bottom-up dynamic of nation-building. First, I will use a corpus of 500 popular songs that circulated in occupied Belgium to show how national identities were layered and imagined by the lower and middle classes during and shortly after the war (1914–20). Second, I will use the Songbook of the Belgian Soldier (1916), a collection of national and traditional songs published in Paris by the Belgian Ministry of War, to explore state efforts to shape the national sentiments of Belgian refugees and soldiers. Third, I will focus on one of the national songs, ‘The Flemish Lion’, to show specifically how its national connotation evolved as national loyalties shifted during the war.

Singing in occupied Belgium By 20 August, German armies entered Brussels, and by December 1914, 90 per cent of Belgian territory was under German occupation. The shock of German armies marching into Belgium singing national songs such as ‘Gloria Viktoria’ left Belgians mute. The lively scene of belle époque musical entertainment, centred around performing and selling sheet music – just like the newspapers (Debruyne 2015: 227) – came to a temporary standstill in the first weeks of the war. On 13 October the German government-general imposed censorship on all pictures, text and sheet music and made it mandatory to ask permission from the Zensurstelle for all texts and performances: theatre plays, moving-picture shows, singing and reading poetry (Huberich and Nicol-Speyer 1915: 21–2).5 On the same day, three Brussels journalists noted in their account of ‘Fifty Months of Occupation’, ‘The freedom to say and sing everything, of which we were so proud and of which we made use so often, will be on severe trial’ (Gille et al. 1919: 100).6 The practice of openly voicing opinion through song – be it commercial or not – would indeed decrease dramatically during the occupation, as would recreational singing by the lower and middle classes in general, at least in the beginning of the war. Not only the harshness of military occupation (shutting down public life and mobility) but also the difficult material conditions, as well as the general idea that war and occupation were no time for singing, contributed to the dwindling of musical expression. Middle- and upper-class writers, intellectuals and the local authorities that stayed in place during the occupation considered entertainment not patriotic when soldiers at the Belgian front were making horrific sacrifices (De Schaepdrijver 2002: 275; Vrints 2013: 322). The silence that supposedly reigned in public spaces was glorified as almost mystical (‘une espèce d’exaltation mystique et silencieuse’; Gille et al. 1919: 253) – a sign that the Belgian population was bearing the misery of the war and the humiliation of the occupation honourably.7 At the same time, some social functions of singing increased importantly during the war. The war asked for making sense, taking position and negotiating norms of behaviour, not only vis à vis the German occupier and the nation under threat, but also – as social tensions in occupied Belgium intensified – vis à vis other social groups

Belgian National Identities during the War

159

and the way Belgium’s governing elites dealt with the subsistence crisis caused by the war. Thus the emotional impact of the war and the social tensions in occupied Belgium gave rise to a large spectrum of wartime songs. The total corpus of at least 1,000 individual songs about (aspects of) the war that I could collect for the period 1914–20 (in Dutch, French and local dialects) attests to the importance of singing about the war in occupied territory. The circumstances of the occupation split the circulation of songs into an open circuit under control of the German occupier and a private or clandestine circuit of songs. From 1914 to 1918 a lot of songs about the war circulated only orally and in handwritten, personal song books that were kept by lower- and middle-class women and men. Some songs, especially new anti-German songs and older Belgian patriotic or allied classics, were distributed in clandestine print and were occasionally performed in semi-public ways as acts of defiance of the German occupier. By the end of 1915 popular entertainment in the cities had also started to pick up again, now under control of the German occupier, attracting considerable lower- and middle-class audiences that longed for distraction (De Schaepdrijver 2002: 275).8 Some theatres and café concerts had reopened their doors, and in the market squares and other public places in the provinces, itinerant singers once again offered their (censored) sheet music to the public (Pharaon n.d.).9 The collaboration of music editors and singers with the occupier for the printing of sheet music, reprehensible from a patriotic stance, remained rather exceptional, however.10 Just like most journalists and writers (De Schaepdrijver 2000: 28; Debruyne 2015: 228), most singers preferred silence to censorship. Because of censorship and the disruption in the music industry, a lot of songs would never make it to print during the war itself. The liberation in November 1918 caused a wave of popular songs: new songs related to the end of the war, as well as older popular wartime successes. For this chapter I have used 500 songs, linguistically balanced (250 in French and 250 in Dutch, including dialects), that stem from all these different circuits: songs found in personal, handwritten song books (200 songs), musical print without mention of the editor or singer (possibly clandestine, 70 songs), sheet music allowed by the German Zensurstelle (70 songs) and sheet music from the immediate post-war period (160 songs).

Flemish blood for the Belgian king: Layered national identities in popular songs Although the linguistic debates were laid to rest in August 1914 (at least initially, Delforge 2008; Wils 2014), this did not mean that the ‘ethnic diversity’ of the country disappeared from discourse. The typical Belgian nationalist image of the country as ethnically diverse but harmoniously united under one common crown was put forward. This was immediately apparent in the way King Albert I addressed ‘the Army of the Nation’ one day after the invasion of Belgium, on 5 August: ‘Caesar has said to your ancestors: Of all the people of Gaul, the Belgians are the bravest. Glory to you, army of the Belgian people! Remember, in the face of the enemy, that you fight for the liberty of our threatened homes. Remember, Flemings, the Battle of the Golden Spurs, and you, Walloons of Liege, that you are now enjoying the honor of the 600 Franchimontois’.11

160

Nations, Identities and the First World War

The royal proclamation spread through the country in newspapers and was posted in local communities. In its concern to mobilize and motivate Belgian men for the army, the royal proclamation not only highlighted the importance of the defence of home and hearth. Fighting for a place called home would indeed prove to be a very real raison de combattre for Belgian soldiers, most of whose families lived under German occupation from 1914 to 1918 (Benvindo 2005: 126). But King Albert’s statement also complied with an old recipe of official Belgian nationalism, as he referred to the martial past of Flemings and Walloons separately but with the overarching identity of ‘Gauls’ (and thus: Belgians). In wartime songs that circulated in the beginning of the war and through the ensuing years of occupation, that image of Flemings and Walloons as brothers in arms defending the Belgian fatherland against a common enemy was strongly present. The discourse of unity over the linguistic divide was part of the patriotic cult born by a wave of Belgian nationalism, which had been sparked by the violent German attack on neutral Belgium that was perceived both domestically and internationally as deeply unjust (De Schaepdrijver 2000). Belgian patriotism, especially strong in the beginning of the war and around the liberation, largely persisted until 1918 and was fed by a strong anti-German sentiment (De Schaepdrijver 2000: 22; Stengers and Gubin 2002: 165; Vrints 2014: 32). Moreover, motivating men to join the army remained relevant in occupied Belgium as volunteers could join the Belgian army forces via smuggling routes, primarily through the Netherlands, which some 30,000 did throughout the war (Vanneste 2014: 14). One of the early wartime songs, ‘March Little Soldiers’ (Marchez petits soldats), typically mobilized men to defend the country (‘with pride’) against German barbarism. It urged Flemings and Walloons jointly to the same task: ‘It’s up to you Flemings, Walloons / to save the Nation / and stand guard / against those raiders’.12 Or as the refrain of another song in the form of a dialogue between a ‘Walon’ and a ‘Flamint’ put it more bluntly: ‘Let’s shout our motto, let’s batter the Germans, Walloon as well as Flemings, on the Germans we will hit’.13 The national motto ‘Strength through Unity’ (‘l’Union fait la force’ or ‘Eendracht maakt macht’), which in the first years of the Belgian state was about the unity of liberals and Catholics, received, in the context of the occupier’s divisive Flamenpolitik, a new nationalist urgency. The Belgian nation would survive the war if the sub-identities acted in unison, some songs insisted: ‘We beg for a victory / that will grant us freedom / and don’t want any peace / that offends our right and honour / thus roars the Lion of Flanders / thus crows the Walloon cock / thus shouts the nation in unity / that nation will not perish’.14 It is very hard to track how national imagination in songs changed during the war, because they can only rarely be dated. Yet it is clear that unity between the Flemish and Walloon sub-identities became more imperative as ‘the storm of the war’ continued its ‘destructive work’. Belgians who failed the national unity were denounced as cowards and traitors: ‘When the storm comes to us from a foreign land / stay united, Fleming and Walloon, in heart and soul […] / Your unity is your strength / Never listen to cowards and traitors / down with all who despises the Fatherland’.15 When taking a general look at the national identities that were explicitly referred to in the songs, three things are of interest. First we see how national phraseology impregnated songs about the war in Belgium (1914–20). Nearly half of the songs (122 songs in Dutch and 92 in French) make explicit reference to the Belgian, Flemish or

Belgian National Identities during the War

161

Walloon identity. This is remarkable, especially in the case of commercial songs, as political and nationalist rhetoric seems to have been of little interest to lower- and middle-class text-writers and performers before the war. Second, the dominance of the Belgian national frame is evident in both languages. The Belgian fatherland was the only national identity referred to for the large majority of the songs in Dutch (75 per cent) and in French (85 per cent). Third, the Flemish and Walloon sub-identities do play a significant role in a minority of the songs in Dutch (25 per cent) and in French (14 per cent), although always in a positive relation to the Belgian fatherland. Importantly, the songs from during the war that referred to Flemish or Walloon sub-national identities generally nestled within the Belgian national frame. Not only did they stress the (desired) unity between Flemings and Walloons but they also positioned the sub-identities as coming to the rescue of the Belgian fatherland. In a lot of these songs the Flemish and Walloon elements overlapped so strongly with the Belgian fatherland that they were almost interchangeable. The songs that

Number of songs Songs in Dutch and Flemish dialects

250

Belgian identity (België, Belgenland, Belgie, Belg(en), Belgisch(e), Belge)

111

Flemish identity (Vlaanderen, Vlaandren, Vlaanderenland, Vlaming, Vlaamsch, Vlaanderschen)

32

Walloon identity (Waal, Waalsche)

6

Total reference to national identities

122

Exclusive reference to Belgian identity

91 (75%)

Exclusive reference to Flemish identity

10 (8%)

References to Belgian as well as Flemish identity

21 (17%)

Songs in French and Walloon dialects

250

Belgian identity (Belgique, Belge(s), belge)

90

Flemish identity (Flandre, flamand(s))

10

Walloon identity (wallon(s), wallonie)

12

Total reference to national identities

92

Exclusive reference to Belgian identity

79 (86%)

Exclusive reference to Walloon identity

1 (1%)

References to Belgian as well as Walloon identity

12 (13%)

Figure 3 Songs with references to national identities in a corpus of 500 Belgian popular songs about the war (1914–1920).

162

Nations, Identities and the First World War

only mentioned Flanders (ten songs) as explicit national reference did make other references to royal symbols or the Belgian flag. Remarkably, some songs in Dutch (twelve) had a distinct way of layering the Flemish and the Belgian identities. The Flemish element was commonly expressed in rather ethnic terms, whereas the Belgian element was connected to national symbols of a rather civic or institutional nature. No similar layering of national identities appeared in songs in French. The Walloon identity was only referred to as part of the ‘Flemings and Walloons together’ scheme that has been described above.16 The stronger development of the pre-war Flemish national identity meant that, compared with the Walloon national identity, it was more clearly ‘delineated’ from the Belgian fatherland. Also the Flamenpolitik, which started earlier and was more far reaching than the Wallonenpolitik (De Schaepdrijver 2000; Delforge 2008; Wils 2014), raised questions on national loyalties specifically in Flanders. This stimulated the need for national narratives from above and from below that confirmed loyalty to Belgium and positioned the Flemish fatherland in regard to the Belgian fatherland. Indeed, some songs that mentioned both the Flemish and Belgian identity presented the ‘Flemish blood’ (courage, family, soil, martyrdom) as being voluntarily, dutifully and proudly spent for the ‘Belgian king’ (the countries liberties, the flag, the crown). The figure of King Albert was an important Belgian national symbol that transcended the linguistic divide, as the so-called king-soldier enjoyed great popularity with both Dutch and French speakers during the war (van Ypersele 2006). In the song ‘The European War’ for example, which glorified fighting until death, the refrain goes: ‘But we have Flemish blood / and fight bravely […] / all together with our weapons raised / for the dear land of Belgians’.17 The downfall of the German emperor was predicted with certainty as Flanders, symbolized by the Flemish lion, dealt the final blow for king and country. One of the many songs called ‘Song of the War’ (Oorlogslied) addressed the German kaiser: ‘You made our king fight at the head of our troops / to triumphantly lead our flag / your German eagles crown now receives her just reward / the Flemish Lion drags her from her throne’.18 The allegiance of Flanders, moreover, was inscribed in older narratives of unconditional (military) loyalty to the fatherland in times of war. One of the popular Belgian patriotic classics during the war, the ‘Song of King Albert’ (Chanson du roi Albert or Le soldat belge), for example, told the story of a Belgian soldier (unknowingly) meeting the king on the front. It was a variation on an older French song in which a dutiful Corsican soldier prevents the emperor Napoleon (whom he does not recognize) from passing. In the Dutch version, ‘Guarding the Yser’ (Op wacht aan den Yzer), the Belgian king tries to bribe a Flemish soldier in order to pass, but it becomes clear that the latter is incorruptible in his defence of the Belgian fatherland. As the king offers money for a free passage, the soldier answers (not recognizing the king): ‘A thousand times no […] / keep your money, never will I betray my country / in peacetime I was a working class boy / in Flanders stands my parent’s house / but now I am a soldier and know my duties / remove yourself, nobody passes here’.19 At the end of the song the Flemish soldier eventually receives a decoration for his loyalty. At the same time, the end of the song ‘Guarding the Yser’ reconfirmed Flemish pride, as it concluded with a reference to the soldier’s Flemish mother and the guarding of ‘the dear’ Flemish soil. As Maarten Van Ginderachter (2005: 65–9, 373) has shown in his study on the national identifications

Belgian National Identities during the War

163

of socialists in Belgium before the First World War, in a similar way the socialists of Ghent referred to the Flemish fatherland as the ethnic fatherland within the context of a (non-ethnic) Belgian state. These songs show that in occupied country, the Flemish and Walloon identities were consistently put within the frame of the Belgian fatherland, not only by elites, not only by official state rhetoric, but also by the lower and middle classes through ‘propaganda from below’. In popular wartime songs in Belgium, which played an important role in tuning lower- and middle-class opinion and norms, there is no direct sign of conflict between the Flemish or Walloon sub-identities and the Belgian national identity. Rather, the need for unity between Flemings and Walloons is positively affirmed, and the Flemish identity in particular is effectively layered as coming to the rescue of the Belgian fatherland. The songs confirm that furthering regional demands through collaboration with the occupier during the war was not supported by the large majority of the population. Earlier research, based on official reports and manifestations of popular hostility towards Flemish activists in occupied Belgium, showed that the Flamenpolitik and the Wallonenpolitik could never achieve a wider popular following (Vrints 2002; De Schaepdrijver 2006; Delforge 2008; Wils 2014). However, class tension did find its way into songs. A considerable number of the songs called for more solidarity of the rich with the poor, vehemently condemned war profiteers, or outrightly claimed the war to be a rich man’s war in which ‘the poor blood’ was spilled. Only after the war did the Flemish-Belgian identity become conflicted in songs, as the cult around Flemish martyrdom developed itself in a tension with the Belgian fatherland.

The ‘songbook of the Belgian soldier’: Illustrating the ‘ethnic originality’ of Belgium By the end of 1914 the Yser front had stabilized, and the Belgian government, the king and the army had retreated behind it, cut off from the rest of Belgium, which was almost completely occupied by the Germans. Behind the allied front things were all but silent: singing was a popular activity in the Belgian Army, and the lively, though censored, Paris music scene (Sweeney 2001: 137–67) offered an abundance of songs to Belgian refugees and soldiers on leave. In the first months of war the Belgian government made no attempt to organize the soldiers’ leisure time, but in 1916 it started to sponsor initiatives for reading rooms and concerts (Vanacker 2000: 82–7). In this same year the Ministry of War accepted the proposal of a military chaplain, Théophile Quoidbach, to publish a collection of national and traditional songs for the soldiers and to organize corresponding musical performances. Throughout the war, 100,000 copies of this bilingual Songbook of the Belgian Soldier (1916) would be sold.20 The songbook was intended not only for the Belgian soldiers, as its name suggests, but also for a broader public of exilés, the many thousands of Belgian refugees who spent the war abroad.21 Promotion of this songbook clearly intended to focus the national imagination in a context of distance to the fatherland. Its songs were meant to evoke ‘the smaller fatherland in the larger’ (‘la petite patrie dans le grande’) with what were called ‘constant

164

Nations, Identities and the First World War

evocations’ (‘évocations constantes’): emotional memories of the native soil, the village and the family home, set to music. To this end the songbook was divided into ‘national songs’ (29) and ‘regional and other songs’ (66). The latter were a selection of traditional, supposedly old, local songs of the type that had been avidly collected by folklorists in the previous decennia as proof of the existence of a supposedly pure, simple and original national soul. The former were two dozen chants nationaux or vaderlandsliederen, part of a growing national canon written by a pantheon of Belgian composers (Hoegaerts 2014: 95–6) who had – ironically – borrowed enthusiastically from the repertoire of foreign national songs. Patriotic newspapers reported that performances from the songbook had a moving and reassuring effect on the soldiers, reminding them of home, uplifting morale and ‘reviving’ the image of the fatherland for which they spent their blood: The brave cyclists have heard a large repertoire of old songs, old melodies of our land, constant evocations of the native village, of the family, of mothers, wives, and fiancées, and of all the dear ones that they have been separated from since almost two years. […] Our songs revive the image of the Fatherland in their eyes, and remind them of the greatness of the cause for which they fight; they relax them, and they restore their spirits.22

The songbook also tackled the complex nature of Belgium’s ethnic composition, described in the foreword as ‘notre originalité ethnique’. Its preface claimed the supposed cultural and ethnic diversity of the country as a particular strength. Moreover, the set-up of the songbook itself was meant to underscore Belgium’s harmonious unity, which was particularly under threat in the army.23 The Songbook of the Belgian Soldier promoted singing as a means to bring Flemings and Walloons closer together by getting to know each other’s songs. Some of the ‘national songs’ in the chansonnier even dealt explicitly with the relationship between the two sub-identities. Occasionally, Flemings in the Belgian Army were ordered to sing the ‘Brabançonne’ in French and Walloons to sing ‘The Flemish Lion’ in Dutch (Vanacker 2000: 212). The songbook carefully balanced the representation of Flemish and Walloon traditions and observed a strict balance in language, counting forty-four songs in French and Walloon dialects, forty-seven in Dutch and four that were translated into both languages.24 Moreover, the Ministry of War stipulated in a private letter to Chaplain Théophile Quoidbach that, at all performances related to the initiative, half of the songs had to be in Dutch.25 The Songbook also balanced Flemish and Walloon symbols and traditions. This matter of equal representation had already become a sensitive issue before the war, especially in official publications. For example, there was discussion about the attention paid to ‘Flemish’ and ‘Walloon’ historical events in schoolbooks (Rottiers 1997: 69), and certain Antwerp newspapers complained that the Flemish did not sing the Brabançonne, the Belgian national anthem (De Vlaamsche). The Songbook included a triumvirate of songs intended to represent the national and sub-national identities equally: the Brabançonne (in both French and Dutch), ‘The Flemish Lion’ (De Vlaamsche Leeuw) representing Flanders and ‘Valiant People of Liège’ (Valeureux Liégeois) representing Wallonia. Because Flemish cultural regionalism had a longer and thus richer tradition, the songs representing the Flemish identity (De Vlaamse Leeuw,

Belgian National Identities during the War

165

Groeninge! De leeuwen dansen, Ons Vaderland, Arteveldelied and De zwarte leeuw) outnumbered the Walloon ones (Valeureux Liégeois, Les six cents franchimontois). This seems to confirm the complaint of the Walloon protagonists just before the war that Belgian nationalism was supported primarily by Flemish historic traditions (e.g. Destrée 1912). Eleven of the Belgian national songs in the Songbook of the Belgian Soldier explicitly dealt with the local and regional diversity of the country. They present the fatherland as a layered identity, implying harmony between smaller regions or cities within the country. They somewhat downplay the dichotomy between the Flemish and Walloon sub-nationalisms by stressing the diversity on an even smaller scale, namely that of the Belgian provinces. Indeed, from its foundation Belgium was a fairly decentralized state with a strong municipal autonomy. This had given rise to a patriotic narrative that explained the strength of the localisms (as well as the regions) as an abhorrence among the ‘Belgian people’ of foreign rule (Van Ginderachter 2011: 111). One of these songs, ‘Where does my dear fatherland lie?’ was already quoted in the introduction. It was modelled after the German national classic Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland? that was originally composed by Ernst Moritz Arndt as an anti-French song in 1813 (Leerssen 2006: 178). But the nationalist tone was remarkably different: Whereas the German version is about the expansion of Germany towards all German-speaking territories, the Belgian version emphasizes the need to internally unite the different languages and regions of the country. This group of national songs with layered identities actively affirms the Belgian state and the crown as the national frame, the ‘super-local’ and ‘super-regional’ that automatically absorbs all smaller identities. A rich pattern of national symbolism was used to explain how the Belgian nation could be ethnically diverse and still one at the same time, especially in songs in Dutch. The two main rivers of the country (the Schelde and the Meuse) were repeatedly used to symbolize the two sub-nationalities. After all, did they not both flow to the same sea?26 Kinship between Flemings and Walloons was suggested by describing them as brothers of one family, children of the same country who had been fed by the same wet nurse.27 Belgium consisted of only one shared heart, and the king was portrayed as possessing both ethnic identities, being a son of Flanders as well as of the land of Walloons.28 The Songbook of the Belgian Soldier thus illustrates the strong belief by members of the government in songs as a way to strengthen the nation and the morale of the people in wartime. Its real impact on the singing practices and mentalities of the Belgian soldiers and refugees, however, remains unknown. Regina Sweeney (2001: 56) noticed for France that traditional and national songs enjoyed a new popularity during the war as the public ‘[…] reached for symbols and values with deep roots, selecting songs from the French national repertoire that crossed boundaries of age, political persuasion, and geography’. In the armies themselves, however, proposals by members of the elites about what they felt the soldiers should be singing were not always very popular (Mullen 2015: 155). It has been noted that in Belgium during the war the existing tendency to ‘civilize’ lower-class entertainment and leisure intensified (De Schaepdrijver 2000: 30; Vrints 2013: 322). On the front it was of particular interest to propagate ‘decent’ homemade songs that would replace the ‘superficial’ and ‘imported’ commercial songs from the vibrant Paris music scene, which enjoyed such wide

166

Nations, Identities and the First World War

success with the lower and middle classes in Belgium. It would go too far, however, to consider the Chansonnier du Soldat Belge or Liederenboek van den Belgische soldaat a purely top-down initiative. The Ministry of War supported the private initiative of a military chaplain because it was in the joint interest of both a powerful group of military chaplains and the government to promote songs that encouraged higher morals and national ideals.

A song on the break of shifting national identities: ‘The Flemish Lion’ ‘The Flemish Lion’ (De Vlaamsche Leeuw, 1847) was one of the most important Flemish national songs before the war – and therefore held a prominent place in the Songbook of the Belgian Soldier. Its use during wartime reveals how Flemish national symbols became ambiguous under the influence of shifting loyalties. On the one hand, ‘The Flemish Lion’ was still a pre-eminently Belgian symbol that played a role in patriotic displays and was incorporated in the Belgian patriotic discourse of new songs about the war. On the other, Flemish symbols had been – especially towards the end of the war – partly ‘contaminated’ by the collaboration of some Flemish activists. The text for ‘The Flemish Lion’ had been written in 1847 by the Flemish doctor and playwright Hippoliet van Peene as a national song for the Flemings. Originally its combativeness was directed at the perceived threat of annexation of Belgium by France (Verschaffel 1998: 173): ‘They never shall him tame / the proud lion of Flanders / even if they threaten his freedom / with shackles and screams / they never shall him tame / as long as one Fleming lives / as long as the lion can claw / as long as he has teeth’.29 In the context of a Flemish nationalism that strived to strengthen the Flemish element as an integral part of Belgium, the song fit perfectly well within Belgian patriotism, although it did not make any reference to the Belgian fatherland. By the beginning of the twentieth century it was officially taken up in the canon of Belgian national songs and was performed for the Belgian king and queen on official occasions. For the Dutch-speaking part of the country it was an often-preferred alternative to the Belgian national hymn, the Brabançonne (for various reasons, including that it was said to be more easy to sing; see ‘De Vlaamsche Zanger’ 1912). At the same time, around the turn of the century ‘The Flemish Lion’ had also become largely accepted as the ‘national song of the Flemings’ by the growing and radicalizing Flemish Movement (Verschaffel 1998: 175). This double affiliation meant that it would be a flashpoint between Belgium and Flanders when, for a minority of Dutch speakers, Flemish and Belgian loyalties drifted apart during the war. In Flanders, singing De Vlaamsche Leeuw and the Brabançonne during the war first of all served as a powerful tool of moral resistance against the German occupier in Belgium, as did the La Marseillaise and (less often) the Internationale. On numerous occasions the occupied population used collective singing of one or more of these songs as a ritual of resistance to endure the humiliation of compulsory measures and to express national identity vis-à-vis the German occupier, notably during the deportations of forced labour from 1916 on (see, for example, Whitlock 1919: 235, 263, 258; Vlaminck 1925: 46; Meert 2013: 59). Moreover, wartime adaptations of ‘The

Belgian National Identities during the War

167

Flemish Lion’ and references to it in new wartime songs strongly weaved the Flemish and (royal) Belgian national element together, as has been described above. In the personal songbook of a Belgian refugee in Great Britain, for example, a ‘translation’ of the song into English (‘to be sung in Flanders by British Soldiers with Tommies’) reworked the text to fit the patriotic Belgian war narrative that was centred around the Belgian king: ‘We struggled strong for justice / for womanhood and hearth / and fought as flemish [sic] lions / all daring, dauntless, hard / we cheer the little kingdom / the Belgian King and Queen / who make of their bold bosom / for fatherland a screen’.30 At the same time, however, the national connotation of ‘The Flemish Lion’ became ambiguous even during the war in a context of Flemish activism. The Belgian patriotic connotation of Flemish national symbols was no longer self-evident and became strongly context-dependent. Although Flemish songs figured in the Songbook of the Belgian Soldier, singing them was increasingly regarded as suspicious by the Belgian authorities, especially at the front (De Schaepdrijver 2006: 253). ‘The Flemish Lion’ had indeed become an important instrument in the struggle for more Flemish language rights in the army, where it resounded at strikes, protests and meetings of the Front Movement31 (Vanacker 2000: 79, 214, 287, 312, 313). After the ban of the Front Movement in February 1917, singing ‘The Flemish Lion’ in the army was considered a sign of insurrection and was occasionally punished with sanctions such as transfer or withdrawing leave (Vanacker 2000: 213, 283). The confounding of Flemish loyalty towards the Belgian fatherland by a minority of Flemish activists thus necessitated the need to reclaim ‘The Flemish Lion’ as a Belgian patriotic symbol. This happened in the song ‘The Patriotic Flemish Lion’ (De Vaderlandsche Vlaamsche Leeuw) that circulated in Brussels around the time of the liberation in 1918. Its author(s) explicitly distanced themselves from the ‘work of treason’ of the Flemish activists: ‘When powerless under domination / our people suffered with torment / when gloriously and enthusiastically / our army fought for us / when Fleming and Walloon generously / stayed loyal to their country / then they have sold us out / in a treacherous and cowardly way’.32 Remarkably, this was the only song of the corpus that explicitly mentioned Flemish activism. The ‘treason’ of a part of the Flemish Movement did not disqualify ‘The Flemish Lion’ as a Belgian patriotic song in the short term, however. The victory of Belgium – ‘gloriously arisen from battle’ – was still being celebrated with the singing of ‘The Flemish Lion’: ‘our Belgium is now free again / and now our young sons / will sing forever happy / the song of the flemish [sic] lion / after all that remains our cry / known from century to century’.33 Playing and singing ‘The Flemish Lion’ was also part of the official ritual of liberation as troops of the Belgian Army entered cities with Dutch-speaking populations in November 1918.34 During the ‘Joyous Entry’ of the Belgian king and queen in Brussels on 22 November, the army band played not only the Brabançonne but also De Vlaamsche Leeuw, which was, reportedly, enthusiastically sung along by the crowds (Het Laatste Nieuws 1918). At the same time, however, the fact that it continued to figure in patriotic festivities did not erase its association as being boche, especially in the eyes of French speakers.35 When the ecstasy of unitary Belgian patriotism of November 1918 died down, the national connotation of the ‘The Flemish Lion’ would eventually follow the course of anti-Belgian Flemish nationalist sentiment. As a part of the Flemish Movement after the war broke with the idea of

168

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Belgium, ‘The Flemish Lion’ would in the inter-bellum period increasingly become a statement against Belgium that was no longer compatible with Belgian national symbols such as the ‘Brabançonne’ (Verschaffel 1998: 177).

Epilogue Both the circulation of popular songs during the war in Belgium and official initiatives such as the Songbook of the Belgium Soldier showed that during the war there was a need to rationalize (and make sense of) the way in which the Flemish and Walloon subidentities related to the Belgian fatherland. A united Belgian patriotism that put the sub-national symbols in the service of the Belgian fatherland was dominant in songs in Dutch as well as in French in occupied Belgium during the war. This underscores the strength of the Belgian national frame as an overarching identity for the lower and middle classes, with the king and Belgium’s neutrality as dominant tropes. At the same time, the shifting loyalties of a minority of Flemings during the war clouded the connotation of national symbols such as the song ‘The Flemish Lion’, which sparked efforts to reclaim it as Belgian patriotic. The triumphalist Belgian nationalist songs that circulated around the liberation in November 1918 celebrated the victory also as a triumph of Belgian unity. In the patriotic songs that spread through the country in these first weeks, the liberation of Belgium was celebrated as a rebirth of the Belgian nation: ‘Belgian soul, denied for too long / by unthankful sons without faith / you now shine again resurrected’.36 The war was presented as a historic event that, in all its bloodiness, might have even created the circumstances for an ethnic fusion of the two Belgian ‘races’: ‘Flemings, Walloons, in the trenches / you have mixed your blood / while having just one image / before the trembling enemy / the sacred union was ever strong / and today, with one heart / beating lively in their trunks / our victorious sons return!’37 This kind of optimistic Belgian patriotism would not hold out very long amidst the difficult economic circumstances of the post-war period. With the departure of the common enemy and the dwindling of Belgium’s international prestige, it was soon apparent that the idea of the artificiality of the Belgian state had come out of the war reinforced (De Schaepdrijver 2000: 48). This is one of the paradoxes about the First World War and the development of Belgian nationalisms. The politics of the German occupier to break up Belgian national feeling along language lines had clearly failed to draw in the large majority of the Belgian population during the occupation, and the war itself was a climax of Belgian nationalism. Nonetheless, the divisions around the ethnic question were eventually deepened by the war experience and would continue to lead to the disintegration of the Belgian state in the long run. Multiple reasons explain this, among other things the strength of the Flemish and Walloon pre-war sub-nationalisms, the impact of the German Flamenpolitik that radicalized a part of the Flemish Movement into anti-Belgian thought and the unwillingness of the Belgian government and king to address Flemish demands during and after the war (Wils 2014). In the years after the war, as Flemish nationalism gained a wider following, the Flemish question entered the repertoires of market and street singers in the shape of the commemoration of fallen

Belgian National Identities during the War

169

Flemish martyrs. Without referencing to Belgium in any way, these songs paid tribute to the men who had died for Flanders and were now sleeping in Flemish soil.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5

6 7 8

9 10

11

A proponent of the former vision was the lawyer Edmond Picard. In 1897, he published his famous essay on the Belgian soul (L’âme belge) in which the essential duality of the Belgian nation, part Germanic, part Latin, was put forward as forming a harmonious entirety. In 1912, however, one of the major figures of the Walloon Movement, the socialist Jules Destrée, stated to the Belgian king, in a much cited letter (Destrée 1912): ‘In Belgium there are only Walloons and Flemings. There are no Belgians’. Those claims of the ‘artificiality’ of Belgium by foreign powers were not new. Since 1830 British and French observers had suggested that the Belgians did not have a real national identity (Witte 2005: 194). The Flamenpolitik started already from 1914, whereas the Wallonenpolitik started only from December 1917. By using the concept of ‘propaganda from below’ Jay Winter expands propaganda beyond its minimal definition as a deliberate process organized by the state (and other actors) to steer public opinion. He describes ‘propaganda from below’ in the context of the First World War as a horizontal societal process in which popular support was generated and dissent was muzzled from within civil society itself through collective representations. On 25 May 1915 the same regulation was proclaimed for the occupied areas closer to the Yser front, the so-called Etappengebiet that were under military command (encompassing, by and large, East and West Flanders as well as a parts of Hainaut and Luxembourg). ‘La liberté de tout dire et de tout chanter, dont nous étions si fiers et dont nous abusions si volontiers, va passer par une dure épreuve’. This was part of a stoic yet hopeful attitude of ‘patriotic endurance’ (De Schaepdrijver 2015: 158). Whether commercial entertainment was really or only superficially restoring itself under control of the German occupier in the first months of the war was subject of debate and indeed varied locally. According to Sophie De Schaepdrijver (2002), some cabarets, cinemas and music-halls in Brussels already restarted business by the end of 1914. The first censored song sheets in my corpus dates to January 1916. Some of the few music editors and singers who did hand in texts to the Kommandantur did so for many songs. Music editor Charles Halleux from Liège and the popular singer and music editor Pharaon (Edouard François) from Mons received permission from the Zensurstelle for at least twenty-five songs each between 1916 and 1918. For the Etappengebiet no censured texts were found, which seems to imply that the printing of sheet music had totally stopped there. In French: ‘César a dit de vos ancêtres: De tous les peuples de la Gaule, les Belges sont les plus braves. Gloire à vous, armée du peuple belge! Souvenez-vous, devant l’ennemi, que vous combattez pour la liberté et pour vos foyers menacés. Souvenezvous, Flamands, de la Bataille des Eperons d’or, et vous, Wallons de Liége, qui êtes

170

12

13 14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

Nations, Identities and the First World War en ce moment à l’honneur, des 600 Franchimontois.’ In Dutch: ‘César heeft van Uwe voorvaderen gezegd : Onder alle volkeren van Gallië zijn de Belgen de dapperste. Roem aan U, leger van het Belgische Volk. Vóór den vijand herinner U, dat gij strijdt voor de vrijheid en voor uwe bedreigde haardsteden. Herinnert U Vlamingen, den slag der gulden sporen, en gij Luiker Walen dat op dit oogenblik de eer der 600 Franchimontenaars U te beurt valt.’ A l’Armée de la Nation/ Aan het Leger van de Natie, Moniteur belge, vol. 84, n° 219, 07/08/1914. ‘A vous Flamands, Wallons / de sauver la Nation / et montrez-vous vaillants / contre tous ces brigands’ (Marchez petits soldats, sheet music, sung to the melody of the Paris hit Les rubans de la vie from 1911). ‘Brèyans nosse devise dârans so l’s-Allemands / Walons come Flamints, so les boches hatchant’ (Walon et flamint, sheet music in Liège dialect). ‘Wij smeeken om de zege / Die ons de vrijheid schenkt / En willen van geen vrede / Die recht en eere krenkt / Zoo briest de Leeuw van Vlaanderen / zoo kraait de Waalsche haan / Zo roept het volk eendrachtig / dat volk zal niet vergaan’ (Vaderlansch lied, songbook of Hilde Keukelinck). ‘Woei eens de storm ons toe uit vreemde streek / Blijft, Vlaming, Waal, vereend met hart en ziel [……] / Uw eendracht zij uw macht / O luistert nooit naar lafaards en verraadren / Weg met alwie het Vaderland veracht’ (Vaderlandsch lied, songbook of Victorina De Brabander). This is quite remarkable because the corpus includes a large number of commercial, censured songs from Liège, which was considered a stronghold of Walloon national sentiment (Delforge 2008: 385). Moreover, a considerable number of songs (thirty) from Liège and Mons were in the local dialect. ‘Maar wij zijn van ‘t Vlaamsche bloed / en strijden met veel moed [……] / allen te samen met ‘t wapen in d’hand / voor ‘t duurbaar Belgenland’ (Den Europeeschen Oorlog, anonymous songbook, sung to the melody of Sous les ponts de Paris). ‘Aan ‘t hoofd liet gij ons dapper koning strijden / om zegevierend ons driekleur te lijden [sic] / uw duitsche arendskroon krijg thans ook haren loon / de vlaamsche leeuw sleurt ze van haren troon’ (Oorlogslied or De duitsche verrader, songbook of Victorina De Brabander). ‘Duizendmaal neen [……] / Houd maar uw geld nooit verraad ik mijn land / In vredestijd was ik een werkmansjongen / In Vlaanderen, daar staat mijn ouders huis / Maar nu ben ik soldaat en ken mijn plichten / verwijdert u, hier gaat men niet voorbij’ (Op wacht aan den Yzer, sheet music). There was a cheap edition (10 cents) and a luxury wartime edition (1 fr. 50). Numbers of print as found in the preface of the post-war edition (Quoidbach n.d. 1918–). In France alone by the end of 1918 there were about 325,000 Belgian refugees. In Great Britain there were an estimated 150,000 and in the Netherlands 100,000 refugees remained at the end of the war (Amara 2008, 80, 161, 248). ‘Les braves cyclistes ont entendu tout un répertoire de vieilles chansons, de vieux airs de chez nous, évocations constantes du village natal, de la famille, des mamans, des épouses et des fiancées, et de tous les êtres chers dont ils sont séparés depuis bientôt deux ans. [……] Nos chansons font revivre à leurs yeux l’image de la Patrie, et leur rappellent la noblesse de la cause pour laquelle ils se battent; elles les délassent, elles leur rendent du cœur’ (‘Le XXe siècle’, Le Havre, 02/05/1916). In late 1915 some Dutch-speaking soldiers launched initiatives (mostly study groups and newsletters circulated among soldiers in the trenches) to defend Flemish rights in the army, and there were rising grievances among Flemish soldiers about the

Belgian National Identities during the War

24

25

26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33

34

35

36

37

171

dominance of the French language in the Belgian Army. A ministerial circular from January 1916 urged officers to respect the language laws and address the soldiers in their own language (Wils 2014: 175; Vanacker 2000: 67). Because of the desire to see Dutch recognized as an official language in Belgium, standardizing the language was part of uplifting the vernacular (Wils 2001). Although the Walloon Movement strived first to defend French from the threat of Dutch, the nineteenth-century ‘rediscovery’ of Walloon culture went hand in hand with publishing in Walloon dialects and, to that end, determining their right orthography. ‘[……] la moitié des chants de chacune des séances devra être en langue flamande’ (Letter from the Minister of War (signed by his chef de cabinet) to chaplain Théophile Quoidbach about extra funding for performances of the Chansonnier du Soldat Belge [not dated]). Juicht Belgen Juicht (Dutch version of the Brabançonne), Waar ligt mijn duurbaar vaderland? and Maas en schelde, in Quoidbach 1916: 2, 26, 28. Maas en Schelde and Valt aan! in Quoidbach 1916: 2, 25. Juicht, Belgen, Juicht, Le drapeau du régiment and Mijn vaderland, in Quoidbach 1916: 2, 8, 24. ‘Zy zullen hem niet temmen / den fieren Vlaemschen Leeuw / Al dreigen zy zyn vryheid / met kluisters en geschreeuw / zy zullen hem niet temmen / zoo lang een Vlaming leeft / zoo lang de leeuw kan klauwen / zoo lang hy tanden heeft’. Songbook of Eleonora Blockhuys. From the end of 1915 some Dutch-speaking soldiers started to organize themselves into a so-called Front Movement to stand up for Flemish right in the army. De Vaderlansche Vlaamsche Leeuw, sheet music (anonymous). ‘ons België is toch weder vrij / en nu gaan onze jongen zonen / ja zingen immer maar verblijd / ‘t lied van den vlaamschen leeuw / dat blijft toch onze schreeuw / reeds lang gekend van eeuw tot eeuw’ (Naar de zegepraal, sheet music by Jan Nolf, sung on the melody of Madelon). ‘The Flemish Lion’ was played, for example, in Antwerp on 16 November 1918 as Belgians marched into the city for the second day in a row, sung by both soldiers and the crowds (Resseler 2008: 101). See, for example, an incident when the playing of ‘The Flemish Lion’ at patriotic festivities in Waregem elicited the exclamation ‘Ca, c’est du boche’ (‘De Witte Kaproen’ 1919). ‘Ame Belge, longtemps niée / Par des fils ingrats et sans foi / Tu resplendis ressuscitée’ (La brabançonne après la guerre, text written by Edmond Picard, known for his prewar writings on ‘the Belgian soul’). ‘Flamands, Wallons, dans la tranchée / vous avez mêlé votre sang / n’ayant qu’une même pensée / devant l’ennemi frémissant / l’union sainte fait la force / et aujourd’huis, le même coeur / bat vivement sous tous les torses / ils reviennent nos fils vainqueurs!’ (La Brabançonne de 1918, written by M. Charette).

References Amara, M. (2008), Des Belges à l’épreuve de l’exil : les réfugiés de la Première guerre mondiale: France, Grande-Bretagne, Pays-Bas, 1914–1918, Brussels: Ed. de l’Université de Bruxelles.

172

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Augusteijn, J., and E. Storm, eds (2013), Region and State in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation-Building, Regional Identities and Separatism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Benvindo, B. (2005), Des hommes en guerre les soldats belges entre ténacité et désillusion: 1914–1918, Brussels: Archives générales du Royaume. Beyen, M., and M. Van Ginderachter, eds (2012), Nationhood from Below: Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cleveland, L. (1994), ‘Singing Warriors: Popular Songs in Wartime’, Journal of Popular Culture, 28: 155–75. De Groen, D. (2014), ‘Nationale identificatie in België tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog: Status quaestionis en nieuwe onderzoeksrichtingen’, Wetenschappelijke Tijdingen, 73: 333–48. De Schaepdrijver, S. (2000), ‘Deux patries. La Belgique entre exaltation et rejet, 1914– 1918’, Bijdragen tot de Eigentijdse Geschiedenis, 7: 17–50. De Schaepdrijver, S. (2002), ‘Occupation, Propaganda and the Idea of Belgium’, in A. Roshwald and R. Stites (eds), European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment and Propaganda, 1914–1918, 267–94, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Schaepdrijver, S. (2006), La Belgique et la Première Guerre mondiale, Brussels: Archives & Musée de la Littérature. De Schaepdrijver, S. (n.d.), ‘Making Sense of the War (Belgium)’, in U. Daniel, P. Gatrell, O. Janz, H. Jones, J. Keene, A. Kramer and B. Nasson (eds), 1914–1918 Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War. Available online: http:// encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/making_sense_of_the_war_belgium, last updated 8 October 2014. ‘De Vlaamsche Zanger’, Cortessem, 1912, n.p. ‘De Witte Kaproen’, Vlaamsch Weekblad, 09/03/1919. Debruyne, E. (2015), ‘Forbidden Reading in Occupied Countries: Belgium and France, 1914–1918’, in S. Towheed and E. King (eds), Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives, 227–41, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Delforge, P. (2008), La Wallonie et la Première Guerre mondiale: pour une histoire de la séparation administative, Namur: Institut Jules Destrée. Destrée, J. (1912), ‘Lettre au roi sur la séparation de la Wallonie et de la Flandre’, extract from Revue De Belgique from the 15th of August 1912, Brussels: M. Weissenbruch. Elias, H. (1970), Geschiedenis van de Vlaamse gedachte. Nederlandsche Boekhandel, Antwerp: De Nederlandse Boekhandel. Genton, F., ed. (2005), La guerre en chansons, Grenoble: Université Stendhal-Grenoble. Gille, L., P. Delandsheere, and A. Ooms (1919), Cinquante mois d’occupation allemande, 1914–18, Brussels: Albert Dewit. Hanheide, S., C. Glunz, D. Helms, and T.F. Schneider (2013), Musik bezieht Stellung: Funktionalisierungen der Musik im Ersten Weltkrieg, Osnabrück: V&R unipress. Het Laatste Nieuws, 25/11/1918 (Brussels). Hoegaerts, J. (2014), Masculinity and Nationhood, 1830–1910: Constructions of Identity and Citizenship in Belgium, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Horne, J. (1997), State, Society, and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huberich, C.H., and A. Nicol-Speyer (1915), Législation allemande pour le territoire belge occupé (textes officiels), La Haye: Nijhoff. ‘Le XXe siècle’, Le Havre, 02/05/1916.

Belgian National Identities during the War

173

Leerssen, J.T. (2006), National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Meert, D. (2013), Aalst 1914–1918: Aalstenaars als slaven weggevoerd, n.p.: Dirk Meert. Mullen, J. (2015), The Show Must Go On! Popular Song in Britain during the First World War, London: Routledge. Murdoch, B. (1990), Fighting Songs and Warring Words: Popular Lyrics of Two World Wars, London: Routledge. Pharaon, S. (n.d.), La guerre en chanson, Dampremy : n.p. Quoidbach T., ed. (1916), Chansonnier du Soldat Belge/Liederenboek van den Belgischen Soldaat, Paris: Henry Wykes. Quoidbach T., (n.d. 1918–), Chansonnier du Soldat Belge/Liederboek van den Belgischen Soldaat, Brussels: Military Cartographic Institute. Resseler, K. (2008), Dagboek van een bezette stad: Antwerpen onder de pinhelmen, 1914–1918, Antwerp: Pandora. Rottiers, S. (1997), ‘De eer van de zeshonderd Franchimontezen’, in A. Morelli (ed.), De grote mythen uit de geschiedenis van België, Vlaanderen en Wallonië, 65–76, Berchem: EPO. Stengers, J., and E. Gubin (2002), Histoire du Sentiment National en Belgique des Origines à 1918, vol. 2: Le Grand Siècle de la Nationalité Belge, Brussels, Edition Racine. Sweeney, R. (2001), Singing Our Way to Victory: French Cultural Politics and Music during the Great War, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Top, S. (1985), Komt vrienden, luistert naar mijn lied. Aspecten van de marktzanger in Vlaanderen (1750–1950), Tielt: Lannoo. Van Ginderachter, M. (2005), Het Rode Vaderland: De Vergeten Geschiedenis van de Communautaire Spanningen in het Belgische Socialisme voor WOI, Tielt: Lannoo. Van Ginderachter, M. (2009), ‘Het vaderland vanuit kikkerperspectief – Recent Belgisch en Nederlands onderzoek naar natievorming tijdens de lange negentiende eeuw’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 122: 522–37. Van Ginderachter, M. (2011), ‘An Urban Civilization: The Case of Municipal Autonomy in Belgian History 1830–1914’, in W. Whyte and O. Zimmer (eds), Nationalism and the Reshaping of Urban Communities in Europe, 1848–1914, 110–30, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. van Ypersele, L. (2006), Le roi Albert: histoire d’un mythe, Loverval: Labor. Vanacker, D. (2000), De Frontbeweging: de Vlaamse strijd aan de IJze, Koksijde: Klaproos. Vandeweyer, L. (1998), ‘Frontbeweging’, in R. de Schryver (ed.), Nieuwe Encyclopedie van de Vlaamse Beweging, 1210–16, Tielt: Lannoo. Vanneste, A. (2014), De Doodendraad: de elektrische draadversperring aan de Oosten Zeeuws-Vlaamse grens tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog, Gent: Provincie OostVlaanderen. Verschaffel, T. (1998), ‘De Brabançonne en de Vlaamse Leeuw’, in L.P. Grijp (ed.), Nationale hymnen, 163–83, Nijmegen: SUN. Vlaminck, C. (1925), Het etappengebied in België tijdens den oorlog 1914–1918, Brussels: Ons Land. Vrints, A. (2002), Bezette stad: vlaams-nationalistische collaboratie in Antwerpen tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog, Brussels: Algemeen Rijksarchief. Vrints, A. (2012), ‘“All the Butter in the Country Belongs to Us, Belgians”: Well-Being and Lower-Class National Identifications in Belgium during the First World War’, in M. Van Ginderachter and M. Beyen (eds), Nationhood from Below: Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century, 230–49, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

174

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Vrints, A. (2013), ‘Verschuivende tolerantiedrempels: de morele codes van het leven in bezet België (1914–1918)’, Volkskunde, 114: 317–39. Vrints, A. (2014), ‘Eenheid in verdeeldheid. Tegenstellingen in België tijdens de 1ste WO’, Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Nieuwste Geschiedenis, 44: 10–35. Whitlock, B. (1919), Belgium under the German Occupation: A Personal Narrative, London: W. Heinemann. Wils, L. (2001), Waarom Vlaanderen Nederlands spreekt, Leuven: Davidsfonds. Wils, L. (2014), Onverfranst, onverduitst? Flamenpolitik, activisme, frontbeweging, Kalmthout: Pelckmans. Winter, J. (1999), ‘Popular Culture in Wartime Britain’, in A. Roshwald and R. Stites (eds), European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment and Propaganda, 1914– 1918, 330–48, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winter, J. (2014), ‘Propaganda and the Mobilization of Consent’, in H. Strachan (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War New Edition, 216–25, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Witte, E. (2005), Nieuwe geschiedenis van België, First volume, Tielt: Lannoo.

Part Three

Minorities in and at War

Figure 4 Belgian refugees in Brussels, August 1914 (War Heritage Institute, N° Inv WHI : 201575501).

10

Minorities in and at War: Exposure, Persecution, Reaction Peter Gatrell

Introduction In November 1922, Turkish parliamentarian Mehmed Şükrü addressed delegates on the eve of their departure for the Lausanne Peace Conference with some remarks about Armenian and Kurdish minorities in the new republic.1 He spoke as follows: They would admit [sic] that they themselves put an end to their existence. And that is true. They really don’t have a place here … Oh, those people, those traitors who had been living in prosperity – they had dominated the businesses, crafts, and commerce, without even serving as soldiers for this country! (Ekmekcioglu 2014: 657, 662).

Şükrü’s comments are revealing in several respects. First, in the context of post-war diplomatic manoeuvres, he indicated that minority treaties sponsored by the new League of Nations were futile and beside the point: how would an externally imposed treaty ensure the future loyalty of Armenians and Kurds to Turkey? Second, Şükrü expressed a widespread view among Turkish nationalists that minorities were not only ‘insincere, tricky, and designing, even conspiratorial’ but also that they alone should be held responsible for their excision from the body politic. Minorities were in his view not only inherently traitorous towards the state but also had left themselves open to attack by virtue of their relatively high economic and occupational status and, by definition, their capacity to exploit the majority. In short, minorities had only themselves to blame for being exposed to persecution. Such views had already gained considerable traction in other belligerent societies during the First World War. Minorities could not be trusted, and at worst they constituted disloyal ‘elements’. Nor was it a matter of the behaviour of certain individuals: minorities collectively betrayed the state by virtue of their ethnicity. Their conspiratorial beliefs and character were revealed by sympathy for the enemy and by

178

Nations, Identities and the First World War

subversive activities. They contributed nothing positive to the war effort and instead sought to derive additional economic advantage for themselves. Before 1914, of course, there were minorities, but the First World War entrenched negative attitudes towards minorities and validated preventive measures such as internment and deportation. The war witnessed the internment of enemy aliens in Europe as well as the persecution and deportation of ‘internal enemies’. The boundaries between the two categories became blurred, particularly in the multinational continental empires. This invites us to think about population displacement more broadly, including refugees whose escape from violence acquired an ethnic dimension. Refugees exposed themselves by virtue of having fled from invasion or the threat of invasion. Minorities were over-represented in the refugee population because they were often clustered close to contested borderlands from which they fled or were expelled. In each case, wartime mobilization generated arguments about minorities in relation to property and its potential redistribution. After the war, the term ‘minority problem’ was on everyone’s lips, as if to advertise an ‘ethno-demographic condition’ that required urgent political and diplomatic attention (Mair 1928; Macartney 1934; Mazower 1998: 40–76). Between 1917 and 1918, defeated empires fractured, and successor states came into being. Victorious and vanquished states alike reckoned with the ‘problem’ of minorities and refugees at home and abroad. Diplomatic responses ranged from ideas of ‘protection’ on the one hand to the transfer of minorities to an ‘external homeland’ on the other (Brubaker 1995), a kind of prophylactic measure to dispose of the minority problem once and for all. The Polish minority treaty was a key example of the former; the Greek-Turkish population exchange an example of the latter. Protection and population transfer both had prewar antecedents, but peacemaking lent them added urgency. Both were endorsed by the League of Nations. In addition, the Soviet Union developed a new framework to secure the interest of minority populations by creating ethno-territorial units – what has been termed an ‘affirmative action empire’ (Martin 2001). War, revolution and state formation thus opened up different vistas. In this chapter I examine the treatment of national minorities in wartime. I set this discussion in the context of pre-war developments and relate wartime practices of persecution and exclusion to post-war policy options and outcomes.

Before 1914 The big continental European empires were multiethnic polities whose historic territorial expansion enrolled minorities in the imperial orbit. Economic opportunities and economic growth encouraged immigration, and this too added to the size of the minority population. Minorities played an important part in the economy and administration of the Russian, Habsburg and Ottoman empires. The chief impulse of these empires was to maintain dynastic authority and suppress protest that threatened its foundations. This is not to minimize antagonism, alienation and violence (such as the Kishinev pogroms in 1903 and the persecution of Armenians between 1894 and 1896) or the impact of revolution such as took place in Russia between 1905 and 1906.

Minorities in and at War

179

Generally speaking, however, minorities could be managed more or less peacefully. Those who spoke in support of ethnic majority domination, such as the proponents of ‘russification’ in tsarist Russia, faced vocal opposition and did not succeed in imposing their agenda (Hosking 1997). Where imperial rule took a heavy-handed form in targeting non-core groups, expressions of international outrage might be (and in some cases was) accompanied by external intervention of some kind (Fink 1998: 250; Rodogno 2012; Mylonas 2013). Yet although international treaties provided for the protection of minorities, they made no provision for enforcement of such protection. One option for persecuted minorities was ‘exit’. Another was to embrace ideas of autonomy. A third option was assimilation, akin to ‘loyalty’ in Albert Hirschman’s famous schematic triad (Hirschman 1970). The exit option was taken up by many Eastern European Jews whose assimilation was forestalled by officials who circumvented international agreements, such as in the case of Jews in Romania, who were denied citizenship and thereby forfeited the protection envisaged by the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 that gave Romania its independence, or in the case of Russian Jews, who suffered all manners of disability including the confinement of most in the infamous Pale of Settlement.2 The autonomy option deserves scrutiny (Ikeda 2015). In the Russian Empire, ideas of national-territorial autonomy emerging from the pens of Austrian social democrats such as Otto Bauer and Karl Renner found fertile soil among Jewish socialists in the Bund, and among Belarusian and Armenian activists, but were opposed by leading Bolsheviks before 1914 and of course by tsarist officials (Hirsch 2005: 25–30). Concerning the Ottoman Empire, Russian diplomat and international lawyer Andrei Mandel’shtam (1869–1949) advanced particularly significant and potentially explosive arguments in support of autonomous enclaves, in order to reduce the ‘oppression’ faced by the Armenian minority; Armenians (and Kurds) would have the right to establish their own schools funded from general taxation. The sultan capitulated in the face of external Armenophile pressure, but the outbreak of war put paid to the proposal, and the Committee of Union and Progress regarded the agreement as a betrayal by Armenian leaders and as a fundamental threat to Ottoman territorial integrity and national security. Turkey’s leaders tore up the accord when Turkey entered the war in November 1914 (Akçam 2012: 130). Before 1914, therefore, the arguments in support of autonomy gained traction but had little practical effect. Pre-war population movements exacerbated social and political tensions in the Ottoman Empire. In 1913, Ottoman officials established a new ‘Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants’, charged with finding somewhere to live for new Turkish refugees from Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro and conducting ethnographic investigations to map political affiliations and discover the extent of ‘Turkishness’. Armenians were expected to make way for the newcomers: government officials adopted a formula whereby the resettlement of non-Turks would not exceed onetenth of the population of Anatolia (Üngör 2011: 45). In other words, land disputes contributed to the intensification of ethnic antagonism. Were national minorities exposed in other ways? The growth of armies reflected the multiethnic character of each imperial state, whether tsarist, Habsburg or Hohenzollern. Scholars now tend towards the view that neither the tsarist nor the

180

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Habsburg army was fundamentally weakened by ethnic differentiation and rivalry and that instead armies were loyal to dynastic authority as the best guarantee of unity of purpose (Sanborn 2003: 71–7). More significant areas of weakness were located in material, technical and administrative shortcomings in the case of the Russian and Habsburg armies (Watson 2014: 117–18). This is not to say that minority disaffection was of no account: on the contrary, Polish and Ukrainian sentiment played a part in pre-war instability in Russia, and the same was true of Czech and Romanian opinion in Austria-Hungary. The Russian General Staff trained officers to think in terms of the ‘quality’ of the population of the tsarist state, with pernicious consequences during the war (Holquist 2001). But any disaffection was largely held in check because of an overall commitment to imperial authority.

Mobilization, patriotism and ‘population politics’ The management of minorities posed a far greater challenge during the First World War because many more people were involved in the war effort and because the political temperature was raised to fever pitch by real and perceived threats to the belligerent polity. Ethnic minorities bore the brunt of the resulting persecution. As Daniela Caglioti puts it, ‘even though suspension of habeas corpus, expulsion, repatriation, deportation of civilians from occupied territories, internment and confiscation had been experienced in past conflicts, the First World War was the first in which all these features coalesced to affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people’ (Caglioti 2014: 2). One fundamental demonstration of loyalty was to enlist. One-half of the Tsarist Army comprised non-Russian troops (Sanborn 2003). Ten per cent of the German Army comprised ethnic minorities, chiefly Poles, Alsatian-Lorrainers and Jews (Watson 2011: 1138). It is more difficult to arrive at an estimate of the contribution of ethnic minorities to the armed forces of Austria-Hungary, but their contribution was certainly considerable. Perhaps one-quarter of Ottoman troops were Arab conscripts, but the war progressively led the ruling class to question their loyalty. Armenians were suspected of desertion from the Ottoman cause (Aksakal 2014: 26). In the end, enlistment did not offer much protection to minorities that supplied manpower. Studies of mobilization have enlarged the frame of reference to include attempts to marshal Russia’s large and disparate population in support of the war. Responses were much varied: for example, many of the large resident German population in Russia petitioned the authorities for permission to change their names (some Jews did likewise), albeit with scant result because tsarist officials found their argument unconvincing (Avrutin 2005). But war also exposed the historically contentious relationship between the state and Jewish, Ukrainian, Polish, Lithuanian, Armenian and other minorities who, like Germans, were subjects of the tsar. Would the war mend fences or produce fresh cracks in the multinational edifice, such as had begun to appear before 1914? At the heart of Russia’s imperial war effort was the paradox that the state dangled concessions in front of some national leaders, particularly Polish, while insisting that the war was fundamentally about the defence of a Slavophile

Minorities in and at War

181

empire. Adding a further layer of complexity, the legitimacy of the tsarist state also depended upon how it managed national minorities who either newly fell within its orbit as a result of occupation or entered Russia’s imperial space in substantial numbers as prisoners of war or as refugees. Something of a common pattern emerges in the behaviour of Habsburg and tsarist military commanders towards minorities on the shifting front line. The Austrian High Command targeted Czechs, Ruthenes and Croats, as well as Italians from the south Tyrol and Trentino – all of them imperial subjects – with considerable ferocity. Similarly, the Russian High Command targeted Poles, Latvians and Jews, along with German subjects of the tsar, all of whom stood accused of aiding the enemy and acting as a kind of fifth column. As in the Ottoman Empire, the fact that each minority readily enlisted did not exempt their families from this ‘military paranoia’ (Watson 2014: 253, 255). Russian generals confidently asserted that ‘the complete hostility of the entire Jewish population towards the Russian Army is well established’ (Gatrell 1999: 16). Russian troops, including Cossack soldiers far from home who encountered Polish Jews for the first time, easily mistook Yiddish for German, and this ignorance only reinforced the message from their superiors that Jews were not to be trusted. Expressions of patriotism by Jewish politicians were to no avail. The war provided their neighbours with an opportunity to denounce Jews for reasons of personal animosity and in the hope of some reward for turning ‘spies’ over to the authorities. Such distorted preconceptions underpinned widespread attacks on Jews and Jewish property. What began as sporadic and unsystematic actions in 1914 turned into methodical deportations in the spring of 1915, accompanied by mass looting. As many as 600,000 Russian Jews were displaced (Lohr 2003: 121–65; Sanborn 2003: 116–22). In the Ottoman Empire, war stoked fears of an insurgency by Armenian irregular forces in eastern Anatolia and led to the close monitoring of local Armenian politicians in order to deter ‘provocations’. Turkish leaders pointed to the prospect of a breakaway Armenian state and Russian colonization in the wake of the Russian military advance. Instructions were issued to deport ‘bandits’ and ‘deserters’ and to prevent Armenian men, women and children from leaving the country. In the menacing words of Talat Pasha, speaking to a German journalist, ‘those who are innocent today might be guilty tomorrow’ (quoted in Mann 2005: 155). The stakes grew higher in the following months. The battle of Sarıkamış in January 1915 turned into a disaster for the Ottoman Army. It was followed by the struggle over the Dardanelles at Çanakkale (Gallipoli) and fears of the imminent loss of Constantinople itself. Tight restrictions were placed on the movement of Armenians of all ages. Uprisings in Van in the months of April and May led the state to issue a decree authorizing deportation where ‘security and military interests’ demanded it. Secret instructions were delivered by special courier in May 1915 for the ‘total deportation’ of Armenians from Zeytun, Erzerum, Bitlis and Van to the area around Damascus and Aleppo. In a coded telegram dated 29 August 1915, Talat Pasha wrote to provincial governors: The objective that the government expects to achieve by the expelling of the Armenians from the areas in which they live and their transportation to other appointed areas is to ensure that this community will no longer be able to

182

Nations, Identities and the First World War

undertake initiatives and actions against the government, and that they will be brought to a state in which they will be unable to pursue their national aspirations related to advocating a government of Armenia. (cited in Akçam 2012: 135)

The language reflected the animosity felt towards Armenians, who were described as ‘internal tumours’ and ‘microbes’ (Holquist 2011; Ekmekcioglu 2013: 530). Thus Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were targeted on grounds of their perceived disloyalty. Persecution and deportation culminated in mass murder orchestrated by the highest echelons of state, with support from the Turkish and Kurdish population. In Russia, by contrast, many ministers and civil servants were appalled by the actions of military commanders. The government’s decision to open most of the Russian interior to displaced Jews offered them an escape route. An important consideration here was the realization that Jews in the diaspora had begun to mobilize on behalf of their coreligionists in Russia. Armenians in the Ottoman Empire had less international leverage but in any case faced a much more intransigent opponent. Another new political dimension of population politics worked in a different direction. This was the decision by rival powers to mobilize minorities as instruments to destabilize the enemy. Germany held out hopes of liberation to the ‘captive nations’ under tsarist domination and sponsored a League of Russia’s Foreign Peoples that held Germany to be the ‘protector of the rights of the oppressed’, although it had to tread carefully lest this destabilize its Habsburg partner. Meanwhile, AustriaHungary dangled the possibility of a united Ukraine under Habsburg auspices. In November 1916, Germany and Austria announced their intention to recognize Polish ‘independence’, obliging Russia to promise greater autonomy for Poland within the empire. The Allied powers also offered inducements, but ‘there was a great discrepancy between the Entente’s liberationist propaganda, directed at potential allies and neutrals, and the treatment of subject populations in the British, French, and Russian empires’ (Fink 2004: 69–70, 79–80). This puts into perspective the tsarist response to Polish claims. The so-called Amber Declaration drawn up by Lithuanian patriots on 4 August 1914 affirmed that ‘the common task of Lithuanian and Slav warriors is to combat … the all-devouring Germanism’. Its purpose was not only to support the Russian war effort but also to encourage the tsarist regime to offer the same autonomy to (an enlarged) Lithuania as it offered Poland (Viscont 1917: 176). Occupation by enemy forces produced various outcomes. When they occupied Serbia, Austro-Hungarian troops expelled and interned around 180,000 people; up to 500,000 fled across the mountains of Albania and Montenegro. The German occupation regime in the Baltic region lent support to non-Russian nationalities by backing Polish and Belarusian schools and cultural organizations in Grodno. By contrast, Russia’s occupation regime in Galicia and Bukovina between 1914 and 1915 targeted local Ruthenian culture and the Uniate (Catholic) religion as part of a ‘russification’ policy, while persecuted Jewish residents fled to the interior of Austria-Hungary or, if they could not get out in time, were deported to Russia. Confronted by forced migrants (vyselentsy) from occupied Galicia, Russian provincial governors decided that they could be treated as ‘ordinary refugees’, provided they demonstrated or were ready to embrace a ‘Slav consciousness’ and Russian Orthodoxy (Gatrell 1999: 167).

Minorities in and at War

183

Notwithstanding wartime rhetoric and widespread military brutality, belligerents could by and large count upon the loyalty of minorities. Outright resistance on the part of imperial subjects was, not surprisingly, met with a concerted response, including organized deportation. The most dramatic challenge to Russian imperial rule between 1905 and February 1917 took place in Central Asia in 1916. For months the tsarist secret police had warned of the difficulties in maintaining surveillance of the indigenous Muslim population. Kirghiz and Kazakh leaders denounced the corruption of local officials; government ministers concluded that pan-Islamist sentiment was much less of a destabilizing factor than social and economic changes contingent on the war. In particular, the arrival of tens of thousands of refugees helped convince the resident population that the tsarist war effort had come unstuck. Against this backdrop, a decision to conscript Kazakh and Kirghiz men was bound to cause trouble. Muslim leaders interpreted it as the precursor to a redistribution of land to Russians – both the newcomers and the tens of thousands of Russians who had settled in the region since the turn of the century. As the revolt gained in intensity, politicians in Petrograd traded blows with military commanders, while local Russian officials complained about the ‘quality’ of the settlers – an interesting indication that the Russian minority in Central Asia did not escape official opprobrium. General A. N. Kuropatkin, who had taken part in Russia’s conquest of Central Asia during the 1870s, advocated the expulsion of nomads and an accelerated programme to settle Russian farmers on the land that became available. Some 250,000 Kirgiz and Kazakhs were deported or fled across the border to China (Bakhturina 2004: 300–15; Happel 2010: 153–67). In this instance, the dilemmas of simultaneously mobilizing resources and managing ethnic relations in a fragile multinational polity were clearly exposed.

‘Aliens’ and ‘alienation’: Internment and expropriation Much has been written about the precarious position of enemy aliens – citizens of enemy states – during the First World War and about the potential for hostility to be extended to naturalized immigrants and citizens who were suspected of disloyalty. Armenians in the Ottoman Empire found themselves in a particularly exposed position and ultimately suffered in the most severe fashion. Internment affected several hundred thousand civilians in Europe alone. It was justified also as a preventive measure to forestall attacks on enemy aliens (US government officials advanced similar arguments in 1941, in relation to the internment of Japanese Americans). Britain interned around 30,000 enemy aliens, France around 60,000, the United States around 110,000 and Australia around 4,500 (Lohr 2003: 178). The measures taken against enemy aliens also extended to restrictions on property ownership and, in some instances, to outright expropriation. The 30,000 enemy aliens that Britain incarcerated were mostly German men of military age; women and children, along with older men, were encouraged to leave the country. Exemptions were made for those who were technically German, Austrian or Turkish but who were ‘violently hostile’ to their overlords on grounds of nationality. In addition to camps, the British government made use of ocean liners and other vessels (Panayi 1991).

184

Nations, Identities and the First World War

In Canada, German and Ukrainian minorities were first demonized and then interned (Luciuk 2001). The Australian government likewise yielded to popular pressure to act against enemy aliens, even though the attorney general of New South Wales neatly explained why internment was counterproductive: There are over 30,000 Germans in Australia … the proposal of a number of people is that these 30,000 Germans should be put into concentration camps. This means that in future Australians will grow wheat for them, build houses for them, make books for them, and that I as the head of the state bakery will employ Australian bakers to bake bread for German citizens. I am not sure, under these circumstances, who would be the most punished, the men who remain in the camp or the men who remain outside and do the work for them. (cited in Fischer 1993: 270–1)

In the United States, conservative and nativist opinion confidently asserted that not only did non-naturalized German immigrants owe allegiance to Germany but also that significant numbers of naturalized citizens were ‘American in name only’. This applied in particular to recent immigrants from Austria-Hungary, relatively few of whom had been naturalized. The Justice Department believed it best to take pre-emptive action before ‘these German aliens commit crimes’. Legislation restricted their mobility and required them to register any change of address or employment. In April 1918, American women who had married enemy aliens forfeited their citizenship, thereby adding 220,000 individuals to the register. There were even calls in 1918 for enemy aliens to be made to wear armbands for ease of identification. Naturalized German Americans, as well as non-naturalized Germans, were caught up in the patriotic fervour, but Germans were not for the most part treated as enemy aliens, unlike the situation in Australia, where the government imposed restrictions on the movement and residence of naturalized citizens in a series of sweeping measures in May 1916. Relatively few German Americans were interned – around 2,000 in total, from a registered German enemy alien male population of more than 254,000 – perhaps because of the resources that would have been required and the availability of other means of surveillance and scrutiny. Those liable to be interned tended to be either high-profile business leaders or labour activists (Nagler 1993: 199–210). In due course, enemy nationals were held in internment camps, partly to deter them from carrying out sabotage but also to protect them from physical attack by non-aliens. In France, ‘Austro-Germans’ were mainly sent to camps in Brittany, while ‘AlsaciensLorrains’ were sent to the far south (Farcy 1995: 135, 137). What Sarah Stein (2014) calls the ‘legal grey zone’ of citizenship fell apart in France during the war. Suspicion – including suspicion that they were spying on behalf of the enemy – fell upon people who held dual nationality. The Hungarian novelist Aladar Kuncz, who found himself in Périgueux at the outbreak of war, was subjected to vitriolic attacks by local French people when he, along with German residents, boarded cattle trucks on the journey to an unknown destination in 1914 (Farcy 1995: 13, 17). In Austria-Hungary, the internment of enemy aliens such as British and French was directed mostly at those of modest means; well-off people were left to go about their business, albeit under strict supervision (Stibbe 2014: 486).

Minorities in and at War

185

In the continental European empires, entire communities of ‘internal enemies’ – imperial subject groups belonging to subordinate minorities – were liable to be deported and in many instances interned. Italian-speaking communities on the Italian- and Slovene-speaking borders of the Habsburg Empire were interned on the grounds of potential irredentist activity. Leading Ruthenian activists were held in atrocious conditions in the Thalerhof internment camp near Graz in the wake of the Austrian retreat from Galicia in 1914. Bosnian Serbs faced similar incarceration and deprivation in Hungarian camps. In the aftermath of the war, the Austrian government drew a veil over these practices or indicated that they were justified and lenient, rather than arbitrary and harsh (Stibbe 2014). In the Russian Empire, deportation of minority populations became widespread, but the tsarist government favoured their settlement in remote regions rather than incarceration. Inevitably, internment camps contributed to an intensification of patriotic sentiment that reflected a sense of having been singled out. German internees celebrated German victories, and Germans interned in Australia sometimes did likewise. But they had little time for fellow internees, whether Austrian, Czech or other nationalities, and Austrian internees protested about being lumped together with Germans (Fischer 1989: 256–7; Farcy 1995: 344–6). Internment did not encourage a belief that minorities had a common cause. Economic considerations also loomed large in the equation of mobilization and ‘alienation’. Government attacks on enemy property ranged from restrictions on business activity to outright expropriation. Expropriation was used not only as a punitive weapon against minorities who were deemed to be ‘inherently disloyal’ but also as a means of rewarding the majority. In addition, it had the potential to encourage anti-capitalist sentiment more broadly, the clearest example being in Russia, where capitalism had not struck firm roots. Beyond this, one should add that legal restrictions on enemy aliens (citizens of enemy states) or their outright denaturalization clearly had consequences for the conduct of business, even if it did not amount (as it did for the Bolsheviks) to an assault on capital. Some businessmen were compelled to dispose of their assets at knockdown prices, as happened with Japanese Americans during the Second World War. Physical attacks on enemy (‘alien’) persons and property increased in intensity during the war. How far they were ‘spontaneous’ and how far they were a response to government propaganda and government initiatives is difficult to say. No belligerent state was immune. In Britain, anti-‘alien’ sentiment shifted from Jews to Germans, particularly after the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915. Assaults on Germans were recorded in Moscow and Paris. Since many of those who had acquired French nationality were business people and bankers, verbal and physical assaults on their ‘foreign conquest’ amounted to an attack on property rights (Farcy 1995: 12–13). The idea of a community of suffering was called into question by the issue of profiteering and corruption and images of people who were behaving in a way that went against collective ‘patriotic’ norms. Generally speaking, therefore, the business affairs and eventually also the property of ‘enemy aliens’ were regarded as fair game. In Russia, concrete measures were taken against German assets, extending the target groups beyond Jewish businessmen

186

Nations, Identities and the First World War

and the petty traders who had traditionally been the victims of pogroms. Many of these people were, of course, subjects of the tsar who had been resident in Russia for generations (Lohr 2003). Newspapers and parliamentarians made much of the so-called German yoke (zasil’e). In Britain too, the media whipped up a storm about German ‘alien penetration’ in industry, trade and banking. A series of acts relating to trading with the enemy was designed to ‘eradicate the plague spot’, for example, identifying and closing down businesses that had changed their name to disguise their alien origin. These actions reached an apogee in August 1918 and were reinforced by the peace treaty that provided for the liquidation of German property overseas (Panayi 1991: 138, 148). Property rights were also at stake in the Ottoman Empire. Turkish contempt for Armenians was matched by the precise statistical delineation of the numbers deported, the quality and quantity of the land they forfeited, the food and draft animals that could be handed over to the Turkish Army and the vacant property to be assigned to Muslim newcomers, including fresh contingents of refugees who had fled the fighting in the Caucasus (Üngör and Lohr 2014; Akçam and Kurt 2015). The First World War thus targeted enemy aliens on the grounds that they had the potential to subvert the war effort. Over time, political and cultural mobilization helped to cultivate a belief that enemy aliens had no place in the social and economic fabric. They became the first minority casualties of war. Propaganda and public opinion turned the idea of victimization on its head: society at large was the victim of alien subterfuge, skulduggery and exploitation.

Minorities as refugees, refugees as minorities The refugee population in the Russian and Habsburg empires amounted to at least 8 million people across the period of the First World War. Mass population displacement was associated with military calamity, and in each case ethnic minorities were disproportionately represented in the refugee population – Jews, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Belarusians, Ukrainians and Armenians in the Russian Empire; Jews and Ukrainians in the Habsburg Empire – mainly because they lived (or in the case of Russian Jews, were obliged to live) in borderlands that were most vulnerable to enemy invasion. In Russia the search for scapegoats of various kinds and the virulent attacks on German property were accompanied by financial and moral support for refugees as ‘victims of war’. In addition to empire-wide organizations, such as the semi-official Tatiana Committee and the Union of Towns and Zemstvos, the tsarist government permitted towns and cities throughout the empire to create national refugee committees. These committees were minority organizations par excellence – no Russian national committee was deemed necessary. They carried out welfare work, found jobs for refugees and organized cultural and educational programmes, not least to educate Russians by means of art exhibitions and concerts about the cultural achievements of the non-Russian population. These refugee committees did not sing from the same hymn sheet, being divided, broadly speaking, between conservatives and socialists. Nevertheless, some generalizations can be made. One is that the committees hoped to enlist pre-existing

Minorities in and at War

187

communities, such as Poles and Latvians who had been exiled to Siberia (and that claimed to have been ‘forgotten’) or Armenians in the Caucasus. Jewish committees sought to counter the tide of anti-Semitism that followed the decision to abandon the Pale of Settlement and allow Jews to settle in the interior, although this exposed them to accusations that they would take over Russian businesses. Each committee was informed by a strong sense of loss and victimhood that rested on the belief that the dispersal of refugees risked their assimilation into a dominant Russian culture. It was imperative to transform their political status, whether by some measure of autonomy within the Russian Empire or, as in the case of Armenian refugees, by liberation from the Turkish ‘yoke’ (Gatrell 1999: 141–70). In the Habsburg Empire, in addition to deportation of civilian Ruthenians, Serbs and Italians, Jewish civilians fled from Galicia to the Austrian interior in order to escape the threat of pogroms from invading Russian troops. The distinction between internees and refugees was fluid and never clear-cut. The Austrian authorities devoted much more energy to working out which people had sufficient means to support themselves and who should be sent to government-controlled camps. Here they were ‘sorted’ according to nationality and religion, but, as Julie Thorpe has shown, the decisions were often arbitrary, ‘creat[ing] national and confessional identities out of nonnational and perhaps bi-confessional or even non-confessional German-speakers, who may have hidden their Ukrainian or Polish linguistic roots in the hope of preferential treatment’. By 1917 the state had replicated the arrangements in Russia that legitimized refugee welfare committees on national lines. The committees provided a platform for nationalists to argue the case for Galicia to be rebuilt under future Polish rule or as an autonomous Ukrainian province of East Galicia (Thorpe 2011: 108, 114–15). The discourse of suffering and victimization became a means of legitimizing claims to autonomy or ‘liberation’ from the imperial yoke. National committees accordingly embarked on the planned ‘repatriation’ of Latvian, Lithuanian and Polish refugees, who would contribute to state-building. In the Russian Empire, which devolved responsibility for managing refugees onto patriotic leaders, the contours of national liberation had already begun to be drawn. This did not happen in the Habsburg Empire, where the nationalism had other mainsprings. In the Ottoman Empire, the policies pursued by the Young Turks afforded no scope for non-Turkish self-expression.

Aftermath The so-called minorities problem persisted in the aftermath of the First World War. The numbers are impressive: one estimate puts the aggregate minority population in interwar Europe at 35 million (Mazower 1998: 55). Statistics buttressed claims and counterclaims advanced by states and other actors, including new intergovernmental organizations, particularly the League of Nations. Attention here is given to Europe’s Jews at war’s end, to the protection of minorities, to Soviet policies towards minorities and to population exchange. The end of the war did little to improve the position of Jews in ‘new Europe’. Postwar conflicts subjected Jews to fresh violence and persecution. During the long and

188

Nations, Identities and the First World War

brutal Russian civil war, Jews found themselves at the mercy of armed peasant bands as well as Polish and Ukrainian soldiers who ran amok in the lawless borderlands. Carole Fink describes Polish attacks on the Jewish residents of Lwow/L’viv in November 1918, who had declared their neutrality in the war that Poles and Ukrainians fought for control of the oil-rich province of East Galicia (Fink 1998: 252–3; Fink 2004: 101–30). Polish soldiers massacred Jewish civilians in Pinsk in April 1919, a cataclysmic event that lead to the formation of a Committee on New States, whose deliberations were given added urgency by the imminent agreement to Poland’s independence (Fink 1998: 264–5; Fink 2004: 171–208). In Europe at large, the vulnerability of Jews increased rather than lessened, since the collapse of European empires had left them more exposed politically and economically. As one contemporary lamented, ‘it was much better to be a minority of six million in one big empire, rather than a lot of little minorities in little states’ (S. Poliakov, quoted in Levene 1993: 516). In addition to familiar accusations of speculation and ‘exploitation’, Jews were now charged – along with many Latvians – with being at the forefront of revolutionary politics in states that sought to confront bolshevism. Finding a ‘solution’ to their vulnerability was not helped by the fact that Jewish leaders were divided among themselves, between ardent Zionists on the one hand and those who acknowledged the sovereignty of the successor states of Eastern Europe on the other; between the ultraorthodox and the secular; and between those who favoured assimilation and those who were resolutely opposed, such as the American Jewish Congress, which advocated greater autonomy for Jewish minorities in Central and Eastern Europe, by which they meant full use of language and the right of cultural expression (Fink 1998: 254, 260; Fink 2004: 77).3 For their part, the Allies tended to see anything tantamount to autonomy as undermining the foundation of the successor states; it was one thing to protect the rights of the individual to practise their religion and to educate children in the parental language, but quite another to provide collective ‘national’ rights in the new Europe. The implications of attempts to agree on measures to protect minorities that remained after the formation of new states and demarcation of frontiers were much discussed at the time in relation to issues of state sovereignty. The Allied peacemakers were committed to protecting ‘minorities of language, race or religion’ in the successor states rather than making explicit reference to ‘national minorities’. The minority treaties were selectively applied to the successor states of Eastern Europe, beginning with Poland. To adopt a universal approach would mean accepting the rights of other minorities – ‘American negroes, Southern Irish, Flemings or Catalans’, as Alfred Zimmern put it (Sharp 1978: 181). Harold Nicolson, a member of the British delegation at Versailles, observed: The result will be that while endeavouring to prevent the ill-treatment of alien minorities we will in effect arouse in a great number of hitherto contented minorities the feeling that they are ill-treated, that they have always had a grievance, and that they now have an appeal to Geneva against their own government. (cited in Sharp 1978: 181)

In the end, although it gave all citizens equality before the law, the Polish Minority Treaty contained loopholes, such as making no provision for refugees who fled during the war

Minorities in and at War

189

and who now sought to claim citizenship. Indeed it avoided any reference to ‘national minority’, substituting the term ‘Polish nationals who belong to racial, religious or linguistic minorities’ whose civil, political and cultural rights were recognized. There was no special representation for Polish Jews and no government department for minorities in Poland (Fink 1998: 270–1; Roshwald 2001: 164–9). French diplomats argued that Poland was a vital bulwark against bolshevism and should not be put in an impossible position. The new governments of Eastern Europe were able to capitalize on the Allies’ determination to block any potential expansion of Bolshevik influence by lending them support rather than undermining their sovereignty in any fundamental way. Thus the constraints imposed on them by the League were rhetorical rather than real. Other minorities also constituted a ‘problem’, including Armenian survivors of genocide. Some of them remained in the new Turkish republic but faced continued discrimination. An added complication was the fate of Armenian women and children who had been abducted by Muslim men and whose status was hotly contested (Ekmekcioglu 2013). Others settled in the new socialist republic of Armenia, where they formed a titular majority albeit under the overarching framework of the Soviet Union; this was not the ‘homeland’ that most Armenians meant when they spoke of ‘greater Armenia’. Most survivors became stateless, having (as contemporary legal doctrine put it) lost the ‘protection’ of the state in which they hitherto had resided. Eventually they swelled the diaspora in the Middle East and the United States or settled in France, where they were expected to assimilate (Mandel 2003). As Lucy Mair (1928: 19) wrote, ‘most important of all are the minorities which the application of the principle of self-determination has itself produced, where territory held by right of conquest has been restored to the people from whom it was taken, and the former dominant race has become a minority in the land of the people whom it once governed’ (Mair 1928: 19). This applied to Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia as well as to Hungarians in Romania, Czechoslovakia, Serbia and Croatia. Weimar Germany used the minority treaties to advance the cause of ethnic Germans beyond its borders (Fink 2004). Their position remained a politically sensitive issue in interwar Europe and was only resolved after the Second World War by mass expulsions of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia. State practices of classifying, monitoring and disposing of potentially troublesome minorities were not confined to East-Central Europe. Thus ‘selection commissions’ (commissions du triage) went to work in AlsaceLorraine after 1918 to deport German residents from the recovered territory in order to establish its unalterable ‘Frenchness’ (Grohmann 2005). The option of expulsion – or at least assisted emigration – was retained even as the League of Nations appeared to offer protection to minorities (Weitz 2008). Bolshevik policy towards national minorities in the newly constituted Soviet Union represented another option. Here ‘affirmative action’ became the order of the day as a means of distinguishing revolutionary policy from the former tsarist ‘prison-house of nations’. Although a bone of contention, and although promoted in the context of a unitary socialist state, Bolshevik support for national-territorial autonomy was designed to support schools, courts and other institutions, including soviets, that would enhance rather than weaken national identity, particularly among ‘backward’ peoples. Hence the Bolsheviks endorsed a system of autonomous republics and regions that promoted cultural ‘nativization’ (korenizatsiia) (Smith 1999).

190

Nations, Identities and the First World War

This is not to say that Bolsheviks cast aside their ideological suspicion of nationalism as a ‘mask’ for counter-revolution. Lenin and Stalin maintained that by granting nationhood they could then turn their attention to engendering class conflict. In the medium and long term, however, the creation of national soviets, the development of ethnographic knowledge and the drawing of thousands of new internal borders encouraged the majority group in the titular republic or autonomous region to look disdainfully on its minorities, sowing the seeds for their eventual flight or expulsion (Janowsky 1945: 103–4; Martin 2001: 36, 44–5). A final example of post-war reckoning with the ‘problem’ of minorities concerns the diplomacy of population transfer/population exchange. Here too there were pre-1914 antecedents as well as ‘solutions’ advocated during the First World War. For example, George Montandon recommended a ‘mass transplantation of nonnationals’, accompanied by the adjustment of frontiers, as being ‘less cruel than war itself ’, while Siegfried Lichtenstädter proposed a ‘national exchange’ of minorities that would remove Russians and Germans from Poland and create a strong and ethnically homogeneous Germany (Frank 2011). The idea of engineering ethnic homogeneity had already taken root in the Balkans as a response to antagonisms that had erupted in violent pogroms in 1906 inflicted on the Greek minority in Bulgaria and the Bulgarian minority in Greece. Preparations for an exchange of populations were already under way in 1913–14 under the auspices of Greek prime minister Venizelos. In 1919, Venizelos proposed a ‘reciprocal and voluntary’ transfer of population between Greece and Bulgaria that would ‘liberate’ the Greek people. Greece was happy to be rid of its Bulgarian minority, even when many of them struggled to identify with the label; Bulgaria was more ambivalent, because the continued presence of Bulgarians in Macedonia and Thrace helped to validate Bulgarian claims to these former Ottoman lands. For their part, many ordinary Greeks and Bulgarians preferred to stay put. The political stakes were raised by the Treaty of Lausanne, which assigned western Thrace to Greece. By 1925, refugees were crossing the borders in both directions in order to escape local persecution. But their experience of resettlement left them disillusioned (Dragostinova 2009). In 1923, after the resurgence of conflict between Greece and Turkey, the Treaty of Lausanne set the seal on the project of population exchange. Crucially, however, international diplomacy insisted that the Greeks and Turks most directly affected would not be able to decide for themselves whether to remain or to be resettled. Compulsion was the order of the day, since the transfer of people was in their best interests and would help bring peace to the entire region. The implementation of the exchange was costly in aggregate economic terms and caused immense personal hardship and chronic misunderstandings between host populations and the newcomers. In particular, the suggestion that Greeks from Anatolia were ‘coming home’ was extremely fanciful and even offensive (Hirschon 2003).This did not stop some diplomats and public figures from embracing the doctrine of population transfer as a ‘solution’ to the problem of minorities (see Janowsky 1945: 140, for a warning shot, however). Finally, what about humanitarianism and human rights in relation to the wartime persecution of minorities and the responses it evoked? Impressive aid work was undertaken by private charities and non-governmental organizations, including

Minorities in and at War

191

refugee committees that were dedicated to supporting specific groups. Already the war had thrown up examples of diasporic involvement in assisting ‘their’ victims of war. Non-diasporic organizations such as Near East Relief also appeared on the scene to provide for the needs of Armenian refugee children who were scattered across mandated Palestine, Lebanon and Syria as well as Greece. Educated in the so-called compatriot schools named after the villages in which they were born, Armenian children received instruction in the Armenian language, with which most of them were hitherto unfamiliar (Watenpaugh 2015: 113–7). Institutional innovation could have durable consequences. In response to the violation of civil rights of Germans in the United States, a group of activists formed the National Civil Liberties Bureau (Nagler 1993: 194). In a similar spirit, international lawyers became advocates on behalf of refugees and minorities during the 1920s, affirming the primacy of individual rights and critiquing the dominant role accorded to state sovereignty (Kévonian 2004). One state, Estonia, took the unprecedented decision to legislate for non-territorial cultural autonomy, enabling recognized minorities to organize their own schools, something that Estonian Germans took seriously, albeit primarily as a means of seeking to preserve Baltic German culture and influence (Smith and Hiden 2006). But this was highly unusual, and Estonia’s example was not followed, nor could it be enforced on other states. For the most part, private organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross followed the lead of the League of Nations by accepting the doctrine that the treatment of its population was a domestic matter for individual states. The issue of human rights requires more attention than is possible here, except to say that the diplomats who agreed to the population exchanges mentioned above were willing to renounce the principle of voluntariness. One final thought on humanitarian ‘concern’ in relation to minority victims of war: not everything can be reduced to institutional form and practice. A poignant reflection on the wartime refugee crisis emerged in an early account published in Baku in 1915, whose author, V. I. Frolov, emphasized the need for aid workers to acknowledge human solidarity rather than national difference: ‘the idea of humanity, the belief in the fact that each person has the right to positive regard by others by virtue of the fact that he is a human being … whatever his nationality is not evident in the present matter [of refugee relief]’ (Gatrell 1999: 289). However, this cosmopolitan voice struggled to make itself heard in conditions of total war.

Conclusions A key dimension of cultural mobilization during the war was the ‘nationalization’ and essentialization that took place, lumping people together and making assumptions about collective behaviour, in a process that has been characterized as the ‘mobilization of ethnicity’ during the war (von Hagen 1998). Fears about the progress of the war effort were projected onto the ‘enemy within’. The outcomes differed from one country to another. German Americans who were naturalized citizens escaped being treated as enemy aliens, but in Australia the government sought to mask internal economic and social cleavages by making Germans into scapegoats (Fischer 1993: 277). In the UK,

192

Nations, Identities and the First World War

the decision to weaken the rights of naturalized Germans reached a crescendo only at the end of the war, when legislation in 1918 gave the government wider power to revoke naturalization certificates and prevent Germans from being given such certificates after the war, in accordance with the belief, ‘once a German, always a German’ (Panayi 1991: 64–5). But the general pattern of opprobrium and discrimination was common to all belligerents, and it tapped a vein of popular support. Second, and related to the above, some minorities were economically more exposed than others by virtue of having attained wealth and status, and this made them particularly vulnerable to accusations of speculation and exploitation during the war – Germans and Jews in Russia, Jews in Galicia and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. It is striking that these were relatively backward societies. By contrast, although Germans in Britain felt the cold blast of public hostility and official persecution, official measures to restrict German enterprise were relatively mild, partly because commercial and financial activities were deeply rooted and impossible to undermine without inflicting greater damage on the British economy as a whole. The third point concerns ideas of nation-state ‘homogeneity’ and the means whereby it could be achieved, usually meaning some kind of demographic ‘surgery’ to excise the ‘dangerous element’ from the body politic, by measures including internment, deportation and expulsion and outright extermination. Can we therefore speak of the wartime origins of ‘ethnic cleansing’? Ottoman and Russian practice certainly points in this direction, where a policy developed of ‘cleansing foreign or unwanted elements’ that were deemed to be ‘dangerous, diseased or unhealthy’ (Lohr 2003: 222). Those who stood in the way for various reasons – economic, social, ideological, political or military – were liable to be deported or punished by some other means. The pursuit of homogeneity did not let up after the war. One attractive option, because the alternatives appeared to be either unworkable or murderous, was a transfer of population, such as was already being implemented in the Balkans before the war. But this ‘unmixing of nations’ did little to achieve the kind of solidarity that ethnic affinity between the indigenous population and the newcomers was supposed to ensure. At the same time, the war paradoxically yielded some benefit to minorities. Notwithstanding the persecution to which they were subjected, national minorities found a degree of solidarity in deportation camps and refugee settlements, where important educational, cultural and political work took place. The eventual achievement of independence, such as for Poland and the Baltic States, came at a considerable cost, but wartime population displacement and the relief effort helped to crystallize a clearer sense of national identity among those directly affected. The status of other minorities was more uncertain, particularly after the war. Jews had to wait until after the Holocaust for a ‘national home’. Armenians living in the former Russian Empire enjoyed a brief episode of independence between 1918 and 1920 before having to come to terms with the sovietization of an Armenian homeland that was far smaller in size than nationalists had hoped. The survivors of Ottoman persecution fled abroad, swelling the size of the Armenian diaspora, which, like the Jewish equivalent, became a focus and a source of humanitarian relief efforts. These too deserve to be included in the balance sheet. Better, perhaps, to be a ‘diasporic nation’ than a beleaguered minority.

Minorities in and at War

193

Notes 1 The Lausanne Peace Conference opened in late 1922 and concluded in July 1923. It brought to an end the protracted conflict in the Balkans and Anatolia. 2 The Pale of Settlement underwent several changes over time, but essentially it was an administrative device to confine Russia’s Jewish population, with a few exceptions, to the western part of the Russian Empire. 3 Samuel Moyn alludes to ‘Jewish “roads not taken” such as diasporic nationalism or various non-nationalist modes of belonging’: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/ fantasies-of-federalism (accessed 4 March 2017).

References Akçam, T. (2012), The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Akçam, T., and Ü Kurt (2015), The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide, New York: Berghahn Books. Aksakal, M. (2014), ‘The Ottoman Empire’, in R. Gerwarth and E. Manela (eds), Empires at War, 1911–1923, 17–33, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Avrutin, E. (2005), ‘Kreshchenie evrei, ethnicheskii konflikt i politika povsednevnoi zhizni v Rossii vo vemia pervoi mirovoi voiny’, in O. Budnitskii (ed.), Mirovoi krizis 1914– 1920 godov i sud’ba vostochnoevropeiskogo evreistva, 99–123, Moscow : Rosspen. Bakhturina, A. (2004), Okrainy rossiisskoi imperii: gosudarstvennoe upravlenie i natsional’naia politika v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (1914–1917 gg.), Moscow : Rosspen. Brubaker, R. (1995), ‘National Minorities, Nationalising States, and External National Homelands in the New Europe’, Daedalus, 124 (2): 107–32. Caglioti, D. (2014), ‘Property Rights and Economic Nationalism, 1914–1918. Available online: International Encyclopaedia of the First World War, http://dx.doi.org/10.15463/ ie1418.10361 (accessed 4 March 2017). Dragostinova, T. (2009), ‘Navigating Nationality in the Emigration of Minorities between Bulgaria and Greece, 1919–1941’, East European Politics and Society, 23 (2): 185–212. Ekmekcioglu, L. (2013), ‘A Climate for Abduction, a Climate for Redemption: The Politics of Inclusion during and after the Armenian Genocide’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 55 (2): 522–53. Ekmekcioglu, L. (2014), ‘Republic of Paradox: The League of Nations Minority Protection Regime and the New Turkey’s Step-Citizens’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 46 (4): 657–79. Farcy, J.-C. (1995), Les camps de concentration français de la première guerre mondiale, 1914–1920, Paris: Anthropos. Fink, C. (1998), ‘The Minorities Question at the Paris Peace Conference: The Polish Minorities Treaty, June 28, 1919’, in M. Boemeke (ed.), The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years, 249–74, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fink, C. (2004), Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fischer, G. (1989), Enemy Aliens: Internment and the Homefront Experience in Australia, 1914–1920, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Fischer, G. (1993), ‘Fighting the War at Home: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens in Australia during the First World War’, in P. Panayi (ed.), Minorities in Wartime:

194

Nations, Identities and the First World War

National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America, and Australia during the Two World Wars, 263–86, Oxford: Berg. Frank, M. (2011), ‘Fantasies of Ethnic Unmixing: “Population Transfer” and the End of Empire in Europe’, in P. Panayi and P. Virdee (eds), Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century, 81–101, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Gatrell, P. (1999), A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War 1, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Grohmann, C. (2005), ‘From Lothringen to Lorraine: Expulsion and Voluntary Repatriation’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 16 (3): 571–87. Happel, J. (2010), Nomadische Lebenswelten und zaristische Politik: der Aufstand in Zentralasien 1916, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. Hirsch, F. (2005), Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hirschman, A. (1970), Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organisations and States, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hirschon, R., ed. (2003), Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, New York: Berghahn. Holquist, P. (2001), ‘To Count, to Extract, and to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia’, in R. Suny and T. Martin (eds), A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, 111–44, New York: Oxford University Press. Holquist, P. (2011), ‘The Politics and Practice of the Russian Occupation of Armenia, 1915–February 1917’, in R. Suny, F. Göçek and N. Naimark (eds), A Question of Genocide, 1915: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, 151–74, New York: Oxford University Press. Hosking, G. (1997), Russia: People and Empire, 1550–1917, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ikeda, Y. (2015), ‘Autonomous Regions in the Eurasian Borderlands as a Legacy of the First World War’, in S. Tabata (ed.), Eurasia’s Regional Powers Compared: China, India, Russia, 155–70, London: Routledge. Janowsky, O. (1945), Nationalities and National Minorities (with special reference to EastCentral Europe), New York: Macmillan. Kévonian, D. (2004), Réfugiés et diplomatie humanitaire: les acteurs européens et la scène proche-orientale pendant l’entre-deux-guerres, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Levene, M. (1993), ‘Nationalism and Its Alternatives in the International Arena: The Jewish Question at Paris, 1919’, Journal of Contemporary History, 28 (3): 511–31. Lohr, E. (2003), Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Luciuk, L. (2001), In Fear of the Barbed Wire Fence: Canada’s First National Internment Operations and the Ukrainian Canadians, 1914–1920, Kingston, Ont.: Kashtan Press. Macartney, C.A. (1934), National States and National Minorities, London: Oxford University Press. Mair, L. (1928), The Protection of Minorities: The Working and Scope of the Minorities Treaties under the League of Nations, London: Christophers. Mandel, M. (2003), In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in TwentiethCentury France, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mann, M. (2005), The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Minorities in and at War

195

Martin, T. (2001), The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mazower, M. (1998), Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, London: Allen Lane. Mylonas, H. (2013), The Politics of Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nagler, J. (1993), ‘Victims of the Home Front: Enemy Aliens in the United States during the First World War’, in P. Panayi (ed.), Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America, and Australia during the Two World Wars, 191–215, Oxford: Berg. Panayi, P. (1991), The Enemy in Our Midst: Germans in Britain during the First World War, Oxford: Berg. Rodogno, D. (2012), Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire 1815–1914, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Roshwald, A. (2001), Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–1923, London: Routledge. Sanborn, J. (2003), Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War and Mass Politics, 1905–1925, DeKalb: University of Northern Illinois Press. Sharp, A. (1978), ‘Britain and the Protection of Minorities at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919’, in A. Hepburn (ed.), Minorities in History, 170–88, London: Edward Arnold. Smith, D., and J. Hiden (2006), ‘Looking beyond the Nation State: A Baltic Vision for National Minorities between the Wars’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41 (3): 387–400. Smith, J. (1999), The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917–1923, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Stein, S. (2014), ‘Citizens of a Fictional Nation: Ottoman-born Jews in France during the First World War’, Past and Present, 226 (1): 227–54. Stibbe, M. (2014), ‘Enemy Aliens, Deportees, Refugees: Internment Practices in the Habsburg Empire, 1914–1918’, Journal of Modern European History, 12 (4): 479–99. Thorpe, J. (2011), ‘Displacing Empire: Refugee Welfare, National Activism and State Legitimacy in Austria-Hungary in the First World War’, in P. Panayi and P. Virdee (eds), 102–26, Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Üngör, U. (2011), The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–50, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Üngör, U., and E. Lohr (2014), ‘Economic Nationalism, Confiscation, and Genocide: A Comparison of the Ottoman and Russian Empires during World War I’, Journal of Modern European History, 12 (4): 500–22. Viscont, A. (1917), La Lituanie et la guerre, Geneva: Atar. von Hagen, M. (1998), ‘The Great War and the Mobilization of Ethnicity in the Russian Empire’, in B. Rubin and J. Snyder (eds), Post-Soviet Political Order: Conflict and State Building, 34–57, London and New York: Routledge. Watenpaugh, K. (2015), Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, Berkeley : University of California Press. Watson, A. (2011), ‘Fighting for Another Motherland: The Polish Minority in the German Army, 1914–1918’, English Historical Review, 126 (522): 1137–66. Watson, A. (2014), Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914–1918, London: Allen Lane. Weitz, E. (2008), ‘From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions’, American Historical Review, 113 (5): 1313–43.

11

Creating ‘Fatherlands’ in the Balkans Emilia Salvanou

Introduction The Great War is often referred to as the first major war fought because of competing nationalisms. Although nationalism was without doubt among the most important reasons for the War, it would be an anachronism to imply that it was a war fought between fully formed national entities – an implication that is often still defended in national historiographies.1 On the contrary, modern nation-states were, rather, the outcome of the War. During its course, three historical European empires collapsed, and new nation-states appeared in their place. Especially as far as Eastern and Southeastern Europe are concerned, where the aforementioned empires were located, the Great War was an event that intensified the transformation of ethnic communities to national ones. The aim of this chapter is to follow this process of transformation of ethnic into national communities in the case of the Greek state. Although the Great War was a turning point in this process, its dynamics cannot be discussed without considering the nationalization process that had been ongoing in the Balkan region since the early twentieth century. From the early twentieth century onwards, before and mainly during the Great War, ethnic, cultural and even social characteristics acquired national connotations, while at the same time widespread violence, inflicted on soldiers and civilians alike, made returning to the pre-national status quo impossible. Regarding the specific case of Greece, the temporal focus of this chapter will spread from the Balkan wars until the end of the Greek-Turkish War and the Lausanne Treaty. It was during this period that the state almost doubled its territory, abandoned the irredentist and imperial dreams of the nineteenth century, pursued national homogeneity and carved its way towards modernization. How did the Greek state deal with inhabitants of the ‘New Lands’ – a term used for the territories annexed by the Greek Kingdom after its independence – and with the refugees who settled in its territory? With maybe the exception of a relatively small number of highly educated urban populations, the vast majority of the inhabitants of the New Lands and the refugees had multi-level and fluid identities, as was typical in imperial contexts. How would these people make the move towards a national defined world? How would the pre-national categories be reinscribed into the new national one?

198

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Early attempts towards nationalization of the Balkans ‘The typical Ottoman subject’, argues Lefter Stavrianos¸ ‘thought of himself primarily as a member of a guild if he lived in a city or as a member of a village community if he lived in the countryside. If he had any feeling of a broader allegiance, it was likely to be of a religious rather than of a political character’ (Stavrianos 1957: 338). The emergence of a national discourse in the Balkans is part of a transnational process that took place at the intersection between Ottoman Balkan communities and members of the diasporic communities. Diasporic communities were established by Christian merchants around the Mediterranean, in the Russian Empire and in Western Europe. Flourishing communities, closely connected with the consolidation of the Greek nation-state, were among others living in Vienna, Paris, Trieste, Odessa, London, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Marseille, Port-Mahon, Cairo and Alexandria. They facilitated trade with Greek-Ottoman communities but at the same time were hubs for intellectual ferment. Discussions on human rights, education, science, the shaping of national identity, liberalism, constitutionalism, bourgeois society and mentality – in one word issues that are codified under the category of ‘modernity’ – were part of the intellectual environment of such communities (Isabella and Zannou 2015: 1–23). Ideas circulated among communities of the diaspora reached the Greek-Ottoman communities through multiple paths, adapted to the situation there, and paved the way for the diffusion of transformative processes. It was not a case of ‘transplanting’ ideas from Western communities to the Ottoman Empire but, rather, one of ‘travelling notions of culture’ (Clifford 1997; Salmi et al. 2016). Such notions formed one part of a process of transformation that favoured the emergence of national identities in place of existing religious and ethnic-cultural ones and that eventually caused the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the course more or less of 150 years. National ideas reached the Ottoman Empire mainly through the local elites, diffused not necessarily as part of a separatist claim but mostly contextualized in a discourse of modernization (Skopetea 1988). In other words, the emergence of national identity was part of the emergence of a discourse of modernity, which entailed specific ideas on the emergence of a bourgeois society and culture, on education, on gender roles, on philanthropy etc. (Exertzoglou 1996; Salvanou 2006). Although such ideas were present in the region throughout the nineteenth century, they were systematically cultivated and diffused in the Ottoman-Christian communities by the interested nation-states (such as Greece and Bulgaria) after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the Russian-Turkish War of 1877–78. As the possibility grew ever stronger that the Ottoman Empire would disintegrate, at least as far as its European territories were concerned, the Ottoman Balkans, and especially Macedonia, had become the nub of discord between rival Balkan nationalisms. During the first decade of the twentieth century, all sides systematically disseminated national propaganda, through a complex network of sympathetic churches and priests, schools and teachers, ambassadors and secret agents. Initiatives were orchestrated by committees and societies based in the interested nation-states. Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian nationalisms based their claims on historical and cultural rights both to the land and to the people. The production of maps and statistics that depicted a

Creating ‘Fatherlands’ in the Balkans

199

population’s ethnicity was part of the antagonism between rival nationalisms in the region (Peckham 2000; Karavas 2002, 2003). At the same time, a systematic attempt was made to cultivate national identities among the population. Language, geography and history education were among the main tasks pursued by the nationalist campaigns during this period, in order to connect real communities to the imagined national communities (Koulouri 1988; Salvanou 2006). Moreover, since the end of the nineteenth century, governments of interested states had encouraged the dispatching of irregulars to the region. They presented themselves as brigands but at the same time had the economic, political and diplomatic support of the concerned government and its diplomatic mechanism. Brigands in this case were used as a cover for state-induced violence (Mazower 2000: 45; Biondich 2011). These nationalisms competed with one another, and irregulars caused more or less minor problems to those considered national enemies, especially in the countryside, but the struggle over the nationalization of Macedonia and Thrace did not involve extensive and systematic use of violence before the Ilinden uprising in 1903.2 It was after this point that violence became not only systematic but also strategic and was used to shape the population’s political behaviour (Biondich 2011: 68–9). Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian nationalisms were fighting during this period (and until the Young Turks’ revolution) to re-inscribe existing ethnic and cultural identities into national contexts. In rural areas, the battle for nationalization was fought mainly by irregulars sent to the region, especially Macedonia, by the interested nation-states. Regarding the Greek state, irregulars – often refugees who had originated from the region – were systematically put under the leadership of officers who usually were members of the social elite and were inspired by romanticized perceptions about the ‘unredeemed national territories’. In the cities, pressure towards nationalization took the shape of pogroms based on ethnicity and of cultural oppression of the less represented community. The anti-Greek episodes in Bulgaria in the summer of 1906 (especially in northern Thrace), although not exceptional, were indicative of the situation of widespread enmity between different ethnic groups during this period and resulted in extensive population movements. The Greek state supported the emigration movement, established a Central Commission to coordinate relief, provided accommodation and granted citizenship to the refugees. The flight of the population acquired political connotations, as it was linked to the state’s ability to protect its co-nationals abroad. Smaller-scale episodes that aimed to inflict mostly symbolic violence on the ‘enemy’ occurred in most Balkan cities (Dragostinova 2011). Nevertheless, national identities had not yet consolidated in the region. The Greek consul of Edirne, Stylianos Gonatas, reported to Athens in 1907 that ‘the villagers are in a miserable condition of national neutrality, to the point that many of them are content with the religious differentiation between Christians and Muslims or Jews and do not care or do not know the national differentiation between Greeks and Bulgarians or Russians’ (Gonatas 1908). The Balkan wars were a crucial turning point in the evolution of the discourse of nationalism in the region. The series of the events is known: in 1912 the Christian nation-states of the Balkans allied and declared war against the Ottoman Empire, supposedly to protect the Christian-Ottoman communities from the empire’s oppression. As a result, the Ottoman Empire lost most of its Balkan lands to the

200

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Balkan League. Nevertheless, unresolved issues about how the winners would split the territorial gains very quickly led to the Second Balkan War, during which the previous allies fought one another for the spoils. Violence against civilians was widespread during the Balkan wars, strategically used as a practice of war. The warring nationstates who were fighting over the details of the partition of the Ottoman territories projected national categories onto ethnic communities; civilians were perceived as members of national communities and were therefore targeted respectively. The Carnegie Endowment Report includes extensive commentary on the inflicted violence and its resulting population movements in the region: The population, warned by the glow from these fires, fled in all haste. There followed a veritable migration of peoples, for in Macedonia, as in Thrace, there was hardly a spot which was not, at a given moment, on the line of march of some army or other. The Commission everywhere encountered this second fact. All along the railways interminable trains of carts drawn by oxen followed one another; behind them came emigrant families and, in the neighbourhood of the big towns, bodies of refugees were found encamped. (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 1914: 151)

The inflicted or feared violence triggered extensive population mobility: about 2.5 million Muslims fled to Anatolia from Russia and the Balkans between 1878 and 1914 – 400,000 during the First Balkan War alone (Pekesen 2012). Likewise, Greeks were expelled from Asia Minor and the expanded territories of Bulgaria and Serbia, although the main population movement towards Greece was during the period 1913– 18, when approximately 230,000 Greeks fled the Ottoman Empire towards the Greek state (Glavinas 2015: 218). The Peace Treaty of Adrianople (1913) was the first agreement between the interested parties (namely, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria), although adherence was voluntary. The same kind of agreement was prepared between Greece and the Ottoman Empire but never materialized, because of the outbreak of the Great War (Mourelos 1985). An agreement for voluntary population exchange between Greece and Bulgaria was signed in 1919 (as part of the Peace Treaty of Neuilly), however, regulating a population movement that had already taken place in previous years.

Crafting imperial subjects into citizens When eventually the Balkan wars were over, the political geography of the Balkan Peninsula had drastically changed, and its human geography had been reorganized. The Ottoman Empire had lost most of its European territories, and new states had appeared in their place. For example, Albania became an independent state; Greece gained southern Macedonia, Epirus, the East Aegean Islands and Crete; and Serbia gained Kosovo and central Macedonia. Crafting national citizens out of imperial subjects and securing social order in a multiethnic and multicultural society were central to the way governmental policies of the nation-states developed during this

Creating ‘Fatherlands’ in the Balkans

201

period. Who was to become a citizen, who was to be dislocated and who protected as a member of a minority? For the first time in its history, the Greek state was facing a situation where it had to manage minorities of significant size. The territories Greece had acquired after the wars were inhabited by a mosaic of ethnic communities with varying possibilities of affiliation to the descriptive elements of ‘hellenicity’. Historically, over the past 150 years (from the Greek Enlightenment to the beginning of the twentieth century), the construction of national identity was based on language, religion and the ability to find a place in the national canon of history. Appropriation of time and space by national ideology was the primary tool used in this process, painstakingly elaborated in the course of the nineteenth century (Liakos 2008). Nevertheless, in the early twentieth century, competing nationalisms in the regions and the bloodshed that divided the communities in the region made identities (and the task) more complicated. The state’s preferred choice for the communities of the New Lands was assimilation. When Prime Minister Eleutherios Venizelos put into action the ‘Great Idea’3 with the country’s participation in the Balkan wars and the Great War, he was envisioning a modern, liberal state that would have developed strategies of inclusiveness through its institutions. Broad reforms in all social fields, including education and labour, were aligned to that vision (Mavrogordatos and Hadjiosif 1988). For example, the nationwide unified compulsory school system and the foundation of workers’ unions were expected to facilitate the emergence of a civil society. In addition, the state planned for a series of practices that would connect the central administration with local administrations, especially for the New Lands. One such practice was the renaming of space with toponyms of Greek origin. Another was a systematic cultivation of willingness to sacrifice oneself for the fatherland. Narratives of ‘liberation’ were systematically diffused, not only in order to facilitate national homogeneity through fostering a sense of national co-belonging but also in order to create an army of soldiers willing to die in battle for a land that had not yet become their fatherland. The death toll for the Greek Army was about 8,000 soldiers. Death for the fatherland became a noble death, an idea supported by monuments erected – even in the most remote villages – in honour of community members who had fallen in during the Balkan wars (Margaritis 1989). Implementation of government plans of inclusiveness was hindered by local administrators, who often governed in ways that resembled a quasi-colonial administration (Mavrogordatos 1983). Suspicion towards the new co-nationals was widespread. Rendering ethnicity and religion rather than citizenship as the main criteria for establishing a person’s membership in the imagined community of the nation was widespread in the Balkans (Roudimetof 1996). As a result, the cultural and religious difference of the inhabitants of the New Lands marked them, in the eyes of administrators, as not full-fledged citizens and, moreover, as potential inside enemies of the nation. Similar ambiguity towards the ‘new citizens’ occurred in most of the states that had acquired new lands during the Balkan wars (Kostopoulos 2007). Incidents of discrimination against the ‘new citizens’ were even more widespread and acute in cases of communities with cultural characteristics that did not selfevidently conform to the mainstream perception of ‘hellenicity’. Different culinary habits, dress codes, language etc. stoked the situation further, as they were interpreted

202

Nations, Identities and the First World War

as indicators of national belonging. Obviously, the variety of combinations of cultural and ethnic characteristics that occurred in the groups that inhabited the region made their national categorization puzzling. In what nation should one categorize, for example, the Slavic-speaking Christian population in Greece, or Turkish-speaking Christians in Anatolia, or Jews, or the Albanian-speaking population in the southern Balkans, or Roman Catholic Christians in Greece, or Albanian-, Slavic- and Vlachspeaking communities in Greece, or Bechtashi, or Dönme Jews of Salonica? In the period we are discussing, ‘minorities’ did not exist as a legal or political concept. Nevertheless, certain ethnic and cultural groups, ‘minorities’, differed from the dominant national group in important ways. The main ‘minority’ groups that found themselves in the Greek territory were Albanian-speaking Muslim communities (Chams), Rumanian-speaking Christian communities (Koutsovlachoi), Slavicspeaking Christian communities (Slavo-Macedonians) and Sephardic Jews, settled mainly in Thessaloniki. How did the Greek state manage their ethnic and cultural differences? Albanian-speaking Muslim communities (Chams) had inhabited the Epirus region for centuries during the Ottoman period without their presence being perceived as a problem for the smooth coexistence of different communities in the region. When competitions or antagonisms between different communities occurred, Chams allied either with the Ottomans or with the Christian communities, depending on the situation and the power relationships, just as most communities did during that period. Nevertheless, problems with the Greek state began to appear during the Balkan wars, when, during the siege of Ioannina, the Chams formed groups to repel actions undertaken by Greek irregulars in the region. When the war was over and the region they inhabited became part of the Greek state, Chams were discriminated against, mostly because of their religious identity (Margaritis 2005: 133–72). The Koutsovlachoi (Vlachs) were Latin-speaking Christians who, since the midnineteenth century, had become attached to Rumanian nationalism. In the early twentieth century the community was recognized by the Ottoman sultan as an ethic minority of the empire. It was involved in the national rivalries in the Balkans, mainly participating in attacks on schools and churches. During the Macedonian Struggle and until the end of the Balkan wars, Vlachs were targeted as a threat to the Greeks and were suspected for potential treason. The targeting was so severe that they accused the Greek state of national cleansing politics. Nevertheless, not much later, Prime Minister Eleutherios Venizelos approved legislation establishing Vlach schools in the New Lands (Mavrogordatos 2003). Slavo-Macedonians were Slavic-speaking Christians settled in the region of Macedonia who became the focus of discord among competing Balkan nationalisms. Since the late nineteenth century they were courted by both Greek and Bulgarian nationalists, through education, propaganda and later on by ‘bands’ – armed militias formed mainly by locals and headed by trained officers from the fatherlands. The existence of people who were loyal to the Bulgarian Exarchist politico-religious party but were ethnically Macedonian and supporters of Macedonian rather than Bulgarian nationalism only made the situation more perplexing. After the end of the Balkan wars, Slavo-Macedonians fled systematically towards Bulgaria, in order to avoid violence

Creating ‘Fatherlands’ in the Balkans

203

inflicted by the Greek military forces. Numbers are estimated at about 43,700 during the summer of 1913 alone (Kostopoulos 2007: 63). Following the opposite route, more than 20,000 Greeks and Slavic-speaking Macedonians with a Greek national identity left Bulgaria for Greece (Kostopoulos 2007: 63). Nevertheless, the Greek administration targeted its Slavic-speaking community as a potential fifth column, questioning the community’s loyalty towards Greece and regarding its members as second-class citizens. Sephardic Jews of Thessaloniki were perhaps the most developed minority in terms of community cohesiveness. They were settled in Thessaloniki during the sixteenth century when they were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. Their presence was important and proved to be a major boost for the city’s revival. During the seventeenth century, the community was divided into two groups when a part of it turned to Islam, although retaining their distinct cultural characteristics (Dönme). Since the midnineteenth century, the Jews of Salonika begun to flourish economically, establishing commercial networks through the city’s port, supporting a community school system and shaping cosmopolitan features in their everyday lives, at least as far as the upper class was concerned. Although the Greek state did not adopt a specific policy targeting Jews during that period, the loss of privileges they had enjoyed under the imperial order seem to have affected the Jews negatively. The working classes subscribed to socialist ideas, while the middle class flirted with the emerging Zionism (Mazower 2004; Fleming 2010).

Minorities and refugees during and after the Great War In addition to these communities, which were more or less ethnically defined, a large number of Christian refugees from Anatolia reached Greece, especially during and after the Great War. The widespread violence that occurred in 1914 in Anatolia against ethnic Greeks sent the first massive refugee wave of Ottoman Greeks to Greece in the twentieth century. At the same time, the dynamics of irredentist rhetoric were put to the test. Evidence that Greeks coming from the Ottoman Empire were perceived (and received) as ‘second-class’ co-nationals had appeared already in the first decades of the Greek state.4 Nevertheless, the arrival of thousands of refugees into the territory in 1914 made the division more apparent, especially because political tension between Prime Minister Venizelos and King Constantinos (known as the ‘National Schism’), about whether Greece should or should not participate in the Great War, was already growing at the time (Dimou 2009: 301ff; Mavrogordatos 2015). The first tension that appeared referred to requests for national preference in the workers’ union, in the attempt to limit the employment of refugees in favour of local workers. Although such complaints were not new, they became widespread in 1914 and appeared in the daily newspapers. Eventually a memorandum was submitted by the Workers’ Centre of Athens to the government. Although this discourse did not exclude refugees from the national imaginary, it marginalized them from the civil community, which is connected to the sacrifices made for the nation – in this case, military service and going to war (Potamianos 2011).

204

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Not much later, though, in 1916, in the shadow of the National Schism, discourses excluding refugees from the nation appeared. Refugees became an easy target for King Konstantinos’s supporters, who argued that Venizelos, who favoured Greece’s participation in the war on the side of Entente, should be held accountable for the presence of the refugees in the country. As was the case with the workers’ union, the equation between military service and participation in the civil community was once more apparent: ‘Episratoi’, a royalist paramilitary organization formed in the context of the National Schism, charged that the refugees, although they favoured the war, at the same time ‘when they are called to arms, in a cowardly and dishonest manner, they claim to be ottoman subjects’ (Nea Imera, 18 August 1916). Opposition culminated during the episodes of November 1916, when Greece was already a divided state with two governments (the king at Athens and the prime minister in Thessaloniki). The British and the French navies imposed a blockade at Piraeus so as to put pressure on Athens to participate in the war. At the same time, though, opponents of Prime Minister Venizelos conducted a large-scale pogrom against his supporters in Athens, especially against the refugees, who were accused of being spies of the French and British and were executed, without trial, that night. Although the numbers of the victims probably has been exaggerated by scholarship favouring Venizelos, the perception of the refugees as spies (and therefore as national ‘aliens’) is telling about how identities and understandings of who was part of the national community, and on what basis, was still under development (Mavrokordatos 2015: 226–7). Greece entered the war on the side of Entente. During the course of the First World War, violence and forced population movements became an everyday occurrence. The end of the Great War was followed by the Asia Minor Expedition (1919–22), a war declared by Entente against the Ottoman Empire, so as to impose the terms of the imminent Sèvres Treaty (1920), protect Christian minorities and prevent ethnic cleansing practices. Greece had a central role in this war, as it quickly became part of its irredentist programme of materializing the ‘Great Greece’. According to the Treaty, Greece gained Eastern Thrace (excluding the region of Istanbul), the islands of Imvros and Tenedos and the administration of the region of Izmir, whose fate would be decided by a referendum five years later. It was a meaningful war for Turkey as well: on its side, it was the War of Independence, which resulted in the emergence of the Turkish state (in place of the Ottoman Empire). Extended violence and major population changes occurred on both sides of the Aegean during this period. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore such movements, it must be acknowledged that the experience of the war transformed the hybrid identities of the previous period. In their place, consolidated national identities appeared, and conflict became part of identity formation. In the new context, multiethnic coexistence was extremely complex and unsustainable. At the end of this decade of wars, in 1923, nation-states had emerged in place of the late Ottoman Empire. In Greece and in the rest of the Balkan State, national ‘purity’ was pursued as the ideal condition for stability and avoidance of future conflicts within and between countries. Despite the widespread population exchange (which took place in 1919 on a smaller scale with Bulgaria as well) and the high percentage of homogeneity that was registered in official records (all newcomers were granted Greek

Creating ‘Fatherlands’ in the Balkans

205

citizenship), ethnic and cultural differentiations between communities disrupted the presumed homogeneity. A great deal of work remained to be done within the states in order to homogenize old and new citizens. Of course, warfare between co-religious communities gradually had shattered the common identity rooted in religion and gave rise to the emergence of national identities, which became more rigid and intolerant, depending on cultural proximity or the lack thereof. Violence – previously connected to massacres, deportations, burning of villages and so on – now took the form of a race to manage the formation and control of memory. Renaming landscapes, erasing the memory of the Ottoman or otherwise contested past and creating a national memory by establishing monuments and rituals were part of this process (Aarbakke 2011). The Lausanne Treaty set the terms for the definition and distinction between refugees and minorities in interwar Greece. Which is to say that, although refugees during the interwar period were legally defined as ‘people that are outside their home country, lack the diplomatic protection of their home governments, and have not yet acquired another nationality’, this was not the case for dislocated populations from the Ottoman Empire, who, as part of the Convention of Population Exchange, were granted citizenship upon their arrival in Greece (Skran 1995: 73). As early as 1917, in fact, a legislative decree on the protection of the refugees had defined who was to be considered a refugee, and the definition included not only those who had been forcefully dislocated from their homelands in ‘enslaved’ Greece but also those who chose to flee during the previous years out of fear of inflicted violence (‘Περί περιθάλψεως Προσφύγων’). The term refugee was therefore used broadly to underline the fragility of migrants’ situation as well as their need for social and economic protection. Protection, though, went hand in hand with marginalization. Despite the vocabulary of victimization that was often used in the period, refugees actively worked towards their inclusion in the national imagination. Their intellectuals, functioning as bridges between the community and the nation, engaged with the practical and remote past in an attempt to align it with the national canon. They invented for their homelands a history that could be adapted and therefore included in the mainstream narrative of the nation’s biography. In this effort, historians focused on two main topics. They reimagined the space of Anatolia as a regional template with a much earlier history and a modern history mixed together. After space, they appropriated time, viewing Anatolian communities as cultural formations in their own right. Language, everyday life and oral tradition – all became part of a newly formed ‘refugee culture’, which gradually made its way next to the other regional cultures that constituted ‘Greekness’ (Salvanou 2018). A different story is to be told regarding the minorities of the Greek state. To the four minorities mentioned above (Chams, Koutsovlachoi (Vlachs), Slavo-Macedonians and Jews), a fifth one was added, that of Muslims at Thrace, which was in reality the only community to which the Lausanne Treaty (1923) officially attributed a minority status. All these communities followed the difficult path between forced assimilation and/or exclusion.5 The Koutsovlachoi were assimilated more or less entirely. During the interwar period, about 2,000–2,500 families left Greece for Rumania, after a special agreement made between the two governments. The decision was on a voluntary basis and was

206

Nations, Identities and the First World War

welcomed by all parties; since Rumania would strengthen its Vlach population, Greece would limit its non-ethnic Greek citizens (those who emigrated did so under the condition that they would lose Greek citizenship) and emigrants would be granted a considerable compensation paid by the Rumanian government. The rise of fascist regimes degraded relations between the Vlachs and the Greek state, because it forbade the use of the language in public and private space. During the Axis Occupation (1941–44) the minority made a last separatist attempt and pursued alliance with Italy. After the defeat of the Axis powers and the liberation of Greece, they actively followed an assimilation strategy (Averoff 1948; Divani 1998). Chams had a long-term troubled relationship with the state. Although Muslims, Chams were exempted from the 1923–1924 population exchange, partly due to their strong opposition to such a possibility and partly due to Turkey’s refusal to accept them. But the arrival of the Anatolian refugees and the fact that they would be compensated with the properties of the Muslims (in this case, the properties of the Chams) complicated things, especially during the period that their exception from the exchange was not final. Enmity and distrust between the two neighbouring communities intensified near the end of the interwar period, when the Chams’ case was taken up by both Italian and Albanian diplomacy. Moreover, the oppression that the community faced had resulted in closer relations with fascist Italy – a relationship that became troubling for Greece during the Second World War. During the Axis occupation, the undercurrent of tension between the Chams and the Christians of the region was played out in the resistance, with the many Chams supporting the Nazi forces, especially in the northern parts of the region. In 1944, under the initiative of the right-wing resistance organization (EDES), the Chams in the Epirus region were violently dislocated towards Albania (Karakasidou 1997; Van Boeschoten 2000; Kostopoulos 2007). The issue of Slavophone Macedonians was complicated by the fact that they were nationally claimed by Serbian and Bulgarian nationalism. Although ‘Macedonian’ as a national-ethnic category had appeared already since the Ilinden uprising, it was supported as such only during the interwar, mainly by Comintern, as a way to hinder the strength of Bulgarian nationalism, which was suspected of being allied with Germany. So, as far as the Greek state was concerned, Slavo-Macedonians were viewed and treated as ‘Bulgarians’ until the interwar. After the war decade was over and until Metaxa’s dictatorship (1936), the state followed a mild strategy of assimilation, mainly through education and mixed marriages. Settling Anatolian refugees in large numbers in the region was part of plan to change the demographic consistency of the region in favour of Greek nationals. During the dictatorship, though, the assimilation politics became violent: use of the local Slavic dialect was forbidden, even in private, and patrols made sure the prohibition was respected. The oppression of SlavoMadedonians turned many of them towards the communist party, which at the time supported claims for independence. During the Occupation and the civil war, SlavoMacedonians supported ELAS (the left-wing resistance organization) or the SlavoMacedonian National Liberation Front. During that period, many Slavo-Macedonians fled towards Yugoslavia to escape violence. From that point onwards and during the Cold War, they were targeted and excluded from the national body both as ethnic

Creating ‘Fatherlands’ in the Balkans

207

aliens and as communists. Economic sanctions against the entire Slavic-speaking community and political prosecution of communists were among the state’s strategies of violent assimilation (Sjöberg 2011: 46–9). The Jewish community – especially that of Thessaloniki, which was both the largest and the strongest economically – suffered greatly from their inclusion in the Greek state. Being cut off from the economic base of their activities and enduring the state’s homogenizing measures (i.e. establishing Sunday as a holiday) led to the community’s economic decline. During the interwar years, antagonism between the refugees and the Jews and the development of both Zionist and fascist cores led to a rather strong anti-Zionist movement, even before the Second World War. Such developments seem to have undermined attempts to adopt strategies of inclusion, in the form of a GreekJewish culture, that were also taking place, especially among the community’s social elite. Tensions between the Greeks and the Jewish community became fatal during the Occupation. Most of the Jewish communities in Greece met the same fate as European Jews in the Nazi death camps (Michailidis 2000; Mazower 2004; Fleming 2010). Muslims settled at Thrace were the only group with an official minority status according to the Lausanne Treaty of 1923. They remained in Greece in exchange for the Greek Orthodox population that remained in Istanbul and on the islands of Imvros and Tenedos. Both groups were granted Greek and Turkish citizenship, respectively. They therefore became part of a political balance between Greece and Turkey that often proved delicate and fragile. The Greek-Turkish agreement (which became final only in 1930, when it was formally signed) favoured religious over ethnic identity (GreekOrthodox and Muslim populations). Nevertheless, it treated religion as a substitute for nationality. According to the Lausanne Treaty, each party agreed to protect the minority rights of the exempted population. The legal framework had been already set by the Treaty of Sèvres, which was never realized. It took force through the Treaty of Lausanne, however. In particular, as far as Greece was concerned, the Treaty stipulated the preservation of Muslim family laws and customs and the provision of selective educational rights to non-Greek-speaking populations.6 Nevertheless, the provisions of the Treaty and the treatment of the minority varied through the years, depending on Greek-Turkish relations.7 This chapter gave an overview of how the war decade of 1912–22 contributed to the crafting of Greece as ‘fatherland’ for the population that inhabited the country. The war decade is central to the shaping of the national narrative. It is regarded as the decade during which the Greek state left behind nineteenth-century irredentist aspirations and a teleological interpretation of historical time and entered a new phase in its history. The Asia Minor Catastrophe (as the defeat in the Asia Minor Expedition is known) and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey put a de facto end to the political and ideological discourse that defined the Greek state during the nineteenth century and that was codified as the ‘Great Idea’. In its place, discourses of modernization and national homogenization emerged. In the course of the decade and the years that followed, various religious, linguistic and cultural groups were reconstituted as national communities, often with contestations and ambiguities. The main challenge that Greece, as well as the other Balkan states, had to face in a world that was rapidly changing was how to deal with the ambiguous communities – those who

208

Nations, Identities and the First World War

did not self-evidently fall under an existing national category or those whose ethnic identities had not yet transformed into national ones. While the states aimed to ensure maximum homogeneity, it was not always an easy task: competing national aspirations repeatedly hindered such a possibility. The outcome of the process of nationalizing the ‘new citizens’ was a constant dynamic balance between strategies that the state adopted, the agency of those citizens and the claims imposed by neighbouring nations. After the war decade had ended, the process was taking place within an international regime supervised by the League of Nations, which attempted to regulate the region through legislative frameworks. In the case of Greece, the fate of the ‘new citizens’ seems to have depended on their willingness and ability to demonstrate their participation to ‘hellenicity’ – to Greek language, culture, religion and history – as well as on the lack of ties to competing nationalism. It was a two-sided relationship: the state developed its strategies towards each minority based on its categorization into the first or the second group, and the minority elaborated its agency accordingly. If for the state the aim was national homogeneity, for the minorities it was to ‘find a place’ in the new context. Therefore, in cases where the possibility of inclusion in the national imagination seemed viable, both parties adopted strategies of assimilation. Such was the cases of Anatolian refugees, for example, or the interwar Jewish community of Thessaloniki or even the Vlachs, especially after the Second World War. In the opposite case, especially when the cultural characteristics of a minority were interpreted as indicators of allegiance to a competing nationalism, the state followed politics of exclusion and oppression, often resulting in a defensive entrenchment of the minority and a possible association with the nationalisms they were accused of favouring (such was the case with SlavoMacedonians, Chams and Muslims).8 Exclusion and marginalization politics have created in the region enduring traumas, as the recent Balkan wars (1991–2001) have exposed beyond doubt. The map that was created after the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and frozen during the Cold War was redrawn in the 1990s, causing a new cycle of pain, bloodshed and dislocation. It remains to be seen how effective the historical memory of the region’s people is by whether they developed (or did not) the politics of inclusion for the ‘new citizens’ on their doorstep, who are unfortunately presented once again as threats to ‘national homogeneity’.

Notes 1 Most national narratives have constructed the Great War as the most important contributor to their liberation from an oppressing authority and to their national completion with the redemption of unredeemed national territories (Winter and Prost 2005: 197). 2 The ‘Ilinden uprising’ was a series of revolts that took place mostly in Macedonia and to a smaller extent in Thrace during the summer of 1903. They combined ethnic, national and social claims and were carried out mostly by the poorer social strata and landless cultivators. Although at the beginning the uprising was connected with seeds of a Macedonian nationalism, it soon was appropriated by Bulgarian nationalism. For more details, see Jelavich (1983).

Creating ‘Fatherlands’ in the Balkans

209

3 The ‘Great Idea’ was a political and ideological project that defined the foreign and interior politics of Greece throughout the nineteenth century, until 1922. It was officially formulated in 1844 and initially acknowledged that there were Greeks (co-ethnics) living beyond the borders of the Greek state. From the end of the nineteenth century until the defeat at Asia Minor, however, a more assertive version was dominant, which promoted the political task of incorporating into the Greek state those territories of the Ottoman Empire in which Greeks lived and therefore could claim historical rights (Skopetea 1988). 4 The first debate about whether ethnic Greeks of the Ottoman Empire should be considered co-nationals and have civil rights took place in 1843, when Greek-speaking and/or Orthodox Christian Ottoman communities were acknowledged as ethnic Greeks, part of the nation’s population, and potentially unredeemed (Skopetea 1988). 5 On minorities in the Greek state, see Clogg (2002). 6 On minority status of Muslim population in Greece, see Tsitselikis (2012: 72–82). 7 For instance, although Muslims fought as soldiers of the Greek Army during the Second World War, they were forbidden to bear firearms after the Turkish invasion at Cyprus (1974) (Tsitelikis 2012: 96). 8 The potential for affiliation to the dominant nation group is an important factor but not the only one that should be taken into account when assessing the possibility of inclusion or exclusion. Often, different strategies emerge within the same minority group, depending on a subject’s social status and the potential for inclusion that derives from that status (Salvanou 2014: 339–66).

References ‘Περί περιθάλψεως Προσφύγων’: ‘Νομοθετικό Διάταγμα της 8ης Ιουλίου 1917, ως ετροποποιήθη υπό του κυρώσαντος αυτό νόμου 752, του νόμου 1430, των μεταγενεστέρων αυτών του ΝΔ της 22–10–1922: άρθρον 1ο’, in Υπουργείο Υγιεινής Προνοίας και Αντιλήψεως, Διατάξεις αφορώσαι την πρόνοιαν και αστικήνεγκατάστασιν των προσφύγων, 22, Athens, 1926. Aarbakke, V. (2011), ‘Images of Imperial Legacy: The Impact of Nationalizing Discourse on the Image of the Last Years of Ottoman Rule in Macedonia’, in T. Sindbaek and M. Hartmuth (eds), Images of Imperial Legacy, 115–28, Berlin: LIT Verlag. Averoff, E. (1948), Η πολιτική πλευρά του Κουτσοβλαχικού ζητήματος, Athens: n.p. Biondich, M. (2011), The Balkans: Revolution, War, and Political Violence since 1878, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1914), Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, 151, Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment. Clifford, J. (1997), ‘Travelling Cultures’, in J. Clifford (ed.), Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, 17–46, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clogg, R., ed. (2002), Minorities in Greece: Aspects of a Plural Society, London: C. Hurst & Co. Publishers. Dimou, A. (2009), Entangled Paths Toward Modernity: Contextualising Socialism and Nationalism in the Balkans, Budapest: Central European University Press. Divani, L. (1998), ‘Το θνησιγενές πριγκιπάτο της Πίνδου. Γιατί δεν ανταποκρίθηκαν οι Κουτσόβλαχοι της Ελλάδας, στην Ιταλο-ρουμανική προπαγάνδα’, Proceedings of the

210

Nations, Identities and the First World War

International Conference Μακεδονία και Θράκη 1941–1944, 189–210, Thessaloniki: ΙΜΧΑ. Dragostinova, T. (2011), Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900–1949, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Exertzoglou, H. (1996), Εθνική ταυτότητα στην Κωνσταντινούπολη τον 19ο αιώνα¸ Athens: Nefeli. Fleming, K.E. (2010), Greece – A Jewish History, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Glavinas, Y. (2015), ‘Συγκατοικώντας με την άλλη πλευρά της ανταλλαγής των πληθυσμών: Η συμβίωση χριστιανών προσφύγων και μουσουλάμων ανταλλαξίμων στην Ελλάδα την περίοδο 1914–1924’, Deltio Kentrou Mikrasiatikon Spoudon, 19: 217–40. Gonatas, S. (1908), ‘Report on Thrace, December 1907’, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives, 21.2. Isabella, M., and K. Zannou (2015), ‘The Sea, Its People and Their Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in M. Isabella and K. Zannou (eds), Mediterranean Diasporas, 1–23, London: Bloomsbury. Jelavich, B. (1983), History of the Balkans, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karakasidou, A. (1997), Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Karavas, S. (2002), ‘Οι εθνογραφικές περιπέτειες του “ελληνισμού”’ (1876–8), Τα Ιστορικά, 36: 23–74. Karavas, S. (2003), ‘Οι εθνογραφικές περιπέτειες του “ελληνισμού”’ (1876–8), Τα Ιστορικά, 38: 49–112. Kostopoulos, Τ. (2007), Πόλεμος και εθνοκάθαρση. Η ξεχασμένη πλευρά μιας δεκαετούς εθνικής εξόρμησης (1912–1922), Athens: Vivliorama. Koulouri, C. (1988), Ιστορία και Γεωγραφία στα ελληνικά σχολεία (1834–1914), Athens: IAEN. Liakos, A. (2008), ‘Hellenism and the Making of Modern Greece: Time, Language, Space’, in K. Zacharia (ed.), Hellenisms: Culture, Identity and Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity, 201–36, Aldershot: Ashgate. Margaritis, G. (1989), ‘Οι περιπέτειες του ηρωικού θανάτου’, Mnimon, 12: 89–116. Margaritis, G. (2005), Ανεπιθύμητοι Συμπατριώτες, Athens: Vivliorama. Mavrogordatos, G. (1983), Stillborn Republic, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Mavrogordatos, G. (2003), ‘Οι εθνικές μειονότητες’, in Ch. Hadjiosif (ed.), Ιστορία της Ελλάδας του 20ου αιώνα, vol. B2, Athens: Vivliorama, 9–35. Mavrogordatos, G. (2015). 1915: O ΕθνικόςΔιχασμός, Athens: Pataki. Mavrogordatos, G., and Ch. Hadjiosif, eds (1988), Βενιζελισμός και αστικός εκσυγχρονισμός, Heraklion: Cretan University Press. Mazower, M. (2000), The Balkans, New York: Modern Library. Mazower, M. (2004), Salonica: City of Ghosts, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Michailidis, I. (2000), ‘On the Other Side of the River: The Defeated Slavophones and Greek History’, in J. Cowan (ed.), Macedonia: The Politics of Identity and Difference, 68–84, London: Pluto Press. Mourelos, Y. (1985), ‘The 1914 Persecutions and the First Attempt at an Exchange of Minorities between Greece and Turkey’, Balkan Studies, 26: 389–95. Nea Imera, 18 August 1916, cited in G. Mavrogordatos, 1915: Ο Εθνικός Διχασμός, 226–27, Athens: Pataki. Peckham, R.S. (2000), ‘Map Mania: Nationalism and the Politics of Place in Greece, 1870–1922’, Political Geography, 19 (1): 77–95.

Creating ‘Fatherlands’ in the Balkans

211

Pekesen, B. (2012), ‘Expulsion and Emigration of the Muslims from the Balkans’, in European History Online (EGO), published by the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz, 2012–03–07, URL: http://www.ieg-ego.eu/pekesenb-2011-en, URN: urn: nbn:de:0159–2012030706 (accessed 31 October 2016). Potamianos, N. (2011), ‘“Ντόπιο πράμα!”. Το αίτημα “εθνικής/εθνοτικής προτίμησης” και οι στρατηγικές ελέγχου της αγοράς εργασίας από τα εργατικά σωματεία της Αθήνας και του Πειραιά στις αρχές του εικοστού αιώνα’, Paper presented at the 7th Historical Conference, Athens, 20–21 May 2011, http://historein-historein.blogspot. com/2011/05/blog-post_14.html. Roudometof, V. (1996), ‘Nationalism and Identity Politics in the Balkans: Greece and the Macedonian Question’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 14 (2): 253–301. Salmi, H., A. Nivala, and J. Sarjala, eds (2016), Travelling Notions of Culture in Early Nineteenth Century Europe, New York: Routledge. Salvanou, E. (2006), ‘Όψεις της διαδικασίας νεωτερικού μετασχηματισμού στις ελληνορθόδοξες κοινότητες της ύστερης Οθωμανικής Αυτοκρατορίας’, unpublished PhD diss., Department of History and Social Anthropology, University of the Aegean. Salvanou, E. (2014), ‘Muslims in Athens: Narratives and Strategies of Belonging’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 32 (2): 339–66. Salvanou, E. (2018), Η συγκρότηση της προσφυγικής μνήμης, Athens: Nefeli. Sjöberg, E. (2011), ‘Battlefields of memory. The Macedonian Conflict and Greek Historical Culture’, Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Umeå University, Umeå. Skopetea, E. (1988), Το ‘Πρότυπο Βασίλειο’ και η Μεγάλη Ιδέα. Όψεις του εθνικού προβλήματος στην Ελλάδα (1830–1880), Athens: Politipo. Skran, C. (1995), Refugees in Inter-War Europe: The Emergence of a Regime, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stavrianos, L.S. (1957), ‘Antecedents to the Balkan Revolutions of the Nineteenth Century’, The Journal of Modern History, 29 (4): 335–48. Tsitselikis, K. (2012), Old and New Islam in Greece, Leiden: Brill/Martinus Nijhoff. Van Boeschoten, R. (2000), ‘When Difference Matters: Sociopolitical Dimensions of Ethnicity in the District of Florina’, in J. Cowan (ed.), Macedonia: The Politics of Identity and Difference, 28–46, London: Pluto Press. Winter, J., and A. Prost (2005), The Great War in History, New York: Cambridge University Press.

12

Nationalism and Racism in Franco-German Controversies about Colonial Soldiers Christian Koller

In 1917, the Social Democrat Karl Renner, later to become prime minister of the first Austrian republic and then president of the second one, challenged in a pamphlet the notion of the First World War as a conflict of nations, emphasizing the ‘falsification and annulment of the national idea by imperialism’: Suddenly, the enormous self-deception we adhered to for a generation and more becomes obvious. The English, French and Russian empires, claiming to be nation-states, have ceased to be so a long time ago! Each of them is an enormous and surprisingly multicoloured International! England second to none: this International […] enters the battlefields in Flanders, Canadians together with Australians, people from the Cape together with Indians […]. No less the French: Arabs from Algiers and Morocco as well as Negroes share the frontline with proletarians from Paris. […] There’s only one reason why we fail to see this International of the suppressed, namely because they are all subjugated by the bourgeoisie of one nation.

In view of the multinational character of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, Renner interpreted the coalition of the Central Powers as such an ‘International’ as well and claimed that the World War was not ‘a national war in the sense of the principle of nationalities’ but, rather, a ‘struggle of imperialisms for world domination’ (Renner 1994: 89–91).1 Renner’s statement emphasized the imperial dimension of the First World War and specifically pointed at one major aspect of the war as a global conflict: intercontinental migration and the presence of soldiers from all five continents at the Western Front. While this phenomenon has never completely vanished from European cultural memories and specialized research has analyzed many of its aspects, it has become a topic of mainstream narratives of the First World War only recently. The advent of global history as an increasingly influential paradigm has boosted awareness of the

214

Nations, Identities and the First World War

First World War’s global dimensions, and in the run-up to the centenary, pre-eminent scholars have called for a global perspective on the war (for instance, Förster 2004; Strachan 2010). This chapter will focus on the French deployment of African soldiers on European battlefields and the discussions it triggered in both France and Germany (see in more detail: Riesz and Schultz 1989; Martin 1997; Koller 2001; Le Naour 2003; Kettlitz 2007; Van Galen Last 2015). Special attention will be paid to the question of how discourses on those soldiers related colonial subjects to the metropolitan nation. As colonial troops were neither units consisting of citizen-soldiers nor mercenary armies, their status and the legitimacy of their deployment in Europe was an extremely contested field of Franco-German propagandistic debate. These discourses were located at the intersection of colonialist imagery, racist ideology and actual needs of nationalist war propaganda. The first section will provide an overview of intercontinental war migration to Europe and will especially highlight the role of African colonial troops in the French Army. In the second section I shall analyze French discourses about these troops, which in the final section will be contrasted with discourses about these soldiers in Germany.

Imperialism and intercontinental war migration The First World War witnessed intercontinental migration to Europe on an unprecedented scale. In addition to large contingents from independent nations, most prominently 2 million soldiers from the United States (Coffman 1968; Barbeau and Henry 1974; Kaspi 1976; Britten 1997; Keene 2000; Hallas 2000; Zieger 2000) and 140,000 war workers from the Republic of China (Wou 1939; Wang 2007; Guoqi 2011; Ma 2012; O’Neill 2014; Segesser 2016), enormous numbers of people from the Western Powers’ large colonial empires were summoned to support the metropolitan war effort, not only at home but also in Europe. The British Empire mustered troops from the socalled dominions, approximately 620,000 men from Canada, 200,000 from Australia and New Zealand and 30,000 from South Africa (Carrington 1959; Nicholson 1962; Graham 1967; Garson 1979; Grundlingh 1987; Morton and Granatstein 1989; Walker 1989; Rawling 1992; Morton 1993; Beaumont 1995; Pugsley 2001; Segesser 2002; Winegard 2012), alongside about 150,000 soldiers of the Indian Army fighting in Europe (Ellinwood and Pradham 1978; Greenhut 1983; Chenevix Trench 1988; Vankoski 1995; Pati 1996; Corrigan 1999; Omissi 1999, 2007; Koller 2004, 2014; Dendooven 2008; Das 2011; Kant 2014; Singh 2014). Britain did not deploy any African troops on European battlefields, although a group of officers and politicians with colonial background lobbied to do so (Killingray 1979). This non-deployment was justified officially on logistical grounds, but racism probably played a role as well, for after the United States had joined the war, the British Army also refused to train African American soldiers, who were eventually incorporated into the French Army (Pershing 1931: 64; Barbeau and Henry 1974). As for colonial war workers, contingents from Egypt (82,000 people), South Africa (31,000), the West Indies (8,000), Mauritius (1,000) and even the Fiji Islands (100) came to Europe to work behind the British lines

Nationalism and Racism

215

(Besson and Perreau Pradier 1919: 121–2; War Office 1922: 772; Carrington 1959: 642; Willan 1978; Schulze 1981: 120–1; Grundy 1983: 54; Beckett 1985: 13–14; Smith 2004). The French colonial empire supplied large contingents of Algerian Arabs (170,000 soldiers) and settlers of European extraction from Algeria, Martinique, Guadeloupe, La Réunion, Senegal and Guayana (139,000) as well as West African infantrymen (130,000). Smaller contingents came from Tunisia (60,000), Indochina (45,000), Morocco (38,000), Madagascar (35,000), the Somali coast (2,000) and the Pacific islands (1,000) (Sarraut 1923: 44). Colonial war workers in France included contingents from Algeria (76,000), Indochina (49,000), Morocco (35,000), Tunisia (19,000) and Madagascar (6,000) (Boussenot 1916: 67–73; Sarraut 1923: 43; Duong 1925: 107–32; Nogaro and Weil 1926; Varet 1927: 41–5; Ray 1937: 48–59; Ageron and Julien 1964– 79: 1157–60; Meynier 1981: 405–13, 459–84; Talha 1989: 63–78; Stora 1992: 14–15; Schor 1996: 40–4). Italy joined the Entente side in spring 1915 and tried to deploy African colonial troops in Europe as well. In August 1915, some 2,700 soldiers from Libya were shipped to Sicily. They did not enter the front line, however, because many died from pneumonia immediately after their arrival, and so the Libyans were shipped home again after a short time (Hill 1995: 588). The Belgian government repeatedly discussed shipping in several thousand soldiers from the Congo, yet these plans would never materialize. Nevertheless, a small number of Congolese soldiers served on the Western Front in metropolitan Belgian troops (Brosens 2013). The Germans, the only colonial power among the Central Powers, used plenty of African soldiers of their Schutztruppen in the African theatres of war (Strachan 2004; Michels 2009; Bührer 2011; Samson 2012), but they had never planned to deploy these troops in Europe and would not have been able to do so anyway, for logistical reasons. Whereas the British Indian troops deployed in Europe consisted exclusively of volunteers, the French recruitment policy in North and West Africa was a mixed one, including the enlistment of volunteers as well as conscription. In 1912, the French parliament had passed several acts enabling conscription in West Africa, Algeria and Tunisia (but not in Morocco) if the number of volunteers was too low. Conscription became more and more important the longer the war lasted (Michel 1973; Echenberg 1975; Clarke 1986). While in 1915 only 2,500 out of a total of 14,500 new recruits in Algeria were conscripts, this ratio changed dramatically in the second half of the war. In 1917 the army enlisted 6,261 volunteers and 25,925 conscripts, and in the following year there were 13,942 volunteers and 34,173 conscripts (Meynier 1981: 405). During the 1915/16 recruiting campaign in West Africa, only 7,000 out of 53,000 recruits were volunteers (Michel 1982: 84). The customary procedure was to ask local chiefs to provide potential recruits. Most often, young men from lower social strata, especially from the group of domestic slaves, were presented to French recruitment officers. French recruitment in West Africa met all sorts of resistance, ranging from malingering and self-mutilation to flight into the bush or to territories not controlled by the French. In some cases, as in Bélédougou in 1915, there was even armed resistance against French colonial administration and recruitment officers (Sere de Rivières 1965: 224–30; Garcia 1970; Gnankambary 1970; Hebert 1970; Kouandété 1971; D’Almeida-Topor 1973; Asiwaju 1976; Johnson and Summers 1978; Echenberg 1980; Cornevin 1981: 418–23; Michel 1982: 50–7, 100–16, 118–20, 127–30; Lunn

216

Nations, Identities and the First World War

1999: 33–58; Braukämper 2015: 81–91). In North Africa there was resistance against forced recruitment as well. As early as the autumn of 1914, young Arabs threatened by conscription, along with their relatives, protested against French recruitment practices in several parts of Algeria. In the winter of 1916–17, Algerian resistance against conscription climaxed in a big uprising in the southern parts of Constantinois (Ageron and Julien 1964–79: 1142–3 and 1150–7; Meynier 1981: 569–98; Braukämper 2015: 101–6). In Tunisia too there were several smaller rebellions in 1915 and 1916 (Lejri 1974: 157–63). Indigenous troops in the French Army, whose numbers massively increased in the second half of the war, participated in all major battles of the Western Front. Additionally, they were deployed in the 1915 Dardanelles expedition and in the Balkans. African soldiers’ task was most often to serve as shock troops in the first wave of attack. Casualty figures for African troops deployed in Europe mentioned in official reports, in unofficial accounts and in historiography are rather unclear, ranging for West Africans from 25,000 to 65,000 soldiers killed, for Algerians from 12,000 to 100,000, for Moroccans from 2,500 to 9,000 and for Malagasies from 2,400 to 4,000. Figures in most recent scholarly publications typically confirm none of the extremes. These vague figures and their differing interpretation have led scholars to contradictory conclusions about whether African troops were misused as ‘cannon fodder’. It would be too simplistic to base any judgement of the cannon-fodder thesis on overall figures of killed and wounded alone, for this neglects the temporal dimension of deployment. West African troops used to be withdrawn from the front and transferred to camps in southern France during the winter months. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of North and West Africans only came to Europe in the second half of the war. Thus casualty rates should not be compared to overall figures of deployed soldiers but to average figures. Joe Harris Lunn, analyzing annual casualty rates of West Africans, concludes that the probability of a West African soldier being killed during his time at the front was two and a half times higher than that of a French infantryman (Lunn 1999: 140–7).

A duty owed to the colonial masters The legal status of the African territories that supplied soldiers and war workers for metropolitan France was quite diverse. The same is true for the inhabitants of these territories. While the French considered Algeria to be an integral part of metropolitan France, French control of Tunisia and Morocco was conducted through protectorates. The French possessions in West Africa and Madagascar had the legal status of colonies. Unlike the soldiers drawn from settlers of European extraction, hardly any of the indigenous African soldiers enjoyed French citizenship, most of them being French sujets without political rights and subject to a special set of laws (code de l’indigénat). This applied, despite Algeria’s metropolitan status, also to most Algerian Arabs. In French West Africa, most of the soldiers recruited were sujets as well. However, in the ‘old colonies’ of Senegal (Saint Louis, Gorée, Rufisque and Dakar) there was a group of so-called originaires who enjoyed, among other rights, the franchise, although without

Nationalism and Racism

217

being fully fledged French citizens (Bruschi 2010; Zimmermann 2014). Thus, as far as their legal status was concerned, most indigenous members of the French colonial troops could not be considered citizen-soldiers according to the model of national armies that had dominated European military discourses since the early nineteenth century. At the same time, they could not be characterized as mercenaries either. The French did not hesitate to deploy European mercenaries by transferring parts of the Foreign Legion to Europe and expanding this force by incorporating foreign volunteers desiring to fight for France as early as in August 1914 (Rockwell 1930; Laffin 1974: 85–95; Porch 1991: 334–81; Michels 1999: 72–3; Montagnon 1999: 155–80; Windrow 1999; Dufour 2003; Koller 2013: 35). Altogether, nearly 43,000 foreigners from fifty-two different nations enlisted in the French Army during the First World War, although not all of these had served in Foreign Legion units. Most of them were Europeans. However, the French were reluctant to recruit extra-European fighters from outside their colonial empire. During the second half of the war, several proposals were made to hire fighters in Ethiopia, Somalia or Yemen, yet the French government never seriously considered these plans (Mangin 1950: 125–6; Ageron 1968: 1164, 1985: 80). The massive use of colonial soldiers and workers, their presence in the French motherland and verbal attacks against them by German propaganda challenged French communication strategies. France had to legitimize the transfer of these people to Europe, stress their importance for the French war effort, address internal fears and refute external allegations of having betrayed the ‘white race’. French propaganda usually rather struggled to characterize colonial soldiers’ status. Generally, representations of colonial troops in the French press and propagandistic publications followed pre-war patterns of colonial imagination, depicting colonial soldiers as belonging to races jeunes and as absolutely obedient to their white masters because of the latter’s intellectual supremacy (e.g. Boussenot 1916: 23). Alphonse Séché, for instance, in 1915 stated in the weekly L’Opinion: For the black man, the white man’s orders, the chief ’s orders are summarised in one word that he repeats again and again ‘y a service’. […] He won’t discuss; he does not try to understand. He would kill his father, mother, wife, child, in order to obey to the order he received. He is not responsible; a superior’s will is more important than his own one. […] In all the blacks’ acts, we find this mixture of childlike innocence and heroism. […] The Senegalese is brave by nature; as a primitive being, he does not analyse. […] For the Senegalese, his officer is everything; he replaces the absent chief of his village, his father. (Séché 1915: 287–8)

This image also appeared in many pictorial representations (Gervereau 1989). The infantile savages – often described as grands enfants – appeared as naïve and almost sexless. Therefore they were a danger neither to white supremacy in the colonial world nor to the French metropolitan population. Sometimes, however, African soldiers’ representations in the French press barely differed from the racism towards colonial troops contained in German propaganda. Two weeks after the outbreak of the war, the Dépêche Coloniale portrayed African

218

Nations, Identities and the First World War

soldiers as démons noirs who would carry over the Rhine, with their bayonets, the revenge of civilization against modern barbarism (La Dépêche Coloniale, 18 August 1914). And in February 1915, the Marseille-based journal Midi Colonial, alluding to German propaganda’s allegations that colonial soldiers were seeking to collect human limbs as trophies, published a cartoon showing a Muslim soldier wearing a necklace with German soldiers’ ears. The subtitle ran: ‘Be silent, be careful, enemy ears are listening!’ (cited in Michel 1982: 345). Despite the French colonial ideology of assimilation, allegedly aiming at turning colonial subjects into fully fledged Frenchmen in the long run, colonial soldiers were obviously not considered members of the French national community. Nonetheless, the notion of the mission civilisatrice played an important role in legitimizing their deployment in Europe. French propaganda again and again stressed the alleged alliance of interests between France and her colonized peoples, who were allegedly in need of further education by their French colonial masters. The Revue de Paris, for instance, stated in 1915: Their existence, their destiny is connected to ours. It is our task to elevate them to a superior life and to protect them from German rule that everywhere has been very hard for indigenous peoples and that considers its colonies only as a field of exploitation. So, we have got the right – and not only the master’s right – to request our subjects’ help, for their interests are mingled with ours. (‘Troupes coloniales’ 1915: 266)

In February 1918, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, in a speech delivered to the French Senate, stated: ‘We are going to offer civilisation to the Blacks. They will have to pay for that’. His immediate remark that he ‘would prefer that ten Blacks are killed rather than one Frenchman’ made it clear that he, like many French, did not regard African colonial subjects as members of the Grande Nation (cited in Ageron 1985: 80). Clemenceau was not the only one to stress the intention to spare the lives of Frenchmen by deploying Africans. In January 1918, for instance, a senior officer responsible for West Africans’ training in the camp of Fréjus wrote in a letter that African soldiers were ‘cannon fodder, who should, in order to save whites’ lives, be made use of much more intensively’ (cited in Michel 1982: 323). French propaganda developed similar themes in its own specific lingo: ‘From the very first hour on, African regiments had the privilege to occupy the most dangerous posts, which permitted them to enrich their book of traditions and past glory’ (Boussenot 1916: 43). Before the war, colonial officer Charles Mangin, who from 1909 on campaigned for a large armée noire to be trained for deployment in European wars, had argued that West Africans were especially suited to be shock troops in an industrialized war because their allegedly less developed nervous system made them immune to the noise of battle (Mangin 1909a,b,c, 1911a,b). Indeed the use of colonial soldiers as shock troops became common practice at the Western Front. French soldiers would soon interpret the emergence of Africans as an unmistakable sign that an attack was imminent. Henri Barbusse, for instance, in his autobiographical novel Le Feu, described Moroccan soldiers as follows: ‘They are imposing and even frighten a bit. […] Of course they are

Nationalism and Racism

219

heading for the front line. This is their place, and their arrival means we are about to attack. They are made for attacking’ (Barbusse 1916: 48–9). Similar images were widespread throughout the French population. When the first units from West Africa arrived in France, large crowds welcomed them shouting: ‘Bravo les tirailleurs sénégalais! Couper têtes aux allemands!’ (Well done, Senegalese tirailleurs! Chop the Germans’ heads!) (Diallo 1926: 113). This image also seems to have caused a latent popular opposition against stationing African soldiers at the Côte d’Azur. Lucie Cousturier, who had been acquainted with several wounded Senegalese soldiers in the military hospital at Fréjus during and after the war, wrote about the French population’s feelings towards the Africans in her book Des Inconnus chez moi: In April and May of 1916 we were very anxious about our future friends. […] There was simply no crime that one could put beyond them: […] drunkenness, theft, rape, epidemics. […] ‘What will become of us?’ the farmers’ wives moaned […]. ‘We cannot let our little daughters go out alone any more because of those savages. We do not even risk going out alone ourselves any more […] Imagine! If you were in the hands of those gorillas!’ (Cousturier 1920: 12–13)

The French military administration as well promoted the image of primitive savages. For instance, the French arsenals issued boots to African soldiers that were far too big for them, as their feet were supposed to have enormous dimensions because of permanent barefooted walking (Tharaud and Tharaud 1922: 100). As late as in 1917 it was proposed that West African soldiers should fight barefoot, because with French boots ‘those agile apes are losing one of their best infantry qualities, namely their elasticity at marching’ (‘L’utilisation des Troupes Noires’ 1917: 882). The sexuality of colonial soldiers and workers was an issue as well, although obviously not discussed in public. A postcard depicting an African grasping a white French woman’s breast with the cry Vive les Teutons has to be seen in this context (Melzer 1998: 222–8). This is a play on words with the expressions teutons (Teutons, Germans) and tétons (tits). It was especially the massive presence of extra-European male war workers that caused bad feelings and indeed met racist violence. French workers often saw these colonial migrants as rivals for jobs as well as for women, and there were numerous attacks on them, especially towards the end of the war. French trade unions were on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand they stressed internationalism and rejected all forms of racism. On the other hand they were aware that the colonial workers were sometimes misused as strike breakers. The French government, for its part, pursued a policy of strict segregation between colonial workers and French civilians and would send the former home as soon as possible after the end of the war (Stovall 1993, 1998). Thus in metropolitan France no one would really consider colonial soldiers and war workers as fully fledged Frenchmen. But what about colonial officials? Having first been in favour of recruitment, they soon changed their minds in view of African resistance. In August 1914, William Ponty, governor-general of French West Africa, had written to Paris that ‘there would be extreme enthusiasm if people were informed that the natives were to be given the honour to fight in France’ (cited in Michel 1982:

220

Nations, Identities and the First World War

43). His successor, Clozel, however, stated only one year later, ‘The brutal and badly prepared effort demanded by Ponty, aggravated by the officers’ incompetence, has completely disgusted everyone’ (cited in Delafosse 1976: 310). French officials in North Africa were less hostile towards conscription than their colleagues in West Africa. Charles Lutaud, governor-general of Algeria, even explicitly announced an expansion of conscription of Arabs in 1916 (Ageron 1968: 1146–7). In the following year, however, he opposed governmental plans for a premature enlistment of the 1918 age group, arguing that ‘even though we managed to suppress last November’s uprising, the tribes’ submission is far from absolute’ (cited in Ageron 1968: 1162). Thereupon, the government renounced these plans and even reintroduced the system of replacements and dispensations they had, against Lutaud’s will, abolished the year before. However, the government’s ambition to recruit another 50,000 Algerian Arabs in 1918 by expanding conscription to the south of Algeria, where no working colonial administration was yet in existence, was criticized by colonial officials as unrealistic. And indeed, far fewer soldiers were recruited than Paris had hoped for (Ageron 1968: 1064–5). In spite of all acts of resistance and criticism from the ranks of colonial administrators, certain military and colonial circles in metropolitan France remained in favour of an expansion of colonial recruitment. In 1915, General Charles Mangin launched a propaganda campaign for the recruitment of half a million soldiers in the French colonies. While most metropolitan newspapers supported his suggestions enthusiastically, colonial experts remained rather sceptical. So did the French government, which decided on a modest expansion of recruitment in Africa only (Margueritte 1916: 127–33; Michel 1982: 73–81). In March 1916, Ministerial Attaché Paulin wrote to the colonial administration in Dakar that the colonial minister had agreed to a further enlistment campaign ‘only because he was forced into it by public and parliamentary opinion, although he was never really convinced by it’ (cited in Delafosse 1976: 310). In September 1917, Governor-General Joost van Vollenhoven obtained a temporary cessation of recruitment in French West Africa. He stressed that France should instead prioritize the economic exploitation of West Africa: ‘This African empire is poor in men but rich in products, so let us use its miserable population for food supply during the war and for post-war times! This country has been ruined just to recruit another few thousands of men!’ (cited in Michel 1982: 132). Furthermore, Vollenhoven pointed to African resistance to recruitment: Recruiting the Black army out of volunteers is a utopia; its creator has been mistaken, facts have proved this so dramatically that this issue can no longer be discussed. […] Since the beginning of the war, recruitment has become a hunt for men. […] Out of recruitment has resulted an unpopularity that has become universal from the very day when recruits were asked to serve in Europe and grim, determined, terrible revolts started against the white man, who had hitherto been tolerated, sometimes even loved, but who, transformed into a recruiting agent, had become a detested enemy, the image of the slave hunters he had defeated and replaced himself. (cited in Michel 1982: 133)

Nationalism and Racism

221

When the government in Paris in winter 1917–18 decided to resume recruitments in West Africa, Vollenhoven desperately wrote, ‘If we really need new tirailleurs, we will have to recruit them forcibly, running the risk of a general revolt’ (cited in Delafosse 1976: 338). Embittered, he resigned and volunteered for the front, where he fell in July 1918 (Une ame de Chef 1920: 27–8, 264–6; Echenberg 1991: 44). In order to organize the new recruitment campaign, the French government appointed Blaise Diagne as Commissaire de la République dans l’Ouest Africain. Diagne, an originaire from Senegal, had been the first Black African to be elected as a deputy in the French parliament in 1914. In 1916 he managed to convince the parliament to pass two bills that granted originaires the same conditions for fulfilling their military duties as granted to French citizens of European extraction and that confirmed the status of originaire as French citizens. At the same time, however, these two lois Diagne widened the legal gap between the few originaires and the many sujets. Like some African American leaders, Diagne considered and propagated war service as a means to obtain rights. His recruitment campaign was an outright success. By September 1918 he had recruited 77,000 soldiers, many more than had been expected. However, most of them were not deployed before the end of the war (Michel 1971; Crowder 1978: 104–21; Glinga 1989: 21–37; Lunn 1999: 73–81; Sarr 2015). For the overwhelming majority of African soldiers, their war service did nothing to improve their legal status within the framework of the French Empire. On balance, French colonial soldiers neither had the legal status of French citizensoldiers nor were considered as fully fledged Frenchmen by the political elites, the French population or the colonial administration. The fact that many of them had not volunteered to fight in France but had been forcibly recruited under a system of compulsory service was not legitimized by attributing to them at least discursively the status of Frenchmen – despite the propagandistic slogan of La plus Grande France (Greater France) participating in the war. Rather, an alleged convergence of interest between metropolitan France and her colonial subjects was stressed: As it was in the latter’s best interest to remain under French rule, the motherland was entitled to demand their military support in winning the war. Underneath the surface of propagandistic glorification of these soldiers lay racist stereotypes of colonial imagery that did not differ considerably from the colonial troops’ representations in German propaganda.

Half-animal peoples, no comrades After the second battle of Ypres in spring 1915, both the liberal German newspaper Vossische Zeitung and the war chronicle Der Völkerkrieg published a letter of the writer Hans Friedrich Blunck, who had volunteered and would later become an important figure in Nazi cultural policy. In this letter, apparently written for propaganda purposes, Blunck complained: In this night, the marvellous fighting had become disgusting to me. The foe deployed Senegalese Negroes and Indian auxiliaries against our glorious volunteers, and it

222

Nations, Identities and the First World War

was, as if, through the steam of blood that covered the battlefield, this trembling beastly smell of the dark-coloured peoples emerged. As if, together with the inferior blood of these strangers, something would pour in the soil plaguing the country, as if the earth knew that it would never again be able to become green after the Africans’ feet had touched it. […] Some soldiers were handling their colonel’s corpse. […] when you looked him in the eyes: shock. Something undescribably horrible must have emerged before he had died. He, who had dreamt so much of equal adversaries’ fight, […] had seen the black flood, the dark mud, devouring him and his men. […] the enemy had sent half-animal peoples of Africa, when he was expected to take on; he had mobilized Asia and betrayed thousand years old Europe. […] It was, as if his shaken soul was with us with all its shock about this dark treason of Europe. (Baer 1915: 217–18)

Blunck’s letter was quite representative of the way in which German propaganda dealt with French and British colonial troops. In general, German representations of colonial soldiers further developed along the line of racist colonial pre-war imagery, even reaching the extremes of representing these soldiers as beasts. In summer 1915, the German Foreign Office put into circulation a pamphlet in several language versions with the title Employment, Contrary to International Law, of Coloured Troops upon the European Theatre of War by England and France. This pamphlet attributed many atrocities to colonial soldiers, such as the poking out of eyes and the cutting off of the ears, noses and heads of wounded and captured German soldiers (Auswärtiges Amt 1915). German propaganda generally described colonial troops with expressions that negated their quality as regular military forces – for example, ‘a motley crew of colours and religions’, ‘devils’, ‘dehumanized wilderness’, ‘dead vermin of the wilderness’, ‘Africans jumping around in a devilish ecstasy’ and ‘auxiliary rabble of all colours’. Other idioms used included ‘an exhibition of Africans’, or ‘an anthropological show of uncivilized or half civilized bands and hordes’, ‘black flood’ or ‘dark mud’, and finally the catch phrase ‘the black shame’ (schwarze Schmach), which quickly rose to common usage in the early 1920s when the French stationed colonial troops in Germany during the Rhineland occupation (Baer 1915: 217; Dill 1915; Valois 1915: 7; Ein Dutzend englischer Sünden 1916: 5; Illustrierte Geschichte des Weltkrieges 1916: 307; Rosen 1916: 96 and 98; Borchardt 1979: 243; on the Rhineland occupation, see Reinders 1968; Nelson 1970; Marks 1983; Lebzelter 1985; Martin 1996, Campt et al. 1998; Koller 2001: 199–341; Nagl 2004; Wigger 2006; Roos 2009). Even the liberal sociologist Max Weber in 1917 complained that ‘an army of niggers, Ghurkhas and all the barbarians of the world’ were at Germany’s borders (Weber 1917: 279). Another recurrent theme in German propaganda against the deployment of colonial troops in Europe was its alleged impact on the future of the colonial system and the supremacy of the ‘white race’. If African and Asian soldiers were trained in the handling of modern arms, if they saw the white nations fighting against each other and if they were even allowed to participate in these battles and experience the vulnerability of the white man, then they would lose their respect for the white nations once and forever. After the war, they would turn their weapons against their own masters and remove colonial rule. Thus German propaganda argued that the French and British policy

Nationalism and Racism

223

of deploying colonial troops in Europe was a flagrant breach of white solidarity and should be condemned by every civilized nation (e.g. Schütze 1914; Müller-Meiningen 1915: 68–9). However, another image – diametrically opposed to the above – can be seen in publications trying to justify the German practice of recruiting Muslim POWs for the Ottoman Army. Images of colonial soldiers in these types of publications resembled paternalistic representations of Germany’s own colonial troops in East Africa (Mass 2006; Michels 2009) rather than the racialist stereotypes usually used to portray Africans and Asians at the Western Front. German propaganda sought to profit from the alliance with the Ottoman Empire and to present the Central Powers as friends of Islam (Hagen 1990; Müller 1991; Lüdke 2005, 2014), for instance, by arranging the publication of several texts by the Algerian officer Rabah Abdallah Boukabouya, who had deserted in 1915 (Boukabouya 1915, 1916a,b, 1917a,b,c,d). Muslim deserters and prisoners of war were interned in a ‘crescent camp’ near Berlin, which comprised a little mosque and where they had to stand the curiosity of linguists and cultural anthropologists (Höpp 1995, 1996, 2000; Kahleyss 1995, 1996, 1998; Hinz 1999; Lange 2008; Mahrenholz 2008; Ahuja et al. 2011; Fogarty 2014). This strategy, however, proved to be a failure, as only about 500 out of 8,000 North African POWs agreed to a transfer to the Ottoman Army (Braukämper 2015: 103). Stories of colonial soldiers’ alleged atrocities circulated by the German propaganda apparently also reached the front, which did nothing to improve the morale of the troops. Statements in soldiers’ letters like ‘you can’t really consider a nigger […] as a comrade’ (Witkop 1928: 26) bear witness to their contempt for Africans as illegitimate opponents. Colonel General Carl von Einem referred to the colonial troops as ‘riffraff ’ and ‘menagerie’ in his diary (von Einem 1938: 108, 419). Private V. Herzog similarly described ‘Hindus’ and ‘Zuaves’ as ‘gory’. Recounting the story of a captured French city, allegedly devastated by fleeing Allied soldiers, he reasoned that ‘these must have been Singhalese, so no wonder’ (mixing up Senegalese with Singhalese) and further noted that lots of ‘Turkos’ and ‘Hindus’ had deserted (cited in Münch 2007: 89–90). Another private wrote in September 1914 about the North African soldiers looking ‘forbidden’ and that he did not feel sorry for the fallen colonial troops (BundesarchivMilitärarchiv, Freiburg im Breisgau, MSg 1/799, Briefe vom September 1914). Apparently it was generally believed the Africans took no prisoners, and when German units captured a new sector of the front, the question was often anxiously put as to whether there were any black soldiers among the opponents. Writing about his experiences on the Western Front, the Senegalese war veteran Bakary Diallo in 1926 recalled an episode about a captured German soldier: ‘A German mistook his trench and, with his coffee, was made prisoner by a Senegalese sentry. When he was encircled by African tirailleurs, the whole of his body was trembling. […] The blacks you thought to be savages have caught you in the war, but instead of killing you, they have made you a prisoner of war’ (Diallo 1926: 123). And a German army report of 1918 stated that a column ‘quickly abandoned the front line without a shot having been fired and without the enemy appearing at the cry of “The French are attacking, the blacks are coming”’ (Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv N 87/7 80. Reserve-Division, 12.10.1918 (Abschrift)).

224

Nations, Identities and the First World War

As for German civilians, very few sources reveal their perceptions of African troops. Elfriede ‘Piete’ Kuhr, later to become an author, dancer and actress under the pseudonym Jo Mihaly, as a twelve-year-old schoolgirl started writing a diary upon the outbreak of the war. In September 1914 she mentioned discussions among civilians of the East Prussian town she lived in about colonial troops. Hearing news of the destruction of a whole French colonial brigade by German machine gun fire, she asked whether a black mother would also receive an honourable letter informing her of her son’s heroic death. Her elder brother stated thereupon that there were still differences between civilizations. Elfriede also mentioned that people talked a lot about French colonial troops’ savagery and quoted her teacher complaining that the use of carnivores against the German heroes was apparently imminent (Mihaly 1982: 74–5). Thus, perceptions of African troops by German soldiers and civilians alike seem to have largely followed the imagery spread by the German propaganda. People made a clear distinction between metropolitan Entente soldiers considered legitimate enemy fighters and allegedly ‘savage’ colonial troops whose deployment on European battlefields was met with outrage, fear and unmitigated racism.

Conclusion On balance, despite the utterly contrary lines of argument in German and French nationalist propaganda, basic common structures can be delineated. Both sides viewed colonial soldiers as fundamentally different and inferior, which implies a common European racism. These notions were apparently shared by most European soldiers and civilians on both sides of the Western Front. Neither the French nor the Germans considered colonial soldiers as equals but, instead, saw them as inferior beings who, according to colonial ideology, were in need of European guidance. The ‘Greater France’ promulgated by French propaganda was thus, despite the assimilationist doctrine of French imperialism, not meant to be an egalitarian national community stretching over different continents but a clearly hierarchical empire structured along colour lines and with no intention of allowing non-whites to stay permanently in the metropolis. The post-war impact of the cultural confrontation between African soldiers, French and Germans was manifold. The question of whether the deployment of African troops in Europe tightened or loosened colonial bonds has no simple answer, but it is clear that relationships between the colonizers and the colonized after 1918 would differ considerably from pre-1914 relationships. Many veterans after the war would (as the French war propaganda had predicted) be closer to the colonial administration and serve as middlemen between the colonizers and the colonized. At the same time, although the great uprising against colonial rule that had been predicted by the German war propaganda as a result of colonial soldiers’ experience of war in Europe would not materialize, wartime recruitment had triggered several local rebellions. In Germany, wartime propaganda against the use of colonial troops in Europe would continue with a highly racist campaign against deployment of Africans in France’s occupational force in the Rhineland in the early 1920s and would then be duplicated at the beginning of the Second World War. In interwar France there was a lukewarm

Nationalism and Racism

225

and heavily paternalist reaction to German racism against African troops, with the erection of several memorials dedicated to the African war effort and the construction of a big mosque in Paris as a tribute to the 70,000 Muslim soldiers who had fallen for the Grande Nation. However, reforms expected by many Africans as a reward for their participation never materialized. The French empire remained hierarchical and segmented along colour lines.

Note 1 All translations from German and French sources are mine.

References Ageron, C.-R. (1968), Les Algériens musulmans et la France, 1871–1919, vol. 2, Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Ageron, C.-R. (1985), ‘Clemenceau et la question coloniale’, in A. Wormser (ed.), Clemenceau et la justice. Actes du colloque de décembre 1979 organisé pour le cinquentenaire de la mort de G. Clemenceau, 69–84, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Ageron, C.-R., and C.-A. Julien (1964–79), Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Ahuja, R., F. Roy, and H. Liebau, eds (2011), When the War Began, We Heard of Several Kings. South Asian Prisoners in World War I Germany, New Delhi: Social Science Press. Asiwaju, A.I. (1976), ‘Migration as Revolt: The Example of the Ivory Coast and the Upper Volta before 1945’, Journal of African History, 27: 577–94. Auswärtiges Amt, ed. (1915), Völkerrechtswidrige Verwendung farbiger Truppen auf dem europäischen Kriegsschauplatz durch England und Frankreich, Berlin: Auswärtiges Amt. Baer, E. H., ed. (1915), Der Völkerkrieg: Eine Chronik der Ereignisse seit dem 1. Juli 1914, vol. 3, 217–18, Stuttgart: Hoffmann. Barbeau, A.E., and F. Henry (1974), The Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I, New York: Temple University Press. Barbusse, H. (1916), Le Feu. Journal d’une escouade, Paris: Flammarion. Beaumont, J., ed. (1995), Australia’s War 1914–18, Sydney : Allen & Unwin. Beckett, I.F.W. (1985), ‘The Nation in Arms 1914–1918’, in I.F.W. Beckett and K. Simpson (eds), A Nation in Arms: A Social Study of the British Army in the First World War, 1–35, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Besson, M., and P. Perreau Pradier (1919), L’Effort Colonial des Alliés, Nancy : BergerLevrault. Borchardt, R. (1979), ‘Der Krieg und die deutsche Selbsteinkehr. Rede, öffentlich gehalten am 5. September 1914 in Heidelberg’, in M.L. Borchardt, U. Ott, G. Schuster and E. Zinn (eds), Gesammelte Werke in Einzelbänden. Prosa V, vol. 12 of R. Borchardt (ed.), Gesammelte Werke in Einzelbänden, 217–64, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Boukabouya, A.H. (1915), L’Islam dans l’armée française (guerre de 1914–1915), Constantinople. Boukabouya, A.H. (1916a), ‘Die marokkanischen Kaids unter der französischen Herrschaft’, Korrespondenzblatt der Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient, 3: 220–2, 271–3, 328–30.

226

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Boukabouya, A.H. (1916b), ‘Der General Gourand als Generalresident von Marokko’, Korrespondenzblatt der Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient, 3: 419–20. Boukabouya, A.H. (1917a), L’Islam dans l’armée française (second fascicule), Lausanne: Librairie nouvelle de Lausanne. Boukabouya, A.H. (1917b), ‘Das Protektorat über Marokko. General Lyautey und seine Islampolitik’, Islamische Welt, 1 (3): 57–8 and 1 (4): 253–4. Boukabouya, A.H. (1917c), ‘Die ‘Weissen Väter’, Islamische Welt, 1 (6): 352–3. Boukabouya, A.H. (1917d), ‘Der zukünftige Friede und die algerischen Muslims’, Islamische Welt, 1 (9): 557–9. Boussenot, G. (1916), La France d’outre-mer participe à la guerre, Paris: Alcan. Braukämper, U. (2015), Afrika 1914–1918. Antikolonialer Widerstand jenseits der Weltkriegsfronten, Berlin: Reimer. Britten, T.A. (1997), American Indians in World War I: At Home and at War, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Brosens, G. (2013), Congo aan den Yser. De 32 Congolese soldaten van het Belgisch leger in de Eerste Wereldoorlog, Antwerp: Manteau. Bruschi, F. (2010), ‘Military Collaboration, Conscription and Citizenship Rights in the Four Communes of Senegal and in French West Africa (1912–1946)’, in H. Liebau, K. Bromber, K. Lange, D. Hamzah and R. Ahuja (eds), The World in World Wars: Experiences, Perceptions and Perspectives from Africa and Asia, 429–56, Leiden: Brill. Bührer, T. (2011), Die Kaiserliche Schutztruppe für Deutsch-Ostafrika. Koloniale Sicherheitspolitik und transkulturelle Kriegführung, 1885 bis 1918, Munich: Oldenbourg. Campt, T., P. Grosse, and Y.-C. Lemke-Muniz De Faria (1998), ‘Blacks, Germans, and the Politics of Imperial Imagination 1920–1960’, in S. Friedrichsmeyer, S. Lennox and S. Zantop (eds), The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy, 205–29, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Carrington, C.E.H. (1959), ‘The Empire at War’, in Cambridge History of the British Empire, vol. 3, 605–44, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chenevix Trench, C. (1988), The Indian Army and the King’s Enemies 1900–1947, London: Thames and Hudson. Clarke, P.B. (1986), West Africans at War 1914–18/1939–45: Colonial Propaganda and Its Cultural Aftermath, London: Ethnographica. Coffman, E.M. (1968), The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I, New York: Oxford University Press. Cornevin, R. (1981), La République populaire du Benin des origines Dahoméens à nos jours, Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose. Corrigan, G. (1999), Sepoys in the Trenches: The Indian Corps on the Western Front 1914–15, Staplehurst: Spellmount. Cousturier, L. (1920), Des Inconnus chez moi: Tirailleurs Sénégalais, Paris: Éditions de la Sirène. Crowder, M. (1978), ‘Blaise Diagne and the Recruitment of African Troops for the 1914–1918 War’, in M. Crowder (ed.), Colonial West Africa: Collected Essays, 104–21, London: Routledge. D’Almeida-Topor, H. (1973), ‘Les populations dahoméens et le recrutement militaire pendant le première guerre mondiale’, Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer, 60: 196–241. Das, S. (2011), ‘“Heart and Soul with Britain?” India, Empire and the Great War’, in J. Leonhard and U. v. Hirschhausen (eds), Comparing Empires: Encounters and Transfers in the Long Nineteenth Century, 479–99, Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Nationalism and Racism

227

Delafosse, L. (1976), Maurice Delafosse, le Berrichon conquis par l’Afrique, Paris: Société française d’histoire d’outre-mer. Dendooven, D. (2008), ‘Troops of British India in Flanders 1914–1919’, in D. Dendooven and P. Chielens (eds), World War I: Five Continents in Flanders, 117–29, Tielt: Lannoo. Diallo, B. (1926), Force-Bonté, Paris: Rieder. Dill, L. (1915), ‘Die Gefangenenlager bei Merseburg’, Gartenlaube 63: 7–9. Dufour, P. (2003), La légion en 14–18, Paris: Pygmalion. Duong, V.G. (1925), L’Indochine pendant la Guerre de 1914–1918. Contribution à l’étude de la colonisation indochinoise, Paris: Budry. Echenberg, M.J. (1975), ‘Paying the Blood Tax: Military Conscription in French West Africa 1914–1929’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 9 (2): 171–92. Echenberg, M.J. (1980), ‘Les Migrations militaires en Afrique Occidentale Française 1900– 1945’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 14: 429–50. Echenberg, M.J. (1991), Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857–1960, Portsmouth: Heinemann. Ein Dutzend englischer Sünden wider das Völkerrecht. Tatsachen und Feststellungen (1916) (s.l.). Ellinwood, D.C., and S.D. Pradham, eds (1978), India and World War 1, New Delhi: Manohar. Fogarty, R.S. (2014), ‘Out of North Africa: Contested Visions of French Muslim Soldiers During World War I’, in R.S. Fogarty and A.T. Jarboe (eds), Empires in World War I: Shifting Frontiers and Imperial Dynamics in a Global Conflict, 136–58, London/New York: Tauris. Förster, S. (2004), ‘Der globalisierte Krieg’, in S. Burgdorff and K. Wiegrefe (eds), Der Erste Weltkrieg. Die Urkatastrophe des 20. Jahrhunderts, 198–210, Munich: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt. Garcia, L. (1970), ‘Les mouvements de resistance au Dahomey (1914–1917)’, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, 10: 144–78. Garson, N.G. (1979), ‘South Africa and World War I’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 8: 68–85. Gervereau, L. (1989), ‘De bien trop noirs desseins’, in J. Riesz and J. Schultz (eds), ‘Tirailleurs sénégalais’. Zur bildlichen und literarischen Darstellung afrikanischer Soldaten im Dienste Frankreichs, 111–31, Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang. Glinga, W. (1989), ‘Ein koloniales Paradoxon. Blaise Diagne und die Rekrutierungsmission 1918’, in J. Riesz and J. Schultz (eds), ‘Tirailleurs sénégalais’. Zur bildlichen und literarischen Darstellung afrikanischer Soldaten im Dienste Frankreichs, 21–37, Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang. Gnankambary, B. (1970), ‘La révolte bobo de 1916 dans le cercle du Dedougou’, Notes et Documents voltaïques, 3: 56–87. Graham, R. (1967), ‘Through the First World War’, in J.M.S. Careless and R.C. Brown (eds), The Canadians 1867–1967, 172–204, Toronto: Macmillan. Greenhut, J. (1983), ‘The Imperial Reserve: The Indian Corps on the Western Front 1914–15’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 12: 54–73. Grundlingh, A. (1987), Fighting Their Own War: South African Blacks and the First World War, Johannesburg: Ravan. Grundy, K.W. (1983), Soldiers without Politics: Blacks in South African Armed Forces, Berkeley : University of California Press. Guoqi, X. (2011), Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Laborers in the Great War, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

228

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Hagen, G. (1990), Die Türkei im Ersten Weltkrieg. Flugblätter und Flugschriften in arabischer, persischer und osmanisch-türkischer Sprache aus einer Sammlung der Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, eingeleitet, übersetzt und kommentiert, Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang. Hallas, J.H. (2000), Doughboy War: The American Expeditionary Force in World War I, Boulder: Lynne Riener. Hebert, J. (1970), ‘Révoltes en Haute Volta de 1914 à 1918’, Notes et Documents voltaïques, 3: 3–54. Hill, R.A., ed. (1995), The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 9, Berkeley : University of California Press. Hinz, U. (1999), ‘Die deutschen “Barbaren” sind doch die besseren Menschen. Kriegsgefangenschaft und gefangene “Feinde” in der Darstellung der deutschen Publizistik 1914–1918’, in R. Overmans (ed.), In der Hand des Feindes. Kriegsgefangenschaft von der Antike bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg, 339–61, Cologne: Böhlau. Höpp, G. (1995), Muslime in der Mark. Als Kriegsgefangene und Internierte in Wünsdorf und Zossen 1914–1924, Berlin: Verlag Das Arabische Buch. Höpp, G. (1996), ‘Die Privilegien der Verlierer. Über Status und Schicksal muslimischer Kriegsgefangener und Deserteure in Deutschland während des Ersten Weltkrieges und in der Zwischenweltkriegszeit’, in G. Höpp (ed.), Fremde Erfahrungen. Asiaten und Afrikaner in Deutschland, Österreich und in der Schweiz bis 1945, 185–210, Berlin: Verlag Das Arabische Buch. Höpp, G. (2000), ‘Gewaltsame Begegnungen. Muslime als Kombattanten, Gefangene und Überläufer in Deutschland – eine andere Seite des deutsch-türkischen Waffenbündnisses im Ersten Weltkrieg’, Der Islam, 77: 307–18. Illustrierte Geschichte des Weltkrieges (1916), vol. 5, Stuttgart: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft. Johnson, R.W., and A. Summers (1978), ‘World War I: Conscription and Social Change in Guinea’, Journal of African History 19: 25–38. Kahleyss, M. (1995), ‘Muslime als Kriegsgefangene’, Rundbrief Fotographie, 7 (3): 43–5. Kahleyss, M. (1996), ‘Muslime in Brandenburg. Kriegsgefangene im Ersten Weltkrieg’, Infoblatt der Gesellschaft für Ethnographie e. V., 7: 28–53. Kahleyss, M. (1998), Muslime in Brandenburg – Kriegsgefangene im Ersten Weltkrieg. Ansichten und Absichten, Berlin: Museum für Völkerkunde. Kant, V. (2014), India and the First World War: ‘If I die here, who will remember me?’ New Delhi: Lustre. Kaspi, A. (1976), Le temps des Américains. Le concours américain à la France en 1917– 1918, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Keene, J.D. (2000), The United States and the First World War, New York: Longman. Kettlitz, E. (2007), Afrikanische Soldaten aus deutscher Sicht seit 1871. Stereotype, Vorurteile, Feindbilder und Rassismus, Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang. Killingray, D. (1979), ‘The Idea of a British Imperial African Army’, Journal of African History 20: 421–36. Koller, C. (2001), ‘Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt’. Die Diskussion über die Verwendung von Kolonialtruppen in Europa zwischen Rassismus, Kolonial- und Militärpolitik (1914–1930), Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. Koller, C. (2004), ‘Krieg, Fremdheitserfahrung und Männlichkeit. Alterität und Identität in Feldpostbriefen indischer Soldaten des Ersten Weltkrieges’, in M. Bos, T. Wirz and B. Vincenz (eds), Erfahrung. Alles nur Diskurs? Zur Verwendung des Erfahrungsbegriffes in der Geschlechtergeschichte, 117–28, Zurich: Chronos.

Nationalism and Racism

229

Koller, C. (2013), Die Fremdenlegion. Kolonialismus, Söldnertum, Gewalt, 1831–1962, Paderborn: Schöningh. Koller, C. (2014), ‘“Only in the Army is any izzat to be acquired” – Ehre und Pflichterfüllung in der indischen Armee des Ersten Weltkriegs’, in U. Ludwig, M. Pöhlmann and J. Zimmermann (eds), Ehre und Pflichterfüllung als Codes militärischer Tugenden, 211–24, Paderborn: Schöningh. Kouandété, M.I. (1971), Un aspect de l’insurrection nationaliste au Dahomey, Cotonou: Éditions Silva. Laffin, J. (1974), The French Foreign Legion, London: Dent. Lange, B. (2008), ‘Academic Research on (Coloured) Prisoners of War in Germany 1915–1918’, in D. Dendooven and P. Chielens (eds), World War I: Five Continents in Flanders, 153–60, Tielt: Lannoo. Lebzelter, G. (1985), ‘Die “Schwarze Schmach”. Vorurteile – Propaganda – Mythos’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 11: 37–58. Lejri, M.-S. (1974), L’histoire du mouvement national, vol. 1, Tunis: Maison tunisienne de l’edition. Le Naour, J.-Y. (2003), La honte noire. L’Allemagne et les troupes coloniales françaises 1914–1945, Paris: Hachette. Lüdke, T. (2005), Jihad Made in Germany: Ottoman and German Propaganda and Intelligence Operations in the First World War, Münster: Lit. Lüdke, T. (2014), ‘Strange Fronts, Strange Wars: Germany’s Battle for “Islam” in the Middle East during the First Wold War, and British Reactions’, in J. Bürgschwentner, M. Egger and G. Barth-Scalmani (eds), Other Fronts, Other Wars? First World War Studies on the Eve of the Centennial, 389–414, Leiden: Brill. Lunn, J.H. (1999), Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First World War, Portsmouth: Heinemann. ‘L’utilisation des Troupes Noires’ (1917), Revue de Paris, 24: 872–94. Ma, L., ed. (2012), Les travailleurs chinois en France dans la Première Guerre mondiale, Paris: CNRS. Mahrenholz, J.-K. (2008), ‘Ethnographic Audio Recordings in German Prisoners of War Camps during the First World War’, in D. Dendooven and P. Chielens (eds), World War I: Five Continents in Flanders, 161–5, Tielt: Lannoo. Mangin, C. (1909a), ‘Troupes noires’, Revue de France, 16: 61–80 and 383–98. Mangin, C. (1909b), ‘Soldats Noirs en Europe’, Questions Diplomatiques et Coloniales, 13: 449–60. Mangin, C. (1909c), La Force Noire, Paris: Hachette. Mangin, C. (1911a), ‘Troupes noires’, Revue de Paris, 18: 484–94. Mangin, C. (1911b), ‘De l’emploi des troupes noires’, Revue anthropologique, 21: 113–28. Mangin, C. (1950), Lettres de Guerre 1914–1918, Paris: Fayard. Margueritte, P. (1916), L’immense effort 1915–1916, Paris: Flammarion. Marks, S. (1983), ‘Black Watch on the Rhine: A Study in Propaganda, Prejudice and Prurience’, European Studies Review, 13: 297–333. Martin, G. (1996), ‘Die Kampagne gegen die “Schwarze Schmach” als Ausdruck konservativer Visionen vom Untergang des Abendlandes’, in G. Höpp (ed.), Fremde Erfahrungen. Asiaten und Afrikaner in Deutschland, Österreich und in der Schweiz bis 1945, 211–24, Berlin: Verlag Das Arabische Buch. Martin, G. (1997), ‘German and French Perceptions of the French North and West African contingents 1910–1918’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 56: 31–68. Mass, S. (2006), Weisse Helden, schwarze Krieger. Zur Geschichte kolonialer Männlichkeit in Deutschland 1918–1964, Cologne: Böhlau.

230

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Melzer, A. (1998), ‘Spectacles and Sexualities: The “Mise-en-Scène” of the “Tirailleur Sénégalais” on the Western Front 1914–1920’, in B. Melman (ed.), Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–1930, 213–44, New York/London: Routledge. Meynier, G. (1981), L’Algérie révélé. La guerre de 1914–1918 et le premier quart du XXe siècle, Geneva: Droz. Michel, M. (1971), ‘La genèse du recrutement de 1918 en Afrique noire française’, Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer, 58: 433–50. Michel, M. (1973), ‘Le recrutement des tirailleurs en A.O.F. pendant la première guerre mondiale’, Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer, 60: 645–60. Michel, M. (1982), L’appel à l’Afrique. Contributions et réactions à l’effort de guerre en A.O.F., Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Michels, E. (1999), Deutsche in der Fremdenlegion. Mythen und Realitäten 1870–1965, Paderborn: Schöningh. Michels, S. (2009), Schwarze deutsche Kolonialsoldaten. Mehrdeutige Repräsentationsräume und früher Kosmopolitismus, Bielefeld: Transcript. Mihaly, J. (1982), … da gibt’s ein Wiedersehn! Kriegstagebuch eines Mädchens 1914–1918, Freiburg: Kerle. Montagnon, P. (1999), La Légion étrangère: de 1831 à nos jours, Paris: Pygmalion. Morton, D. (1993), When Your Number’s Up: The Canadian Soldier in the First World War, Toronto: Random House of Canada. Morton, D., and J.L. Granatstein (1989), Marching to Armageddon: Canadians in the Great War 1914–1919, Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys. Müller, H.L. (1991), Islam, ğihad (‘Heiliger Krieg’) und Deutsches Reich, Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang. Müller-Meiningen, E. (1915), Der Weltkrieg und das Völkerrecht. Eine Anklage gegen die Kriegführung des Dreiverbandes, Berlin: Reimer. Münch, P. (2007), Bürgerliche Kriegserfahrungen im Ersten Weltkrieg. Hamburger Turner zwischen ‘Kriegsglaubensbekenntnis’ und Verzweiflung im Spiegel ihrer Feldpost, MA Thesis: University of Hamburg. Nagl, T. (2004), ‘“Die Wacht am Rhein”. “Rasse” und Rassismus in der Filmpropaganda gegen die “schwarze Schmach” (1921–1923)’, in H. Hertzfeld and K. Schäfgen (eds), Kultur, Macht, Politik. Perspektiven einer kritischen Wissenschaft, 135–54, Berlin: Karl Dietz. Nelson, K.S. (1970), ‘Black Horror on the Rhine: Race as a Factor in Post-World War I Diplomacy’, Journal of Modern History, 42: 606–27. Nicholson, G.W.L. (1962), Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1919: Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War, Ottawa: Duhamel. Nogaro, B., and L. Weil (1926), La main-d’œuvre étrangère et coloniale pendant la guerre, Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Omissi, D., ed. (1999), Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters 1914–18, London: Macmillan. Omissi, D. (2007), ‘Europe through Indian Eyes: Indian Soldiers Encounter England and France 1914–1918’, English Historical Review, 122: 371–96. O’Neill, M. (2014), The Chinese Labour Corps: The Forgotten Chinese Labourers of the First World War, London: Penguin. Pati, B. (1996), India and The First World War, New Delhi: Atlantic. Pershing, J.J. (1931), My Experiences in the World War, vol. 2, New York: Stokes. Porch, D. (1991), The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History, New York/London: HarperCollins.

Nationalism and Racism

231

Pugsley, C. (2001), The Anzac Experience: New Zealand, Australia and Empire in the First World War, Auckland: Reed. Rawling, B. (1992), Surviving Trench Warfare: Technology and the Canadian Corps 1914–1918, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ray, J. (1937), Les Marocains en France, Paris: Lavergne. Reinders, R.C. (1968), ‘Racialism on the Left: E.D. Morel and the “Black Horror on the Rhine”’, International Review of Social History, 13: 1–28. Renner, K. (1994), ‘Der Staat des Imperialismus’ (1917), in K. Renner, Schriften, ed. Anton Pelinka, 60–101, Salzburg/Vienna: Residenz. Riesz, J., and J. Schultz, eds (1989), ‘Tirailleurs sénégalais’. Zur bildlichen und literarischen Darstellung afrikanischer Soldaten im Dienste Frankreichs, Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang. Rockwell, P.A. (1930), American Fighters in the Foreign Legion 1914–1918, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Roos, J. (2009), ‘Women’s Rights, Nationalist Anxieties, and the “Moral” Agenda in the Early Weimar Republic: Revisiting the “Black Horror” Campaign against France’s African Occupation Troops’, Central European History, 42: 473–508. Rosen, E. (1916), England, ein Britenspiegel. Schlaglichter aus der Kriegs-, Kultur- und Sittengeschichte, Stuttgart: Lutz. Samson, A. (2012), World War I in Africa: The Forgotten Conflict among the European Powers, London/New York: Tauris. Sarr, A.-L. (2015), ‘The Senegalese Tirailleurs (1914–1918): African Soldiers in the Service of France’, in M. Lakitsch, S. Reitmair and K. Seidel (eds), Bellicose Entanglements 1914: The Great War as Global War, 247–71, Vienna: Lit. Sarraut, A. (1923), La mise en valeur des colonies françaises, Paris: Payot. Schor, R. (1996), Histoire de l’immigration en France de la fin du XIXe siècle à nos jours, Paris: Colin. Schulze, R. (1981), Die Rebellion der ägyptischen Fallahin 1919. Zum Konflikt zwischen der agrarisch-orientalischen Gesellschaft and dem kolonialen Staat in Ägypten 1820–1919, Berlin: Baalbek. Schütze, W. (1914), Englands Blutschuld gegen die weisse Rasse, Berlin: Curtius. Séché, A. (1915), ‘Les Noirs. L’âme du Sénégalais’, L’Opinion, 8 (41): 286–8. Segesser, D.M. (2002), Empire und totaler Krieg. Australien 1905–1918, Paderborn: Schöningh. Segesser, D.M. (2016), ‘“When bench gained parity with trench”. Aussereuropäische Kriegsarbeiter im Ersten Weltkrieg’, in F. Eichmann, M. Pöhlmann and D. Walter (eds), Globale Machtkonflikte und Kriege. Festschrift für Stig Förster zum 65. Geburtstag, 193–210, Paderborn: Schöningh. Sere De Rivières, E. (1965), Histoire du Niger, Paris: Éditions Berger-Levrault. Singh, G. (2014), The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy, London/New York: Bloomsbury. Smith, R. (2004), Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War: Race, Masculinity and the Development of National Consciousness, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stora, B. (1992), Ils venaient d’Algérie. L’immigration algérienne en France (1912–1992), Paris: Fayard. Stovall, T. (1993), ‘Colour-blind France? Colonial Workers during the First Wold War’, Race & Class, 35: 35–55. Stovall, T. (1998), ‘The Color Line behind the Lines: Racial Violence in France during the Great War’, American Historical Review, 103: 737–69. Strachan, H. (2004), The First World War in Africa, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

232

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Strachan, H. (2010), ‘The First World War as a Global War’, First World War Studies, 1 (1): 3–14. Talha, L. (1989), Le salariat immigré dans la crise. La main-d’œuvre maghrébine en France (1921–1987), Paris: CNRS. Tharaud, J., and J. Tharaud (1922), La randonnée de Samba Diouf, Paris: Plon. ‘Troupes coloniales. Nos forces ignorés’ (1915), Revue de Paris, 17: 265–80. Une ame de Chef. Le Gouverneur général J. Van Vollenhoven (1920), Paris: Phénix. Valois, V. (1915), Nieder mit England! Betrachtungen und Erwägungen, Berlin: Dr Wedekind & Cie. Van Galen Last, D. (2015), Black Shame: African Soldiers in Europe 1914–1922, London: Bloomsbury. Vankoski, S.C. (1995), ‘Letters Home 1915–16: Punjabi Soldiers Reflect on War and Life in Europe and Their Meanings for Home and Self ’, International Journal for Punjab Studies, 2: 43–63. Varet, P. (1927), Du concours apporté à la France par ses Colonies et Pays de Protectorat au cours de la Guerre de 1914, Paris: Les Presses Modernes. Von Einem, C. (1938), Ein Armeeführer erlebt den Weltkrieg. Persönliche Aufzeichnungen des Generalobersten v. Einem, Leipzig: Hase & Koehler. Walker, J.W. St. G. (1989), ‘Race and Recruitment in World War I: Enlistment of Visible Minorities in the Canadian Expeditionary Force’, Canadian Historical Review, 70: 1–26. Wang, N. (2007), ‘Chinesische Kontraktarbeiter in Frankreich im Ersten Weltkrieg’, in K.J. Bade, P.C. Emmer, L. Lucassen and J. Oltmer (eds), Enzyklopädie Migration in Europa vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, 440–3, Paderborn: Schöningh. War Office, ed. (1922), Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War 1914–1920, London: War Office. Weber, M. (1917), ‘Russlands Übergang zur Scheindemokratie’, Hilfe, 23: 272–9. Wigger, I. (2006), Die “Schwarze Schmach am Rhein”. Rassistische Diskriminierung zwischen Geschlecht, Klasse, Nation und Rasse, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Willan, B.P. (1978), ‘The South African Native Labour Contingent 1916–1918’, Journal of African History, 9: 61–86. Windrow, M. (1999), French Foreign Legion 1914–1945, Oxford: Osprey. Winegard, T.C. (2012), Indigenous Peoples of the British Dominions and the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Witkop, P., ed. (1928), Kriegsbriefe gefallener Studenten, Munich: Müller. Wou, P. (1939), Les travailleurs chinois et la grande guerre, Paris: Pédone. Zieger, R.H. (2000), America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Zimmermann, S. (2014), ‘Citizenship, Military Service and Managing Exceptionalism: Originaires in World War I’, in A.T. Jarboe and R.S. Fogarty (eds), Empires in World War I: Shifting Frontiers and Imperial Dynamics in a Global Conflict, 219–48, London/ New York: Tauris.

Part Four

Town and Nation

Figure 5 The Belgrade University destroyed by the Austro-Hungarian guns, August 1914 (Museum of the City of Belgrade, Fl 1 4519).

13

An Urban Geography of the World at War, 1911–1923 Pierre Purseigle

The invasion of Belgium by the German army in August 1914 brought industrial warfare to the urban heart of Europe. Marching through its densest and most urbanized country, the German forces turned towns and cities into battlefields – Liège, Namur, Louvain, Charleroi, Mons, Antwerp and then Ypres, to name but a few. For most contemporaries in Western Europe and beyond, the names of these cities punctuated the unfolding story of the conflict (De Schaepdrijver 2004). For all its strategic and symbolic importance, however, Belgium was an outlier in a world where urbanization still remained an uneven and incomplete process (Clark 2013). This chapter nonetheless argues that the urban history of the First World War offers critical insight into the experience of this global conflict. By 1914, towns and cities, like war itself, had been transformed by the process of modernization that characterized the long nineteenth century (Chickering and Funck 2004; Goebel and Keene 2011). During the conflict, urban communities were, as Zygmunt Bauman noted of contemporary cities, ‘the battleground on which global powers and stubbornly local meanings and identities [met]’ (Bauman 2007: 81). The wartime experience of urban populations was indeed shaped by the interaction of global and local dynamics that determined critical aspects of the conflict, such as the mobilization of military and civilian manpower. It remains nonetheless difficult to find the appropriate way to articulate and integrate the urban experience of the conflict and its transnational and global history. Today, in a time when the majority of the population live in towns and cities – the world officially turned urban in 2008 – images of urban devastation routinely illustrate the ravages of military conflicts. During the centennial commemorations of the First World War, the victimization of cities like Aleppo or Grozny once again came to symbolize contemporary warfare as in the case of Sarajevo in the 1990s. Subsequently, the outbreak of war in Europe shattered the irenic visions of a united continent that rose following the dissolution of the Soviet Empire. For scholars of the

236

Nations, Identities and the First World War

First World War, the fate of Sarajevo did not simply recall the assassination of the Habsburg Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, on 28 June 1914. The destruction of the city’s library evoked the destruction of another urban site of learning: the university library at Louvain, destroyed by the German army in August 1914. The extent to which this context accounts for the renewal of interest in the urban experience of the Great War is a moot point and is beyond the scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, a number of individual and collective urban histories of the conflict were initiated in the mid- and late 1990s. Spearheading this scholarly wave, the Capital Cities at War project, led by Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert, propounded urban history as a specific and explicit contribution to the then nascent comparative and transnational history of wartime Europe. In the following two decades, the urban and European histories of the conflict proceeded apace and alongside each other while a number of scholars framed their contribution in both local and continental terms (Davis 2000; Healy 2004; KnezevicLazic 2006; Chickering 2007; Winter and Robert 2007; Julien 2009; Seipp 2009; Cronier 2013; Morelon 2015; Purseigle 2013). Now in the final stages of the centennial commemorations of the First World War, historians are once again called upon to help the general public make sense of a conflict whose reverberations continue to be felt across the contemporary world. To our diverse and often multicultural audiences, whose life experiences are routinely shaped by the twin dynamics of urbanization and globalization, the First World War evokes a distant, alien past. Several factors may account for this seemingly unbridgeable historical distance separating our world from that of 1914: the then inescapable centrality of the nation-state, the ubiquity of military service as a marker of citizenship, different attitudes towards war as instrument of policy, to name but a few. However, the uneven development of both the urban and global histories of the conflict arguably contributes to confining the memory of the war to the domain of emotional discourses and family history, and to the public’s reluctance to confront the role that war, along with urbanization and globalization, played in shaping today’s dominant version of modernity. This issue arises with a new urgency as the community of historians reflect on the conditions for a truly European and global history of the First World War (Compagnon and Purseigle 2016). This chapter questions a series of notions and methodological premises, which run implicitly through the historiography of the conflict and, specifically, that of its urban experience. The objective here is to place the practice of urban history in the wider debate over the nature and conditions for the global history of a global conflict. In this period of centennial commemorations, the historiographies and memories of the First World War remain largely ensconced in national – if not nationalist – narratives. While transnational and comparative approaches have already yielded undeniable scholarly advances, the search for an elusive European history of the war continues. Likewise – notwithstanding the weight of academic fashion – the profession is yet to produce a global history of the conflict that would do justice to the geographic spread of the war as well as to the circulations and transfers that defined its experience. Despite the growth in transnational and comparative studies of the war, most historians continue to pay lip service to the European and global history of the war; many indeed remain confined within well-established national and disciplinary boundaries. For there also remains a detrimental gap between the military, social and cultural histories of the war

An Urban Geography of the World at War

237

as well as between disciplines and methodologies deployed within the field. This chapter argues that urban history is one of the ways to address this gap. There have, of course, been several attempts to write a global history of the conflict and these tend to belong to two different genres. The first one may be described as ‘grand synthesis’ and is best exemplified by Hew Strachan’s magisterial first volume of his history of the First World War. But very few scholars are so equipped to deal with the narrative and analytical challenges the global history of the war raises (Strachan 2001, 2006). The second type of attempt is collective in nature and can be found in the form of collective volumes or special issues of academic journals. They do, however, often by necessity, tend to rely on the juxtaposition of national or disciplinary case studies (Horne 2010). Unprecedented in scope and ambition, the recent three-volume Cambridge History of the First World War, edited by Jay Winter, successfully sets out to offer a global history of the conflict. This synthetic enterprise nonetheless demonstrates how global history continues to depend on national or regional case studies (Winter 2014a, b, c). Such pioneering works have made an important contribution to our understanding of the global dimensions of the war. There remains, however, one critical issue: the integration into a common analytical framework of the diversity and the complexity of experiences that unfolded on a global scale. These methodological considerations cannot be separated from wider reflections on the transformations of warfare in the twentieth century; for to question the character of the First World War is to think afresh of both the chronology and the geography of the conflict. The First World War has, of course, long been seen as the quintessential industrial modern war, brought about by the culmination and concatenation of a series of economic, social and political transformations that had taken place since the late eighteenth century. Significantly, these transformations also altered and redefined understandings and experiences of space and time. As Stephen Kern put it, ‘modern war required a multiplicity of perspective’ (Kern 2003: 300). A great deal of ink has been spilled to discuss, revise and debate the idea of the First World War as a rupture in European and world history. For long, historians argued to determine if the Great War was a ‘total war’ and if it constituted a ‘revolution in military affairs’ (Bailey 1996; Boemeke et al. 1999; Chickering and Förster 200 0; Knox and Murray 2001). These insightful debates continue to mobilize an impressive array of scholars and some of the brightest minds in the profession. Yet, articulated in these terms, the reflection on the character of the war may well draw our attention away from the diversity of experiences and contexts that this conflict brought about. Here we owe a great deal to colleagues who have written about the imperial dimensions of the war (Morrow 2004). The recent historiography of the war has, as a result, nuanced the vision of war as a clean break with the past, since colonial warfare had already challenged the conventional demarcation between soldiers and civilians (Hull 2005; Kramer 2007; Neitzel 2014). Such blurring of boundaries between combatants and non-combatants was, for instance, a notable feature of military operations and occupation policies on the European battlefields (De Schaepdrijver 2013). One must therefore consider the war in the wider context of the transformations of imperialism as a political project, in the context of the changes in the modes and policies of imperial domination, including, of course, the projection of violence into colonial domains. The war will

238

Nations, Identities and the First World War

therefore be better understood within a larger political geography of imperial and domestic domination. Historians of the Great War must find new ways to combine spatial and temporal scales of analysis to ensure that their research fits with the spaces of experience that the belligerent populations lived in and through. It may even be time to move beyond centres and peripheries to explore what Antoinette Burton called the ‘structural below’ and the ‘geographic below’ to challenge Euro- as well stato-centric perspectives (Burton 2007). Urban historians have a central role to play in thisenterprise. The historiography of the First World War does indeed still betray the continuing dominance of national and Eurocentric perspectives. The conventional chronology of the war (1914–18) is another heritage of conventional diplomatic and military history. Recent works have, however, stressed the necessity to place the First World War in a wider chronological framework (1911–23): in a continuum of colonial conflicts, European wars, civil wars, revolutions, political violence and genocide. The war clearly did not end on 11 November 1918 as 4 million people died between 1918 and 1923 (Holquist 2002; Gerwarth and Horne 2012; Nübel 2015; Gerwarth 2016). As a result, the urban history of the First World War must also be placed in the longue durée of urbanization and the wider history of urban catastrophes.

Towards a geography of belligerence In this historiographical context, it first appears essential to develop a geographic perspective on the war. The initial question is simple enough: What would a historical geography or a geographic history of the war attentive to notions of space and place look like? This undertaking echoes the approach adopted by Tim Snyder in Bloodlands. In a sense, locating the war experience, asking where the war – or genocide – happened prompts us to rethink what the war was and when it happened (Snyder 2012). Concerned with the transformations of warfare, this historical geography of the war will deepen our understanding of the totalizing and globalizing logic of the First World War. However, this commitment to locating the First World War does not amount to calling for a spatial turn in First World War studies. It is indeed hard to see what would justify such call. First, history and social sciences have always been concerned with space, even before the institutionalization of geography as a discipline. Second, asserting the spatiality of war is little more than a truism. Soldiers fight with maps, battles transform landscapes and terrains and wars create their own imaginative geography (Nübel 2014). Nonetheless, spatial metaphors are so prevalent in historical and social scientific discourse that we ought to offer a few words of definition. Gender historians have demonstrated how useful spatial metaphors can be by exploring the construction and enforcement of the distinction between public and private or domestic spheres. Michel Foucault and his ‘heterotopia’ has allowed us to rethink the body and the performance of sexual identities and practices in their spatial context; queer studies scholars like Sara Ahmed have convincingly demonstrated the need to take the spatiality of sexual ‘orientation’ seriously (Foucault 1984; Ahmed 2006). Yet

An Urban Geography of the World at War

239

in multiplying spatial metaphors, we run the risk of diluting their heuristic value. As Michael Crang and Nigel Thrift put it, ‘space is the everywhere of modern thought. It is the flesh that flatters the bone of theory. It is an all-purpose nostrum to be applied whenever things look sticky’ (Crang and Thrift 2000: 1). In the absence of any consensus within geography, urban studies, social and cultural theory and history on the definition of space and place, historians of the Great War may find an indispensable guide in Michel de Certeau. Place refers to location – to the natural and material environment in which historical actors go about their business. Place in other words is positional. Space is defined by movement – by the vectors of circulation of people, goods and cultural representations. Space in other words is relational (de Certeau 1990). It is, of course, very difficult to maintain a clear-cut distinction between place and space because historical experience constantly blurs the boundary between the two. One moves from one place to the other, to interact, trade, or fight with one another. These are processes invested with, and ascribed, meaning and cultural significance. Both place and space are clearly culturally constructed. The key point here is that we should not lose sight of the materiality, or to put it in another way, of the environmental nature of space and place. The first consequence of this approach to the war is to challenge the conventional geography of the war which, inherited from operational history, reduces the war to belligerency and military operations. Shifting the emphasis to belligerence and the mobilization of resources in response to the war allows us to redefine both the spaces and temporalities of war. We can then hope to situate the conflict and trace its gradual penetration within and beyond the belligerent empires; to highlight the varying intensity and spatial unevenness of mobilization; and to rethink the experience of combat, mobilization and reconstructions. As a new generation of scholars presides over the emergence of a truly global urban history, urban historians of the Great War should underline how they may contribute to a revised historical geography of the conflict (Goebel 2015; Lewis 2016; ‘Global Urban History Project’ 2017). This approach would first challenge one of the most enduring, yet only partially accurate, image of the First World War: that of a strategic stalemate, embodied by millions of soldiers stuck in the mud of the Western Front. Indeed, the space of belligerence was defined by mobility to and from the combat zones, as much as it was by the apparently static line of trenches. The initial stages of military mobilization saw millions of soldiers entrained at railway stations across the belligerent world. Many joined their units on foot, while imperial soldiers often travelled considerable distances to report for duty. From the very first hours of the war, towns and cities stood out as critical staging posts and sites of mobilization. A particular experience of wartime mobility was that of the volunteers who left neutral countries to join belligerent armies on both sides. This transnational volunteerism was partly a product of nationalist movement eager to seize an opportunity to remap Europe. In the United States, immigrant communities – Poles, Lithuanians, Czech in particular – thus mobilized politically and militarily. Likewise, Italians imbued with the memory of Garibaldi and of the Risorgimento enrolled in the French army. So did hundreds of Latin American men. Armenians formed their own ‘legion’ within the British Expeditionary Force and, later, in the French army. Here again, further work is

240

Nations, Identities and the First World War

needed to offer a prosopography of these transnational volunteers, to understand their motivations and to retrace their wartime and post-war trajectories. But these stories were often, if not always, urban stories, played out in the streets of Rio or New York for instance (Prezioso 2010; Arielli and Collins 2013; Varnava 2015). Urban history also provides critical insight into the ways in which the warring states and empires deployed their bureaucratic and logistical expertise to extract, transport and allocate human and material resources to their armies in the field. Sustaining tens of millions of men and horses on the battlefield for several years was a costly and complex business. The outcome of war largely depended on the belligerents’ capacity to control the space in between supply sites and the battlefield. Here, of course, the maritime empires – and Britain’s in particular – held a decisive advantage (Halpern 1994; Lambert 2012; Sondhaus 2014). Surprisingly, however, the historiography of the war has paid relatively little attention to logistics (Sumida 1993; Brown 1998; Bernède 2006; Roy 2010; Ulrichsen 2010; Phillips 2015). Yet the war had a defining impact on the nature and density of infrastructure networks both within and outside the belligerent nations. It often required significant upgrades and the creation of new infrastructures, which reshaped the territories of belligerents, of their colonies and of neutral countries alike. The experience of port cities from Osaka to Buenos Aires through Lagos testifies to the impact of war on infrastructures across the globe. It also underlines how the urban history of the conflict can contribute to a wider reflection on globalization in the early twentieth century (Albert 2002; Olukoju 2004; Graf and Chua 2009; Miller 2012; Suárez Bosa 2014). Last, but not least, this proposed historical geography of the war would allow us to challenge the common conflation of the urban experience of the war with that of the home front. Indeed, as armies fought their way through the continental landscape, the conflict inflicted unprecedented levels of destruction upon urbanized Europe. Scores of towns along the Western and Eastern Front came to encapsulate the nature and meaning of an industrial conflict waged with unprecedented firepower. The war was indeed often waged over an urban battlefield. In his innovative and insightful study of French towns under fire in the zone of military operations, Alex Dowdall illuminated the experience of those urban populations. In towns and cities where home is the front, urban communities found themselves if not at odds, at least out of sync, with the rest of the national community. Furthermore, many occupied communities became targets for the artillery of their fellow countrymen and their allies. In such circumstances, the war experience also dramatically redefined the relationship between these urban populations and the rest of the national communities. Most importantly, Dowdall’s work demonstrates that this complex urban geography of victimization also meant that those urban populations experienced the war along different and specific temporalities: from mobilization to reconstruction through combat (Dowdall 2015).

An urban history of mobilization Historians of towns and cities therefore have a specific contribution to make to the global history of the war, not least by encouraging scholars to combine different scales

An Urban Geography of the World at War

241

of analysis. In this regard, the comparative history of urban mobilization has helped to renew our approach to conventional problems and to open up new avenues of inquiry. Drawing the rich historiography of the urban experience of the war, and often inspired by the Capital Cities at War project, the history of medium-sized towns has shifted the focus away from the metropolitan and onto the provincial, if not peripheral, experience of the conflict. Downplaying questions of continuing relevance to urban historians, such as social mobility, spatial segregation, or urban morphology, those studies chose an urban lens to scrutinize the process of wartime mobilization and post-war demobilization (Seipp 2009). Local studies were indeed set out to pursue the broader, comparative agenda defined by John Horne. In other words, the idea was to use urban history to explore how belligerent societies responded to the transformation of warfare and to what Horne called ‘the totalizing logic’ of the First World War (Horne 1997). The comparative method was thus deployed to investigate the culture, sociology and politics of urban belligerence. To analyse the modalities of urban mobilization, historians may scrutinize a range of practices elicited by the war effort: the raising and support of local military units, the assistance to war victims, various charitable initiatives and the commemoration of military and patriotic service. In doing so, one can reveal the role of urban identities in the process of national mobilization. In a sustained and critical dialogue with other social sciences, this comparative history also underscores the significance of social movements. Urban contention was indeed integral to wartime social mobilization. Attentive to the opposition as well as to the collaboration between national authorities and voluntary organizations, such a comparative urban history also highlights the wartime reconfiguration of the state (Purseigle 2013). This comparative urban approach also underlines the need to reconsider the conventional chronology as well as the geography of wartime social mobilization. Specifically, it stresses the need to place this process in the broader context of the nationalization of the masses in the long nineteenth century. The study of pre-war social movements is indeed necessary to understand how these populations articulated their urban, local and national identities when the war broke out. In both the British and French cases, for instance, the mobilization of class and community in response to what was perceived as existential socio-economic crises in the years leading up to the war drew on place and space as cognitive and political resources. The First World War would activate parent, if not identical, repertoires of urban mobilization (Purseigle 2011). The recent renewal in the urban history of the conflict also stems, in part, from the realization that rigid historiographical boundaries drawn between the local, the national, the imperial and the global do not do justice to the social history of the war. In towns and cities across the belligerent world, soldiers and civilians responded to the conflict in a multiplicity of ways that belies the myth of war enthusiasm or the existence of a unique or unified ‘war culture’ (Becker 1977; Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker 1997; Verhey 2000; Gregory 2008; Pennell 2012). Patriotism did nonetheless matter and wartime loyalty was not the exclusive preserve of Western European nation-states. A multinational polity like the Habsburg Empire could tap into much greater and deeper reserves of loyalty than traditional nationalist historiographies would have us believe

242

Nations, Identities and the First World War

(Deák 1990; Cornwall 2000; Deak 2014; Hsia 2014; Morelon 2015). In other contexts, the war experience also contributed to the process of nationalization, including in Italy and Russia, at times of fundamental political and military crises (Pyle 1997; Lohr 2003; Sanborn 2003; Stockdale 2004; Wilcox 2012). The urban history of the war does indeed offer an excellent way to scrutinize the language and practices of patriotism. The defence of the nation was commonly articulated in communitarian terms and framed in the language of urban, class, religious as well as imperial solidarities. These infra- and supra-national solidarities underpinned the mobilization of urban civil societies in favour of combatants and war victims. Although expressed in the most mundane words and habits, wartime patriotism should not be equated with the ‘banal nationalism’ that Michael Billig deconstructed so effectively. For nationalism invokes an ideological coherence as well as the systematic primacy of the Nation, it fails to render the characteristics of patriotism. Important though it is, Billing’s work also ignores the potential of patriotism to sustain social mobilization against the state (Billig 1995). Indeed, as the experience of the war attests, the mobilization of urban communities did not necessarily set them in a collision course with national mobilization, even when protesters took on state authorities. The relationship between the national centre and the urban periphery was one of collaboration and integration as well as one of resistance and open conflicts. For patriotism was and should be understood in both an anthropological and legalpolitical sense, as a performance of solidarity to kith and kin, as a performance of loyalty to an imagined community of fellow citizens. Nationalism – both as a political project and as a category of analysis – is intimately bound up with the demands that the state may place on the citizenry. By contrast, patriotism underlines the capacity to mobilize nationhood to assert distance towards the state and even to resist its authority (Purseigle 2013). The success of wartime national mobilization did not rest on an improbable national consensus, but on the capacity of patriots of all hues to reconcile their diverging understandings of the national project to defend the existence of the nation-state. In this context, social movements performed a critical role, allowing social groups to assert the condition of their participation to the war effort. This comparative urban history also invites us to think afresh of what one may call ‘the consensual view’ of wartime mobilization – the surprisingly prevalent idea that wartime mobilization stemmed from the ‘Union Sacrée’, the ‘party truce’, or from a rather improbable national consensus. In this perspective, social conflicts are exclusively understood as a crisis, a sure sign that the mobilization was gradually unravelling in the face of the demands of industrial warfare. However, social mobilization was a more dynamic and contested process. Contrary to traditional interpretations, the wartime growth of the state’s apparatus and intervention did not strip the local civil societies of their mediating role. Indeed, a closer look at local associations discloses the extent to which the war altered the social location of power and therefore shifted political conflicts into the realm of voluntary organizations. The organizations of the urban civil society were contentious spaces that partially made up for the wartime curtailment of the public sphere (Purseigle 2003). Social conflicts raise numerous questions because they translated the new kinds of political problems entailed by the war. The management of recruiting and conscription,

An Urban Geography of the World at War

243

of the organization of labour, and of the supply and shortages of coal or food questioned the legitimacy of authority on the imperial, national and local levels alike. Across the frontlines, the urban history of belligerent societies has similarly highlighted the critical nature of such conflicts over the access and distribution of essential resources (Fallows 1978; Tobin 1985; Scholliers 1994; Davis 2000; Chickering 2007; Tanielian 2014). Part and parcel of the process of mobilization, these conflicts enabled belligerent societies, by way of strikes and protest, to articulate the conditions of their commitment to the war effort. This is what John Horne describes in his contribution to this volume as the populations’ attempt to claim and exercise sovereignty over their sacrifice. A continuing process of negotiation and bargaining thus manufactured popular consent to a war effort elaborated as much through struggles and conflicts as through outspoken support (Tilly 1990: 102, 1996, 229). The urban history of the conflict also supplements the history of the wartime state, which has so far largely and rightly focused on the national administrative structures and governmental agencies (Renouvin 1925; Hurwitz 1949; Lowe 1978; Bock 1984; Rowley 1984; Cronin 1989; Green and Whiting 1996). By contrast, the comparative urban history of mobilization allows for an investigation into the institutional and sociological adaptation of public services to the exceptional circumstances of the conflict. For urban civil society did provide many of the material or human resources so needed by the state. From strict control to flexible partnership, circumstances dictated the attitude of the state towards civil society organizations. Circumstances if not universal goodwill imposed cooperation. Yet the capacity of the British and French political system to harness the resources of their pluralist society allowed them to preserve the delivery of key public services and to maintain, by and large, social cohesion. By contrast, the German state and military failed, like their allies, to mobilize the country’s vibrant and resourceful civil society to best effect (Trentmann 2000). The urban history of the First World War thus demonstrates the need to pay particular attention to the geography of belligerence. It invites us to go not only both beyond and below the nation but also ‘to think through the nation’, as it engages on fresh terms with social, political and global history (Burton 2007).

Reconstructions and replacement This geography of warfare and belligerence may also shed new light on the aftermath of the First World War and on the processes of reconstruction that characterized the transition from war to peace. Historians of the post-war recovery of Western Europe have for long focused on its financial and economic dimensions and have largely neglected the urban history of reconstruction (Maier 1975; Silverman 1982; Adamthwaite 1995; Martin 1999; Orde 2002). As a result, scholars have overlooked critical aspects of the social history of the devastated regions of France and Belgium. Though recent publications have shed new light on the exile of Western Front refugees, the history of their return and resettlement remains largely unexplored (Nivet 2004; Purseigle 2007; Amara 2008). While the French countryside and its agriculture have been meticulously researched (Clout 1996), the reconstruction of

244

Nations, Identities and the First World War

urban communities has mainly been studied from a local perspective, thanks to the efforts of local historians, archivists and museums intent on preserving the memory of a key episode in the modern history of their regions (Smets 1985; Archives Départementales du Pas-de-Calais 2000; Archives départementales de l’Aisne, Musée national de la coopération franco-américaine (Blérancourt); and Musées de Noyon 2000). Historians are also dependent on the efforts of other social scientists who, from the fields of geography, architecture, urban planning or heritage studies, have studied the urban reconstruction from their own, often technical and professional, perspective. Tellingly, the few historians to have published on the matter have done so in other disciplines’ journals (Smets 1987; Lebas, Magri, and Topalov 1991; Osborne 2001; Clout 2005). The comparative history of urban reconstruction is therefore largely unexplored, despite the insights one might draw from a social history of the devastated regions of France and Belgium. Using the methods of transnational history, it would unearth an underestimated circulation of representations, people and funds as well as the international networks of philanthropy and expertise that contributed to the stabilization of Western Europe after 1918. Such networks operated both within and across national boundaries in Western Europe and North America. The study of the urban aftermath of the war could thus depart from traditionally state-centred and technical accounts to combine social, environmental and transnational perspectives on the reconstruction and demobilization of belligerent societies. In the months and years following the war, reconstruction, remembrance and renewal appeared indissociable, as the experience of war violence and invasion, of exile and occupation, determined visions of the post-war urban and national communities. The role of urban communities, states and Allied civil societies in the process of reconstruction was indeed construed within a broader political and cultural narrative, which lent its significance to the way in which Allied nations came to terms with the war experience and its legacy (Horne and Kramer 2001; Kramer 2007). The evocation of ‘martyr towns’ that lay at the core of the rhetoric of social mobilization in the first weeks of the conflict had equally been central to the remobilization effort mounted in 1916– 17. With the transition to peace, the issue of reconstruction gained a new acuteness. As the armistice uncovered the full extent of the destruction and the dire necessity of a sustained national effort, it was nonetheless welcome with relief and the desire to discontinue wartime exertions. Yet, the reconstruction required maintaining and redirecting the momentum of local, national and transnational mobilization. While these efforts drew on the rhetoric of the ‘war for civilization’ elaborated in 1914, they also underlined the persistence of distinct and complex geographies of mobilization. In the devastated regions, urban local elites called upon their counterparts across the country and the allied empires to help with the reconstruction.1 Remembrance and mourning did form the problematic nexus of demobilization and reconstruction. This explains why British towns were called upon to support those communities whose sacrifice had spared them the ravages of invasion. As the Lord Mayor of Liverpool put it, ‘You keep vigil over our dead, we will help your survivor.’2 The reconstruction thus sealed a transnational covenant of mourning and remembrance (Winter 1995; Lloyd 1998; Winter and Sivan 1999). In the context of post-war cultural demobilization,

An Urban Geography of the World at War

245

the reconstruction was indeed one of the ways in which nations ascribed meaning and validated their wartime sacrifices. The study of reconstruction – as an idea, as public policy, as experience – also demonstrates a wider point about the history of global warfare. It cannot be written from the exclusive perspective of a single spatial or political unit. Local, national and transnational approaches must be combined, because the belligerent societies navigated metaphorically and literally between different spaces. Indeed, the post-war reconstruction was first and foremost experienced as a replacement. If mobility had defined the war experience as much as stalemate, it equally defined the period of reconstruction. In the immediate aftermath of the conflict, the roads were filled with soldiers on their way home and by refugees in search of one. While the fraught process of veterans’ demobilization has attracted the attention of scholars of fascisms, historians have only recently begun to explore the problems created by unprecedented movements and transfer of populations to old and new states alike. As paramilitary violence maintained many regions in a state of belligerence, the plight of displaced populations questioned the legitimacy and structure of new national and revolutionary polities in Eastern Europe. The social history of these populations and of their fellow returnees in France and Belgium largely remains in its infancy (Horne 2002; Baron and Gatrell 2004; Edele and Gerwarth 2015). Their concomitant attempt to resettle and relocate both materially and figuratively calls for a comparative and transnational approach. The challenges of reconstruction and resettlement were of course material and economic, but they were also social and cultural as they required those populations to rebuild a place and a sense of place. This process was both intensely local and transnational. It called for the mobilization of material, political and cultural resources at the level of urban and rural communities, of the nation-state and of empires. It also involved a range of humanitarian organizations, which often originated in the civil societies of the allied nations and in the wartime mobilization of transnational philanthropic networks. Across the old empires brought down by war and revolution, the successor states set out to reorient their transport infrastructures away from the old imperial metropolis and towards the new capital cities. But the war, of course, did not merely brought new railways timetables. Along with the ensuing civil wars and revolutions, it redrew the political maps of Europe and of the world. The experience of Fiume/Rijeka further illuminates the transformation of post-imperial polities. Fiume is unfortunately best known for the antics of Gabriele D’Annunzio than for its fascinating post-war experiment in reshaping sovereignty. Now the object of a fascinating work by Dominique Reill at the University of Miami, its citizens attempted to define sovereignty outside the framework of the nation-state and international law. The transition from war to peace in this very particular context is also a transition, or rather a very pragmatic attempt to carve out a political and legal niche, between the Habsburg imperial polity and the nationalizing project of the Italian state (Reill 2014). It was an attempt to manufacture sovereignty at the urban level. Fiume/Rijeka illustrates the multifaceted impact of the war on imperial political geographies.

246

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Towards a typology of urban experiences of the war In keeping with the urban histories of the First World War published under the aegis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, scholars have largely focused their efforts on the wartime experience of urban communities and municipal government (Herriot 1924; Gignoux 1926; Levainville 1926; Lhéritier and Chautemps 1926; Masson 1926; Sellier and Bruggeman 1926). More recently, the study of the urban experience of war benefited greatly from the attention of cultural historians. During the conflict, towns and cities did indeed stand as both symbols and victims of modernity (Kramer 2007; Panchasi 2009; Goebel and Keene 2011). By way of conclusion, this chapter will underline the value of an alternative way to approach, and indeed to map, the urban experience of the conflict. Urban historians conventionally use size or function to distinguish different types of urban settlements, from capital cities to market towns, through global metropolises for instance. By contrast, historians of warfare can offer a new urban typology based on the experience of violence and on urban forms of victimization and mobilization. This typology would first locate urban battlefields, defined by the direct experience of combat. Secondly, the experience of occupied towns and cities underlines the extent to which the Great War was a war of siege, underpinned – even in Europe – by colonial ambitions. Yet occupation was also a tool of peacemaking, as the case of Constantinople, occupied by British, French and Italian forces between 1918 and 1923, illustrates. Third comes the urban home front, where towns and cities are primarily sites of local, national and imperial mobilization. Fourth, the reconstruction process stresses the specificities and – in particular – the specific temporalities of devastated urban communities, whose experience of mobilization and demobilization was out of sync with that of the national community as a whole. Last, and perhaps not least, historians of the conflict ought to think more broadly about wartime urban catastrophes, like the Halifax explosion or the Salonica fire of 1917. In Halifax, a collision between a French cargo ship carrying high explosive and a Norwegian boat killed about 2,000 people, flattened a large part of the city and even brought about a small tsunami. (Prince 1920) In Salonica, a domestic accident turned into a massive conflagration that engulfed and destroyed a third of the city, which displaced tens of thousands of people and a large part of the city’s Jewish community. Efforts to deal with the fire were certainly hampered by the presence of Allied troops and the attitude of their commanders (Papastathēs and Chekimoglou 2010). Such wartime disasters remind us of the need to place the urban experience of the war in the broader history of urban catastrophes. From San Francisco in 1906 to Beirut in the late twentieth century, the capacity of urban settlements to recover from environmental catastrophes, industrial accidents, economic decline and from the ravages of war revealed the strengths and the weaknesses of their social fabric. In dramatic circumstances, urban reconstruction brings to light many issues of great importance to modern historians: the link between the built environment and local identity, the nature of social cohesion, the relationship between state and civil society, the emergence of transnational solidarity and so on. These are just some of the issues of primary importance to all urban historians of the First World War.

An Urban Geography of the World at War

247

Notes 1 Les Annales Coloniales, 20 May 1921 ‘Pour réparer les ruines. Appel au colonies françaises’. See also issue date 9 November 1921. Archives Générales du Royaume de Belgique, T 521, T 527. 2 Archives Départementales du Pas-de-Calais, B.C. 1970, La reconstruction des régions libérées du Pas-de-Calais, suivie de la guerre sur les champs de bataille de l’Artois. Situation au premier janvier 1927, septembre 1927.

References Adamthwaite, A. (1995), Grandeur and Misery: France’s Bid for Power in Europe 1914– 1940, London: Edward Arnold. Ahmed, S. (2006), Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Duke University Press, http://read.dukeupress.edu/lookup/doi/10.1215/9780822388074. Albert, B. (2002), South America and the First World War: The Impact of the War on Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Chile, Cambridge Latin American Studies 65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Amara, M. (2008), Des Belges à L’épreuve De l’Exil: Les réfugiés de la Première Guerre mondiale: France, Grande-Bretagne, Pays-Bas, 1914–1918, Histoire. Bruxelles: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles. Archives départementales de l’Aisne, Musée national de la coopération franco-américaine (Blérancourt), and Musées de Noyon, eds (2000), Reconstructions En Picardie Après 1918, Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux. Archives Départementales du Pas-de-Calais (2000), La Grande Reconstruction: Reconstruire Le Pas-de-Calais Après La Grande Guerre, Dainville: Archives départementales du Pas-de-Calais. Arielli, N., and B. Collins, eds (2013), Transnational Soldiers: Foreign Military Enlistment in the Modern Era, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Audoin-Rouzeau, S., and A. Becker (1997), ‘Violence et Consentement: La “Culture de Guerre” Du Premier Conflit Mondial’, in J.-P. Rioux and J.-F. Sirinelli (eds), Pour Une Histoire Culturelle, 251–70, L’Univers Historique. Paris: Le Seuil. Bailey, J. (1996), The First World War and the Birth of the Modern Style of Warfare, Camberley, Surrey : Strategic and Combat Studies Institute. Baron, N., and P. Gatrell, eds (2004), Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918–1924, London: Anthem Press. Bauman, Z. (2007), Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Cambridge: Polity Press. Becker, J.-J. (1977), 1914: Comment Les Français Sont Entrés Dans La Guerre, Paris: FNSP. Bernède, A. (2006), ‘Verdun 1916: un choix stratégique, une équation logistique’, Revue historique des armées, 1916, les grandes batailles et la fin de la guerre européenne, no. 242 (March): 48–59. Billig, M. (1995), Banal Nationalism, London: Sage. Bock, F. (1984), ‘L’exubérance de l’Etat En France de 1914 à 1918’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’Histoire, (3): 41–51. Boemeke, M., R. Chickering, and S. Förster, eds (1999), Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914, Publications of the German Historical

248

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Institute. Washington, DC, Cambridge, UK and New York: German Historical Institute – Cambridge University Press. Brown, I.M. (1998), British Logistics on the Western Front, 1914–1919, Westport, CO: Praeger. Burton, A. (2007), ‘Not Even Remotely Global? Method and Scale in World History’, History Workshop Journal, 64 (1): 323–8. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbm039. Chickering, R. (2007), The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chickering, R., and S. Förster, eds (2000), Great War, Total War. Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Chickering, R., and M. Funck, eds (2004), Endangered Cities: Military Power and Urban Societies in the Era of the World Wars, Boston: Brill. Clark, P., ed. (2013), The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History, 1st edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clout, H. (1996), After the Ruins: Restoring the Countryside of Northern France after the Great War, Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Clout, H. (2005), ‘The Great Reconstruction of Towns and Cities in France 1918–35’, Planning Perspectives, 20 (1): 1–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/0266543042000300519. Compagnon, O., and P. Purseigle (2016), ‘Géographies de la mobilisation et territoires de la belligérance durant la Première Guerre mondiale’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 71e année (1): 37–64. Cornwall, M. (2000), The Undermining of Austria-Hungary: The Battle for Hearts and Minds, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Crang, M., and N.J. Thrift, eds (2000), Thinking Space, Critical Geographies 9. London and New York: Routledge. Cronier, E. (2013), Permissionaires dans la Grande Guerre, Biblio Belin. Paris: Belin. Cronin, J. (1989), ‘The Crisis of State and Society in Britain, 1917–22’, in L.H. Haimson and C. Tilly (eds), Strikes, Wars, and Revolutions in an International Perspective. Strikes Waves in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, 457–76, Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press – MSH. Davis, B. (2000), Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin, Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. de Certeau, M. (1990), L’invention du quotidien. 1, Arts de faire, Paris: Gallimard. De Schaepdrijver, S. (2004), La Belgique et la Première Guerre mondiale, Collection ‘Documents pour l’histoire des francophonies /Europe’, no 4. Bruxelles: Archives & Musée de la littérature. De Schaepdrijver, S. (2013), ‘Military Occupation, Political Imaginations, and the First World War’, First World War Studies, 4 (1): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/19475020.201 2.761378. Deák, I. (1990), Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918, New York: Oxford University Press. Deak, J. (2014), ‘The Great War and the Forgotten Realm: The Habsburg Monarchy and the First World War’, The Journal of Modern History, 86 (2): 336–80. https://doi. org/10.1086/675880. Dowdall, A. (2015), ‘Under Fire: Civilians at the Western Front, 1914–1918’, PhD thesis, Dublin: Trinity College. Edele, M., and R. Gerwarth (2015), ‘The Limits of Demobilization: Global Perspectives on the Aftermath of the Great War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 50 (1): 3–14. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0022009414557907.

An Urban Geography of the World at War

249

Fallows, T. (1978), ‘Politics and the War Effort in Russia. The Union of Zemstvos and the Organization of the Food Supply, 1914–1916’, Slavic Review, 37 (1): 70–90. Foucault, M. (1984), ‘Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias’, Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, (5): 46–9. Gerwarth, R. (2016), The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923, London: Allen Lane. Gerwarth, R., and J. Horne, eds (2012), War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gignoux, C.-J. (1926), Bourges Pendant La Guerre, Paris and New-Haven: PUF – Yale University Press. ‘Global Urban History Project’, (2018), http://globalurbanhistory.org/. Goebel, M. (2015), Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism, Global and International History. New York: Cambridge University Press. Goebel, S., and D. Keene, eds (2011), Cities into Battlefields: Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations of Total War, Historical Urban Studies Series. Farnham: Ashgate. Graf, A., and Beng Huat Chua, eds (2009), Port Cities in Asia and Europe, Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia 54. London and New York: Routledge. Green, S.J.D., and R.C. Whiting, eds (1996), The Boundaries of State in Modern Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gregory, A. (2008), The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halpern, P.G. (1994), A Naval History of World War I, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press. Healy, M. (2004), Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herriot, E. (1924), Lyon Pendant La Guerre, Paris and New Haven: PUF – Yale University Press. Holquist, P. (2002), Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Horne, J., ed. (1997), State, Society, and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horne, J., ed. (2002), Démobilisations Culturelles Après La Grande Guerre, 14–18, Aujourd’hui. Today. Heute. Vol. 5. Paris: Noesis. Horne, J., ed. (2010), A Companion to the First World War, Oxford: Blackwell. Horne, J., and A. Kramer. (2001), German Atrocities, 1914. A History of Denial, New Haven – London: Yale University Press. Hsia, Ke-Chin. (2014), ‘Who Provided Care for Wounded and Disabled Soldiers? Conceptualizing State-Civil Society Relationship in First World War Austria’, in J. Bürgschwendtner, M. Egger and G. Barth-Scalmani (eds), Other Fronts, Other Wars?: First World War Studies on the Eve of the Centennial, 303–29, Leiden: Brill. Hull, I.V. (2005), Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hurwitz, S.J. (1949), State Intervention in Great Britain. A Study of Economic Control and Social Response, 1914–1919, New York: Columbia University Press. Julien, E. (2009), Paris, Berlin : La Mémoire de La Guerre, 1914–1933, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Kern, S. (2003), The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

250

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Knezevic-Lazic, J. (2006), ‘The Austro-Hungarian Occupation of Belgrade during the First World War: Battles at the Home Front’, New Haven, CT: Yale University. Knox, M., and W. Murray, eds (2001), The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300–2050, Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press. Kramer, A. (2007), Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Lambert, N.A. (2012), Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lebas, E., S. Magri, and C. Topalov (1991), ‘Reconstruction and Popular Housing after the First World War: A Comparative Study of France, Great Britain, Italy and the United States’, Planning Perspectives, 6 (3): 249–67. https://doi. org/10.1080/02665439108725730. Levainville, J.R. (1926), Rouen Pendant La Guerre, Paris and New Haven: PUF – Yale University Press. Lewis, S.L. (2016), Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia, 1920–1940, Asian Connections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lhéritier, M., and C. Chautemps (1926), Tours et La Guerre, Paris and New-Haven: PUF – Yale University Press. Lloyd, D.W. (1998), Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia and Canada, 1919–1939, The Legacy of the Great War. Oxford: Berg. Lohr, E. (2003), Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I, Russian Research Center Studies 94. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lowe, R. (1978), ‘The Erosion of State Intervention in Britain, 1917–1918’, The Economic History Review XXXI, (2): 270–86. Maier, C.S. (1975), Recasting Bourgeois Europe. Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Martin, B. (1999), France and the Après Guerre, 1918–1924: Illusions and Disillusionment, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Masson, P. (1926), Marseille Pendant La Guerre, Paris and New Haven: PUF – Yale University Press. Miller, M.B. (2012), Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth-Century History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morelon, C. (2015), ‘Street Fronts: War, State Legitimacy and Urban Space, Prague 1914–1920’, Joint PhD, Birmingham and Paris: University of Birmingham/IEP Paris. Morrow, J. (2004), The Great War : An Imperial History, London & New York: Routledge. Neitzel, S. (2014), ‘Der Historische Ort Des Ersten Weltkrieges in Der Gewaltgeschichte Des 20. Jahrhunderts’, Aus Politik Und Zeitgeschichte, 64 (16/17): 17–23. Nivet, P. (2004), Les Réfugiés Français de La Grande Guerre, 1914–1920 : Les ‘Boches Du Nord.’ Paris: Economica. Nübel, C. (2014), ‘Raum in Der Militärgeschichte Und Gewaltgeschichte. Probleme, Ergebnisse Und Neue Felder Der Forschung’, Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift, 73: 285–307. Nübel, C. (2015), ‘Neuvermessungen Der Gewaltgeschichte. Über Den “Langen Ersten Weltkrieg” (1900–1930)’, Mittelweg, 36 (24): 225–48. Olukoju, A. (2004), The ‘Liverpool’ of West Africa: The Dynamics and Impact of Maritime Trade in Lagos, 1900–1950. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

An Urban Geography of the World at War

251

Orde, A. (2002), British Policy and European Reconstruction after the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Osborne, B. (2001), ‘In the Shadows of Monuments: The British League for the Reconstruction of the Devastated Areas of France’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 7 (1): 59–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527250118973. Panchasi, R. (2009), Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France between the Wars, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Papastathēs, C.K., and E.A Chekimoglou (2010), The Great Fire of Thessaloniki, 1917, Thessaloniki: E.N. Manos. Pennell, C. (2012), A Kingdom United. Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phillips, C. (2015), ‘Managing Armageddon: The Science of Transportation and the British Expeditionary Force, 1900–1918’, PhD thesis, Leeds: University of Leeds. http:// etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/8684/. Prezioso, S. (2010), ‘Les Italiens En France Au Prisme de l’engagement Volontaire : Les Raisons de l’enrôlement Dans La Grande Guerre (1914–1915)’, Cahiers de La Méditerranée 81: 147–63. Prince, S.H. (1920), ‘Catastrophe and Social Change’, PhD, New York City : Columbia University. Purseigle, P. (2003), ‘Les Associations Locales Face à La Grande Guerre: Société Civile et Etat de Guerre. Etude Comparée Angleterre – France’, in M. Frangi and B. Benoit (eds), Guerres et Associations, 87–104, Lyon: PUL. Purseigle, P. (2007), ‘A Litmus Test of Wartime Social Mobilization: The Reception of Belgian Refugees in Europe, 1914–1918’, in Zealandia’s Great War, Auckland: Exisle Publishing. Purseigle, P. (2011), ‘“Wither the Local?” Nationalization, Modernization, and the Mobilization of Urban Communities in England and France, c.1900–1918’, in O. Zimmer and W. Whyte (eds), Nationalism and the Reshaping of Urban Communities in Europe, 1848–1914, 182–203, London: Palgrave. Purseigle, P. (2013), Mobilisation, sacrifice et citoyenneté. Angleterre-France 1900–1918, Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Pyle, E.E. (1997), ‘Peasant Strategy for Obtaining State Aid: A Study of Petitions during World War I’, Russian History/Histoire Russe, 24 (1–2): 41–64. Reill, D. (25 February 2014), ‘Rebel Law: Fiume/Rijeka and the Dissolution of the Habsburg Empire’, International History Seminar at Yale University, New Haven, CT. Renouvin, P. (1925), Les Formes de Gouvernement de Guerre. L’organisation Gouvernementale Française Pendant La Guerre, Publication de La Dotation Carnegie Pour La Paix Internationale. Paris and New Haven: PUF – Yale University Press. Rowley, A. (1984), ‘Nouvelle Régulation Ou Retour à La Normale? Le Cas Britannique Après 1918’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’Histoire, 3: 53–68. Roy, K. (2010), ‘From Defeat to Victory: Logistics of the Campaign in Mesopotamia, 1914–1918’, First World War Studies, 1 (1): 35–55. https://doi. org/10.1080/19475021003621051. Sanborn, J.A. (2003), Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Scholliers, P. (1994), ‘The Policy of Survival: Food, the State and Social Relations in Belgium, 1914–1921’, in J. Burnett and D. Oddy (eds), The Origins and Development of Food Policies in Europe, 39–53, London and New York: Leicester University Press.

252

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Seipp, A.R. (2009), The Ordeal of Peace : Demobilization and the Urban Experience in Britain and Germany, 1917–1921, Birmingham Studies in First World War History. Farnham: Ashgate. Sellier, H., and A. Bruggeman (1926), Paris Pendant La Guerre, Paris – New-Haven: PUF – Yale University Press. Silverman, D. (1982), Reconstructing Europe after the Great War, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smets, M., ed. (1985), Resurgam. La Reconstruction de La Belgique Après 1914, Bruxelles: Passage 44. Smets, M. (1987), ‘Belgian Reconstruction after World War I: A Transition from Civic Art to Urban Planning’, Planning Perspectives, 2 (1): 1–26. https://doi. org/10.1080/02665438708725629. Snyder, T. (2012), Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, New York: Basic Books. Sondhaus, L. (2014), The Great War at Sea: A Naval History of the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stockdale, M.K. (2004), ‘“My Death for the Motherland Is Happiness”: Women, Patriotism, and Soldiering in Russia’s Great War, 1914–1917’, American Historical Review, 109 (1): 78–116. Strachan, H. (2001), The First World War, vol. I: To Arms, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strachan, H. (2006), The First World War, London: Free. Dr. Suárez Bosa, M. (2014), Atlantic Ports and the First Globalisation c. 1850–1930, Basingstoke, GB: Palgrave Macmillan. Sumida, J.T. (1993), ‘Forging the Trident: British Naval Industrial Logistics, 1914–1918’, in J.A. Lynn (ed.), Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western Warfare from the Middle Ages to the Present, History and Warfare. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Tanielian, M.S. (2014), ‘Feeding the City: The Beirut Municipality and the Politics of Food during World War I’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 46 (4): 737–58. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743814001044. Tilly, C. (1990), Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Tilly, C. (1996), ‘The Emergence of Citizenship in France and Elsewhere’, in C. Tilly (ed.), Citizenship, Identity and Social History, 223–36, International Review of Social History Supplement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tobin, E.H. (1985), ‘War and the Working Class: The Case of Düsseldorf 1914–1918’, Central European History, 18 (3–4): 257–98. Trentmann, F., ed. (2000), Paradoxes of Civil Society : New Perspectives on Modern German and British History, New York: Berghahn Books. Ulrichsen, K.C. (2010), The Logistics and Politics of the British Campaigns in the Middle East, 1914–22, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Varnava, A. (2015), ‘The Politics and Imperialism of Colonial and Foreign Volunteer Legions during the Great War: Comparing Proposals for Cypriot, Armenian, and Jewish Legions’, War in History, 22 (3): 344–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/0968344514524937. Verhey, J. (2000), The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilcox, V. (2012), ‘“Weeping Tears of Blood”: Exploring Italian Soldiers’ Emotions in the First World War’, Modern Italy, 17 (2): 171–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/13532944.2012 .665290. Winter, J.M. (1995), Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

An Urban Geography of the World at War

253

Winter, J.M., ed. (2014a), The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 2: The State. 3 vols, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Winter, J.M., ed. (2014b), The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 1: Global War. 3 vols, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Winter, J.M., ed. (2014c), The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 3: Civil Society. 3 vols, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Winter, J.M., and J.-L. Robert, eds (2007), Capital Cities at War. Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919, Vol. II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winter, J.M., and E. Sivan, eds (1999), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

14

Paris under the Bombs: Urban Experiences between Localism and National Identity Élise Julien

Introduction During the First World War, cities proved to be crucial to home mobilization as centres for decision-making, areas of intensive production (both material and symbolic), traffic hubs and sites of population concentration. At the same time, the First World War marked a boom in unprecedented means of destruction, some of which allowed distant targets to be reached. This resulted in a new depth of the war front that failed to keep cities out of the conflict, even when they appeared to lie some distance from the fighting itself (Chickering and Funck 2004; Goebel and Keene 2011; Goebel 2014). The case of Paris serves here to shed light on these different aspects of wartime cities. Paris is of interest also because of its special role as a capital city, located precisely at the junction between the local urban community and the wider national community. A study of Paris allows us to analyse the combination of several factors in a single location, as well as the particular relationship that emerged between engagement on a local level and nationwide mobilization. Focusing on Paris thus offers a starting point for tackling a number of questions that touch more generally on the relationship between city and nation.

An urban experience of war: The case of Paris The place occupied by Paris prior to 1914, the way in which the war developed on both a national and a local level, as well as the role attributed to the capital during the conflict, determined the manner in which the war was experienced and how this experience was represented. From this perspective, Paris was caught between its location relatively close to the front and its characteristics as a home-front city; it is in this context that the experience of bombing takes a prominent position.

256

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Paris on the eve of war: An undisputed capital Paris is a capital city (Jollivet et al. 2004; Higonnet 2005). More so than any other, the French capital in the early twentieth century was the model of an accomplished capital, hegemonic even, with a supremacy that was undisputed throughout the country (Charle 2004: 10–11). In France it is also more difficult than in other countries to disassociate the history of the nation from that of its capital. National public life is played out in Paris alongside the city’s local life. More often than not, any evolution or important development that takes place in the capital immediately acquires a national dimension and has a long-term impact on the provinces to a lesser or greater extent. Conversely, any event intended to have a national scope is organized, as a priority, in Paris. Paris’s domination over the country as a whole results, first and foremost, from the historical presence in the city of political power at the highest level. National institutions bring with them a multitude of other institutions and activities linked to international relations, as well as administrative, intellectual and cultural life. Paris plays host to nearly all the most influential figures in every field; it is also the city in which careers are made and to which they are dedicated. At the other end of the social scale, heavy industrial development led to the emergence of a large, active and often qualified working class in Paris from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. At that time, Paris became the bastion of a working population rebellious towards central government, of the classes considered ‘dangerous’ prior to 1850 (Chevalier 1958). The capital remained a concentrated centre of workers in the early twentieth century, even if it was also home to a vibrant craft tradition and an important service sector. Finally, Paris’s influence over France is also a question of numbers. In 1914, just over 4 million people lived in the Paris area. Thanks to its size, France’s only metropolis comfortably dominated the country.

Wartime Paris: A city near the front Paris remained close to the front throughout the four-year war. Despite optimistic military communications during the first few weeks of the conflict, the population could not fail to notice the wave of refugees flooding into Paris’s railway stations from across northern France. In late August 1914, German planes began appearing in the capital’s skies, and it became clear that the enemy was marching on Paris. On 2 September, the government left Paris for Bordeaux, by night, taking with it the Banque de France gold reserve. On 3 September, Parisians could read the following statement by Gallieni, commander-in-chief of the entrenched camp of Paris, on posters put up around the city: ‘Army of Paris, Citizens of Paris, The members of the government of the Republic have left Paris to give renewed momentum to the national defence. I have received a mandate to defend Paris against the invader. I shall carry out this mandate until the end’. These lines saw Gallieni’s popularity melt away. They referred primarily to a Paris left to its own devices and its own courage after the departure of the nation’s rulers. They

Urban Experiences between Localism and National Identity

257

also revived memories of the siege of 1870: while the exodus of Parisians increased, the command reviewed the city’s defences by tidying up fortifications and blocking road access. Paris would not have the opportunity to test the likely ineffectiveness of this system: the first Battle of the Marne, in early September 1914, succeeded in stopping the German advance. The ‘taxis of the Marne’ episode, as Gallieni requisitioned 600 taxis to move a brigade from Paris to the battlefield to reinforce the army of Maunoury, was militarily in no way a decisive contribution to the battle; it nonetheless became the symbol of a decidedly Parisian contribution to the fighting that led to the defence of the city as well as the country. Once the initial phase of direct danger to the capital had passed, the situation stabilized along a line from the North Sea to the Swiss border, now passing to the north of the Aisne, 100 kilometres or so from Paris. But this relative détente did not mean a definitive distancing of the danger, which would continue to come from the skies in particular, in the form of bombing.

A specific aspect: The bombing On 30 August 1914, a German monoplane (a Taube) flew over Paris. Not equipped with a sighting device, it dropped four bombs, modest in size, and caused no casualties. But the stated objective was primarily psychological: to demoralize the population behind the front. In addition to bombs, the aircraft also jettisoned leaflets, as well as a banner in the colours of the German Empire that was printed with the words: ‘The German army is at the gates of Paris. You have no choice but to surrender!’ This first foray may have seemed somewhat harmless. Jean Hallade has reviewed press accounts from the beginning of September: The Parisians were more consumed by curiosity than by a sense of fear. They went out into the streets armed with binoculars and took up positions on benches in the squares and along the boulevards to wait for the enemy. Better was yet to come! Higher ground across Paris was besieged and on Montmartre hill, you could rent chairs and telescopes to wait for the daily Taubes to appear in the sky. (Hallade 1987: 17)

The danger nevertheless quickly became more significant with the first wave of destruction and casualties. At first the destruction was limited and the number of victims remained low (about ten deaths for the first few months of the war). These multiplied, however, with advances in German bombing techniques. From 1915, the Taube gave way to biplanes (including Gothas), while Zeppelins also began to appear. Developed before the war, these huge airships flew high enough to resist anti-aircraft defences; however, as soon as they were forced to face off against powerful fighter planes, they were regularly brought down, resulting in their disappearance from the skies over Paris in 1916. Aircraft, however, remained most destructive and deadly, with increasingly powerful bombs and accurate drops. From 23 March 1918, in addition to air strikes, Paris also had to reckon with long-range guns, which were equally

258

Nations, Identities and the First World War

destructive and deadly. These guns were extremely long-range pieces of artillery set up in the Aisne département and capable of firing on Paris from a distance of 120 kilometres. The French called them ‘Grosse Bertha’ (Big Bertha), while the Germans referred to them as the Pariser Kanone (Paris Cannon), the Wilhelm-Geschütz (Wilhelm Cannon) or the Lange Max (Long Max) (Huyon 2008: 111–25; Dutrône 2012). The bombing of Paris was not tactical or justified by immediate military necessity, as bombing close to a battlefield would have been. In the stated objectives, it was a response to broader strategic considerations for better overcoming the enemy by attacking its military, industrial and economic structures to destroy any potential for arms production, supply networks and transport infrastructures to sustain the front; beyond destruction, it was also a question of diverting the efforts of the enemy towards organizing anti-aircraft defences and establishing an alarm system. However, it cannot be ignored that strategic bombing was aimed primarily from the outset at affecting the morale and fighting spirit of the civilian populations: this is demonstrated by the dropping of propaganda material on Paris and exhortations to surrender on the eve of the Battle of the Marne (Kilduff 1991; Morrow 1993; Buckley 1999; Schmidt 2003; Grayzel 2006). If we look at the evolution of the bombing of Paris in more detail, we find that the bombing of the first three years of the war was exclusively airborne, with a gradual increase in the destructive power of the devices dropped, as well as the number of casualties.1 The first three months of the conflict saw a number of Taube raids, which dropped small two-kilogram bombs that immediately resulted in the first casualties; the number of victims nevertheless remained limited to ten or so killed and about fifty wounded. In May 1915, air raids continued with the appearance of Gothas that dropped larger bombs, from one to several dozen kilograms; thanks to precautions taken, no victims were recorded. The first Zeppelin raid in March 1915 did not result in a single death. The Zeppelin raid of January 1916 was much more deadly, however: the 50- and 100-kilogram bombs killed twenty-six and wounded about fifty. It was the first time so many victims of a single bombing raid had been recorded in Paris. Aircraft raids then resumed in July 1917, with the Gothas now dropping bombs of more than 100 kilograms. These raids were particularly deadly in the first half of 1918: it was then that the largest number of casualties were recorded, approximately 230 killed and 400 wounded, in addition to the most significant destruction. In total, these bombings killed between 260 and 300 people and wounded around 600. Shelling by long-range artillery overlapped with air raids in early 1918 before taking over in the final months of the war. Four sequences of shelling were recorded.2 In March–April 1918, the first shells came by surprise, in broad daylight and with no warning, unlike the air raids announced by sirens. This shelling caused a number of deaths, around 160, just when the air raids were at their most formidable. In late May–early June 1918, after a break due to the explosion of a piece of German artillery, shelling resumed and resulted in around thirty-five deaths. In mid-July, after the likely movement of the guns, approximately ten more people were killed. Finally, in early August, just before the German retreat, another forty-five people were killed. In total, this shelling killed approximately 250 and injured approximately 700.

Urban Experiences between Localism and National Identity

259

If we compare the two types of bombing, we can see that the number of casualties from air raids and those from cannon shelling are similar. If we try to trace an overall chronological trend, we can see that the first significant slaughter took place in January 1916 but that the majority of deaths occurred in 1918, due, in particular, to the accumulation of casualties from air raids and those from long-range cannon shelling. Material damage fluctuated like the number of casualties: it dropped from May 1915 (Gotha bombings), became more significant from January 1916 (Zeppelin bombings) and increased considerably in the spring of 1918 (Gotha bombings in January and March 1918, bolstered by cannon shelling in March and April). Overall, bombs dropped by planes had a greater destructive capacity than shells; at the same time, long-range cannon shelling was extremely inaccurate and therefore spared nothing and no one. This damage made the proximity of the front and the consequent presence of danger very real. This presence of danger led to certain adaptations in daily life. From January 1915, Parisian authorities mandated the blackening of windows at night; the lights of terraces, cafés and window displays were reduced to a minimum; street lights were fitted with hoods.3 At night the city became sinister and sometimes dangerous. These measures continued throughout the war. On 20 February 1918, Le Figaro reported: ‘The blue light […] turns the City of Light into a City of Darkness in which the hesitant pedestrian trips […]. The taxis driving savage enemies melt into these shadows like tanks that are infinitely too fast’. The separation between the capital and its suburbs was particularly sensitive; to some the gates of Paris were closed, to others only open during the day, forcing inhabitants to make long detours once night began to fall (Robert 1995: 69). As events unfolded, the authorities developed systems for warning and protecting citizens and property: large sirens were installed across Paris; the number of shelters was increased; the metro had to remain open in the event of an alert; cellars were listed and identified to passers-by. This steady increase was especially clear from March 1918 with the onset of long-range cannon shelling4: windows were systematically protected on homes, shops and public buildings. Certain monuments were enveloped in sandbags, and works of art from public collections were taken to the south of France. In the summer of 1918, the municipality evacuated schoolchildren still present in the capital to the provinces. Throughout the war, Parisians were well aware of both the proximity of the invading forces and the constant danger.

The place of the bombing in a multifaceted experience of war These measures had a tendency to make Paris a front-line city in its own right. However, the capital had an ambiguous status because, although it was subject to the vicissitudes of the fighting, it also presented many attributes of a home-front city: a place for industrial and patriotic mobilization; a refuge for soldiers and civilians arriving from the combat zones; a both coveted and criticized place of entertainment. The experience of the war in Paris was multifaceted and far from purely military. The capital was first and foremost the seat of the government, which returned from its exile in Bordeaux on 8 December 1914. Paris therefore played host to political

260

Nations, Identities and the First World War

power at the highest level; the city also played host to military power through the army chiefs of staff and services, located mainly at Les Invalides or nearby. Throughout the war, Paris was called upon to play a major decision-making role, at a national level as well as at an international level as part of the Allied forces. Overall, the city became a nerve centre for the men and material travelling to and from the front. The streets were filled with men in uniform, members of the military administration or soldiers on leave, depending on the part of the city in question (Cronier 2013). In addition to soldiers, Paris also welcomed rulers and statesmen for meetings and receptions, giving it the appearance of an Allied capital. With attrition warfare, success is based on the production of weapons and ammunition. While the northern and eastern regions were occupied, Paris and its surroundings represented considerable industrial potential, whose production was directly accessible to the front. The capital was also the object of the most intense effort in terms of economic mobilization (Fridenson 1977; Bonzon et al. 1997a; Robert 2000). The ‘affectés spéciaux’, those with what were classified as ‘reserved occupations’, were discharged from their units and returned to their civilian jobs, while provincial, foreign and especially female labour increased. The war machine conferred one of its most significant features on the physiognomy of Paris. As a consequence of the war, living conditions deteriorated as the months passed. In Paris the coal supply posed the most pressing problem, as a cold snap occurred at the peak of the shortage in early 1917. This led to the establishment of free distribution for the poorest and the introduction of a ration card. The Parisian diet was also affected. Bread became ‘national’, and food rationing was gradually introduced. These measures did not apply to all products, however, and failed to prevent a rise in prices (Bonzon et al. 1997b; Triebel et al. 1997). The strikes that began in 1917, spontaneous in the majority and overwhelmingly female, were also the result of a widespread weariness with the living conditions imposed by a war that was dragging on and on. Paris also held on to some of the characteristics it had before the start of the conflict. In particular, the intense pre-war artistic life had merely slowed. Theatres, cinemas, music halls and entertainment venues, closed during the first few weeks, resumed operations despite the restrictions. Once again Paris became a pleasure city, at least for those with the leisure time and means: however, what was generally considered legitimate for the wounded or those on leave rapidly saw the city fall under suspicion as the refuge of choice for shirkers or war profiteers who blended in with the rest of the civilian population (Ridel 2007; Bouloc 2008). As far as the soldiers were concerned, it was sometimes civilians as a whole who were deemed to be enjoying themselves too much, unaware of the dangers others were facing on their behalf. In the face of this suspicion, Paris had to prove its commitment. The city needed to legitimize its place within the system of national mobilization by underlining the different facets of its commitment. Beyond the restrictions, which were not unlike those experienced by other large cities, it was the bombing that took centre stage and represented an experience more specific to the capital.

Urban Experiences between Localism and National Identity

261

Giving meaning to Paris’s experience of the bombing By bursting into the lives of Parisians and forcing them to change their everyday habits, the bombing undeniably resulted in striking experiences of the war. However, such experiences are socially constructed in that they are impregnated with representations proper to the time at which they emerge. In view of the research carried out by Reinhart Koselleck, we can consider experience a present past, the events of which have been taken in and can be remembered (Koselleck 1990); it includes both a rational elaboration and unconscious behaviour; it is the result of something that has been lived through but also filtered and passed on by institutions or the media. It is therefore important to look at the suggested interpretation of these bombings, in particular in speeches given by public officials and in the press.

Paris: A symbol of the nation From the beginning of the war, speeches that mentioned the bombing stressed the fact that Paris, as the capital city, was the symbol of the nation and that it was precisely for this reason that the city was under attack. We find this idea consistently in the words of national and Parisian elected officials of all political persuasions; we also find it in the various media and the press in particular. Edouard Vaillant, socialist member of parliament for the Seine département, expressed this idea in September 1914 after the Battle of the Marne: ‘The people know well that the brain of the nation thinks and its heart beats in Paris, and that the nation would be mortally wounded if it fell’ (L’Humanité, 20 September 1914). The minister of the interior, Louis Malvy, picked up on this theme in early 1916 after the deadly Zeppelin attack of 29 January: ‘They wanted to hurt Paris today, the soul of France, the home of modern civilization, the city in which all the feelings, traditions and genius of an entire people is concentrated and reflected’.5 And in 1918, when shell fire merged with air raids, the Paris daily L’Intransigeant read, with the evocative title ‘Protecting the head’: ‘Paris is the capital city, the centre of the political movement and the war command. When you give a helmet to a poilu, it is to protect his head, his brain […] a bullet to the forehead makes him a lost man. The same is true of Paris’ (L’Intransigeant, 13 March 1918). Throughout the conflict, Paris was thus seen as a symbol of national defence because it was intended to represent France: its heart, head and soul. Even outside Paris, Susan Grayzel underlines how the Paris bombings were seen as events of national importance, which concentrated the attention and news reports throughout the war. This focus on Paris brought about both compassion and irritation: the inhabitants of cities closer to the front, such as Calais or Nancy, struggled to have their provincial sufferings recognized as being on a par with those of the capital (Grayzel 2006: 594, 600–2, 606).

262

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Paris: A local identity Different in scale to the significance held by Paris for the rest of the country, Louis Chevalier postulated a Parisian ‘collective existence’ (Chevalier 1967); taking account of the diversity of the capital’s population, the unity of this ‘collective existence’ could come from ‘being Parisian’ in a way that transcended particular groups (Robert and Gauvard 2004). The question of the capacity for social integration in Paris arises in this context. The population of Paris was in fact very diverse, due to the size of the city, its complex structures and the mixing of different categories. Urban segregation certainly has never been total in French cities, and complex mediations encouraged the integration process on this occasion (‘L’habitat’ 1998; Faure 1999; Blanc-Chaléard 2004). However, these phenomena did not result in complete unification, and Paris as a global space remained an artificial construct. This raises the question of symbolic representations that could both encourage and reflect a Parisian community – in particular through whether or not a ‘people of Paris’ existed, a symbolic people that was at the junction between imaginary and real (Robert and Tartakowsky 1999: 8). This people existed through political practices, including those that were revolutionary, through which it expressed itself and grew during the nineteenth century (Agulhon 1999). It lies, in fact, at the root of an identity appropriated and passed on through a system of representations, providing a common framework to a population that became increasingly heterogeneous in the twentieth century (Tartakowsky 2004). At the same time, however, Parisians seemed to lose their status as a collective autonomous body, becoming primarily participants in the manifestations of sovereignty organized by the institutions, or spectators required by the drama being played out in the city. This discrepancy between the myth of an active Parisian people and reality did not prevent the persistence of symbols that reappeared in the course of certain speeches (Tartakowsky 1999). The designations reserved for Parisians during the war reflect this sharing. We can pinpoint several appeals to the Parisian population, to the inhabitants of Paris, that address Parisians as citizens and characterize them as much by how they really were as how it was hoped they could be: enthusiastic and celebratory when receiving honoured guests; moved and composed at the funerals of victims of the fighting; attentive and proud during patriotic ceremonies.6 The periods of mobilization were nevertheless an opportunity to try to stir a symbolic people back into action, and this was indeed what occurred during the heaviest period of bombing in early 1918. In early February the préfet de police declared: ‘Never in the course of its glorious past has Paris trembled before its enemies. Paris will remain true to its age-old traditions. Let us be worthy of it’.7 Its decision makers wanted Paris to function as one with a clearly identified personality and will, as expressed some weeks later by the head of the municipal council: ‘For a moment, the heartbeat of Paris quickened. But it immediately regained its rhythm. Its head remains clear and its resolution unshaken’.8 The press was not left behind in the use of anthropomorphism: ‘Paris knows that it must hold firm and it will hold firm’ (Le Matin, 1 February 1918); ‘Paris wants to work and live’ (Le Petit Parisien, 25 March 1918).

Urban Experiences between Localism and National Identity

263

Finally, beyond the real and symbolic integration offered by Paris, the question arises of the imaginary relationship between Parisians and their city, what lay behind their attachment to it and how it may also have influenced their behaviour. Such collective imaginations are difficult to measure, but they surfaced in cultural productions: the press, literature, cinema, songs and painting construct and reflect representations (Robert and Tsikounas 2004). These productions reveal an imaginary people of Paris with relatively stable attributes (strength, idealism, sentimentality, devotion, morality … ), a people steering between hope and anger. These characteristics are entirely compatible with the existence of a multitude of figures. Some of these are social in nature, linked to an activity or a status; others are socially more unifying, based on criteria of type or generation, like the la Parisienne stereotype or le gosse de Paris. As a result of the mobilization and demographic upheavals of wartime, these figures made a particular impression on the imagination. More than ever, Paris was a city with a clear female majority, and Parisian women were supposed to do their duty: ‘Parisian women are admirable in their performance of duties imposed by an unprecedented situation’.9 The figure of Mimi Pinson, a working-class daughter of the republic and a moineau de Paris, was among others revived for patriotic ends.10 La Parisienne participated in the unification of the imaginary community. This is why it often prevailed over Parisian women: ‘It is thanks to la Parisienne that Paris now has this special physiognomy, stern and gentle, this serious smile that makes you love a city like you have never loved it before’.11 If la Parisienne crystallized an image of Paris that was undoubtedly real, the same can be said of le gosse de Paris, the Paris urchin, a figure that also counted among the key vectors for the construction of a Parisian identity (Yvorel 2002). These two figures dominated representations of Paris, including during the period of bombing. Throughout the conflict, Paris therefore appeared as a symbol of national defence while at the same time exhibiting certain characteristics of a specifically local community. It was at the junction between these two identities that Paris faced the bombing. On the one hand, it was seen specifically as the capital, which made it a victim of the highest importance; on the other hand, the idea of a particular responsibility for Paris prevailed, which led to the need to stand firm and which involved a city and a more active population that were genuinely mobilized to face these attacks.

Paris, a victim of enemy determination Public speeches about the bombing seemed to vacillate between denunciation and bravado. The legitimacy of the bombing was immediately challenged, like that of any deliberate attack on civilians who were also some distance from the front. The press denounced the ‘pirates of the air’ (e.g. Le Matin, 27 March 1915) who dropped their bombs on the city in the middle of the night. The theme of piracy was also suddenly revived after the sinking of the British transatlantic liner Lusitania on 7 May 1915, which resulted in the death of approximately 1,200 civilian passengers: the parallel was drawn in a way that related as much to the barbarity of German methods as the innocence of its victims (Grayzel 2006: 598). Faced with the bombing, public

264

Nations, Identities and the First World War

speeches also underlined Germany’s intent to demoralize the population of Paris and the required response to this: derision. The press initially painted Parisians as more curious than afraid: they were taking to the streets and taking up positions in spots that allowed for the best views of the planes. After the first few months of the war, this initial curiosity was sated in part, but it was later revived by the appearance of new aircraft, Gothas then Zeppelins. Derision meanwhile remained a characteristic attributed to the Parisians that could be found in various types of media, including drawings by Francisque Poulbot, an artist who played a full part in properly Parisian culture, specifically with his figure of the Paris urchin, both impertinent and fearless.12 This drawing by Poulbot, published in colour on the front page of the humorous weekly Le Rire rouge on 25 December 1915, was not the first to make reference to the air raids. We see two children lying in wait for the arrival of Santa Claus on a Montmartre roof, while the Sacré-Coeur stands out in the background. One says to the other, ‘If we don’t see Santa, we might see a Zeppelin’. Mention of the threat takes on a swaggering tone: even the youngest Parisians were supposed to wield derision. As the danger and number of casualties increased, thanks to the Zeppelin raids in particular, the tone changed: speeches became more hard-hitting in order to make the population aware of the danger and to make sure the public would protect themselves in the event of an alert. This concern is apparent in a second drawing by Poulbot. The inhabitants of a building, with the children at the front, tumble down the staircase and through the caretaker’s door. They are scrupulously respecting the sign hanging on the wall: ‘In the event of a Zeppelin raid, go downstairs to the caretaker’. The caretaker jokingly responds on seeing such a mass influx: ‘Oh, it’s a Zeppelin! I thought you’d come for your rent receipts!’ Although humour remained in order to make the situation less alarming, recklessness was in decline: from now on, disciplined and responsible Parisians were brought to the fore. Consequently, in the face of rising casualty numbers and increasing damage, especially from shell fire towards the end of the war, speeches tightened around the theme of victimhood and the denunciation of enemy acts. Certain waves of bombing were also dressed up with a particular symbolic significance. Once shells began falling not only on housing but also on cemeteries, churches and hospitals, the bombing was interpreted as a sign of a barbarism specific to the Germans. On the afternoon of 25 March 1918, a shell fell on the Père Lachaise Cemetery in the 20th arrondissement, provoking scathing comments about the desecration of launching an attack on the dead. On 29 March 1918, in even more noteworthy fashion, a shell fell on the SaintGervais Church, just behind the Hôtel de Ville de Paris in the 4th arrondissement, in the midst of the Good Friday celebrations. The incident resulted in ninety-one deaths, almost as many wounded, and gutted the church.13 The indignation was widespread, the press denounced ‘the abominable outrage’ (Le Matin, 29 March 1918) and ‘the German Good Friday massacre’ (Le Petit Parisien, 30 March 1918); the Germans had killed civilians, mainly women and children, as they were marking the death of Christ; they were guilty of both an atrocity and a sacrilege. After several hospital bombings, a shell exploded on 11 April 1918 in a ward of the Baudelocque maternity hospital, resulting in six deaths and fourteen wounded among the new mothers, infants and medical staff.

Urban Experiences between Localism and National Identity

265

Poulbot reported the event with his drawing of a still newborn lying next to its overturned cradle. A bomb has clearly just shattered the window. The caption is brief: ‘Killed in action’. Any trace of humour has disappeared this time: this representation is instead a way of emphasizing the horror of the situation in order to better denounce the German barbarism that affected the most innocent of victims, babies.14 These murderous episodes led Parisians to take the threat hanging over them more seriously. A likely sign of their anxiety and powerlessness, they developed the fashion for Nénette and Rintintin dolls. Originally inspired by the porcelain dolls created by Poulbot on the eve of the war to thwart the success of German toys on the French market, these dolls morphed into modest woollen dolls that were easy to make. These little good luck charms, joined in pairs by a cord, were said to give the bearer magical protection against Gotha bombs and Bertha shells (Poulbot 1918). Their childlike appearance and playful size were intended to reassure. In late March 1918, many had left for the provinces, to stay with relatives or in resort towns; in practice, these departures coincided in part with the Easter holidays, brought forward by two days in the school calendar. The likely 500,000 people who left the capital in the spring of 1918 included a number of working-class children, who benefited from childcare facilities put in place by the municipality (Dutrône 2012: 95, 99, 103).

Paris mobilized beneath the bombs Both in Paris and the provinces, the discourse insisted that Paris was the victim of German barbarism, leading to an unembellished denunciation of the savagery of the enemy. This was nevertheless accompanied by the idea that Paris should not remain a passive victim: the indignation was intended to strengthen the mobilization of an urban community committed to a particular mission, in which resisting the enemy tended to become conflated with that of the national community as a whole. Poulbot’s caption ‘Killed in action’ referred to a certain militarization of civilian death. This post-mortem mobilization was not only symbolic; in a legal setting, the law of 12 July 1915 extended the distinction ‘died for France’ to ‘any civilian who dies as a result of acts of violence committed by the enemy’.15 Deaths caused by bombing were therefore recognized as a direct effect of the state of war. The victims of the Zeppelin bombing of Belleville on 29 January 1916 were the first civilian victims to receive quasi-state funerals, to be honoured as having died for their country and to be buried in Père Lachaise in a plot reserved by the City of Paris.16 In March 1918, the office of the municipal council decided to systematically grant the families of victims a perpetual plot in suburban cemeteries; in addition, ‘following a government decision that a military delegation would follow the funeral of every victim and that the military governor of Paris would be represented by an officer, the office of the municipal council has decided that the City of Paris will also be represented and that coffins will be covered with a tricolour flag’ (Le Figaro, 13 March 1918). In this way, civilian deaths became increasingly militarized. In addition, bombing victims were increasingly

266

Nations, Identities and the First World War

awarded the Légion d’honneur or the Croix de guerre; among these, a special place was kept for medical personnel ‘fallen in the line of duty’ (e.g. Le Figaro, 14 March 1918). This symbolic extension of the battlefield allowed Paris to be presented as an area of combat and Parisians to be depicted as a fighting community. In a patriotic propaganda text written in 1918, the historian Ernest Lavisse pretends to talk to a long-range German cannon to galvanize the population of Paris: ‘Big gun, you will not take Paris’s courage. Paris has entered the trial that is this war’. As such, he claims the proximity of the mobilization of Paris and that of the front: ‘Our emotions, our dangers are our part in the country’s anxiety and danger; we accept it. This is how the civilian population becomes military. Who, at this present time, would not want in some small way to be a soldier?’17 Le Figaro agreed wholeheartedly: ‘The men and women of Paris have gradually acquired the state of mind of a poilu. […] They “make war”, and while listening to the sounds at night they are proud of no longer being shirkers’ (Le Figaro, 14 March 1918). And when a commemorative ceremony was held at the SaintGervais Church on 29 March 1919, a year after the bombing, the priest hung a tricolour flag and explained that it was to remember that ‘the victims of Saint-Gervais had fallen for the same cause as the heroes in the trenches’ (La Semaine religieuse, 5 April 1919: 449). The idea of mobilizing Paris pervaded the public space more generally through the press; it was particularly striking in illustrated representations. Such representations were even found on the front page of La Vie parisienne, a weekly known for covering rather more trivial subjects. In July 1918, the magazine published the image of a mobilized Lutetia in the guise of a Parisienne who knew how to remain stylish in any situation (see figure 6). She has, however, swapped her dress, ribbons, necklace and hat – which are lying on the ground – for a dress in the famous bleu horizon colour of France’s metropolitan troops and an Adrian helmet. In the distance, the Eiffel Tower dominates a landscape of houses, bell towers and factories: the Parisian territory that needed to be defended. The image may appear futile, but it nonetheless denotes the trivialization of the idea that Parisian mobilization is on a par with the mobilization of the front.

Reasserting Parisian identity after the conflict As soon as the war was over, the question arose of the posterity of Paris’s experience of the bombing. This question was relevant to both the material reconstruction and a reassertion of Parisian identity. Firstly, on a material level, the question of the reconstruction was asked in the immediate aftermath of the destruction. The ruins bore witness to the conflict and how it had unfolded, as well as to the suffering experienced by civilians. Representations of devastation from the front (particularly those of cultural buildings) were used as propaganda to demonstrate the violence of artillery warfare, denounce enemy barbarism and justify public mobilization. A process was undertaken to determine how best to preserve remains of the war and whether recovery was possible (Danchin 2015). In Paris, despite censorship, the press printed a number of photographs of bomb damage. But pragmatic arguments in favour of a rapid reconstruction seemed obvious in this specifically Parisian context. This kind of destruction had to be repaired

Urban Experiences between Localism and National Identity

267

Figure 6 « Lutetia », Cover illustration by Chéri Herouard, La Vie parisienne, 6 July 1918. (Bibliothèque National de France. Source: collection of the author).

and could not be abandoned; in particularly dense areas, the organization of a large modern metropolis requires the efficient use of all space. In the spring of 1918, the Seine préfecture offered advances on compensation to fund work essential to the restoration of housing and businesses.18

268

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Longer-term regulation came at the end of the war, however. In April 1919, a law organized the reconstruction by supervising the repair of war damage, from rebuilding ruined structures to decontaminating the soil; for this it relied on article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, which stipulated that Germany was responsible for damage caused by the war and should therefore provide reimbursement. The commissions responsible for assessing the damage in Paris completed their work at the end of 1920.19 This relative speed was due to the fact that there was less damage in Paris than in the regions nearest the front. The issue of material damage therefore seems to have been quickly resolved. However, thought was also given to the preservation of some of the scars left behind by the bombing for commemorative reasons, particularly those that had been most deadly and destructive. For example, the municipal councillor Léon Riotor urged his colleagues to make ‘a gesture to the history of Paris, a history in which certain events of the Great War will hold a tragic place’ with the following arguments: ‘One evening in April 1918, German barbarism raged. Everything within a radius of 100 metres was destroyed […]. The last vestiges will disappear, the wounds in the stone have been dressed, life has returned everywhere. The building at 12, rue de Rivoli is now being rebuilt. I ask you to decide that a commemorative plaque will be affixed to this building’.20 This was eventually carried out in 1924. In his inaugural speech, the mayor of the arrondissement declared: During these difficult years of war, we have lived through some very painful times. In 1918, the enemy was preparing yet again to run on Paris, ‘heart of France’, goal of all its ambitions. […] Innocents: children, women and the elderly were all victims of this infernal nation. […] The night of 12 April 1918 exceeded every imaginable horror. […] The scars of these atrocities have disappeared and without this plaque there would be nothing to remind us of the catastrophe.21

The préfet of the Seine département said, ‘The memory of these tragic nights of 1918 must live on, when, in the poignant silence of the stoic and wounded city, not even the beating of a single heart could be heard’.22 Here we find both specific features of Parisian history, as well as of its national vocation, and the framing of a city fallen victim in a way that was both innocent and stoic. Other plaques were hung elsewhere for similar reasons but this was done selectively (see figure 7). If we superimpose a map showing the bomb sites with another showing the commemorative plaques affixed after the end of the conflict, we can see that although plaques were indeed hung at bomb sites, this was far from systematic or even homogeneous. Some places were chosen because they were already symbolic of wartime Paris, such as the Ministry of War in the 7th arrondissement; others because they had suffered particularly severe damage, as in the rue de Rivoli in the 4th or the boulevard Saint-Michel in the 6th arrondissement; still others because they were sanctuaries of one kind or another and their destruction seemed to bear witness to a particular barbarity, such as the Sainte-Rosalie Church in the 13th or the Saint-Gervais Church in the 4th arrondissement or the Baudelocque maternity hospital in the 14th arrondissement.

Urban Experiences between Localism and National Identity

269

Figure 7 Parisian Map showing bombardment impacts and commemorative plaques. (Source: Julien E. (2010), Paris, Berlin, la mémoire de la guerre 1914--1933, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, p. 314.)

Paris: A community strengthened by the experience of the bombing? Ultimately, beyond the scars it left on the urban landscape, the bombing remained extremely present in the public space of Paris: it was truly the most memorable experience of the war in Paris, as is demonstrated by the press, speeches and local histories. In addition to the histories of specific neighbourhoods, particular businesses, parishes and schools – which systematically gave pride of place to the bombing to underline the danger to which that particular section of Paris society had been subjected and the bravery it had shown – other publications appeared that addressed Paris as a whole (among others: Benaerts 1919; Cerfberr 1919; Maréchal 1921; Gay 1923). The cover of one collection of photographs devoted to the bombing, published in 1919, represents Paris: the skyline, marked among other things by the towers of Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, stands out against a threatening twilight sky; an antiaircraft projector reveals the arrival of a squadron of German planes. Paris is depicted in the guise of a crowned and victorious woman; her pose, with her arms crossed, is marked by sangfroid and unwavering determination. She is supported by laurel branches and the Parisian coat of arms; the motto Fluctuat nec mergitur is inscribed on the Croix de guerre. It is Paris’s stoic heroism that appears to be being rewarded here (see figure 8). It was through the bombing that a specific contribution to the war was recognized, as became apparent when the City of Paris was awarded the Croix de guerre in October 1919. The president of the republic, Raymond Poincaré, underlined Paris’s centrality:

270

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Figure 8 «Paris sous les bombardements» (Paris under the bombardments). Cover illustration by René Jouenne for the collection of photographs by Maurice-Louis Branger (1919). (Source: Paris sous les bombardements, Paris: La renaissance du livre).

‘France was at the vanguard of the human race on the frontiers of liberty and Paris was the beating heart of the country’.23 The president of the municipal council, Emmanuel Evain, highlighted the capital’s contribution by referring to its victims: ‘Paris in the war, 521 killed, 1,224 wounded’.24 These figures do not include the victims of the restrictions or of Spanish Flu, which were much higher, only victims of the bombing. It is also surprising to see no mention in this type of accounting of the Parisians who fell while serving under the flag – these soldiers far outnumbered the civilians who died as a result of the bombing – all the more so because a national remembrance of the war in France was largely built around paying tribute to fallen soldiers, including memorials to the dead, a tribute that has largely overshadowed the memory of civilian experiences (Becker 1998; Sherman 1999). However, the death of civilians brings with it a very specific meaning that the centrality of Paris made more visible than elsewhere. These deaths deserved special attention because their fate seemed even crueller and more scandalous than that of the fighters; they were not kept out of harm’s way from German barbarism. It was intended that the specific maintenance of their memory would serve to denounce enemy acts so that future generations could not confuse these with ordinary acts of war. Finally, we may ask ourselves whether or not this staging succeeded in strengthening the community and identity of Paris. It is certain that the experience of the bombing was a shared experience for Parisians. But, although it was more concentrated than the various experiences of those at the front, it was not experienced in the same way by all

Urban Experiences between Localism and National Identity

271

those involved. Firstly, although the bombs inflicted damage on all kinds of buildings, more poorly built buildings were most vulnerable; it was also attics and upper floors, usually home to servants’ quarters and modest apartments, which were more often than not destroyed. Nor did the restrictions imposed by the bombing affect every layer of the population in the same way. A drawing by Quesnel (see figure 9), published in the humorous weekly Le Pêlemêle on 28 April 1918, is a scathing critique of the social differences that persisted in wartime: the baroness who accepts having to undergo the rigours of war through restrictions imposed by the bombing maintains a quality of life that the vast majority of Parisians could never know. The privileges available to some were not strictly linked to the bombing; they were susceptible to other issues such as black-market provisions or war profiteering. But they act as a reminder that the capacity for social integration in Paris, even and perhaps especially during wartime, was limited. More than geographical and social realities, it was symbolic and imaginary representations that brought Paris’s identity to life. While the bombing was used primarily to spur a symbolic people into action, the la Parisienne and le gosse de Paris figures served to mobilize an imaginary people. Victims of the highest importance, due to their perceived weakness and innocence, it was also they who mobilized in order to support the action of fighters at the front.

Conclusion An innocent, feminized and admirable city: wartime speeches about Paris alternated, depending on the phase of the war, between victimization, denunciation of actions of the enemy and heroization, to better mobilize the population. Its status as a capital city within the sights of the enemy brought with it a specific responsibility and a particular mission: to hold firm and fight to defend the city, but also, by doing so, to defend the country as a whole. Paris emerged as a city on the front line, as the urban community largely assumed its part in the defence of the nation. The resistance of Parisians to the enemy had a tendency to merge with that of the national community as a whole. After the conflict, Paris retained the aura it had before the war. Its position as the ‘heart of France’ was even strengthened by the military threat that hung over it directly during the war. The mobilization of Paris was at the same time a specifically urban mobilization. In fact, the Parisian population remained socially very heterogeneous. Although there has been a lack of research into the polarization or homogenization of society in France between 1914 and 1918, unlike in Germany and England (Kocka 1973; Waites 1987), it nevertheless seems that in comparison with what took place in other capital cities, Berlin in particular, the Parisian authorities succeeded in limiting inequality – hence social instability – during the conflict (Robert and Winter 1997). However, the city’s capacity for integration remained limited, and more divisions evolved than vanished: it was up to symbolic and imaginary representations to transcend the various realities in order to develop a relative urban unity. These representations, which brought Paris’s identity to life during the war, were largely produced and disseminated by the

272

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Figure 9 «Une cave-salon en 1918» (a salon-basement in 1918). Drawing by Quesnel, Le Pêle-mêle, 28 April 1918. (Bibliothèque National de France).

Urban Experiences between Localism and National Identity

273

political, intellectual and cultural elite, as demonstrated by the speeches delivered by public officials, in press articles and in illustrations. Although these representations persisted, it was because they struck a chord with the experience of Parisians, from the most affluent to the more modest. The experience of the bombing – through the threat, night-time alerts and destruction – remained the most sensitive and shared experience of the war. Ordinary Parisians would likely not forget the restrictions, but the deterioration of their living conditions also stemmed from the bombing. The bombing had a spectacular dimension that reinforced the special fate of the capital and allowed its inhabitants in turn to adopt a position not only of victims but also of heroes. For these reasons, the representations of the city offered in reaction to the bombing were easily appropriated by all Parisians. Finally, the bombing strengthened the Parisian community; it served to legitimize Paris’s commitment alongside or at the head of the nation; it ultimately justified a claim to special recognition.

Abbreviations AHAP

Archives historiques de l’archevêché de Paris

AN

Archives nationales

AP

Archives de Paris

BMO

Bulletin municipal official

JO

Journal officiel

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10

For the statistical report that follows, see Thiery (1921), Poirier (1930), Hallade (1987) and the press reviews preserved in AP, DR7 / 98. For the statistical report that follows, see Thiery (1921), Poirier (1930), Dutrône (2012) and the press reviews preserved in AP, DR7 / 98. BMO, 19 January 1915, p. 179. AN, F7/12730; AP, DR7 / 98. Louis Malvy at the funerals of the victims of the attack of a German aircraft on the evening of 20 January 1916. BMO supplement, 13 February 1916, p. 471. AP, VK3 / 187 à 204. Fernand Raux, préfet de police, at the funeral of the victims of the air raid on the night of 30–31 January 1918. BMO supplement, 13 February 1918. Adrien Mithouard on the anniversary of US entry into the war. BMO supplement, 7 April 1918. Jules Hénaffe, Municipal Councillor, at the distribution of awards in the Edgar Quinet upper elementary girls’ school. BMO, 3 August 1915. All these speeches on women are given by men. Opening of the exhibition ‘Cocardes de Mimi Pinson’ in the Palais des Beaux-arts de la Ville de Paris. BMO, 6 December 1915, p. 2528.

274 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Nations, Identities and the First World War Maurice Donnay, of the Académie française, quoted by Jules Hénaffe, BMO, 3 August 1915. Francisque Poulbot (1879–1946) was an important figure in Montmartre at the turn of the century. He became famous during the war thanks to his illustrations, posters and patriotic postcards. The neologism poulbot refers to its numerous representations of Parisian street kids. AHAP, 4°1P / 57. This illustration met those by Poulbot at the beginning of the war to denounce the ‘German atrocities’ in Belgium and northern France, including severed hands. JO, 9 July 1915, p. 4653. Funerals of the victims of the attack of a German aircraft on the evening of 20 January 1916, BMO supplement, 13 February 1916, pp. 471–3. ‘La réponse d’un Parisien à la Grosse Bertha, par Ernest Lavisse, de l’Académie française’, Paris, s.d., reproduced by Dutrône (2012), p. 94. BMO, 9 April 1918, p. 1121. AP, DR7/380 à 385. Meeting of 13 July 1922. BMO, 22 July, p. 3395. Inauguration of the memorial plaque on 12 April 1924. BMO, 24 April 1924, pp. 2233–4. Ibid. Official presentation of the Croix de guerre to the City of Paris on 19 October 1919. BMO, 3 January 1920, p. 44. Ibid., p. 45.

References Agulhon, M. (1999), ‘La tradition politique du peuple de Paris de Waterloo à la Commune’, in J.-L. Robert and D. Tartakowsky (eds), Paris le peuple, XVIIIe–XXe siècle, 131–46, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Becker, A. (1998), Oubliés de la Grande Guerre. Humanitaire et culture de guerre, populations occupées, déportés civils, prisonniers de guerre, Paris: Noesis. Benaerts, L. (1919), Un lycée de Paris pendant la guerre, ‘Condorcet’ 1914–1918, Montrouge: Droeger. Blanc-Chaléard, M.-C. (2004), ‘Hier à Saint-Antoine, aujourd’hui à Belleville. Les étrangers et le creuset parisien depuis un siècle’, in J.-L. Robert and C. Gauvard (eds), Etre Parisien, 163–81, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Bonzon, T., J. Cole, and J. Lawrence (1997a), ‘The labour market and industrial mobilization, 1915–1917’, in J.-L. Robert and J. Winter (eds), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919, 164–95, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bonzon, T., B. Davis, J. Manning, and A. Triebel (1997b), ‘Feeding the Cities’, in J.-L. Robert and J. Winter (eds), Capital Cities, at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919, 305–41, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bouloc, F. (2008), Les profiteurs de guerre, Paris: Complexe. Buckley, J. (1999), Air Power in the Age of Total War, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cerfberr, G. (1919), Paris pendant la guerre, Paris: Berger-Levrault. Charle C., ed. (2004), Capitales européennes et rayonnement culturel, XVIIIe–XXe siècle, Paris: Editions de l’ENS.

Urban Experiences between Localism and National Identity

275

Chevalier, L. (1958), Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle, Paris: Plon. Chevalier, L. (1967), Les Parisiens, Paris: Hachette. Chickering, R., and M. Funck, eds (2004), Endangered Cities: Military Power and Urban Societies in the Era of the World Wars, Leiden: Brill. Cronier, E. (2013), Permissionnaires dans la Grande Guerre, Paris: Belin. Danchin D. (2015), Le temps des ruines, 1914–1921, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Dutrône, C. (2012), Feu sur Paris ! L’histoire vraie de la Grosse Bertha, Paris: Pierre de Taillac Éditions. Faure, A. (1999), ‘Comment devenait-on Parisien? La question de l’intégration dans le Paris de la fin du XIXe siècle’, in J.-L. Robert and D. Tartakowsky (eds), Paris le peuple, XVIIIe–XXe siècle, 37–56, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Fridenson P., ed. (1977), 1914–1918, l’autre front, Paris: Editions ouvrières. Gay, E. (1923), Paris héroïque. La grande guerre, Paris: Lavauzelle. Goebel, S. (2014), ‘Cities’, in J. Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 2: The State, 358–81, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goebel, S., and D. Keene, eds (2011), Cities into Battlefields: Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations of Total War, Farnham: Ashgate. Grayzel, S. (2006), ‘“The Souls of Soldiers”: Civilians under Fire in First World War France’, The Journal of Modern History, 78 (3): 588–622. ‘L’habitat du peuple de Paris’ (1998), special issue, Le Mouvement social, 182 (January–March). Hallade, J. (1987), 1914–1918: De l’Aisne on bombardait Paris, Soissons: L’Aisne nouvelle. Higonnet, P. (2005), Paris, capitale du monde. Des Lumières au surréalisme, Paris: Tallandier. Huyon, A. (2008), ‘La Grosse Bertha des Parisiens’, Revue historique des armées, 253: 111–25. Jollivet, G., M.-C. Bouaré, and I. Cardot (2004), Paris dans l’histoire de France, Paris: Sudel. Kilduff, P. (1991), Germany’s First Air Force 1914–1918, London: Weidenfeld Military. Kocka, J. (1973), Klassengesellschaft im Krieg. Deutsche Sozialgeschichte 1914–1918, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. Koselleck, R. (1990), ‘“Champs d’expérience” et “horizons d’attente”: deux catégories historiques’, in Le futur passé, contribution à la sémantique des temps historiques, 307–29, Paris: Editions de l’EHESS. Maréchal, P. (1921), Un arrondissement de Paris pendant la guerre, Paris: Fasquelle. Morrow, J. (1993), The Great War in the Air. Military Aviation from 1909 to 1921, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Poirier, J. (1930), Les bombardements de Paris 1914–1918, Paris: Lavauzelle. Poulbot, F. (1918), Encore des gosses et des bonhommes. Cent dessins et l’histoire de Nénette et Rintintin, Paris: Ternois. Ridel, C. (2007), Les embusqués, Paris: Colin. Robert, J.-L. (1995), Les ouvriers, la patrie et la Révolution, Paris 1914–1919, Besançon: Annales littéraires de l’Université de Besançon. Robert, J.-L. (2000), ‘L’usine de guerre’, Paris et Ile-de-France, Mémoires publiés par la Fédération des sociétés historiques de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France, 51: 311–17. Robert, J.-L., and C. Gauvard, eds (2004), Etre Parisien, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne.

276

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Robert, J.-L., and D. Tartakowsky (1999), ‘Le peuple et Paris’, in J.-L. Robert and D. Tartakowsky (eds), Paris le peuple, XVIIIe–XXe siècle, 7–18, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Robert, J.-L., and M. Tsikounas, eds (2004), Imaginaires parisiens, Paris: CREDHES. Robert, J.-L., and J. Winter, eds (1997), Capital Cities at War. Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmidt, W. (2003), ‘Luftkrieg’, in G. Hirschfeld, G. Krumeich and I. Renz (eds), Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg, 687–89, Paderborn: Schöningh. Sherman, D. (1999), The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (1914–1940), Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Tartakowsky, D. (1999), ‘Appels au peuple et peuple en marche’, in J.-L. Robert and D. Tartakowsky (eds), Paris le peuple, XVIIIe–XXe siècle, 159–72, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Tartakowsky, D. (2004), ‘Le Parisien, une difficile identité politique’, in J.-L. Robert and C. Gauvard (eds), Etre Parisien, 283–92, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Thiery, M. (1921), Paris bombardé par Zepplins, Gothas & Berthas, Paris: Boccard. Triebel A., A. Lawrence, and T. Bonzon (1997), ‘Coal and the metropolis’, in J.-L. Robert and J. Winter (eds), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919, 342–73, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waites, B. (1987), A Class Society at War. England 1914–1918, Leamington Spa: Berg. Yvorel, J.-J. (2002), ‘De Delacroix à Poulbot, l’image du gamin de Paris’, Images de l’enfance et de la jeunesse ‘irrégulières’, Le temps de l’histoire, 4: 39–72.

15

The Transformation of the Serbian National Capital through War and Occupation Jovana Knežević

Introduction On 28 July 1914, the first shots of the First World War were fired by the Habsburg military on the Serbian capital of Belgrade. For nearly five months, shells rained on state buildings, private homes and the streets of the city. This prolonged onslaught came from the opposite banks of the Danube and Sava rivers, which formed the border between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. In December 1914 the Habsburg Army succeeded in taking and occupying Belgrade. The Serbian Army led by King Peter Karadjordjević liberated the capital after only thirteen days. The city then experienced a period of relative calm, although like much of the country, it was affected by a typhus epidemic and still the occasional shell attack. In the fall of 1915, the Habsburg Army, bolstered by the Germans, made another push against the city in its attempt to conquer Serbia. This time it succeeded, and a three-year-long occupation by Habsburg troops ensued. Nearly fifteen months of bombardment, battle and disease had left the Serbian capital physically and demographically ravaged. Swiss criminologist R. A. Reiss, who documented atrocities committed by Austro-Hungarian troops during the invasions of Serbia, pointed to the attack of this open, unfortified city and the non-military targets within it, such as the National Museum and the University of Belgrade, as criminal acts in violation of the Hague Convention (Reiss et al. 1916: 17–19).1 Long before the Habsburg Army conquered Belgrade, through evacuation and flight, the capital had lost its pre-war political and military presence and significance, not to mention the vast majority of its inhabitants. So, how to account for the intensity and pervasiveness with which the Habsburg Army targeted Belgrade and the degree to which the Serbian Army fought to defend it against formidable odds? Why such a bitter fight for the city? Indeed, Belgrade was more of a symbolic target than a geopolitical one. The Habsburg Army saw Belgrade’s political, cultural and social institutions as the embodiment of extreme Serbian nationalism, which it feared and deemed politically illegitimate. Even

278

Nations, Identities and the First World War

more threatening, however, was the capital’s role as the core of the broader Serbian nation whose members lived in neighbouring Habsburg lands. This was a relatively recent and not fully realized role in 1914, for the city had been the seat of Ottoman imperial officials until the 1860s. In the latter part of the nineteenth century Belgrade underwent a substantial physical and demographic transformation, as control of the city and state passed to officials of the newly independent Kingdom of Serbia, who sought to physically inscribe in its space the fatherland as part of the process of Serbian nation- and state-building. In transforming Belgrade from an Ottoman garrison town to a national capital, they erected public buildings, such as the university and national theatre, and an infrastructure to support the country’s new elites, thus shaping its urban identity to reflect the country’s emerging national political identity. The Habsburg Army sought to transform Belgrade yet again in 1915 and, on the ruins created by its shells, to restyle this young, adversarial national capital into a compliant imperial outlier by pulling it back into a recent past when Serbia had a lesser degree of state independence and exerted less influence in the Balkans. The Habsburg Army’s effort to re-imperialize Belgrade ultimately failed, and the city was liberated by the Serbian Army in November 1918. However, victory did not merely bring about the resurrection of the pre-war Serbian capital. Belgrade emerged from the First World War the capital of the new multinational Yugoslav state and was propelled into an uncertain future that gave rise to new battles over its identity and how it would be reflected in the physiognomy of the capital.

‘The most besieged town of the world’ In the first month of the First World War, the Defence of Belgrade unit of the Serbian Army reported to the High Command ‘incessant bombardment of the city’ by enemy artillery (IAB, ZF, VII, 4 August 1914). The city became a battlefield, defended along a 60-kilometre front by Serbian troops of the third levy, supported by Russian and British naval units (Grahovac 1975: 104). After the city was liberated from a thirteenday occupation in December 1914, a ten-month lull in fighting followed. This period, however, was no less difficult for the Serbian population, marked as it was by lack of food, terrible economic conditions and a typhus epidemic that included more than 1,000 cases in Belgrade (Harding 1982: 45). Moreover, Habsburg artillery continued to lob occasional shells at Belgrade, a reminder that the city was not entirely out of danger and a sign of things to come. During this period of relative calm, international humanitarian workers and journalists came to the capital, and in their diaries and reports they captured a vivid picture of what American Red Cross surgeon Earl Bishop Downer described in his memoir as ‘the most besieged town of the world’ (Downer 1916: 49). When in the autumn of 1915 a combined force of Habsburg and German troops launched another offensive against Serbia, Belgrade once again became a target. Twenty-year-old Mara Radenković kept a diary during this second attack. Living in the Dorćol quarter along the Danube River, she found herself amidst some of the worst of the bombardment and street fighting of the Battle of Belgrade. She described days

Serbian National Capital through War and Occupation

279

of endless shelling, with scarcely a minute or two separating shots, the impact of which she likened to ‘the greatest thunderstorm’. On the night of 23 September (6 October),2 the day on which military reports estimated that 30,000 shells fell on Belgrade, Mara described her neighbourhood as being ‘under a reddish-yellow haze’ from the great fires raging, whose ‘flames reach the sky’ and for which there is ‘no water to put out’ (IAB, ZArh, K-9/LF, 23 September 1915). The troops defending the city were outnumbered more than threefold,3 and the city fell after two days of intensive fighting. On 9 October 1915, the Habsburg Army entered the city and hoisted the imperial black and yellow flag on Kalemegdan fortress. Walking through the conquered capital, along a route that ran north from Terazije Square in the city centre to Kalemegdan Park along the Sava River and then home to Dorćol quarter on the Danube, Mara Radenković described the city as a deserted pile of ruins, ‘giving the impression of a town in which the entire population has been mowed down by disease’ (IAB, ZArh, K-9/LF, 9 October 1915/22 October 1915). Both assaults on Belgrade, in 1914 and 1915, had led to a massive flight of civilians from the city. By the time Habsburg troops conquered the city, only 7,000–12,000 of the pre-war population of 82,498 remained (Zavod 1953: 54). This once-thriving metropolis had shown signs of desolation and desertion even before the October 1915 attack led to the largest retreat of civilians. Filled with a sense of insecurity because of the precarious geopolitical location of the city, some Belgraders fled already on 24 July 1914, the day after the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum was delivered in Belgrade (Marković 1986: 102). During the first period of attack and fighting, between July and December 1914, around 40,000 civilians retreated with the army (Grahovac 1975: 103). Travelling through the city in early 1915, American journalist John Reed described moving ‘through silent Belgrade. Grass and weeds pushed between the cobbles, untravelled now for half a year’ (Reed 1916: 64). The telegrams of the Defence of Belgrade unit to the Serbian High Command that detailed the damage and destruction of the city included targets of military significance, such as the ministries of war, construction and finance as well as the Royal Palace and the railway station but also mentioned non-military sites such as cafés, hotels and private homes. They also frequently reported deaths of civilians (IAB, ZF, VII, 30 August 1914). The widespread and massive nature of the destruction in Belgrade was captured by Reed in his memoir: ‘[h]ardly anything had escaped that hail of fire – houses, sheds, stables, hotels, restaurants, shops, and public buildings’ (Reed 1916: 65). ‘Everywhere were visible the effects of artillery fire. Great holes fifteen feet in diameter gaped in the middle of the street … ’, he wrote, describing buildings ‘pitted and scarred by shrapnel’ and ‘doorless private houses, with roofs cascading to the sidewalks’ (Reed 1916: 64). Similarly, Red Cross surgeon Earl Downer described the streets as ‘devastated and torn by the firing of the enemy, and lined on each side by shapeless piles of masonry’ (Downer 1916: 169–70). Austrian artillery also extensively damaged transportation and infrastructure. Belgrade was without electricity from mid-August until the beginning of October 1914 (Marković 1986: 108). Due to the destruction of the railway station in Belgrade and nearby towns, travellers had to disembark from the train six miles away from the city and drive the remainder of the way (Reed 1916: 60). Damage to waterworks left very few supplies of potable water, the surrounding river

280

Nations, Identities and the First World War

water being ‘unsafe because of the many corpses in it’ (Harding 1982: 45). Only two firemen and two local doctors remained in the city (Marković 1986: 113–14). During the first occupation of Belgrade in December 1914, further destruction was wrought through large-scale pillaging and looting by Austro-Hungarian troops, as well as ‘wanton destruction’. In their memoir, Alice and Claude Askew, special correspondents who travelled to Serbia in 1915 as part of a British relief effort, attributed the nature of the destruction they encountered in one house – ‘the fine brocade coverings of the chairs had been slit with the sword … the rose-trees had been cut down, and the shrubs, some of them rare varieties, torn up by the roots’ – to ‘a sheer spirit of malice’ (Askew 1916: 99). By the end of the invasions, 25 per cent of Belgrade’s buildings had been destroyed or damaged (Čalić 2004: 314). Belgrade’s geographical location on the very border between the Serbian kingdom and the Habsburg monarchy placed the city on the front lines of battle. Historically, both the Ottoman and Habsburg empires had acknowledged the strategic value of this frontier city as ‘the gateway to the Balkans’ or a ‘civilizational bridge’ linking Central Europe, the Balkans and the Near East (Čubrilović 1970: 217). Thus, throughout its history, Belgrade had been the object of attacks, invasions and conquests; it had passed between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires numerous times in the preceding two centuries. However, when on 28 July 1914 the first shells fell on Belgrade, its significance both politically and militarily was questionable. The Serbian government and Crown already had withdrawn to the southern town of Niš and the Army General Command to Kragujevac three days earlier, when Serbia had mobilized for war (Grahovac 1975: 104). Militarily, the city ‘was more of a vulnerability than anything else. The impressive Kalimegdan [sic] fortress was not the defense bulwark that it had been in the 18th century’ (Gumz 2014: 129). Due to the city’s exposure, Serbian military leaders weighed whether even to defend it under ‘extremely unfavourable conditions and at the cost of a great number of casualties’ (Grahovac 1975: 103). They chose to defend the capital. The city’s symbolic role was recognized by both Serbs and neutral visitors to wartime Serbia. In his introduction to his cousin Mara Radenković’s wartime diary manuscript, Živan Petrović estimated that the Habsburg settling of accounts with Belgrade was akin to settling accounts with Serbia as a whole. ‘The primary target was actually Belgrade’, he wrote, ‘everything else was a mask for that goal’ (IAB, ZArh, K-9/ LF, March 1956). Despite the fact that wartime destruction had ‘relegated Belgrade to a secondary position, it remained the place in which all of the events within the borders of our fatherland and beyond it were felt the most deeply and intensely’, wrote the Serbian daily Pravda in October 1914. Even in a state of desolation and destruction, Belgrade ‘had more spiritual life and interest than all other towns in the interior’, it declared (cited in Marković 1986: 110). Recognizing Belgrade’s centrality, a Habsburg soldier stationed in Belgrade during the occupation said he found himself ‘in the heart of oppressed Serbia’, even though in reality he was located on its periphery (D.M. 1919: 3, emphasis added). That Belgrade’s significance was so widely recognized reflects how central a role the city played in the building of the modern Serbian nation-state following liberation from Ottoman rule.

Serbian National Capital through War and Occupation

281

The making of a national capital At the outbreak of the First World War, Belgrade was at the same time a centuriesold city and a relatively young capital of the newly independent Kingdom of Serbia. Only fifty years earlier, Belgrade still had been occupied by a residual contingent of Ottoman officials and troops who were last to leave Serbia’s towns, particularly the military garrison in Kalemegdan fortress in Belgrade. Vasa Čubrilović, a member of the Young Bosnia movement involved in the assassination of the archduke and later a politician and scholar, maintains that only after Ottoman imperial forces permanently evacuated the city in 1867 could Belgrade truly become the national capital, not only in a political sense but also in an ethno-cultural one: ‘Freed of a foreign population and of a foreign military, only then could Belgrade spread its wings and become the real capital of Serbia and its main economic and cultural hub’ (Čubrilović 1970: 234). Čubrilović thus directly links Belgrade’s fulfilment of its national role with its sovereignty. The nationalization of Belgrade involved both de-Ottomanization and assimilation. Although these processes had already begun to some extent after Serbia gained autonomy from Ottoman rule in the 1830s, they accelerated in the decades between 1867 and the outbreak of the First World War. Beginning in the 1830s, Serbian authorities sought to reclaim the city by undertaking the urban development of Belgrade in a manner that marginalized the Muslim population and introduced European influences intended to supplant a foreign, Oriental heritage. This ‘process of dispossession’, as it is described by historian Miloš Jovanović, included the confiscation of Muslim land and the passing of laws that permitted its sale only to the Serbian municipal government or Serbian Orthodox landowners. It also entailed the introduction of tax and public health regulations meant to strangle Muslim businesses. To reshape the city, the Serbian municipal government brought in experts from the Habsburg lands, who introduced baroque architecture, wide streets, public squares and other features of European urban modernization. Their aim was to bring Serbia closer to Christian Europe and allow it take its place in the European family (Jovanović 2013: 38–45). The extent to which they succeeded is evident in both the demographic and physical changes the city underwent in the nineteenth century. By 1900, only 140 Muslims lived in Belgrade (Mišković 2011: 210), and all but one of its eleven mosques had been razed (ibid.: 298). The old Muslim quarters and the main bazaar had been converted into a park called King’s Square (Mišković 2011: 208). Like other urbanizing cities in Eastern Europe at the time, Belgrade was a city of immigrants. In 1900, only 35 per cent of the Belgrade population had been born in the city, as compared, for example, with two-thirds in London (Lampe 1979: 14–15). The pull to the city was different at different times in the century. When Serbia gained autonomy in the 1830s, Christians from surrounding lands still under Ottoman rule and South Slavs from Habsburg lands came to the city. Due to their education, Habsburg Serbs were welcomed into the ranks of the newly formed Serbian government and assumed places of prominence in society, forming the kernel of Belgrade’s burgeoning elite. They filled a lacuna created by the lack of a native educated class. Under the

282

Nations, Identities and the First World War

influence of the Habsburg Serbs, who brought with them nationalist ideas from Central Europe, conceptions of identity in Serbia increasingly shifted from religious to ethnic in nature. Between Serbia’s gaining of autonomy in the 1830s and the departure of the remaining Ottoman population in the 1860s there was a fair amount of intermingling among Belgraders of various faiths who ‘participat[ed] in a shared culture of everyday life’ even though Belgrade was ‘bifurcated in the administrative sense’ between the Serbs and Ottomans (Jovanović 2013: 46). In the latter half of the century, assimilatory impulses in government policy and society strengthened, as both naturalization and property ownership hinged on the willingness of people – either already living in Belgrade or newly arrived – to adopt Serbian Orthodoxy and to Serbianize their last names. For example, Georg Weifert, born to a Danube Schwabian family in the Habsburg Empire that owned the famous Weifert brewery, one of the few significant industries in Belgrade, Serbianized the spelling of his name to Djordje Vajfert (Mišković 2011: 210). Prominent Serbian statesman, diplomat and scholar Stojan Novaković changed his birth name from one of Greek origin, Konstantin (Kosta) to a more Slavic one several years after arriving in Belgrade from his hometown of Šabac in western Serbia (Mišković 2010: 337). Habsburg Serbs, and sometimes other Slavs from the empire, played a central role in the development of the Serbian national consciousness and movement. Čubrilović argues that with the ‘settlement of embattled, national conscious people from all Serbian and South Slav lands, Belgrade was predestined to influence the development of nationalist politics in Serbia and lead it towards helping liberation movements around it’ (Čubrilović 1970: 236). Historian Ivo Banac points to the significant role that Moravian military leader František Zach played in influencing Serbian statesman Ilija Garašanin in his composition in 1844 of Načertanije (Outline), a plan for the national expansion of Serbia to include Serbs living in neighbouring lands under imperial rule (Banac 1984: 83). As a pan-Slavist, Zach also took part in anti-imperial uprisings throughout the Habsburg lands and in 1867–77 even served as chief of the general staff in Serbia. From the earlier decades of the nineteenth century, the cooperation – or collusion, as Habsburg authorities were inclined to view the relationship – between Habsburg Serbs and the Serbian state posed a potential threat to the sovereignty and integrity of the Habsburg Empire. This internal-external connection, which later would turn into overt irredentism, was present from the first stages of Serbia’s liberation from imperial rule. And the capital city of Belgrade – home to Serbian political, social and cultural elites – assumed a central role in the national movement they led. In reality, the Serbian capital was far less homogenous a place and far more contested than Serbian elites aspired for it to be and Habsburg elites thought it to be. If Belgrade represented the centre of the Serbian nation, it also embodied its divisions. It was caught not only between an ‘Oriental’ past and a ‘European’ future but also between a predominantly rural population and a recently urbanized elite. In the debate surrounding what it meant to be Serbian, the capital figured prominently. Towards the end of the century, a significant wave of internal migrants fled to Belgrade from difficult economic conditions in the countryside. Even so, by 1910 the population of Belgrade comprised only 3.1 per cent of the population of Serbia, less than half of other European capitals (Lampe 1979: 13). Social divisions were physically reflected in the city’s centre-

Serbian National Capital through War and Occupation

283

periphery divide. The city centre belonged to an even smaller percentage of elites. ‘The social circle in Belgrade is a small one, almost entirely confined to the diplomatic and political world’, observed Winifred Gordon, a contemporary British traveller to the Balkans, in her memoir (Gordon 1918: 37). Urbanization focused on the city centre, on the construction of public buildings such as ministries and banks, European-style universities, hotels and theatres, where the elites worked and lived (Lampe 1980: 28). Forsaken in this approach to urban development were public infrastructure and services – waterworks, sewage, transportation systems, affordable housing – that would have benefited the broader urbanizing population. Or, rather, these services, where available, were instituted in a manner that benefited elites (Lampe 1979: 15). Broadly beneficial urban development was thwarted by political struggles that prioritized the political and economic gains of political parties over the public good (Stojanović 2013: 22–5). Moreover, with the exception of a minority of dissenting voices, the various political parties in Serbia generally agreed that foreign policy focused on securing state sovereignty superseded in importance issues of internal development. In the words of historian Dubravka Stojanović, Belgrade remained ‘an unfinished capital’ because Serbian leaders instead channelled resources to the ‘unfinished project’ of liberating and unifying all Serbs in a single sovereign state (Stojanović 2013). This project came to the fore of Serbian political life in the decade preceding the First World War. In 1903 a group of Serbian military officers overthrew King Alexander Obrenović in a bloody coup and brought to power King Peter of the rival Karadjordjević dynasty (hereafter referred to as Karadjordjević). Unlike his predecessor, Karadjordjević was not an Austrophile, and the years of his reign were characterized by a far less conciliatory approach to the Habsburg Empire. The new regime of Karadjordjević and the Serbian Radical party instead had Russophile leanings, challenged Habsburg imperial designs on the Balkans and pursued more actively a pan-Serbian expansionist foreign policy aimed at liberating and unifying all Serbs who still lived under Ottoman and Habsburg imperial rule. It was during Karadjordjević’s reign that Garašanin’s Načertanije (1844) finally came into public view in 1906. This period was marked by escalating tensions between Serbia and AustriaHungary, as their incompatible plans to exert economic and political control in the Balkans came into ever closer conflict. In the customs war of 1906–8, known as the Pig War, the Karadjordjević regime succeeded in breaking Serbia’s economic subservience to Austria-Hungary. With its annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, AustriaHungary asserted its dominion on the peninsula. Through the Balkan wars of 1912– 13, Serbia nearly doubled in size both territorially and demographically by reclaiming from Ottoman imperial rule its southern territories. This expansion was perceived as threatening by the Habsburgs, prompting Conrad Graf von Hötzendorf, the chief of the general staff of the Habsburg Army, to advocate for pre-emptive war against Serbia. For Serbs, the reclaiming of Old Serbia was imbued with national symbolism. The territory included Kosovo, the centre of the Serbian medieval empire. It was the site of the battle in which the Serbian Army had suffered a defeat at the hands of the attacking Ottoman forces on 15/28 June 1389. The mythologizing of the battle began shortly after it took place and was passed down for centuries through oral tradition. The myth was revived in the nineteenth century, and its predominant themes of the

284

Nations, Identities and the First World War

struggle for freedom and the importance of unity in the face of the enemy along with martyrdom and sacrifice for a more noble cause were marshalled by nationalists. The vital role that the myth played in integrating and mobilizing the Serbian nation in the process of state-building has been noted by many historians. Nataša Mišković considers it to have been ‘the Serbian elite’s most powerful instrument to mobilise the population’ (Mišković 2011: 206). She further argues that at a time when diverse origins and political and socio-economic differences divided the populace, the Kosovo myth was ‘the only thing that in 1900 bound together society’ (Mišković 2010: 376). St Vitus Day (Vidovdan), the date on which the battle of Kosovo was fought, was first commemorated by the Serbian Orthodox church. Under the Karadjordjević regime the holiday became more officially and publicly recognized, particularly during the First Balkan War (Trgovčević 1996: 334). During the First World War, the Kosovo myth would offer tropes of martyrdom and sacrifice that were particularly salient, especially in light of Serbia’s defeat and occupation. In the decade preceding the outbreak of the First World War, not only did the Karadjordjević/Radical regime mobilize the Serbian populace behind the national cause to a greater extent than had their predecessors, but also that mobilization crossed over the borders of the Serbian kingdom. St Vitus Day was celebrated not only in Serbia but also in surrounding Habsburg and Ottoman lands inhabited by Serbs. The holiday thus was of pan-Serbian, or even more broadly South Slav, significance. This dimension was reflected in the work of Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović, who was educated in Vienna. In the first decade of the twentieth century he began work on his St Vitus Day Temple, a majestic structure designed to house marble figures of the main heroes of the Kosovo epic. While the temple itself was never realized, Meštrović created a wooden model that was shown at the Rome Exposition in 1911. Meštrović’s South Slav, or Yugoslav, views were explicit in his inclusion of both Roman Catholic and Orthodox elements in his design of the temple. He explained, ‘The temple cannot be dedicated to any one confession or separate sect, rather to all of them together, to all who believe in the ideals expressed in our folk songs’ (cited in Wachtel 1998: 59). Meštrović also chose to show his work at the Serbian pavilion in Rome rather than in the Habsburg pavilion when his request to have a separate pavilion for South Slav artists was refused (Wachtel 1998: 55). Such affinities were threatening to the Habsburgs because of Serbia’s expansionist nationalist project of ‘liberation and unification’. While there remain legitimate questions regarding the degree to which the Serbian state actively pursued an irredentist foreign policy in the years before the First World War, the conciliatory stance of the Karadjordjević/Radical regime towards various underground nationalist groups undertaking subversive measures in the Habsburg lands was enough to make the regime suspect in the eyes of Habsburg authorities before the archduke’s assassination and culpable following it. Nedeljko Čabrinović, one of the seven conspirators in Sarajevo, claimed that St Vitus Day had motivated him to participate in the assassination of the archduke (Trgovčević 1996: 334), demonstrating how easily the Kosovo myth could be instrumentalized for violence. Belgrade was the symbol and cradle of the Serbian nationalist movement and thus of the irredentist threat to the Habsburg Empire. The Habsburgs ‘presumed that

Serbian National Capital through War and Occupation

285

the roots of all Serbian irredentist activity within the empire led back to the panSerbian propaganda of the Belgrade-based patriotic networks’ (Clark 2012: 99). Such presumptions were bolstered by Habsburg military intelligence coming from Croatia in 1909 that ‘Belgrade city leaders’ were funding the arming of guerrilla groups in the Habsburg lands (Gumz 2009: 35). Vasa Čubrilović retrospectively validated the Habsburg perception of Belgrade as a leader in the Serbian nationalist movement, insisting on the city’s ‘revolutionary’ role throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: ‘Belgrade was truly the centre from which revolutionary, democratic ideas radiated towards the Yugoslav provinces under Turkish and Austro-Hungarian rule’ (Čubrilović 1970: 240). He pointed to the pivotal role Belgrade played in the demonstrations of 1875, 1903 and 1908 (Čubrilović 1970: 233).4 He also described how the city served as the headquarters of the subversive South Slav nationalist movements outside of its borders, referring, of course, to its support of such movements as Young Bosnia, responsible for the archduke’s assassination, but also to its historic support of South Slav insurgents dating back to the 1848 revolution in Hungary (Čubrilović 1970: 231). Thus, as a national capital, Belgrade was the centre not just of the existing Serbian kingdom but also of the expanded Serbian national state that Serbian leaders sought to build by unifying all Serbs, and perhaps South Slavs, in the region, many of whom were citizens of the neighbouring Habsburg lands. Belgrade was viewed by Serbian nationalists who envisaged a Serbian nation-state uniting all Serbs as a ‘Piedmont’.5 As such, to the Habsburgs, Belgrade symbolized the existential threat posed by expansionist Serbian nationalism.

The destruction of a national capital It is in this context of the Habsburg military’s fear of Serbian nationalism and Belgrade’s role as the hotbed of this nationalism that the political and cultural institutions in the capital’s modernized city centre became targets in 1914. The city’s geography undoubtedly contributed to the extensive destruction of this area in the war. The urban development of Belgrade in the late nineteenth century had concentrated government buildings and cultural institutions, as well as commercial and residential areas, in the city centre, which was situated at the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers, on the border with Austrian-Hungary and within close range of Habsburg shells. However, numerous contemporaries and historians have looked beyond geographical location to point to the wilful destruction of urban cultural and social sites of national significance. Urban institutions not associated directly with the Crown, government and military also were seen by the Habsburg military as symbols and harbingers of Serbian nationalism, and some, such as the university, did indeed play such role, which was acknowledged by Serbian contemporaries. Djordje Stanojević (Stanoïéwitch), rector of University of Belgrade, claimed, ‘The first projectiles were, so to speak, directed at the University … the enemy never forgot to send its greetings of devastation to the University’ (Stanoïéwitch 1915: 7). The extent of the destruction of the university was detailed in the Times History of the War: ‘[it was] riddled until the building, with its classrooms, laboratories, libraries, and workshops, was entirely demolished’ (1915:

286

Nations, Identities and the First World War

399). If this claim that the first shell hit the university is true, then the first casualty of the First World War was a cultural institution.6 But Belgrade University was not merely a cultural institution. After describing the university as ‘only a mass of yawning ruins’, John Reed in his memoir surmised that ‘[t]he Austrians had made it their special target, for there had been the hotbed of Pan-Serbian propaganda, and among the students was formed the secret society whose members murdered the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’ (Reed 1916: 65). Stanojević supported this interpretation of the university’s role in the Serbian national movement, describing it as lying ‘at the centre of all the territories of the Serbian language and races’ (Stanoïéwitch 1915: 15). He characterized the primary aim of the university and its antecedent, the Lycée, as being ‘to provide functionaries for the different services and needs of the State’. These functionaries, which included ‘teachers, professors, judges, etc. have formed for some years already, a small army of intellectuals who, penetrated by national patriotism, support and propagate the idea that the union of all Serbian lands is not too distant’ (Stanoïéwitch 1915: 16, emphasis added). Of course the Serbian lands to which he was referring included Habsburg territories inhabited by Serbs and other South Slavs, which, since the ascent of the Karadjordjević dynasty, had become the object of an expansionist Serbian foreign policy. It thus may not be entirely surprising that supporters and symbols of the Karadjordjević regime were particularly targeted both during the invasions and under occupation. The monument to Karadjordje, the leader of the first Serbian insurrection against the Ottomans – which, over the course of the nineteenth century, had been cast as the first event in Serbian liberation from imperial rule – was destroyed by the Habsburg military during the battle for Belgrade. The monument was located in the park surrounding the Kalemegdan fortress, where ‘Austrian fire had fallen heaviest; hardly a building but had been literally wrecked. Roads and open spaces were pitted with craters torn by big shells. All the trees were stripped’ (Reed 1916: 67). D. M., a Croatian soldier in the Habsburg military who was stationed in Belgrade in 1917, recounted having heard from several Belgraders of the destruction of this monument. They described that Karadjordje’s face, along with other decorations had been carried off, presumably to be melted down to make shells and cannons. Despite this practical use of the monument material, they did note that of the many monuments throughout Serbia that met this fate, ‘the majority of which were those commemorating the Karadjordjevićs’ (DM 1919: 9). Cafés had played a central role in Belgrade’s urban life since the late nineteenth century. Even while the city was embattled, café life continued to be lively. In early 1915 John Reed described, ‘Every evening towards sundown, the streets became more and more crowded. A few stores timidly opened, some restaurants, and the cafés where the true Belgradian spends all his time sipping beer and watching the fashionable world pass’ (Reed 1916: 66, emphasis added). However, the role of the café in Serbia, both in the pre-war period and during the war, was not entirely social. Winifred Gordon, an Englishwoman who travelled to Belgrade during the war, noted in her memoirs that ‘the cafés are the clubs of Belgrade, and here politics and again politics, and a “leetle” business is discussed’ (Gordon 1918: 20). Not only were they the site where people came to hear news and discuss important events but also they were the place, even before the war, where underground nationalist organizations and military units met.

Serbian National Capital through War and Occupation

287

One man who was a teenager during the war recounted in his memoir that the Zlatna moruna café in his neighbourhood was the site of komitadji meetings7: ‘In the back of the café was a separate room on the door of which was a black sign the wording of which I cannot remember, but I do remember the white skull and crossbones that were drawn on the sign’. He suggests that this café might even have been a meeting place for the Black Hand, as his older brother remembers having played billiards with Gavrilo Princip in the café (Milojević 1977: 199–200). A young doctor who spent the war in Belgrade recorded in her diary in August 1914 that ‘the high command for the defence of Belgrade met in “Lepi izgled”, a café across the street from the mental hospital’ (Mihajlović 1955: 49). As social and cultural sites, cafés and the university were not conventional military objects, but their ambiguous roles as both urban sites of society and culture as well as politics and nationalism made them legitimate targets in the eyes of the Habsburg military. The blurring of civilian and military in this urban context echoed the blurring of combatant and non-combatant that had led to Habsburg atrocities in the Serbian countryside. The Habsburg Army saw this blurring as an expression of the extreme national mobilization of the Serbian population. As Jonathan Gumz has argued, the Habsburg military viewed war as ‘a duel between armies and states, not between peoples … The perception that Serbia deliberately undermined war’s autonomy led to Habsburg Army violence during the war and occupation in Serbia’ (Gumz 2009: 16). The incessant bombardment of the city between the outbreak of war and the first conquest of Belgrade in December 1914 also reflected the mounting frustration of the Habsburg Army at not being able to conquer this pesky little neighbour to its south, which was proving to be an able adversary on the battlefield. The destruction of Belgrade was part of Austria-Hungary’s Strafexpedition, punishing Serbia for daring to stand up politically to the Habsburg Empire, for its perceived complicity in the assassination in Sarajevo, for succeeding twice in repelling Habsburg forces on the battlefield and for waging an unjust war. In light of this, Čubrilović argued, ‘one can understand the attitude and hatred of Austro-Hungarian military and political circles towards Belgrade … the degree of hatred and obduracy with which the army of the Dual Monarchy took revenge on the Serbian capital because of its stance and role in the battle against the Monarchy’ (Čubrilović 1970: 241). To neutralize the threat of Serbian nationalism meant to conquer the Serbian national capital and all it represented. Capturing a capital is always symbolic of the conquest of a state, but it was even more so in the case of Serbia, since the capital symbolized not only the state but the broader Serbian nation as well. Subduing the national capital was the opening battle in the Habsburg Army’s prolonged campaign to neutralize the threat of Serbian nationalism during the First World War.

Belgrade under occupation: The transformation of a national capital By the time the Habsburgs hoisted their flag in the Serbian capital, Belgrade was a remnant of the city it had been before the onset of war. As has been described, the

288

Nations, Identities and the First World War

government had evacuated; rubble heaps lay where state and residential buildings once stood; the population had fallen to 8–15 per cent of its pre-war size; and with the flight of the city’s elites, commercial activity had diminished, and cultural life had come to a halt. The very people and institutions that had made Belgrade a national capital were no longer part of the city. Under Habsburg occupation, 100 years after the Second Serbian Uprising that had secured Serbia’s autonomy from the Porte, Belgrade once again became a space in which a new (imperial) regime could inscribe its meaning. The process of transformation of the Serbian national capital that had started during the protracted period of attack continued under occupation but now assumed a different form. In its effort to neutralize Serbian nationalism, as embodied by both people and cultural and social objects, the Habsburg Military General Government (MGG) pursued policies that continued to transform the city demographically, physically and thus symbolically throughout the war. The demographic transformation, which had started as a ‘voluntary’ flight from the city, now continued through a policy of internment aimed at Serbs who were deemed to pose an ideological and political threat to the Habsburg Empire, particularly members of the ruling Radical party and supporters of the Karadjordjević regime. Central to shifting support away from the Karadjordjević regime was removing from the population the elites who supported it. Before the occupation, the flight of Belgrade’s elites had changed the city’s status as a political centre. What Habsburg shells had started, forcible internment was designed to complete. In establishing its regime in Serbia, the priority of the occupation government was to secure peace and order, which it considered to be predicated on neutralizing all political activity in the country. Its extensive policing and surveillance network aimed to identify and eradicate all Serbian citizens who were considered politically ‘unreliable’ (AS, VGG, VIII-1134, 30 July 1917). Particularly dangerous were those members of the intelligentsia who were seen has having the potential to thwart the occupying government’s efforts of political demobilization by continuing to stoke nationalist fires among the general population. According to MGG intelligence officers, the ‘city population’ was particularly unreliable ‘because of the large number of intelligentsia’ (Gumz 2009: 86–7).8 At the same time, the MGG spared and even favoured elites who had sympathized with the Obrenović dynasty and opposition parties, offering them concessions and positions in municipal government. A similar dynamic is evident in the MGG’s approach to the appropriation and reconstruction of the cityscape. First, the MGG turned Belgrade into the capital of Habsburg-occupied Serbia. It supplanted the evacuated Serbian national leadership, appropriated the Royal Palace and ordained its Orthodox chapel as Catholic (Beogradske novine, 30 June 1916: 1). It introduced symbols of imperial rule into this national capital, including its yellow and black flag, which to Serbs was an emblem of conquest and foreign, enemy rule. Mara Radenković, whose new apartment was located directly across from MGG headquarters, wrote in her diary, ‘Laying eyes on their flags, I felt as if a knife had been plunged into my heart’ (IAB, ZArh, K-9/LF, 28 September/11 October 1915). The uniform of the Habsburg Army, that pillar of imperial rule, became a pervasive sight on city streets. The occupiers commemorated the birthdays of the Habsburg emperor and the German kaiser in Belgrade’s public

Serbian National Capital through War and Occupation

289

squares and streets. The celebration of St Vitus Day continued under occupation, but the commemoration had an entirely different meaning than it had in pre-war Serbia. Instead of celebrating the nationally significant Battle of Kosovo, a memorial service was held for Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. The governor-general and MGG officers attended services at the Cathedral (Saborna) Church, where the governor sat in the king’s seat (Beogradske novine, 30 June 1916: 1). University professor Jovan Miodragović, who remained in Belgrade during the war, wrote in his journal on that date: ‘today is our St. Vitus Day, and in the Cathedral (Saborna) Church a memorial is being held for the late heir to the throne Ferdinand and his wife. May our Kosovo heroes forgive us!’ (Miodragović 1921: 101). But the MGG did not merely impose its rule through the overt presence of imperial troops or symbols in the cityscape. It also sought to establish the legitimacy of imperial rule by returning the city to a liveable condition and normalizing daily life under occupation. Belgrade underwent a partial physical restoration, as the MGG undertook reconstruction projects to rebuild the infrastructure and urban spaces its own shells had destroyed. The occupying government heralded its efforts in its main propaganda organ, the daily newspaper Beogradske novine (Belgrade News). Among the ‘many cultural works that the Imperial and Royal army had carried out with unusual sacrifice and love in such a short period of time’ it counted repairing the city lights and waterworks, laying cobblestones on the streets, opening schools and saving the botanical garden (Beogradske novine, 30 April 1916: 1). A central focus of propaganda was to portray the occupying government not merely as benevolent but also as working more in the interest of the average Serbian citizen than had the Karadjordjević and Radical regime, which instead of caring for the needs of its people had deceptively led them into war and brought the country to the ‘brink of ruin’ (Beogradske novine, 24 March 1916: 1). While many reconstruction efforts were aimed at normalizing life under its regime, the MGG favoured the restoration of buildings and sites linked to the deposed Austrophile Obrenović dynasty. Thus the occupying government carried out the reconstruction of the city in a selective manner. This practice formed part of the broader campaign to neutralize the aggressive, expansionist form of Serbian nationalism championed by the Karadjordjević regime. In the first year of occupation, the MGG renovated the Church of St Mark at the Old Cemetery, which had been damaged during the battle for the city. The occupiers did not merely repair the shrapnel damage; they also undertook a complete renovation of the church (Beogradske novine, 3 November 1916: 2). In her journal, a Serbian officer’s wife, Natalija Arandjelović, construed that the occupying authorities were ‘repairing that church, because of King Aleksandar’s grave, because they are particularly sympathetic towards him’ (IAB, ZMG, Dnevnik NNA, K. 1/I, 2b, 1 April 1917.) Not only did the MGG renovate the church in 1916 but it also built a monument to King Alexander Obrenović in 1917, which stands in stark contrast to the fate met by Karadjordjević monuments under Habsburg invasion and rule. To demonstrate the population’s support for its construction endeavour, the regime reported in the Belgrade News that Belgraders gathered in the church, along with the entirety of the Belgrade priesthood, to celebrate the slava, or feastday, of St Mark in 1916 (Beogradske novine, 4 May 1916: 2). Notably, the occupiers ‘hardly meddled in

290

Nations, Identities and the First World War

these affairs [of the Serbian Orthodox church]. They gave the population the liberty to attend church and authorized Serbian priests to hold services … [only] they prohibited the mentioning of the names of King Peter [Karadjordjević], the heir to the throne and the army’ (Yovanovitch 1930: 243). The MGG also held annual memorials to mark the deaths of King Milan Obrenović, who had ruled Serbia from 1868 until 1889, and his son and successor, Alexander Obrenović, who had ruled Serbia until his assassination in 1903 (Beogradske novine, 8 February 1917, No. 37: 2). Natalija Arandjelović noted in her diary that a large service was held in the Saborna (Cathedral) Church; that five cannons were fired (although she did not herself hear them); and that the king’s grave had been decorated (IAB, ZMG, Dnevnik NAA, K. 1/I, 2b, 29 May/11 June 1916). Similarly, the occupying regime’s policy of changing street names, a tactic long used by nationalists in their struggle to appropriate physical space, was an attempt to remove from the cityscape symbols linked to the expansionist Serbian nationalist programme and the leaders who propagated it. In keeping with the Habsburg occupier’s policy to neutralize Serbian national politics, the streets of Belgrade were renamed with apolitical monikers that made reference to a street’s geographical location or attributes and to prominent landmarks on or near the street, as well as to trades or crafts typically carried out on the street (Mladenović 1998: 292). Thus, for example, Karadjordje Street became Lower Street, and King Peter Street became Cathedral Street (Mladenović 1998: 297). While names referring to Serbian figures or events of historical significance were sometimes given, these harkened back to distant Serbian medieval history (Mladenović 1998: 292), predating the Battle of Kosovo. Streets associated with the Karadjordjević dynasty – as well as komitadji leaders or battles of the Serbian wars of liberation from Ottoman imperial rule, including the First Serbian Uprising and the Balkan wars of 1912–13 – were renamed, as were streets named after territories in the Habsburg lands at which Serbian expansionism was aimed, especially in Bosnia and Dalmatia (Mladenović 1998: 290). Significantly, street names that referred to members of the Obrenović dynasty were left unchanged. Through its reconstruction practices, the MGG was symbolically reinstating the conciliatory Obrenović dynasty, whose policies had allowed the Habsburgs the political influence and economic advantage they had sought in the Balkans. It was reshaping the national capital into a city representative of a bygone Austrophile regime, thus setting back the clock to a time when Serbia was a deferential neighbour rather than a menacing, expansionist state. These acts could be nothing but symbolic, as there was no living Obrenović heir; a real restitution of the dynasty would not have been easy. The long-range plans of the Habsburg regime in Serbia remained contested, as did the confidence of the MGG that it could gain the allegiance of the Serbian population. Once the occupying government was established in the city, a normalization of life followed that typically accompanies the cessation of armed conflict. There was a gradual repopulation of the city, as civilians who had evacuated during the period of attack and invasion returned to their homes. Normalization of life under occupation, however, was both relative and selective and served in a number of ways to establish the hegemony of the MGG’s rule. The domiciles to which Belgraders returned were not their homes as such. Their homes had been transformed by the damage of shell fire and the absence of familiar and valued objects carried away by looters. Due to

Serbian National Capital through War and Occupation

291

quartering, some had to share their homes with enemy troops. In returning to their daily activities, be they work or school or socializing, the occupier’s policies determined where and how they did so. They lived their lives under the watchful gaze of the enemy occupier. By pursuing policies intended to distance Serbs from the highly nationalized Karadjordjević regime and its adherents, the occupier’s policies aimed to transform the population away from being imperial adversaries. In the Serbian national capital, the occupying government did not merely assert its presence and expunge all traces of Serbian history. It did not name streets after Habsburg leaders but removed reference to Serbian leaders and events associated with the Karadjordjević regime and preserved those of the Obrenović regime. It refashioned the Serbian national narrative and reshaped its national space in a way that benefited the Habsburg agenda in the occupied territory and the Balkans more broadly. In this way, it sought to inscribe its form of anachronistic, depoliticized imperialism onto Belgrade’s urban landscape.9

Belgrade after the war: Becoming a South Slav capital During the war, Belgrade ceased to function as a Serbian capital. However, the Habsburg project to remake the Serbian national capital was short-lived, ending with the loss of the war, the end of occupation and the liberation of the city. The Serbian Army retook Belgrade on 19 October 1918, fulfilling the long-harboured hopes of its occupied population. A few months into the occupation, Mara Radenković had written in her diary, ‘May soon arrive the day of our liberation, of the resurrection of Serbian freedom!’ (IAB, ZArh, K-9/LF, 29 February 1916/13 March 1916), her words echoing the tropes of defeat followed by resurrection of the Kosovo myth. The loss of sovereignty and the (re)imposition of imperial rule on the Serbian national capital during the war had been temporary experiences. Belgrade emerged from the war triumphant. But after the war, Belgrade was different. When Serbian teacher Paulina Lebl-Albala, who had spent part of the occupation in the city, returned again to Belgrade in August 1919, she described the city as ‘unbelievably transformed’, full of new, unfamiliar faces and people speaking with different accents and in various dialects. ‘There was a great deal of wandering, disorganization, confusion, much experimentation’, she wrote in her memoir (Lebl-Albala 2005: 265). Serbia had emerged from the war part of an expanded multinational South Slav state. The new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was proclaimed on 1 December 1918 by Prince-Regent Alexander Karadjordjević. The new kingdom unified in one state pre-war Serbia and Montenegro and South Slavs living in the former Habsburg territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slavonia, Vojvodina, Dalmatia, Carniola and Styria. Serbian national leaders refashioned themselves into Yugoslav (South Slav) leaders and integrated the creation of the new state into their existing narrative of liberation and unification, thus casting the First World War as the final stage in a century-long struggle for liberation from imperial rule and the unification into a single state of all not only Serbs but, further, all South Slavs. According to this narrative, Belgrade had fulfilled its fate to serve as the

292

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Serbian national ‘Piedmont’. As it emerged from the rubble to become the capital of a Yugoslav state, its transformation was just beginning. Of course, these narratives obscure the fact that the new state was home to military men, statesmen and citizens who had fought or found themselves on opposing sides of the occupation and the First World War. The process of unification left unresolved questions regarding the governance of the new state. A tension between Serbian centralism and federalism emerged as the dominant political battle, reaching its climax in 1928 with the assassination in parliament of two Croat deputies and the mortal wounding of Stjepan Radić, the leader of the popular Croat Peasant Party. In response, King Alexander Karadjordjević proclaimed a royal dictatorship in 1929 and embarked on a project to instil a Yugoslav identity in his embattled citizens.10 This effort was reflected in how his regime sought to commemorate the experience of the First World War. In spring of 1934, King Alexander commissioned Ivan Meštrović to design the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The location chosen was on top of Avala Mountain, approximately ten kilometres from the centre of Belgrade. It was the site where in 1922 the local community had erected a ‘plain pyramid headstone … dedicated to an unknown Serbian soldier fallen in the First World War’ (Ignjatović 2010: 624). In his memoirs, Meštrović recounted that the local peasants had chosen this site ‘because they had found there the skeleton of some buried soldier wearing Serbian boots’ (cited in Wachtel 1998: 265). The peasants had built the headstone in the place where a tombstone had been erected by the German Army after they conquered Serbia in 1915 on which was inscribed: ‘Ein unbekannter serbischer Soldat’ (Ignjatović 2010: 626). Thus, a site that the local community had reappropriated from the Germans was now being reappropriated yet again by their king in order to transform it from an essentially Serbian site of commemoration into a Yugoslav one. This was easier to do on the outskirts of the capital than within it. As Aleksandar Ignjatović has argued, whereas in most other countries, memorials to the unknown soldier ‘were built in or inserted into the historical urban fabric of national capitals’ (Ignjatović 2010: 628), in the political context of interwar Yugoslavia, ‘to reinforce the idea that old ethnic traditions were no longer important, the Tomb of the Unkown Soldier had to be built away from the former Serbian capital’ (Ignjatović 2010: 629). Building the tomb on Kalemegdan Fortress as had been planned would have reinforced the narrative that Serbs deserved primacy of place in the new state because they had liberated the other South Slavs through their suffering in the war (Ignjatović, 630). Thus, in the new multinational regime, the national capital had its limitations. On 9 October 1934, King Alexander was assassinated in Marseilles by Macedonian and Croatian terrorists. His death ushered in the decline of his Yugoslav ideology, and by the time the Tomb was completed in 1938, it too had lost its intended significance as a symbol of integral Yugoslavism. What was the fatherland and whose was the fatherland remained open questions in interwar Yugoslavia, and, yet again, Belgrade became a space on which a new regime worked to inscribe its hegemony. Whether Belgrade would be an essentially Serbian national capital, would transform into a truly Yugoslav one, or would take its place in a broader transnational network of European capitals would remain contested well into the next World War.

Serbian National Capital through War and Occupation

293

Notes 1 Reiss was commissioned by the Serbian government to investigate the conduct of war in Serbia during the invasions. He based his inquiry on testimonies of Austrian prisoners of war, official reports by Serbian military authorities, depositions of witnesses and photographic documentation taken on the spot. 2 Serbia followed the Julian calendar until 1918. Since 1900, the Julian calendar has diverged from the Gregorian calendar by thirteen days. 3 By the beginning of the German-Habsburg offensive in October 1915, 20,524 troops defended the city, spread across a front much greater than the 10-kilometre front along which the more than 65,000 Habsburg troops attacked (Grahovac 1975: 106–7). 4 All of these dates mark significant turning points in the relationship between Serbia and the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. The year 1875 marks the beginning of a twoyear uprising by Serbs against Ottoman rule in Herzegovina, and later Bosnia. In 1903 the Austrophile Obrenović dynasty was overthrown by the Serbian military, bringing to power the Russophile Karadjordijević dynasty. In 1908 Austria-Hungary, which had occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878, following the 1875–7 uprising, annexed the territory. 5 Whether Serbia could justly be considered a Piedmont for all South Slavs is a topic of historical debate, beyond the scope of this study. For this study it is significant that Serbian nationalists imagined this role and that Habsburg rulers saw this potential. 6 I would like to thank John Horne for this observation. 7 Komitadji were bands of insurgent guerrilla fighters active in the Balkan wars and also during the First World War. They were feared by the Austro-Hungarian military, who saw them as an illegitimate fighting force. 8 Jonathan Gumz offers an exhaustive treatment of the MGG’s internment policies in Gumz 2009: chap. 2. 9 Gumz’s study (2009) makes a compelling case for the neo-absolutist imperialism of the Habsburg Army. 10 This is the subject of Christian Nielsen’s study (2014).

References Primary Sources AS (Arhiv Srbije) – Archives of Serbia VGG (Vojni Generalni Guvernman) Beogradske novine, 1915–18. IAB (Istorijski arhiv Beograda) – Historical Archives of Belgrade ZArh (Zbirka arhivalija) ZF (Zbirka fotokopija), Vojnoistorijski institut (VII), Vrhovna komanda – Odbrana Beograda ZMG (Zbirka memoarske gradje), Dnevnik Natalije Nikole Arandjelović ‘How Serbia Routed the Austrians’, The Times History of the War (Part 36, Vol. 3, 17 April 1915).

294

Nations, Identities and the First World War

Reiss, R.A., Copeland, F.S., and Serbia. (1916), Report upon the Atrocities Committed by the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First Invasion of Serbia, London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., Ltd. Stanoïéwitch, G.M. (1915), Le Bombardement de l’université de Belgrade, Paris: M. Vermot.

Memoir Literature Askew, A., and C. (1916), The Stricken Land: Serbia as We Saw It, London: Eveleigh Nash. D.M. (1919), Strahote u Srbiji, Zagreb: Venus. Downer, E.B. (1916), The Highway of Death, Philadelphia: F.A. Davis. Gordon, W. (1918), A Woman in the Balkans, London: T. Nelson & Sons. Lebl-Albala, P. (2005), Tako je nakad bilo, Belgrade: BMD. Mihajlović, S. (1955), Oblaci nad gradom, 1914–1918, Belgrade: DOZ. Milojević, P. (1977), ‘Kad sećanja ožive’, in Savić and Djoković (eds), Beograd u sećanjima, 1900–1918, 197–207, Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga. Miodragović, J. (1921), Tragični dani Srbije: Beleške iz zloglasne trogodišnje vladavine austriske u Srbiji, Belgrade: Knjižarnice Rajkovića i Čukovića. Reed, J. (1916), The War in Eastern Europe, New York: C. Scribner’s Sons.

Secondary Sources Banac, I. (1984), The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Čalić, M.-J. (2004), Socijalna Istorija Srbije: 1815–1941: Usporeni napredak u industrijalizaciji, Belgrade: Clio. Clark, C. (2012), The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, London: Allen Lane. Čubrilović, V. (1970), ‘Beograd – Nacionalno i kulturno središte Srbije u XIX veku’, in Vasa Čubrilović (ed.), Oslobođenje Gradova u Srbiji od Turaka 1862–1867. God: Zbornik Radova Prikazanih na Naučnom Skupu Srpske Akademije Nauka i Umetnosti, Održanom Od 22. Do 24. Maja 1967. god. u Beogradu Povodom Proslave 100-Godišnjice Oslobođenja Gradova, 217–42, Belgrade: Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti. Grahovac, M. (1975), ‘Odbrana grada Beograda 15. godine’, Vojnoistorijski Glasnik, 26 (2): 95–123. Gumz, J. (2009), The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914–1918, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumz, J. (2014), ‘The Habsburg Empire, Serbia and 1914: The Significance of a Sideshow’, in G. Bischof, F. Karlhofer and S.R. Williamson (eds), 1914: Austria-Hungary, the Origins, and the First Year of World War I, New Orleans: UNO. Harding, P.M. (1982), ‘A Red Cross Nurse in Belgrade: Mary Gladwin Saw World War I from the Inside of a Hospital. Her battles were no easier than those of the soldiers’, American History Illustrated, 16 (9): 41–47. Historical Abstracts with Full Text. Web. 26 July 2016. Ignjatović, A. (2010), ‘From Constructed Memory to Imagined National Tradition: The Tomb of the Unknown Yugoslav Soldier (1934–38)’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 88 (4): 624–51. Jovanović, M. (2013), ‘“The City in Our Hands”: Urban Management and Contested Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Belgrade’, Urban History, 40 (1): 32–50.

Serbian National Capital through War and Occupation

295

Lampe, J.R. (1979), ‘Modernization and Social Structure: The Case of Pre-1914 Balkan Capitals’, Southeastern Europe, 5 (2): 11–32. Lampe, J.R. (1980), ‘Urban History in Southeastern Europe: Recent Research on the Capital Cities’, The Maryland Historian, 11 (2): 25–38. Marković, P. (1986), ‘Svakodnevni zivot Beograda na pocetku rata 1914. godine’, Istorijski Glasnik, 1: 93–118. Mišković, N. (2010), Bazari i bulevari: svet zivota u Beogradu 19. Veka, Belgrade: Muzej grada. Mišković, N. (2011), ‘Mission, Power and Violence: Serbia’s National Turn’, in H. Grandits, N. Clayer and R. Pichler (eds), Conflicting Loyalties in the Balkans: The Great Powers, the Ottoman Empire and Nation-Building, 205–24, London: Tauris. Mladenović, B. (1998), ‘Promena naziva ulica u gradovima vojno-generalnog guvernmana: prilog proučavanju odnosa između paralelnih društava’, Istorijski časopis, 45/46: 289–305. Nielsen, C.A. (2014), Making Yugoslavs: Identity in King Aleksandar’s Yugoslavia, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Stojanović, D. (2013), ‘Unfinished Capital – Unfinished State: How the Modernization of Belgrade Was Prevented, 1890–1914’, Nationalities Papers, 41 (1): 15–34, Historical Abstracts with Full Text, EBSCOhost, viewed 6 September 2016. Trgovčević, L. (1996), ‘The Kosovo Myth in the First World War’, in I. Konev (ed.), Sveti Mesta Na Balkanite: Za Izdavaneto Na Sbornika Rŭkovodstvoto Na Mezhdunarodnii︠ ︡ a Universitetski Seminar Za Balkanistichni Prouchvanii︠ ︡ a I Spet︠ ︡ sializat︠ ︡ sii Pri I︠ ︡ uzu ‘neofit Rilski’, 331–38, Blagoevgrad: UNESCO. Wachtel, A. (1998), Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Yovanovitch, D. (1930), Les effets économiques et sociaux de la guerre en Serbie, New Haven: Yale University Press. Zavod za statistiku i evidenciju N.R. Srbije, ed. (1953), Stanovništvo Narodne Republike Srbije od 1834–1953, Belgrade: n.p.

Index Action Française 99 Adrianople Treaty 200 Africa British colonialism 18, 28, 39 casualty rates of colonial troops 216 colonial troops deployed in Europe (soldiers’ racist experiences) 213–25 ‘failed states’ in 104 French colonialism 18, 28, 39 resistance to recruitment 220–1 Ahmed, Sara 238 air strikes 255–74 Akif, Mehmet 51 Albert I 2, 159–60, 162, 167 Albertini, Luigi 59 Alexander Obrenović 283, 289, 290 Alfieri, Vittorio 68 Algeria 18, 26, 28, 215–16, 220, 223 Allies 22, 25, 28, 30, 32, 68, 79, 87, 101, 102, 106–7, 109, 110, 188, 189 Amber Declaration 182 Anatolia 19, 24, 41, 48, 50, 53, 104, 105, 108, 179, 181, 190, 200, 202, 203, 205, 206, 208 anthropomorphism 262 anti-war movements 4, 100, 120, 140, 142 Antonelli, Qunito 125 Arab nationalism 28, 106, 109 Arandjelović, Natalija 289, 290 Arneitz, Franz 128 Asia Minor 200 Asia Minor Expedition 204, 207 Askew, Alice and Claude 280 assimilation 1, 8, 53, 78, 80, 138, 146, 179, 187, 188, 189, 201, 205–7, 218, 224, 281, 282 Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal 53, 109 attrition 22, 23, 24, 260 Australia 6, 7, 18, 25–6, 28, 183–4, 185, 191, 213, 214

Austria-Hungary annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina 19, 137, 283 collapse of 25, 116 enemy minorities 29 internment camps 184, 185, 187 minorities 29–30, 57, 63, 65, 66, 68, 84–7, 115, 180–1 nationalization programme 118–20 Serbia’s subservience to 277, 279, 283–4, 285, 286, 287 universal male suffrage 20 autonomy, notions of 20, 25, 65, 68, 83, 84, 86, 98, 102, 110, 120, 122, 129, 135, 139, 165, 179, 182, 187, 188, 189–90, 191, 262, 281–2, 287, 288 Axis powers 31, 50, 206 Baha, Muhyiddin 52 Bais, Livio 125 Balkans, the commemorative practices 148–51 limits of nationalization 135–52 modernity and modernization 139–42 nationalization process 197–209 as non-modern states 102–3 population displacements 145–8 remaking of 25 transnationalism 142–5 Balkan wars 9, 19, 21, 45–6, 48, 52, 102–3, 135–9, 142, 145–6, 149, 151–2, 197, 199–202, 208, 283, 284, 290 Baltic States 31, 192 Banac, Ivo 282 banal nationalism 242 Barbusse, Henri 218–19 Barzilai, Signor 58 Battisti, Cesare 63 Battle of Kosovo 289, 290 Battle of Ypres 221 Bauer, Otto 101, 179

298 Bauman, Zygmunt 235 Bavaria 18, 21, 30 Becker, Jean-Jacques 2, 3, 5 Beirut 246 Belgium anti-state nationalisms 2, 22, 156–7 censorship 159 German occupation 6–7, 25, 155–71, 235 guerrilla war against Germany 22 layered national identities in popular songs 155–71 post-war reconstruction 243, 244, 245 refugees 22, 175 Belgrade bombardment of 278–80, 285–6 de-Ottomanization 280, 281 geographical location 280 post-war reconstruction 287–92 social divisions 282–3 as South Slav state 278, 291–2 urban life 285–7 Belgrade University 233, 285–6 Bencivenga, Roberto 64 Beneš, Edvard 116, 124 Berger, Vojtěch 124 Berlin Congress 137 Berlin Treaty 105, 179 Bertha shells 258, 265 Bessel, Richard 5 Billig, Michael 141, 242 Bismarck, Otto von 18, 24, 81, 82 Black Hand, Serbia 138, 287 black market 5, 271 Bloodlands (Snyder) 238 Blunck, Hans Friedrich 221–2 Bohemia’s Case for Independence (Beneš) 116 Bosnia-Herzegovina 19, 20, 105, 118, 147, 283, 291, 293 Boukabouya, Rabah Abdallah 223 Boysen, Jens 75–90 Brandt, S. 4 Bresciani, Giuseppe 123, 124–5 Brest-Litovsk peace treaties 31 Breton 8 Breuilly, John 9, 97–112, 118 Britain anti-state nationalism 2 civilian refugees flooding 22

Index deployment of colonial troops 214, 215, 222 Enemy Propaganda Agency 32 Home Rule Act 99 Intelligence Bureau 115 as modern nation-state 99–100 naval power 22 overseas empire and national identity 7, 18, 20, 33 post-war ‘reconstruction’ 23 remobilization campaigns 5 War Cabinet 115 wartime mobility (transnational volunteerism) 239, 240 Brusati, Roberto 65–6 Brussels 1, 158, 167, 175 bubonic plague 42 Bucharest Treaty 31 Budinich, Antonio 123 Bulgaria commemorative practices 149, 150 defeat of 137, 140 formation of 19 minorities 179, 190, 198 Mollov-Kafandaris agreement 147 nationalism 33, 102, 136–8, 198–9, 202–3, 206 socialist movements 143 Soldiers’ uprising 4, 144, 145, 147 Burton, Antoinette 238, 243 Čabrinović, Nedeljko 284 Cadorna, Luigi 58, 64, 65, 66, 67 Caglioti, Daniela 180 Cambridge History of the First World War (Winter) 237 Canada 7, 18, 25–6, 28, 184, 213, 214 British rule in 18, 25–6, 28 Capital Cities at War (Robert and Winter) 236 Carnegie Endowment 200, 246 Casement, Roger 27 casualties 22, 100, 186, 216, 257–9, 264, 280, 286 Catalonia 18 Caucasus 29, 31, 50, 52, 108, 186, 187 Cavallero, Ugo 64 censorship 4, 40, 41, 42, 49, 58, 60–1, 65–6, 120, 127, 158, 159, 163, 169, 266

Index Central Europe 2, 17, 18, 19, 28, 29, 30, 75–80, 86, 89, 98, 106, 116, 140, 188, 189, 280, 282 Central Powers 19, 22, 30, 77, 85, 86, 87, 213, 215, 223 Chams 202, 205, 206, 208 Charles I 25 Chechens 6 chetnik movement 137 Chevalier, Louis 256, 262 China 28, 98, 109, 110, 183, 214 Clausewitz, Carl von 77, 89 Clemenceau, Georges 23, 24, 34, 218 Cold War 206–7, 208 Cole, Laurence 9, 101, 111, 112, 115–29, 136, 139 Comintern 26, 206 communism 33, 109, 144, 145, 206–7 concentration camps 6, 184 Congress of Vienna 76, 90 Connolly, James 28 conscription 21, 23, 26, 28, 65, 103, 105, 119, 123, 142, 147, 180, 183, 215–16, 220, 242–3 conservatism 100 Constantinople 40, 181, 246 Constantinos 203 Cornwall, Mark 31, 121, 126–7, 129 Côte d’Azur 219 Courland 31 Cousturier, Lucie 219 Crang, Michael 239 Crimean War 42 Čubrilović, Vasa 281, 282, 285, 287 cultural autonomy 98, 102, 191 cultural production 49, 79, 157, 263 cultures of war 4 Czechoslovakia/Czechs in exile 6, 7 mass expulsions of 189 mobilization of soldiers 2, 7–8, 65, 68–9, 123–4, 127, 239 nationalism 101, 103, 108, 116, 118, 121 national minorities 20, 29, 31, 66, 67–8, 78, 101, 180, 181, 185 war memorials 8 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 245 de Certeau, Michel 239 democracy 5, 19, 20, 24, 29, 77–8

299

de Rossi, Eugenio 63 Deruytter, Barbara 9, 155–71 Diagne, Blaise 221 Diallo, Bakary 223 diaries 4, 85, 124, 125, 157, 223, 224, 278, 280, 287, 288, 290, 291 Dimitrova, Snezhana 4 distrust 6, 8, 206 Dmowski, Roman 30, 84, 88 Dmyterko, Hanna 122 Dowdall, Alex 240 Downer, Earl Bishop 278, 279 Dreyfus Affair 23 Dual Monarchy 5, 19, 20, 21, 25, 29, 31, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 287 East Africa 98, 223 Eastern Europe 2, 18, 19, 30, 33, 75, 188, 189, 245, 281 Easter Uprising 7 Ebert, Friedrich 107 Egypt 19, 26, 28, 52, 109, 110, 214 Ehrenpreis, Petronilla 120 Eiffel Tower 266, 269 Einem, Carl von 223 Elisabeth, Empress-Queen 119 English Channel 18 Enver Pasha 48–9, 51 Estonia 31, 191 Ethiopia 217 Eurocentrism 238 Europe, map of 1919 7–8 European Economic Community 18 Evain, Emmanuel 270 family, importance of 4–5 ‘fatherland,’ notions of 1–10 local vs. imperial patriotism 26–33 patriotism and the ‘enemy within’ 17–33 pre-war notions 17–21 wartime notions 21–6 federalism 98, 292 feminism/feminist movements 19, 100, 143, 144–5 Ferdinand, Franz 20–1, 120, 236, 286, 289 Fiji Islands 214 Finzi, Cesare 67 ‘Flemish Lion, The’ 158, 162, 164, 166–8

300 food rationing 260 food supply 6, 67, 129, 220 Fourteen Points 25, 116 Fraccaroli, Arnaldo 59 France bombing of Paris (urban experiences) 255–74 cultural productions 263 deployment of African colonial troops 213–15 German POWs in 6 local/national identity 261–3 mobilization campaigns 262, 265–6 as modern nation-state 99–100 notion of ‘fatherland’ before 1914 18 overseas empire and national identity 18, 33, 213–25 post-war reconstruction 243–4, 245, 266–71 press campaigns 217–18 refugees 22 trade unions 219 wartime casualties 263–5, 270 wartime nationalism 23 wartime patriotism 23, 24 Freeden, Michael 100 French Revolution 18, 23, 24 Friedrich Wilhelm III 80 Frolov, V. I. 191 Front propaganda 30–1 Galicia 22, 29, 63, 83, 87, 121, 123, 125, 128, 147, 182, 185, 187, 188, 192 Gallieni, Joseph 256–7 Gallipoli 28 Gallipoli Battle 48, 49, 50, 181 Garašanin, Ilija 282, 283 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 123, 239 Garruccio, Giovanni 64, 66 Gatrell, Peter 10, 103, 146, 177–93 Gellner, Ernst 1, 141 German Socialist Party 99, 100 Germany and Arab world 27, 28–9 bombing of Paris 255–74 colonial troops 217–24 Fatherland Party 24 Foreign Office 222 and Islam 27, 28–9 minority patriotism/nationalism 29

Index mobilization against the ‘enemy within’ 5, 26–7 as modern nation-state 99–100 Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL) 27, 31–2 overseas empire 18–19, 25 POWs in 6 Prussia influenced by 79–84 unification of 18, 80 war propaganda 222–4 wartime nationalism/patriotism 23–4, 28–9 Giacomolli, Giacinto 125 Gillis, J. 151 globalization 236, 238, 240 Gökalp, Ziya 46–7, 49–50, 52 Gonatas, Stylianos 199 good governance 5 Gothas 257, 258, 259, 264, 265 Grayzel, Susan 261 Greece and the Balkan wars 137, 138, 146 formation of nation-state 19, 198 minorities and refugees 190–1, 200–8 nationalization process 197–209 Greek-Turkish War 7–8, 111, 135, 197 green politics 100 Guadeloupe 215 Guayana 215 Gumz, Jonathan 287 habeas corpus 180 Habsburg Empire bombardment of Belgrade 278–80, 285–7 collapse of 116, 129 deported minorities 186–7 dissident nationalities 7, 20, 25 Military General Government (MGG) policies 288–90 minorities 178, 180 as modern multinational state 100–2, 118–19 nationalization process/policies 115–29, 139 pre-war landscape 118–19 reactions to outbreak of war 119–26 refugee population 186–91 urban battlefields 236 wartime loyalty 241–2 Hague Convention 143, 277

Index hajj pilgrimage 28 Halifax explosion 246 Hamburg 18 Hanák, Péter 127 Herzog, V. 223 Hirschfeld, Gerhard 119 Hirschman, Albert 179 Holy Roman Empire, fall of 18 Horne, John 9, 17–33, 241, 243 Hroch, Miroslav 43–5, 106 Huss, M.-M. 4 Ignjatović, Aleksandar 292 Ilinden uprising 199, 206, 208 India 18, 20, 26, 27, 28, 34, 42, 52, 110, 213, 214, 215, 221–2 Indochina 110, 215 internationalism 143, 144, 145, 219 International Women’s Suffrage Alliance 143, 144 internment 128, 178, 180, 183–6, 288 Ireland 2, 7, 18, 23, 27–8, 33, 99, 188 Istanbul Phone Company 43 Italian Press Association 58 Italy censorship 60–2, 65–6 deployment of African colonial troops 215 formation of nation-state 18 media propaganda 57–69 national strategy 23, 63–9 unification of 18, 19, 23 wartime nationalism and patriotism 23–4, 242 Japan 33, 84, 183, 185 Jászi, Oscar 116–17 Jews 6, 25, 26, 29, 33, 41, 150, 179, 180, 181, 182, 185–9, 192–3, 199, 202, 203, 205, 207, 208, 246 jihad 27, 28, 29, 51, 52, 53, 105, 108 Joseph, Francis 66 Joseph, Franz 122, 127 Jovanović, Miloš 281 Judson, Pieter 117 Julien, Élise 10, 255–74 July Crisis 21 Karadjordjević dynasty 277, 283–4, 286, 288, 289–92 Karl, Emperor 120, 127

301

Karnoouh, Claude 150 Kemal, Mustafa 53, 109 Kerensky, Alexander 24, 30 Kern, Stephen 237 Khan, Oguz 52 Khuen-Héderváry, Count 115 King, Jeremy 117 Kishinev pogroms 178 Klabjan, Borut 115, 120 Knežević, Jovana 10, 277–93 Koller, Christian 10, 213–25 Köroğlu, Erol 9, 39–54 Korošec, Anton 129 Kosciuszko, Tadeusz 88 Koselleck, Reinhart 261 Kosovo 200 Kosovo myth 283–4, 291 Koutsovlachoi 202, 205–6 Kučera, Rudolf 123–4 Kuhr, Elfriede ‘Piete’ (Jo Mihaly) 224 Kuncz, Aladar 184 Lausanne Treaty 10, 111, 177, 190, 197, 205, 207 Lavisse, Ernest 266 Lawrence, T. E. 28 League of Nations 25, 33, 34, 106, 107, 144, 177, 178, 187, 189, 191, 208 Lein, Richard 124 Lenin, Vladimir 30, 99, 109, 110, 190 liberalism 82, 100, 198 Lichtenstädter, Siegfried 190 Lithuania 31, 84, 180, 182, 186, 187, 239 living conditions 22, 260, 273 Lloyd George, David 23, 89 Lošinj, Mali 123 Lunn, Joe Harris 216 Lutaud, Charles 220 Macedonia 19, 22, 31, 137–8, 147, 150, 190, 198, 199, 200, 202–3, 205, 206–7, 208, 292 Madagascar 215, 216 Mair, Lucy 189 Malvy, Louis 261 Mandel’shtam, Andrei 179 Mangin, Charles 218, 220 Marchetti, Tullio 65–7, 68 Mariot, Nicolas 4 Martinique 215 Marxism 99, 101

302

Index

Mauritius 214 Mauss, Marcel 24 Mayr, Erich 125 Mazzini, Giuseppe 57 Mecca 28 Mehmet V 27 memoirs 63, 66, 70, 123, 128, 278, 279–80, 283, 286–7, 291, 292 memorials 8, 75, 84, 88, 149, 151, 225, 270, 289, 290, 292 Mercier, Désiré-Joseph 25 Mesopotamia 28, 98 Meštrović, Ivan 284, 292 Metaxa 206 Middle Ages 79 Middle East 17, 19, 22, 25, 28, 97, 98, 104, 106, 189 Milan Obrenović 290 modern multinational states 97, 100–2, 107, 110, 118, 119 modern nation-states 10, 39, 97, 99–100, 101, 103, 107, 110, 197 Moll, Martin 128 Mondini, Marco 9, 57–70 Montandon, George 190 Morocco 213, 215, 216, 218 motivational vs. structural nationalism 99, 100, 101 Mudros Armistice 50, 54 Mychailyshyn, Pavlyna 120 Napoleon 18, 162 Napoleonic Wars 80 national indifference 101, 117, 157 nationalism definitions 98, 100 forms of 97, 99–110, 111 ideologies 100, 141 motivational vs. structural 99–100 vs. patriotism 242 politics of identity 151 war and 116 nationalism studies 116 national loyalty 6, 9, 82, 97, 118–19, 158, 162, 166, 168 National Schism 203, 204 national self-determination (NSD) 17, 25, 29, 31, 98, 102, 106, 107–10 Naumann, Friedrich 86 Neuilly Treaty 200 New Europe periodical 31

Newman, John-Paul 138 New Zealand 18, 214 Nicolson, Harold 188 Nikolaevich, Nikolai 29 non-modern multinational states 97, 102, 104–6, 108, 110 non-modern nation-states 97, 102–3, 110 North Africa 28, 216, 220, 223 Northcliffe, Lord 32 Novaković, Stojan 282 Ojetti, Ugo 67, 68 Oppenheim, Max von 27 Ottoman Empire Arab Revolt against 25 Armenian genocide 6, 19 defeat and decline of 19, 20–1, 25, 138–9 deported minorities 183–6, 187 economy 41–2 failed propaganda efforts 39–43 formation of national identity 43–5 invasion of Serbia 283 jihad propaganda 50–2 media strategy 45, 49–52 minorities 178, 180–3 ‘ten year war’ concept 45–50 Young Turk revolution, 1908 19, 20, 24 Pacific islands 215 Paderewski, Ignacy 88 Padua Commission 31, 126 Palestine 25, 28, 191 Pan-German League 23, 99, 100, 112 pan-Islamism 51, 53, 105, 183 Patriotism and Endurance (Mercier) 25 Peter I 283 Peter Karadjordjević 277, 290 Petrović, Živan 280 philanthropic networks 198, 244, 245 Pig War 283 Piłsudski, Józef 30, 84, 88, 123 Pivko, Ljudevit 68 Poland Congress 83–7 creation of 25 German control over 25, 29–30 Haller’s army 31 independence 188, 192 interned minorities 6 minorities 25, 29–30, 78, 189

Index Prussian 81, 87–8 refugees 22 war memorials 8 Polish Minority Treaty 178, 188–9 Pompermaier, Pietro 125 Ponty, William 219–20 popular nationalism 8, 97–112, 129 populism 20, 77 Porro, Carlo 64, 66 Poulbot, Francisque 264, 265, 274 prostitution 6 Prussia and Central Europe, pre-war landscape 75–9 German influences 79–84 Prussian Poles’ loyalty 81–2, 84–7 Prussian Poles’ separatist views 87–8 psychological warfare 5, 30–1, 63, 137, 257 Purseigle, Pierre 10, 235–46 Quercioli, Alessio 123 Rachamimov, Iris 126 Radenković, Mara 278–9, 280, 288, 291 Radić, Stjepan 292 Radice, Giuseppe Lombardo 60 realpolitik 29 Red Cross 4, 85, 191, 278, 279 Reed, John 279, 286 Reich, The 19, 24, 78–9, 82, 83, 85, 86 Reill, Dominique 245 Reiter, Christian 124 Renner, Karl 101, 179, 213–14 Réunion 215 Riotor, Léon 268 Risorgimento 23, 57, 239 Robert, Jean-Louis 236 Romania 19 and the Balkan wars 137, 138, 146, 147, 149, 150 commemorative practices 149 minorities 179, 189 nationalism 101, 103, 118, 146–7, 150 national-unification agenda 137 pre-war instability 180 Romanov Empire 19, 20, 104, 106, 107, 112 Rome 31, 64, 112, 284 Rome Exposition 284

303

Rome Pact 68 Russia Bolshevik 31 collapse of 20, 31, 51, 77 minorities and refugees 6, 20, 105, 178–9, 181, 185–8, 190, 198 mobilization 5, 26, 122, 182–3 nationalism 20, 83, 85–7, 101–2, 137 naval units 278 October Revolution 144 POWs 6, 7, 126 pre-war landscape 17–18, 178–80 Romanov dynasty 19 wartime patriotism 20, 24–5, 26, 242 Russian Revolution 20, 24, 26, 30, 33, 50, 83, 84, 124, 127 Salandra, Antonio 57 Salonica fire 246 Salvanou, Emilia 10, 197–209 Sanborn, Joshua 24 Saxony 18 Schlieffen Plan 85, 86 Séché, Alphonse 217 Senegal 215, 216, 217, 219, 221–2, 223 separatism 25, 41, 45, 78, 83, 87–8, 198, 206 Serbia and Austria-Hungary 283 and the Balkan wars 137, 138, 143, 146 defeat of 30 July Crisis 21 nationalization of Belgrade 277–93 national-unification agenda 137 post-war reconstruction 287–91 refugees 22 as South Slav state 291–2 Serbophilia 128 Seton-Watson, Robert 31, 115, 116 Sèvres Treaty 204 Singapore 28 Sluga, Glenda 143 Snyder, Tim 238 socialism/socialist movements 33, 100, 144–5 Somalia 217 Somali coast 215 Songbook of the Belgian Soldier 155, 158, 163–6, 167, 168

304 Sonnino, Sidney 57, 66, 69 South Africa 18, 28, 214 Southeast Asia 18 Southeastern Europe 9, 19, 20, 116, 135–52, 197 South Slav question 115 Soviet Union communism 33 dissolution of 144, 235 minority policies 178, 187, 189–90 multinationalism 106 nationalism 110 space vs. place 239 Spain 18 Spanish Flu 270 spatial metaphors 238–9 Stalin, Joseph 110, 190 Stanojević, Djordje 285, 286 Stavrianos, Lefter 198 Steed, Henry Wickham 31 stigmatization 6 Stojanović, Dubravka 283 Strachan, Hew 237 structural nationalism 99–100, 101, 107 structural patriotism 119, 136 Stürgkh, Count Karl 127 submarine warfare 22, 27 Sükrü, Mehmed 177 Tevfik, Mehmet Ali 46, 47–8 Thorpe, Julie 187 Thrace 19, 137, 147, 190, 199, 200, 204, 205, 207, 208 Thrift, Nigel 239 Times newspaper 31 total war 2, 3, 5, 66, 76, 157, 191, 237 trade unions 19, 219 Triple Alliance 58 Tunisia 215, 216 Turkey 19 Muslim and Turkic peoples 50–2 ‘ten year war’ concept 45–50 War of Independence 204 war propaganda 39–54 Überegger, Oswald 128 Ukraine 29, 31, 182 United Nations Security Council 17

Index Universal Declaration of Human Rights 17 United States colonial soldiers in 214 diplomacy 117 emigrant communities 27, 189, 191, 239 entry into the war 3, 25, 98 expropriation 183–4 National Civil Liberties Bureau 191 and ‘Polish question’ 87–8 post-war recovery of urban settlements 246 wartime mobility (transnational volunteerism) 239 universal male suffrage 18–19, 20, 24, 118, 119 Unknown Soldier monument 8, 149–50, 292 urban experience of the war (global scale) 235–46 centennial commemorations 235, 236 geographical context 238–40 mobilization practices 240–3 post-war reconstruction and replacement 243–5 urban typology 246–7 urbanization 97, 140, 235, 236, 238, 240, 281–3 Vajfert, Djordje 282 Valiani, Leo 116–17 Van Ginderachter, Maarten 157, 162–3 van Ypersele, Laurence 1–11 Venizelos, Eleftherios 190, 201, 202, 203, 204 Versailles Peace Treaty 7, 17, 34, 106, 107, 188, 268 Vienna 20, 21, 43, 76, 84, 90, 105, 117, 118–19, 120, 126, 198, 284 bread queue, 1915 95 Vlachs (Koutsovlachoi) 202, 205–6, 208 Volk, the 140 Vollenhoven, Joost van 220–1 von Hindenburg, Paul 51 von Hötzendorf, Graf 283 Vrints, Antoon 157 Vukov, Nikolai 102–3, 135–52

Index war as a birth moment 155 cost of 22 as instrument of policy 236 and nationalism 116 war crimes 22, 76 war factories 23 Weber, Eugen 1, 99 Weber, Max 76, 81, 99, 222 Weifert, Georg 282 West Africa 215–25 Western Europe 18, 86, 142, 198, 235, 241, 243, 244 Western materialism 76 West Indies 214 Wilhelm, Kaiser 27 William, Hadji 51 Wilson, Woodrow 29, 34, 69, 102, 106, 109, 110, 116

305

Wilson Doctrine 106 Wilsonian moment 7, 17, 29 Winter, Jay 157, 169, 236, 237 Wouters, Nico 1–11 xenophobia 120 Yalman, Ahmed Emin 40, 54 Yemen 54, 217 Yiddish 180 Young Turk revolution 19–20, 24, 26, 104, 187, 199 Yugoslavia 33, 104, 106, 108, 116, 150, 206, 292 Zach, František 282 Zahra, Tara 1, 2, 117 Zahradnik, Mgr. 115 Zeppelin raids 257–9, 261, 264, 265