Philanthropy, Conflict Management and International Law: The 1914 Carnegie Report on the Balkan Wars of 1912/13 9789633864241

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Philanthropy, Conflict Management, and International Law

Leipzig Studies on the History and Culture of East Central Europe Volume 7 Series editors: Maren Röger and Stefan Troebst Published in the Series: Alfrun Kliems, Underground Modernity: Urban Poetics in East-Central Europe, Pre- and Post-1989 (2021) Oksana Myshlovska and Ulrich Schmid, eds., Regionalism without Regions: Reconceptualizing Ukraine’s Heterogeneity (2019) Hannes Siegrist and Augusta Dimou, eds., Expanding Intellectual Property: Copyrights and Patents in Twentieth-Century Europe and Beyond (2017) Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotr Piotrowski, eds., Art beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945–1989) (2016) Agnieszka Halemba, Negotiating Marian Apparitions: The Politics of Religion in Transcarpathian Ukraine (2015) Maria Todorova, Augusta Dimou, and Stefan Troebst, eds., Remembering Communism: Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in Southeast Europe (2014)

Philanthropy, Conflict Management, and International Law The 1914 Carnegie Report on the Balkan Wars of 1912/1913

Edited by

Dietmar Müller and Stefan Troebst

Central European University Press Budapest–Vienna–New York

Copyright © by Dietmar Müller and Stefan Troebst 2022 Published in 2022 by Central European University Press Nádor utca 11, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary Tel: +36-1-327-3138 or 327-3000 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.ceupress.com 224 West 57th Street, New York NY 10019, USA All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher. ISBN 978-963-386-423-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-963-386-424-1 (ebook) ISSN 2416-1160

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Müller, Dietmar, 1969- editor. | Troebst, Stefan, editor. Title: Philanthropy, conflict management, and international law : the 1914 Carnegie report on the Balkan wars of 1912/1913 / edited by Dietmar Müller, and Stefan Troebst. Other titles: 1914 Carnegie report on the Balkan wars of 1912/1913 Description: Budapest ; New York : Central European University Press, 2022. | Series: Leipzig studies on the history and culture of East Central Europe, 2416-1160 ; vol. 7 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021039217 (print) | LCCN 2021039218 (ebook) | ISBN 9789633864234 (hardback) | ISBN 9789633864241 (adobe pdf) Subjects: LCSH: International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars. Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan wars. | International commission to inquire into the causes and conduct of the Balkan wars--History. | Balkan Peninsula--History--War of 1912-1913. | Balkan Peninsula--History--War of 1912-1913--Historiography. Classification: LCC DR46 .P45 2022 (print) | LCC DR46 (ebook) | DDC 949.6/039--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039217 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039218

Table of Contents

List of Acronyms Introduction The Balkan Wars and the Carnegie Report: Historiography and Significance for International Law; An Introduction Dietmar Müller Part One: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Philanthropy and Internationalism in the Twentieth Century 1. International Law and Conciliation under Pressure: Political Profiles of the Carnegie Men behind the Balkan Report c. 1910–1919 Helke Rausch 2. “The International Law of the Future”: The Carnegie Endowment and the Sovereign Limits of International Jurisdiction, 1910s–1960s Isabella Löhr 3. Shaping International Minds: Education for Peace and International Cooperation after the Great War in the United States Katja Castryck-Naumann

vii 1

25

27

61

93

Part Two: Biographical Approaches: The Commission

117

4. The Balkan Carnegie Commission of 1913: Origins and Features Nadine Akhund-Lange

119

5. Macedonia as a Lifelong Topic: Henry Noël Brailsford Stefan Troebst

155

vi

Contents

6. History and Politics: Macedonia in the Assessment of Pavel N. Milyukov Thomas M. Bohn Part Three: The Carnegie Commission on the Spot and its Legacies 7. The 1913 Carnegie Commission of Inquiry: Background, FactFinding, and International Reactions Ivan Ilčev 8. Doomed to Fail: The Carnegie Commission in Greece Adamantios Theodor Skordos

167

185

187

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9. The Carnegie Commission Reports and Serbia: Balkan Wars and their Legacies Stefan Djordjević

235

10. The Balkan Wars in Memory: The Carnegie Report and Trotsky’s War Correspondence Maria Todorova

275

List of Contributors

301

Index

303

List of Acronyms

AAIC: ACEIP: AHA: AMAE:

American Association for Conciliation Archives of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace American Historical Association Archive diplomatique du Ministère des Affaires étrangères, France Arch. Dept. Le Mans: Archives Départmentales, Le Mans, Sarthe, France CC: Contemporary Civilization CDIA: Centralen Dăržaven Istoričeski Arhiv (Central State Historical Archive), Sofia, Bulgaria CEIP: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace CEST: Committee on Education and Special Training FRUS: Foreign Relations of the United States HHStA, PA: Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Politisches Archiv, Austria ICTY: International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia LEP: League to Enforce Peace NBHS: National Board for Historical Service NGO: Non-governmental Organization POW: Prisoners of War SANU: Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts SATC: Student Army Training Corps UNESCO: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization UNWCC: United Nations War Crime Commission

Introduction The Balkan Wars and the Carnegie Report: Historiography and Significance for International Law; An Introduction Dietmar Müller

In the early 1990s, as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was marking the eightieth anniversary of the publication of its Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars,1 Yugoslavia was being torn apart by war and the media was once again covering the “Balkan Wars.”2 The Carnegie Endowment decided to respond with a reprint of the historic Carnegie Report with an introduction by George F. Kennan, published under the eye-catching title The Other Balkan Wars.3 For better or worse, this suggested that the Yugoslav wars of secession amounted to another all-Balkan war decades after the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. In the preface, Morton Abramowitz, then the president of the Carnegie Endowment, wrote:

* I am indebted to Cindy Daase, Isabella Löhr, Helke Rausch, Adamantios Skordos, and Stefan Troebst for their many inspirational and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Nevertheless, responsibility for this article is borne solely by the author. Also, I would like to thank Merve Neziroğlu for her manifold help in turning our manuscript into the present book, especially with the indexes. 1 Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Division of Intercourse and Education, no. 4 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914). 2 Of the abundant relevant literature produced in the 1990s, Robert Kaplan’s book was probably the most influential. See Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New York: Macmillan, 1993). For a review of this update, see Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 3 The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George Kennan (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1993).

2

Introduction In November 1992, I read a “Letter from Bosnia” in the New Yorker magazine, which chronicled the horrors of Serbian “ethnic cleansing.” The article led off with a quotation from a report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released in 1914 on this century’s first Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913. I knew about the report but had never read it.4

At first sight Abramowitz’s remark looked like an admission that the Carnegie Endowment had a very poor institutional memory, but there was actually far more to it than that. It also demonstrated the limited attention the report received upon its publication in the spring of 1914. At that time, the July Crisis on the eve of the First World War presumably overshadowed both the report and the Balkan Wars themselves. Above all, Abramowitz’s statement signaled a veritable research desideratum, for historians have neither subjected the Carnegie Report to in-depth source criticism nor contextualized it politically or institutionally, and its impact on the development of international law has not been interrogated in detail either. Previously, the Carnegie Report has been discussed by three mostly unrelated strands of scholarship.5 The first is the regional studies approach taken by historians of Southeast Europe, which is primarily interested in the report as a historical source for the Balkan Wars.6 These military conflicts were of paramount importance to Southeast Europe because they led to the Ottoman Empire’s almost complete withdrawal from the continent and the start of extensive territorial expansion by the Balkan nation-states. The second group to reference the Carnegie Report are scholars writing new histories of military conflict and violence in the Balkan Wars who focus primarily on the question of whether the particular manner of warfare and ethnic policies such as the “people’s war” and “ethnic cleansing” that became infamous at that time are really specific to the Balkans or can be ascribed to some form of “European normality” yet to be

4

Morton Abramowitz, “Preface,” in The Other Balkan Wars, 1. Andrea Despot’s decision to totally ignore the Carnegie Commission on the Balkan Wars in her otherwise excellent and pertinent analysis is difficult to understand. See Andrea Despot, Amerikas Weg auf den Balkan: Zur Genese der Beziehungen zwischen den USA und Südosteuropa 1820–1920 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010). 6 See Katrin Boeckh, Von den Balkankriegen zum Ersten Weltkrieg: Kleinstaatenpolitik und ethnische Selbstbestimmung auf dem Balkan (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1996); Richard C. Hall, The Balkan Wars 1912–1913: Prelude to the First World War (New York: Routledge, 2000); Marco Sigg, “Die Balkankriege 1912/13: Bulgarische Kriegsvölkerrechtsverletzungen im Spiegel der europäischen Kriegsberichterstattung und des Carnegie-Berichts,” in Am Rande Europas? Der Balkan– Raum und Bevölkerung als Wirkungsfelder militärischer Gewalt, ed. Bernhard Chiari and Gerhard Paul Groß (Munich: De Gruyter, 2009), 105–19. 5

Introduction

3

defined.7 The third thread of scholarship owes much to “new international history,” an approach that investigates American institutions (such as the Carnegie Endowment) as actors in a broad network of international relations.8 Yet despite the work of these scholars, it is clear from Abramowitz’s above-quoted admission, that the Carnegie Report on the Balkan Wars has received negligible attention in the history of the Carnegie Endowment, a surprising fact given that the creation of the report was one of its first international activities.9 The essays in this collection attempt to fill this research gap, and came out of a workshop hosted by the Leipzig Centre for the History and Culture of East Central Europe (GWZO) in July 2013.10 However, this book is only the start of an integrated research perspective regarding the Carnegie Report. After briefly placing the Balkan Wars in their historical context, this article will reconstruct the composition and work of the Carnegie Balkan Commission based largely on previous prosopographical 7

Wolfgang Höpken, “Archaische Gewalt oder Vorboten des ‘totalen Krieges’? Die Balkankriege 1912/13 in der europäischen Kriegsgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Schnittstellen: Gesellschaft, Nation, Konflikt und Erinnerung in Südosteuropa; Festschrift für Holm Sundhaussen zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Ulf Brunnbauer, Andreas Helmedach, and Stefan Troebst (Munich: De Gruyter, 2007), 245–60; Holm Sundhaussen, “Wie ‘balkanisch’ waren die ‘Balkankriege’ des 20. Jahrhunderts?,” Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte 13 (2012): 3–24. For a longer perspective on the Balkan Wars and the history of violence in the region, see Wolfgang Höpken, “Gewalt auf dem Balkan—Erklärungsversuche zwischen ‘Struktur’ und ‘Kultur’,” in Politische und ethnische Gewalt in Südosteuropa und Lateinamerika, ed. Wolfgang Höpken and Michael Riekenberg (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Bӧhlau Verlag, 2001), 53–95; Dietmar Müller, “Das ‘lange 20. Jahrhundert’ der ‘ethnischen Säuberungen’ in Südosteuropa,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte und Kultur Südosteuropas 7 (2005): 33–52. 8 Volker R. Berghahn, “Philanthropy and Diplomacy in the ‘American Century’,” Diplomatic History 23 (1999): 393–419; Helke Rausch, “Professionalisierung als diplomatische Strategie: Das US-amerikanische Carnegie Endowment in Europa vor 1945,” in Kultur und Beruf in Europa, ed. Isabella Löhr, Matthias Middell, and Hannes Siegrist (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012), 217–26; Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 9 Michael Lutzker, “The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: A Study of the Establishment-centered Peace Movement, 1910–1914,” in Building the Organizational Society: Essays on Associational Activities in Modern America, ed. Jerry Israel (New York: The Free Press, 1972), 143–62. 10 See also the conference report by Arno Trültzsch, “100 Years On: The Carnegie Report in the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars of 1912/13,” H-Soz-Kult, April 9, 2013, http://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-4998.

4

Introduction

and institutional historical work by French historian Nadine Akhund. It assesses the genesis and character of the Carnegie Report on the basis of Akhund’s findings and the work presented in this issue, in which Thomas Bohn and Stefan Troebst focus on the main members of the Carnegie Balkan Commission, while Adamantios Skordos, Stefan Djordjević, and Ivan Ilčev examine the commission’s work in Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria. This article will also situate the Carnegie Report within the intellectual and institutional development of the Carnegie Endowment from its inception to the foundation of the League of Nations in 1920, aided by research conducted by Helke Rausch, Isabella Löhr, and Katja Castryck-Naumann later in this volume. Finally, this introduction will present new research perspectives (particularly from international history) that address aspects of international law in the Carnegie Report. This attempt to historicize international law owes much to careful conceptualizations of memory, such as Maria Todorova’s in this volume. Combined, these approaches and findings paint a picture of the Carnegie Report that goes far beyond the hitherto predominant interpretation of it as a mere documentation of ethnic cleansing. First of all, the report points to future political developments in the region. Given the similarities of the problems that ensued from the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire’s large-scale retreat in the wake of the Balkan Wars and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and German Empires after the First World War, the authors of the Carnegie Report appear to have anticipated discussions at the Paris Peace Conference about the right of nations to self-determination, the rise of the nation-state, and minority rights and their institutionalization. The Carnegie Report and Balkan Wars were themselves dramatic watersheds in the ongoing juridification of international relations through the robust institutionalization of international law. The Carnegie Report documents the dashing of hopes for a peaceful solution to bilateral conflicts by way of arbitration and by the impact of the Hague Convention on Land Warfare. The collapse of this central aspiration of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace accelerated liberal-internationalist protagonists’ development of a strong, institutionalized system of international law within the framework of the League of Nations.

The historical position of the Balkan Wars In the military history of Southeast Europe in the “long nineteenth century,” the Balkan Wars were characterized by the interaction of two elements: the participation of all the existing nation-states in the struggle against the Ottoman Empire, and the formation of political and military

Introduction

5

coalitions under the slogan “The Balkans to the Balkan peoples!” largely independently of the influence of European powers.11 These factors distinguish the Balkan Wars from the earlier, isolated Serbian (1804–13, 1815, 1876), Greek (1821–29, 1897), and Montenegrin (1852–62) rebellions and wars of liberation against the Ottoman Empire, as well as from the conflict that began in 1877 as the Russo-Turkish War, later joined by Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Romania, and finally settled by the European great powers at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. The Second Balkan War of 1913, in which Bulgaria warred against its former allies Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, and the Ottoman Empire, was reminiscent of the Bulgarian-Serbian conflict over disputed territories between the new states of Southeast Europe in 1885.12 The Balkan Wars thus marked a perspectival shift for the new Balkan states away from the old enemy—the disintegrating Ottoman Empire—toward rivalries among the Balkan peoples. In terms of its diplomatic and political history, the two main subjects of note in the Balkan Wars were the agreement reached at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and the Macedonian Question (Macedonia being the region most affected by the conflict).13 The situation came to a head in July 1908, when the autocratic Sultan Abdulhamid II was overthrown by the Young Turk movement organized by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). On October 5, Bulgaria proclaimed its independence, and Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina the very next day. The Young Turks, whose power and organizational base was in the European part of the Ottoman Empire, especially Macedonian Thessa-

11

See in the following Stefan Troebst, “Politische Entwicklung in der Neuzeit,” in Südosteuropa: Gesellschaft, Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur; Ein Handbuch, ed. Magarditsch Hatschikjan and Stefan Troebst (Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1999), 73–109; Konrad Clewing, “Staatensystem und innerstaatliches Agieren im multiethnischen Raum: Südosteuropa im langen 19. Jahrhundert,” in Geschichte Südosteuropas: Vom frühen Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Konrad Clewing and Oliver Jens Schmitt (Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2011), 432–553. See also André Gerolymatos, The Balkan Wars: Conquest, Revolution and Retribution from the Ottoman Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 12 See Sundhaussen, “Wie ‘balkanisch’ waren die ‘Balkankriege’,” 4–6. 13 Heinz Willemsen characterized the situation as follows: “The Macedonian question arose in the mid-nineteenth century as a result of European expansion into the Ottoman Empire and nation-building in the Balkans reflecting the intense rivalry between Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece over the central Balkan region of Macedonia.” Heinz Willemsen, “Makedonische Frage,” in Lexikon zur Geschichte Südosteuropas, ed. Edgar Hösch, Karl Nehring, and Holm Sundhaussen (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Bӧhlau Verlag, 2004), 427.

6

Introduction

loniki,14 aimed to resurrect wide-ranging attempts at modernization that had been made in the Tanzimat period, which had been obliterated by national bankruptcy in 1875 and the Great Eastern Crisis of 1875–78. A generation later, the efforts of the Young Turks in power from 1908 to 1912, including the Tanzimat supporters, ultimately led to a disastrous Balkan War. The war of 1877–78 initially ended in the Treaty of San Stefano, under which the Ottoman Empire ceded its Balkan possessions, apart from Albania and parts of Thrace, to Bulgaria, which was supported by the Russian Empire. Great Britain, the Habsburgs, and the German Reich mobilized substantial resistance to the tsarist empire’s attempt to bring the Balkans into its sphere of influence, allowing the Ottoman Empire to retain Macedonia to stimy the further growth of Russian power in the region. Meanwhile the Habsburgs occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina, which by 1908 had been annexed and fully integrated into the Habsburg Monarchy. The three remaining Vilayets of Macedonia in the Ottoman Empire (Kosovo, Monastir, and Thessaloniki) became the crux of the Eastern Question in its final phase.15 Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria had all claimed lands and their inhabitants there since the 1870s, with the externally supported political and cultural groups in Macedonia entering into various, changing coalitions, including with the Young Turks. Alongside Kosovo, Thrace, Epirus, and South Dobruja, Macedonia emerged as a region that was subject to territorial claims before and during the Balkan Wars, not just by the Ottoman Empire but by all the states in the Balkans. In October 1912, Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia declared war on the Ottoman Empire,16 having previously joined forces in a military alliance based on several bilateral treaties. Earlier in March 1912, Bulgaria and Serbia had signed a treaty of alliance and friendship and secretly divided the European territories of the Ottoman Empire between themselves, after which Greece and Montenegro joined the military alliance. In May 1912, Greece and Bulgaria concluded a “defense agreement” that, despite its 14

Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950 (New York: Vintage, 2006), 238–71; Stefan Troebst, “Sehnsuchtsort Saloniki,” in Erinnerungskultur – Kulturgeschichte – Geschichtsregion: Ostmitteleuropa in Europa, ed. Stefan Troebst (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2013), 53–60. 15 Fikret Adanɩr, Die Makedonische Frage: Ihre Entstehung und Entwicklung bis 1908 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1979); Mehmet Hacɩsalihoğlu, Die Jungtürken und die Mazedonische Frage (1890–1918) (Munich: De Gruyter, 2003). 16 See Boeckh, Von den Balkankriegen zum Ersten Weltkrieg, 23–92, Clewing, “Staatensystem und innerstaatliches Agieren,” 485, 490. Regarding the military dimension of the Balkan Wars, see the essays in the section “Armed forces and military operations,” in East Central European Society and the Balkan Wars, ed. Bela K. Király and Dimitrije Djordjevic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

Introduction

7

name, paved the way for a joint attack on the Ottoman Empire. The system of alliances expanded further when Montenegro signed agreements first with Bulgaria in August 1912 and then with Serbia, two months later. The troops of the four allied Balkan states very successfully advanced on the Ottoman army in the First Balkan War and finally drove it out of Southeast Europe. The Second Balkan War was fought over the allies’ division of the conquered territories. In June 1913, Greece and Serbia signed a treaty on the division of the Macedonian territories that was very unfavorable to Bulgaria. Sofia responded by declaring war on its former allies but was quickly defeated, partly because Romania and the Ottoman Empire had entered the war. Accordingly, Greece and Serbia divided most of the central Balkan region of Macedonia between themselves and emerged as the biggest winners of the two Balkan Wars. In the wake of the 100th anniversary of the Balkan Wars, international historiography has produced an impressive number of publications that have significantly deepened our knowledge on several issues of diplomatic and military history.17 Although the details gathered in this classic field of historiography have not led to major revisions in the factual history of the Balkan Wars, new insights have emerged on liberal internationalists and international law in the Balkans, a focus of the present volume. Most importantly, we now have more precise knowledge about the strategic and technical nature of warfare and how “the enemy” was imagined. Notably, Wolfgang Höpken has pointed out the transitionary nature of the Balkan Wars: in some ways the conflict was reminiscent of traditional warfare in the Balkans, and in others resembled the modern warfare of the coming First World War.18 Since the 1890s, the armies of the Ottoman Empire and 17

Catherine Horel, ed., Les guerres balkaniques (1912–1913): Conflits, enjeux, mémoires (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2014); Dominik Geppert, William Mulligan, and Andreas Rose, eds., The Wars before the Great War: Conflict and International Politics before the Outbreak of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Katrin Boeckh and Sabine Rutar, eds., The Balkan Wars from Contemporary Perception to Historic Memory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); James Pettifier and Tom Buchanan, eds., War in the Balkans: Conflict and Diplomacy before World War I (London: I.B. Tuaris, 2016); Katrin Boeckh and Sabine Rutar, eds., The Wars of Yesterday: The Balkan Wars and the Emergence of Modern Military Conflict, 1912–13 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018); Eyal Ginio, The Ottoman Culture of Defeat: The Balkan Wars and their Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). For a review see the essay by Dietmar Müller, Die Balkankriege 1912/13, H-Soz-Kult, August 30, 2018, www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/rezbuecher-27476. 18 Wolfgang Höpken, “‘Modern Wars’ and ‘Backward Societies’: The Balkan Wars in the History of Twentieth-Century European Warfare,” in Boeckh and Rutar, The Wars of Yesterday, 19–90.

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Introduction

Balkan nation-states had significantly modernized their arms and ammunition, but not their tactics. In military training at the time, the conventional knowledge on proper warfare for standing armies centered on open infantry attack, so armies—especially the Ottomans’—were uninclined to dig trenches as would later become popular in the First World War. This reluctance left soldiers exposed to the deadly fire of newly popularized machine guns and heavy artillery. Other historians have analyzed a similar mismatch between the needs of modern warfare and the level of preparedness regarding deployment of troops and materiel. Attacked by several enemies on different fronts, the Ottoman army was unable to transport enough troops, ammunition and food to the fronts in time.19 Meanwhile, all armies displayed appalling carelessness for the sick and wounded, the most extreme example being the Romanian army, which joined the fighting only in the Second Balkan War in 1913: more of its soldiers perished due to cholera and other diseases than were killed in action.20 The national movements in the Balkans were used to having to “sell” their political and territorial aspirations to the European Concert of Powers, and during the Balkan Wars all belligerent nation states built impressive propaganda machines hitherto unsurpassed in the region.21 For the most part the output of newspaper articles, brochures, and other publications was intended for internal consumption and was aimed at mobilizing and stabilizing the home front. Yet, creating a convincing narrative for one’s war aims and justifying the means to achieve them

19

Mehmet Beşikçi, “The Ottoman Mobilization in the Balkan War: Failure and Reorganization,” in Boeckh and Rutar, The Wars of Yesterday, 163–89; Enis Tulça, “Une étude politique et militaire de la défaite rapide des armées ottomanes lors de la Première Guerre balkanique,” in Horel, Les guerres balkaniques, 19–23. 20 Christian Promitzer, “Combating Cholera during the Balkan Wars: The Case of Bulgaria,” in Pettifer and Buchanan, War in the Balkans, 76–101; Claudiu-Lucian Topor, “A Forgotten Lesson: The Romanian Army between the Campaign in Bulgaria (1913) and the Tutracan Debacle (1916),” in Boeckh and Rutar, The Wars of Yesterday, 240–57. See also Claudiu-Lucian Topor, Germania, România şi Războaiele Balcanice (1912–1913) (Iaşi: Editura Universităţii “Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, 2008). 21 Ivan Ilčev, Văşnopoliticeska prapaganda na balkanskite strani (Sofia: Universitesko izdatelstvo “Sv. Kliment Ohridski”, 1995), in Romanian: Ivan Ilčev, Are dreptate sau nu, e patria mea! Propaganda în politica externă a ţărilor balcanice (1821–1923) (Bucharest: Curtea Veche, 2002); Spyridon Tsoutsoumpis, “Morale, Ideology, and the Barbarization of Warfare amongst Greek Soldiers,” in Boeckh and Rutar, The Wars of Yesterday, 206–39; Claudiu Lucian Topor, “Journalisme bravache et réthorique nationaliste: La Seconde Guerre balkanique dans la presse roumaine,” in Horel, Les guerres balkaniques, 289–301.

Introduction

9

would be vital to a postwar peace conference in which the traditional great powers would presumably play a role. Comparing the war propaganda of all belligerents, we observe an interesting, important commonality: they all depicted the enemy in cultural or/and civilizational terms as “barbarians” and non-Europeans, and themselves as bearers of the highest standards of modern civilization. Building on the Orientalizing European representation of the Ottoman Empire, Balkan nation states predictably “played that tune” in the First Balkan War. Interestingly, once Bulgaria became the enemy of Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, Romania, and the Ottoman Empire, all these latter states accused the Bulgarians of barbaric crimes. Besides its effect on diplomatic imagery, such propaganda seems to have contributed considerably to the dehumanization of foreign combatants, thereby providing individual and collective reasons for warfare that flouted several norms of international law, such as distinguishing between belligerents and civilians and prohibiting harm to prisoners of war. Composition and work of the Carnegie Commission The formation of the Carnegie Balkan Commission reflects the work and intentions of the Carnegie Endowment, founded in 1910.22 Nicholas Murray Butler, head of the Division of Intercourse and Education in the Endowment, and Baron Paul d’Estournelles de Constant, head of the Paris-based Carnegie office responsible for Europe, sought out several people (most of whom they knew personally) from a network of scholars, politicians, diplomats, and journalists from Europe and the United States who had studied history, the social sciences, and international law, and asked them to join the commission. In July 1913, Butler urged his longtime friend Baron d’Estournelles de Constant to hurry up: The time has come to send a notable commission, without a day [of] unnecessary delay, to the Balkan states in order that they might see for themselves just what the conditions are and make a report to the trustees of the Carnegie Endowment . . . which might be sent broad-cast all over the world.23 22

See: the introduction to the Carnegie Report written by Baron Paul d’Estournelles de Constant in Report of the International Commission, 1–19; Nadine Akhund, “The Two Carnegie Reports: From the Balkan Expedition of 1913 to the Albanian Trip of 1921, A comparative approach,” Balkanologie: Revue d’études pluridisciplinaires 14 (2012): 1–2; Helke Rausch, “Professionalisierung als diplomatische Strategie: Das US-amerikanische Carnegie Endowment in Europa vor 1945,” in Löhr, Middell, and Siegrist, Kultur und Beruf in Europa, 217–25, as well as the chapters by Helke Rausch and Stefan Troebst in this volume. 23 Butler to d’Estournelles de Constant on July 21, 1913, quoted in Akhund, “The Two Carnegie Reports,” para. 6.

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Introduction

At the same time, Butler emphasized to the CEIP’s first chairman, the Republican former Secretary of State Elihu Root, that this was an auspicious opportunity for the Endowment to play an international role: Amazing charges of Bulgarian outrages attributed to the King of Greece give us great opportunity for prompt action. If you approve I will send a notable commission at once to Balkans to ascertain facts and to fix responsibility for prolonging hostilities and committing outrages. Please reply . . . today if possible.24

In the preface to the Carnegie Report, Nicholas Murray Butler described the commission’s instructions to undertake an impartial, comprehensive inquiry able to rectify conflicting reports, especially regarding the manner of warfare that was taking place. He defined the report’s short-term political and long-term legal functions as follows: The purpose of such an impartial examination by such an independent authority was to inform public opinion and to make plain just what is or may be involved in an international war carried on under modern conditions. If the minds of men can be turned even for a short time away from passion, . . . a step and by no means a short one, will have been taken toward the substitution of justice for force in the settlement of international differences.25

The commission’s planned July departure was delayed until August because the recruitment of its members was still under way. For various reasons, several candidates who had been asked to participate were reluctant to travel to the war zone. Some suggested other colleagues: the Russian sociologist Maksim M. Kovalevsky, for example, recommended another Russian, the politician and historian Pavel N. Milyukov. Similarly, the Austrian lawyer Heinrich Lammasch proposed his compatriot and colleague Josef Redlich. Some of the approached notables, such as Francis W. Hirst, editor of the magazine Economist, Orientalist Victor Bérard, and d’Estournelles de Constant, attended preparatory meetings in Paris but did not travel to the Balkans. In the end, the commission consisted of eight people, of whom only four actually investigated the situation in the Balkans: Justin Godart (France), Samuel T. Dutton (USA), Henry N. Brailsford (Great Britain), and Pavel N. Milyukov (Russia). Neither Godart, a deputy representing Lyon in the French National Assembly who served as the commission’s secretary, nor Dutton, who taught law at Columbia University, spoke any Southeast European languages. Accordingly, Milyukov, a historian and a member of the Russian Duma, and Brailsford, a journalist and Balkan expert, who between them spoke 24 25

Butler to Root, quoted by M. Abramowitz, in The Other Balkan Wars, 1. Nicholas M. Butler, “Preface,” in Report of the International Commission, iii.

Introduction

11

most of the relevant languages, were responsible for the lion’s share of information-gathering. International law expert Joseph Redlich from the University of Vienna, who was also responsible for fact-finding, was barred by his government from actively participating in the commission’s fieldwork. At the last minute the German government prevented the most important member of the Endowment in Germany, Wilhelm Paszkowski of the University of Berlin, from taking part. Moreover, Walter Schücking from the University of Marburg, whom Paszkowski had recommended, received approval from Berlin too late to meet the commission in Belgrade in time. Once he did arrive, the Serbian authorities hoodwinked him with the false information that the commission had already disbanded, and he returned home empty-handed.26 This volume’s essays on Pavel N. Milyukov by Thomas Bohn and on Henry N. Brailsford by Stefan Troebst show that the work of the Carnegie Commission on the ground was influenced both positively and negatively by the members’ allegedly pro-Bulgarian attitude. Adamantios Skordos and Stefan Djordjević find that Athens and Belgrade adopted very similar policies toward the commission, although without in-depth research it is impossible to say whether this was a coordinated approach, or who decided to snub the Carnegie Commission first and who followed suit. Around the same time, shortly after the announcement of the Carnegie initiative, leading politicians and members of the press in both Serbia and Greece accused Milyukov of being biased, and once he arrived in Belgrade, leading Serb politicians and journalists called on the Carnegie Commission to dismiss him. When the other members of the commission stood by Milyukov, the government, led by Nikola Pašić’s Radical Party, made it clear that the Serbian authorities would not work with the commission. The commission then traveled to Thessaloniki (which had become Greek little more than a year previously), where the provincial governor, Stefanos Dragoumis, received it with the same reservations shown to Milyukov, now also extended to Brailsford. This left Milyukov and Brailsford unable to move freely and openly gather information in Serbia and Greece. Only Dutton and Godart were allowed to do so, and solely in Greece, since the commission had left Serbia after a few days. Bulgaria alone welcomed the members of the Carnegie Commission with open arms and provided it with excellent working conditions. On arriving in Sofia on September 13, they were able to talk to a large number of war refugees and displaced people, many from Macedonia, and the Bulgarian government also gave them the wherewithal to conduct their investigation in other parts of the country. It permitted the Carnegie Commission to use official materials and hold meetings with several senior officials. 26

Akhund, “The Two Carnegie Reports,” para. 9.

12

Introduction

According to Baron d’Estournelles de Constant, the commission returned to Paris on September 28, having spent just under six weeks in Southeast Europe. Back in Paris, Nicholas Murray Butler pressed for the report to be completed and published as quickly as possible.27

The historiographical reception of the Carnegie Report and its impact on international law The Carnegie Commission Report is undoubtedly the most widely cited contemporary analysis of the Balkan Wars. However, due to several structural factors in the wars—the large number of Southeast European states taking part, the involvement of Western European military experts, and heavy coverage in the popular press28—as well as simple chance, there exists a wealth of other mostly untapped primary sources on the conflict. Though hardly a comprehensive list, coverage of the wars by Leon Trotsky and other socialists from Western and Southeast Europe,29 Filippo Tomasso Marinetti’s depictions in his futurist art,30 and numerous war memoirs written by military advisers, analysts, and technical and medical personnel particularly merit readers’ attention.31 The concluding chapter of this book, Maria Todorova’s text on “The Balkan Wars in Memory,” is a 27

Report of the International Commission, 11; Akhund, “The Two Carnegie Reports,” para. 9f. 28 For a more detailed account, see Florian Keisinger, Unzivilisierte Kriege im zivilisierten Europa? Die Balkankriege und die öffentliche Meinung in Deutschland, England und Irland, 1876–1913 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2008). 29 Leo Trotsky, The Balkan Wars 1912–13 (New York, Sydney: Resistance Books, 1980 [Moscow and Leningrad, 1926]). See Maria Todorova, “War and Memory: Trotsky’s War Correspondence from the Balkan Wars,” Perceptions 18, no. 2 (2013): 5–27. Regarding the Southeast European socialists, see Dimitrije Tucović, Serbien und Albanien: Ein kritischer Beitrag zur Unterdrückungspolitik der serbischen Bourgeoisie (Vienna: Hrsg. Arbeitsbruppe Marxismus, 1999) (initially Belgrad, 1914) and other publications in Todorova, “War and Memory.” 30 Todorova, “War and Memory,” 16–17. 31 For a small selection of German-language literature, see Friedrich Immanuel, Der Balkankrieg, 5 vols. (Berlin: E.S. Mittler, 1913–14); Albin Kutschbach, Die Serben im Balkankrieg 1912–1913 und im Krieg gegen die Bulgaren: Auf Grund amtlichen Materials des Generalkommandos der serbischen Armee (Stuttgart: Franck, 1913); Oberst M. Gaertner, “Über die Verwendung der Feldartillerie im Balkankrieg,” Streffleur’s Militärische Zeitschrift 55, no. 7 (1914); Beiträge zur Kriegsheilkunde aus den Hilfsuntersuchungen der Deutschen Vereine vom Roten Kreuz während des Italienisch-Türkischen Feldzuges 1912 und des Balkankrieges 1912/13, published by the Central-Comitee der Deutschen Vereine vom Roten Kreuz (Berlin, 1914).

Introduction

13

parallel analysis of the Carnegie Report and Trotsky’s war correspondence. Her findings on Trotsky’s praxis and ethos as a war correspondent under military censorship and the perception of the wartime articles he published in Kievskaya Mysl serve as a powerful reminder that all memory needs contextualization: “Memory itself is meaningless. We make sense of it through a framework.” As a rule, research on Southeast Europe has taken the Carnegie Report at face value (i.e., as a source speaking directly and objectively to the reader, as it were) without source criticism or in-depth knowledge of the CEIP. But there is a literature on the Carnegie Endowment itself that is critical from an ideological standpoint, though one largely written without any knowledge of the Balkans or the commission’s members. In the first perspective, the CEIP comes across as an impartial institution without any agenda that, “startled by reports . . . on atrocities during the Balkan Wars . . . [launched] an international commission of inquiry.”32 Whereas the second, more ideologically critical strand of research, grounded mainly in theoretical work by Michel Foucault and Edward Said, predominantly views the Carnegie Report as an orientalizing document that the CEIP intended to use to help spread American “exceptionalism” across Europe.33 Seeking a new direction for the historiography on the CEIP, the authors in this collection return to the historical sources themselves and attempt to build a deeper understanding that is critical and attuned to the international contexts of the Carnegie Endowment and the Balkan Wars. First of all, we need to examine how the Carnegie Report came to be written, a task made possible by Nadine Akhund’s meticulous archival research.34 After the four commission members returned to Paris, several plenary meetings of the commission were held to decide how the report would be structured and who would write each chapter. The introduction 32

Marco Sigg, “Die Balkankriege,” 112. See also Boeckh, Von den Balkankriegen zum Ersten Weltkrieg, 371–76. 33 See Patrick J. Adamiak, “Perceiving the Balkan Wars: Western and Ottoman Commentaries on the 1914 Carnegie Endowment’s Balkan Wars Inquiry,” in War and Nationalism: The Balkan Wars, 1912–1913, and Their Sociopolitical Implications, ed. M. Hakan Yavuz and Isa Blumi (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2013), 474–95; Jonathan Schmitt, “Whose is the House of Greatest Disorder? Civilization and Savagery on the Early Twentieth-Century Eastern European and Northern Frontiers,” in War and Nationalism: The Balkan Wars, 496–527. For a review of War and Nationalism, see Dietmar Müller, in H-SozKult, April 17, 2015, www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/rezbuecher-21657. 34 Akhund, “The Two Carnegie Reports,” para. 10, 29. See also her paper “The Balkan Carnegie Commission: Origins and Main Features,” from the workshop “100 Years On: The Carnegie Report on the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars of 1912/13.”

14

Introduction

carried the byline of Baron d’Estournelles de Constant, but the seven chapters of the publication were not credited to particular authors, so the book appeared to be a collaborative effort by the Carnegie Commission. This may have been done to protect Milyukov and Brailsford, who had endured such harsh criticism in Serbia and Greece. Nevertheless, archival materials reveal that Milyukov was the author of chapters I (The Origin of the Two Balkan Wars), III (Bulgarians, Turks, and Servians), IV (The War and the Nationalities), and V (The War and International Law); Brailsford wrote chapter II (The War and the Noncombatant Population); Godart, chapter VI (Economic Results of the War); and Dutton, chapter VII (The Moral and Social Consequences of the Wars and the Outlook for the Future of Macedonia).35 Further research into the course of the commission’s meetings is needed to establish the criteria for the report’s structure. At present, the authors are assumed to have been able to write freely, without any interference from the leadership of the Carnegie Endowment. The texts were also edited by the commission; only the transliteration of names and similar corrections were carried out by the CEIP in the United States. To disseminate the commission’s findings as widely as possible, the CEIP planned to publish the report simultaneously in English, French, and German, but the German version was abandoned due to the heavy workload for Milyukov. He delayed submission of the texts due to the time-consuming work of translation (the texts by Milyukov and Godart had to be translated from French into English, and those by Brailsford and Dutton from English into French). Finally, in spring 1914, a press release sent to 1,250 newspapers worldwide announced that the Carnegie Report had been published with a print run of 15,000 English and 5,000 French copies.36 Instead of being sold in bookshops, the report was sent free of charge (mostly by request) to the press, relevant institutions, and individuals. Strikingly, the US headquarters of the CEIP exerted little direct influence on the makeup of the commission or the writing of the report. Instead, the officials of the CEIP assumed that the authors of the report would arrive at the desired conclusion because they shared the same basic liberal internationalist politics. Cindy Daase, in her paper at the abovementioned GWZO workshop on Nicholas Murray Butler’s book The International Mind, and Helke Rausch in this volume argue that this 35

See also George F. Kennan, “Introduction; The Balkan Crises: 1913 and 1993,” in The Other Balkan Wars, 8. 36 Enquête dans les Balkans: Rapport présenté aux Directeurs de la Dotation par les Membres de la Commission dʾEnquête (Paris: European Center of the Carnegie Foundation, 1914).

Introduction

15

attitude comprised a strong conviction that international law was an “authoritative resource and forward-looking criterion for international politics in the crisis regions of the world.”37 At the stakeholder level, this liberal internationalism was buoyed by optimism that the lawyers and legal scholars documenting and assessing events would be guided by high ethical and professional standards of justice, truthfulness, and rationality—or “scientistic neutralism,” as Rausch has described this attitude. Tracing the role of the Balkan report within the history of the Carnegie Endowment, she characterizes the report and its underlying assumption of “scientistic neutralism” as a catalyst of the CEIP’s evolution from its roots in the American peace movement into the optimism of liberal internationalism and on to the forging of international networks in the context of the League of Nations. At an international level, the Endowment (funded by the industrialist and Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie) was one of the world’s most active philanthropic institutions when it came to supporting international diplomatic efforts, for example, it provided intellectual and material support for the Hague Peace Conferences (1899, 1907) and financed the construction of the Peace Palace (1907–13) in The Hague, where the Permanent Court of Arbitration sat.38 Until the Balkan Wars and the Carnegie Report, leading Carnegie men such as Elihu Root and Nicholas Murray Butler acted as vital negotiators for the peaceful settlements of international conflicts, modeled on an American system of justice for arbitration tribunals.39 From 1907 to 1912, Butler chaired the Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration, held annually since 1895. The friendships forged at the Hague and Lake Mohonk conferences constituted a transatlantic network of like-minded lawyers, diplomats, and publicists such as Root, Butler, and d’Estournelles de Constant that formed the pool from which commission members were recruited for the Balkan report. In the introduction to the report, d’Estournelles de Constant wrote a summary of Milyukov’s chapter on international law in the Balkan Wars. Here, given its importance for the development of international law, it is 37

See the chapter by H. Rausch in this volume. According to the biographer of the Russian scholar of international law Friedrich Fromhold Martens, Andrew Carnegie is said to have suggested financing the construction of the Peace Palace. See Vladimir V. Pustogarov, Our Martens: F. F. Martens, International Lawyer and Architect of Peace (The Hague: Simmonds & Hill Publishing, 2000 [1993]), 328. 39 See Cindy Daase, “‘The International Mind’ – Nicholas Butler’s Idea of a Peaceful (Legal) World Society in the 20th Century,” paper presented at the workshop “100 Years On: The Carnegie Report on the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars of 1912/13,” Leipzig, July 4–5, 2012. 38

16

Introduction

quoted in full. Sharing his personal reaction, he first expressed his disappointment that every army fighting in the war had violated the Hague Convention on Land Warfare. Chapter V, “The War and International Law,” is not less impartial than the preceding. Its conclusion is this: Every clause in international law relative to war on land and the treatment of the wounded, has been violated by all the belligerents, including the Romanian army, which was not properly speaking belligerent. Public opinion has made great progress on this question of late years. I confess that in my ardent participation in the two Hague Conferences, the conventions fixing the laws and customs of war, interested me infinitely less than those organizing arbitration, mediation and good will, which tended in fact to prevent war, and not to humanize it. To humanize war seemed to me then a hypocrisy and a satire, leading to its being too easily accepted, but since then I have recognized my error. War is not declared by those who carry it on. The armies are only instruments in the hands of the governments; and these armies are recruited among the youth of each country. We at least owe it to them to spare them sufferings which they have not brought upon themselves. To refuse to humanize war for fear of making it too frequent, is to let the weight of the governments’ fault fall upon the soldier. In short, whatever amelioration diplomatic conferences can bring about in the horrors of the war, it could never be enough. The torture of criminals is now suppressed. Should it exist—and what torture!—for soldiers and for hostile populations? The Commission has done its duty in contending that in spite of the Hague Conventions, the cruelty and ferocity and the worst outrages remained in the Balkans as the direct heritage of slavery and war.40

Besides relating d’Estournelles de Constant’s personal disappointment, his summary can be read as indicating the limits of the influence of liberal internationalism, whose main institutional achievements—the Hague Convention on Land Warfare and the Permanent Court of Arbitration— had been totally ignored in the Balkan Wars.41 Now that the pacifism that d’Estournelles de Constant shared with many a Carnegie man had failed to bring about a limitation of jus ad bellum at the Hague Peace Conferences, it

40

D’Estournelles de Constant, “Introduction,” in Report of the International Commission, 13–14. 41 None of the warring states were founding signatories of the Hague Convention on Land Warfare, but they all had joined by 1912. See Jost Dülffer, “Regeln im Krieg? Kriegsverbrechen und die Haager Friedenskonferenzen,” in Frieden stiften: Deeskalations- und Friedenspolitik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Marc Frey, Ulrich S. Soénius, and Guido Thiemeyer (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Bӧhlau Verlag, 2008), 87. See also, Jost Dülffer, Regeln gegen den Krieg? Die Haager Friedenskonferenzen 1899 und 1907 in der internationalen Politik (Berlin: Ullstein, 1981).

Introduction

17

was clear that any hope that the Permanent Court of Arbitration would mediate conflict had been just as false as the hope that the Hague Convention would have an impact on warfare. Liberal internationalists’ optimism about the reach of their scientistic neutralism was further dampened by the composition of the commission, not to mention the difficult working conditions and the reception of the report. Puzzlement had pervaded the CEIP headquarters in New York when the political classes of Berlin and Vienna kept the university lecturers Paszkowski, Schücking, and Redlich out of the fact-finding mission to the Balkans.42 And like the commission’s makeup and working conditions, the reception of its report was predictably politicized: widely disseminated and largely positively received in Bulgaria, the report went down very poorly in Serbia and Greece. As the CEIP proudly revealed in its 1915 yearbook, the Balkan Report had been reviewed 333 times all told. But while nearly twothirds of the reviews (216) appeared in US newspapers and the French media printed another 92, the report was reviewed just 13 times in Germany, and only five times in Britain and Italy respectively.43 The report did not directly concede that liberal internationalism had reached its limits in the Balkan Wars and the Carnegie Report’s account of them, but it did so indirectly. In the passages concluding the chapter on international law, Milyukov wrote: Were it possible for there to be a commission of inquiry with the belligerent armies, during war, not in the shape of an enterprise organized by private initiative, but as an international institution, dependent on the great international organization of governments, which is already in existence, and acts intermittently through Hague Conferences, and permanently through the Hague Tribunal, the work of such a body would possess an importance and an utility such as can not attach to a mere private commission. . . . A commission which was a permanent institution, enjoying the sanction of the governments which signed the convention, could exercise some control in the application of these conventions.44

Here Milyukov laid out the lesson to be learned from the Balkan Wars in a proposal that was partially carried out by the international

42

Akhund, “The Two Carnegie Reports,” para. 9. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Year Book for 1915, quoted in Ivan Ilčev in this issue. This is somewhat contradicted (though it cannot be resolved here) by Florian Keisinger’s statement on the reception of the Carnegie Report in Germany, Britain, and Ireland: “None of the newspapers included in this work make any reference to the publication of the Carnegie Report.” Keisinger, Unzivilisierte Kriege im zivilisierten Europa, 47, footnote 177. 44 P. N. Milyukov, “Report of the International Commission,” 234. 43

18

Introduction

community of states, though only after the First World War: namely, that the Permanent Court of Arbitration established in 1899 be developed further. But Milyukov’s view did not acknowledge that the Arbitration Court could only arguably be characterized as “permanent,” since everything but its outer shell was fluid. For one thing, the judges nominated by the states did not constitute a committee; rather, they were a list of arbitrators from whose midst a court was to be constituted on a case-by-case basis.45 Likewise, the arbitration tribunal had no right of initiative, leaving the Court’s jurisdiction subject to political considerations: the states involved could negotiate what matters they could decide, and the resolution of disputes was not mandatory. In 1899 this jurisdictional policy had merely roughly summarized the hitherto customary forms of state practice. Eight years later at the Second Hague Peace Conference in 1907, hardly any new aspects had been formulated, showing that the Arbitration Court was very seldom invoked prior to the First World War.46 Yet, arbitration in The Hague was not abolished after the war,47 for in 1921–22, alongside the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the Permanent Court of International Justice was set up there in connection with the League of Nations.48 The acceding states accepted the Court’s jurisdiction, and eleven permanent judges and four deputy judges officiated for a nine-year term. This step toward the institutionalization of an international regime and juridification of international

45

To this end, a single international bureau was set up in The Hague in 1899. In this context, Andrew Carnegie’s financing of the Hague Peace Palace can be interpreted as a source of impetus for the continuing development of international arbitration. See Pustogarov, Our Martens, 328. 46 Regarding the history of international arbitration at the turn of the twentieth century, which can be broadly understood as one of the disappointments that befell the peace movement and the liberal internationalists, who had hoped for a general peace order facilitated by judicial conflict resolution, see Dülffer, “Der britisch-amerikanische Schiedsvertrag von 1897: Ein Modell zur Neugestaltung der internationalen Beziehungen?,” in Frieden stiften, 89–117. More broadly, see Dülffer, Regeln gegen den Krieg?, 80–100, 205–26, and 300–327. 47 Since then, especially since the latest wave of globalization began in the 1970s, the jurisdiction of international arbitration tribunals has increasingly shifted away from traditional questions of international law on war and peace, and toward economic questions of investment security. See Armin von Bogdandy and Ingo Venzke, In wessen Namen? Internationale Gerichte in Zeiten globalen Regierens (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014), especially 122–27. 48 Géza v. Magyary, Die international Schiedsgerichtsbarkeit im Völkerbunde (Berlin: O. Liebmann, 1922); Cornelis G. Roelofsen, “International Arbitration and Courts,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, ed. Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 165–68.

Introduction

19

relations is particularly evident in the court’s name: no longer an arbitration tribunal, it now was permanently in session.49 Whether the above-cited plea to discontinue weakly institutionalized arbitration in favor of robust international jurisdiction was Milyukov’s private opinion or marked a deliberate change of tactics by the CEIP can be determined only after intensive study of the files. But the former is probably the case, as the trajectory of the Carnegie men sketched by Helke Rausch—from liberal internationalism to conditional support for the League of Nations and its relatively firmly institutionalized conflict resolution mechanisms—did not begin until later in the First World War.50 Then again, as early as the Second Hague Peace Conference in 1907, Butler, as president of the Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration, had called for further development of arbitration modeled on the US Supreme Court: We should ask that the Permanent Hague Court be transformed from a semidiplomatic into a truly judicial tribunal. We should ask that judges be substituted for arbitrators. We wish to see a permanent international court which, like our United States Supreme Court, will have a status, procedure, traditions, and precedents of its own. We wish to see international law declared and established as well as individual differences composed.51

In addition to arbitration, the Carnegie Commission’s report brought up another dimension of international law in much greater detail and intensity, namely the question of jus in bello, that is, whether the belligerents had adhered to the Hague Convention during the Balkan Wars.52 Judging

49

Alexander P. Fachiri, The Permanent Court of International Justice: Its Constitution, Procedure and Work (London: Oxford University Press, 1925). 50 See M. D. Rubin, “The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Advocacy of a League of Nations, 1914–1918,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 123, no. 6 (1979): 344–68; J. P. Winn and Nicholas Murray Butler, “The Carnegie Endowment for Reconciliation in Europe, 1919–1933,” Peace & Change 31, no. 4 (2006): 555–84; Katharina Rietzler, “Experts for Peace: Structures and Motivations of Philanthropic Internationalism in the Interwar Years,” in Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars, ed. Daniel Laqua (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 45–65. 51 Nicholas M. Butler, “The Progress of Real Internationalism (1907),” in The International Mind: An Argument for the Judicial Settlement of International Disputes (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912), 12. 52 Daniel M. Segesser, “The International Debate on the Punishment of War Crimes during the Balkan Wars and the First World War,” Peace & Change 31, no. 4 (2006): 533–54; Daniel M. Segesser, Recht statt Rache oder Rache durch

20

Introduction

by Adamantios Skordos’s, Stefan Djordjević’s, and Ivan Ilčev’s assessment of the Carnegie Report in this regard and their summary of the relevant research, there is no doubt that many provisions of the Hague Convention were violated by all the combatants. In particular, the treatment of POWs and the wounded, as well as the endemic attacks on the civilian population, suggest that the violations were not due primarily to a lack of top-down command: their main cause was instead a deliberately tolerated or even planned intermingling of regular and irregular combatants in the fighting, along with the consequent blurring of the distinction between combatants and civilians—both on one’s own side and on the enemy’s.53 The aim and result of such warfare was the “ethnic cleansing” of the conquered territory, implemented by expelling or killing the undesired population, or by such means as “Bulgarization,” a term for forced Christianization.54 One feature of the Carnegie Report that is rarely noted or discussed in research is that it dealt mostly with the Second Balkan War. Although the three main belligerents from the Balkans (Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece) featured in the planned itinerary of the Balkan Commission, the Ottoman Empire was left out. In the end Milyukov traveled to Istanbul for a few days, but that was only because he could not move freely in Greece. The following formulation by d’Estournelles de Constant, constructed as a chain of his preferred conflict-control mechanisms, explains the omission of the Ottoman Empire in a nutshell: “War rather than slavery; Arbitration rather than war; Conciliation rather than arbitration.” His use of the powerful term “slavery” expressed his view that the First Balkan War was a classic liberatory struggle and thus justified, whereas the Second Balkan War was a “fratricidal war”: “We know that [this war] was only the prelude

Recht? Die Ahndung von Kriegsverbrechen in der internationalen wissenschaftlichen Debatte 1872–1945 (Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2010), 143–50. 53 For a comparative history of the integration of irregular organizations into warfare and the armies of the Balkan states, see Mogens Pelt, “Organized Violence in the Service of Nation Building,” in Ottomans into Europeans: State and Institution Building in South-East Europe, ed. Wim van Meurs and Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2010), 221–44. 54 For recent additional corroboration that ethnic cleansing was one characteristic of the Balkan Wars, see several chapters from Boeckh and Rutar, The Wars of Yesterday: Vera Goseva and Natasha Kotlar-Trajkova, “The Plight of the Muslim Population in Salonica and Surrounding Areas,” 312–25; Iakovos D. Michailidis, “Cleansing the Nation: War-Related Demographic Changes in Macedonia,” 326–43; Edvin Pezo, “Violence, Forced Migration, and Population Policies During and After the Balkan Wars (1912–14),” in Boeckh and Rutar, The Balkan Wars, 57–80. Also Ugŭr Ümit Üngör, “Mass violence against civilians during the Balkan Wars,” in Geppert, Mulligan, and Rose, The Wars before the Great War, 76–91.

Introduction

21

to a second fratricidal war between the allies of the previous day, and how this second war was the more atrocious of the two.”55 D’Estournelles de Constant’s assessment of the Balkan Wars reflected the widely held belief that the Ottoman Empire’s status in international law justified its disregard by the Carnegie Report. Although the Ottoman Empire had been part of the Concert of Europe ever since the Treaty of Paris settled the Crimean War by diplomacy in 1856, it had come to be viewed as a target rather than a subject with autonomous agency in international law owing to its diminishing political weight and allegedly limited civilization in political practice and cultural representation.56 In a sense, however, the same could be said of the victorious states in the First Balkan War, for although the Carnegie Commission was appalled by the Balkan states’ violations of the Hague Convention on Land Warfare, it proposed no measures such as demanding they be punished by national military tribunals or even in international war crimes trials. Daniel Marc Segesser summarizes this Orientalizing attitude as follows: The fact that no lessons were learned from this was primarily due to the fact that the “civilized” states believed that they themselves would act differently from un-civilized or semi-civilized nations in a war. The First World War would show how wrong this assumption was . . .57

In the research perspective of international history,58 the Balkan Wars and the Carnegie Report are watersheds in many respects. The Balkan Wars marked both the end of the Eastern Question, which had involved all the major European powers as well as the players in the Balkans, and the beginning of a state of war that would last almost ten years in Southeast Europe. During this decade of conflict, the territorial legacy of the empires was distributed among the Balkan states. In some cases, though, competing claims to territories and populations perpetuated the contestation of the (national) state status quo until the Second World War, after which they were completely reshuffled in the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s. Against this backdrop, the repercussions of the Second World War in Southeast Europe seem to have been dealt with better than those of the Balkan Wars.59 55

D’Estournelles de Constant, “Introduction,” in Report of the International Commission, 1. 56 See Adamiak, “Perceiving the Balkan Wars,” 478–81. 57 Segesser, Recht statt Rache, 150. 58 See Jost Dülffer and Wilfried Loth, eds. Dimensionen internationaler Geschichte (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2012). 59 Revealing a similar mindset, the Swiss historian and diplomat Paul Widmer stated in 1991 that whereas Europe had coped well with the repercussions of the

22

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The Carnegie Report also owed much to the tradition of philanthropic endeavors made by other American organizations, especially for persecuted Christians in the Ottoman Empire and Jews in the Balkan states. It broke new ground in terms of methods and pursued broader goals. Its socialscientific approach of neutrally documenting the facts must also be seen in the context of the intensified spread of propaganda by the belligerent states and the frequently one-sided reporting of the world press. Since the late nineteenth century, any prudent analysis of international relations must take into account the global media—a finding that Ivan Ilčev’s essay connects to the Balkan Wars in particular, which can be regarded as an event subject to especially intensive media coverage.60 With regard to international law, the Carnegie Report highlights the ambiguity of the criteria of belonging to the community of states under international law. After the Crimean War, the Ottoman Empire legally became part of the domain of international law previously defined as Christian and, since the late eighteenth century, “civilized.”61 Compared to Christianity, this softer category of being civilized allowed for more powers of discretion, which the European powers and the Balkan states exercised, politically and culturally, against the Ottoman Empire. That the Ottoman Empire did not govern its Balkan provinces to the satisfaction of the elites and parts of the predominantly Christian population can be seen as evidence of a lack of political and cultural inclusion. D’Estournelles de Constant also attributed the manner of warfare conducted by the Balkan states, which had flouted standards of both international law and

Second World War, it was still struggling with those of the First. See Paul Widmer, “Europäische Bemühungen zur Lösung von Minderheitenfragen,” Europa-Archiv 48 (1993): 265. For an attempt to steer the histories and historiographies of Southeast Europe onto consensual paths within the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe in the wake of the Yugoslav wars of secession, see Teaching Modern Southeast European History: Alternative Educational Materials, ed. Christina Koulouri, 4 vols. (Thessaloniki: Center for Democracy and Reconciliation in Southeast Europe, 2005). Volume 3 deals with the Balkan Wars in particular. As a pars pro toto for politico-historical disputes carried over to this day, see the new Macedonian Question, Adamantios Skordos, Griechenlands Makedonische Frage: Bürgerkrieg und Geschichtspolitik im Südosten Europas 1945– 1992 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012). 60 See Friedrich Kießling, “(Welt-)Öffentlichkeit,” in Dülffer and Loth, Dimensionen internationaler Geschichte, 85–105. 61 See Karl-Heinz Ziegler, Völkerrechtsgeschichte: Ein Studienbuch (Munich: Juristische Kurz-Lehrbücher, 2007), 176f. For a discussion of how the categories “Christian” and “civilized” relate to the community of states under international law, see Liliana Obregón, “The Civilized and the Uncivilized,” in Fassbender and Peters, The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, 917–39.

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customary international law, to a lack of civilization among people and nations that had lived for centuries in “slavery or destitution” in the Ottoman Empire.62 Critics of Western foreign and military policy who doubted that this was the case were proved right a few years later.63 The Balkan Wars and the Carnegie Report had no direct consequences for international arbitration or international criminal law, but given the impunity of war crimes and the widespread failure of the peacekeeping function of arbitration, they certainly buoyed demands for the further juridification of international relations.64

62

D’Estournelles de Constant, “Introduction,” in Report of the International Commission, 3. 63 See Segesser, Recht statt Rache, 149–50. 64 See Eckart Conze, “Völkerstrafrecht und Völkerstrafrechtspolitik,” in Dülffer and Loth, Dimensionen internationaler Geschichte, 198–205.

CHAPTER ONE

International Law and Conciliation under Pressure: Political Profiles of the Carnegie Men behind the Balkan Report c. 1910–1919 Helke Rausch

The Carnegie Report on the Balkan Wars was an unprecedented moment of diplomatic activity in many respects.1 Published in 1914 by the American Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), it was the first report to be initiated by a US-based private NGO after careful recruitment of an international investigative commission.2 Moreover, the tone and mode of the Carnegie Report were groundbreaking: its declared program—to conduct an “impartial examination” that would provide a fact-based, reliable, analytically objective inventory of the specific local conditions of the conflict area—contrasted sharply with the fierce debates and polemics that dominated contemporary international newspapers.3

1

“The Work of the Balkan Commission,” The Advocate of Peace 75, no. 10 (1913): 228ff. 2 See Marco Sigg, “Die Balkankriege 1912‒1913: Bulgarische Kriegsvölkerrechtsverletzungen im Spiegel der europäischen Kriegsberichterstattung und des Carnegieberichts,” in Am Rande Europas? Der Balkan – Raum und Bevölkerung als Wirkungsfelder militärischer Gewalt, ed. Bernhard Chiari and Gerhard P. Groß (Munich: De Gruyter, 2009), 113; Frances Trix, “Peace-mongering in 1913: The Carnegie International Commission of Inquiry and its Report on the Balkan Wars,” First World War Studies 5, no. 2 (2014): 147–62; Dzovinar Kévonian, “Lʼenquête, le délit, la preuve, les ‚atrocities‘ balkaniques de 1912–1913 à lʼépreuve du droit de la guerre,” Le Mouvement Social 1 (2008), 13–40. For a European perspective, see The Wars Before the Great War: Conflict and International Politics before the Outbreak of the First World War, ed. Dominik Geppert, William Mulligan, and Andreas Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 3 Nicholas Murray Butler, “Preface,” in Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, Carnegie Endowment for

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Accordingly, the report condemned the terrible war crimes committed by all responsible war parties, who had thereby virtually obliterated established conventions of international law.4 The report called for an unflinching examination of the human catastrophe and urged rival groups to steadfastly commit themselves to a heretofore unprecedented “substitution of justice for force in the settlement of international differences.”5 The Carnegie men gave their full attention to the Balkan question, an attitude that dovetailed with Americans’ growing awareness of the Balkan region. Both the US foreign policy establishment and the American public were increasingly cognizant of the political conflicts that had troubled the Balkan region since the previous century. In stark contrast to the European empires’ interventions and claims on Balkan territory, American minds were instead set on expanding trade relations with regional authorities. Since the late nineteenth century, Washington had, in keeping with the Monroe Doctrine, remained largely neutral toward the guerillas who fought the Ottoman Empire in Macedonia with Bulgarian support between 1876 and 1901.6 Yet, when faced with the impending Balkan crisis, the US government had withdrawn from the chaos and shied away from the power politics of the European powers and Ottoman Empire. Thus, when the recently established American Jewish Committee energetically lobbied for US support on behalf of Jews, the government refused to officially provide assistance. In a meeting at the London peace conference in March 1914, President Woodrow Wilson did take note of the committee’s request to grant aid to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had fled to Romania. However, the State Department was only willing to have its diplomatic corps issue a declaration of intent advocating legal protections for Jewish immigrants.7 As for the American public, two factors consistently aroused political interest in the vicissitudes of the Balkan region. First, in step with many in the diplomatic establishment, major parts of the American press were antiInternational Peace: Division of Intercourse and Education, no. 4 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914), iii. 4 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Year Book for 1915 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1915), 74. 5 Butler, “Preface,” in Report of the International Commission, iii. 6 See Andrea Despot, Amerikas Weg auf den Balkan: Zur Genese der Beziehungen zwischen den USA und Südosteuropa 1820–1920 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010), 40–85; Margaret MacMillan, “Too Much History and Too Many Neighbours: Europe and the Balkans before 1914,” in Balkan Legacies of the Great War: The Past is Never Dead, ed. Othon Anastasakis, David Madden, and Elizabeth Roberts (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 13–22. 7 “Events in 5673: July 1, 1912, to June 30, 1913,” in The American Jewish Year Book 15 (1913–1914), 221–360, here: 239ff.

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Ottoman and rather favorably disposed toward Bulgaria and Macedonia. These elements usually printed pieces with decidedly Christian overtones or insinuating a broader American civilizing mission.8 Second, the Southeastern European diaspora in the United States constantly addressed the conflict zones of the Balkans in American mass media. Southeastern European labor migrants, often paupers deemed backward by Americans, had been streaming to the United States by the millions since the late 1880s. Having formed special interest groups, they were now persistently asserting their conflicting political claims, competing for US support.9 Meanwhile, proponents of a hawkish US foreign policy had kept a wary eye on the largely preindustrial Balkans since the turn of the century. Aiming to open up American spheres of influence in the region, “Open Door” diplomats like the former US ambassador in Constantinople, Philip Brown, had spoken out in favor of a stronger trade partnership with the Ottoman Empire even before the conflicts started in 1911. Along these lines, Brown made efforts to silence ethnically based prejudices against the allegedly genuine brutality of the Muslims and advocated close economic relations between the United States and Turkey as an important catalyst for a modern, liberal state in the Balkans.10 In light of the dominant European great powers’ interests, however, the Americans had very little room for action, as illustrated by the gradual pace of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company’s attempts to establish itself in Romania and the utter failure of an American investment group’s railroad project in 1911.11 Although the American foreign policy establishment was not altogether unfamiliar with the Balkans, the 1914 Carnegie Report was still unable to assuage animosities or even achieve peace. International critics of the publication frequently noted that the declared scientific neutralism at the core of the report was far away from the bitter conflicts and agitations in the crisis region.12 In the American daily press, the report was likewise received skeptically. Commentators expressed doubt and accused the reporters of bias, going so far as to suggest the CEIP was complicit in the conflict.13 American journalists called for immediate preventive American 8

Despot, Amerikas Weg auf den Balkan, 40–85. Ibid., 222–36; Ulf Brunnbauer, Globalizing Southeastern Europe: Emigrants, America, and the State since the Late Nineteenth Century (London: Lexington Books, 2016), chap. 2. 10 See Philip Brown’s fundamental assessment of US-Turkish relations and Turkish development in Philipp Brown, “Turkey and the United States,” in Journal of Race Development 1 (1911), 449. 11 Despot, Amerikas Weg auf den Balkan, 124–37. 12 “Greeks Denounce Carnegie Board,” New York Times, June 8, 1914; “‘Malice’ in Carnegie Report,” Washington Post, July 13, 1914. 13 “Sees future strife in Balkan Report,” New York Times, June 1, 1914. 9

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armament to keep the United States from being drawn offhand into such a skirmish.14 Before the Balkan Commission had even been constituted, Andrew Carnegie had for his part stopped short of opposing the report when he claimed, quite in line with contemporary topoi of Balkanism, that the “less civilized foreign nations of the world” had hardly any elaborate war regulation measures,15 thus publicly expressing doubt about the civil maturity of the Balkan states. Indeed, in their report of 1913–14 the Carnegie men failed to predict the intertwining of the Balkan crisis and the outbreak of the First World War only a few months later. Nor did they comprehend that the excesses of ethnic violence they documented would turn out to be a fatal harbinger of events in the mid-twentieth century far beyond the Southeastern European region, to which the Balkan Wars were only a prelude.16 The historical significance of the Carnegie Report lies not in its pacifying impact or anticipatory approach, but in showcasing the CEIP’s own self-understanding, discourse, and approach. Two central aspects of their historical significance stand out. First, the report sheds light on an intellectual and political assemblage of American philanthropists and internationalists with intimate knowledge of US governmental policies who sought alternatives that could create a world order without war and violence. The Carnegie Report was one of many cases since the CEIP’s inception in 1910 in which the Carnegie men had positioned themselves as representing a new breed of academically trained, scientifically informed, legally qualified experts. Quite a few of them were first-class foreign policy experts who saw their mission as providing the public with adept, politically binding assessments of the international situation. Most of all, and quite characteristically for the CEIP, its financial support of the report testified to an almost essentialist emphasis on international law as the decisive resource and frame of reference for international policy in the crisis-torn regions of the world.17 14

“The Balkan Cruelties,” Washington Post, October 25, 1913. “War had to be – Carnegie: Doesn’t Think Balkan States Yet for Permanent Peace,” Washington Post, November 20, 1912. 16 See Philipp Ther, Die dunkle Seite der Nationalstaaten: “Ethnische Säuberungen” im modernen Europa (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011); Adamantios Skordos, “Geschichtsregionale Völkerrechtsforschung: Der Fall Südosteuropa,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 61 no. 3 (2012): 433–73. 17 For broader contexts of contemporary international law debates and nascent American international relations as an academic discipline before and during World War I, see Benjamin Allen Coates, Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) and Isabel Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). 15

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The second aspect, however, was that the Carnegie men’s legal and political expertise and their emphasis on international law, concretized in the 1914 report, were not static. Instead, their discourse transformed a great deal just in the year after the publication of the report. As it were, the philanthropic project of the CEIP increasingly changed in response to the outbreak of war in 1914, the US declaration of war in April 1917, and the Paris Peace negotiations in 1918–19. Following the report’s publication at the moment war broke out in Europe, the previously strong pacifist tendencies of the CEIP quickly evaporated. Around 1917, the Carnegie philanthropists were marginalized by a massive military mobilization and a nativist panic spread by rapidly intensifying American wartime nationalism. Then, in the course of the peace conference of 1919 and fierce domestic debates back home in the United States, the CEIP’s mission of orchestrating a new world order grounded in law took new shape. Most of all, it connected to Wilsonianism, which was much less concerned with the ordering power of codified international law than with establishing politically institutionalized internationalized cooperation. Considering these dual aspects of the particular political profile of the Carnegie men and the rapid transformation of their internal international law discourse in the shadow of world war, the Carnegie Report of 1914 appears to be a highly significant, if only transient, moment in the history of American philanthropy, which was deeply affected by the experience of the Great War. Carnegie’s Endowment around 1910: Imperial Pacifism and Scientistic Rapprochement Carnegie’s philanthropic commitment and the emergence of the CEIP went hand in hand with a boom in the US peace movement, which grew substantially from the turn of the century until the Americans’ entry into World War I in 1917. Many driving forces propelled this upswing in American peace advocacy. First, at the 1899 conference in The Hague, participants resolved during the Convention Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land (Haager Landkriegsordnung) to form an International Court of Arbitration.18 The United States led the way, 18

See Coates, Legalist Empire, chap. 4; Hatsue Shinohara, “International Law and World War I,” Diplomatic History 38, no. 4 (2014): 880–93; Ignacio del Moral, “The Ambivalent Shadow of the Pre-Wilsonian Rise of International Law,” Erasmus Law Review 7, no. 2 (2014): 80–97; David D. Caron, “War and International Adjudication: Reflections on the 1899 Peace Conference,” American Journal of International Law 94 no. 1 (2000): 4–30; Jost Dülffer, “Die Haager Friedenskonferenzen von 1899 und 1907 im internationalen Staatensystem,” Die Friedenswarte 4 (1999): 98–111.

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ratifying the resolutions in 1900.19 Second, the American peace movement took shape against the backdrop of the United States’ relentless emergence as a leading Western industrial power. Given that US foreign trade was developing successfully, large corporations and financial and political elites expected the American government to regulate and ultimately halt international conflicts, particularly when and where the United States was involved. In their eyes, peace was a key prerequisite for powering a freemarket economy.20 Yet third, belying such hopes, the United States’ ascent as the leading economic power was about to transform US foreign policy. On the one hand, the country’s growing power and importance spurred a new American interventionism accompanied by a series of successful expansions, such as the widely celebrated victory over Spain in 1898 and the annexation of Hawaii and the Philippines. At that time, Andrew Carnegie engaged in the vibrant peace movement by joining the short-lived Anti-Imperialist League, which had emerged in the course of the SpanishAmerican War in 1898. He was among the elitist conservative, and occasionally racist New England rank and file of the league, who opposed US imperialism not least because they suspected that the annexation of foreign populated areas might dilute the Anglo-Saxon core of America.21 On the other hand, the United States’ rise to world power also provoked international conflicts like the Russian-Japanese War of 1904–05, which sensitized the American public and politics to the potential danger of expanding wars and excessive violence. Such incidents reverberated strongly in the American peace movement and aroused public debates on the threat of the potential wars conjured up by American peace activists in the election year of 1904, when Theodore Roosevelt campaigned for introducing sound procedural rules for international conciliation and a new arbitration conference in The Hague.22 19

See Christof Mauch, “Pazifismus als politische Kultur: Die organisierte Friedensbewegung in den USA und Deutschland in vergleichender Perspektive, 1900–1917,” in Zwei Wege in die Moderne: Aspekte der deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen 1900–1918, ed. Ragnhild Fiebig von Hase and Jürgen Heideking (Trier: Wissenschaft Verlag Trier, 1998), 268. 20 “Report of the Seventeenth Annual Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration, May 24–26, 1911 (Lake Mohonk Conference 1911),” in The Eagle and the Dove: The American Peace Movement and United States Foreign Policy, 1900–1922, ed. John W. Chambers II (New York: Garland Pub., 1976), 177; Alvin Saunders Johnson, “Commerce and War,” International Conciliation (1912– 1914), 14. 21 See David S. Patterson, Toward a Warless World: The Travail of the American Peace Movement 1887–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 48, 55, 77. 22 See Katherine Unterman, “The United States in the World during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” in A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,

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But even before the turn of the century, the thoroughly heterogeneous American peace movement started dissipating when a markedly elitist movement quite separate from the mainstream one came into the picture. Its central platform was the Lake Mohonk Conferences on International Arbitration convened by Quaker entrepreneur Albert Smiley.23 Carnegie initially joined the conferences but soon started pursuing a completely different agenda, organizing his own four-day National Peace and Arbitration Congress in Carnegie Hall in April 1907 to do so.24 These New York congress participants represented the new, conspicuously metropolitan face of an elitist peace movement run by entrepreneurs, politicians, diplomats, and renowned legal experts. In their eyes, there was no doubt that only world peace could secure the United States’ long-term, meteoric ascent as a great power. Wars, by contrast, would critically damage modern industrial capitalism and torpedo the economic stability of a US-based world order.25 Thus Carnegie figured prominently in bringing about a professional, elite, and confident American brand of pacificist internationalism that soon prevailed over the then traditional currents of peace activism still much more oriented around moral, religious, and humanitarian values, who had long since flourished in the nineteenth century.26 Andrew Carnegie’s CEIP became a central player in the conciliatory internationalism of these years. Its founders aimed to systematically professionalize peace research and expand its scope as a source of legitimation, to facilitate a firm American peace policy, and to help establish an international court of arbitration to alleviate conflicts around the world. Among such institutions, the Endowment was one of the best funded worldwide, with over ten million dollars at its disposal.27 This gave the CEIP an enormous financial advantage compared to traditionally respected organizations like the American Peace Society, which had to get ed. Christopher McKnight Nichols and Nancy Unger (Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell, 2017), 410–20; Mark T. Gilderhus, “Bravado and Bluster: Theodore Roosevelt’s Sphere of Influence in the Caribbean,” in Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, vol. 1, To 1920, Documents and Essays, ed. Dennis Merrill and Thomas G. Paterson (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2010), 408–14; Christof Mauch, “Pazifismus,” 269. 23 Frederick E. Partington, The Story of Mohonk (New York, 1932). 24 “The National Arbitration and Peace Congress at New York,” American Journal of International Law 1 (1907), 727ff. 25 Ibidem. 26 Edwin Ginn and His Peace Foundation, The Advocate of Peace 76 (1914), 26f. 27 “Carnegie Tells Purpose of Gift,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 15, 1910; “$10,000,000 for peace new Carnegie gift,” New York Times, December 15, 1910.

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by with a budget of around $17,000 in 1910.28 Carnegie worked hard to acquire privileged networking abilities based on his financial power and ingenious managerial approach. His board of trustees formed a united phalanx of internationally respected scholars and senior political and business elites. Most prominent amongst its renowned figures was the first, long-time CEIP president (1910–1925), esteemed lawyer, and long-serving Republican Secretary of State Elihu Root.29 Carnegie essentially recruited Root as well as his board from the enduring circle of committed internationalists behind the Lake Mohonk conference and like congresses.30 As of 1910, however, the founding of the CEIP reshaped the character of the peace movement, if only because the Endowment developed an enormous centripetal force. Its leading trustees were eager to systematically bundle US peace activism into their philanthropic support. But at this point the Carnegie men entered into a head-on confrontation with most of the Peace Advocates, whose rigorous anti-war position and anti-militarism had visionary potential31 but seemed increasingly unrealistic to the Endowment’s officers. In contrast, the CEIP’s highly ambitious agenda had a much firmer foundation across the broad spectrum between interventionist mediating foreign policy in the tradition of the Republican era, powerfully embodied by Elihu Root, and a kind of progressive reconciliation internationalism represented by the trustee and president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler. By recruiting Root to the CEIP, Carnegie enhanced the Endowment’s prestige with a confirmed foreign policy expert and internationally renowned legal scholar. Root’s political profile markedly illustrated the self-image of the Carnegie men, being utterly incongruous with the older American pacifism (which was increasingly adjusted by the CEIP) and a poor fit with Carnegie’s previous 28

See Michael A. Lutzker, “The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: A Study of the Establishment-centered Peace Movement, 1910–1914,” in Building the Organizational Society: Essays on Associational Activities in Modern America, ed. Jerry Israel (New York: The Free Press, 1972), 146. 29 Carnegie also recruited the former US Secretary of Commerce and Labor and erstwhile US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Oscar Salomon Straus, the former Ambassador to Germany Charlemagne Tower, and American congressmen such as the influential Democrat and former Governor of Virginia Andrew J. Montague. They were joined by entrepreneurs such as manufacturer and eventual think tank founder Robert S. Brookings, the initiator of the Lake Mohonk Conferences Albert Smiley, and illustrious personalities of the academic world such as the long-time President of Harvard University, Charles W. Elliot. See Chicago Daily Tribune, 15 December 1910. 30 The National Arbitration and Peace Congress, 728. 31 See C. Roland Marchand, The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1898–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 134f.

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anti-imperialistic position. At the same time, Root clearly exemplified Carnegie’s emphatic political affinities: a former Secretary of War under US President William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt’s former Secretary of State, Root seemed to consolidate both a more hot-tempered New Nationalism and a calmer type of mediating diplomacy. Root’s ostentatiously imperialistic foreign policy in the Caribbean, Latin America, and East Asia from around the turn of the century ultimately reflected the mindset of self-proclaimed American missionaries of civilization, whose stance toward the previous barbarian periphery ever since had fused AngloSaxon superiority with unabashed social Darwinism.32 Added to that, Root supported a globally expansive US strategy of economic profit mongering and, with the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904, the ambition to secure zones of American political and military influence by excluding rival European claims to colonial expansion.33 Such positions were hardly congruent with the peace rhetoric of the CEIP. Yet at the same time, Root energetically embodied a new kind of foreign policy based on conciliation. While still keeping an eye on its own power policy, the United States had intervened in international crises around the turn of the century in this more propitiatory spirit. Such was the case in 1904–05, when Americans, alarmed by the struggles between the great powers of Japan and Russia, feared that a quick Japanese victory might dangerously shift the region’s precarious power constellations. With an eye to channeling Japanese ambitions and insuring nascent but vital trade interests with China, Roosevelt and Root negotiated a cease-fire and the Russo-Japanese peace treaty in 1905, and became recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 and 1912 respectively.34 However, neither would head the American peace 32

See Dana Gardner Munro, Intervention and Dollar Diplomacy in The Caribbean, 1900–1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Paul A. Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and U.S. Empires, 1880‒1910,” in The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives, ed. Anne L. Foster and Julian Go (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 43–91. 33 See Marc-William Palen, “The Imperialism of Economic Nationalism, 1890– 1913,” Diplomatic History 39, no. 1 (2015): 157–85; Cyprus Veeser, “Inventing Dollar Diplomacy: The Gilded-Age Origins of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” in Diplomatic History 27, no. 3 (2003): 301–26. Similarly, at the Algeciras Conference of 1906, the US helped resolving the Franco-German conflict over Morocco, which subsequently strengthened the Anglo-French Entente in Europe against the German Empire. 34 See Manfred Berg, “‘A Great Civilized Power of a Formidable Type’: Theodore Roosevelt, die USA und der russisch-japanische Krieg,” in Der Russisch-Japanische Krieg 1904/05: Anbruch einer neuen Zeit?, ed. Maik Hendrik Sprotte, Wolfgang Seifert, and Heinz-Dietrich Löwe (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2007), 241–58.

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movement, as they both still placed the United States’ national interest over the idea, held dear by peace activists, of a court of arbitration. By the end of Theodore Roosevelt’s term in 1909, and thanks to his naval armament, the country’s prioritization of a conciliatory foreign policy alongside its national interests had made the United States the secondstrongest maritime power, as well as a global hegemon in Central and South America in the lead-up to World War I and an increasingly influential power in Europe and Southeast Asia. It was considered America’s task to actively shape its destiny as an emerging power. In step with the simultaneous warmongering in Europe, the United States’ growing power was due not least to its recent wars of colonial expansion and victories abroad after the conclusion of the westward expansion.35 To a certain extent Root neutralized the contrast between his foreign policy profile and the CEIP’s now distant anchorage in pacifism. To emphasize his role as a respected and successful lawyer and defender of international law, he identified the Endowment primarily as an “institution for scientific research.” In the same vein, he did not want to position the Carnegie philanthropists as peace activists, but rather as uncompromising supporters of studies and memos on international law, economics, and history.36 For this very reason, Root approached legal scholars such as James Brown Scott, who not only was one of the founders of the CEIP but also epitomized the fraternization among the established peace movement, political elites, and Carnegie philanthropy. A former legal advisor to the secretary of state and one of the delegates at the Hague peace conference, Scott had been promoted to CEIP trustee in 1910 and become the long-term head of the CEIP’s International Law division. He proved to be Root’s virtual fellow traveler. In three respects, they shared a common vision of assuring peace through international law. First, both aimed to codify international law for application on a binding and compulsory basis in cases of conflict. In his capacity as president of the American Institute of International Law since 1907 and as an internationally renowned legal expert at the Belgian Institut de droit international, which had its own rich tradition, Scott could vouch for this

35

See Oliviero Bergamini, “Elihu Root, the League of Nations and Republican Internationalism,” in From Theodore Roosevelt to FDR: Internationalism and Isolationism in American Foreign Policy, ed. Daniela Rossini (Staffordshire: Ryburn Pub., Keele University Press, 1995), 69–92; Juan Pablo Scarfi, “In the Name of the Americas: The Pan-American Redefinition of the Monroe Doctrine and the Emerging Language of American International Law in the Western Hemisphere, 1898–1933,” Diplomatic History 40, no. 2 (2016): 189–218. 36 Carnegie Endowment Yearbook 1911 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1912), 82.

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principle.37 Second, both Root and Scott expected international arbitration institutions to stabilize eventually.38 They took for granted that international conflicts would need to be resolved along the lines of the US constitution and its processes of reconciling differences and compromising to settle disputes. Accordingly, both Scott and Root oriented their work around the model of the US Supreme Court, thereby assuming that judges on the International Court of Arbitration would optimally be selected by the League of Nations Council and plenary assembly.39 Third, Scott and Root expected the CEIP to be able to win public opinion over to the Peace Through Law project through educational campaigns that would hopefully pressure political elites to affiliate with the CEIP’s positions. In fact, the Carnegie men managed to close ranks with influential East Coast newspapers and thus prompted regular reporting on the annual meeting of the American Society of International Law, chaired by Scott, which had been founded with Carnegie’s assistance in 1905. The CEIP’s campaign was intended to familiarize a wider American public with legal discussions while constantly fueling expectations of legal scholarship’s enormous political potential.40 Yet, the Carnegie men’s mindsets proved far from homogeneous. When Nicholas Murray Butler succeeded Root in the office of president of the CEIP in 1925, he did not simply adopt his predecessor’s legalistic internationalism. In his capacity as head of the CEIP’s International Relations and Education division in the summer of 1913, Butler was reportedly one of the main initiators of the Balkan Commission.41 Himself not a member of the foreign policy establishment, Butler followed his own agenda and sought to advise on foreign policy as an unofficial diplomat 37

James Brown Scott, “The American Institute of International Law,” American Journal of International Law 10 (1916), 122; The Report of the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, ed. James Brown Scott (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1917). On Scott and the Institute, see especially Coates, Legalist Empire, chap. 3 and Juan Pablo Scarfi, The Hidden History of International Law in the Americas: Empire and Legal Networks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 38 Elihu Root, “The Need of Popular Understanding of International Law,” American Journal of International Law 1 (1907), 1. 39 See Frederic L. Kirgis, “Elihu Root, James Brown Scott and the Early Years of the ASIL,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (ASIL) 90 (1996): 139–43. 40 On the foundation, see “In Interests of Peace,” Washington Post, December 10, 1905. On the public reports on the society’s meetings, see “International Law,” Washington Post, April 27, 1908; “Law Could End War,” Washington Post, April 29, 1910. 41 See Nadine Akhund, “The Two Carnegie Reports: From the Balkan Expedition of 1913 to the Albanian Trip of 1921,” Balkanologie 14, no. 1–2 (2012).

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close to the US administration. A former president of the Lake Mohonk meetings in 1907 and 1909–1912, Butler enjoyed superb connections and good repute. As early as 1906/07, he had joined hands with the soon-to-be head of the European office of the CEIP in Paris, Baron Paul d’Estournelles de Constant, in order to establish the American Association for International Conciliation (AAIC), a peace organization of their own making. To some extent the AAIC structurally and programmatically anticipated the CEIP. On the one hand, Butler, as AAIC President, had already collaborated closely with its honorary president, Andrew Carnegie.42 On the other hand, Butler was able to secure governmental consensus on his own and started to consider a long-term symbiosis with US President Theodore Roosevelt and his secretary of state. Butler offered both of them assistance for their political campaigns in 1907. The AAIC made it its business to align US “public opinion” with the very line that US delegates would take at the Hague conference half a year later.43 Unlike most peace institutions, which attempted to exert the biggest possible direct influence on the US government, Butler entered the picture as a more discreet, unofficial informer working “to educate public opinion” in the United States and internationally via publications, lecture series, and international exchange among experts on international relations.44 He envisioned the CEIP as a provider of authoritative collections of data and facts to be retrieved by the US administration and international governments, in order to move beyond nationalist passions by facilitating independent, factual, objective political decisions. Butler adhered to this position explicitly after becoming head of the CEIP. Accordingly, in 1913, the year of the Balkan report, Butler announced that his CEIP division’s widely ramified network of professional correspondents made it uniquely qualified to inform about the “conduct of international affairs.”45 From there was only a short step to Butler’s initiative for the Carnegie Report on the Balkan Wars. Butler hoped he could institutionalize a genuine truth and reckoning commission. Ultimately intended to help assuage the Balkan conflict, the commission was to do so by accomplishing its project of a pointed publication based on impartial assessments and meticulous on-site 42

“Mrs. Eddy’s Peace Plan,” New York Times, April 24, 1907. Butler to Roosevelt on January 21, 1907, quoted by Michael A. Lutzker, “Themes and Contradictions in the American Peace Movement, 1895–1917,” in The Pacifist Impulse in Historical Perspective, ed. Harvey L. Dyck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 326. 44 Nicholas Murray Butler, The International Mind: An Argument for the Judicial Settlement of International Disputes (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1912), x. 45 Nicholas Murray Butler, “The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,” The Independent, November 27, 1913, 397f., quoted in Lutzker, “The American Peace Movement,” 329. 43

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analysis of facts. Thus the contemporary progressive emphasis on the rational, clarifying impact of the social sciences was essential to the Balkan Report’s authors: Butler and his peers assumed that the social-scientific processing of official documents, data samples, and interviews with contemporary witnesses would equip the CEIP to provide politicians with substantiated recommendations for a new mode of scientifically based foreign and peace policies.46 Along these lines, D’Estournelles de Constant advocated a “progressive” foreign policy centered on “free intercourse,” “education,” and “security.” Two points were particularly striking in his assessment in the Carnegie Report: D’Estournelles de Constant was sure that such a policy would not only abolish backward “wars of religion” and racial conflict but could also showcase yet again the utter failure of European politics and diplomacy, whose nationalist rivalries and alliance tactics were the root causes of the violent disaster.47 More than anything, the initiators of the Carnegie Report were anxious to strengthen international law as the guiding reference point of political order in the Balkans. The Carnegie men wanted to point politics toward exclusive reliance on successfully codified international law. Most notably, they invoked civilization as a main parameter of political action introduced by the Hague Conventions of 1907. They also recalled that the Hague agreement prohibited appalling nationalist war between different ethnic groups, including irregular combat between marauding paramilitary groups like those raging through the Balkans.48 Apart from such programmatic aims, the report avoided admitting that the Balkan Wars had thwarted Carnegie’s lofty thoughts and plans—after all, the Permanent International Court of Arbitration, which was housed in a Carnegie-funded Peace Palace in The Hague in 1903 and functioned as of 1913, had failed as a sanctioning institution because the signatory powers had ultimately withdrawn.49 46

Butler, “Preface,” in Report of the International Commission, iii; “The Work of the Balkan Commission,” The Advocate of Peace 75 (1913), 228f. 47 D’Estournelles de Constant, “Introduction,” in Report of the International Commission, 15–19. 48 See Holm Sundhausen, “‘Wir haben nur Missverständnisse geklärt’: Die Krisenregion Balkan,” in Am Rande Europas? Der Balkan – Raum und Bevölkerung als Wirkungsfelder militärischer Gewalt, ed. Bernhard Chiari and Gerhard P. Groß (Munich: De Gruyter, 2009), 27–45; Martin Kröger, “Balkankriege 1912–1913,” in Kriegsverbrechen in Europa und im Nahen Osten im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Franz W. Seidler and Alfred M. de Zayas (Hamburg: E.S. Mittler, 2002), 16–18; Sigg, “Die Balkankriege,” 106f. 49 “The Temple of Peace at The Hague,” The Advocate of Peace 75 (Sept. 1913), 200; The American Minister Lloyd Bryce to the Secretary of State, The Hague, September 3, 1913, in United States Department of State: Papers relating to the

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Thus, the Carnegie men’s philanthropic project remained heterogeneous. Meanwhile, apart from such variants, a central component of their credo was the conviction that the hope for an effective, persistent internationalism would rise and fall with philanthropists at the helm as its moral, intellectual, civilizing elite.

Dissociations, Internal Conflict, and Repositioning: The Repercussions of 1914 With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the political discourse surrounding the CEIP in the United States began to change significantly.50 Initially, the Carnegie men took a clear stand in favor of pacifism. Carnegie himself rejected political demands for “preparedness” as monstrous nonsense.51 In September 1914, the National Conciliation Bulletin, coedited by Butler, published a special edition with war posters from the American press that tended to depict the outbreak of the Great War with a sense of alienation based on humanitarian grounds rather than focus on the war as a catastrophe for global civilization.52 In November that year, Butler, together with pacifist supporters of disarmament, outspokenly denounced the ongoing war as ultimately exposing the complete failure of militarism and claimed that Foreign Relations of the United States [FRUS] with the address of the president to Congress, December 2, 1913 (Washington, 1913), 1017. Carnegie paid the government of the Netherlands 1,700,000 USD in 1903. See Jost Dülffer, “Kriegsverbrechen und die Haager Friedenskonferenzen,” in Kriegsverbrechen im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Wolfram Wette and Gerd R. Ueberschär (Darmstadt: Primus, 2001), 35–49. 50 For the domestic policy debate surrounding the outbreak of World War I in the United States, see amongst many others Christopher Capozolla et al., “Interchange: World War I.,” Journal of American History 102, no. 2 (2015): 463–99; P. P. O’Brien, “The American Press, Public, and the Reaction to the Outbreak of the First World War,” in Diplomatic History 3, no. 37 (2013): 446–75; Jennifer Keene and Michael Neiberg, eds., Finding Common Ground: New Directions in First World War Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2011); David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 51 “Asks World Court: Carnegie Comes Out against U.S. War Defense Plans,” Washington Post, December 3, 1914; E. Marshall, “Fight to the Bitter End: An Interview with Andrew Carnegie,” in New York Times Current History of the European War (New York: New York Times Co., 1915), January 9, 1915, 1: “Peace can come only when mankind abandons warful preparation.” 52 The Changing Attitude Toward War: As Reflected in the American Press (New York: American Association for International Conciliation, 1914; “Anti-Armament League Forming,” Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1914.

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armament had to be democratically controlled at all costs. Butler envisioned the United States in a leading role, but less in terms of politics or power than in terms of morality. Displaying its mature state of civilization, it was to promote the reconstruction of a peaceful and liberal “world concert” far beyond the designs and decadence of Europe’s “balance-of-power” intrigues.53 Wary of any form of left-wing peace activism critical of the war as well as overly hasty debate on “preparedness” in conservative circles, the CEIP trustees initially exercised restraint,54 instead continuing the international law discussion for two reasons. On the one hand, like the conservative elitist peace societies, they were optimistic that it would be possible to implement efficient mechanisms for preventing war. CEIP officers were therefore quite reticent toward the Wilson administration (in office since March 1913) when running battles broke out between the United States and Mexico in the spring of 1914.55 Only Carnegie, who was otherwise anxious to be on good terms with the new president, candidly lambasted the US intervention in Mexico in exactly the same way as the decidedly pacifist groups,56 that is, by declaring it an illegitimate violation of a republic’s sovereignty.57 Carnegie’s opinion drew much notice in the internal American controversy about the 53

Nicholas Murray Butler, “The Work of Reconstruction,” The Advocate of Peace 76 (Nov. 1914), 234f: “The time may not be so very far distant when to be the first moral power in the world will be a considerably greater distinction than to be the first military power or even the second naval power, which latter goal is so constantly and so subtly urged on the people of the United States. How any one, not fit subject for a madhouse, can find in the awful events now happening in Europe a reason for increasing the military and naval establishments and expenditures of the United States is to me wholly inconceivable. . . . When exhaustion, physical and economic, brings this war to an end, as I believe it will at no distant day, the task of America and Americans will be . . . to lead the way in the colossal work of reconstruction that must follow. Then . . . we may gain new honor and imperishable fame for our country. We may yet live to see our great policies of peace, of freedom from entangling alliances, of a world concert instead of a continental balance of power, of an international judiciary and an international police, of international co-operation instead of international suspicion, generally assented to, and as a result the world’s resources set free to improve the lot of peoples, to advance science and scholarship, and to raise humanity to a level yet unheard of. Here lies the path of national glory for us, and here is the call to action in the near future.” 54 See Marchand, The American Peace Movement, 163. 55 See Mauch, “Pazifismus,” 284. 56 “Churches’ Peace Message to Wilson,” New York Times, April 22, 1914. 57 In “Educators to Tour European Capitals,” New York Times, April 26, 1926, quoted Carnegie as saying: “Our whole attitude with regard to the Mexican situation has been wrong . . .”

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Mexican policy. It prompted the Republican governor of Kentucky and senator William Bradley to release a passionate tirade against Carnegie and his philanthropy. Bradley was convinced Carnegie’s only aim was to manipulate public opinion.58 On the other hand, as the international law discourse of the Carnegie men reveals, the administration in Washington enjoyed a kind of credit of trust among established American peace advocates. Wilson, who was a former speaker of the long-standing American Peace Society, and his secretary of state William Jennings Bryan were ultimately counted as moderate peace advocates who would rely on their negotiation skills.59 However, in the very same year it became clear that their attitude toward the war issue required the Carnegie men to take up position again. They wanted to side both against the old pacifist networks from which the CEIP had emerged, and second, against those American pundits who propagated a new, aggressive kind of collective security in the debate flaring up around the future world order after the war. The Carnegie men loosened their ties to the remaining minority of the peace movement that was decidedly anti-militaristic.60 Agitating against the US government was not deemed advisable. Where anti-war demonstrations by committed pacifists such as the Women’s Peace Party or the American Union Against Militarism took place, the Carnegie men ignored them.61 At the same time, they maintained unofficial contact with the moderate pacifists of the earlier Lake Mohonk conferences, whose representatives would soon find solidarity with the Wilson administration.62 Having distanced themselves from American peace activists, the CEIP representatives seemed increasingly disillusioned. The question of international conflict regulation based on international law seemed to be gradually fading into irrelevance, given that it had become difficult to 58

“Bradley Spurns Purchased Peace,” Washington Post, May 7, 1914. See for instance, Woodrow Wilson, “Address delivered at the First Annual Assemblage of the League to Enforce Peace: American Principles,” May 27, 1916, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/ address-delivered-the-first-annual-assemblage-the-league-enforce-peace-americanprinciples: “the peace of the world must henceforth depend upon a new and more wholesome diplomacy.” See also the argument with Mauch, “Pazifismus,” 286. 60 “Socialist Antimilitarist Meeting,” Washington Post, October 15, 1914. Regarding antimilitarism, see Marchand, The American Peace Movement, 151f. 61 See Milton Cantor, “The Radical Confrontation with Foreign Policy, War and Revolution, 1914–1920,” in Dissent: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred F. Young (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1968), 215–49. 62 Report of the Twenty-First Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration (Lake Mohonk, NY: Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration, 1915), 11f.; “Peace Men Praise President’s Course,” New York Times, May 22, 1915. 59

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safeguard international law principles in the first place. Butler increasingly doubted that wars could be avoided by educating the American public because the outbreak of the world war had revealed that escalating violence was not the product of the “militarist spirit” of the majority population but was due rather to the cold calculations of politicians and military leaders.63 Root shared the view that modern mass war had virtually annihilated the efforts of legalists. He reasoned that the causes of war were significantly more complex than proponents of legal concepts for conflict resolution had argued thus far.64 The Carnegie men increasingly disagreed as the year progressed. Their varying positions on the League to Enforce Peace (LEP), created in June 1915 by northeastern Republicans such as former President William Howard Taft and the Harvard University President A. Lawrence Lowell, became a veritable litmus test for how they conceived of regulating international conflicts. The Carnegie men took different views of the LEP’s political aim, which was to establish a league powerful enough to effectively impose sanctions on warmongers by threatening with collective military retaliation. On the one side, a large majority of international skeptics amongst the CEIP officers kept their distance from the LEP.65 They were deterred by Taft’s belief that the United States had to play an active role in asserting international arbitration policies in the world, including the use of military force if necessary.66 The skeptics feared that such aspirations would raise the league to the level of a supranational power prone to relegate the international community and above all the United States to a secondary role. On the other side, a smaller group of Carnegie legalists appreciated the LEP. John Bates Clark, for instance, a Columbia economist who at the same time led the CEIP’s Economics and History division, joined the league’s executive committee.67 Even Root cautiously made appreciatory remarks on Taft’s 63

Nicholas Murray Butler, “The Onrush of War. An Address at the Opening of the 161st Academic Year of Columbia University, September 23, 1914,” in A World in Ferment: Interpretations of the War for a New World (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1917), 17. 64 See Sandra R. Herman, Eleven Against War: Studies in American Internationalist Thought, 1898–1921 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969), 45. 65 League to Enforce Peace, American Branch, Independence Hall Conference held in the City of Philadelphia, Bunker Hill Day, June 17th, 1915 (New York, 1915), 4. Regarding the CEIP’s international lawyers’ criticism of the LEP, see Marchand, The American Peace Movement, 168f. 66 William Howard Taft, “A World League and Arbitral Court,” The Advocate of Peace 77 (1915), 145f. 67 J. B. Clark, “The European Nations and the League Program,” in Enforced Peace: Proceedings of the First Annual National Assemblage of the League to Enforce Peace, Washington, May 26–27, 1916 (New York, 1916), 85–92. The Second Balkan

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LEP, though he did not advocate closing ranks with it.68 Besides the CEIP, American philanthropists who approached the LEP included the Boston department store tycoon and later founder of the Twentieth Century Fund Edward A. Filene, who was certainly committed less to pacifism than to the utopia of an egalitarian American consumer society.69 Filene expected that the LEP would stand up for an American foreign policy that was equally cooperative and influential.70 The Carnegie men may have drifted apart when it came to dealing with the LEP, but their internal debates had consequences beyond mere fictional losses. Indeed, this discourse also helped them to urgently consider the question of how the future international world order had to be shaped. Most of all it was Root, at the head of the CEIP from 1915–16, who sought a new approach. His main concern with the soon-to-be established International Court of Arbitration was not necessarily its future jurisdictional competences; rather, Root cared about the reasons adduced to internationally legitimize the court. He started from the premise that legal experts had a duty to reframe international law procedures and codify them in a flexible way that would keep pace with the tremendously rapid, radical development of actual international politics during the war years.71 These experts, Root hoped, would advocate the concept of legal intervention of a neutral arbitrary agency as the sole appropriate process for War was a central issue for Clark. It seemed to exemplify the severe discord between former coalitionists and the morphing into cruel hostilities. Thus, Clark suggested, the victors of the ongoing war should make sure to establish common ground by settling their disputes through law. Only then would they be able to negotiate and guarantee conditions of peace on a more global scale. Ibidem, 87. 68 See Stephen Wertheim, “The League that Wasn’t: American Designs for a Legalist-Sanctionist League of Nations and the Intellectual Origins of International Organization, 1914–1920,” Diplomatic History 35, no. 5 (2011): 812. For American foreign policy at the time, see Christopher Capozzola, “The United States Empire,” in Empires at War 1911–1923, ed. Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 235–53. 69 See Meg Jacobs, “Constructing a New Political Economy: Philanthropy, Institution-Building, and Consumer Capitalism in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Philanthropic Foundations: New Scholarship, New Possibilities, ed. Ellen Condliffe Lagemann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 110ff. 70 Edward A. Filene, “The League to Enforce Peace and the Soul of the United States,” in Enforced Peace: Proceedings of the First Annual National Assemblage of the League to Enforce Peace, Washington, May 26–27, 1916 (New York: League to Enforce Peace, 1916), 37–50. 71 Elihu Root, “Should International Law Be Codified? And If So, Should It Be Done through Governmental Agencies or by Private Scientific Societies?,” Proceedings of the American Society of International Law at Its Annual Meeting 9 (1915), 163f.

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conflict regulation in the “community of nations.” They would have the task of conveying to the informed international public that violence in war, which infringed on the fundamental rights of all civilized nations, was not only an attack on the states directly involved, but also on the international community as a whole. If authorized to resist, the international community could put the aggressor in its place. It was aggressors who put themselves in the wrong, not the internationally commissioned institutions that would rather prosecute rights violations on behalf of the international community.72 With such statements, Root clearly edged his way toward those who suggested an arbitration league as a mediating authority in 1916. However, he did not define the jurisdiction of a worthwhile arbitration agency in more detail. The position of the Carnegie men in 1916 remained unclear. In some sense, Root agreed with the model of a legalistic league that was possibly prepared to impose sanctions and could guarantee a new, stable world order after the war, as imagined by Taft’s LEP. Yet Root saw the LEP’s rhetoric as fiercely interventionist and shied away from it, just as he by then mistrusted Wilson’s idea of a league, which he deemed inefficient. This twofold distinction proved unproductive. There was no new, consistent design for optimal regulation of international relations after the war.73 The Carnegie men’s problem lay partly in the prevailing interpretation by the American public during the winter of 1916, when Root found himself on the defensive as the LEP set the tone. LEP representatives achieved growing popular success with their propaganda for a strong, interventionist league. Only well-known anti-militaristic pacifists of the caliber of William Jennings Bryan disagreed with them in public debates.74 Meanwhile, Root avoided coming across as a proponent of US intervention in the world war as long as the United States was neutral.75 Another obvious factor in the Carnegie elites’ attitude was the major propaganda setback suffered by Henry Ford late in 1915. The wealthy businessman had joined fifty civil volunteers on a pacifist mission to Europe in favor of anti-war neutralists, 72

Elihu Root, “The Outlook for International Law (Opening Address by Elihu Root, as President of the American Society of International Law, at the Ninth Annual Meeting in Washington, December 28, 1915),” American Journal of International Law 10, no. 1 (1916): 4ff. 73 See Wertheim, “The League,” 809–12. 74 During Winter 1916, Bryan got involved in a public debate with Taft which was published verbatim as a monograph: World Peace: A Written Debate between William Howard Taft and William Jennings Bryan (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1917). 75 See Wertheim, “The League,” 815; Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

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but the trip lacked support from the administration in Washington and was completely ignored by the warring parties.76 This mission’s failure might also have contributed to the Carnegie elites’ lack of outspokenness when the LEP dominated domestic debates. However, despite strong dissensions, the Carnegie men could still agree with both the LEP and the anti-war activists on one common point: at least by the time war broke out, they all expected the United States to assume a role as a global leader in regard to world peace.77 According to Root, a resort to plain isolationism was deemed utterly inappropriate.78 Even as a neutral power, the United States was obliged to lead the discussion about the future international legal system and thereby prepare for the brisk competition between diverging visions of order that was expected to take place after the war’s end.79

Voluntarily Governmentalized Carnegie Men in the Wartime Nationalism of 1917 When the United States entered the world war in early April 1917, domestic political discourses shifted drastically again. Proponents of the preparedness movement launched an increasingly rigid propaganda campaign designed to enforce a homogeneous public and published opinion. Pacifist agitation in general was rigorously silenced. Criticizing the American entry into the war was anathema, and conscription laws and the Espionage Act forcibly paralyzed opponents of war within American society.80 The entry into the war completely fractured the minority faction 76

Carolyn Wilson, “War on Ford’s Peace Ship,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 20, 1915. 77 Mauch, “Pazifismus,” 290. 78 Nicholas Murray Butler, “The United States of Europe: An Interview with Edward Marshall printed in the New York Times, October 18,” 1914 in Butler, A World in Ferment, 28, as well as Butler, “The Changed Outlook,” in idem, 92: “It is no longer possible for the United States, ostrich-like, to plunge its head into the sands of a supposed isolation and to assume that its policies, its influences, and its ideals are not part of the wider world. The outlook has wholly changed. The . . . immediate future is charged with serious international interest and with heavy international responsibility. Of this interest we cannot divest ourselves . . . without proving false to our trust as keepers of the faith in civil liberty as the highest political aim and object of mankind.” 79 Elihu Root, “Address of the President,” American Bar Association Journal 2 (1916), 736f. 80 Besides David M. Kennedy, Over Here, and Ross A. Kennedy, The Will to Believe: Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America’s Strategy for Peace and

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of American opponents of war. Only a few activists such as the Civil Liberties Bureau spoke out against the war and conscription.81 The CEIP was not excluded from attacks from that direction. Most conspicuously, the busy, anti-militarist publisher of the New York Evening Post, Oswald Garrison Villard, who had resigned as head of the New York Peace Society in order to side fully with American anti-preparedness activists, stirred up criticism of what he took to be the CEIP’s scandalous public reticence, in light of the war raging in Europe. According to Villard, the plethora of CEIP-financed studies in international law could not refute the fact that the Endowment elites were uninclined to rouse themselves to sharp protest.82 As a matter of fact, the CEIP’s international law experts had swung fully to the administration’s line, which now focused on the antagonism between military autocrats and democratic societies. From Wilson’s perspective, the new world-security architecture promoted by the United States now had to go along with the more universalist claim of a joint US- and League of Nations-led “ultimate peace of the world” over German autocracy. Violence was to be denounced on principle as an illegitimate means of conducting modern foreign policy; instead, the right to national selfdetermination would have to become the cornerstone of a new, multiethnic Europe.83 Thence the Carnegie men proclaimed complete patriotic loyalty to the American “war to end all wars.” Clearly signaling its allegiance to the government, the CEIP made office space in the CEIP headquarters available to the propagandist Creel Committee on Public Information, which declared that agreeing to war was simply a question of “one hundred percent Americanism.”84 In a joint resolution, the executive committee of the CEIP—which in addition to Root, Butler, and Scott included the astronomer and director of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Henry S. Pritchett, and Governor of Virginia Security (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2009), see especially Justus D. Doenecke, Nothing Less Than War: A New History of Americaʼs Entry into World War I (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 2011). 81 See Charles DeBenedetti, The Peace Reform in American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 99. 82 Villard, Speech file, n.d. (ca. Januar 1917), quoted in Lutzker, “The American Peace Movement,” 332. Among the Antipreparedness-Groups was the American Union Against Militarism which had just circa 1,000 members in 22 US cities and an annual budget of some 50,000 USD based on donations. 83 See Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War, and Peace, ed. John Milton Cooper (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008). 84 Elihu Root and George Creel (draft) on December 27, 1917, quoted in Lutzker, “The American Peace Movement,” 334.

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Andrew Jackson Montague—emphasized “that the most effectual means of promoting durable international peace is to prosecute the war against the Imperial German Government to final victory for democracy, in accordance with the policy declared by the President of the United States.”85 The State Department was much obliged for the declaration of solidarity: Secretary of State Lansing promised Butler that the CEIP’s pronouncement on war nationalism would be spread within the diplomatic corps and the consulates of the United States.86 Butler also positioned himself for greater relevance after 1917. Little remained of his former vision of the United States calming European antagonisms.87 What is more, he was carried away by an ardent zeal to vindicate preparedness. He crusaded against academic colleagues who lacked enthusiasm for war, joining in the rousing campaign against the maverick war critic, Senator Robert La Follette from Wisconsin.88 Butler also readjusted his “International Mind” program, which he had eloquently propagated before 1914 at the Lake Mohonk conferences. Whoever eschewed nationalism and patriotism now stood accused of a fatal “false internationalism” that, according to Butler, was “hopelessly impractical” and grounded in nothing but volatile humanitarianism. By contrast, Butler favored a “true” and “crystalline internationalism” with proven “nationalistic and patriotic sentiments and aims” that would support international order.89 Thus the CEIP’s distance from anti-militarists loyal to the American tradition of despising war became definitively irreconcilable. Condemning the United States’ entry into the war, such loyalists advocated settling nationalistic struggles in Europe by converting them into more negotiable conflicts.90 Much closer to Butler than to anti-militarists, the Columbia historian James Thompson Shotwell, who would rise to become director of the CEIP 85

Nicholas Murray Butler, “Statement Issued by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,” New York, November 2, 1917, Resolution on April 19–20, 1917, in FRUS 1917, Supplement 2, The World War, Washington 1917, 300. 86 Secretary of State Robert Lansing to the Director of the CEIP, N. M. Butler on November 20, 1917, FRUS 1917, Supplement 2, The World War (1917), 310. 87 Nicholas Murray Butler, “The Unrush of War: An Address at the Opening of the 161st Academic Year of Columbia University, September 23, 1914,” in A World in Ferment, 21. 88 See Nancy C. Unger, Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 242–62, for Butler, especially 255. 89 Butler, A World in Ferment, 7f. 90 Exemplary representatives include La Follette and Villard. See Oswald Garrison Villard, Fighting Years: Memoirs of a Liberal Editor (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939).

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Economics and History division in the mid-1920s, exemplified the Carnegie men’s close affinity with bellicose nationalism.91 During the war years, Shotwell figured prominently among self-mobilized US academics in at least two ways. First, he belonged to the National Board for Historical Service (NBHS), founded a few weeks after the United States entered the war in 1917. Overtly signaling its affinity for the Carnegie philanthropists by establishing its offices in the Carnegie Institution headquarters in Washington, this propagandistic hub was joined by a clear majority of American historians. Shotwell’s NBHS was in part responsible for conceptualizing a pamphlet series co-edited with George Creel’s central propaganda institution, the Committee on Public Information,92 which supported Wilson’s “war to end all wars” rhetoric and the idea of a democratic US world mission with staunch anti-German overtones to refute the chauvinist, pan-German furor.93 Second, Shotwell was co-opted to the American Commission to Negotiate Peace—known as the Inquiry— established in the summer of 1917 and thus gained access to the White House’s secret “S Group” of some 150 intellectuals and academics.94 Above all, the Inquiry was intended to supply the president and his peace planners with thoroughly researched, easily obtainable data and document collections provided above all by specialists with regional expertise, in order to define political parameters for a more progressive postwar order.95 As a

91

See Harold Josephson, James T. Shotwell and the Rise of Internationalism in America (Madison, NJ.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975). 92 Letter from Creel to Prof. Joseph Schaeffer, Vice-Chairman National Board for Historical Service Committee on Public Information, Washington, D.C. from October 18, 1918, in The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy: Issued by the Committee on Public Information, George Creel Chairman, ed. Edgar G. Sisson (Washington, DC: Committee on Public Information, 1918), 29. 93 On the inquiry, see FRUS 1919: The Paris Peace Conference, 13 vols. (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1942–1947); Lawrence Emerson Gelfand, The Inquiry: American Preparations for Peace, 1917–1919 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963), 35f. 94 The membership list from May 1, 1919, is in “American Commission to Negotiate Peace,” Paris 1919. 95 “The Inquiry: Report of Progress to December 15, 1917,” in FRUS 1919: The Paris Peace Conference (1919) (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1919), 34–39. Walter Lippmann to Colonel House, December 19, 1917, in FRUS 1919: The Paris Peace Conference (1919), 39–41. “Report on the Inquiry: Its Scope and Method, March 20, 1918,” in FRUS 1919: The Paris Peace Conference, 55f. The American Geographical Society’s Contribution to the Peace Conference, Geographical Review 7 (1919), 1–10. See Charles DeBenedetti, The Peace Reform, 100; Charles DeBenedetti, Origins of the American Peace Movement, 1915–1929 (Millwood, NY: KTO, 1978), 4–18.

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go-between with the NBHS and the Inquiry, Shotwell also drew on the rich informational materials of the CEIP.96 With this stance, Shotwell once more testified to the massive push for homogenization that had passed through the ranks of the CEIP since 1917. Up to then, the CEIP masterminds had only debated the legitimacy and competences of a future international institution of arbitration. Following the US war entry, though, they focused primarily on legitimizing the US government rather than rethinking the legal shape of the international postwar order. Even Root backed down and adopted the propagandistic rhetoric of the day, which tagged the war as a global clash between the German Anti-Christ, despiser of civilization and virtual martial God of war, on the one side, and the Western defenders of the “liberty of the AngloSaxon race”97 on the other.

Cracks in the Philanthropic Foundation: The Marginalization of International Legalism in 1918–19 As the World War wore on and finally ended, quite a few Carnegie men increasingly worried about developments in American politics. What Wilson had hinted at as a possibility in his Fourteen Points speech in early January 1918 became a certainty during the Paris Peace negotiations in February 1919: from the CEIP’s perspective, Wilson’s vision of an international peace order was aimed primarily at introducing territorial stability rather than urging the international community to commit itself to a legal code for regulation of international conflicts.98 The Carnegie men’s legalism and focus on collective security were a poor fit with Wilson’s expectations that the League of Nations would operate as a flexible, elastic, quasi-parliamentary forum. Wilson chiefly envisioned a moral authority 96

Walter Lippmann to the Division Chiefs of the Inquiry, New York, December 11, 1917 and “The Inquiry. Report of Progress to December 15, 1917,” both in FRUS 1919: The Paris Peace Conference (1919), 26, 34. 97 “Root Calls It a War against Paganism,” New York Times, March 8, 1918. 98 See Trygve Throntveit, “The Fable of the Fourteen Points: Woodrow Wilson and National Self-Determination,” Diplomatic History 35 (2011): 445–81; William R. Keylor, “Wilson’s Project for a New World Order of Permanent Peace and Security,” in A Companion to Woodrow Wilson, ed. Ross A. Kennedy (Malden: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 470–91; Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Democracy, Peace, and World Order,” in Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War, and Peace, ed. John Milton Cooper (Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 225–52; Alan Sharp, The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking After the First World War, 1919–1923 (Basingstoke: Red Globe Press, 2008).

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that could reach a wide range of agreements without committing itself to static rules of law. The main goal was for the United States to secure meaningful influence in world politics without compromising American national independence. Wilson’s first draft of the future statutes of the League of Nations in February 1919 completely omitted mention of an International Court of Arbitration. Thus, it seemed obvious that he would work toward establishing an international forum for discussion rather than enshrining institutional guarantees on behalf of a league that could enforce sanctions if necessary.99 Against this backdrop, the CEIP establishment basically felt duped. Accordingly, the Endowment initially excluded proven protagonists of the League of Nations movement from its grantee list. The New York Peace Society, for instance, was no longer considered eligible for CEIP funds after 1920. But that attitude would be repeatedly challenged by public criticism. Peace activists like the leading figure of the pro-League movement, Charles Herbert Levermore, complained that the Advocate of Peace, a CEIP-sponsored publication, was particularly known for its harsh criticism of the League.100 Meanwhile the CEIP’s international legalists continued their criticism of Wilson’s League of Nations project. Yet, just as they had done before the US entry into the war, the Carnegie men kept their distance from Wilson’s noisy Republican critics. They tried to dominate domestic debates in the United States after the war ended and held that his League project compromised American sovereignty and the Monroe Doctrine, loosened American immigration laws, and distracted the United States from the primary goal of controlling Germany on a longterm basis.101 When faced with such Republican anti-League tirades, the Carnegie men kept their distance and asserted their own critical position. Amongst the circle of renowned CEIP representatives, it was Root yet again who rebelled most forcefully against what he felt was an untenable utopianism à la Wilson. Willfully contesting the excesses of Wilson’s foreign policy, Root responded to the fierce Wilson critic, Republican and Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, in open letters in the spring and summer of 1919. Unlike the Republican majority leaders, Root did not campaign for a 99

Woodrow Wilson, “The Law and the Facts: Presidential Address, Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association,” The American Political Science Review 5, no. 1 (1911): 1–11. See Wertheim, “The League,” 801, 818. 100 See Warren F. Kuehl and Lynne K. Dunn, Keeping the Covenant: American Internationalists and the League of Nations, 1920–1939 (Kent: Kent University State Press, 1997), 59f. 101 See Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “W. Wilson, Alliances, and the League of Nations,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5, no. 2 (2006): 139–65.

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US withdrawal from the League of Nations project, but rather argued for a much stronger sanctioning power for the League. In his public statements, Root even advanced his earlier core argument: that the League was not violating US sovereignty, but on the contrary should assume ever larger rights to represent a supervisory body conspicuously controlled by the United States.102 The CEIP officers remained aloof from the LEP. Quite unlike the LEP, Root did not contemplate automatic rights to sanction for the League, but rather suggested a much more subtle arrangement of competences. The Council of the League of Nations should decide on conflict regulation procedures on a case-by-case basis and at its legal discretion, right up to controlling the International Court of Arbitration. In his almost confessional declaration, Root favored an evolutionary strategy of implementing law that would ultimately lead to a peaceful world order. Accordingly, periodic conferences of international law experts should constantly re-examine the principles of international law and its practical application and adjust them where necessary.103 Such statements proved detrimental to the CEIP president’s actual aim of attaining decisionmaking power in the immediate postwar phase of 1918–19: despite his sharp wit and high honors, the Republican critic of the government was excluded from the American delegation to the peace treaty negotiations in Paris. Moreover, the US government altogether ignored Root’s public statements and meticulously listed amendments for an effective League of Nations, which Root publicized with a goal of influencing the Paris negotiations in the spring of 1919.104 Incidentally, Root could not prevent the Republican majority in the Senate from voting against the United States joining the League of Nations in March 1920.105 Nevertheless, Root still wielded influence. Despite his skepticism about US membership in the League of Nations, in 1920 he accepted the League’s invitation to join the highly decorated body of experts that 102

Elihu Root, “Letter of the Honorable Elihu Root to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Regarding the Covenant of the League of Nations,” American Journal of International Law 13, no. 3 (1919): 596–602; “Root Suggests Six Amendments to League Draft,” New York Times, March 31, 1919; and “Qualify Treaty on Ratification, Says Elihu Root,” New York Times, June 22, 1919, 1. 103 “Letter of the Honorable Elihu Root to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Regarding the Covenant of the League of Nations,” American Journal of International Law 13 (1919): 596–602. 104 “Root Suggests Six Amendments to League Draft,” New York Times, March 31, 1919. See also Mary Ellen O’Connell, “Elihu Root and Crisis Prevention,” in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (ASIL) 95 (2001), 117. 105 See “The Senate Kills the Treaty,” New York Times, March 20, 1920; “America Isolated without Treaty,” New York Times, March 20, 1920.

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conceived the statutes of the Permanent International Court of Justice and, among other things, decided on the rules for recruiting judges.106 In October 1920, he attempted to influence Republican discussion with his legalistic opinion and argued, not without effect, for the United States’ entry into a League of Nations rid of Wilson’s ideas.107 During the presidential campaign of 1920, Root once again sensed a chance to be heard. Shortly after the election of the Republican Warren Harding in November 1920, Root approached the new administration to raise the issue of an International Court of Arbitration and promote his vision of the new world order.108 However, neither in Wilsonian circles nor amongst obstinate Republican League of Nation opponents was he in a position to win a majority over to a reworking of the League of Nation statutes. The Republican-led Senate intentionally remained passive, and Root’s legalism failed. Meanwhile, the Senate became absorbed in allegations about the two most controversial options discussed at the time: either favoring a US League of Nations membership or pressing for a significant revision of the League’s statutes. In fact, the Senate refused to consider a compromise to overcome the deadlock.109 As a corollary, the legalistic internationalist creed espoused by many Carnegie men and certainly Root, based on the vision of a League that could impose sanctions, remained a futile political fiction that was irrelevant to American foreign policy of the early 1920s. It is hard to say whether the kind of legally and politically reequipped League envisioned by Root might have been better suited for launching an international peace politics that included the Balkans. At any rate, in the United States the Carnegie men of Root’s standing were unable to win a majority position against Wilson’s progressive idealism or in opposition to the Republicans’ outright rejection of League of Nations politics. Therefore, Root saw the League as a highly incomplete guarantor of collective security. However, these critical voices were hardly influential. Shotwell, who as a member of the Inquiry accompanied Wilson to Paris for the peace negotiations in December 1918, was another renowned Carnegie man who indeed ranked among the cloud of political informants close to the president. Yet Wilson communicated only loosely with the experts in Paris and thereby significantly diluted the original concept of policy advice.

106

See O’Connell, Elihu Root, 117. This includes the context of Root’s Carnegie Hall speech, “Root for Modified League of Nations, New York Times, October 20, 1920; “Mr. Root’s View of the Covenant,” New York Times, October 21, 1920. 108 “Root and Fall Have 5-Hour Talk,” New York Times, December 10, 1920. Senator Fall was one of Harding’s followers. 109 See Wertheim, “The League,” 832. 107

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In the end, the president was hardly amenable to the insinuations of commissioned or self-declared Carnegie experts.110

“Catharsis”: Carnegie Men on the Pro-League Track by 1919 Shortly after the war’s end, Butler struggled to defy bellicose nationalism and the Carnegie elites’ deeply engrained skepticism of Wilson’s dealings in Paris. Unlike the others, Butler harked back to the idea of a powerful system of law-based international conflict regulation that he hoped, against all odds, to make an important new option for US foreign policy. Looking beyond the bitter postwar altercations in the League of Nations, he wanted to revitalize the constructive approaches of the 1899 and 1907 Hague peace conferences, not least because they entailed a leading role for the United States.111 Butler’s statements also clarified that the CEIP officers hoped their global commitments would give them authority to take part in shaping the basic political direction of the international system after 1919: in view of the Russian October Revolution and recent events in Russia, the philanthropists meant to help bring about a decidedly non-revolutionary, distinctly capitalist world order.112 Such was Butler’s main thrust when he publicly described Bolshevism as synonymous with chaos and an antagonist of democracy in late January 1919.113 Meanwhile Shotwell stepped forward in Paris for the very same reason, though as a proponent of international social policy. Somewhat fraught and defensive, he held that the founding of an International Labor Office had become indispensable in light of the impending Russian revolution.114 Accordingly, in the winter of 1918/19 he began writing memoranda aimed at recognition and integration of the labor movement in the Paris Peace negotiations. Called in to attend the deliberations of the commission on International Labor Legislation as an 110

See Josephson, Shotwell, 80. On this issue, see Butler on April 15, 1920, in his preface to a CEIP edition of presidential keynote speeches on US foreign policy: American Foreign Policy: Based upon Statements of Presidents and Secretaries of State, Publication No. 17 (Washington: CEIP. Division of Intercourse and Education, 1920), i. 112 Nicholas Murray Butler, “Our Bolshevic Menace,” The Forum, Jan. 1920, 49– 55. 113 Butler in a speech to the United Waist League of America, excerpts published in “Deplores Allied Policy in Russia,” New York Times, January 28, 1919. 114 James Thomson Shotwell, “The International Labor Organization as an Alternative to Violent Revolution,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 166 (1933): 18–25 and “Report of the Commission on International Labor Legislation to the Peace Conference,” Monthly Labor Review 8 (1919): 1. 111

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adviser and member of the brain trust, by spring 1919 Shotwell had negotiated a Labor Charter the American delegation could also agree to.115 That said, the anti-Bolshevist topos was admittedly not an invention of the Carnegie men, but rather notoriously widespread among American liberals at the time. The long-term publisher of the Independent Hamilton Holt, for instance, likewise thought he could recognize the League of Nations as the only powerful response to the threat of Bolshevism and thus contended that the United States needed to join a League of Nations with revised statutes.116 In his latest capacity that of CEIP president, Butler ultimately rose to prominence as the Endowment’s prime programmatic thinker in the 1920s. Although he could not imagine the United States joining the League, he still sought close contact.117 He initiated appropriate advertising campaigns and led the CEIP to, for instance, recruit American teachers and professors to be sent to Europe on missions that would allow them to study the work of the International Court of Arbitration and other League policies.118 By the mid-1920s, not only the Carnegie men but likewise the academic and political elites they approached in Europe regarded this “intellectual cooperation” as brilliant proof of the progressive leading role that the United States had already assumed despite its refusal to join the League of Nations.119 Against this backdrop Butler expected the CEIP would coordinate academic internationalism and help establish international law as an integral, genuinely political discipline within international relations generally, and as the keystone of the new internationalism more particularly.120

115

Josephson, Shotwell, 81–90. “Assails Senate for League Criticism,” New York Times, March 30, 1919. 117 “Butler Says Public Is against League,” New York Times, April 27, 1924. 118 “Educators to Tour European Capitals,” New York Times, April 26, 1926. In this case, the mission consisted of representatives from 49 colleges. 50 American professors were sent to Geneva in August that year, see “Attend Geneva Reception,” New York Times, August 16, 1926. In October, the New York Times published a report of a member of an additional mission of some 60 teachers; see C. Eagleton in “Educators Study the League,” New York Times, October 3, 1926. See also “30 Editors to Study Europe’s Progress,” New York Times, February 7, 1927. 119 See the editor of the Journal des Débats on the occasion of an International Conference on foreign policy problems that was co-initiated by the CEIP: G. Lechartier, “America’s Part in International Cooperation,” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science in the City of New York 12 (1926): 475–78. 120 Nicholas Murray Butler, “The Development of the International Mind. Address Delivered Before the Academy of International Law, at The Hague July 20, 1923,” Advocate of Peace Through Justice 85 (1923): 342–45. For the funding 116

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In the late 1920s, Shotwell forged particularly close ties with the US government. Since the mid-1920s he had intervened in discussions on the collective security and disarmament policies pushed by some segments of the American and European internationalist communities and eventually also by the General Assembly of the League of Nations. In the mid to late 1920s, this Carnegie man and his Endowment colleague Butler played important roles in the negotiation of the 1928 Briand-Kellog Pact, which multilaterally condemned war.121 Meanwhile, the Republican opposition in the United States lambasted Shotwell and the convention.122 Shotwell, for his part, was quite aware that the pact provided no effective mechanism for arbitration and sanctions, making compliance with its stipulations hard to ensure. He also sensed that the ban on war could actually quickly shrink to an almost lyrical footnote in the continuing politics of violence (as in the Italo-Ethiopian War and the like).123 The Carnegie men did not lose track of the Balkans after 1919. In 1926, when the CEIP convened a much-noticed National Conference on International Problems and Relations at Briarcliff Manor to address current foreign policy problems,124 they also included speakers who reported on the latest developments in the Balkans.125 The Balkan region was now deemed profile of the CEIP during the interwar period, see Helke Rausch, “Professionalisierung als diplomatische Strategie: Das US-amerikanische Carnegie Endowment in Europa vor 1945,” in Kultur und Beruf in Europa, ed. Isabella Löhr, Matthias Middell, and Hannes Siegrist (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 2012), 217–25; J. W. Winn, “Nicholas Murray Butler, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Search for Reconciliation in Europe, 1919–1933,” Peace & Change 31 (2006): 555–84; Katharina Rietzler, “Before the Cultural Cold Wars: American Philanthropy and Cultural Diplomacy in the Interwar Years,” Historical Research 84 (2011): 148–61; Jens Wegener, “An Organization, European in Character: European Agency and American Control at the Centre Européen 1925–1940,” in American Foundations and the Coproduction of World Order in the 20th Century, ed. John Krige and Helke Rausch (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 37–60. 121 See Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chaps. 8 and 9. 122 Henry Cabot Lodge, “The Meaning of the Kellogg Treaty,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, December 1, 1928, 32–41. 123 James T. Shotwell, “Disarmament Alone No Guarantee of World Peace,” Current History, September 1, 1929, 1024–25. 124 “Limitation of Arms Placed at Our Door,” New York Times, May 11, 1926; “Finds Men, Not Arms Source of War Evil,” New York Times, May 12, 1926, 20; “Filipino Opposes Island Self-Rule,” New York Times, May 1, 1926; “New Causes of War Cited by Dr. Butler.” New York Times, May 15, 1926. 125 Zdenek Fierlinger, “Central Europe and the Balkans,” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science in the City of New York 12 no. 1 (1926): 276–81 and Adamantios

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attractive for further investigation because, as in a laboratory situation, it seemed to afford the American observers valuable insights into both the economic crisis burdening the region and the excesses of aggressive nationalism. Both ills were deemed pressing, fundamental evils weighing upon Europe, if not upon global society. It fell to the renowned Columbia historian and Middle East specialist Edward Mead Earle to uplift the Carnegie-sponsored experts: Earle felt compelled to anticipate a brighter future for the region, given that Southeastern and Eastern Europe had cast off the yoke of the “imperial rule” of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires.126 Furthermore, the Carnegie men did not content themselves with summoning experts on the Balkan region, but occasionally also took a clear stance in contemporary political debates. On that note, in spring 1926 Butler agitated for a “Balkan Locarno” to calm the region and defended the League of Nations’ strategy of inducing conflicting parties on-site to disarm combatants and settle disputes.127 The Locarno politics of the late 1920s, which numerous Carnegie men explicitly pursued, made the Endowment’s representatives into enthusiastic advocates of active, official US involvement in the peace internationalism of their time. Very closely connected with the League of Nations NonPartisan Association in 1927–28, Butler invoked “the spirit of the Locarno treaties” and advised that the United States abandon its politics of “isolation and aloofness” to promote world peace in the future.128 Along the way, he counted Germany among the nations capable of peace.129 Professing his programmatic creed, he declared all the more energetically that it was necessary to establish “international institutions to lessen the possibility of future international wars . . . supported by public opinion in the great nations.”130 But even as the Carnegie men called on the United States to join the League of Nations, such claims as Butler’s fell on deaf ears in the postwar Republican administration. The Carnegie internationalists’ aims put them at odds with the mobilization of those American politicians who tended to avoid conflict, and with the temper of public opinion more broadly speaking. Referring to the large number of lingering or ongoing international conflicts T. Polyzoides, ibidem, 287–94; C. F. Scott, H. W. Harris, L. Mises, and A. H. Jones, “Discussion: The Danubian and Balkan States,” ibidem, 295–98. 126 Edward Mead Earle, “Problems of Eastern and Southeastern Europe,” ibidem, 268. 127 “A Balkan ‘Locarno’ Asked to Aid Peace,” New York Times, March 6, 1926; “Butler Points Out Two Foes to Peace,” New York Times, April 19, 1926. 128 “Dr. Butler Appeals to Nation to Drop Policy of Isolation,” New York Times, January 11, 1927. 129 “Dr. Butler Extols the German People,” New York Times, January 2, 1928. 130 “Sees World Opinion Strong for Peace,” New York Times, May 11, 1928.

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and wars seemed strategically unwise. The spread of such a perception of permanent international conflicts could destabilize the American perspective and incriminate proponents of the League of Nations. If the internationalists alarmed the public in order to highlight the need for arbitration, they would risk meeting with resistance from two directions. On the one hand, conservative isolationists would most likely categorically oppose any kind of US involvement in international conflicts. On the other, the League’s advocates had to take care not to strengthen critics of the League, who had ever since the planning and founding of the League of Nations pointed to continuing international conflicts as evidence of the inefficiency of arbitration mechanisms.131 Hence the Carnegie men were unable to make the League of Nations into the crucial international arbitration authority dependent on American membership that they wanted. The road to the Carnegie men’s participation in contemporary political debates in the 1920s was long—longer, it seemed, than had initially been expected when the CEIP was set up in 1910. The Carnegie Report of 1914 had claimed it should be possible to institutionalize a kind of scientifically undergirded institution of criminal jurisdiction fit to investigate conflicts according to the principles of international law. This was in line with contemporary efforts to codify international law and to require a judicial basis for resolution of political conflicts. Moreover, it was consistent with the increasingly prominent role the Carnegie men had played in such endeavors since 1910 and even far into the 1920s. The “ethnic cleansing” carried out during the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 by marauding paramilitary groups entrenched in local civil societies132 was shocking, yet even these escalations of violence had ultimately proved containable. This reasoning strengthened the Carnegie men’s resolve, initially still deeply rooted in pacifist traditions, to insist that international conflicts be legally mediated, or ideally prevented, through a flexible and efficient international law. But once the experience of the Great War had subdued the philanthropists’ regulatory optimism, it finally became obvious that at that time, international law per se was neither a neutral, decidedly apolitical, nor transparent resource, and it was not an automatic guarantee of a stable international order.133 On the contrary, the war experience even 131

See Kuehl, Keeping the Covenant, 62. See Wolfgang Höpken, “Archaische Gewalt oder Vorboten des ‚totalen Krieges’? Die Balkankriege 1912‒1913 in der europäischen Kriegsgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Schnittstellen: Gesellschaft, Nation, Konflikt und Erinnerung in Südosteuropa, ed. Ulf Brunnbauer, Andreas Helmedach, and Stefan Troebst (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2007), 245–60. 133 By all indications, this contemporary experience was by no means confined to the Carnegie Men. Besides Coates, Legalist Empire, and Scarfi, The Hidden History of International Law, see for example Markus Payk, “Institutionalisierung 132

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dramatically pluralized contemporary expectations as to how an international legal order could be negotiated. Carnegie men like Root, who espoused more intricate concepts of such a world order, promptly found themselves competing with (1) Wilson’s rather associative plans for a League of Nations, (2) Republican internationalists, and (3) proponents of emphatic sanctioning via the League to Enforce Peace. Most Carnegie officers set their sights primarily on a league that would bind its members to an assessable set of legal principles. Defeated by the Wilson administration and their organicist League of Nations concept, in 1918–19 the Carnegie men eventually were left with nothing. However, Butler and Shotwell remained strident proponents of reconciliation internationalism in the early and later 1920s, and of continued cerebration regarding the question of a feasible international legal order. What is more, they sought and maintained close ties to the League and its conciliatory international networks, even without the United States’ formal membership in the League of Nations.

und Verrechtlichung: Die Geschichte des Völkerrechts im späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 52 (2012): 861–83.

CHAPTER TWO

“The International Law of the Future”: The Carnegie Endowment and the Sovereign Limits of International Jurisdiction, 1910s–1960s Isabella Löhr

In July 1914, the New York Times enthusiastically welcomed the publication of the “Carnegie Report on the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars 1912–13.”1 The report was the outcome of a five-week trip to Southeastern Europe by members of the so-called Carnegie Commission who had collected documents, heard witnesses, and conferred with officials from Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia with the aim of documenting the massive atrocities committed against the civilian population during the two Balkan wars. Although the commission failed to enquire into the roles of Romania, Montenegro, and the Ottoman Empire, which had also been major parties in the conflict, the report was considered both a milestone in the public condemnation of ethnically motivated violence, and a strong appeal to respect the 1907 Hague Convention, particularly its provisions on the laws and customs of war.2 The New York Times celebrated the 500-page report as a “serious, loyal, and substantial contribution to further 1

Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914). For the historical context of the Balkan Report, see Nadine Akhund, “The Two Carnegie Reports: From the Balkan Expedition of 1913 to the Albanian Trip of 1921: A Comparative Approach,” Balkanologie: Revue d’études pluridisciplinaires 14 (2012): 1–2; Frances Trix, “Peace-Mongering in 1913: The Carnegie International Commission of Inquiry and its Report on the Balkan Wars,” First World War Studies 5, no. 2 (2014): 147–62. 2 Arthur Eyffinger, “A Highly Critical Moment: Role and Record of the 1907 Hague Peace Conference,” Netherlands International Law Review 54, no. 2 (2007): 197–228; James Brown Scott, ed., The Hague Conventions and Declarations of 1899 and 1907 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1915).

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enlightenment and to further advance” and as a sober attempt to give “something like a substantial ‘sanction’ to the Hague decisions” that, it was hoped, would herald the “beginning of an international executive machinery, without which any court must be relatively helpless.”3 The newspaper’s positive reception of the Carnegie Commission’s work went far beyond the trumpeting of a single attempt to document war crimes and accuse belligerents of departing from international agreements by using violence as political means. The report on the Balkan Wars was the first noteworthy venture to put the program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace into practice. Founded in 1911, the Endowment took up the cause of promoting peace via the strengthening of international law and arbitration. Reaching back to the peace movement of the late nineteenth century, it placed itself at the intersection of peace activism and international politics, where it vigorously emphasized international law as a method of settling conflicts and pacifying interstate dialogue. At the same time, the report was also a political novelty: for the first time, a private nongovernmental organization had recruited an international commission to investigate states’ behavior. As the New York Times noted, the Endowment conceived the report as a public forum that would condemn modern warfare and enlist support for replacing force with conciliation and legal justice. The Balkan Report also took a clear stand on the region’s political organization. The New York Times stressed that the report had reassessed the Balkan Wars, judging the first, in 1912, as a “splendid success” because it enabled Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, and Bulgaria to “free themselves from the Turkish yoke” so that “each nationality” could subsequently be empowered “to secure the greatest possible gain for itself.” By contrast, the second war of 1913 was seen as a complete disaster: not only had the Ottoman Empire regained parts of formerly lost territories, but former allies had also waged war on each other.4 The unequivocally partisan demand for the Balkan provinces’ national independence and selfdetermination went hand in hand with a civilizing mission that denied the legacy of the Ottoman Empire and conceived it as backward in political rule.5 In that context, international law was assigned a civilizing role based 3

“The Balkan War: Important Results for the Peace Movement Gained Through the International Commission,” New York Times, July 5, 1914. 4 Ibidem. For the historical context of the Balkan Wars, see Dietmar Müller’s chapter in this volume. 5 For the Eastern Question, see Matthew Smith Anderson, The Eastern Question, 1774–1923: A Study in International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1968); Lucien J. Frary, ed., Russian-Ottoman Borderlands: The Eastern Question Reconsidered (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014); Isa Blumi, “Impacts of the Balkan Wars: The Uncharted Paths from Empire to Nation-State,” in War and

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on justice, a clear set of rules and regulations, and a counter-imperial disposition that would acknowledge national sovereignty and peoples’ claims thereto. It is the contention of this chapter that historians of international law need to rethink the legacy of international law by taking notions of hegemony and knowledge into account and closely contextualizing the situations in which international law emerged or developed. To that end the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace serves as a case study to scrutinize the supposed universality of international law. The chapter analyzes the evolution of international jurisdiction over five decades through the lens of a single though influential actor and thus offers a painstaking and relational interpretation of the law’s inconsistencies and political pitfalls. In so doing, the chapter posits that in the first half of the twentieth century the Endowment played a major role in shaping the politically delicate relationship between national sovereignty and international jurisdiction by actively contributing to the gradual anchoring of sovereignty as a core category in international law. The Balkan Report marked the beginning of that endeavor, which met a temporary end in the late 1940s. Supporting that contention, the case study posits a notion of international law that focuses on the interplay of actors, norms, and political processes to explore the law’s functions and limits. Whereas other contributions to this volume carve out the particular role that regional conflicts in Southeastern Europe played in the development of international and/or humanitarian law, this chapter looks critically at the legal agenda of the Carnegie Endowment and interrogates its hegemonic implications. With that aim, it analyzes a certain expert community’s relation to knowledge production and power. Martti Koskenniemi, among others, has identified the limits of legal universalism by arguing that modern international law is tied to state sovereignty and deeply linked with notions of civilization and imperialism.6 In response, the present chapter Nationalism: The Balkan Wars, 1912–1913 and Their Sociopolitical Implications, ed. Isa Blumi and M. Hakan Yavuz (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2013), 528–57; Holm Sundhaussen, “Orientalische Frage,” in Lexikon zur Geschichte Südosteuropas, ed. Holm Sundhaussen and Konrad Clewing (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2016), 667–69. For the civilizing mission, see Jürgen Osterhammmel and Boris Barth, eds., Zivilisierungsmissionen: Imperiale Weltverbesserungen seit dem 18. Jahrhundert (Constance: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2005). 6 Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of Modern International Law (Cambridge:

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delves into that discussion by showcasing a particular transnational law community—legal scholars, lawyers, and officers of the Endowment—and its role in the creation of world order. Examining the complex relationship between codification processes and law as modes of power, it posits that the Endowment did not advance a universalist cause, but instead remained intertwined with state interests and worked to reinforce asymmetrical power relations. This focus on a non-state actor’s role in international relations aligns with a new kind of diplomatic history that acknowledges the embeddedness of states and state practices in border-crossing agencies. The concept has been reframed to include foreign diplomacy, state administrations, international organizations, and private actors, all with transnational reach. This analytical shift is of profound consequence for historians’ understanding of what makes up international politics, now framed not as a club, but as a network engaging an increasing number of actors, topics, and practices.7 Critical legal scholarship echoes this analytical shift by paying attention to the transitional character of law and engaging with its structural and institutional underpinnings. As Peer Zumbansen remarks, a critical approach to international law from a global perspective means a “radical challenge to the nexus between state and law, that is a challenge to the assumption that law emanates from authoritative, institutionalized processes grounded in a state-based system of norm creation, implementation, and adjudication.”8 In that reading, the particular, nonuniversal character of law becomes visible only when the focus is on actors, institutions, and situations that precede the codification and subsequent universalization of legal norms.9 Highlighting the regional character of legal

Cambridge University Press, 2005); Anne Orford, ed., International Law and Its Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 7 Laurence Badel and Stanislas Jeannesson, “Introduction: Une histoire globale de la diplomatie?,” monde(s): Dossier Diplomaties 5 (2014): 6–26; Andrew F. Cooper, Jorge Heine, Ramesh Thakur, eds., “Introduction: The Challenges of 21stCentury Diplomacy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy (Oxford, 2013), 1–38; Arthur Eyffinger, “Diplomacy,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, ed. Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters (Oxford, 2012), 813–39. 8 Peer Zumbansen, “Lochner Disembedded,” Osgoode Hall Law School: Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy, Research Paper Series 40 (2014), 2f.; Roger Cotterell, “What is Transnational Law?” Law and Social Inquiry 37 (2012): 500–524; Thomas Duve, “Entanglements in Legal History: Introductory Remarks,” in Entanglements in Legal History: Conceptual Approaches, ed. Thomas Duve (Frankfurt a.M., 2014), 3–25. 9 See Arnulf Becker Lorca, Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History 1842–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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thinking, historical actors serve as lenses through which to better understand the close connection between legal and political norm-setting. At the same time, a critical view of how legal norms serve hegemonic interests draws attention to competing visions and stresses the contingent character of codification processes and the diverging forces at stake. To substantiate those points, the chapter examines activities of the Carnegie Endowment during World War II that illustrate the embeddedness of the institution’s legal positions’ in the construction of normative orders. Whereas the Balkan Report reflected the US public’s general interest in the region and the Endowment’s particular interest in making a strong, exemplary case for its legalist, state-centric version of international law, the key issue during World War II was the legal manifestation of US hegemony. The chapter begins by assessing the Endowment’s legal agenda, tracing its transformations from its founding in 1911 until the late 1930s. The second section shifts attention to the rediscovery of international law at the end of the 1930s. It presents a detailed analysis of two key wartime publications that elaborated the jurisdiction of international courts, especially regarding war atrocities and the boundaries of international law relative to national sovereignty. The final section traces those issues to the 1950s and 1960s, casting light on two Carnegie publications that anticipated the emergence of the legal figure of the common heritage of mankind.

Philanthropy and Imperial Legalism At its inception, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was conceived as a philanthropic foundation with strong roots in liberal internationalism and pacifist movements. Its declared mission was to seek out alternative avenues to a world free of war and violence.10 In his letter to the trustees in December 1910, Andrew Carnegie entrusted the Endowment to vest the peace movement with a legalist view that would stress arbitration and judicial solutions to international conflicts.11 Accordingly, 10

Michael A. Lutzker, “The Formation of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: A Study of the Establishment-Centered Peace Movement, 1910–1914,” in Building the Organizational Society, ed. Jerry Israel (New York, 1972), 143–62; David S. Patterson, Toward a Warless World: The Travail of the American Peace Movement 1887–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976). 11 Nicholas Murray Butler, The International Mind: An Argument for the Judicial Settlement of International Disputes (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1912); Katharina Rietzler, “Fortunes of a Profession: American Foundations and International Law, 1910–1939,” Global Society 28, no. 1 (2014): 10.

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the Endowment placed special emphasis on the need to strengthen the laws of war and advance the acknowledgment of arbitration as a diplomatic means. The “Carnegie Report on the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars 1912–1913” was one of the first ventures to put that agenda into practice. Putting the focus on belligerents’ massive infringements of the provisions of the 1907 Hague Convention, it proposed a new type of diplomatic interventionism endowed with a political effectiveness that the foregoing peace movement had lacked.12 The report sought to deliver a neutral, evidence-based survey of atrocities and breaches of international humanitarian law during the Balkan Wars. Its investigation of the treatment of prisoners of war and wounded soldiers, as well as atrocities against the civilian population, suggested above all that the belligerent parties had consciously blurred the distinction between combatants and noncombatants in order to carry out ethnic cleansing.13 The report was unprecedented in several respects. By declaring itself competent to undertake such a study, the Carnegie Endowment asserted its authority to delineate the limits of state practice and claim that states had to subject themselves to the rule of international law.14 To accomplish this, the Endowment opted for expert knowledge that, despite its purportedly neutral character, was eventually used to pressure the international community.15 The Endowment was the first private organization with the resources to undertake such a politically delicate and complicated investigation, and its financial means far surpassed those of various internationalist movements of the fin-de-siècle and private institutions such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, which stood at the fore of international humanitarian law in the 1860s. The peace movement suffered from a considerable lack of the financial resources that would have enabled supervision of the legal practices of states. Daniel Laqua has illustrated the sometimes acute financial difficulties of peace activists using the examples of Paul Otlet, Henri LaFontaine, and Alfred H. Fried, the godfathers of pacifism and internationalism in the Belle Époque whose many projects stalled time and again when the needed funds could not be 12

David Cortright, Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 25–44; Sandi E. Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 13 See in this volume the contributions of Ivan Ilčev and Dietmar Müller. 14 For a general overview, see Chris af Jochnick and Roger Normand, “The Legitimation of Violence: A Critical History of the Laws of War,” Harvard International Law Journal 35, no. 1 (1994): 49–95. 15 On the role of experts in internationalist movements, see Bernhard Struck, Davide Rodogno, and Jakob Vogel, eds., Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks, and Issues (c. 1850–1930) (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014).

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raised.16 At the second Hague peace conference in 1907, peace activists identified appropriate solutions to this problem and initiated public campaigns as well as extensive press coverage of negotiations that would, it was hoped, exert moral pressure on official delegates.17 By contrast, the Endowment was able to usher in legal internationalism and establish a transnational infrastructure to rally politicians and the public around its cause. The Endowment stemmed from the Lake Mohonk Conferences on International Arbitration that Andrew Carnegie had attended before devising a proper agenda.18 In contrast to currents in the nineteenthcentury peace movement that had united a religious orientation with a focus on humanitarian aid,19 the new breed of peace activist generated under Carnegie’s influence incorporated diplomats, politicians, businesspeople, and lawyers who approached peace in practical, socioeconomic terms, viewing it as a necessary precondition for the United States’ rise to global power.20 Consequently, the peace movement had a strong imperial character combined with a civilizing mission. Andrew Carnegie made its nature perfectly clear when he stated in a letter to the Endowment trustees that the spearhead of any peace activism was the “English-speaking race.”21 The imperial and industrialist foundations of US peace activism supported an elitist composition that pursued peace work in professional terms. The Endowment was expected to advance peace campaigns by

16

Daniel Laqua, “Alfred H. Fried and the Challenges for ‘Scientific Pacifism’ in the Belle Époque,” in Information Beyond Borders: International Cultural and Intellectual Exchange in the Belle Époque, ed. Rayward W. Boyd (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 181–99. 17 Madeleine Herren and Cornelia Knab, “Die Zweite Haager Friedenskonferenz und die Liberalisierung des politischen Informationsmarktes,” Die Friedenswarte 82, no. 4 (2007): 51–64. 18 For the conference, see Report of the Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration, Lake Mohonk 1895–1916; William I. Hull, The New Peace Movement (Boston: The World Peace Foundation, 1912). 19 Daniel Maul, “American Quakers, the Emergence of International Humanitarianism and the Foundation of the American Friends Service Committee 1890–1920,” in Dilemmas of Humanitarianism in the Twentieth Century, ed. Johannes Paulmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 63– 90; Peter Stamatov, The Origins of Global Humanitarianism: Religion, Empires, and Advocacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 20 See Helke Rausch’s chapter in this volume. 21 Mr. Carnegie’s Letter to the Trustees Read at Their First Meeting, in Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Year Book for 1911 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1912), 1–4.

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pooling expertise and systematizing peace research, and as part of the international law community, it was in fact well qualified to accomplish these aims, especially given the professional profile of its first president, Elihu Root, and the director of the International Law division, James Brown Scott, who were prominent lawyers, legal scholars, and at times government advisers.22 Despite the Endowment’s self-confidence, the trustees recognized the limits of its funding schemes and consequently strove to embed its activities in already existing networks. The executive committee also sought to strengthen the Endowment’s mission of advocacy by configuring the Endowment as a sort of information hub at the intersection of manifold peace groups and movements.23 At the same time, the Endowment had links to private institutions specializing in international law, and the executive committee pursued a close association with the Institute de Droit International. This renowned private institution, which had assisted the preparations for the two Hague peace conferences, was from 1912 on a standing adviser to the Endowment’s International Law division.24 Despite efforts to embed the Carnegie Endowment’s activities in transnational knowledge and advocacy networks, the Balkan Report remained fairly insignificant. This was largely because of its strategically inopportune moment of publication just weeks before smoldering conflicts in the Balkan region triggered the outbreak of World War I, in which the magnitude of atrocities and war crimes was far more distressing to contemporaries than the excesses of the Balkan Wars had been. In the course of World War I, belligerents violated international humanitarian laws to a previously unknown extent, violating neutrality, committing atrocities against the civilian population and prisoners of war, resorting to legally and morally contested methods of economic warfare, and deploying new and devastating weapons such as poison gas. Worse still, Germany’s recourse to military necessity as an argument for flouting international law cast doubt on the universal acceptance of international legal norms and on the irreversibility of their character, and thereby threatened international

22

George A. Finch, “James Brown Scott, 1866–1943,” American Journal of International Law 38 no. 2 (1944): 183–217; Nicholas Murray Butler, Elihu Root: Memorial Address Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, November 12, 1937 (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1937). 23 Carnegie Endowment, Year Book for 1911, 32, 20, 22. 24 Ibidem, 27; Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Year Book for 1912, (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1913), xvi. The establishment of a board of advisers went hand in hand with an allotment to the Institut de Droit International of 20,000 US dollars. Ibidem, 25.

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law as a normative, overarching framework meant to ensure peaceful coexistence.25 The 1919 Paris peace conference triggered a fundamental change in the political organization of the world. Unlike the Endowment’s vision, the new international order embodied by the League of Nations was focused on social and political cooperation. Legalist paradigms, meanwhile, failed to find adequate institutional expression and were sidelined. The Permanent Court of Arbitration, installed in 1907, was not included in the Covenant. The Permanent Court of International Justice of 1922 was certainly innovative and attached to the League of Nations, but its jurisdiction remained largely unenforced.26 For that reason the Endowment distanced itself from the League at first. This was in line with the then prevailing domestic suspicion of the League of Nations in the United States as well as with the position taken by Elihu Root, then chairman of the Endowment, who placed his confidence in the long-term impact of legal norms instead of incorporating them into a political structure set to resolve diplomatic conflicts. In the course of the early 1920s, however, the Endowment abandoned its skeptical restraint. Revising its legalist positions, the Endowment acknowledged the existence of the League of Nations as an irreducible fact and aligned its funding programs accordingly. Joseph W. Winn associates this policy shift with the Endowment’s change of leadership in 1925, when Nicholas Murray Butler succeeded Root as president. Winn remarks that Butler “instilled the organization with Wilsonianism.” This entailed a political vision that placed its trust in the balancing of power and settling of conflicts via negotiations in an internationally binding forum while at the same time installing national self-determination as a key principle, even if this triggered secessionist movements.27 The gradual incorporation of the League in the Endowment’s programmatic framework became manifest in a more comprehensive concept implying a departure from legal internationalism and a shift to the educational sector, to be carried out by the Endowment’s Intercourse and 25

Isabel V. Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during the Great War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). 26 John Bassett Moore, “The Organization of the Permanent Court of International Justice,” Columbia Law Review 22, no. 6 (1922): 497–526; Manley O. Hudson, The Permanent Court of International Justice 1920–1942 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1943). 27 Joseph W. Winn, “Nicholas Murray Butler, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Search for Reconciliation in Europe, 1919–1933,” Peace & Change 31, no. 4 (2006): 558. For Wilsonian internationalism, see Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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Education, headed by Butler.28 Katharina Rietzler suggests that this revision be understood as cultural diplomacy avant la lettre that paved the way for the Cold War era, when private foundations and governmental agencies cooperated to engineer the cultural relations between the United States and the rest of the world.29 This turn toward supporting European institutions of higher education, funding libraries, and sustaining the Committee and Institute of Intellectual Cooperation reflected the marginalization of international humanitarian law in the interwar years and the standstill in international criminal law after the push to prosecute international crimes in the immediate aftermath of World War I backfired.30 The League’s Committee on Arbitration and Security, set up at the end of 1927, attempted to reinforce the peaceful settlement of disputes and to make warfare more humane, but its efforts led to only minor revisions.31 Even the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928, intended to outlaw the use of war as a political means and highly celebrated in its day, had a short life, ended by the Manchurian and Abyssinian Wars just a few years later.32 In other words, the use of international law to frame questions of war and peace ground to a halt in the interwar period.

28

On the role of higher education in this context, see Katja Naumann’s chapter in this volume. 29 Katharina Rietzler, “Before the Cultural Cold Wars: American Philanthropy and Cultural Diplomacy in the Inter-War Years,” Historical Research 84, no. 223 (2011): 148–64; Inderjeet Parmar, “American Power and Philanthropic Warfare: From the War to End all Wars to the Democratic Peace,” Global Society 28, no. 11 (2014): 54–69. 30 Beth van Schaack and Ron Slye, “A Concise History of International Criminal Law,” Santa Clara Law Digital Commons, 2007, 20–27, http://digitalcommons. law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1629&context=facpubs; Helke Rausch, “US ‘Scientific Philanthropy’ in France, Germany and Great Britain: Historical Snapshots of an Interwar Panorama,” in American Foundations and the European Welfare States, ed. Klaus Petersen, John Stewart, and Michael Kuur Sørensen (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2013), 79–103. 31 “Part 2: The Progressive Development of International Law by the League of Nations,” American Journal of International Law, Supplement 41, no. 4 (1947), 53f. 32 Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919–1933 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 572–74; Randall Lesaffer, “Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928),” in Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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Reviving International Law during World War II The horrors of World War II put international law back on the agenda and spurred fresh attempts to draw up legal rules that would enable the Allies to prosecute war crimes committed by the Axis powers. Moreover, the gradual and ostensibly unstoppable collapse of the international community from the Manchurian incident in 1931 made it necessary to anchor a renewed, much more powerful legal rule in an institutional structure that would include all countries of the world, having learned a major lesson from the formal and (in the case of the Soviet Union) temporal absence of the United States and the Soviet Union from the League of Nations.33 With these issues at the core of the International Law division, the Carnegie Endowment seized the opportunity to revive its legal agenda. In the 1930s and the war years, the major foundations took effort to expand their activities on a global scale.34 This held true for the Carnegie Endowment, which, as Andrew Johnstone argues, worked to promote a new international order during the war. It did so in various ways, channeling public pressure, gathering other pressure groups, producing expert opinion, and consulting the US government. For these purposes the Endowment developed a broad array of activities aimed at promoting support for a new international organization that would later become the United Nations.35 The Endowment’s Division of Intercourse and Education under Nicholas Murray Butler took the lead. Apart from campaigns to create a new, better equipped international organization, it harkened back to the so-called Chatham House principles of 1935. These had been formulated by an international meeting of well-known scholars and experts on international affairs, as well as private organizations such as the International Chamber of Commerce, that convened to work out principles that would foster international cooperation. The first principle emphasized the roles of the League of Nations and of international law, while the 33

Robert C. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Robert Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America during World War II (New York: Atheneum, 1967). 34 Inderjeet Parma, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 65–96. 35 Andrew Johnstone, “Shaping our Post-war Foreign Policy: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Promotion of the United Nations Organisation during World War II,” Global Society 28, no. 1 (2014): 25; Johnstone, “Isolationism and Internationalism in American Foreign Relations,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 9, no. 1 (2011): 7–20.

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other three highlighted the need to integrate issues of peace into international economic and financial affairs—a program first articulated in 1911 that was also in line with the Atlantic Charter principles pronounced by Roosevelt and Churchill in summer 1941.36 Implemented via a broad range of activities, this agenda included a series of broadcasts on NBC in 1943 and the funding of several groups opposed to isolationism, such as the International Relations Club, International Relations Centers, or Commission to Study the Organization of Peace.37 The Endowment’s International Law division, for its part, conceded key demands of the 1914 Balkan Report, which had called for arbitration and the enforcement of international law to align governmental politics and maintain peace. To this end, the Endowment addressed a professional audience consisting of lawyers, legal scholars, and consultants with sound knowledge of the technically complex topics at hand. The Endowment was well prepared for this task. Its Division of International Law was headed by the prominent law scholar James Brown Scott, a leading figure in the American Society of International Law and a long-time editor of the American Journal of International Law. Scott had also been instrumental in the planning of the Permanent Court of International Justice in 1920–21 and was known as the “dean of international law” because of his professional devotion to the subject matter.38 Additionally, the Endowment officers were closely affiliated with foreign policy elites, especially during and shortly after World War I, when they served as expert advisers or compiled studies in preparation for the peace conference in Paris. Even though international law lost priority in the 1920s and 1930s, the officers continued to foster these relations and “retained a certain closeness to officials in the State Department,”39 which was of immediate benefit from 1939 onward. Relying on scholarly expertise and political consultancy, the division aimed to provide legal knowledge and proactively involve law scholars and lawyers in its endeavor to indicate future directions of legal development to political decision-makers. Part of this scheme was a publication program 36

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, International Conference Held at Chatham House, London, March 5–7, 1935 on Steps to Be Taken to Restore Confidence by Promotion of Trade (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1935); Dan Plesch, America, Hitler and the UN: How the Allies Won World War II and Forged a Peace (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 31–58. 37 Johnstone, “Shaping our Post-war Foreign Policy,” 27–32. 38 Hatsue Shinohara, US International Lawyers in the Interwar Years: A Forgotten Crusade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 14; John Hepp, “James Brown Scott and the Rise of Public International Law,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7, no. 2 (2008): 151–79. 39 Katharina Rietzler, “Before the Cultural Wars,” 154.

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launched in 1914 that sought to provide sound expertise in various publication series. The main aim was to get current legal disputes between states onto the agenda, and to assist practitioners and law instructors by providing content-related material on special issues and preparing the ground for legal and political engagement with controversial issues. The Endowment initiated a comprehensive knowledge campaign, pursuing a multilevel publication strategy that would involve various kinds of texts and target a professional audience worldwide. This approach included the financial promotion of reputable law journals such as the Swiss Die Friedenswarte, the Japanese Journal of International Law and Diplomacy, the French Revue de droit international, the Cuban Revista de derecho internacional, and the German Zeitschrift für Völkerrecht. Moreover, the Endowment attempted to gather a comprehensive body of legal knowledge to create a scholarly canon based on annotated and partly translated reeditions of the classics of international law. The Endowment took this series over from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, where it had been published under Scott’s direction since 1906, and completed it with translations of works by contemporary law scholars; reports on national and international court decisions; and eventually collections of international treaties, diplomatic correspondence, and legal instruments considered key to understanding the underlying mechanisms of legal developments.40 At least superficially, the division assessed its prolific paper production from a positivist point of view, hinting at the literal weight of some volumes, the quantitative extent of publication projects, and its alleged primary objective of filling gaps with regard to the documentation of international law.41 What appeared under the guise of the documentation of norms and practices to be discovered and processed by the jurist, however, was in fact imbued with an interventionist quality that undermined the series’ technical character.42 This becomes evident in works printed as of 1939. This period saw a range of publications that linked political, legal, and juridical issues closely by pursuing questions pertinent to future scenarios in international law, including the politically delicate relationship between domestic and international affairs. Most prominent in this regard was Raphael Lemkin’s major book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Published by the Endowment in 1944, this work had a key role in paving the way for the further development of international criminal law after the war was over. It had been conceived as an exhaustive 40

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Summary of Organization and Work, 1911–1941 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1941), 38–43. 41 Ibidem, 39. 42 Ibidem, 43.

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collection of the laws of occupation and a thorough analysis of the German government’s extermination policies. But Lemkin’s main achievement was to insist early on “that attacks upon national, religious, and ethnic groups should be made international crimes.”43 Lemkin’s pivotal and enduring legacy was to coin the concept of genocide and to sketch the concrete dimensions of systematic and targeted attacks on entire populations. Advocating the term genocide, Lemkin’s book set the stage for it to become a legal principle of international criminal law and eventually a mandatory rule when the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948.44 Lemkin’s intervention proved to be of overarching importance for both the further development of international criminal law and the somewhat erratic expansion of the international defense of human rights in the early postwar years.45 Far less known than Lemkin’s work and the Endowment’s support of it are the attempts of the latter to impact the nascent international architecture. Supporting the concept of genocide was but one component of a diversified strategy to give momentum to a range of codification processes that were deemed politically relevant to the primary task of re-establishing some sort of world order. In this context, the Endowment issued two monographs in 1944 that deserve a closer look: Manley O. Hudson’s work on international tribunals, and another collection of postulates and principles on the international law of the future.46 Within months of their publication, the two books had become 43

Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), xiii. 44 For Lemkin and the concept of genocide, see Claudia Kraft, “Genozid,” in Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, vol. 2, ed. Dan Diner (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 422–26; A. Dirk Moses “Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide,” in The Oxford Handbook on Genocide, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 19–41; Agnieszka Bie≈czyk-Missala and Dębski Sławomir, eds., Rafał Lemkin: A Hero of Humankind (Warsaw: Polski Instytut Spraw Miedzynarodowych, 2010). 45 Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, “Introduction: Genealogies of Human Rights,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–26; for the current debate on the breakthrough of human rights, see Samuel Moyn, “The End of Human Rights History,” Past & Present 1, no. 233 (2016): 307–22 and Lynn Hunt, “The Long and the Short of the History of Human Rights,” Past & Present 1, no. 233 (2016): 323–31. 46 Manley O. Hudson, International Tribunals: Past and Future (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944); The International Law of the Future: Postulates, Principles, and Proposals (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944).

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outdated in part due to decisions taken at the four-power London conference and the San Francisco conference in summer 1945. Nevertheless, the publications revolved around the key question of the terms under which international law was to be revived, and therefore allowed for scrutinizing the Carnegie Endowment’s contribution, in cooperation with US-based lawyers and legal scholars, to the rebuilding of international relations immediately after acts of war were terminated. Moreover, the books addressed the vital question of how international law and its institutional counterparts could be drafted to allow the squaring of a circle so that national sovereignty was acknowledged even as rules were being drafted with the intent to domesticate the very claim to sovereign power. In other words, the books delved into delicate subject matter to explore how the end of American isolationism could take shape.

International Courts and War Crimes The books formed part of the Endowment’s series Studies in the Administration of International Law and Organization and were authored by personalities who combined scholarly knowledge with political careers that included the setting up of international institutions. Manley O. Hudson was such a personality. Already a distinguished law professor, he became a politically influential jurist as well due to his impassioned commitment to advance international codification and create a body of juridical decisions that would serve to deepen rule-setting and international lawmaking. Hudson was an associate of the Institut de Droit International and a member of the League of Nations Committee of Experts for the Progressive Codification of International Law, set up in 1924. When this conference petered out in 1930, Hudson continued his activities as director of the Harvard Research in International Law, a research project carried out with gifts from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Commonwealth Fund, indirectly supported by the Carnegie Endowment. Initially connected with the 1930 League conference, by 1939 the Harvard Research in International Law had drafted thirteen international conventions sketching out future codification projects. Though the immediate impact of these conventions remained modest, Hudson transferred this body of work to the UN International Law Commission, which he chaired from 1947 onward.47 Besides his politically inspired research activities, Hudson became known for his seat on the Permanent Court of Arbitration as of 1933 and his judgeship on the Permanent Court of International Justice from 1936 until its 47

Rietzler, “Fortunes of a Profession,” 17–22.

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dissolution in 1946.48 In the course of these activities, Hudson’s concentrated experience in international criminal law and arbitration made its way into the monograph on the past and future of international tribunals. Published in 1944, the book addressed seminal but unresolved questions about the definition of war crimes and the need to formulate legal norms and standards that would, upon the war’s end, provide for trials and punishment of the Axis powers’ wartime atrocities. Eventually termed “crimes against humanity” and prosecuted in the framework of the international military tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo,49 these acts were still being fiercely discussed when Hudson’s book came out at the end of 1944. Hudson addressed these issues.50 After the first part of the monograph surveyed past attempts to set up judicial mechanisms and institutions by focusing on structure, personnel, financing, or procedures, the second part turned to the reform of international justice. Hudson connected the politically delicate question of a proposed international criminal court with considerations about a comprehensive system of international tribunals that would include regional courts and tribunals tasked to settle economic disputes. Despite his scholarly stance, Hudson took an unequivocal stand on the pressing question of how to deal with German mass atrocities. First, he rejected the accountability of individuals before an international court. Though he conceded that in some cases international judicial agencies might replace local agencies for a limited period of time, he championed the idea of leaving state sovereignty untouched and fostering interstate cooperation in such matters as extradition, judicial assistance, jurisdiction to punish for crime, and coordinated surveillance by national police. Whatever course of development may be imminent with reference to political organization, the time is hardly ripe for the extension of international law to include juridical process for condemning and punishing acts either of States or of individuals.51

48

Julius Stone, “Manley Hudson: Campaigner and Teacher of International Law,” Harvard Law Review 74, no. 2 (1960): 215–25; Philip C. Jessup “Manley Hudson, 1886–1960,” American Journal of International Law 54, no. 3 (1960): 603–4. 49 Out of the many publications on the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, see recent work by Daniel Hedinger and Daniel Siemens, eds., “New Perspectives on the Post-World War II Trials of Nuremberg and Tokyo,” Journal of Modern European History, special issue, 14 no. 4 (2016). 50 George A. Finch and Harold G. Moulton, “Foreword,” in Hudson, International Tribunals, v–vi. 51 Hudson, International Tribunals, 186.

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This lucid argument against a serious broadening of international jurisdiction must be understood in the context of the still unsettled question of whether and to what degree the US administration would be willing to accede to a League of Nations successor organization like that projected by the Atlantic Charter in August 1941 and reaffirmed in the Moscow Declaration of October 1943.52 One of the main reasons the US Senate had voted against the Covenant of the League of Nations in the early 1920s was the concern of keeping domestic interests separate from involvement in European politics.53 This doctrine also applied to the Permanent Court of International Justice, which the US government had never ratified despite a special protocol in 1929 that acknowledged its reservations.54 By 1944 the situation had changed, and the US government was about to take the lead and move toward integrating into an international community.55 However, as Kirsten Sellars has pointed out, American readiness to agree to an international order entailing a meaningfully enforced rule of law was not ensured at that point in time.56 Hudson’s monograph reflected this still hesitant position in its solid rejection of any appearance of international jurisdiction mingling with domestic affairs. Though earlier he had advocated the codification of a public international law that national jurisdictions would have had to adjust to, this time he insisted that law should be a neutral arbiter and maintain a distance from politics. Accordingly, Hudson’s concluding remarks put special emphasis on the limits of international courts and affirmed the unmistakable separation of political and judicial affairs and the subordination of each international tribunal to the political control of its member state.57 One prominent arena of disputes about the manner, content, and range of international prosecutions of Nazi leaders was the United Nations War Crime Commission (UNWCC), created in 1943 by 52

Royal Institute of International Affairs, ed., United Nations Documents, 1941–1945 (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1947). 53 Stephen Wertheim, “The League That Wasn’t: American Designs for a LegalistSanctionist League of Nations and the Intellectual Origins of International Organization, 1914–1920,” Diplomatic History 35, no. 5 (2011): 797–836. 54 Hudson, International Tribunals, 155f. 55 David Reynolds, From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the International History of the 1940s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 77–113; Plesch, America, Hitler and the UN, 31–58. 56 Kirsten Sellars, “Crimes against Peace” and International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 84–112. 57 Hudson, International Tribunals, 237.

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seventeen Allied governments with its seat in London. The mission of the UNWCC was to elaborate common grounds in international law on which to investigate single war crimes and develop key issues in international criminal law. Only recently have scholars called attention to the significant role the UNWCC played in broadening the concept of war crimes by coining the notion of crimes against humanity.58 Apart from the more than 36,000 cases in which it reported war crimes by individuals and units that then became subject to national trials and prosecution, the UNWCC’s main legacy was its role in fleshing out the so-called London Charter of 1945, which laid the ground for the Nuremberg trials. Adopted at the four-power London Conference in summer 1945, the charter stipulated punishment for Nazi leaders, not only for war crimes but also for crimes against peace and crimes against humanity, which both were path-breaking novelties in international law. Moreover, the London Charter allowed for individuals’ accountability, including command responsibility and collective responsibility. This count of charges meant a sea change in legal thinking and practice.59 Institutionally, the UNWCC served as a vehicle for gaining access to the Allied political leadership, which came together at war summits, which replaced the peace conferences that had been common practice during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.60 With regard to personnel, the UNWCC was dominated by exiled lawyers and experts who maintained close relations with the various Eastern European exile governments in London during the war. Furthermore, the UNWCC membership included Soviet law scholars who numbered among advocates of criminal proceedings against the Axis powers at an early stage. Aron Trainin’s 1944 book The Criminal Responsibility of the Hitlerites merits special mention for presenting early ideas of complicity and conspiracy as offenses liable to prosecution that would later be key notions at the Nuremberg trials.61 The book was published in Russian in 1943, translated into English in 1944, and circulated prior to the London

58

Dan Plesch and Shanti Sattler, “A New Paradigm of Customary International Law: The UN War Crimes Commission of 1943–1948 and Its Associated Courts and Trials,” Criminal Law Forum 25, no. 1 (2014): 17–43. 59 David Luban, “A Theory of Crimes Against Humanity,” Yale Journal of International Law 29 (2004): 85–167; Beth van Schaack, “The Definition of Crimes Against Humanity: Resolving the Incoherence,” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 37 (1998–1999): 787–850. 60 David J. Stone, War Summits: The Meetings that Shaped World War II and the Postwar World (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005). 61 Aron Trainin, The Criminal Responsibility of the Hitlerites (Moscow: Legal Publishing House NKU, 1944).

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Conference among its participants.62 Ultimately, Kerstin von Lingen notes, the four-power conference seemed largely to follow the recommendations of the UNWCC and included the new charges in the London Charter.63 Hudson’s standpoint on the controversial question of whether to convict the Axis powers on the grounds of national or international law must be interpreted as immediate response to the still unsettled debates within the UNWCC in London, and as a counter-project to Trainin’s politically influential ideas. Though Hudson and the UNWCC agreed on the need for establishing strict legal guidelines to enable criminal proceedings, they fundamentally disagreed about the institutional scale and political consequences of an international criminal jurisdiction. Notwithstanding its internal divisions about whether to set up an international criminal court or deal with the war atrocities in ad hoc tribunals,64 the UNWCC was clear about its moral approach to the idea that humanity was the inviolable basis of the international community and to a criminal procedure that was politically motivated. Did the UNWCC justify this method, and the speediness with which the trials should be carried out, on grounds of the unprecedented extent of the crimes committed?65 Hudson opposed such an argument, making instead a strong plea for careful distinction between the political and the judicial. Thus he disapproved of what he called a “hasty action by an international tribunal” and insisted on an impartial, independent tribunal, arguing that “unless it is freed from the necessity of compromising principles to the policies of the moment, it will lack the authority required for effective adjudication, and it will not be in a position to discharge its primary function successfully.”66 Yet Hudson’s position was no less attributable to the moment, as he did not perceive the US government and public as prepared for an international order in which sovereign action could be contested by legal rule.

62

Kerstin von Lingen “Setting the Path for the UNWCC: The Representation of European Exile Governments on the London International Assembly and the Commission for Penal Reconstruction and Development, 1941–1944,” Criminal Law Forum 25, no. 1 (2014): 65. 63 Kerstin von Lingen, “Fulfilling the Martens Clause: Debating ‘Crimes against Humanity, 1899–1945,’” in Humanity: A History of European Concepts in Practice from the Sixteenth Century to the Present, ed. Fabian Klose and Mirjam Thulin (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016), 201. 64 von Lingen, “Setting the Path for the UNWCC,” 67f. 65 Plesch and Slatter, “A New Paradigm of Customary International Criminal Law,” 31. 66 Hudson, International Tribunals, 237.

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The International Law of the Future The contested issue of the limits of sovereignty and the empowerment of international law to stipulate national decision-making arose also in a second publication sponsored by the Endowment, a treatise on the international law of the future.67 The book resulted from a joint effort by a group of about two hundred US and Canadian lawyers, legal scholars, judges, and officials to reinstall international law as the main pillar of peaceful cohabitation. The list of participants, who co-authored the book, reads as a who’s who of the reform-oriented Anglo-American law community, including the US Supreme Court justice Robert H. Jackson, who was to later conduct negotiations at the four-power conference in London, as well as representatives of the American peace movement and liberal think tanks, refugee scholars from Europe, former League officials, and members of notable private law firms. On the initiative of Manley Hudson, the Carnegie Endowment funded a series of conferences that would present North American views on the future course of international relations. Starting in spring 1942, participants in about twenty conferences worked out a “community of views.”68 The book was in line with parallel attempts by leading personnel of the Carnegie Endowment to take an active part in the instituting of the United Nations. As Andrew Johnstone observes, during the war years the Endowment set up a bundle of initiatives aimed at lobbying for the restoration of a cooperative world order based on international law.69 The pamphlet was part of a multilayered strategy to have a say in planning processes once the war ended. The text was disseminated widely in journal publications and in French, Spanish, and Portuguese translations.70 It was strictly organized, presenting six postulates, ten principles, and twenty-three proposals. The postulates, which were deemed to lay the groundwork “for the establishment and maintenance of an effective legal order in a world of States,”71 encompassed relationships between states. In so doing they took a clear stance, acknowledging states as the main entities of international relations and positioning them in a community of states. Most noteworthy here are the unconditional manner in which the postulates obliged states to subject themselves to the rule of law, and the strong plea for a strict limitation of state sovereignty. The postulates’ vision of an international community strongly emphasized the 67

The International Law of the Future. Ibidem, v–vi. 69 Johnstone, “Shaping our Post-war Foreign Policy,” 31. 70 Shinohara, US International Lawyers, 184. 71 The International Law of the Future, 3. 68

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aspect of community. Above all, states were to acknowledge that each governmental decision directly or indirectly affected other states and was therefore always of concern to the international community. For this reason, the postulates called for strong regulations. Their overall aim was “to promote the common welfare of all peoples and to maintain just and peaceful relations between all states.”72 Additionally, principle 7 departed from the theories of “just war” that informed the school of thought behind the Hague peace conferences of 1899 and 1907.73 The principles of ius ad bellum and ius in bello recognized war as a legitimate political instrument and restricted it only by prescribing rules and customs of warfare. The pamphlet, however, called for banning the use of force as a political technique and pushed for acknowledgement of “crimes of aggression” as a legal matter of fact.74 At the same time, however, the pamphlet anticipated the paradigmatic shift in international relations that took place in 1945. With regard to the politically delicate question of the relationship between domestic and international affairs, the pamphlet clearly asserted the inviolability of national territory and sovereign jurisdiction. Though the principles for the international law of the future, which made up its second part, started with the claim “that each State has a legal duty to carry out in full good faith its obligations under international law,” the pamphlet placed a strong restriction on that claim, stating that “each State has a legal duty to refrain from intervention in the internal affairs of any other State.”75 Moreover, the pamphlet said nothing about any provisions for sanctions to enforce international law—a desideratum that had been considered key to the League of Nations’ power, or lack thereof, to settle conflicts among its powerful member states. Like Hudson’s book on the international courts of the future, the pamphlet called for strict separation of juridical and political functions, noting that “an international court does not have, and should not have, a staff of marshals and sheriffs to levy execution of its judgements. Their enforcement goes beyond the strictly judicial function which should be confined to a court. If any enforcement of judgement is to

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Ibidem, 5–6. Stephen C. Neff, War and the Law of Nations: A General History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 74 This remained a pending discussion throughout the second half of the twentieth century and was only settled in 2010 at the Kampala Revision Conference of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Further see Surendran Koran, “The International Criminal Court and Crimes of Aggression: Beyond the Kampala Convention,” Houston Journal of International Law 34, no. 2 (2011–12): 231–88. 75 The International Law of the Future, 9. 73

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be attempted, it should be entrusted to a body possessing a political responsibility.”76 The pamphlet amounted to a strong plea for the sovereign nationstate. Though international law was expected to tame the state, the latter was assumed to form the basis of the international community, so law had only a limited capacity to rebuke state behavior. Andrew Carnegie had advocated the same view in a letter to the trustees of the Carnegie Endowment in 1910, stating that international arbitration should not be a problem for domestic affairs: “If the independence and rights of nations to their respective internal policies were first formally recognized in such treaties, no dispute concerning these elements of sovereignty could arise.”77 Whereas World War I had led to a gradual weakening of the vigorous legalist principles, the return to strong sovereign power during World War II indicated a departure from the course the Endowment had taken in the 1930s when it shifted to a more progressive approach. This had included acceptance of the League of Nations as a political institution to govern interstate affairs, along with growing awareness that international law could not be developed if it was unprepared to approach the relationship between international and national law.78 During the war, however, the Carnegie experts prefigured what Mark Mazower has called the “territorialization of postwar planning.”79 The means of achieving international stability was not seen as international law, but rather as the coherence of political power and territorial rule. This became particularly evident upon the discontinuance of minority protections that had been crucial to the effort to empower the League of Nations to settle international conflicts arising from ethnically motivated quarrels. Though minority protection applied only in the new states of Eastern Europe, it entailed the right of the international community to intervene in national politics and, consequently, in national sovereignty.80 Yet, the shift from minority protection to the protection of the human rights of the individual went hand in hand with states’ responsibility to assume responsibility for the individual. Now that the international community was refraining from monitoring the rights of vulnerable groups or persons, it fell to the state to fill the gap. 76

Ibidem, 148. Carnegie Endowment, Year Book for 1911, 3. 78 Rietzler, “Fortunes of a Profession,” 22f. 79 Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 113. 80 Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Umut Öszu, Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 77

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In 1951, Hannah Arendt encapsulated the problems resulting therefrom when she observed that the liberal turn to the individual and the individual’s right to have rights hinged entirely on the precondition of being a national of the given state. In other words, this shift depended on the sovereign state’s willingness to grant these rights: the international community had no ability at all to make states allocate the rights of citizenship or grant protections.81 The Carnegie pamphlet of 1944 addressed this issue, demanding that each state must observe justice and what were called the “dictates of humanity.”82 This claim, however, paled in contrast with the strong position the authors granted the sovereign power. As Mazower notes, this double twist of initiating a major juridification of interstate relations while at the same time preserving the inviolability of the state was not just a reaction to the “minority issue” that was considered the core problem of interwar Europe’s political instability. In fact, it was also very convenient for the Allied powers because it allowed them to remove internal conflicts—such as domestic racial politics in the United States, and Great Britain’s imperial struggles as decolonization dawned—from international jurisdiction.83

Sovereignty at Sea: Anticipating the Turn to the Common Heritage of Mankind Despite the urgency of issues of international criminal law and the shape of the legal dimension in the postwar order in the first half of the 1940s, the Carnegie Endowment ventured to advance international law also in other fields that seem, at least at first sight, peripheral to the exigent task of organizing the transition from war to peace on lasting grounds. During the war, its International Law division published two monographs addressing the regulation of fisheries: Stefan Riesenfeld’s book on the protection of 81

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 1951). This stage of development was fundamentally challenged by the UN member states’ adoption of the so-called Responsibility to Protect at a world summit in 2005. This political commitment reminds states of their responsibility to protect all populations from atrocities or any form of violence, and authorizes the international community to infringe upon national sovereignty as soon as a state has failed to fulfill its responsibility. However, whether the Responsibility to Protect can be considered a legal norm of international law remains highly contested among legal scholars. Further see Anne Orford, International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 82 The International Law of the Future, 7. 83 Mark Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950,” The Historical Journal 47, no. 2 (2004): 389.

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coastal fisheries, released in 1942, and Larry L. Leonard’s 1944 work on the international regulation of fisheries.84 Both books at first seem at odds with the works of Lemkin, Hudson, and the group of authors who were responsible for the book on the international law of the future. For while the works of the latter were immediately linked to the events of war and had relevance that was clear to contemporaries without further explanation, Riesenfeld’s and Leonard’s books stood out due to their technical imprint and the turn to a field that had so far received only marginal consideration in modern international law. Nevertheless, a close look reveals that the legal questions Riesenfeld and Leonard tackled strongly resembled the ones that had preoccupied Hudson and the group of authors, namely how to define the limits of sovereignty and determine the qualities of international law in order to allow for intervention. Like other Carnegie publications, Riesenfeld’s and Leonard’s books claimed to refrain from politically relevant conclusions or recommendations, yet also provided programmatic analyses of transnational legal affairs that had far-reaching consequences for the legal definitions of territory and sovereignty. Additionally, both books anticipated the juridification of a field that in subsequent decades would center on the common heritage of mankind, a concept that gained momentum in the political context of decolonization and stemmed from fears, beginning in the 1950s, of an increasing scarcity of resources. International regulation of the high seas emerged at the fore of so-called classical international law. In 1604–05, Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius, later considered the founder of international law, published a work on the legal status of maritime regulations that would eventually lead to a marked shift in legal assessments of and geopolitical approaches to all issues involving the seas and coastlines. A legal opinion he wrote on behalf of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), Mare liberum, was soon disputed by the Portuguese empire regarding its portrayal of trade routes from Europe to Southeast Asia and Latin America. Grotius interpreted the conflicting claims in favor of his client by declaring the high seas res communis omnium and thus common to all. Grotius backed unrestricted navigation on the high seas, including fisheries, with consideration of sovereign claims by riparian states, which he specifically limited to a three-mile zone from the coast. Everything beyond that three-mile zone was declared to be free and not subject to territorial claims or even unilateral attempts at annexation.85

84

Stefan Riesenfeld, Protection of Coastal Fisheries under International Law (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1942); Larry L. Leonard, International Regulation of Fisheries (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944). 85 Norman Weis, ed., Hugo Grotius: Mare Liberum, Zur Aktualität eines Klassikertextes (Potsdam: University of Potsdam, 2009 [Leiden, 1609]); R. Jeffery, Hugo Grotius

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Since then, the principles of the freedom of the seas and their division as only seldom territorial and mostly neutral have been pillars of international law that were notably confirmed in 1994 by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). However, the three-mile zone did not contain any detailed provisions for common use of the nonterritorial parts of the seas that in fact form their overwhelming majority. As early as 1925, Argentine professor of law José Léon Suárez, a member of the League of Nations Committee of Experts for the Progressive Codification of International Law, proposed that the high seas be conceived of as economic space belonging to the community of states. Amid growing conflicts about the shared use of fisheries, significantly diminished stocks of cod and herring, and the endangering of certain whale and seal populations,86 Suárez argued that the sea should be subject to international law, and that both the use of resources and national property claims should be open to political negotiation.87 Riesenfeld and Leonard drew upon those considerations in depicting the overexploitation of fisheries and the need to regulate the common use of the sea as “one of the burning problems of our age.”88 Whereas Leonard primarily addressed high seas fisheries, Riesenfeld focused on the rising number of conflicts between coastal states regarding the exploitation of fishing grounds, which had become considerably more effective with the development of new fishing techniques. The assessment that coastal and high seas fisheries regulations would rank among the most urgent problems of the time is arguably tenacious, given that both books were published during World War II. Yet, even a cursory look at Leonard’s book reveals the politically delicate implications of the issue. By presenting several maps that visualize the key issues—namely, schooling fishes such as salmon, herring, and cod in the North Pacific—both Leonard’s and Riesenfeld’s books dealt in International Thought (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). The Carnegie Endowment reprinted the book in 1916: Hugo Grotius, The Freedom of the Seas, or, The Right Which Belongs to the Dutch to Take Part in the East Indian Trade: A Dissertation, translated with a revision of the Latin text of 1633 by Ralph Van Deman Magoffin, edited with an introductory note by James Brown Scott (New York: Oxford University Press, 1916). 86 William M. Adams, Against Extinction: The Story of Conservation (London: Routledge, 2004); Julio A. Baerberis “International Regulation of the Use of Water,” in Encyclopedia of Public International Law, vol. 4, ed. Rudolf Bernhardt (Amsterdam: Max Planck Institute, 1995), 1435. 87 Anna-Katharina Wöbse, “Globales Gemeingut und das Naturerbe der Menschheit im Völkerbund und den Vereinten Nationen,” in Global Commons im 20. Jahrhundert: Entwürfe für eine globale Welt, ed. Isabella Löhr and Andrea Rehling (Munich: De Gruyter, 2014), 86f. 88 Riesenfeld, Protection of Coastal Fisheries, 2.

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with the war’s Asia-Pacific theater. The maps depict the multiple dimensions of the problem: fishing grounds and routes of schooling fishes cut through war zones; affected Japanese, Soviet, and US border regions; crossed threemile zones of coastal states; and altogether antagonized the already complicated relationships among the continental shelf, the coast, and the three-mile zone.89 Despite its supposedly remote character, at least at first glance, the regulation of fisheries was a highly topical issue involving conceptualizations of territorial sovereignty that would soon become relevant to the settlement of the postwar order. Indeed, the question of how to regulate the extension of sovereign power to the seas had already figured in Woodrow Wilson’s well-known address of January 1918, in which “the freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war” immediately followed the demand to establish a new kind of public diplomacy.90 More recently, the Atlantic Charter provided for free navigation of the high seas—this time not as a precondition, but as a result of enduring peace.91 Unlike the high seas, territorial waters and their legal regulation had been chief concerns in the few efforts to further codify international law in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1927, territorial waters were a central topic at a conference of the League of Nations expert committee tasked with producing a draft convention. As Katharina Rietzler remarks, that choice of topic signaled a departure from previous efforts to advance international law, which had focused solely on the laws of war and not on international relations during peacetime.92 However, the League conference failed, as did subsequent attempts by the Harvard Research in International Law. The book by Riesenfeld, a refugee scholar from Germany, cast critical light on the problem underlying the failure. Although the concept of the three-mile zone dated back to the seventeenth century, its general application had always been a source of conflict. Riesenfeld meticulously analyzed the controversial relationships between the three-mile zone and the freedom of the seas, the rights of exploitation and sovereign privileges, and the need to negotiate to reach consensus. Whereas the first part of his volume probed different opinions of legal theory, the second part explored state practices by asking whether the three-mile zone was in fact considered an applicable 89

Leonard, International Regulation of Fisheries, maps on 78, 180. “Address of the President of the United States, Delivered at a Joint Session of the Two Houses of Congress, 8 January 1918,” in The United Nations and Its Predecessors, vol. 2, Predecessors of the United Nations, 19th Century and League of Nations, ed. Franz Knipping, Hans von Mangoldt, and Volker Rittberger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 362. 91 Atlantic Charter, August 14, 1941, The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp. 92 Rietzler, “Fortunes of a Profession,” 17. 90

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legal rule that compelled adherence. The third part addressed judicial practice and international arbitration. In his final analysis, Riesenfeld asserted that “there is no such thing as a universally recognized three-mile rule.”93 That said, he pled for a pragmatic approach: to prevent anarchy, states should acknowledge the three-mile zone as a principle of international law and use it to regulate exploitation rights and exert control over territorial waters.94 Riesenfeld and Leonard went to the core of the long history of controversies about the legal and political status of extraterritorial spaces. Their books broached a topic that would become a major issue during the Cold War and decolonization, when territories beyond international jurisdiction—the deep sea, the polar regions, and the universe—were identified as locations rich in resources, strategic sites, or spaces of imperial expansion. With his focus on competing interests and consequent conflicts over the right to exploit fishing grounds on the high seas, Leonard struck at the heart of the matter. Visualizing it with maps showing the divergence among the three-mile zone, the continental shelf, and the fishing grounds, he delved into the problem of drafting the relationships between geography, law, and sovereign politics. Principle 4 of the Atlantic Charter had already addressed natural resources’ importance in the future world order by stressing that “all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, [should have] access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity.”95 In the 1950s this debate gained momentum, prompting the emergence of a new field of international law centered on the legal figure of the common heritage of mankind, which, following Grotius, served as a legal tool to restrict the unhindered or unilateral appropriation of extraterrestrial spaces. The reference to mankind underscored the idea that the nonsovereign territories of the world should belong to all people.96 As a trustee of resources, mankind also surfaced in the redrafting of political maps during decolonization and the Cold War, when the emergence of new technologies put the exploitation of deep-sea and polar resources within tangible reach. The common heritage of mankind was deeply rooted in competing colonial and postcolonial attempts to shift power relations and reorganize postwar relations. Although fueled by serious fears of

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Riesenfeld, Protection of Coastal Fisheries, 280. Ibidem, 263. 95 Atlantic Charter, August 14, 1941, The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp. 96 For a detailed account of this argument, see Andrea Rehling and Isabella Löhr: “‘Governing the Commons’: Die global commons und das Erbe der Menschheit im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Löhr and Rehling, Global Commons, 3–31. 94

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diminishing resources,97 the discussion became a venue for interrogating the optimal features of political, social, and cultural relations in a globalized world marked by extreme political asymmetries. Similarly, the common heritage of mankind served as a legal tool that made two contradictory promises. On the one hand, political emancipation in the use and handling of natural and cultural resources related to hopes of a share in their technical and economic exploitation. On the other, it presented opportunities to maintain colonial path-dependencies and spheres of influence via legal stipulations. Thus the mankind’s common heritage was extended from the sphere of resources to those of cultural heritage and environmental law, accentuating the instrumental character of this legal concept and allowing for officially sanctioned access to remote sites and regions.98 The controversies of the 1950s and 1960s differed from the quandaries of the 1940s. Riesenfeld and Leonard anticipated a legal strand that would lead to a series of codification processes beyond international humanitarian or criminal law and significantly expand international law. At the same time, their language and the presentation of the subject remained tied to a concrete problem, in contrast to the subsequent, far more general question of how to tailor access to politically relevant but territorially attached resources. Nevertheless, during World War II the Carnegie Endowment provided expertise in a field of law that soon became strategically important, and in so doing its experts advanced a state-centered approach aligned with the state-centered vision of international law that shone through the Balkan Report and framed the Endowment’s recommendations for construction of the postwar order. A closer look, however, reveals that the experts were less coherent than one might expect. While Riesenfeld gave only a vague, cautious sketch of future scenarios, Leonard suggested dropping the three-mile rule and merging territorial interests in a greater association that would stress the common interests of economic use and exploitation, a vision that was finally realized with the 1994 ratification of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).99

97

For the most controversial interventions, see Garrett Hardin “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 13 (1968) 13, 1243–48; Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Sierra Cub and Ballatine Books, 1968). For a critical assessment, see Heinrich Hartmann, “‘No Technical Solution’. Historische Kontexte einer Moralökonomie der ‘Weltbevölkerung’ seit den 1950er Jahren,” in Löhr and Rehling, Global Commons, 31–49. 98 Andrea Rehling, “‘Kulturen unter Artenschutz?’ Vom Schutz der Kulturschätze als Gemeinsames Erbe der Menschheit zur Erhaltung kultureller Vielfalt,” in Löhr and Rehling, Global Commons, 109–38. 99 Leonard, International Regulation of Fisheries, 163–77.

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Conclusions The Balkan Report was the first manifestation of the complex relationship among knowledge production, codification, and law as hegemonic practices at the heart of the Carnegie Endowment. Although the report’s effect was inconsequential for the handling of reported war crimes and the politically unstable situation in the then Ottoman provinces, it substantiated the Endowment’s claim to conceive of statehood as a precondition for justice and equality on a global scale and, if necessary, support geopolitical change in the Balkan region.100 The legalist view behind the strong plea for the sovereign state saw international law and arbitration as ideal solutions that could prevent conflict and war among states. But the argument that initially implied the taming of sovereign power actually rested upon a neat distinction between domestic and international affairs, and thus was inextricable from the inviolability of the modern state. In the interwar years this legalist position transitioned into an embrace of international institutions, whereas World War II ushered in a reinvigoration of legalist ideas. The vision of a clear distance between law and politics, as advanced by Hudson and the group of authors preoccupied with the law of the future, played into larger controversies among the US law community’s reformist and traditionalist wings, which had been ongoing since the Progressive Era.101 In the context of this chapter, the manifest expression of new trends with an ambiguous outlook becomes relevant. On the one hand, they aimed to achieve a lasting postwar peace by expanding international jurisdiction toward a universally applicable law; on the other, they acknowledged that the politics of multilateralism went hand in hand with strong restrictions. The reinstatement of international law as the primary code of conduct for handling interstate affairs presupposed that only sovereign nation-states would be recognized as subjects of rights and duties. That dynamic denoted a policy change. The League system had been characterized by manifold interfaces that allowed interest groups, private international organizations, and all kinds of non-state actors to address their concerns and collaborate in committee work with international civil servants,

100

Andrea Despot, Amerikas Weg auf den Balkan: Zur Genese der Beziehungen zwischen den USA und Südosteuropa 1820–1920 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010); George Frost Kennan, The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1993). 101 Rietzler, “Fortunes of a Profession,” 9–10; for an overview of this debate, see Shinohara, US International Lawyers.

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experts, and state delegates to conduct studies or collect data on certain topics, initiate international press campaigns, or elaborate draft conventions. Albeit not formally recognized as part of the international legal order, representatives of civil society were crucial cogs in the League’s machinery.102 Although the Carnegie Endowment had profited from this open-door policy, its legal experts challenged such inclusive political architecture. Before the rights of the individual gained momentum in international law, those experts attempted to pare down the list of politically relevant actors. In that vein, it is worth mentioning that James T. Shotwell, a figurehead of the Endowment, was largely responsible for the inclusion and wording of Article 71 of the UN Charter, which allowed the Economic and Social Council to consult national and international organizations.103 What has been positively assessed as a step to empower the Economic and Social Council vis-à-vis UN member states was in fact a strengthening of states’ capacities to control social and economic work and delimit the formerly fluid, overlapping zones of interaction between states and civil society.104 Riesenfeld’s and Leonard’s books were also a product of political considerations that framed the legal expertise of the authors. Each book was a joint publication of the Endowment and the Institute of Pacific Relations. Established in 1925 by Americans with a strong interest in the Pacific region, the institute was tasked with producing knowledge on the Asiatic region that would provide politicians and diplomats with expertise. What Tomoko Akami describes as state-related public education and the distribution of new norms underscores the links between legal and political norm-setting that had salience for the Carnegie Endowment.105 What can we therefore conclude regarding the Endowment’s political and legal disposition? In reaching out to shape international order, the Endowment formulated norms directed not at civil society but at a transnational professional audience with close ties to the state. The studies 102

Wolfram Kaiser and Johan Schot, Making Europe: Experts, Cartels, and International Organizations (London: Palgrave Macmilan, 2014), 1–77; Eyffinger, “Diplomacy,” 813–39; Iver B. Neumann and Halvard Leira, “Introduction: The Pluralisation of Diplomacy – Changing Actors, Developing Arenas and New Issues,” in International Diplomacy, vol. 3, ed. Iver B. Neumann and Halvard Leira (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2013), vii–xv. 103 Johnstone, “Shaping our Post-war Foreign Policy,” 46. 104 Thomas G. Weiss, Tatiana Carayannis, and Richard Jolly, “The ‘Third’ United Nations,” Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations 15, no. 1 (2009): 123–42. 105 Tomoko Akami, “Between the State and Global Civil Society: Non-Official Experts and Their Network in the Asia-Pacific, 1925–45,” Global Networks 2, no. 1 (2002): 67f.

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owed their universalist appearance to their mostly thorough engagement with legal practice and theory. However, a close look at their political and institutional contexts pushes us away from overemphasis of the professional stance, and toward a conception of legal norms as outcomes of specific constellations of actors, institutions, interests, and situations. Such a recontextualization reveals the particularities of international law, suggesting that despite its claim of universality, its backbone is unstable. This warrants its reinsertion into a global history of power asymmetries, imperial aspirations, and inter-regional relations, which will yield a far more complex and contradictory picture.

CHAPTER THREE

Shaping International Minds: Education for Peace and International Cooperation after the Great War in the United States Katja Castryck-Naumann

Having campaigned for judicial arbitration of international disputes prior to the First World War, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) numbered among the emphatic advocates of international law after the war both as a system for dealing with such conflicts and as the basis of a new liberal internationalism. By the end of the war, however, circumstances had changed. The decision to found the League of Nations as a global organization with the aim of permanently safeguarding peace was taken in January 1919 and by the end of 1920 it was clear that the United States would not join. How did liberal internationalists respond to these two decisions? Many supporters of the idea behind the League of Nations stepped up their efforts to persuade the public and politicians of the importance of international peace work and an internationalist foreign policy. Accordingly, the significance of educating young Americans to be “international minds” grew.1 The Carnegie Endowment, whose priorities included support for peace research and its integration into higher education, played a considerable part in this effort. Education for peace, a concept which flourished at US schools and colleges in the 1920s, was a prominent yet hitherto neglected aspect of US 1

I would like to thank Dietmar Müller and Geert Castryck for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. This phrase is based on the title of a book by Nicholas Murray Butler written in his function as president of the American Association for International Conciliation: Nicholas Murray Butler, The International Mind: An Argument for the Juridical Settlement of International Disputes (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1913).

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internationalism in this period.2 Although not directly related to the work of the CEIP, I would like to highlight how education for peace helped promote internationalist peacekeeping and thus contributed to CEIP’s approach of reconciliation internationalism in the United States after the First World War. In the autumn of 1919, the College of Columbia University opened a new undergraduate course entitled Introduction to Contemporary Civilization. Influential among educators from the start, it soon replaced the previously compulsory orientation courses at Columbia in history, philosophy, and logic. The course quickly came to serve as a model for postwar undergraduate education because it was based on an innovative wartime curriculum that now seemed able to solve a protracted dilemma in college education. During the war, colleges and universities had mobilized their resources for the home front by introducing training programs for the army. One training unit, concentrated largely on technical knowledge, was intended to prepare recruits mentally for their deployment in Europe. In “War Issues”courses, they learned about their opponents, the historical buildup to the confrontation, and the reasons for US involvement. After the ceasefire, it was proposed that this content be included in the regular curriculum as “Peace Issues”-courses covering recent European history, current affairs and ongoing peace negotiations, and the ubiquitous debate about how to create a lasting, peaceful world order. This combination of historical synthesis and present-day analysis was attractive, given the lack of historico-political general education in the college curriculum. Until the turn of the century, bachelor programs had consisted solely of compulsory subjects, including a type of civic education. But around 1900 the elective system caught on, allowing students to choose which courses to attend and leaving it up to faculty to decide what was taught. This led to the academization of the curriculum and soon prompted resistance. The war soon intensified the calls for a more integrated curriculum that would teach a fixed view of the world in a time of crisis and upheaval. Peace Issues seemed ideal for this purpose. First offered as a subject at several US colleges in spring 1919, Peace Issues quickly became a mainstay of higher education, often based on the Columbia format, partly because of the original course’s highly elaborated

2

Though Warren Kuehl in particular highlighted internationalists’ numerous activities in the 1920s and 1930s and their attention to educational projects, he did not examine their endeavors regarding new curricula at schools and in higher education. Warren F. Kuehl and Lynne K. Dunn, Keeping the Covenant: American Internationalists and the League of Nations, 1920–1939 (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1997).

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syllabus. In its very first year it comprised more than 100 pages, and a printed and bound version was soon available for the public as well. Meanwhile, the demand for interdisciplinarity in the 1920s became the spearhead of the emerging general education movement. This movement advocated an obligatory curriculum (or at least a set of required courses) and the teaching of general knowledge at the college and emphasized the Columbia course as a successful combination of factual historical knowledge and contemporary analysis. The Columbia course also became influential after it was recommended as an outstanding orientation course for students in their first year of the study by the American Association of University Professors in 1922. European history exams set by the College Examination Board were first based on the Columbia syllabus in 1924.3 Consequently, the number of Contemporary Civilization and similar courses rose from fourteen in 1919 to more than eighty in the 1925–26 academic year.4 The course’s program of peace education became a blueprint used throughout the US, and at Columbia the Introduction to Contemporary Civilization became so well-known it was simply abbreviated to “CC.”5 Since the course syllabi were published as study handbooks detailing the material to be dealt with and listing recommended literature, they provide an excellent framework for reconstructing what was taught at college about peace matters and internationalism, and about changes in the attitude to these topics. As it turned out, the liberal version of a judicial order for world peace as advocated by the CEIP became more pronounced at Columbia in the mid-1920s. The approach of the course was not intended to replace political institutions, but to act alongside them. The League of Nations therefore remained prominent in the syllabus for years despite the US Senate’s refusal to join. As for the detailed study of new international institutions, it ended in the late 1920s. The original one-year course was extended to two academic years in 1928, and the seminars addressing war 3

H. H. Shoen, “The History Examinations of the College Entrance Examination Board 1901–1933,” PhD dissertation (Columbia University, 1936), appendix 1, 97. According to Timothy Cross, the syllabus was used by over 200 universities and colleges over the next two decades: Timothy P. Cross, An Oasis of Order: The Core Curriculum at Columbia College (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), chapter 4. 4 Charles T. Fitts and Fletcher H. Swift, The Construction of Orientation Courses for College Freshmen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1928), 168f.; Frederick Rudolf, Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study since 1636 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977), 238. 5 Some believe it to be the most famous course in the US curriculum: W. B. Carnochan, Battleground of the Curriculum: Liberal Education and American Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 71.

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and peace were reduced in number. The first year of study now dealt extensively with the history of Europe (and other parts of the world) while the second year was devoted to contemporary analysis of the economic and social developments of the United States. In this context, the importance of internationalism changed, too. Though initially presented as a key aspect of the present day with attention also paid to its historical origins, from 1928 the theme began to play only a minor role. This narrowing of focus was undoubtedly a result not only of an increasingly inwardly focused American mindset, but also from a historicopolitical view expressed in two new narratives of general history, which figures today under the term world history. On the one hand, the concept of Western civilization that caught on in the late 1920s described the rise of the “West” and constructed a transatlantic entity whose recent history featured the United States in a major role. On the other hand, the “world history” that emerged as the history of Asia and Latin America (and later Africa) tended to view the United States in relation to these regions of the world. These two historico-political projects—the one incorporating the United States into (and hence revising) the previously established universal history that had long been focused on Europe and the other devising a new version of world history that prioritized “non-Western” cultures over Europe and the “West”—were opposed to each other. Still, they had something in common: both sought an alternative to nineteenth-century European universal history, which no longer suited the USA’s contemporary self-image and its growing determination to replace the old European empires as the champion and representative of “Western culture.”6 Peace education and internationalism were not essential items in either concept of a new history of the world. Besides, the League of Nations’ increasingly critical detractors were now presenting the League as an imperialist tool of the major European powers. Although the literature attributes the diminished importance of internationalism in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s to its changing foreign policy (abandoning multilateral cooperation with other countries in favor of a unilateral strategy in the context of an internationalist foreign policy7), an analysis of history and education policy 6

Katja Naumann, Laboratorien der Weltgeschichtsschreibung: Lehre und Forschung an den Universitäten Chicago, Columbia und Harvard von 1918 bis 1968 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht Verlage, 2018). 7 Neither position had much to do with isolationism. Rather, each represented a different variety of internationalism with its own vision of the USA as part of a world sharing responsibility for the whole. One side devised the Pax Americana as multilateral cooperation, while the other backed solo efforts and American economic muscle as guarantors of a peaceful world, Volker Depkat, Geschichte der USA (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 2016), 193.

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points to a more nuanced interpretation. Below I present this notion by outlining the historical context of the Columbia course in two short sections: (I) the changing circumstances in the peace movement, and (II) the war aims courses in military training programs. Afterward, I examine (III) how the Columbia course dealt with war, peace, and internationalism, and then summarize the further development of the syllabus to explain (IV) the historico-political debate about the USA’s stance toward Europe and the rest of the world.

The Peace Movement and Internationalism in Transition during and after the Great War The First World War changed the American peace movement and the point of departure of advocates for international participation, conflict resolution, and cooperation. Before the war, campaigners for peace had acquired substantial influence, and the idea of creating international institutions to prevent war had been the subject of broad public and political debate. Positions ranged from advocacy of primarily judicial solutions, such as the creation of arbitration tribunals, to calls for a world court and international organizations as political instruments (which did not necessarily mean that those voicing them favored sanctions or rejected defensive wars), to the unconditional rejection of war. This wide-ranging peace work stemmed from the prevailing belief, in influential circles of lawyers, politicians, and business leaders, that peace contributed to economic stability and progress.8 Organizations like the World Peace Foundation and the CEIP, which promoted the study of peace and education for peace at schools and colleges, were among the most influential players in the peace movement. Several presidents of colleges and universities held leading positions in such organizations or sat on their boards of trustees. Their aim was to form a knowledgeable elite who would reform the international order according to the principles of arbitration. In addition, in 1900 the United States stimulated academic interest in international law by ratifying the Hague Convention on the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, which set up a Permanent Court of Arbitration. Contemporary conflicts, especially

8

Christoph Mauch, “Pazifismus und politische Kultur: Die organisierte Friedensbewegung in den USA und Deutschland in vergleichender Perspektive, 1900– 1917,” in Zwei Wege in die Moderne: Aspekte der deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen, 1900–1918, ed. Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase and Jürgen Heidenking (Trier: Koenigshausen and Neumann G., 1998), 261–92, especially 262–69; see also Helke Rausch’s contribution to this volume.

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the Russo-Japanese War, had clearly demonstrated the scale of destruction that could be inflicted by modern weaponry in confrontations between major powers. This prompted President Theodore Roosevelt to support the convening of the Second Hague Conference, once again focusing debate on the idea of arbitration. When the First World War broke out, questions about its causes and about the attitude of the USA became more relevant. There was intense discussion about whether future wars could be counteracted by judicial and organizational mechanisms, and if so, what form those mechanisms should take. New organizations were founded. Conservatives flocked to the Association for a League to Enforce Peace, cofounded by the Harvard University president A. Lawrence Lowell, which backed a world peacekeeping organization. The CEIP, for its part, continued to promote a judicial approach based on scholarly analysis of international law. Meanwhile, the American Peace Society attracted those who favored the idea of a world court and periodic conventions according to the Hague model. There were also more radical voices that doubted peace could be achieved by international law alone and believed social change was necessary.9 After the USA’s entry into the war in 1917, this diversity of opinion faded as the balance of power shifted. Radical opponents of war and advocates of social reform soon found themselves isolated. Even those who favored granting international institutions the power to impose sanctions lost their support. By contrast, supporters of the League of Nations gained popularity, with Woodrow Wilson’s ideas predominating. The right to national self-determination and a US-led League of Nations were intended as the foundation on which Europe and the world would be reorganized.10 Conversely, the leaders of the CEIP continued to argue for a world order based on law and arbitration, and in some cases for a League of Nations operating on this basis. For example, the long-serving Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler (who also headed the Division of Intercourse and Education and from 1925 was president of the CEIP) appealed for a system of legally effective international conflict resolution.11 9

Mauch, “Pazifismus und politische Kultur,” 287ff. Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and American Internationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 11 Regarding Butler, see Joseph W. Winn, “Nicholas Murray Butler, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Search for Reconciliation in Europe, 1919–1933,” Peace & Change 31, no. 4 (2006); Butler, The International Mind. Regarding Butler’s role in the CEIP, see the articles by Rausch and Löhr as well as Martin David Dubin, “The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Advocacy of a League of Nations, 1914–1918,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 123, no. 6 (1928): 356ff. 10

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His colleague James Thompson Shotwell, a professor of history at Columbia University and head of the CEIP’s Division of Economics and History, also spoke out for a system of internationalism based on law.12 After the rejection of peace treaties and membership in the League of Nations, internationalist enthusiasm dissipated among US-American politicians and the public. Nonetheless, internationalists in the education sector seized on the possibility of advocating collective peacekeeping. A spirit of change pervaded colleges and universities. The Great War had changed the world, and the general view was that education must change too, as “the war has changed our historical outlook as well as our historical perspective [so] that our teaching of history will never again be what it was before the war”13 or, to quote Butler: The war has distinctly helped us. . . . It has laid to rest some rather widespread illusions, and it has burnt up many sources and causes of intellectual, moral and social waste. It has shortened by many years, perhaps by a generation, the path of progress to clearer, sounder and more constructive thinking as to education . . .14

Higher education was (again) to become a site of the orientation in the world and education of citizens, producing intelligent Americans with rational ideas, internationalist values, and international minds. Thus, the CEIP and the liberal wing of the peace movement, along with representatives of other proponents of internationalism, increasingly turned to the field of education. As a result, colleges briefly offered a new form of peace education meant to enlighten students about the mechanisms of war and peace, the new world order, the possible role of the United States, and to nurture an internationalist attitude.

From War Issues to Peace Issues: Contemporary Civilization at Columbia College In February 1918 American colleges and universities began the mobilization for war in coordination with the Department of War’s Committee on Education and Special Training (CEST), which was tasked 12

John Milton Cooper ed., Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War, and Peace (Washington, D.C. and Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Harold Josephson, James T. Shotwell and the Rise of Internationalism in America (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975). 13 S.B. Harding, “What the War Should Do for Our History Methods,” Historical Outlook 10 (1919): 188–90, 188. 14 Nicholas Murray Butler, “Education after the War,” Educational Review 57, no. 1 (1919): 65.

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with adapting college curriculum to the requirements of the war in liaison with educational institutions, attracting recruits, and preparing them in separate classes for military service.15 To this end, Student Army Training Corps (SATCs) were launched at over 500 colleges on October 1, 1918. The training concentrated on technical knowledge and military skills,16 but since no war can be won without solid morale, students were also to be given a clear picture of their enemy and grounding in the history of the military confrontation.17 A framework syllabus had been drawn up to elucidate the political and economic causes of the conflict and provide an introduction to the history of the warring nations in three hours a week over nine months. It was based on an emergency syllabus that the National Board of Historical Service (also founded during the war and headed by Shotwell) had drawn up for history at schools. Going back as far as the Napoleonic Wars, the framework syllabus described the First World War as a struggle between autocracy and democracy.18 Building on this, in May CEST launched a trial War Issues course at a Boston college and, later that summer, presented a roadmap for the introduction of this course in all SATCs still in preparation. The details of each course were to be worked out by local lecturers, but all the courses shared the following framework: [T]he first three months [should] be devoted mainly to the historical and economic causes of the war; the second three months to the study of the points of view of the various nations engaged, as expressed in their governments and social institutions; and the third three months to the study of their points of view as expressed in their philosophies and literatures.19 15

Carol S. Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of Higher Learning in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), 95ff; Willis Rudy, Total War and Twentieth-Century Higher Learning: Universities of the Western World in the First and Second World War (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991). 16 “R. I. Rees, CEST, To the Colleges of the United States, 28 August 1918,” in National Archives, College Park, MD, Records of the U.S. War Department, General and Special Staffs, Record Group 165.8.4, box 1, fd. 5; “CEST, A review of its work during 1918, Washington 1919”; “CEST, General Order, no. 1, 1 September 1918” and “Training Memoranda 1 and 2, 26 September and 26 October 1918,” in ibidem, box 1, fds. 1 and 5. 17 “CEST, Development of Morale, 21 June 1918,” in National Archives, College Park, MD, Records of the U.S. War Department, General and Special Staffs, Record Group 165.8.4, box 1, fd. 5. 18 Samuel B. Harding, The Study of the Great War: A topical outline (Washington, 1918). 19 “CEST, Course on the Issues of the War, 10 September 1918.” p. 2, in National Archives, College Park, MD, Records of the U.S. War Department, General and Special Staffs, Record Group 165.8.4, box 1, fd. 4; “CEST, Preliminary

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Robert McCaughey aptly characterized the War Issues course as “Allied apologetics with no pretenses at objectivity and balance.”20 CEST also circulated a memorandum proposing three accompanying history courses to deal with developments in the USA since 1861, Europe since 1850, and Great Britain since 1832. Written by R.C. MacLaurin, the memo also outlined the core content of the courses. The course in US history emphasized the United States’ external relations: the war with Spain, its protectorate in the Philippines, its actions vis-à-vis Cuba and the Panama Canal, the Open Door policy in Asia, and the international developments leading up to the Hague Peace Conventions. For European history, MacLaurin recommended starting with the French Revolution, then discussing the national movements and revolutions of the midnineteenth century, imperialism, and the emergence of the new world order, finally describing the present day as a confrontation between autocratic and democratic societies.21 This outline foreshadowed the subsequent narrative about the genesis of the transatlantic West. Though little is known about how this recommendation was implemented at individual colleges and universities, the curricula written after 1919 were usually similar to that proposed in the CEST memorandum. At Columbia College, Frederick J.E. Woodbridge, professor of philosophy and dean of the graduate faculties, and Herbert E. Hawkes, dean of the college, were responsible for the new syllabi. They contacted historians Charles D. Hazen and William E. Dunning as well as political scientist Howard Lee McBain, and the five of them developed the syllabus of the Peace Issues course at Columbia. Initially, recruits were to study the global political and economic situation in 1914, next turn their gaze to international relations in the years before the outbreak of the war, and then familiarize themselves with history since 1815.22 The aim was to develop a historical understanding of the conflict—a concept that proved successful.23 Instructions, 27 June 1918,” ibidem, box 1, fd. 5; “CEST, A review of its work during 1918, appendix I,” ibidem; A. K. Heckel, “The War Aims Course in the Colleges,” Historical Outlook 10 (1919): 20–22. 20 Robert A. McCaughey, Stand Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, 1754–2004 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 290. 21 “CEST, Special Descriptive Circular: History,” in Hoover Institution Archive, Stanford University, Records of the U.S. War Department, Committee on Education and Special Training, box 2, fd. 2. 22 “Report to the President, Dean of the Faculties,” in Annual Report of the President of Columbia University 1919 (New York, 1920), 147f.; Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, “The ‘Issues of the War’ Course in the SATC Schedule,” Columbia Alumni News 10, no. 6 (1918): 271f. 23 McCaughey, Stand Columbia, 290 ff; Herbert E. Hawkes, “A College Course on Peace Issues,” Educational Review 58, no. 9 (1919): 144.

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With the course going well at other institutions too, many colleges signaled that they wanted to continue teaching it. In late November 1918, with demobilization imminent, the regional coordinators of the course met with Frank Aydelotte, national director of the War Issues Course for CEST, as well as representatives of the National Board of Historical Service and the American Historical Association (AHA), to draft a suitable proposal in response. Recommending a focus on the peace negotiations, reconstruction, and the new world order, they teamed up with the World Peace Foundation to compile a syllabus and reading lists for such a Peace Issues course.24 At the same time, the question of whether the war course could be a suitable alternative to the regular first-year courses in history and perhaps even replace “general history” entirely made it onto the agenda of the AHA’s upcoming annual meeting. In the end, this matter was not debated because the meeting was canceled when a flu epidemic hit Cleveland. Nevertheless, in the last year of the war the impetus to renew the syllabi led to the establishment of a Committee on History and Education for Citizenship, which issued a report that sparked heated debate and pointed to a need for more robust civic education.25  At any rate, many colleges’ spring 1919 course catalogues included a course on peace issues. Day-to-day politics—US participation in the Paris negotiations and Wilson’s Fourteen Points—evidently played into this decision. In addition, CEST had insisted that the courses be as interdisciplinary as possible, echoing demands to reform the curriculum by improving the integration of specialized knowledge and interdisciplinary teaching to deliver a broad general education. The War Issues course was a suitable, tried, and tested format for a preliminary course in politics and history—which, as many college teachers reasoned around 1920, ought to include education in peace and internationalism. In a speech at the start of the new academic year in autumn 1919, Butler declared again that the university faced new challenges due to the war: “We are here to gain a firmer message upon the realities of life, to get knowledge and to transmit it into wisdom, to find new understanding and to be guided to new interpretations, both of nature and life and of organized man.”26 The 24

“Stenographic Notes on Conference of District Officers, 25/26 November 1918,” 8f. in US, WD, HIA, box 2, fd. 2; Frank Aydelotte, Facilities for future courses on problems of the War, the Peace Conference, and Reconstruction, November 30, 1918, in National Archives, College Park, MD, Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs, Record Group 165.8.4, box 1, fd. 9. 25 Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1919 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1923), 36. 26 Nicholas Murray Butler’s address at the University’s opening exercises in September 1919, quoted in Cross, An Oasis of Order, chapter 1, https://www. college.columbia.edu/core/oasis/history1.php.

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realities of life included dealing with the consequences of the war and debating what a stable postwar order should be like. Woodbridge and Hawkes were proponents of adding these topics to the curriculum at Columbia College, as was philosopher John J. Coss (a lecturer at the college). They heeded the maxim that well-informed citizens should know why their country went to war and what the foundations of a peaceful world order could be. Born of the consciousness that a democracy needs to know what it is fighting for, it has awakened a consciousness of what we, as a people, need to know if our part in the world of today is to be intelligent, sympathetic, and liberal. In the past, education was liberalized by means of the classical tradition. . . . If education is to be liberalized again, if our youth are to be freed from a confusion of ideas and standards, no other means looks so attractive as a common knowledge of what the present world of human affairs really is.27

Faculty gave their blessing to a new course with these aims in January 1919. Various ideas for naming the course, such as changing War Issues to Peace Issues, taking a more general approach to the new era under the heading “The world we live in,” and emphasizing the current state of upheaval with the title “Contemporary History,” were discussed until April. Introduction to Contemporary Civilization (CC for short) ultimately won. The committee in charge for developing the program submitted the syllabus for the winter semester on October 1, and by Christmas it had produced the syllabus for the coming spring semester.28 “The main purpose of the course,” wrote Butler in his 1918/19 annual report, “is to lay the foundation for intelligent citizenship.”29 In Hawkes’ words: “the underlying purpose . . . is to make the students citizens who can participate in national affairs with clear judgment and intelligence.”30 In contrast to conventional history orientation courses, CC was to comprise an analysis of the present day from a historical perspective. “[T]he goal was not only to provide a historical survey or even a history of ideas, but also to throw into relief the chief characteristics of our age,”31 seen from a

27

Woodbridge, “The ‘Issues of the War’ Course,” 217f; Report, Dean of the College to the President, 1918–19, 87. 28 John J. Coss, “Progress of the New Freshman Course,” Columbia University Quarterly 21, no. 4 (1919): 332. 29 Columbia University, Annual Report of the President, 1918–19, 41f. 30 Herbert E. Hawkes, “Memorandum on the New Course in Columbia College ‘Introduction to Contemporary Civilization’,” in Columbia University Archive, New York, John Jacob Coss Papers, box 4, fd. 1. 31 John J. Coss, “A Report of the Columbia Experiment with the Course on Contemporary Civilization,” in The Junior College Curriculum, ed. William S. Gray (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1929), 133–46.

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standpoint of both a common cultural heritage and a position in the world.32 Civic education had been in vogue as an educational goal since the waves of immigration around 1900, and in the 1920s it centered on educating “citizens of the republic and the world.”33 The war had globalized the curriculum. Peace Education and International Topics in CC The syllabus for the course’s debut was largely written by John J. Coss, in his new role as head of the CC team (a position he would hold for many years), and Herbert W. Schneider, professor of philosophy, who in the 1950s became the head of the UNESCO Division of International Cultural Cooperation.34 They were assisted by three younger colleagues: Harry J. Carmen had just completed his doctorate in American history, his fellow student Benjamin B. Kendrick was still working on his doctoral thesis in the same field, and Irwin Edman’s philosophy thesis was recommended background reading for the first block of the course.35 The other twelve contributors were philosophers and historians too, except for an economist and a political scientist. The participation of just two social scientists was explained by the fact that CC replaced the compulsory introductory courses in history and philosophy. Later, however, when the number of lecturers increased, considerably more social scientists were involved. From 1919 to 1928, the syllabus prescribed five 50-minute seminars per week covering three major topics: the foundations of civilization, historical developments occurring in the present, and insistent problems of today. War and peace together with internationalism were dealt with in the third part as one of five key challenges of the postwar era.36 Both subjects were 32

Carolyn C. Lougee, “The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course: Comments,” American Historical Review 87, no. 3 (1982): 727; Lawrence W. Levine, The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 58f. 33 Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The History Situation in Colleges and Universities,” Historical Outlook 11 (1920): 103–10. 34 “Introductory Note,” Introduction to Contemporary Civilization: A Syllabus (New York: Columbia University Press, 1919) [hereinafter CC, Syllabus, academic year]; Coss to Lamprecht, April 15, 1919, in Columbia University Archive, New York, John Jacob Coss Papers, box 1, correspondence; “Columbia Returns to Peace Time Basis,” Columbia Alumni News 11, no. 1 (1919): 5. 35 Irwin Edman, Human Traits and their Social Significance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1920). 36 The other four were industrious relations, conservation of natural and cultural resources, problems of government, and education. In 1921–22, the “problems of

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addressed throughout the decade, the content being slightly altered in the mid-1920s. One of the key texts of the course was The League of Nations: The Principle and the Practice, a collection of essays edited by Stephen P. Duggan. Six of the essays were on the reading list, and very few of the core aspects of the overall theme were discussed without reference to this book. Many of the views taught are revealed in texts from this volume, which is referred to frequently below. Duggan, one of the most ardent advocates of the League of Nations and considered an “apostle of internationalism,” had studied at Columbia University and obtained his doctorate there in 1902. He knew Butler as well as John Basset Moore, an expert on international law.37 During the war Duggan collaborated with James T. Shotwell and Joseph Chamberlain, and worked on the American Commission to Negotiate Peace (also known as The Inquiry), in which some 150 scholars and intellectuals assisted the President and the US delegation to the Paris peace negotiations regarding the planning of the postwar order. In 1919, Duggan became the first director of the Institute of International Education, a position he held until 1946. Active in other international institutions, he was involved in foreign policy think tanks and campaigned continuously for the League of Nations and strong US involvement.38 The authors of the essays in The League of Nations: The Principle and the Practice, which Duggan edited in the first half of 1919, were friends, companions and like-minded people, including Moore and Chamberlain, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, Edwin Montefiori Borchard, and Lindsay Rogers. The format he chose was a textbook that discussed in an accessible manner how the newly decided League of Nations ought to be organized and what the United States’ attitude to it should be. imperialism and the ‘backward peoples’” were also discussed. CC, Syllabus, 1919, 25–84; CC, Syllabus, 1920, 62–120; CC, Syllabus, 1924, 100–140; John J. Coss, “The New Freshman Course in Columbia College,” Columbia University Quarterly 21, no. 3 (1919): 247, 249; Harry J. Carman, “The Columbia Course in Contemporary Civilization,” Columbia Alumni News 17, no. 8 (1925): 143f. 37 As a professor of law and diplomacy, Moore held numerous advisory positions and was involved in various ways in the debates over, and codification of, international law. From 1912 he worked in the Permanent Court of Arbitration, remaining convinced of the effectiveness of international law and regulation even after the First World War. See the entry on him in Warren F. Kuehl, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Internationalists (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983), 508–11. 38 Chay Brooks, “The Apostle of Internationalism: Stephen Duggan and the Geopolitics of International Education,” Political Geography 49 (2015): 64–73; see also the entry on him in Warren F. Kuehl, Biographical Dictionary of Internationalists, 222f.

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In CC for the first five years, the themes of war, peace, and internationalism were examined under the heading “Nationalism and Internationalism,” with discussion of a) the relation between nationalism and individualism, b) national self-determination versus historic, ethnic, strategic, geographic, and economic claims, and c) problems arising from conflicting national economies, followed by d) problems of war and peace, and finally e) the problem of nationalistic versus cosmopolitan civilization. Harry E. Barnes’s essay introduced an analysis of the principle of national self-determination that amounted to a justification of international organizations: “Without some form of world order and organization to curb national aggression, the application of the principle of national selfdetermination . . . would be a greater evil than a restoration of the condition which existed before the war.” The more states there were, the greater the likelihood of wars, wrote Barnes. “But with a sanely conceived and wisely constructed world organization, the smaller nations may be emancipated and elevated to statehood with a very considerable benefit.”39 Overall, Barnes propounded the idea of the League of Nations as a body for controlling and taming nationalism and new nation states, especially those in East-Central and Southeast Europe. But to do so, it would have to be able to effectively protect national minorities and encourage small countries to join regional federations.40 The topic of conflicting national economies, discussed in the essay by Glenn Frank, concerned issues such as the control of non-European regions, the free use of the seas, and international sovereignty over ports and coaling stations. Besides acting to resolve political conflicts, Frank contended, the League of Nations should also develop a kind of economic internationalism.41 The proposal to link peace and the economy—a 39

Harry E. Barnes, “National Self-Determination and the Problems of the Small Nations,” in The League of Nations: The Principle and the Practice, ed. Stephen P. Duggan (Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1919), 174f. In addition, see Arnold Toynbee, Nationality and War (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1915); and Lothrop Stoddard and Glenn Frank, eds., Stakes of the War: Summary of the Various Problems, Claims, and Interests of the Nations at the Peace Table (New York: The Century Company, 1918). 40 Barnes, “National Self-Determination and the Problems of the Small Nations,” 181–83. Examples of regional cooperation cited by Barnes include a Balkan customs union discussed by Toynbee, a league of Balkan states, and a Central European Union extending from Pressburg (now Bratislava) to Riga. 41 Glenn Frank, “The League of Nations and Economic Internationalism,” in Duggan, League of Nations, 184–200. This view was also highlighted in James Louis Garvin, The Economic Foundations of Peace: Or World-Partnership as the Truer Basis of the League of Nations (London: Macmillan and Co., 1919), in which the author called for the creation of a world economic council to be placed in

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hallmark of liberal peace and internationalism42—took into consideration the sharp increase in US foreign investment in the early twentieth century, which prompted an interest in stable foreign trade. In connection with economic questions, the course also debated the creation of an International Labor Organization (ILO) as provided for in the Treaty of Versailles. The chapter by John B. Andrews, then secretary of the American Association for Labor Legislation, described the state of industrial health and safety legislation around the world, outlined the related Article 23 of the League Covenant and urged that the US join the new international institutions.43 The third aspect of internationalism concerned war and peace. First of all, the pros and cons of warfare were examined. Extracts from Edward B. Krehbiel’s Nationalism, War and Society, a polemic against nationalism in textbook format, discussed diplomacy, international law and international organizations as approaches to peacekeeping. There was also debate over the possibility of limiting state sovereignty by means of a cooperative union of states, a federation (with decision-making powers), or a world government.44 Students also read John A. Hobson’s work Imperialism (1902), which underpinned the core idea that nationalism led to war and exploitation. Next, ways of preventing military conflict were put forward and a historical narrative of contemporary internationalism was developed. The latter was based on the view worked out by Carlton J. H. Hayes as a historical overview chapter for Duggan’s book. In it, Hayes looked back to

charge of the global distribution of food and commodities. The financial and economic organization of the League of Nations was to be made permanent as an intermediate step to this body. 42 For more on the varieties, see for example Waqar Zaidi, “Liberal Internationalist Approaches to Science and Technology in Interwar Britain and the United States,” in Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements between the World Wars, ed. Daniel Laqua (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 17–43. Regarding the connection between liberal internationalism and other concepts of internationalism, see Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, eds., Internationalisms: A Twentieth Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 43 John B. Andrews, “Labor in the Peace Treaty,” in Duggan, League of Nations, 237–52. 44 Edward B. Krehbiel, Nationalism, War and Society: A Study of Nationalism and its Concomitant, War, in Their Relation to Civilization, and of the Fundamentals and the Progress of the Opposition to War (New York: Wentworth Press, 1916); John A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (New York: James Pott & Co., 1902). In addition, students also read passages from Ralph Barton Perry, The Present Conflict of Ideals: A Study of the Philosophical Background of the World War (New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1918).

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the ancient world to describe the steadily growing need for a world organization. In his opinion, the crucial watershed had been in the nineteenth century, when global integration was massively accelerated by the advent of new transport and communication technologies (railways, steamships and telegraphy) and international undertakings proliferated. Ever after, “no civilized state could possibly live to itself alone.”45 Various forms of international regulation (the Holy Alliance, the Concert of Europe, the Pan-American and the Hague Conferences) had emerged in response, but none of them managed to secure permanent peace because they lacked the authority of a confederation of states. “[E]very one of them was founded on the assumption that the parties to them were independent sovereign states, which had interests of their own at variance with, and superior to, the interest of mankind at large.”46 In the twentieth century, Hayes continued, this position was anachronistic: a new format was required. In the cooperation-oriented international organizations and movements that had arisen since the 1860s, attention centered on the common interest. At the same time, however, the sovereign nation state was still of central importance. Unlike older ideas and models such as universality, world citizenship, and cosmopolitanism (which “carried with it a decrying of local distinctions and of patriotism”), in which “the unit of its ideal world-state was to be the individual, and not the nation,” internationalism was based on a solid bond between the individual and the nation state: “the internationalist would build the world state with blocks of nationalism.”47 According to Barnes, nations’ right to self-determination and sovereign nation states were therefore fundamental to a viable contemporary internationalism. This view undergirded discussion of selected measures against the war: the Concert of Europe, the democratic control of foreign policy (e.g., through the Union of Democratic Control), and general strikes.48 Arbitration, disarmament, and the state arms monopoly, and the League of Nations were likewise dealt with in depth. Furthermore, Frederic Austin Ogg’s chapter on armaments limitation debated what kinds of sanctions (if 45

Carlton J. H. Hayes, “The Historical Background of the League of Nations,” in Duggan, League of Nations, 39. The general historical overview is provided in another book by the same author: Hayes, Political and Social History of Modern Europe (New York: Macmillan Company, 1916). 46 Ibidem, 47. 47 Ibidem, 41. 48 Regarding the strikes, students read extracts from a book by the socialist and abolitionist William E. Walling, The Socialists and War: A Documentary Statement of the Position of the Socialists of All Countries, with Special Reference to Their Peace Policy; including a Summary of the Revolutionary State Socialist Measures Adopted by the Governments at War (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1915).

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any) the League of Nations should be able to impose.49 Duggan also discussed the League of Nations in his introduction, characterizing it as an international administration that at best was developing into an intermediate stage on the road to an international government. Like the European Commission of the Danube, he called for passage of resolutions by a simple majority rather than unanimously, and for acceptance of the resulting limitation of state sovereignty.50 After that, some seminars of the course were devoted to causes of international conflicts and to factors that can work against belligerent tendencies. They emphasized increasing economic interdependence, the internationalism of workers and socialists, churches as “advocates for peace,” the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, and finally international organizations, congresses, and conventions such as the Universal Postal Union and the regulation of copyright. The discussion of peace and internationalism concluded with a short section on the relationship between national and cosmopolitan culture that listed arguments for international cooperation, including examples. The enthusiastic backing of the League of Nations and the express support for US participation did not cease once the course had first been held in the 1919–20 academic year but continued after the United States decided not to join, despite the obsolescence of prominent questions in the syllabus about the organization’s structure and active US-American involvement. The 1924–25 syllabus, this subject was placed under the new heading Problems of National Relationship (instead of Nationalism and Internationalism) and reduced from five to three aspects, but the lines of interpretation and core arguments remained almost unchanged. The course continued to introduce a view of internationalism as a multiplication of the national, based on the principle of national self-determination and nationstate sovereignty. It maintained the appeal for an internationalist governmentality51 founded on an intellectual “combination of liberal patriotism and geopolitical globalism” that culminated during and after the Great War in the United States, too.52 Internationalism was now clearly regarded

49

Frederic Austin Ogg, “International Sanctions and the Limitation of Armaments,” in Duggan, League of Nations, 112–27. 50 Stephen P. Duggan, “Introduction,” in Duggan, League of Nations, 1–17. 51 Found for example in Ramsay Muir’s study Nationalism and Internationalism (1916) and in psychologist Walter Pillsbury’s study The Psychology of Nationality and Internationalism (1919), in which the author postulated the existence of a supranational attitude alongside patriotism, with international and supranational organization strengthening this awareness and vice versa. 52 Glenda Sluga, “Patrioten und Mondialisten: Geschichtskolumne,” Merkur: Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken 70, no. 4 (2016): 47, emphasis in original, translation by the author.

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in two ways: as an instrument to prevent war53 (negative peace), and as a counterbalance to nationalism and a way of achieving peaceful relations between states (positive peace). To support this, the previously somewhat diffuse concept of various forms of international cooperation since the 1860s was concentrated and emphasized. John A. Hobson’s Towards International Government (1915), which advocated international executive power and democratic-socialist internationalism, was added to the reading list.54 A new topic, the development of international law, was considered, with reference to the Permanent International Court of Justice (1922).55 Although this general view was reinforced over the next few years, the content and the emphasis on certain aspects were adjusted to reflect a shift in attention toward original documents and research-based literature, and away from the political writings of the early 1920s and the largely general secondary literature mainly used at first. Internationalism was still presented as a method to prevent war and illustrated with seven mechanisms: diplomatic agreements like the Concert of Europe, international law, arbitration, disarmament, civic control of foreign policy, workers’ resistance (via strikes) to military plans, and finally the League of Nations. However, other texts were read as well: an activity report published by the League of Nations; a study of the organization and work of the League of Nations written by George F. Kohn using materials from the League of Nations’ Permanent Secretariat; a report by Arthur Sweetser, a member of the Permanent Secretariat; and a description of the activities of the League of Nations by Parker T. Moon.56 Moon, who had worked on the American

53

In addition to the extracts from Krehbiel, Hobson, and Perry (see footnote 44), the reading list now included passages from Will Irwin’s popular book The Next War: An Appeal to Common Sense (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1921). In it Irwin described the dangers of the continued development of weapons technology, especially poison gas, and warned against the military use of chemical weapons. 54 CC, Syllabus, 1924, 100–103; regarding Hobson, see David Long, Towards a New Liberal Internationalism: The International Theory of J.A. Hobson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 55 CC, Syllabus, 1924, 102; CC, Syllabus, 1925, 89. 56 League of Nations Secretariat, The League of Nations: A Survey, January 1920– June 1925 (Geneva, 1925); George F. Kohn, Organization and Work of the League of Nations, supplement to vol. 114 of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences (July 1924); Arthur Sweetser, What the League of Nations Has Accomplished (New York: League of Nations Non-Partisan Association, 1923); Parker T. Moon, “Permanent Court of International Justice,” Political Science Quarterly, Supplement (March 1925). The bibliographical information has been taken from the syllabus: CC, Syllabus, 1925, 89. Regarding Sweetser, see Madeleine Herren and Isabella Löhr, “Being International in Times

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Commission to Negotiate Peace and the US delegation to the peace negotiations, was awarded a doctorate by Columbia University in 1921 and subsequently appointed professor of international relations. Although the aim of these texts was still to introduce the League of Nations as one of the main achievements of the Treaty of Versailles and a key player in the new world order, the approach was more analytical; students learned specific facts about the League of Nations’ internal structure, how it functioned, and its various fields of activity. In addition to Moon’s report, on the topic of arbitration students also read a draft of an agreement on conflict resolution (the Cecil-Requin Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance), the Geneva Protocol (Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes) and a proposal for international disarmament to pave the way for the Geneva Protocol, written by Shotwell, Tasker H. Bliss, and David Hunter Miller, that Sweetser had tabled for discussion in Geneva.57 The in-depth study of war, peace, and internationalism was discontinued in a major revision of the syllabus in 1928. This revision had been encouraged by agricultural economist Rexford Tugwell (among others), who later joined Franklin Roosevelt’s team of advisers and became one of the architects of the New Deal. He and other colleagues were keen to include an examination of the economic and social challenges in the USA. This was done by extending CC across two years: CC-A comprised an Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West, and CC-B an Introduction to Contemporary Problems in the United States. The first year was almost entirely devoted to history. The teaching addressed the social, intellectual, economic, and, to some extent, the political history of the West from the beginning of the Middle Ages to the reconstruction following the World War. In previous years, historical analyses had delved deeper and deeper into the past, leading on occasion to talk of Western civilization in connection with European expansion. Now the concept of Western civilization became the main theme of the whole section: of War: Arthur Sweetser and the Shifting of the League of Nations to the United Nations,” ed. Antje Dietze and Katja Naumann, special issue, European Review of History 25, nos. 3–4 (2018): 532–52. 57 The syllabus refers to the text by Shotwell as the “Shotwell Plan,” which is probably the following article: League of Nations 5th Assembly, Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes: Text and Analysis, with an introduction by James Thomson Shotwell (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of Intercourse and Education, 1924). For more on the context, see Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 274f; Daniel Marc Segesser, Recht statt Rache: Die Ahndung von Kriegsverbrechen in der internationalen fachwissenschaftlichen Debatte 1872–1945 (Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2010).

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“The culture of America today we call western civilization. . . . Historically it is a type of life which has resulted from the fusion of the Graeco-Roman barbarian (mainly Teutonic) and western-oriental cultures which began to develop in Europe at the opening of the modern era.”58 The study of problems of the modern world (Contemporary Civilization) was replaced by an examination of the historical beginnings of the transatlantic area and problems of the United States. Peace education was dropped. The First World War and the peace negotiations were still mentioned, but it was mainly factual knowledge that now was taught. As for the study of internationalism, all that remained was a similarly fact-based discussion of the League of Nations leading to reparations arrangements.59 In the 1930s, the League of Nations was subject to increasing criticism. It was mainly dealing with conflicts that it tried to resolve, such as the disputes between Sweden and Finland over the Åland Islands and among Turkey, Iraq, and the UK regarding Mosul, or the Chaco conflict between Bolivia and Paraguay. Subsequently, discussion turned to problems arising in connection with the Saar Basin, the former German colonies, and the mandate system, and to the “insoluble” problem of minorities.60 This development was rooted in part in the search for a new narrative of the history of the world and the position of the United States. 58

CC, Syllabus, 1928, 5. CC, Syllabus, 1928, 208ff, as well as 214–16. Regarding the League of Nations, students read an extract from Harold S. Quigley, From Versailles to Locarno: A Sketch of the Recent Development of International Organization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1927). On reparation payments, they read the “Dawes Report on German reparation payments,” International Conciliation, no. 204 (1924), published by the CEIP. 60 CC, Syllabus, 1933, 21; CC, Syllabus, 1937, 50. After the Second World War, the League of Nations was described as having failed for obvious reasons: “The tragedy of the League, and indeed the whole post-war settlement, is that it became the plaything of Utopians who made impossible claims for it and surrounded it with a mystic glamor, and of hardheaded ‘realists’ who sabotaged its efficiency. . . . the League was constantly diverted from its true object of making slow but real progress toward the ordering of the international life.” Students also read excerpts from Alfred Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law (London: Macmillan, 1936). This interpretation paved the way for an effort urging the USA to actively participate in the new international organizations: “We are forced to conclude that a major factor explaining this failure was the refusal of the United States to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. . . . This failure to ratify was certainly the hardest blow to the new institutions. The intervention of the United States had created a military and political situation that might have been stabilized had that country remained; the situation was hopelessly unstable from the moment she withdrew.” Columbia College, Syllabus “Introduction to CC in the West: Manual for volume II,” 1946, 147. 59

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Construction and Deconstruction of the Narrative of the Rise of the West The Columbia course established a new form of education for peace and knowledge dissemination about international conflict resolution and cooperation in the early 1920s. By the end of the decade, however, it had become a major site for the development of new historical narratives. Previously, the history orientation courses (often called General History) had presented an overview of European history from its beginnings until the nineteenth century and dealt with US history separately. Now, CC presented history as the road to a transatlantic entity. Formerly taught on the basis of universal histories from Europe, general history was now augmented by US history—ostensibly to address global (but actually Western) civilization. The close ties between Europe and the USA were brought into the present day. Apart from causing unprecedented destruction and loss of life, the Great War had shattered the credibility of European values and institutions and raised serious doubts about their progressiveness, lending urgency to the restoration of their foundations— a task that the USA in particular was capable of fulfilling. [T]he historical perceptions of a pioneer America, formed by the frontier experience, gave way to an alternative vision of the nation’s connection with Europe. The war, in this sense, vitalized an interpretation of history that gives the United States a common development with England and Western Europe and identifies this “civilization” with the advance of liberty and culture.61

This new concept reflected the development of European history into an independent field of research in American historiography after the First World War, not least because its relevance had been re-established. US specialists in European history saw their compatriots “as partners with the European democracies in a great Atlantic civilization, formed from a common history, challenged by a common enemy, and destined to a common future.”62 This narrative quickly found its way into academia and academic teaching. The European-American history now taught was “liberal, progressive, focused on the modern period and based on the premise of a common history that bound together the North Atlantic

61

Gilbert Allardyce, “The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course,” The American Historical Review 87, no. 3 (1982): 695–725. 62 Leonard Krieger, “European History in America,” in History, ed. John Higham, Leonard Krieger, and Felix Gilbert (Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 233–11, especially 255f; Chester Higby, “The Present Status of Modern History,” Journal of Modern History 1, no. 1 (1929): 3–8.

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nations, connected the United States to the European past, and established Western preponderance in the world.”63 Already discernible in the Columbia course when it was introduced in 1919, this historical interpretation was spelled out in 1928 when the course was extended to two years, the entire first year being devoted to historical development. The presentation of “unique features of the western world” began with Greek city-states and continued with such topics as secularization and industrialization before examining the political revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It described Britain, France, and the United States as the key players.64 The metanarrative of the rise of “the West” would be the core of the course for many years. Yet, it also immediately came under criticism, and a slow process of distancing began, accompanied by debate about alternative views. Doubts about the overall interpretation were reflected in a number of changes. For one, the watershed moments of history charted by the course soon no longer coincided solely with the turning points of European history. For example, the 1871 watershed in the history of “civilized” nations was replaced by an 1850 watershed in world history. Moreover, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America all found their way into the course, and not just in connection with colonialism. The Ottoman Empire was traced back to its origins; political revolutions were illustrated by the national independence movements in Latin America in the mid-nineteenth century; and Australia and New Zealand served as examples of the emergence of a middle class in modern societies.65 It was no longer all about the “West” (in a narrow sense). Not only were the course’s geographical dimensions rearranged, but its content was also restructured to address imperialism in detail, reinterpreted now no long as simply an aspect of European history but a feature of world history in general. Parallel to this, colonial expansion and non-European history were treated separately from each other, and an uneasiness emerged about describing colonialism as a process of progress. In contrast to other topics, the course program now questioned colonial aspirations and colonization as well as the widespread belief that European culture was 63

Allardyce, “The Rise and Fall,” 708. See the 1919 syllabus: Introduction to Contemporary Civilization, Columbia College (New York, 1919); Harry J. Carman, “The Columbia Course in Contemporary Civilization,” Columbia Alumni News 17, no. 8 (1925): 143–45; John J. Coss, “A Report of the Columbia Experiment with the Course on Contemporary Civilization,” in The Junior College Curriculum, ed. William S. Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 133–46. 65 John J. Coss, “Contemporary Civilization,” Columbia Alumni News 12, no. 27 (1921): 410–15; Introduction to Contemporary Civilization: A Syllabus, Columbia University, New York 1920 (as well as the revised editions of 1921 and 1924). 64

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obliged to expand. Moreover, skepticism soon arose over whether the “West” was entitled to “civilize” and preach its creed beyond its own borders. In the end, a critical attitude toward colonialism prevailed, and John A. Hobson’s Imperialism and Leonard Woolf’s Economic Imperialism were added to the reading list.66 Furthermore, nationalism was increasingly called into question as the guiding principle of international relations and, as we have seen, the development of internationalism was addressed, albeit for a limited time. There are also indications that at this time the idea of the “West” as the cradle of progress came to be regarded as problematic. The term “backward peoples” appeared in scare quotes in 1921, was analyzed in 1925, and a year later was criticized as biased in a comment added to the reading list. Over the next few years, other passages implying superiority of the “West” were deleted. Nevertheless, qualms about measuring nonWestern societies against Western culture were few. In the 1930s, cultural differences came to the fore and external influences were seen as a key factor in social development. This went back to an anthropological concept of culture in which one’s own culture did not have positive connotations per se. This concept was used to draw students’ attention to the fact that although progress (or stagnation) could be identified in individual areas of society, the development of an entire society could not be described as progressive (or backward). More importantly, the more lecturers dealt with the specifics of world cultures, the louder were the demands to not assume a universal history but to deal with, say, Indian, Chinese or Japanese history in their own right.67 The idea of an introduction to Asian culture was proposed shortly afterward, and in 1946 the course catalogue included a colloquium called Oriental Humanities that soon was made a regular course. Three years later it came to be followed by a course in Oriental Civilization, so that by the end of their first year, students had been introduced to non-Western history and culture. The separate inclusion of these subjects in the curriculum did not mean that Orientalizing and Eurocentric views had been eliminated, but it shows that the history of Asia, Africa, and Latin America were treated far more independently. The course’s restriction to the history of the “West” was therefore attributable in part to the new recognition of the intrinsic value of non-European history. Note that the narrative of the rise of the West enshrined within the concept of “Western Civ” prevailed at a time when the history of other regions of the world became relevant and was integrated into the compul66

See the syllabus Introduction to Contemporary Civilization, 1920, 58; as well as the edition of 1925, 87, and the edition of 1926, 80. 67 See the syllabus Introduction to Contemporary Civilization, 1928, 2.

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sory parts of the curriculum. Put bluntly, the construction of the “West” was accompanied by efforts to deconstruct it. It was no longer possible to talk of a “Western” culture without recognizing the existence of many cultures and civilizations.68

Summary Any attempt to alter the main narratives about the world and the position of the United States began with the college curriculum, especially history survey courses. They were (and perhaps still are) the foremost institution of historical and political education in the United States, for in addition to delivering basic factual knowledge, the college curriculum was also supposed to impart certain values and a corresponding view of history, and to enforce certain interpretations of the history of the world. Inspired by the Introduction to Contemporary Civilization course at Columbia College in the 1920s, the study of war and peace as well as contemporary internationalism became established as a core theme and a new form of education of peace. The example of CC shows that concepts of internationalism, including those represented by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, did not fade when the United States declined to join the League of Nations, but were disseminated in a new arena. Butler, Shotwell, and other leading figures of liberal internationalism and the US peace movement seized upon the mood of change at universities after the end of the Great War to express their views on the reorganization of the world in new orientation courses. However, in the late 1920s this internationalist orientation gradually disappeared because the foundations of the historico-political debate had shifted. The emphasis on the USA’s role in the new international structures was diminished, and attention turned to striking a balance between the US-American position in the transatlantic West and its connections to non-Western regions of the world.

68

Just as the course’s first syllabus had become a model, this new approach comprising a course on the history of the West also spread. For instance, in 1940 the University of Illinois had 143 History of Civilization courses, most of them following the Western Civ approach; see “A Compilation of Texts and Syllabi Used in Survey Courses in the History of Civilization, 24 June 1940,” in Columbia University Archive, New York, Harry Carman Papers, subseries I, box 13, fd. 7. In step with this growth, doubts about and distancing from Western Civ spread, out of which World History grew in the wake of World War II.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Balkan Carnegie Commission of 1913: Origins and Features Nadine Akhund-Lange

On the initiative of the Division of International Relations and Education of the Carnegie Endowment Fund for International Peace, a committee, representing the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany and Austria, has been appointed to make an impartial inquiry into the alleged massacres in the Balkans in the course of the recent war, and the economic consequences arising from the war. The inquiry will not be affected by any political consideration. —Press release from the New York Times, August 20, 1913

Introduction On August 20, 1913, ten days after the signing of the treaty of Bucharest ended the Second Balkan War, four men representing the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace embarked on a train from Paris for a five-week journey throughout the Balkan Peninsula. Paul Milyukov (Russia) and his companions Henry Brailsford (Great Britain), Justin Godart (France), and Samuel Dutton (United States) were about to enter unsettled lands and confront the harsh reality of countries and populations coming out of two wars whose atrocities and violence had shocked the world’s “civilized nations.” The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), an American-based philanthropic organization, was created in December 1910, barely two years before hostilities began in the Balkans.1 The CEIP was guided by three objectives: to promote international understanding and 1

The Endowment joined a group of four other US-based Carnegie organizations, namely the Pittsburgh Institute (1896), the Carnegie Institution of Washington (1902), the Carnegie Hero Fund (1904), and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (1905). In 1911, the presidents of the five organizations comprised the executive committee of the newly created Carnegie Corporation. The CEIP would be the only one with an international scope.

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cooperation with an emphasis on conflict prevention; to study the causes and impacts of war especially in relation to the civilian population, as the war was appreciated as an object of scientific study; and to support the emerging concept of international law. Structured as an international and transnational network, the Endowment was organized into the three divisions of International Relations and Education, International Law, and Economics and History. The CEIP enjoyed an exceptional position, with three centers of operation scattered on both sides of the Atlantic: its headquarters in Washington, an office in New York, and one in Paris, where a European Center opened in March 1912. As a relay to the American Center, the Paris Bureau supervised representatives based in Austria-Hungary, England, Germany, and Japan.2 Originally from Scotland, Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) was one of the most successful businessmen of his time, having made his fortune in the steel industry in the aftermath of the Civil War. Like other entrepreneurs of his time, Carnegie was also a convinced and committed philanthropist who joined the peace movement and the internationalist circle.3 Supporting the concept of peace through law, he donated a large part of his considerable wealth to realize the ideal of an organized international peace, an ambitious, perhaps even utopian program.4 Surrounding himself with prominent personalities, Carnegie formed a team of leaders, a nucleus of close advisers carefully chosen from academia and politics: the Carnegie Men.5 A limited 2

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Summary of Organization and Work (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1941), 27. After 1918, seven special correspondents were dispatched. 3 An outcome of the Napoleonic era, the peace movement grew throughout the nineteenth century and became institutionalized after two world peace conferences held in The Hague in 1899 and 1907, which respectively brought together 26 and 44 states. Peter Weber, “The Pacifism of Andrew Carnegie and Edwin Ginn: The Emergence of Philanthropic Internationalism,” Global Society 29, no. 4 (2015): 530–50. 4 Katarina Rietzler, “Experts for Peace,” in Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements between the World Wars, ed. Daniel Laqua (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011). See page 49 on the CEIP’s creation of a transnational elite of experts who would mediate between governments and publics to forge an international consensus. 5 The Carnegie archives (Columbia University, New York) clearly reveal the role and the impact of this elite group that I term the “Carnegie men,” showing how their team concept was a decisive element in the running of the Endowment. Nadine Akhund, “Die Interventionspolitik der Großmächte in Mazedonien vor 1914,” in Der Erste Weltkrieg auf dem Balkan: Perspektiven der Forschung, ed. Jürgen Angelow (Berlin: Be.Bra Wissenschaft, 2010), 13–34; Nadine Akhund, A Transnational Network: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Conference paper, ASN, Columbia University, 2013.

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group, this entourage was comprised of fewer than a dozen of a new breed of professionals, lawyers, academics and diplomats. Most of them had studied at Harvard or Columbia Universities and held high-ranking positions in the US administration, Congress, or judiciary. Mostly Protestant, Republican, and conservative, they regarded education as a way to shape public opinion and played prominent roles leading up to the Great War and beyond. Influenced by the pre-war peace movement, they believed that although war could not be eliminated, it could be codified in international law. They were dedicated to building world peace and felt the Endowment had a missionary role to fulfill.6 This team of leaders was to be a significant and, up to today, an underestimated player in the preparations for the Carnegie Report. Besides Andrew Carnegie himself, three of its members had particularly important roles in the formation of the Balkan Commission. Elihu Root (1845–1943) was Carnegie’s lawyer. A former secretary of war (1899–1904) and secretary of state (1905–1909), he specialized in international arbitrage and served until 1925 as the first CEIP president. Nicolas Murray Butler (1862–1947), the charismatic president of Columbia University from 1901 to 1945 and a close friend of Carnegie and Root, was instrumental in the creation of the Endowment. A strong personality, autocratic and authoritarian, he was often described as a “tsar.” Later he became the second president of the CEIP. Finally, Paul d’Estournelles de Constant (1852–1924) was a French statesman, senator of the Department of the Sarthe, and a diplomat who had previously been posted in the Ottoman Empire, Montenegro, and the Netherlands.7 A longtime peace activist, he founded the Association for International Conciliation in 1905 and worked tirelessly to promote the idea of arbitration. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1909. Butler and d’Estournelles de Constant had met in 1902 and become close friends. They held the same opinion of disarmament and were openly critical of the arms race. “It is really wildly foolish to use public funds to multiply and increase weapons of war and means of destruction” wrote d’Estournelles de Constant in March 1910.8 Two years 6

Mark Weston Janis, “Chapter 8: Root, Scott, and Taft: Of Peace and Laws and Learned Men,” in America and the Law of Nations 1776–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 7 D’Estournelles de Constant started his career in the Balkans in 1879, working on the border delimitation between Montenegro and the Ottoman Empire. Stephane Tison, Paul d'Estournelles de Constant: concilier les nations pour éviter la guerre (1878– 1924) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015). 8 Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Columbia University (RBML), Butler Papers, Vol. 112, d’Estournelles de Constant to Butler, March 9, 1910: “il est vraiment fou de consacrer les ressources publiques à multiplier les engins de guerre et les moyens de destruction.”

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later, d’Estournelles de Constant became the president of the Paris Bureau and then of the Balkan Commission. The Balkan Wars were a short military conflict lasting from October 1912 to August 1913.9 The two wars constitute the concluding part of five centuries of Ottoman rule in Europe, a long historical process that started in 1804 with an uprising in Serbia. Whereas the First Balkan War was perceived as a war of liberation from the Ottomans, the Second Balkan War was viewed as an illegitimate war of conquest waged between former allies in the name of national programs and national ideas. The scale of violence in the new century set a precedent of massive atrocities throughout every theater of war.10 The Balkan Wars resulted in huge casualties. The Bulgarians lost around 65,000 men, the Greeks 9,500, the Montenegrins 3,000, and the Serbs at least 36,000. The Ottomans suffered as many as 125,000 fatalities. In addition, tens of thousands of civilians were massacred or died of disease. At the end of the Second Balkan War, the Carnegie Endowment sent an international commission to the region. From the United States, the Carnegie Men viewed the expedition as a response to a humanitarian disaster, and the report resulting from the expedition duly denounced the war’s massacres and atrocities while also addressing issues of civilian conditions, casualties, and people’s rights during wartime. What were the parameters and position of the Carnegie leadership given the seeming paradox of their preoccupation of studying war while working for an organization that advocated for peace? The CEIP’s approach was to advance the cause of organized peace by combining scientific philanthropy with strategic giving.11 But how was an American philanthropic institution drawn into a regional conflict six thousand kilometers away, between an alliance of Balkan states and the declining Ottoman Empire? The “Eastern Question,” whose final chapter opened with the two Balkan Wars, was a major concern in international affairs throughout the entire nineteenth century. At that time the Ottoman Southeastern Mediterranean territories constituted a laboratory of political experiences ranging from classic military wars and invasion to a range of political ventures such as the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1878), Bulgaria’s complex autonomy status (1878–1908), the Great Powers refusal to intervene in Armenia (1895–1896), and the ill-defined international mandates implemented in Crete (1899) and Macedonia (1904–1908). Nicholas Butler and his close advisers James Brown Scott (1866–1943), an 9

Richard C. Hall, The Balkan Wars 1912–1913: Prelude to the First World War (New York: Routledge, 2000). 10 The military forces are estimated to have numbered up to a million soldiers. 11 Peter Weber, “The Pacifism of Andrew Carnegie.”

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international lawyer; James Shotwell (1874–1965), a history professor at Columbia University; and Andrew Dikson White (1832–1918), a former ambassador to Germany and Russia, were receptive to ideas that emphasized collective intervention to defuse crisis and avoid military options. These concepts had been discussed at the two world peace conferences in The Hague, where White led the US delegation in 1907. The following study describes how the Carnegie Report constituted an international intervention of a new kind, one that was not mandated by any of the great powers.12 By sending their delegates to the Balkans, the Carnegie Men took an innovative and decisive step as leaders of a nongovernmental organization in the field of international relations. Entirely based on the Carnegie Endowment’s archives in the United States (New York) and France (Le Mans, Department of the Sarthe), this study presents the Carnegie investigation in the Balkans from the perspectives of its narrative of the 1913 expedition, followed by a critical analysis of the report. Its purpose is to look beyond the report itself and its polemic aspects regarding the massacres and atrocities, to examine how the powerful network of the Carnegie Endowment, benefiting from the influential weight of its leadership and the name of Andrew Carnegie himself, initiated a new international intervention led by a new actor in foreign affairs: a nongovernmental organization driven by the goal of reshaping foreign policy.

12

This essay is part of a larger project on the history of the CEIP before and after WWI and follows a previous study, Nadine Akhund-Lange and Stéphane Tison, “Penser la Grande Guerre au prisme des Balkans. Le témoignage de la Dotation Carnegie pour la paix international,” Monde(s): Histoire, espaces, relations 1, no. 9 (2016): 95–114. Using primarily the CEIP archives in New York and at Le Mans, I take the view of a historian following the paths taken by the eight commissioners. Two studies on the Carnegie Commission in the Balkans deserve further attention. Dzovinar Kévonian emphasizes the link between the commission and the development of international law. Francine Trix writes from an anthropological perspective. See Dzovinar Kévonian, “L’enquête, le délit et la preuve: Les ‘atrocités’ balkaniques á l’épreuve du droit de la guerre.” Le Mouvement Social, no. 1 (222) (2008): 23–24; Francine Trix, “Peace mongering in 1913: The Carnegie international commission of inquiry and its report on the Balkan Wars,” First World War Studies, 5, no. 2 (2014): 147–62.

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I. The Carnegie Commission and the Journey The Origins of the Commission: Butler’s Decisive Role On July 19, 1913, Nicholas Butler sent the following telegram to Elihu Root: “Amazing charges of Bulgarian outrages attributed to King of Greece give us great opportunity for prompt action. If you approve, I will send notable commission at once to Balkans to ascertain facts and to fix responsibility for prolonging hostilities and committing outrages.”13 Having received Root’s approval that very day, Butler notified his friend d’Estournelles de Constant and asked him to form and to preside over an international commission. James Brown Scott, director of the CEIP’s International Law division, was also consulted, but the various letters show that Butler was to be the major decision maker in the creation of the Balkan Commission, even though Root suggested that the European Center should be in charge of appointing the commissioners.14 Andrew Carnegie himself was not consulted, as he was traveling in Europe on his way to Scotland. He only learned about the commission through a British newspaper a few weeks later. “I confess that I got a shock,” he wrote about the revelation.15 In fact, Carnegie had reservations about the concept, fearing that a foreign inquiry into the alleged atrocities would further aggravate the conflict. Why did a philanthropic US-based organization intervene in the Balkans? Since its inception, the CEIP leadership had perceived the dramatic situation in the region as an opportunity to apply concepts it had been defending for several years. As Butler emphasized later in the report’s preface, the violations of the laws of war and the treatment of civilians in warfare had caught the attention of the CEIP leadership. The wars were covered extensively in the European and US presses. A flurry of articles exposed the magnitude of atrocities and opened to the public the question of the belligerent’s war responsibilities. In the United States, the New York Times released articles on the Balkan conflict every single day in the month of July.16 On July 18 and 19, 1913, two articles about the King of Greece’s announcement that Bulgarian troops had massacred civilians attracted

13

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Records, Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, Columbia University, New York (CEIP), vol. 200, box 520, Butler to Root, July 19, 1913. 14 CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, Root to Butler, July 19, 1913. 15 CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, Carnegie to d’Estournelles de Constant, Skibo, September 18, 1913. 16 The New York Times, July 1–31, 1913, featured the Balkan Wars on the front page. Usually, one long piece was followed by three to five shorter pieces.

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Butler’s attention. The horrific graphic details obviously disturbed the university president, who commented extensively on these two lengthy articles in a letter to d’Estournelles de Constant.17 As he also wrote, the press was speculating on why the CEIP was not taking a public position against the massacres. Further, Butler precisely defined the main objectives of the future commission: to seek out those responsible for the outbreak of the wars between former allies; to establish the truth about the massacres and atrocities; to determine the moral and economic losses caused by the war and possible lessons for “the civilized people”; and finally, to conduct an impartial study of the facts observed on the ground. The idea of dispatching CEIP representatives to the Balkans to inquire about the wars had been mentioned six months earlier in December 1912, in an exchange between Butler and d’Estournelles de Constant. The two men discussed “instituting a careful inquiry into the personal and property losses in connection with this war” and considered what might be used to inform and educate public opinion.18 In fact, education of the public was their primary concern and an objective that would later guide the commission. Initially, the CEIP’s Economics and History division was supposed to take charge of the investigation and to put forth a maximally complete and objective statement of losses—of both lives and assets—occasioned by the Balkan Wars. The CEIP archives also hold documents showing that yet another inquiry was envisioned, this one by the division of Economy and History. In October 1913, the division’s director, John B. Clark (1847– 1938), referred to a study entitled “Proposed Economic Investigations into the Balkan Wars” and supervised by Dr. Velimir Bajkić (1875–1952) of Serbia and Lujo Brentano (1844–1931), an economics professor who had been a participant at the Bern Conference of 1911, where the foundations were laid for the monumental series on the economic and social history of the Great War, as it will be developed after the end of World War I.19 17

The July 19 New York Times article starts with a description of one hundred women burned alive. 18 CEIP, vol. 199, box 519, Butler to d’Estournelles de Constant, December 2, 1912, Haskell to Prudhommeaux, January 2, 1913, and Prudhommeaux to Haskell, January 17, 1913. 19 CEIP, vol. 148, box 483, Clark to Butler, October 14, 1913. Bajkić was also a professor of economics. He was part of the Serb delegation to the Versailles conferences in 1919 and later as the editor of the Yugoslav Series, he published writings in the CEIP Economic and Social History of the Great War. Brentano taught economics at Munich University. In 1911, the CEIP had gathered about twenty world economic specialists in Bern to launch a systematic, scientific study of war from a social and economic perspective. The project was launched after 1918 under the supervision of the history professor James Shotwell (1874–1965), the new director of the CEIP’s Economics and History division.

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Bajkić’s proposal was not retained, but the preliminary project he submitted to the Carnegie Men emphasized the war’s effects on the national Balkan economies, from agriculture and industry to the banking system, foreign and national investment, and loan and debt policies. These aspects constitute an essential part of the Balkan Report. Once the principle of sending a team to conduct an inquiry was adopted, Butler continued to exercise leadership in the setting up of the commission. Up to mid-August, his notes and letters reveal a visionary sense of modernity in international affairs. He also set out the entire structure of the future report. First, the commission was to be international. While suggesting and exchanging names with d’Estournelles de Constant, Butler insisted on including a German and an Austrian at a time of increasing tension with Germany. Nationalities other than American, British, and French were considered. Italian was suggested, though only briefly, and Argentine as well as Hungarian after being considered were rejected, whereas Russian was retained.20 Neither Scandinavian nor Belgian names were mentioned, while military officers from Sweden, Norway, and Belgium were already among the police-gendarmerie forces dispatched to Macedonia in 1903 and 1904. Second, Butler insisted on choosing well-known people because he wanted as much publicity as possible, including large-scale use of the press to advertise the CEIP’s objectives: As noted by Haskell, Butler’s secretary and following his instructions, “It will be of vital importance to use all possible publicity for this commission and its work.”21 In Butler’s own words, the report was also to be sent broadcast all over the world. And third, timing was also key: Butler wanted the commission to be on the scene of the massacres so that it would have the standing to denounce them. He insisted on an almost immediate departure, twenty days at most on the ground, and a report prepared for publication by September 1913. However, the process of selecting commissioners proved more complex than Butler had anticipated. The CEIP functioned as a network, relying on personal connections and common interests. Consequently, the members of the commission were chosen on the basis of their relationship with either Butler or d’Estournelles de Constant, rather than regard for their professional competence. Still, knowledge of the Balkan states and local languages was taken into consideration. Eventually the commission

20

The French deputy and mathematician Paul de Painleve (1863–1933), Colonel Leon Lamouche (1860–1945), the Hungarian Rackowski, and the Italian political economist and jurist Luigi Luzzati (1841–1927) were among the candidates under consideration. CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, Puech to d’Estournelles de Constant, August 14, 1913 and Butler to d’Estournelles de Constant, August 15, 1913. 21 CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, Haskell to d’Estournelles de Constant, July 28, 1913.

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expanded, and the head of the Paris Bureau decided to split it: one group would remain in Paris while the other traveled to the Balkans.22 The commission was formed by mid-August and placed under the presidency of d’Estournelles de Constant. Its eight members were from Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States. Three commissioners were university professors, three were representatives of their national parliament, and two were journalists and editors. D’Estournelles de Constant, then sixty-one years old, presided over the commission but he had refused to take part in the expedition because of an issue with the king of Montenegro: in a letter published in Le Temps on October 11, 1912, he had declared King Nicholas responsible for the opening of war in harsh, almost insulting terms.23 Butler had directly recommended the American professor Samuel Train Dutton (1849–1919), who became the doyen of the expedition.24 An affiliate of Columbia University’s Teachers College and the head of the Horace Mann School, Dutton was a school superintendent and specialist in educational management, as well as a peace activist and member of the New Peace Society. Butler described him as “a wise and experienced worker in the cause of arbitration and conciliation.”25 At sixty-four years old, Dutton was well known as an educator in the United States and had broad international interests. He was treasurer of both the American College for Girls in Istanbul and the Canton Christian College in China. He replaced Professor Dyneley Prince, who was Butler’s first choice owing to his knowledge of Turkish and Slavic languages but had declined a seat on the commission for family reasons. The CEIP archives include several personal letters from Dutton to Andrew Carnegie, most notably one about the status of refugees and displaced people and other issues in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars. Later, in 1915, Dutton was involved in refugee and relief aid operations in Armenia and Syria.26 It was also Butler who suggested the German international law professor Walther Schücking (1875–1935) of Marburg Universi22

CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, d’Estournelles de Constant to Butler, Creans, August 6, 1913. 23 In this letter to Le Temps, d’Estournelles de Constant also recalled how in 1879, he had disapproved the way the King of Montenegro, using coercive forces on the ground, managed to gain Albanian populated territories assigned to the kingdom. 24 Charles Herbert Levermore, Samuel Train Dutton: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1922). Levermore’s book is based on Dutton’s personal archives and interviews with family members. Dutton met Butler in 1899 when he was invited to join the Teachers College at Columbia University. He knew Carnegie personally and visited his castle in Skibo, Scotland, in 1909. 25 CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, Butler to d’Estournelles de Constant, July 21, 1913. 26 Dutton was among the founders of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief (November 1915): Levermore, Dutton, 158–59.

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ty.27 The youngest member of the commission at thirty-eight years old, Schücking was an established authority and a pioneering theoretician of peace guaranteed by international organization. He believed international law should be the new guiding concept to reorganize international affairs. In 1911, he participated in the foundation of an Association for International Conciliation, similar to the one created by d’Estournelles de Constant in 1905. Later, he became the first German judge on the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague (1930–1935).28 D’Estournelles de Constant had been thinking of another law professor from Berlin, Wilhem Paszkowski (1867–1918), but the German authorities denied him permission to take part in the journey.29 On the Austro-Hungarian side, law professor Heinrich Lammasch (1853–1920) was already an active member of both the Carnegie European bureau and the Balkan Commission. Being close to d’Estournelles de Constant, he also knew Butler, but he declined to take the trip for health reasons. His place on the commission was taken by the Viennese professor Joseph Redlich (1869–1936). An “excellent Austrian” according to Butler, and professor of constitutional law, Redlich, then aged forty-four, was a member of the Austro-Hungarian Parliament and had taught at Harvard University a few years earlier, in 1907.30 His diary shows that he was close to the CEIP leadership in the United States, where he met with Carnegie and Butler as well as others members of the European Bureau.31 In Redlich’s assessment the entire enterprise was being rushed, and he should have been consulted at the initial stage. The two British commissioners were members of the press. Henry Noel Brailsford (1873–1958) was a British journalist close to the left-wing 27

CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, Butler to d’Estournelles de Constant, July 31 and August 15, 1913. 28 Monica Garcias-Salmones, “Walther Schücking and the Pacifist Traditions of International Law,” European Journal of International Law 22, no. 3 (2011): 755– 82. Butler had originally suggested another German jurist Philipp Zorn. 29 In 1913, Wilhelm Paszkowski’s report “German International Progress” for the CEIP’s International Relations division was published in the series preceding the 1914 Balkan Report. A member of the Paris Bureau, he was a close friend of Butler’s, as indicated in some of his letters during the Great War, CEIP, vol. 203, box 523, Butler to d’Estournelles de Constant, November 30, 1914. CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, d’Estournelles de Constant to Butler, undated: Final composition of the commission; Paul Milyukov, Political Memoirs, 1905–1917, ed. Arthur P. Mendal (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 257. 30 CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, Butler to d’Estournelles de Constant, July 31, 1913. 31 Diary entry: August 23, 1913, in Josef Redlich, Schicksalsjahre Österreichs: Die Erinnerungen und Tagebücher Josef Redlichs (1869–1936), ed. Fritz Fellner and Dorris A. Corradini (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2011), 556.

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Labour Party. Recommended by Samuel Dutton, he was forty years old and a foreign correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. Already recognized as an authority and a Balkan specialist, in 1897 he went to Greece and joined a Greek volunteer force fighting against the Ottomans. In 1903, as member of the London-based Balkan Committee, he led a British relief mission in Macedonia and subsequently wrote a book on the Macedonian Question, becoming openly pro-Bulgarian.32 He spoke Greek, Bulgarian, and French.33 Francis Hirst (1873–1953), also forty, was a liberal who had studied political economy and become a writer. In 1907 he was named editor of the magazine The Economist and wrote further about the law of war. In 1914, he openly declared the Great War a tragedy from the start and an economic catastrophe. He declined to travel to the Balkans because his father was gravely ill. Later on, though, he was fully involved in the writing of the report and commented on chapters and drafts (see part II below). Redlich, who contributed to the Economist, spoke highly of Hirst, and the two men were close.34 Hirst and Dutton met in London, and when the later found out that Hirst would not travel to the Balkans, he recommended Brailsford to Jules Prudhommeaux (1869–1948), the secretary of the CEIP’s Paris Bureau.35 According to CEIP records, it was d’Estournelles de Constant who took the initiative to include a Russian on the Balkan Commission. The Russian historian Paul Milyukov (1859–1943), aged fifty-two, was a member of the Duma and the leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party. Milyukov, praised as highly intelligent by d’Estournelles, was recognized as a Balkan specialist, having traveled and taught previously in Bulgaria and Macedonia. In 1897, he had been hired to teach courses on Slavic antiquity and archeology at Sofia University,36 where he developed a strong interest in the Macedonian Question. His name was suggested by his mentor Maksim Kovalevsky (1851–1916), who was a Russian lawyer, professor of legal history, and friend of d’Estournelles de Constant.37

32

Henry Noel Brailsford, Macedonia: Its Race and Their Future (London: Methuen & Co., 1906). CEIP, Paper Estournelles de Constant, vol. 189, Créans, August 23, 1913: “Brailsford ne s’est nullement caché de ses sentiments pro-bulgares.” 33 On Brailsford’s views on Macedonia, see Stefan Troebst in this volume. 34 CEIP Vol. 200, box 520, Butler to d’Estournelles de Constant, July 31, 1913. 35 Levermore, Dutton, 121. CEIP, CE, vol. 189, Puech to d’Estournelles de Constant, August 14, 1913. 36 Melissa Kirsche Stockdale, Paul Milyukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia 1880– 1918 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 81–85. Milyukov stayed about two years and explored the Macedonian vilayets. 37 CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, d’Estournelles de Constant to Butler, August 1, 1913. Kovalevsky was in Carlsbad.

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On the French side, Justin Godart (1871–1953), a Lyon deputy from the Radical-Socialist Party, was appointed secretary to the commission. Four years younger than Schücking and a lawyer by background, he had a strong interest in social and economic history that dovetailed with CEIP views. A protégé of d’Estournelles de Constant, he became vice president of the Paris Bureau after World War I. In 1921 he was assigned to an investigation in Albania and eventually also became involved in the Armenian refugee question in France.38 Finally, Victor Berard (1864– 1931), another authority on the Balkans, was also contacted by d’Estournelles de Constant but declined to become a member of the commission. Berard did not perceive the two wars in terms of national issues, but rather as a religious conflict involving the Bulgarian Church (the Exarchate), the Greek Church (the Patriarchate), and social classes. In his refusal letter he advised organizing a mission to Crete, Armenia, and Syria.39 In sum, then, the Carnegie Commission was comprised of contrasting, diverse personalities representing six nationalities and four native languages. The commissioners Butler chose were people without specific involvement as decision makers in foreign policy. They were mainly bound by a strong common interest in making a case for the rising concept of international law. What was the spirit of the mission to accomplish, according to its two founders? The French peace activist and philosopher Theodore Ruyssen (1868–1967) wrote in La Paix Par le Droit, that the aim of the mission was as the opposite of war journalism.40 Following d’Estournelles de Constant’s final instructions, the commissioners were to dwell on the wars’ economic impacts and to reach “both worlds” of the United States and Europe.41 He insisted the Balkan states had a meaningful role in Europe’s overall economic development at the time. The impartiality of the initiative was demonstrated by its provenance in the United States, a country that was not involved in the conflict. Butler echoed his friend when he added that the international composition of the commission would highlight the true 38

Justin Godart: Un homme de son siècle (1871–1956), ed. Annette Wieviorka (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2004). 39 CEIP, vol. 200. Box 520, Berard to d’Estournelles de Constant, August 18, 1913. Berard drew a parallel between the Balkan Orthodox Churches’ rivalry and the sixteenth-century discord and violent conflict between the Catholic and Protestant churches that happened in France. 40 Archives Départementales Le Mans, France 12J 207, “La Paix par Le Droit,” article by Theodore Ruyssen, May 25, 1914. Die Friedenswarte, September 15– 19, 1914, 204: “Es ist keine Kriegsgeschichte, die man in jenem Bericht finden wird.” 41 CEIP European Center, Vol. 189, d’Estournelles de Constant to the commission members, August 21, 1913.

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role of the Endowment: to inform and to educate public opinion, denounce war, and envision new rules in international policy based on international law. As the US commissioner Dutton commented, setting up an international commission to investigate a war and its cruelties was something entirely new.42 Milyukov added: “We, of course, did not go as official representatives of our states, but as people capable of dealing with public opinion.”43 Butler regarded public opinion as a potential actor in politics that needed to be educated to prevent future conflict.44

A Five-Week Journey Leaving Paris by train on August 20, the commissioners traveled via Vienna to Belgrade, Thessaloniki, Athens, Kavala, Istanbul/Constantinople, Sofia, and back to Paris after five weeks on September 28. A large part of the journey took place in the former vilayets of Macedonia (Thessaloniki, Üsküb/Skopje, Serres, Doxato, and Drama) and the capital cities of Belgrade, Athens, and Sofia. Paradoxically, considering d’Estournelles de Constant’s network, the Ottoman and Balkan state authorities were notified late, in the midst of the second war’s conclusion. The Treaty of Bucharest ending the wars was signed on August 10, just ten days before the commission’s departure. Also, since it had taken almost a month to select the commission’s members, time to lay the groundwork in the field had been limited. According to the CEIP archives, the participants gathered only once, on August 19, the day before their departure. A note from d’Estournelles de Constant addressed to diplomats from Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and the Ottoman Empire only mentioned Godart as part of the delegation assembled by the CEIP to run an impartial inquiry in the region. Prudhommeaux, the general secretary of the Paris Bureau, reported a meeting with the Bulgarian ambassador, and the day of the commission’s departure from Paris, a Greek and a Serbian representative came to the railroad station. While in London before the trip, Dutton had taken the initiative to meet with the Greek, Bulgarian, and Serbian diplomats: “They were all friendly and courteous, gave me some information and several letters.”45 Important here is that the Carnegie

42

Levermore, Dutton, 120. Milyukov, Political Memoirs, 257. 44 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Summary of Organization and Work, 18–30 on the role of the division of International Relations and Education. 45 CEIP European Center, vol. 189, Note from d’Estournelles de Constant, August 1913, Puech to d’Estournelles de Constant, August 21, 1913, Levermore, Dutton, 121. 43

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Commission was a nongovernmental initiative and the first of its kind. Fully appreciating the inquiry’s final objective, as defined by Butler and d’Estournelles de Constant, was therefore a complex matter for the Balkan authorities. Both men insisted that the investigation should be conducted as an indictment of war itself, and not as a means of denouncing the belligerents.46 As Samuel Dutton wrote to Butler, if the wars’ horrors “can be capitalized and all the machinery available for reaching human minds and human heart can be set in motion, it might almost seem that such a reaction would result as to make another war impossible.”47 In the Balkan governments’ appreciation, however, the Carnegie Men’s initiative was a barely tolerable act of interference in internal or national affairs. In Paris and London, Greek and Serbian diplomats, without criticizing the commission itself, expressed reluctance to d’Estournelles de Constant.48 To Butler’s dismay, upon reaching Belgrade the commission remained limited to only four members: Henry Brailsford, Paul Milyukov, Samuel Dutton, and Justin Godart. At the last moment, the Austro-Hungarian government denied Joseph Redlich permission to travel to the Balkans.49 Later, only after the German authorities had disallowed Wilhelm Paszkowski’s participation, Walther Schücking left Ostend on August 29, for Vienna and Budapest. According to the narrative he wrote thereafter, Schücking was distressed by his journey to Belgrade. He had no passport, and the spectacle of a country only just emerging from war must have been painful to watch.50 At a meeting at the German embassy, he was warned about potential security issues and risks to his personal safety. Soon after, the director of political affairs at the Serbian Foreign Ministry informed him that he would face multiple difficulties in trying to reach Thessaloniki where the Commission’s members had already arrived on August 28. Then, he also learned that the Greek government had refused to assist the Carnegie Commission. Discouraged and disheartened, Schücking, without reporting to d’Estournelles, decided to return to Germany via Budapest. Only after reaching Cologne did he contact d’Estournelles de Constant.51 The interference by the German and Austrian governments surprised 46

CEIP, vol. 201, box 521, d’Estournelles de Constant to Butler, January 6, 1914. CEIP, vol. 121, Dutton to Butler, July 23, 1913. 48 CEIP Centre European Center, vol. 189, Puech to d’Estournelles de Constant, August 23, 1913. 49 CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, d’Estournelles de Constant to Butler, August 27, 1913. In his August 23, 1913 diary, Redlich mentioned urgent work to do before his coming trip to the USA, see Redlich, Schicksalsjahre Österreichs, 556. 50 Archives Départmentales, Le Mans, Sarthe, France (henceforth Arch. Dept. Le Mans), 12 J207, Narrative of Schücking journey in German, September 8, 1913. 51 CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, d’Estournelles de Constant to Butler, September 15, 1913. Schücking sent a telegram on September 5, 1913. 47

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Butler, who regarded universities as private institutions whose faculty should remain independent from government influence.52 Without the participation of German and Austro-Hungarian representatives, the commission lost a substantial part of its international character, one of its main features. Later in Paris, though, Redlich, Schücking, and Hirst were asked to join in the process of writing the report, and their names are listed in its table of contents. Letters from Hirst (see Part II) document his active involvement in the revision of the manuscript. The remaining members of the commission were stopped and delayed several times. In Belgrade and later in Thessaloniki, Milyukov and Brailsford faced hostile protests against their openly pro-Bulgarian and liberal positions. Upon their arrival in Belgrade, they found out that the Serbian government would only assist them if Milyukov resigned. The commissioners decided against such a move: as Dutton wrote, “we felt that we must stand together.”53 Godart, for his part, rejected the description of the commissioners as “judges” in a statement issued by the Serbian general secretary of foreign affairs. The French delegate insisted the commissioners were foremost “investigators” tasked with gathering documents to inform public opinion.54 This difference in terms highlights the divergent perceptions regarding the Carnegie mission, and as Redlich and Dutton both stressed, better preparatory work should have been undertaken by d’Estournelles de Constant, who probably had not adequately evaluated how commissioners sent by a nongovernmental organization would be perceived. Consequently, protests occurred among students and in the press. The traveling conditions were sometimes harsh and grim. While on the train from Belgrade to Thessaloniki on August 26, Dutton commented: “we are in the cholera section now. We drink nothing but wine and bottled or boiled water.”55 Two days later, following a brief stop in Üsküb, recently renamed Skopje, the commission arrived in Thessaloniki, only to face the same issues that had plagued Milyukov and Brailsford in Belgrade.56 The Greek authorities and the governor of Thessaloniki, Stefanos Dragoumis (1842–1923), assigned several officers to supervise the inquiry.57 Brailsford was unable to leave Thessaloniki due to administrative troubles of his own, 52

CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, Butler to d’Estournelles de Constant, September 22 and 29, 1913. 53 CEIP, CE vol. 10, file 10/2, Godart’s manuscript notes. The Godart narrative in French is consistent with Dutton’s letters in the Levermore biography of Dutton. Levermore, Dutton, 124; Milyukov, Political Memoirs, 257. 54 CEIP, CE vol. 10, file 10/2, Godart’s manuscript notes. 55 Levermore, Dutton, 125. 56 For the CEIP in Greece, see Adamantios Skordos in this volume. 57 CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, d’Estournelles de Constant to Butler, September 6, 1913.

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and from September 1 until their reunion in Sofia, the four men parted ways. Milyukov went alone to Istanbul and Adrianople, but the CEIP archives do not mention this part of the journey; Godart went to Athens; Dutton visited Serres, Drama and Doxato, located northwest of Thessaloniki; and Brailsford finally managed to visit Kukuch. The reports indicate that Godart and Dutton were welcomed by the local authorities. Dutton was even perceived as sufficiently impartial to visit military hospitals in Serbia as well as Greece and Bulgaria, and wrote, “I believe I am the only one who has done so.”58 According to rumors spread by the press in Athens and Belgrade and relayed in French and British newspapers such as Le Temps and the Times, the commission had renounced its mission. By August 31, this information had reached CEIP headquarters and the New York Times had announced the end of the Carnegie mission. Butler angrily requested information, while d’Estournelles de Constant gathered news of the mission’s next steps in Sofia. Despite the difficult work conditions, the four commission members approached their assignment as fieldwork. Seeking to collect evidence for their investigation, they conducted extensive interviews on all sides. They gathered information and evidence of torture from civilian witnesses and survivors, and inspected destroyed villages, religious sites, churches, mosques, and mass graves. Upon their arrival in Bulgaria around September 10, 1913, Professor Dutton wrote to Butler: “What an experience: I sometimes feel as though I had been standing on the brink of Hell.”59 In Sofia, the commissioners conducted interviews and were provided with considerable information prepared by the Bulgarian authorities. Dutton met with King Ferdinand, who emphasized the injustice of the Bucharest treaty and regarded the CEIP mission as an American enterprise: “your ideas are noble, and I am grateful for your deep interest and for what the United States is doing.”60 Overall, one should notice that between their arrival in Thessaloniki on August 28 and their reunion in Sofia on September 13, the day of Milyukov’s own arrival, the commissioners worked separately and traveled alone to various locations.61 On their five-week journey they stayed only about four days in Belgrade and another four days in Thessaloniki, then spent the two weeks from September 10 to September 23 or 24 in Bulgaria. Godart was back in Paris on September 26. The others followed two days later, having stopped over in Budapest.

58

CEIP, vol. 121 Dutton to Butler, Sofia, September 20, 1913. CEIP, vol. 121 Dutton to Butler, Sofia, September 20, 1913. 60 Levermore, Dutton, 136. 61 Milyukov, Policial Memoirs, 263 (August 31, Old Style). 59

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The Process of Writing the Report Upon their return, the members of the Balkan Commission held several meetings in Paris. Redlich and Hirst were present at the first one. Later on, Hirst remained involved in the readings and revisions.62 The writing process was long and complex, partly because of the geographical distance between the commissioners and the CEIP offices in France and the United States. The report was the collective work of a team composed of not only the commissioners but also executive board members of the Paris Bureau— such as the French mathematician and politician Paul Painleve—who were consulted on a regular basis. Proofreading sessions were held which included discussion of opinions expressed in the manuscript as well as its length. Each chapter was revised several times.63 It was decided that Brailsford, Godart, and Dutton would each write one chapter and Milyukov would write four, even though he, out of the four commissioners, had conducted the least field investigation, having been asked to leave Serbia and Greece.64 To reinforce the collective nature of the report, the chapters’ authors were not named: “there will only be one collective signature, the one of the entire commission.”65 Butler’s recommendation was to dwell as much as possible on the great moral and economic devastation caused by the wars. Unfortunately, the publication was delayed by more than six months, mainly because Milyukov was unable to complete his manuscript, about two-thirds of the volume, before February 1914. He wrote in French, and d’Estournelles de Constant remarked that the entire Paris office shared the burden of the difficult work of revision and correction, describing Milyukov’s French as “an ordeal”: “the French of Milyukov is more difficult to translate into real French than any other known language.”66 The work was collectively reviewed and revised by d’Estournelles de Constant himself, helped by Godart and Jules Prudhommeaux. Godart also wrote in French; Hirst and Brailsford supervised the English translation. Dutton and Brailsford wrote their own chapters in English. The delays greatly exasperated Butler, who had hoped for publication by November

62

Redlich, Schicksalsjahre Österreichs, 561. CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, d’Estournelles de Constant to Butler, January 30, 1914; Prudhommeaux to Haskell, February 3, 1914; d’Estournelles de Constant to Butler, March 3, 1914. 64 CEIP, vol. 201, box 521, Haskell to Prudhommeaux, December 12, 1913. 65 CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, Prudhommeaux to Haskell, October 3, 1913. In Thessaloniki, Milyukov acknowledged that he had collected data from witnesses without taking trips: Milyukov, Political Memoirs, 260. 66 CEIP, vol. 201, box 521, d’Estournelles de Constant to Butler, January 30, 1914. 63

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1913, insisting that the “psychological moment, both here and abroad” was not to be missed.67 By April 1914, the work was finally drafted. Hirst expressed criticism in several letters, raising two points. First, he advised against publication of Godart’s chapter on the grounds that the gathered data were incomplete: “the financial part is necessarily imperfect and incorrect, partly because Godart has not got all the financial documents before him.”68 Second, quoting sentences from Brailsford’s chapter and opinions expressed by Milyukov, he warned that the report could be perceived as lacking credibility because it risked being seen as pro-Bulgarian: “there is no necessity for example that we should express an opinion as to what is the nationality of the bulk of the people of Macedonia.”69 He also recommended the removal of several cases and incidents that looked overly biased against either of the belligerents. D’Estournelles de Constant likewise disapproved of Milyukov’s one-sided opinion in favor of the Bulgarian and considered his fourth chapter although a serious work but anti-Serb and anti-Greek oriented and thus less credible;70 meanwhile he hoped that denunciation of war and the abuse of civilians in warfare would deflect attention from this sensitive issue. The finished work was then sent to the United States for editing and transliteration of Slavic names, while maps and photos printed in the United States were sent to France for the French edition. Finally, in May 1914 a communiqué sent to about 1,250 newspapers announced the official release of the report on May 18.71 Butler was truly at the avant-garde of communication techniques as he decided to issue the report in French and in English on the same day in an operation of international scope conducted simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. A German translation had been planned but never took place because of the delays.72 Though this fact is mentioned several times in the archives, 67

CEIP, vol. 201, box 521, Butler to Estournelles de Constant, December 12, 1913; d’Estournelles de Constant to Butler, January 6, 1914: “Je suis aussi ennuyé que vous par ce maudit rapport des Balkans. Milyukov s’est enseveli dans je ne sais quelle solitude de la Finlande pour terminer son travail.” 68 Arch. Dept. Le Mans, 12J2017, Hirst to Prudhommeaux, February 3, 1914. 69 Arch. Dept. Le Mans, 12J207, Hirst to d’Estournelles de Constant, February 5 and to Brailford, February 6, 1914. 70 CEIP European Center, Vol. 189, note d’Estournelles de Constant, April 8, 1914: “Mon impression est que ce chapitre IV est très inférieur aux précédents. C’est un réquisitoire probulgare contre la Serbie et la Grèce (. . .) Très intéressant et, je crois, juste en ce sens qu’il montre le mal d’autant plus terrible que la guerre a éclaté entre les peuples plus encore qu’entre les armées.” 71 CEIP, vol. 202, box 522, Prudhommeaux to Haskell, Paris, May 12, 1914. 72 CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, Prudhommeaux to Haskell, Paris, October 17, 1913.

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there is no explanation of why it was abandoned. Two other translations were also planned, one Bulgarian (one chapter was published in 1919) and one Turkish, but the cost proved too high. Almost 20,000 volumes were published, 13,000 in English and 5,000 in French.73 The report received mixed reviews. It was particularly criticized for its extensive coverage of military excesses against civilians, eliciting protests and complaints from most of the Balkan governments. In the preface, Butler defended it as an “impartial examination by an independent authority,” while d’Estournelles de Constant stated that he would gladly have included the Greek and Serb governments’ “official communications and protestations,” but none of them had been sent prior to publication.74 The volumes were sent to major universities and libraries upon request, as the commission’s work was not a profit-driven operation. Whereas the American press generally covered the report, European newspapers were preoccupied with international tensions. Overall, reactions and critiques were eclipsed by the outbreak of World War I. Butler’s fears proved well founded: the momentum was interrupted, and the report’s impact on international public opinion remained limited.

II. Critical Analysis: The Main Features of the Report Overview and Technical Features The Balkan Report was the fourth volume published by the CEIP’s International Relations and Education division. The first and third volumes addressed the situation in Japan and China in 1912/13, and the second dealt with Germany in 1913.75 The volume’s more than four hundred pages are divided into seven chapters. Published as a collective work, it bears no signature of the authors. Milyukov wrote chapter 1 (“The Origin of the Two Balkan Wars”), chapter 3 (“Bulgarians, Turks and Servians”), chapter 4 (“War and Nationalities”), and chapter 5 (“War and 73

CEIP, vol. 202, box 522, Haskell to Prudhommeaux, April 6, 1914. Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, DCL Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914), 1, 12. 75 Charles W. Eliot, Some Roads Toward Peace: A Report on Observations Made in China and Japan in 1912 (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 1914); Hamilton W. Mabie, Educational Exchanges with Japan: A Report to the Trustees of the Endowment on Observations Made in Japan in 1912–1913 (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914); Wilhelm Paszkowski, German International Progress in 1913 (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 1914). 74

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International Law”), which together made up about 175 of the 273 pages of text. Brailsford wrote chapter 2, devoted to the Greeks and Bulgarians, while the last two chapters, by Godart (chapter 6) and Dutton (chapter 7), treated the economic, moral, and social consequences of the wars; together these added about 50 pages.76 A range of modern tools was used to provide a precise recollection of the facts. Numerous photos from the expedition illustrated a desire to be as accurate as possible and to make a strong impact on the reader. Among the 51 photos, only one shows the members of the commission interviewing refugees, while 26 are graphic photos of corpses, some taken from brutally close angles and refugees, mostly of women and children; 14 show urban areas in ruins and damaged structures like roads and bridges. Obviously, these photos were selected to emphasize one major theme: the war’s impacts on civilians, especially the displacement of vast numbers of people. The images showed that massive destruction of cities and infrastructure made it impossible for refugees to return to their homes. Several photos also depicted the gruesome living conditions in the refugee camps. There were also eight detailed maps, four of them focused on Macedonia. Indeed, the Macedonian Question featured heavily, taking up the lion’s share in four of the seven chapters. One of the last Ottoman territories in Europe, the region—which was divided into three districts or vilayets (Üsküb, Monastir, and Salonika, in the Ottoman nomenclature)— was a decisive issue for the Balkan states. The notion of Macedonian identity had appeared relatively late and was still ill defined in 1912. Ethnic and religious heterogeneity had aggravated the situation during the two Balkan Wars, and disputes over Macedonia sparked the war’s reprisal. 123 pages of the report is devoted to appendices, making up more than a quarter of the total volume. Organized into nine sections, these documents rigorously detailed some of the massacres that took place, recording dates, times, places, and victims’ ages and occupations, as well as the names of perpetrators. A second set of documents and statistics explains the financial costs of the Balkan Wars. For each state involved in the wars, a detailed account is given of expenditures on military equipment—types of weapons, clothing, bedding, food—and the costs of handling flows of refugees and war prisoners, as well as pensions granted to invalids and their families. This second part of the appendix holds twenty pages of detailed statistics and figures on the costs of the wars. Victims were categorized as killed, wounded, or missing. The documents also extend to impacts on the Balkan states’ infrastructure, listing industrial complexes, factories, and workshops that were destroyed. Only for Bulgaria, however, are the sources of the statistics included. 76

CEIP, vol. 201, box 521, Puech to Haskell, February 12, 1914.

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The CEIP Records: New Facts and Omissions As mentioned above, the CEIP archives reveal the crucial role of Nicholas Butler. D’Estournelles de Constant played more the part of an intermediary, and certainly an important one as he took care of the logistic aspect, but the inner conception of the report from the setting up of the commission, the structure and spirit of the final work, and the manner in which it was issued were entirely Butler’s work. As d’Estournelles de Constant pointed out on July 21, it was after all an American initiative. One could almost call the Balkan Report the “Butler Report.” The archives demonstrate the importance of the Carnegie Men. They functioned as a coherent team whose field of action extended beyond its founder as early as 1912–13. The exchanges between Butler and d’Estournelles de Constant mirror a sub-layer of correspondence and activities between their respective secretaries’ offices, led by Henry Haskell and Jules Prudhommeaux, who were fully involved in the composition of the report. The teamwork aspect is particularly noticeable in communications sent during the writing process. The manuscripts are kept in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML), Columbia University, New York, CEIP Centre Europeen, volumes 9, 10, 11, and 12. The boxes include three kinds of documents, largely handwritten in French though a few are in English. An overview and selected pieces are presented, summarized, and commented on here. The first type of document comprises handwritten, annotated, and typed manuscripts of chapters of the volume as follows: the final, typed version of the Preface; handwritten and typed versions of Milyukov’s chapter 1 in French, though part I is missing from the typed version; the handwritten French translation of Brailsford’s chapter 2; Milyukov’s chapter 5, handwritten in French; Godart’s chapter 6, handwritten in French; and a complete, handwritten French translation of Dutton’s chapter 7 by Mrs. Clement, a secretary at the Paris Bureau. An English typescript is also included, as is a second typed set, in French, of the complete chapters 1–4; chapter 5 is mentioned as incomplete. Finally, chapters 1, 4, 5, and 6 are also typed in English. Due to lack of information (date, acknowledgment, or signature), it is uncertain whether the handwritten manuscripts are the original ones. It is not known if Dutton wrote first by hand and then typed his chapter; Brailsford’s text appears only in French, and Godart’s text bears almost no annotation. Only in the case of Milyukov can the texts potentially be assumed to be originals. A close reading of the manuscript of his chapter 5 in French and the text of the final printed version shows that the two texts are similar. The handwritten document is fully annotated.

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The second kind of document is an extensive series of notes and narratives addressing the massacres and atrocities. Covering a few hundred pages, these were used mostly in the appendix pertaining to chapters 2 and 3. For example, a letter of August 29, 1913, written by Baroness Varvara d’Yxcoull (Üxküll von Hildenbrand), who witnessed the Bulgarian occupation of Edirne/Adrianople, is typed in French. Official records of massacres usually include the name and signature of the policeman or military officer who reported the facts. Also among these documents are numerous records of Bulgarian civilians victimized by Serbs, letters from Greek soldiers translated into English, and lists of destroyed villages. Third, letters from Godart and Brailsford provide additional information about the commission’s departure and subsequent arrival in Belgrade. Brailford’s writings from February 1914 show his involvement in the writing process of the volume was substantial, even though he was based in London. Some information is missing. The CEIP archives do not include a comprehensive narrative of the trip. Godart took notes, some of which are kept in the Département of the Sarthe archives, Le Mans, France. However, d’Estournelles notes, Butler’s writings to and from the Parisian staff (CEIP reports, New York), Godart’s and Brailsford’s letters (CEIP, Le Mans), Redlich’s diary, Levermore’s biography of Dutton, and Milyukov’s memoirs, when compared to one another, offer similar accounts of the facts and chronology of the expedition. Numerous letters from Dutton are included in the Levermore biography, and according to Kirschke-Stockdale, Milyukov kept a diary of the trip that was not entirely included in his memoirs. Photos of the commission in the field are presumably also missing. There is only one such photo among the fifty-one in the report.

An Innovative Document for Its Time The Carnegie initiative took place in the twilight of the great powers’ empires, a turning point in European international history. Throughout the nineteenth century, new approaches in international affairs were slowly emerging in the region as the great powers balanced urges to dismember the Ottoman Empire and implement reforms to modernize it. After 1878 and the Berlin Congress, the great powers’ Balkan policy relied on collective intervention and diplomacy and was guided by increasing concern for civilian populations—what would later be termed humanitarian intervention. The Carnegie Report follows a trail that had been already blazed by the examples of international interventions in Crete in 1899, followed a few

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years later by the Mürzsteg program implemented in Macedonia from 1904 to 1908.77 Even the non-intervention in Armenia in 1895–1896 can be added here, as it was driven by the same collective and non–militaryinterventionist way of thinking as well as by the concept that international crises should be handled with the participation of a growing emerging group, the international lawyers.78 In these three cases, the great powers decided against military options and chose to contain the crisis by carrying out a collective program.79 Overall, the report’s main characteristics foreshadowed some major modern concepts that would dominate both the format and the content of twentieth-century international policy on international intervention and conflict prevention. The Carnegie Men opted to give the report a fully innovative format: a collective inquiry guided by the concern to establish the truth as observed in the field. Despite the proliferation of articles on the investigation, the information reported by the press in 1913 appeared fragmentary, distorted, and contradictory. To some extent, the inquiry was initiated by press coverage that emphasized the wars’ horrors from a sensational and graphic perspective. Butler wrote that he had been deeply impressed by the photos released in the French review L’Illustration: “the last number of L’Illustration contained photographs more horrible than I have ever seen.”80 In fact the Balkan Wars were amongst the first military conflicts to receive such extensive press coverage, although the process had started during the Crimean War. Nicholas Butler insisted on reporting the truth as seen at

77

Tensions between Christian and Muslim elements in Crete (1896–99) and the rise of a national movement (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, IMRO) in Macedonia in 1903 led to the implementation of two programs of international reforms (of police/gendarmerie). The situation in Armenia (1895– 96) also led to a reform plan, but its implementation remained rather limited. Nadine Lange-Akhund, The Macedonian Question, 1893–1908, from Western Sources (New York: East European Monographs, 1998). 78 Patrick Louvier, “Un engagement humanitaire et pacificiste. Les juristes internationalistes et la question armenienne des grands massacres de 1894–96 à la fin de l’ère hamidienne (1894–1908),” in Exprimer le genocide des Armeniens, ed. Annick Asso (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016). Louvier examines how international lawyers were becoming experts in human rights and international affairs, a trend that was perceptible among the Carnegie Men. 79 Massacres of Christian Armenians occurred in 1895–96. Davide Rodogno, Against Massacres, the Humanitarian Intervention in the Ottoman Empire 1815–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), chapter 8. The great powers pushed for at least a Christian governor to run the local administration of the province, a concept retained later for Macedonia. 80 CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, Butler to d’Estournelles de Constant, August 18, 1913. Butler was referring to the L’Illustration issue of August 2, 1913.

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close quarters. As a corollary, the inquiry was to be conducted with impartiality and objectivity, words that were used repeatedly on both sides of the Atlantic. Several times Butler defined the inquiry as an equitable examination run by an independent authority. A press communiqué on August 18, 1913, emphasized the neutrality of the commissioners, none of whom were nationals of any of the states involved in the wars. However, the selection of commissioners was essentially a function of the prevailing network of personal and friendly ties amongst the CEIP leadership. Milyukov was recommended by his mentor Kovalevsky, who also knew d’Estournelles de Constant, and Brailsford’s name was suggested by his friend Hirst and by Dutton. The Russian historian and the British editor never concealed their pro-Bulgarian positions on the Balkan Wars. Of interest here is the discrepancy between d’Estournelles de Constant’s will to present the commission as an impartial one, and Milyukov’s open acknowledgment of his own pro-Bulgarian views. In his memoirs, he stated that Bulgaria was the first victim of the conflict and Godard described Brailsford as animated by a sort of Bulgarian fanaticism.81 Further, Milyukov and Brailsford regarded the Treaty of Bucharest as nothing but the humiliation of Bulgaria. For their part, the Serbian and Greek governments publicly indicated that they disapproved of Milyukov’s presence on the trip, an opinion shared by Hirst, Godart, and Dutton. The latter even concluded that other Russian and British commissioners could have been chosen.82 Thus, Milyukov and Brailsford put the commission’s credibility in jeopardy from the very start of the mission’s work, and later their chapters discredited the content of some aspects of the report, an issue that historians continue to discuss today. As mentioned above, the archives show that even if Butler and d’Estournelles de Constant were fully aware of these arbitrary positions, they were hoping that the report’s focus on the indictment of war and the impartiality-neutrality cachet conferred by the CEIP’s reputation would supersede Milyukov’s and Brailsford’s opinions. One can argue that the risks of involving Milyukov and Brailsford were significantly underestimated by d’Estournelles de Constant and ignored by Butler. The report opens with an exhaustive introduction of approximately twenty pages written by d’Estournelles de Constant, who uses vivid language to express his viewpoint as a personal statement. He speaks to readers as a witness and an interlocutor, using direct, forceful sentences to 81

Milyukov, Political Memoirs, 263. Arch. Dept Le Mans, 12J207, Godart to d’Estournelles de Constant, August 30, 1913: “Brailford a une sorte de fanatisme bulgare, avec un aspect mysterieux, et une obstination impressionante”. 82 Levermore, Dutton, 124; Sarthe Dpt. Archives, 12J207, Hirst to d’Estournelles de Constant, February 5, 1914.

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get their attention. Words such as “truth,” “impartiality,” and “objectivity” are repeated as many as twenty-five times. The text provides an elaborate description of the wars’ context, the reasons for the CEIP’s involvement, and a rundown on the trip and its participants. D’Estournelles de Constant also discusses the initiative’s weaknesses and the obstacles and the difficulties it encountered, including the protests in Balkan states and the tensions with Belgrade and Athens during the trip. He tends to emphasize his own crucial role, a perspective that does not entirely correspond to the content of the CEIP records. The cohesion among the commission members was perhaps less strong than d’Estournelles de Constant implies, especially after their arrival in Thessaloniki, barely ten days after their departure from Paris. On August 29 and 30, while deciding how to handle Brailsford’s and Milyukov’s difficulties with the Greek authorities, Godart and his companions argued about whether they should abandon the inquiry.83 A dissension is discernible between the overall positive resonances of the preface, where the commission was united in “one spirit,” and the reality encountered on the ground. Their notes and memoirs reveal that the commissioners had expressed a certain skepticism even before their departure. Redlich, convinced that only limited material would be available to the mission, expected little to come of it. Referring to the current state of mind of the Balkan people, he added, “I have political concerns as well. Why expose these people ex-post, while they are still crucified in their shame!”84 Later, while in Belgrade, Godart underlined that the mission was at a standstill. In his memoirs, reflecting on the trip, Milyukov offered a strong statement about “abstract pacifism” in contrast to the atrocities the commissioners have just witnessed and the hundreds of pages that nobody would ever read. On his part, Dutton recalled that Andrew Carnegie did not believe in sending the Commission.85 This introduction has been widely used by historians who have written on the Balkan Report in recent years. These authors tend to follow d’Estournelles de Constant’s “interpretation.”

83

Arch. Dpt. Le Mans, 12J207, Godart to d’Estournelles de Constant, August 30, 1913; Lervermore, Dutton, 126. 84 Redlich, Schicksalsjahre Österreichs, 556: “Ich habe auch politische Bedenken. Wozu jetzt ex-post diese Leute dort noch in ihrer Schande annageln.” 85 Milyukov, Political Memoirs, 264, Arch Dept Le Mans, 12J207, Godart to Prudhommeaux, August 24, 1913; Dutton to d’Estournelles de Constant, June 5, 1914.

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The Main Theme of the Report: War The report denounces war itself. The Carnegie Commission describes the Balkan Wars as a total war, a perspective shared by historians such as Mark Mazower and Eyal Ginio, who emphasize how it involved the entire society, soldiers versus civilians, Muslims versus non-Muslims, men versus women and even children, as Ginio points out in his latest work.86 The report presents and analyzes the wars from several different angles, as a war of liberation from the Ottomans (chapter 2); then as a war between the Greek, Serb, and Bulgarian nationalities (chapter 4); as well as in terms of the link between war and international law (chapter 5), the wars’ economic impact (chapter 6), and the wars’ consequences from the social and moral perspective (chapter 7). Samuel Dutton commented that “the opportunity of gathering materials for new and most impressive propaganda against war is unique.”87 Two perspectives linked to the consequences of war are particularly innovative. First, the report dwells on the role that international law could play in regulating war and its features. Indeed, the report is a case study in which war meets with jurists, especially in chapter 5, “War and International Law.” Dzovinar Kévonian underlines that the body of international lawyers—a major element among the CEIP trustees and considered the foot soldiers of the Endowment—had undergone a rapid buildup since The Hague Conferences of 1899, driven by the principles of establishing peace through law and codifying the laws of war.88 The second innovative perspective reflected the Carnegie Endowment’s long-standing interest in how warfare, along with its consequences once hostilities end, impacts society economically. The CEIP’s Economics and History division was focused largely on understanding how economic conditions influence historical developments, and the Carnegie Report, as mentioned, assesses the amount of economic damage inflicted by the wars. In chapter 6, Godart describes the economic consequences of the wars in 86

Eyal Ginio, “Mobilizing the Ottoman Nation during the Balkan Wars 1912– 1913: Awakening from the Ottoman Dream,” War in History 12, no. 2 (2005): 156–77; Eyal Ginio, “War, Civic Mobilization and the Ottoman Home-Front during the Balkan Wars: The Case of Children,” in The Wars before the Great War: Conflict and International Politics before the Outbreak of the First World War, ed. William Mulligan, Andreas Rose, and Dominik Geppert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 92–113; Mark Mazower, The Balkans: A Short History (New York: Modern Library, 2002). 87 CEIP, vol. 201, box 521, d’Estournelles de Constant to Butler, January 6, 1914; Vol. 121, Dutton to Butler, July 23, 1913. 88 Dzovinar Kévonian, “L’enquête, le délit et la preuve: Les ‘atrocités’ balkaniques à l’épreuve du droit de la guerre,” Le Mouvement Social Paris, no. 1 (222) (2008): 23–24.

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terms of destruction of infrastructure, industry, and agriculture. His chapter opens with a short, powerful statement condemning war as “destruction of wealth.” He insisted on addressing the wars’ repercussions on the national revenues of each Balkan state and the diminished value of deposits in saving banks.89 The chapter also provides a complete account of the disruption of the banking, debt, and tax systems. Furthermore, Godart detailed the costs of the war in terms of war materiel such as ammunition, equipment for the army, and so forth. This general financial statement extends also to refugees and displaced people, as well as the impact on emigrants’ remittances from abroad. D’Estournelles de Constant wanted the report to be a damning indictment, though less of the belligerents than of war itself. This powerful statement is reinforced by the method chosen to conduct the investigation, which followed a scientific approach, that is, a field approach that regarded the wars and the massacres as objects of study. The commissioners wanted to ascertain the facts themselves and record them with accuracy (even if translators were involved, as only Milyukov and Brailsford understood Slavic languages). As Butler emphasized, perhaps in a grandiose tone, the inquiry “represents the first instance in History of study of the results of war by the laboratory method.” The methods of investigation required that events be reported systematically and analytically. Further, “this is the first time,” Butler remarked, “that trained men have ever gone into territory which war has devastated and studied its moral, economic and social conditions by the inductive method of observation.”90 The commissioners started with observations of war sites like destroyed villages, aiming to settle on a few powerful statements that would define the impacts of war on civilians. They associated the inductive method with a quantitative approach that is clearly perceptible upon examination of the sources used to build the corpus of appendices. Once again, however, personal opinions tainted the final conclusions. In the appendix, the authors, referring to chapters 2 and 3 (on Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, and Turks), provided highly detailed documents reporting the exact circumstances of certain massacres selected to reflect all belligerents. The day, time, and location of each interview are provided, as are the age, name, and profession of all witnesses involved. These documents were gathered mainly as testimony to reinforce the case for protecting civilians in warfare through implementation of international law. Yet, in these two chapters, the description of an incident often concluded with an assessment of who its perpetrators were. For example, a report on the massacre in the southeastern Macedonian town of Doxato stated that, 89 90

Report of the International Commission, 247–53. CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, Butler to ďEstournelles de Constant, October 7, 1913.

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“we do not hesitate to conclude that the massacre at Doxato was a Turkish and not a Bulgarian atrocity.”91 Finally, a new terminology appeared. The report mentions a “war of extermination,” deportation, “campaigns of murders,” forced emigration, the torture of prisoners of war, “massacres of prisoners,” “violence against women” and children, horrendous living conditions in refugee camps, the plundering of resources, forced conversion, and other issues where the commission felt deep concern for the protection of civilians in warfare. The suffering of civilians is detailed in graphic descriptions, recalling those already published in US and European newspapers.92

The Civilian: Protagonist of the Report Aiming to further the study of war, the report introduces a new actor and participant: the civilian. This is another innovative aspect of the report. The civilian (man, woman, or child) is positioned on the same level as the soldier but is dissociated from military reality, a major argument of the report being the need to separate the treatment of civilians from that of military personnel during warfare. According to the Carnegie Commission, the civilian had rights that must be codified, respected, and accepted in accordance with the laws of war. Having established the category of the civilian, the report highlighted similar subcategories such as refugees, displaced persons, prisoners (military or not), veterans, and victims of torture and abuse. The conceptual dissociation and separation of civilians from the military during warfare is one of the main contributions of the 1913 documents to international law. The Carnegie Report asked whether the massacres of civilians had been committed by armies representing their governments’ interests in the war, or by nations seeking to achieve homogeneity by annihilating ethnic groups in the name of nationalism. The report equally denounced all the wars’ belligerents—Turks as well as Montenegrins, Greeks, Serbs, and Bulgarians—and their efforts to reach an idealized nationstate using coercive methods. The report’s chapter 4 introduces readers to “the second characteristic feature of the Balkan wars, a feature which is a necessary correlative to the first” (i.e., expulsion and forced migration): the carrying out of “orders of extermination” or murder.93 The report describes

91

Report of the International Commission, 79–83. Report of the International Commission, 76: “The dead body of a woman was hanging from a tree, and another one with a young baby lay dead on the ground with their eyes gouged out.” For a similar description, see also p. 287 and the appendix. 93 Report of the International Commission, 151. 92

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numerous retaliatory operations against civilians at length. Milyukov wrote: “Turkish villages were burned down; Moslems became the first victims of the atrocities.”94 This was the first instance of a public document attempting to assign responsibility for the massacre of civilians by asking whether the atrocities were committed by officers, soldiers following orders from their commanders, or “armed bands” operating semi-independently. The possibility of officers ordering crimes against civilians is raised and discussed in letters exchanged between Butler’s secretary Haskell and Prudhommeaux at the Paris Bureau. Both men are very careful to gauge the veracity of the information.95 Commenting on the notion of responsibility, Dutton, in a letter addressed to Andrew Carnegie, openly held Balkan leaders answerable for their conduct and policies: “the blame should be given not to the people, most of whom in all those countries are peasants more or less ignorant of politics, but to the handful of politicians whose ambition ran away with their judgment and their sense of humanity.”96 The premonitory aspects of the report deserve emphasis here, for some decades later, after World War II, the concept of an international tribunal would be implemented to try those held responsible for war crimes.

The Main Outcome of the Report: A New International Order? A recurrent theme highlighted throughout the Carnegie Report is the need for new foreign policy rules and a new international order. The report condemned the great powers’ policy, arguing that “these unhappy Balkan states have been until now much more the victims of European decisions than of their own faults”97 and underlining that the Balkan people had never, in the thirty-five years from the Berlin treaty to the Bucharest treaty, been consulted about any international agreements. Overall, the report denounced “secret diplomacy” and advocated what today would be called “transparency” in politics. The traditional features of the great powers’ policy in the Balkans, which amounted to opting for either military invasion or the creation of “zones of influence,” were also criticized, as d’Estournelles de Constant, perhaps excessively, saw the national idea, and the national projects of Greater Greece, Greater Bulgaria, and Greater Serbia, as fostered by and through this great power policy. Despite the two recent wars, he worried that the great powers would continue to act 94

Milyukov, Political Memoirs, 258. CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, Haskell to Prudhommeaux, November 20, 1913. 96 CEIP, vol. 121, Dutton to Carnegie, New York, November 7, 1913. 97 CEIP, Paper d’Estournelles de Constant, vol. 189, August 21, 1913. 95

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according to their own interests without taking into consideration those of the people of the Balkans. Taking a pragmatic approach, Dutton contended that the report should also be more constructive by suggesting the Great Powers might make investments in order to modernize the infrastructures and economies and thereby bring stability and regional cooperation, rather than exert influence over the Balkan governments, which had been the primary objective of previous investments.98 Hirst opted for a radical position in this case. Denouncing the wars and the great powers’ policy, he asserted that “the really striking and significant feature of the war [is] finance namely, that it was financed on short term loans by banking firms connected with Krupp, Creusot and other armament companies.”99 He also wanted this information to be inserted in Godart’s chapter. Butler and the Carnegie Men were fully aware that international relations were approaching a decisive turning point and the time of the balance of powers was nearing its end. The report emphasized interaction between region-specific issues such as the Eastern Question or the national Balkan questions on the one hand, and the Carnegie Men’s vision of an internationalizing, rapidly changing world on the other. Linking these topics, Butler developed a global concept of the current international challenges that were characterized to his eyes by a new increasing interdependence and interpenetration, due mainly to the development of economic ties between states around the world. This theory, which he called The International Mind, was expanded on from around 1907 to 1912.100 According to Butler, this international mind, born of the peace movement and The Hague conferences, would help redefine international policy and transcend nationalism, viewed as an outdated stage of society. Rooted in this framework, Chapter 5 of the report, mentioned above, is a text of about twenty-five pages dedicated to the relationship between war and international law, and represents probably the most significant aspect of the volume. In it Milyukov describes the extensive violations of the conventions signed in 1907 at The Hague peace conference on civilians during warfare (Articles 3, 8, 22–28, 46–52, signed on October 18, 1907). Focused almost exclusively on the treatment of civilians during the Balkan Wars, the chapter asserted, perhaps idealis-

98

CEIP, vol. 121, Dutton to Butler, January 5, 1914. Arch. Dpt. Le Mans, 12J2017, Hirst to d’Estournelles de Constant, February 5, 1914. 100 Nicholas Butler, The International Mind: An Argument for the Judicial Settlement of International Disputes (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1913). Butler presented his theory at the Lake Mohonk conferences (1895–1916), which were organized to promote international arbitration through an annual gathering of the elite of US government, business, religion, press, and education. 99

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tically, that international laws on warfare could prevent or limit atrocities in the future. The text provided a detailed, eight-point analysis of the sick and wounded during the war, the use of outlawed dumdum bullets, looting, and ransacking, as well as the mistreatment of prisoners of war, including in hospitals. Milyukov concludes by calling for the creation of a permanent international commission to enforce the laws of war. In this way, the Balkan Report illustrated the CEIP leadership’s desire for the establishment of an international organization whose authority would supersede that of any state. The Carnegie Men believed in international conciliation and arbitrage as a way to avoid the military option entirely and hoped they were influential enough to convince the Balkan states to submit their future issues to The Hague Court of Arbitration. Further, the Balkan Report showcased the CEIP’s innovative role in foreign policy as a third actor between the Balkan states and the great powers, and Nicholas Butler was determined to use it “as a great opportunity to extend our influence and authority and to make known everywhere the awful aspects of the wars.”101 The approach of a turning point in international relations must be mentioned once again. Butler was also aware of the growing importance of a new player and its potential influence on the international scene: international public opinion, which the Carnegie Report was intended to educate. With the Balkan Commission, Butler had assigned public opinion the unprecedented role of convincing a private group of influential people to participate and affect decisions in international affairs. The commissioners he selected were not specifically involved in decision making in international affairs, but their voices could reach a large audience. As Dutton observed, “the simple fact that an organization backed by money was investigating the greatest tragedy of modern times made an impression, which will continue for some time, I am sure.”102 Butler viewed the public as a potential actor that needed to be informed and educated to play a role in the emerging civil society, particularly regarding prevention of conflicts or wars. As noted, education of the public was one of the Carnegie Endowment’s main objectives,103 and it was the third aim described in the March 1911 documents establishing the organization of the CEIP. The CEIP archives show that Butler insisted several times on the need to inform public opinion in Europe and America. 101

CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, Butler to d’Estournelles de Constant, July 21, 1913. CEIP, vol. 121, Dutton to Carnegie, November 7, 1913. 103 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Summary of Organization and Work (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1941), 18–30 on the role of the Division of Intercourse and Education. 102

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Aware of the press’s ability to shape public opinion, Butler wanted to advertise the report on as wide a scale as possible. He mobilized all possible forms of publicity to influence public opinion, a strategy he would use again after the war to advertise the Carnegie Endowment reconstruction program undertaken in Europe and the building of universities and public libraries in Belgrade, Leuven, and Reims.104 In his words, “the public opinion of the world is crying out for the light and for leadership in regard to these dreadful happenings in the Balkans.”105 In 1913 Butler issued several press communiqués, mainly via the New York Times, and kept journalists informed of the commission’s progress following its highly publicized departure from Paris by train.106 The Carnegie Report addressed public opinion and the international audience as such in an appeal to inform and an attempt to educate about the horrors of the war. The report was meant to be the first step in an effort to promote international conciliation, a work in progress to be pursued more vigorously in the future. Until 1914, the Balkan Commission held regular meetings to discuss emergent and long-term geopolitical Balkan issues. In a personal letter written in the winter of 1913, Dutton confirmed to Andrew Carnegie that another war would come, and sooner than anyone expected. “There is sure to be another war in the not distant future just as cruel and bloody as the last one,”107 he predicted, referring to the Balkan conflicts of 1912–13. This letter described the ravages of the war at length, dwelling on the fate of the women and children who were “the innocent victims of the wars,” and on their complete deprivation of anything worth living for. Dutton warned of the risks that the ongoing critical and dramatic conditions of refugees presented for the stability of the region. Without taking sides, he advised that aid and financial relief be distributed to displaced Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks, Montenegrins, Macedonians, Albanians, and Turks. Meanwhile, refugees remained a concern for the CEIP leadership. Discussing this unresolved issue in 1914, Godart once again linked the stability of the region to refugees and the national propaganda that had been spread by each Balkan state. On his part, in a long, detailed report addressed to Butler, Dutton laid out ways to bring conciliation in the region and suggested holding a Balkan conference in a neutral country like 104

CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, Butler to d’Estournelles de Constant, August 15, 1913. 105 CEIP, vol. 200, box 520, Butler to d’Estournelles de Constant, July 31, 1913. 106 New York Times, August 19, 20, 26, 31 and September 2, 4, 12, 1913. 107 CEIP, vol. 121, November 7, 1913, Dutton to Carnegie. On the treatment of civilians and refugees in the Balkan Wars, see Annette Becker, “Droit, observations et intervention humanitaires dans les Balkans, 1912–1914,” in Alerte en Europe, la guerre dans les Balkans, 1912–1913, ed. Catherine Durandin (Paris: ĽHarmattan, 2014), 39–54.

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Switzerland. It would involve representatives of the seven states: Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Montenegro, Albania, and Turkey. A few emissaries from the United States and Europe would be invited too: “The conference, while unofficial, should have the general approval and sanction of the governments.”108 It would address a large array of issues in such diverse spheres as communication, railways, trades, cultural exchanges, and education, as well as potential exchanges of territory to settle national claims. Taking a closer look at this ambitious program, one can discern precisely the main features of the four Balkan Conferences Programs conducted from 1930 to 1933.109 Although Dutton’s proposal was met with a degree of skepticism by the Paris Bureau, his argument for further pursuing the work undertaken by the international commission was accepted. In June 1914 the Balkan Commission convened in Paris under Butler’s presidency to discuss various political options for the region, such as revision of the Berlin and Bucharest treaties, possible regime changes, possible forms of federalism or federation that could be organized for the entire peninsula, and even a proposal “to internationalize what was left of Turkey and to place the integrity of the country under the protection of a consortium of powers.”110 Also envisioned were practical measures like sending experts in economics and finance to modernize infrastructure. The report was republished during the mid-1970s and then again in 1993 (in English) and 1995 (in Bulgarian). The 1993 publication, with an introduction by George Kennan, sparked some reactions, including Maria Todorova’s well-known polemic against Kennan’s interpretation, arguing that nothing in the Balkans had really changed between 1913 and 1993. It was Butler’s will and decision that the Carnegie Report should be published as part of a global public relations operation. Yet, for historians it was and remains today a complex document to use. Despite its rigorous approach, the report does not always give sources. It lacks references or footnotes, and the massacres included in the appendices remind the reader of similar lists of atrocities known as “pro-memoranda,” kept in the archives of the Great Power’s Consular Affairs of the three vilayets of Macedonia. One should look to other sources to corroborate these facts. Today, historians of the Balkans and the Eastern Question cite the report frequently: Mark Mazower, Maria Todorova, Ivo Banac, John Allock,

108

CEI, vol. 121, Dutton to Butler, February 13, 1914; Vol. 129, Report of the Balkan Commission, June 17, 1914. 109 Nadine Akhund, “From the Balkan Report to the Balkan Conferences: The Carnegie Endowment in Central and Southeastern Europe, 1914–1934,” conference paper, Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, IOS, Regensburg University, 2014. 110 CEI, vol. 129, Report of Balkan Commission, Paris Meeting, June 17, 1914.

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Misha Glenny, Ulf Brunnbauer, Robert Bideleux, Ernst Weibel, Holm Sundhaussen, and others. Anglo-Saxon and German historiographers seem to refer to it more than do the French. Paradoxically, most of these authors are referring to facts and massacres that have been denounced as false by the Balkan authorities and are even today considered open to interpretation by some historians of the region.

Conclusion Because it accorded a recognized status to civilians in warfare for the first time, the Carnegie Report remains an exceptional document for its time and today offers invaluable testimony on a crucial turning point in the history of international relations. In an unexpected way, the report both linked and vividly contrasted the two parties involved in its creation: on one side a newly created, well-endowed US philanthropic organization, and on the other side the newly independent Balkan states, all vying to achieve “one nation within one state.” The practice of doing such an inquiry into warfare and its ramifications was continued and expanded in later conflicts.111 In 1921 the CEIP’s Paris Bureau released a second Balkan report focused exclusively on Albania, a country that had been left out of the 1913 expedition. During and after World War I, several investigative commissions were sent to various areas: a French-Belgian-British commission to investigate German massacres, a Russian one to document Bolshevik massacres targeting the Orthodox Church, and an American one to Ireland.112 However, as d’Estournelles de Constant wrote several times, the CEIP failed to stop war, a fact he resented greatly once the Great War started. In that sense, the 1913 report fell short of its general objective. In 1913–14 d’Estournelles de Constant, well aware that the report would please no one, was ready to face criticism but he was convinced that ultimately his innovative vision of international affairs would prevail. Up to the end of the Great War, the Carnegie Men, envisioning their own innovative role as part of the postwar leadership, positioned themselves as a body of professional experts in international affairs fully ready to participate 111

However, the principle of sending an international commission had already been applied in Armenia (1895–96), and to some degree in Macedonia in 1904. In both cases, the investigations were conducted by diplomatic or military representatives of the great powers. 112 Kévonian, “L’enquête, le délit et la prevue.” The author includes a detailed list of investigative commissions sent after 1918. Alexander A. Valentinov, The Assault of Heaven: The Black Book Containing Official and Other Information Illustrating the Struggle Against All Religion Carried by the Communist (Soviet) Government of Russia (London: Boswell Printing & Publishing Co., 1925).

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in the establishment of the international order that would emerge after 1918. During and after the war, the Carnegie Endowment moved away from its previously pacifist position to become instead a leader in “the production and dissemination of knowledge on international relations.”113 The CEIP continued to recommend that states and their leadership function under “the umbrella of internationalism,” best represented by the two pillars of international organization and international law. The Balkan Wars represented the point of departure for the CEIP’s innovative mode of thought. Overall, the CEIP participated in redefining the relationship between the public sphere, including the state and its agents, and the private sphere, particularly the financial and industrial sectors.

113

Katarina Rietzler, “From Peace Advocacy to International Relations Research,” in Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s, ed. Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck, and Jakob Vogel (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 185.

CHAPTER FIVE

Macedonia as a Lifelong Topic: Henry Noël Brailsford Stefan Troebst

On July 18, 1913, the opponents in the inter-alliance or Second Balkan War—the defeated Bulgarians and the victorious neighboring Romania, Serbia, Greece, and Ottoman Empire—agreed to a truce. In the immediate aftermath, the leadership of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), founded in New York in 1910 by the industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, resolved to send an international commission to the theater of war to analyze the causes and course of the two Balkan wars of 1912–13 and 1913. In particular, the commission aimed to examine massacres and atrocities committed by combatants and non-combatants (i.e., civilian populations), identify the culprits, and calculate the economic damage the wars had caused. It was the first enterprise of its kind to be launched by a nongovernmental organization. The Carnegie men strove to establish the CEIP on a global scale, above all on the map of international relations in the transatlantic area, while also generating a wave of professionalization in US foreign policy.1 Both goals were only achieved to a limited degree. This was mostly due to considerable delays in the publication of the research the commission conducted on location in August and September 1913 in Serbia, Greece, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. Only in May 1914 was its report at last in print,2 and by then its potential effect was stifled by the July crisis and

1

Helke Rausch, “Professionalisierung als diplomatische Strategie: Das USamerikanische Carnegie Endowment in Europa vor 1945,” in Kultur und Beruf in Europa, ed. Isabella Löhr, Matthias Middell, and Hannes Siegrist (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012), 217–26. See also Rausch’s contribution to the present volume. 2 Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914).

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the outbreak of World War I. Furthermore, the report was a very hard-toread conglomerate of vastly differing chapters and appendices. Two factors characterized the manner of composition of the eightmember commission. First, it was traceable to a growing network of personal connections between the conservative philosopher Nicholas Murray Butler, later a Nobel Peace laureate and the head of CEIP and at that time the president of Columbia University, and the diplomat Baron d’Estournelles de Constant, head of the Endowment’s Paris Bureau.3 Second, personal circumstances led many invitees to decline to participate in the commission due to ill health or other reasons, while others were unable or unwilling to make the planned journey to the Balkans. For instance, Professor Wilhelm Paszkowski of the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, who was also a “special correspondent” of the Carnegie Endowment in Germany and Butler’s confidante, was prevented from participating in the commission or the journey but nominated the Marburg-based scholar of constitutional and international law Walter Schücking. Similarly, Francis Hirst, the editor of the London-based Economist, agreed to sit on the commission but opted out of the Balkan journey, suggesting that his place go instead to his fellow journalist Henry Noël Brailsford (1873–1958). The St. Petersburg-based sociologist Maksim M. Kovalevsky also declined, and nominated in his stead the Russian historian, journalist, and politician Pavel N. Milyukov, who became a member of the commission. Similarly, the Balkan expert Victor Bérard suggested the Lyon-based politician Justin Godart as his replacement, and an American linguist by the name of Price recommended the pacifist and lawyer Samuel Dutton of New York’s Columbia University, who had been active in providing assistance to Armenian and Syrian refugees from the Ottoman Empire.4 The resulting group was heterogeneous in several aspects, including linguistic and religious expertise, political position, and ideological orientation. One consequence concerning Godart, Dutton, and Schücking was that after the commission’s work ended, they maintained contact with the Carnegie Endowment, but not with each other. The biographies of most members of the commission’s inner circle—Godart, Milyukov, Brailsford, and Dutton—who traveled to Belgrade, Thessaloniki, Istanbul,

3

The commission members were Paul d’Estournelles de Constant (chair), Francis Hirst, Walter Schücking, Justin Godart, Henry N. Brailsford, Pavel N. Milyukov, Samuel Dutton, and Joseph Redlich. See Nadine Akhund, “The Two Carnegie Reports: From the Balkan Expedition of 1913 to the Albanian Trip of 1921: A Comparative Approach,” Balkanologie: Revue d’études pluridisciplinaires 14, no. 1–2 (2012), and her contribution to this volume. 4 Ibidem.

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and Sofia on a fact-finding mission, have been very well researched.5 The special scope of this remarkable research is evident in Fred Leventhal’s thorough and critical biography of H. N. Brailsford, published in 1985, which also focuses in particular detail on Brailsford’s Balkan interests as well as his stays there between 1897 and 1951.6 In addition, Brailsford (like Milyukov) is a well-known name in the region. His book Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future, published in London in 1906, established him as a Macedonia expert. It is no coincidence that more than a hundred years later, its Bulgarian translation was presented with much fanfare in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, upon its publication in 2013.7 This high esteem was due above all to Brailsford’s classification of Ottoman Macedonia’s eastern Slavic–speaking Christian Orthodox majority as “Bulgarians” in 1906. Not surprisingly, Brailsford’s Pauline conversion on the Macedonian question decades later, when he would change from a pro-Bulgarian “Saul” into a pro-Macedonian “Paul,” was not given much emphasis during the Bulgarian celebration of his work in the 2010s. During and after World War II, Brailsford came to the conclusion that the Orthodox Slavophonic Vardar Macedonians were in fact an independent South Slavic nation of “Macedonia.” Precisely this interpretive shift complicates Brailsford’s authorial relationship with historical scholarship and the contemporary public interested in history in Sofia and Skopje. However, it should be stressed that Brailsford was actually less interested in the genuine ethnic identification of the region’s people—such loyalties being frequently fluctuating or even marked by indifference—than in possibilities for undoing the knot of conflict that emerged in late- and post-Ottoman Macedonia. As will be demonstrated, 5

For Godart, see Justin Godart: Un homme dans son siècle (1871–1956), ed. Annette Wieviorka (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2004) and François Bilange, Justin Godart: La Plaisante Sagesse Lyonnaise (Lyon: Editions Lyonnaises d’Art et d’Histoire, 2006); for Brailsford, see Fred M. Leventhal, The Last Dissenter: H. N. Brailsford and His World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); for Milyukov, see Thomas Riha, A Russian European: Paul Miliukov in Russian Politics (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), also Melissa Kirschke Stockdale, Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia 1880–1918 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); and Pavel N. Milyukov and Valentin V. Shelokhaev, eds., P. N. Milyukov: Istorik, politik, diplomat: Materialy meždunarodnoj naučnoj konferencii, Moskva, 26–27 mart 1999 g. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2000); as well as Thomas Bohn, “Wissenschaftliche Expedition und politische Reise: Bulgarien in der Balkankonzeption P. M. Milyukovs,” Österreichische Osthefte 34 (1992): 312–33 and his contribution to the present volume. Very little is known about Dutton. 6 Leventhal, The Last Dissenter. 7 Ch. N. Brejlsfărd, Makedonija: Nejnite narodi i tjachnoto bădešte (Sofia: Institut Bălgarija Makedonija, 2013).

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the change in his thinking in this respect was not about switching sympathies between the Ottoman Sublime Porte and the principality of Bulgaria, but rather about shifting preference between autochthonous and Austro-Serbian models of devolution (“Ausgleich”). However, Brailsford had a long interest in Macedonia dating back to his mid-twenties. The son of a Methodist preacher, he was raised in Yorkshire and attended school in Scotland. After trying his hand as a classical philologist and novelist, he made his first mark both as a member of the Labour Party and as a very influential journalist concentrating on the British Commonwealth, its colonies, and its relations with other world powers. Like many young British men in the nineteenth century, he was very much a Grecophile, and in 1897, aged twenty-four and having no military experience at all, he volunteered to serve in the British Philhellenic Legion, which supported the Kingdom of Greece in its war against the Ottoman Empire. Wounded lightly at Larissa and deeply frustrated by his Greek co-combatants’ lack of discipline and bravery, he soon returned to Great Britain. As his biographer Leventhal wrote, “Seven weeks in Greece had shattered his ideals, leaving a permanent distaste for the excesses of patriotism and the brutalities of war.”8 But Brailsford’s Greek adventure had yet another consequence. In the crisis year of 1903, his short but intense Balkan adventure prompted C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, to send him to the crisis-ridden Ottoman region of Macedonia as a correspondent. There, Brailsford and his wife Jane visited numerous villages as well as cities like Monastır (today Bitola), Kalkandelen (today Tetovo), and Üsküb (today Skopje) from April to July.9 He had just returned to London when the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization rose up against the Sublime Porte during the festival of the Prophet Elijah.10 The Brailsfords returned to a Macedonia now destroyed by war in October 1903, immediately after regular and informal Ottoman troops suppressed the revolt. This time, however, the couple came not as reporters, but rather as regional representatives on a humanitarian mission of the newly founded London Macedonian Relief Committee in the Vilâyet of Monastır. It was Henry Brailsford’s task to bring aid to the far-flung villages; meanwhile, Jane Brailsford ran a clinic in

8

Leventhal, The Last Dissenter, 32. Ibidem, 46–48. 10 On the uprising, see Fikret Adanır, Die Makedonische Frage: Ihre Entstehung und Entwicklung bis 1908 (Wiesbaden: Frankfurter historische Abhandlungen, 1979) 160–99; Duncan M. Perry, The Politics of Terror: The Macedonian Liberation Movements, 1893–1903 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988), 107–42; Keith Brown, Loyal Unto Death: Trust and Terror in Revolutionary Macedonia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 9

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Ohrid. Here she contracted typhoid, which forced the Brailsfords to return to Great Britain in April 1904.11 Brailsford then began work on his Macedonia book, which was published in early 1906. In addition to being an “ethnographical map of Macedonia,” by which he meant the region settled primarily by Bulgarians, the book contained photographs of the destruction war had brought to villages, churches, and infrastructure, and, most importantly, concrete policy recommendations.12 The Turkish historian of Macedonia Fikret Adanır summarized it as follows: The author is strictly against a division of Macedonia between Austria and Russia or between the Balkan countries, since none of the latter would be in a position to treat the other nationalities in a just way, and he pleads for Macedonia remaining within the Ottoman Empire under efficient international control. Concerning this control he elaborates detailed proposals in ten points. Finally, he proposes a division of Turkey-in-Europe into three administrative unites: Macedonia, Albania and Thrace.13

In the subsequent years, while Jane Brailsford held a leading position in the suffragist movement, Henry Brailsford had a career in the Labour Party, which he joined in 1907. In parallel to this, he was active in the Balkan Committee, founded in 1903, an influential pro-Bulgarian lobby organization made up of British politicians. However, even if Brailsford considered the majority of denizens of Ottoman Macedonia to be Bulgarians, unlike most other committee members he did not favor annexation by the principality of Bulgaria, but rather cultural autonomy under the Sultan’s rule, which ideally would be liberalized. His initial reaction to the Young Turk Revolution in 1908 was correspondingly positive. In 1911, however, when the Macedonian Relief Committee renewed its offer to make him its regional representative in Macedonia, he declined, referring to his wife’s health.14 In a series of newspaper articles published in the summer of 1912, Brailsford described possible future scenarios for the central Balkan region, once again plagued by crisis. He considered three developments both feasible and acceptable: first, “some qualified form of Home Rule,” or in 11

Leventhal, The Last Dissenter, 49–50. Henry N. Brailsford, Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future ([London: Methuen & Co., 1906] New York: Arno Press, 1971). 13 Adanır, “Brailsford, H[enry] N[oël]: Macedonia: Its Races and their Future,” in Historische Bücherkunde Südosteuropa: Bd. II. Neuzeit: Teil 1. Osmanisches Reich, Makedonien, Albanien, ed. M. Bernath and K. Nehring (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988), (Nr. 1531), 335. 14 Leventhal, The Last Dissenter, 98–100. 12

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other words territorial autonomy for Macedonia and Albania within the Ottoman Empire; second, division of the remaining parts of the Ottoman Empire among the neighboring states of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece; and third, Austria-Hungary’s expansion into a three-part monarchy integrating the Habsburg and Serbian Slavs as well as the Macedonians, a population he called “undoubtedly Slav.”15 The start of the First Balkan War in October 1912 made these scenarios irrelevant. Back in London, Brailsford reported so thoroughly and vividly on the course of the war that his readership assumed he was in the thick of it. He gave an early prognosis that the victorious Balkan front against the Ottoman Empire would soon be divided by questions of borders, and during the Second Balkan War he predicted that even a peace treaty between Bulgaria on one hand, and Serbia and Greece on the other would be no guarantee against further military conflicts between Bulgaria and its neighbors.16 In other words, between 1903 and 1913 Brailsford established himself as the leading British expert on the Balkans. According to his biographer Leventhal, it was “perhaps inevitable that he would be selected as one of the two British representatives on the commission, established by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1913, to inquire into the causes and conduct of the two Balkan Wars.”17 However, Brailsford immediately accepted d’Estournelles de Constant’s invitation for two very different reasons. First, having been unable since 1904 to persuade either the Sultan or the Young Turk leadership to approve his urgent application to travel to the European parts of Turkey, he was correspondingly glad to be able to travel there once again. And second, in May 1913 he and his wife Jane had separated—temporarily, as it later turned out. Together with Godart, Milyukov, and Dutton, Brailsford set off for Vienna and Belgrade on August 20, 1913.18 Whereas the Serbians had 15

Ibidem, 102–3. Ibidem, 104. 17 Leventhal, The Last Dissenter, 105. 18 There is no systematic account of the commission’s activities in the summer and fall of 1913. For an overview, see Ivan Ilčev, “Karnegievata Anketa na Balkanite prez 1913 g. Obstanovka, izvăršvane i meždunaroden otzvuk,” Istoričeski pregled 45, no. (1989): 15–28; Katrin Boeckh, Von den Balkankriegen zum Ersten Weltkrieg: Kleinstaatenpolitik und ethnische Selbstbestimmung auf dem Balkan (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1996), 371–76; Nadine Akhund, “The Two Carnegie Reports.” For the reception of the commission’s report in Bulgaria, France, and the Ottoman Empire, see Ilčev, “Karnegievata anketa” and Patrick J. Adamiak, “Perceiving the Balkan Wars: Western and Ottoman Commentaries on the 1914 Carnegie Endowmentʼs Balkan Wars Inquiry,” in War and Nationalism: The Balkan Wars, 1912–1913, and Their Sociopolitical Implications, ed. M. Hakan Yavuz, and Isa Blumi (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2013), 474–95. 16

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justified their reluctance to cooperate by pointing exclusively to the participation of the “Bulgarophile” Russian member of the commission Milyukov, who had lectured in history at the university in Sofia and in 1898 participated in an expedition into Ottoman Macedonia led by Bulgarian archeologists, in Thessaloniki it was Brailsford whose “Bulgarophilia” most noticeably drew the attention of the Athens government and the administration of Thessaloniki, which had become part of Greece the previous year.19 Brailsford was twice prevented by Greek authorities to visit the almost war-torn small city of Kukuš/Kilkis.20 The head of the commission, d’Estournelles de Constant, defended him from the Greeks’ accusations in the introduction to the Carnegie Report of 1914: Brailsford . . . had been frankly partisan, but for whom? For the Greeks. He took up arms for them and fought in their ranks, the true disciple of Lord Byron and of Gladstone; and in spite of this fact today Brailsford is held to be an enemy of Greece. Why? Because, passionately loving and admiring the Greeks, he has denounced the errors that bid fair to injure them, with all the heat and vigor of a friend and of a companion in arms. This did not seem to be a sufficient motive for demanding his resignation. As we could not condemn Brailsford for being at one and the same time, both the friend and the enemy of Greece, we kept him, and have been very fortunate in doing so.21

Brailsford’s knowledge of Greek and South Slavic languages made him the commission’s most important member in terms of the fieldwork the commission carried out by interviewing refugees from Macedonia in Bulgaria as well as military personnel, clergy, teachers, village inhabitants, local leaders, and many others in the Vardar and Aegean regions of Macedonia. In Thessaloniki, Brailsford and Milyukov spoke with both Dimitar Vlahov, leader of the Bulgarian Socialists there, and Avraam Banaroya, the head of the local Jewish Sephardic Socialist Labor Federation.22 In Sofia they spoke with the Bulgarian foreign minister Nikola Genadiev, the Bulgarian Macedonian ethnographer Yordan Ivanov, 19

See Adamantios Skordos’s contribution to the present volume. D’Estournelles de Constant, “Introduction,” in Report of the International Commission, 5–10. According to Ilčev, Brailsford nevertheless managed to travel to Kukuš/Kilkis. See Ilčev, “Karnegievata Anketa,” 21, as well as several photographs in the report of places of massacres and ethnic cleansings accessible to non-monitored contact to civil victims of the war. 21 D’Estournelles de Constant, “Introduction,” in Report of the International Commission, 7. 22 Dimitar Vlahov, Memoari (Skopje: Zaednica za izdavačka dejnost pri NIP “Nova Makedonija”, 1970), 183–84. After a few days, however, the Greek governor of Thessaloniki ordered Brailsford and Milyukov to leave the city. See Ilčev, “Karnegievata Anketa,” 21. 20

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and even King Ferdinand I.23 Interpreters were not needed because Brailsford spoke Bulgarian as well as German. Upon arriving in Sofia on September 13, the commission members received an exuberant welcome at the train station. In hopes that the commission’s report would have a positive outcome for Bulgaria, the government offered far-reaching political and logistical support, such as providing vehicles for visiting distant refugee camps.24 The Balkan Report included a photograph depicting commission members Milyukov and Brailsford conversing with refugees from Macedonia in Samokov, near Sofia, but one can also make out Bulgarian officers in the background.25 If George F. Kennan’s statements in his introduction of the 1993 reprint of the commission’s report are accurate, then Brailsford was the author of chapter 2, titled “The War and the Noncombatant Population” and equipped with a large appendix.26 Contrary to the Greek accusations of bias, Brailsford devotes a large section of his chapter to “The Conduct of the Bulgarians in the Second War,” detailing massacres carried out by the Bulgarian army in the small town of Doxato/Doksat, located between Drama and Kavala, and in the regional center of Serres/Sjar, northeast of Thessaloniki.27 He documents the massacres with numerous eyewitness accounts, photographs, and documents in the appendix.28 The chapter is followed by a concluding remark that reflects both Brailsford’s perception 23

“Balkan War Report Will Shock World. Prof. Dutton, a Member of Carnegie Commission, Says the Worst Has Not Been Told. Studied Loss of Allies. With an Englishman, a Russian, and a Frenchman, He Investigated All Causes and Effects,” New York Times, October 14, 1913. 24 Ilčev, “Karnegievata Anketa,” 22–23. 25 Report of the International Commission, 153. 26 George F. Kennan, “Introduction: The Balkan Crises, 1913 and 1993,” in The Other Balkans Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect, with a New Introduction and Reflections by George F. Kennan (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1993), 8. Maria Todorova’s critique of the Carnegie Endowment, published in 1997—specifically, that it should have sent another commission to the Balkans instead of reprinting the 1914 report—is unjustified because in 1995 the Endowment and the Aspen Institute Berlin had jointly set up such a commission, which intensively traveled the Balkans and in 1996 published a detailed report, including policy recommendations. See Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 4 and L. Tindemans, et al., Unfinished Peace: Report of the International Commission on the Balkans (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1996). 27 [H. N. Brailsford], Chapter II, in Report of the International Commission, 71–108, especially 78–95. 28 Ibidem, Appendix B, Documents Relating to Chapter II, 285–325, especially 285–97.

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of the Balkans and his professional ethics as an investigative journalist, including his moral worldview: In bringing this painful chapter to a conclusion, we desire to remind the reader that it presents only a partial and abstract picture of the war. It brings together in a continuous perspective the sufferings of the noncombatant populations of Macedonia and Thrace at the hands of armies flushed with victory or embittered by defeat. To base upon it any moral judgment would be to show an uncritical and unhistorical spirit. An estimate of the moral qualities of the Balkan peoples under the strain of war must also take account of their courage, endurance, and devotion. If a heightened national sentiment helps to explain these excesses, it also inspired the bravery that won victory and the steadiness that sustained defeat. The moralist who seeks to understand the brutality to which these pages bear witness, must reflect that all the Balkan races have grown up amid Turkish models of warfare. Folk-songs, history and oral tradition in the Balkan uniformly speak of war as a process which includes rape and pillage, devastation and massacre. In Macedonia all this was not a distant memory but a recent experience. The new and modern feature of these wars was that for the first time in Balkan annals an effort, however imperfect, was made by some of the combatants and by some of the civil officials, to respect an European ideal of humanity. The only moral which we should care to draw from these events is that war under exceptional conditions produced something worse than its normal results. The extreme barbarity of some episodes was a local circumstance which has its root in Balkan history. But the main fact is that war suspended the restraints of civil life, inflamed the passions that slumber in time of peace, destroyed the natural kindliness between neighbors, and set in its place the will to injure. That is everywhere the essence of war.29

Regardless of his critical stance toward the Bulgarian political elite and the war crimes perpetrated by the Bulgarian army during the Balkan Wars, after 1913 Brailsford also preferred Macedonia be annexed by Bulgaria, rather than become part of Serbia or Greece. In 1915 he even appealed to the British government to let Bulgaria annex Macedonia in order to prevent Sofia from joining the Central Powers.30 Even after Bulgaria had joined World War I on the side of the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Germany, he regarded the incorporation of Macedonia into Bulgaria as the solution to the Macedonian question and advocated this position at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.31 Even more, he circulated the idea of a new version of the Carnegie Balkan Commission, which besides himself, Milyukov, and Hirst was to include the Bulgarophile member of the House of Commons Edward Noel Buxton, as well as additional members of the London Balkan Committee. This did not come to fruition, however.32 29

Ibidem, 108. Leventhal, The Last Dissenter, 140–41. 31 Ibidem, 143–44. 32 Ilčev, “Karnegievata Anketa,” 28. 30

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The Balkans—in contrast to other topics like the Soviet Union, Germany, India, Voltaire, the League of Nations, and the Spanish Civil War—did not take prominent place in Henry Brailsford’s feverish journalistic and publishing activity during the interwar period, which included a dozen books. It is unclear whether his sympathies for a Bulgarian annexation of Macedonia continued, or whether his approval of an autonomous Macedonia within a South-Slavic Federation—an approval that became manifest during and after World War II—had formed before the war. The statement expressed by the long-serving head of the Balkan Committee, Edward Boyle, in a private letter to the committee president and Brailsford’s fellow Labour Party member Buxton, “Brailsford is too purely Macedonian in his reputation,” is too laconic and ambiguous to reveal any more particular opinion of Brailsford.33 However, an article by Moša Pijade, the chief ideologist of the Communist Tito partisans in occupied and annexed Yugoslavia during World War II, published on May 15, 1944, in the party organ Nova Jugoslavija, indicates that Brailsford had in a statement to the BBC welcomed the decision of the Yugoslav partisan parliament AVNOJ (the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia) in Jajce in November 1943 to establish a Macedonian republic as a part of a federated Yugoslavia: Thus a Norwegian [sic] publicist, Brailsford, a connoisseur of Macedonians, speaking over the London radio, said . . . “For me, who knows Macedonia well, the promise of Tito and his comrades, is the best guarantee that independent Macedonia will go as a member into the South Slav Federation, that is the sole way to assure victory and real peace.”34

In the winter of 1950–51, the nearly eighty-year-old Brailsford accepted Tito’s invitation and took his second wife Eva-Maria, a Jewish Socialist who had fled to London from Nazi Germany, on a two-month journey in Yugoslavia that led him to his former places of service within the new Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. His generous host there was the dogmatic Prime Minister Lazar Koliševski, whom he thanked with panegyrics in the Manchester Guardian and other British periodicals. For 33

Facsimile of a letter by Edward Boyle to Edward Noel Buxton, London, March 8, 1940, in Balkanskijat komitet v London (1903–1946), ed. Ivan Ilčev (Sofia: Universitetsko izd-vo “Sv. Kliment Okhridski,” 2003), 509f., 510. For the British view on Macedonia, see Dimitris Livanios, The Macedonian Question: Britain and the Southern Balkans, 1939–1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Velika Britanija i Makedonija: Dokumenti (1918–1940), ed. T. Čepreganov and Teon Džingo (Skopje: Institut za nacionalna istorija, 2011). 34 Quoted after Stephen E. Palmer and Robert R. King, Yugoslav Communism and the Macedonian Question (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1971), 110.

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instance, as early as January 1951 he praised communist policies of modernization, including forced industrialization, under the title “New Jugoslavia—Macedonian Renaissance.”35 He was overwhelmed by the fact that he was able to see a production of Mozart’s opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail in Skopje, which he had first encountered as the malaria-infested poorhouse of the Ottoman vilayet of Üsküb in 1903.36 Before her death in 1988, Eva-Maria Brailsford née Perlman told Fred Leventhal about a special Macedonian déjà-vu her spouse experienced: “In one village to which [in 1903—S. T.] he had travelled by mule, carrying food and blankets, an old woman who recognized him declared that everything was fine now since the new regime was giving the people electricity.”37 Upon returning to London after the strenuous journey, Brailsford suffered a severe decline in his health from which he did not recover before his death in 1958. Of all the members of the Carnegie Commission of 1913, Brailsford undoubtedly had the best knowledge of language, regional specifics, and local history, as he had already been intensively engaged with the situation in Ottoman Macedonia and the Macedonian question for more than a decade. He also was the commissioner who pursued these topics most persistently after the publication of the report, at least until the start of the interwar period. The fact that he returned to the topic during and after World War II, even at an advanced age, demonstrates his continuing interest in the region. His euphoric contrasting of the “modern” Macedonia in Tito’s “new” Yugoslavia—which he perceived as “socialist” but was in fact decidedly Stalinist far into the 1950s—with the lateOttoman situation might have been seen through rose-colored glasses. However, the positive bent of the dramatic shifts in economic and society he described was rooted in reality, as least in terms of the health and education infrastructure of Yugoslav Macedonia. He shared this combination of life-long interest in the Balkans with a somewhat naïve optimism for its future, which could be characterized as “very British,” 35

Henry N. Brailsford, “New Jugoslavia – Macedonian Renaissance,” The New Statesman, January 13, 1951, 31. See also Brailsford, “Macedonia Revisited. I – The Revolution in Kosovo,” Manchester Guardian, March 14, 1951; “II – A Textile Centre,” Manchester Guardian, March 17, 1951; “III – Its Intellectual Life,” Manchester Guardian, March 21, 1951. 36 Leventhal, The Last Dissenter, 294–95. The malaria-infested swamps to the southeast of Skopje were drained only at the end of the 1930s. See Patrick Zylberman, “Mosquitos and the Komitadjis: Malaria and Borders in Macedonia (1919–1938),” in Facing Illness in Troubled Times: Health in Europe in the Interwar Years 1918–1939, ed. Iris Borowoy and Wolf D. Gruner (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 304–43. 37 Leventhal, The Last Dissenter, 295.

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given the work of similar, countless contemporaries in London who were active in politics, journalism, diplomacy, and literature.38 Regardless, it can be reasonably asserted that readers today still have much to gain from Henry Noel Brailsford’s publications on Macedonia from the years 1903 through 1951, along with his equally objective and substantial contributions to the work and report of the Carnegie Commission of 1913.

38

This was true, for instance, for the writer Rebecca West (1892–1983), the diplomat and novelist David Footman (1895–1983), the journalist Joseph S. Swire (1903–1978), the detective fiction author Eric Ambler (1909–1998), and the politician Julian Amery (1919–1996). See Andrew Hammond, British Literature and the Balkans: Themes and Contexts (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2010) and Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

CHAPTER SIX

History and Politics: Macedonia in the Assessment of Pavel N. Milyukov Thomas M. Bohn

In historical scholarship, Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov (1859–1943) features most prominently as the leader of the Constitutional Democrats and the foreign minister of the provisional Russian government in the spring of 1917.1 In relation to this, the fact is overshadowed that he made his name earlier in 1892 with a sensational dissertation about the crisis of the Russian state economy in the era of Peter the Great, followed by a multivolume history of Russian culture published between 1896 and 1904.2 Also often forgotten is that this “Russian European,” as he was later called as an emigrant,3 was also interested in a solution to the “Oriental question.” His years of affiliation with Bulgaria were eventually brought to attention again in 1929, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. Other than an official celebratory volume issued in Paris and a jubilee publication (Festschrift) published in Prague, the only publication devoted to the event appeared in Sofia, where the city council declared Milyukov an honorary citizen and resolved to name a street after him. The University of Sofia also conferred on him an honorary doctoral degree for his “scholarly work in the field of history and his service in the defense of the Bulgarian people in its national interests.”4 This could only refer to his stance on the Macedonian question 1

Thomas Riha, A Russian European: Paul Miliukov in Russian Politics (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1969); Melissa Kirschke Stockdale, Paul Milyukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, 1880‒1918 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 2 Thomas M. Bohn, Russische Geschichtswissenschaft von 1880 bis 1905: Pavel N. Miljukov und die Moskauer Schule (Cologne: Bӧhlau Verlag, 1998); Thomas Bohn, Russkaia istoricheskaia nauka (1880–1905): Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov i Moskovskaia shkola (St. Petersburg: Olearius Press, 2005). 3 Mark Vishniak, “Russkii evropeets,” in P. N. Milyukov: Sbornik materialov po chestvovaniiu ego semidesiatiletiia, 1859‒1929, ed. S. A. Smirnova et al. (Paris: 1929), 173–79. 4 Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov, Po sluchai 70-godishniia mu iubilei (Sofia, 1929); Petr Bitsilli, “P. Milyukov – istorik na Rusiia: Po povod na 70 godishninata mu (1859–

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and his position as a member of the Carnegie Commission studying the Balkan Wars. In his memoirs, written during World War II, Milyukov defined the role he played in the Balkans as that of “an observer from the sidelines.”5 He had taken various trips to the Balkans, observing in the capacity of historian, archeologist, ethnologist, journalist, politician, and international evaluator. Between 1897 (when he started teaching in Sofia) and 1900, he undertook three expeditions to Macedonia, and by the time World War I erupted, he had logged six additional journeys to the Balkans. His scholarly publications on the problems of the Balkan countries were initially devoted to the Macedonian question, but he subsequently turned to Bulgarian domestic politics, producing a study on the Bulgarian constitution. Following the Russian Revolution of 1905, Milyukov became an outspoken critic of the czarist government’s foreign policy, first as publisher of the liberal newspaper Rechʼ (Speech) and from 1907 as the leader of the Constitutional Democratic faction in Russia’s Duma. During the crisis years of 1908–09 and 1912–13, he had occasion to thoroughly explain his position on the situation in the Balkans in the Duma. His publishing activity during the debate over how Austro-Hungary might appropriately respond to the Balkan political offensive in 1908–09 was recorded in a book by him on Russian foreign policy. Finally, his participation in the international Carnegie Commission tasked with investigating the course and causes of the Balkan Wars reaffirmed Milyukov’s renown as an expert on the Balkans, even outside Russia.6 This essay will explore how Milyukov’s interest in the Macedonian question developed and why his search for a solution led him to side with the Bulgarians. In this context, the role Milyukov’s Bulgarophilia played in the Carnegie Report published in 1914 should become clear.

1929),” Bŭlgarska misŭl’ 4 (1929), 297–300; Lyubomir Miletich, “P. N. Milyukov i Bŭlgariia: Po sluchai na sedemdesetgodishninata na P. N. Milyukova,” Makedonski pregled 5, no. 1 (1929): 121–28; S. Germanov, “Pavel N. Milyukov i Bŭlgariia,” Vekove 12, no. 4 (1990): 76–89. 5 Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov, Vospominaniia (1859‒1917), vols. 1–2, ed. M. M. Karpovich and B. I. Elʼkin (New York: Izdatelstvo imeni Chekhova, 1955), vol. 2, 28. 6 Horst Giertz, “Die außenpolitische Position Miljukovs am Vorabend und während der Bosnischen Krise (Zur Herausbildung des außenpolitischen Programms der Kadettenpartei),” Jahrbuch für Geschichte der sozialistischen Länder Europas 18, no. 2 (1974): 77–113. Uwe Liszkowski, Zwischen Liberalismus und Imperialismus: Die zarische Außenpolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg im Urteil Miljukovs und der Kadettenpartei 1905‒1914 (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1974).

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Teaching at the University of Sofia Milyukov’s interest in the “Oriental question” emerged in the crisis years of 1875–1878. In his final year of schooling he volunteered to work in a medical unit in Bulgaria, but was transferred to the Caucasus in the summer of 1877.7 Only after he took up professorial duties at the HistoricPhilosophical Faculty at the University of Moscow in 1886 was he taken to Bulgaria—unwittingly, as it were, when his activity in the student movement and adult education caused him to be banned from teaching at the University of Moscow and sent into administrative exile in Riazan. There the Bulgarian minister for national education, the writer Konstantin Velichkov, commissioned him as professor of general history at the University of Sofia (renamed the St. Kliment Ohridski University in 1905). At first Milyukov was unable to teach due to the legal proceedings against him, but he petitioned Tsar Nicholas II’s Ministry of the Interior to accept his guest professorship and was granted the “highest permission” to start teaching after the winter semester of 1896–97. His inaugural address on historical-philosophical systems, delivered in Sofia at the beginning of the 1897 summer semester, was conceived as an introduction to a twosemester series of lectures. Subsequent lectures focused on the decline of the Roman Empire and formation of the medieval world as well as Slavic cultural monuments. Milyukov’s acquaintances in Sofia included the literary scholar and future university rector Ivan Shishmanov and the liberal politician Petko Karavelov, who had already held numerous positions. Milyukov continued to cultivate contacts with the Democrats and the later Minister President Aleksandǔr Malinov, as well as Professors Lyubomir Miletich and Ivan Georgov, who were involved in the Macedonian question.8 However, a permanent association between Milyukov and the University of Sofia was prevented by the veto of the Russian ambassador. This occurred against the background of student revolts in Sofia in the spring of 1897, which led to a smear campaign against Milyukov by Russian officials. When Ambassador Georgi P. Bakhmetev took up his post in the Bulgarian capital in early 7 8

Milyukov, Vospominaniia, vol. 1, 67–76; Bohn, Geschichtswissenschaft, 156–68. Bohn, Geschichtswissenschaft, 169–74, 195. See Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov, “Pregled na filosofsko-istoricheskite sistemi. (Uvod),” Bŭlgarski pregled 4, no. 3 (1987): 23–28. Also: Almanakh na Sofiiskiia universitet Sv. Kliment Okhridski: Zhivotopisni i knigopisni svedeniia za prepodavatelite: Za petdeset godishninata na universiteta 1888–1939, 2nd ed. (Sofia: Universitetska biblioteka, 1940 [Phototype edition 1988]), 351; Petur Cholov, Bŭlgarski istoritsi: Biografichno-bibliografski spravochnik (Sofia: Akademichno ize-vo “Prof. Marin Drinov,” 1981), 265; Ts. Todorova, “Sofiiskiia universitet ‘Kliment Okhridski’: Profesorska kolegiia (1888– 1915 g.),” Istoricheski pregled 45, no. 2 (1989): 32–51.

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May, the affair had nearly been laid to rest. At a reception hosted by Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha on the occasion of the presentation of Bakhmetev’s credentials as ambassador, Bakhmetev clearly communicated his disapproval of the Russophobic currents at the university and demanded Milyukov’s dismissal. Wishing to avoid immediate capitulation but also interested in improving its relationship with the Russian Empire, the Bulgarian government postponed action until the conclusion of the academic year. Thus Milyukov became one of the three members of the library committee in September 1897 and, early the next month, a member of the academic senate, which granted him the status of full professor. He decided to cancel the Russian history lectures scheduled for the winter semester and instead cover Czech history, which was less politically explosive. However, his arrangements for a six-month official trip to Macedonia in January 1898 caused a scandal within the faculty of history and philology because he had sought and received permission for the trip from the new minister of public education, the writer Ivan Vazov, without first receiving the approval of his colleagues. Vazov’s strategy of appeasing the Russian ambassador by temporarily removing Milyukov from his post would not work; on the contrary, at the embassy Milyukov’s leave of absence was already considered a dismissal. Vazov therefore had no choice but to advise Milyukov to submit his resignation, effective at the end of the summer semester 1898.9

Academic Expeditions to Southeastern Europe Of course, Milyukov’s academic work in the Balkans continued throughout his intermezzo at the university in Sofia. It was no coincidence that the official visit he set out on in spring 1898 took him to Macedonia. This European outpost of the Ottoman Empire had seized the Russian public’s attention with the terrorist activities carried out within its borders by separatist nationalists, as well as its “terra incognita” quality and archaic living conditions.10 In Volume III of his Outlines of Russian Culture, in 9

Konstantin Velichkov, “Dnevnik,” in Sŭchineniia v pŭt toma, vol. 3 (Sofia, 1987), 244–46; Mihail Arnaudov, Istoriia na Sofiiskiia universitet Sv. Kliment Okhridski prez pŭrvoto mu polustoletie, 1888–1938 (Sofia, 1939), 125–31; Anatolij Kostjantynovyč Martynenko, Russko-bolgarskie otnosheniia v 1894–1902 gg. (Kiev, 1961), 142; Istoriia na Sofiiskiia universitet “Kliment Okhridski” (Sofia, 1988), 40– 45. 10 Zhivka N. Vŭzharova, Ruskite ucheni i bŭlgarskite starini: Izsledvane, materiali i dokumenti (Sofia, 1960); Arkadiĭ Semenovich Shofman, “Iz istorii russkikh puteshestvii v Makedoniiu,” Izvestiia vsesoiuznogo geograficheskogo obshchestva 92

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discussing how competing Serbian and Bulgarian education policies had provoked a national metamorphosis of the population, Milyukov characterized the case of Macedonia as a “sociological experiment” just as interesting as the “melting pot” in the United States.11 Traveling as a private person, Milyukov was unable to gather more impressions and gain a deeper knowledge of the region, beyond mere photographic documentation, than he did during his first excursion to Macedonia. He had a simple, if questionable method for determining ethnicity: because he did not speak Serbian, he spoke Bulgarian with the locals, judging those who understood him to be ethnically Bulgarian.12 But early on in his professional studies, Milyukov was able to prove his knowledge in the field of Slavic cultural monuments over the course of two scholarly expeditions. In autumn 1898, immediately following his dismissal from the university at Sofia, he joined a research trip to Constantinople with the Russian Archeological Institute under the direction of the Byzantine expert Fiodor Upenskii, whose goal was to study church buildings, frescoes, and inscriptions of Slavic origin.13 In 1899 Milyukov reported on the expedition’s findings before the XI Archeological Congress in Kiev14 and published a catalogue in the Izvestiia Archeologicheskogo instituta (Reports from the Archeological Institute).15 However, Milyukov’s informative “Letters from Macedonia,” which appeared as a series of articles in the liberal Russkie vedomosti (Russian News) in 1898–99 and were reprinted in

(1960): 53–62; S. Germanov, “Makedoniia i Odrinska Trakiia v pŭtnite belezhki na ruski ucheni i korespondenti (kraia na XIX – nachaloto na XX v.),” Istoricheski pregled 44, no. 4 (1988): 67–82. 11 Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov, Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul’tury, vol. 3, Natsionalizm i obshchestvennoe mnenie, part 1, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg, 1903), 7f.; Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov, Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul’tury: Iubileinoe izdanie, vol. 3, Natsionalizm i evropeizm (Paris, 1930), 14. 12 Milyukov, Vospominaniia, vol. 1, 176–79, 186. 13 See: “Otchet o deiatel’nosti Russkogo arkheologicheskogo instituta v Konstantinopole v 1898-m godu,” Izvestiia Russkogo arkheologicheskogo instituta v Konstantinopole 6, no. 3 (1899): 122–52. 14 “Neskol’ko slov po povodu XI arkheologicheskogo s-ezda v Kieve,” Russkaia myslʼ 20, no. 12 (1899): 104. See also the discussion in the journal Izvestiia Russkogo arkheologicheskogo instituta v Konstantinopole 4, no. 1 (1899), between Fyodor Ivanovich Uspenskii, “Nadpisʼ tsaria Samuila,” 1–4; T. D. Florinskii, “Neskolʼko zamechanii o nadpisi tsaria Samuila,” 5–13; and L. Miletich, “Kŭm Samuiloviia nadpisʼ ot 993 godina,” 14–20. 15 Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov, “Khristianskie drevnosti Zapadnoi Makedonii: Po materialam, sobrannym Russkim Arkheologicheskim Institutom v techenie letnei ekskursii 1898 goda,” Izvestiia Russkogo arkheologicheskogo instituta v Konstantinopole 4, no. 1 (1899): 21–151.

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Sofia in Priaporets (The Banner), proved to hold more weight with the Russian public than did his archeological discoveries.16 Upon his return to St. Petersburg, Milyukov—now considered a proven expert on the Balkans—accepted the invitation of the Byzantine scholar Nikodim P. Kondakov to participate in a Russian Academy of Sciences expedition to Macedonia planned for the summer of 1900, with the goal of collecting archeological and philological materials.17 In addition, Milyukov also wrote an adventurous travelogue for the popular science periodical Zhurnal dlia vsekh (Journal for Everyone) about his excursion into the “medieval corner” of Old Serbia.18 In light of the political complications there, Kondakov eventually concluded years later that “almost all of Macedonia, with the exception of several Northwestern localities that belong to Old Serbia, should be conceded to Bulgaria.”19

Historical Work on the Balkan Countries For Milyukov, the Macedonian question was primarily a Slavic question. It was the focal point of his historical analysis of the Balkan problem, published in 1899, and during his later activity as a member of the Duma it assumed a central role in his relation to the Balkan politics. In his article “The Serbian-Bulgarian Relationship in regards to the Macedonian Question,” Milyukov portrayed Macedonia as within the sphere of interest of the Serbian state, which wanted to assert its voice in the Balkans after its defeat in the 1885–86 war with Bulgaria. Forced to decide between the Serbian partition plan and the Bulgarian autonomy project, Milyukov chose the Bulgarian solution to the Macedonian question because it could be brought about peacefully with diplomatic support and corresponded to the national consciousness of the population.20 In his article “On a Journey 16

Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov, Pisʼma iz Makedonii. Also: Russkie vedomosti (1898), 159, 168, 181, 183, 277; (1899), 4, 7, 15, 21, 28, 36, 44, 60, 85. Priaporets (1898), 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25; (1899); 53, 56, 57, 58, 61, 62, 68, 71, 73, 80. 17 Milyukov, Vospominaniia, vol. 1, 186. 18 Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov, “Srednevekovoi ugolok v sovremennoi Evrope (Iz poezdki v Staruiu Serbiiu),” Zhurnal dlia vsekh 7 (1902): 330–46, 467–79, 579– 87. 19 See Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov, Makedoniia: Arkheologicheskoe puteshestvie (St. Petersburg, 1909), 295f. 20 Pavel Nikolaevich Miličukov, “Serbsko-bolgarskie otnosheniia po makedonskomu voprosu,” in Sbornik zhurnala “Russkoe bogatstvo”, ed. Nikolaĭ Konstantinovich Michailovskii and Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko (St. Petersburg, 1899), section 2, 238–91. See translations into Bulgarian and German: “Srŭbskobŭlgarskite otnosheniia po makedonskiia vŭpros,” Bŭlgarski pregled 5, nos. 9–10

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to Macedonia: European Diplomacy and the Macedonian Question,” Milyukov detailed the superpowers’ reactions to the “uncompromising” Macedonian revolutionaries and the “unscrupulous” Sublime Porte. He argued that as long as Russia, in which the Macedonian people placed their hopes, still had a voice in the European concert, neither the “Slavophile” solution of 1877—meaning war with the Ottoman Empire—nor, at the other extreme, the Turkish solution of total passivity on the Macedonian question would be allowed to take effect. Noting that it was more advantageous for Russia to have a “strong ally” on the peninsula than a “weak vassal,” Milyukov advocated for the Bulgarian option, while also expressing his disapproval of the path of Russian diplomacy.21 Finally, in 1900 he justified Bulgaria’s territorial claims once more in his editing of and commentary on an ethnographic atlas of Macedonia.22 The fact that the Bulgarian ethnicity was dominant in Macedonia was expressed in Milyukov’s letter to the Russkie vedomosti.23 In Macedonia, in September 1903 he made his sympathies once again clear in a report on the Ilinden Revolt (which took place on the feast day of the Prophet Elijah on July 20).24 In fact, his scholarly contacts and his academic work represented sympathy to Bulgaria. In 1902 he became a corresponding member of the Bulgarian Book Society, which was restructured in 1911 to form the Bulgarian Academy of Science.25 For a liberal historian like Milyukov, the Balkans were of interest as more than just a powder keg. On the 25th anniversary of the Tărnovo constitution of 1879, which provided for a unicameral system and universal suffrage, he presented “The Bulgarian Constitution,” a study intended to

(1899): 51–110; “Die serbisch-bulgarischen Beziehungen in ihrem Verhältnis zur makedonischen Frage,” in Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukoff über Makedonien: Zwei Studien, ein Aufsatz und eine Rede, ed. Fritz von Philipp (Leipzig, 1918), 82–153. 21 Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov, “Iz poezdki v Makedoniiu: Evropeiskaia diplomatiia i makedonskii vopros,” Vestnik Evropy 34, no. 5 (1899): 52–83, in particular 55; no. 6 (1899): 425–56, in particular 454–56 (here: 456). See Translations into Bulgarian and German: Evropeiskata diplomatsiia i Makedonskiia vŭpros (Sofia, 1899); “Die makedonische Frage und die europäische Diplomatie,” in Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukoff über Makedonien, 7–81. 22 5 etnograficheskikh kart Makedonii s tekstom P. N. Milyukova (St. Petersburg, 1900). See Henry Robert Wilkinson, Maps and Politics: A Review of the Ethnographic Cartography of Macedonia (Liverpool, 1951), 39. 23 Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov, “Pisʼmo v redaktsiiu,” in Russkie vedomosti 1900, 356. 24 Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov, “S makedonskoi granitsy,” in Russkie vedomosti 1903, 269. 25 Sto godini Bŭlgarskata akademiia na naukite, 1869‒1969: T. I. Akademitsi i chlenove-korespondenti, ed. Petar Zarev et al. (Sofia 1969), 840.

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stimulate the Russian public’s interest in the Bulgarian experiment and thereby also force a discussion in Russia as well.26 On the one hand, he argued, the Bulgarian constitution had emerged thanks to the protection of Alexander II and thus enjoyed the blessing of the Russian autocracy. On the other hand, it proved that underdeveloped countries could make their way to constitutionalism. While acknowledging the aging of the political parties and the regression of pluralism, Milyukov, looking far beyond the then current crisis of the Bulgarian constitutional system, optimistically concluding that like its external independence, the inner strength of Bulgaria rested on the unity of its people. Its political leaders, he asserted, had nolens volens learned to take public opinion into account. Consequently, in the printed version of the lectures on “Russia and Its Crisis” that he gave in 1903 and 1904 in the United States, Milyukov interpreted the Bulgarian example as a guarantee of the functionality of a future Russian constitutionalism.27 In the summer of 1904, Milyukov traveled to Dalmatia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, to prepare for a lecture series on the Balkans planned for that winter semester. The University of Chicago had invited him to deliver the lectures with the assistance of funding arranged by the industrialist Charles R. Crane.28 He went on excursions through Montenegro with the Bulgarian diplomat Dimitǔr Rizov and received information on preliminary discussions of a Serbian-Bulgarian alliance.29 However, the news of Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg (January 22, 1905) prompted him to abruptly abandon his lectures in Chicago and return to Russia.30 This event marked both his entry into politics and the end of his historical scholarship in Southeastern Europe. The projected book on the Balkan countries did not appear. From that point on, questions of contemporary politics were front and center. 26

Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov, “Bolgarskaia konstitutsiia,” Russkoe bogatstvo, no. 8 (1904): 193–216; no. 9 (1904): 26–69; no. 10 (1904): 28–59, here no. 8 (1904): 193, reprinted in P. D. Dolgorukov and I. I. Petrunkevich, eds., Politicheskii stroi sovremennykh gosudarstv, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1905), 545–652, here: 545–46. Bulgarian translation: Bŭlgarskata konstitutsiia, ed. M. Arnaudov (Solun, 1905). See Cyril E. Black, The Establishment of Constitutional Government in Bulgaria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943), 286. 27 Pavel Milyoukov, Russia and Its Crisis: Crane Lectures for 1903 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1905), 563f. 28 Milyukov, Vospominaniia, vol. 1, 223–34; Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov, “Rokovye gody. (Iz vospominanii),” Russkie zapiski, no. 5 (1938): 109–18. 29 Milyukov, Vospominaniia, vol. 1, 37. See Dimitur Rizoff, Bulgarien und Rußland; “Der bulgarische Verrat”; Deutschland und die Entente; Die russische Revolution (Berlin: Kronen Verlag, [1917]), 43f. 30 Milyukov, Vospominaniia, vol. 1, 249.

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Political Travels to Southeastern Europe Milyukov first redirected his attention to the Balkans in the spring of 1908 as a member of the third state Duma. His statements regarding the Bosnian annexation crisis are collected in the book The Balkan Crisis and the Politics of A. P. Izvol’skii.31 After the Austrian foreign minister’s offensive in the realm of railroad politics spurred some movement in Balkan politics, this issue became a focus of interest in the Duma’s first great foreign policy debate, in which Milyukov had occasion to display his knowledge in a highly regarded speech. Proceeding from Russian Foreign Minister Aleksandr Izvol’skii’s statement that Russia’s Middle East policy should be guided “by a healthy egotism,” Milyukov elucidated his understanding of the politics of national interests, contending that the framework in which diplomacy should take place was not Slavic but rather Russian politics. In this respect, the sphere of influence was dictated by the interests of the other great powers. In this context, Milyukov saw healthy egotism as “complete altruism” or “renunciation of a policy of conquest.” His speech went on to analyze Russian policies toward Bulgaria and Macedonia since the Berlin Congress, demonstrating that they had failed to create a strong partner in the Balkans.32 In order to learn about the situation in the crisis region and familiarize himself with Turkish domestic policy, Milyukov traveled again to the Balkans from July to September, that is, the period between the eruption of the Young Turk Revolution (July 3, 1908) and Bulgaria’s declaration of independence and the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (October 6, 1908).33 In the September 23 issue of Rechʼ he reacted with extreme annoyance to the proclamation of Bulgarian independence and Prince Ferdinand’s assumption of the title of “Tsar” in Tǔrnovo in violation of the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, because the timing legitimized the Austrians’ expansion on the Balkans.34 By February 1910, his assessment would be 31

Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov, Balkanskii krizis i politika A. P. Izvol’skogo: S prilozheniem dvukh kart i peresmotrennogo vo 1909 g. teksta turetskoi konstitutsii (St. Petersburg, 1910). 32 Gosudarstvennaia duma: Stenograficheskii otchet; Tretii sozyv; Sessiia I; Zasedanie 49-oe; 4 aprelia 1908 g. (Sankt Peterburg, 1908), column 1786–1798, here column 1786–1788. See A. P. Izvol’skogo, Rechʼ, April 5, 1908, in Milyukov, Balkanskii krizis, 179. 33 Milyukov, Vospominaniia, vol. 2, 34–38. See “Pis’ma s dorogi,” in Milyukov, Balkanskii krizis, 184–322. 34 “Anneksiia Bosnii i nezavisimosť Bolgarii,” Rech’, September 23, 1908, in Milyukov, Balkanskii krizis, 223–24. See also “Russkie, upreki‘ i bolgarskie opravdaniia,” Rech’, November 3, 1908, in Milyukov, Balkanskii krizis, 324– 26.

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that Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha had proven himself “the only true victor” and “the only political realist.”35 In a public lecture on October 26, 1908, though, Milyukov took stock of the “development of the Balkan crisis” since the Russian-Austrian agreement in 1897 and envisioned the solution of a Balkan federation including Turkey, which opposed further Austrian expansion.36 Then, in the Duma debate on December 12, he criticized the conception of Balkan policy as being based on separate spheres of interest and demanded that Russian diplomacy recognize the right of the Balkan peoples to self-determination.37 In the summer of 1912, his Chicago mentor Charles Crane invited him to take part in a journey to Sofia. Milyukov was able to take time between June and November, during the sessions of the third and fourth Duma. From Sofia there were excursions to the Rila monastery and Shipka Pass. In October the two travelers followed Bulgarian troops to Edirne following the outbreak of the First Balkan War, and Milyukov had an enlightening experience at the last train station before the front. While attempting to photograph the bucolic landscape along the Maritsa, he was taken into police custody. Then, upon looking into the passport, the examining officer exclaimed with amazement: “Mr. Milyukov? The friend of Bulgaria!?,” which put an end to the interrogation.38 It was, at any rate, a remarkable sign of his prominence in Bulgaria. On his next visit to Sofia, during the Duma’s Christmas break of 1912–13, he was granted an audience with Tsar Ferdinand on January 5. The encounter was limited to a speech in which Ferdinand presented his case in French. He declared himself constitutional ruler and consummator of Bulgarian unification and praised the Slavic community, in which Russia played a principal role. Overestimating the influence of oppositional parties in the Duma, he appealed to Milyukov to petition the Russian tsar to support Bulgaria in capturing the city of Rodosto, today Tekirdağ in Turkey on the Sea of Marmara.39 On January 21, 1913, on the return journey via Thessaloniki, Milyukov met the Serbian ambassador Živojin Balugdžić in Athens and was able to impress him with official notes documenting Serbian attacks on members of the Bulgarian Exarchate. Milyukov took the opportunity

35

Milyukov, Balkanskii krizis, xii. Milyukov, “Razvitie balkanskogo krizisa,” in Milyukov, Balkanskii krizis, 51–55. 37 Gosudarstvennaia duma: Stenograficheskii otchet; Tretii sozyv; Sessiia II; Zasedanie tridtsať pervoe; 12 dekabria 1908 g. (St. Petersburg 1909), column 2678–2704, here column 2683 and column 2699. 38 Milyukov, Vospominaniia, vol. 2, 117f., 120. 39 Milyukov, Vospominaniia, vol. 2, 123, 126f. See Grigor Cheshmedzhiev, Politicheski spomeni, ed. B. Grigorov (Sofia, 1988), 269. 36

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to obtain an appointment in Thessaloniki with the Serbian heir to the throne.40 At the end of January 1913, none other than Leon Trotsky, who also spent time in the Balkans as a war reporter, started an “extra-parliamentary questioning of Mr. Milyukov” in the Menshevik newspaper Luch (Ray of Light)—a polemic against the “intermediary between Petersburg diplomacy and Balkan dynasties” that was quite unusual in the Russian media landscape. Trotsky asked whether Milyukov had noticed the Bulgarian and Serbian atrocities against Turkish prisoners of war and Islamic civilians on his “political journey,” and if he had, why he had remained silent about it in Rechʼ.41 Milyukov did not react to the polemic, so Trotsky concluded that Rechʼ was biased toward continued Bulgarian dominance in the Balkans and therefore supported the old elites.42

Assessor on the Carnegie Commission According to his memoirs, it was the Carnegie Foundation’s initiative to analyze the causes and course of the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 that made Milyukov, who to date had served as an observer and commentator, into a judge in August–September 1913.43 The French senator Baron Paul d’Estournelles de Constant, who had participated in both the 1899 and 1907 peace conferences in The Hague, assumed the chairmanship and the task of selecting the commission’s members. Aiming to bolster the commission’s reputation, he strove to recruit from every European great power at least one distinguished representative who was also well known in the peace movement.44 In Russia, the head of the Petersburg Peace Society 40

Milyukov, Vospominaniia, vol. 2, 127f. See Miloš Boghitschewitsch, Die auswärtige Politik Serbiens 1903‒1914, vol. 1, Geheimakten aus serbischen Archiven (Berlin, 1928), Nr. 263, 286f. and Nr. 264, 287f. 41 “Vnedumskii zapros g-nu Milyukovu,” Luch, January 30, 1913, reprinted in Leon N. Trockii, Sochineniia: Seriia II. Pered istoricheskom rubezhom. T. VI. Balkany i Balkanskaia voina (Moscow/Leningrad, 1926), 273–75. German translation in Leo Trotzki, Die Balkankriege 1912‒1913 (Essen, 1996), 319f. 42 Luch, February 9, 21, and 22, 1913. Reprinted in Trotskii, Sochineniia, vol. 4, 275–83. 43 Milyukov, Vospominaniia, vol. 2, 128. 44 See Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Division of Intercourse and Education, no. 4 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: 1914); Enquête dans les Balkans: Rapport présenté aux Directeurs de la Dotation par les Membres de la Commission dʾEnquête (= Dotation Carnegie pour la Paix Internationale), Paris, 1914. Reprinted as The Other Balkan

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(founded in 1909), sociologist and constitutional law expert Maksim Maksimovich Kovalevsky, initially received the invitation. However, he then recommended Milyukov, who had distinguished himself with lectures made at the Russian Peace Society and as a delegate to the congresses of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in 1908 and 1910.45 The commission—consisting of its nominal leader, the French parliamentarian Justin Godart, along with the English journalist Henry N. Brailsford, the American academic Samuel T. Dutton, and Milyukov—set out from Paris once the warring parties’ representatives had been notified of their mission. Milyukov characterized the two members with command of the local language, Brailsford and himself, as the “only real workers on the commission.”46 When they arrived in Belgrade on August 26, the day of the army’s triumphal return, the Serbian authorities did not offer the commission any possibility to undertake their work. In front of their hotel that evening, there was a demonstration against Milyukov, whom the Serbian government had designated an “enemi déclaré” on August 25 (September 7).47 This attitude was a reaction to Milyukov’s critical stance toward the reinforcement of Serbian positions in Macedonia in the course of the First Balkan War. Milyukov had let himself be swayed to make a personal statement during debate in the Duma on June 6, 1913: “I would say that the most natural solution to the question wouldn’t be the Serbian, but the Macedonian. Most natural would be the solution that would offer Macedonia autonomy over the whole territory.”48

Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect, with a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George F. Kennan (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1993). See also Ivan Ilchev, “Karnegievata anketa prez 1913 g. Obstanovka, izvŭrshane i mezhdunaroden otzvuk,” Istoricheski pregled 45, no. 10 (1989): 15–28; Nadine Akhund, “The Two Carnegie Reports: From the Balkan Expedition of 1913 to the Albanian Trip of 1921: A Comparative Approach,” Balkanologie 14, nos. 1–2 (2012): 2–15; Frances Trix, “Peace-mongering in 1913: the Carnegie international commission of inquiry and its report on the Balkan Wars,” First World War Studies 5, no. 2 (2014): 147–62. 45 See Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov, Vooruzhennyi mir i ogranichenie vooruzhenii (St. Petersburg, 1911). Excerpt in Bulgarian translation: “Voinata – otzhivelitsa na sotsialnata psikhologiia,” Demokraticheski pregled 10 (1912): 322–27. See also Liszkowski, Zwischen Liberalismus und Imperialismus, 246–48. 46 Milyukov, Vospominaniia, vol. 2, 130–34. 47 Report of the International Commission, 10, note 1. 48 Gosudarstvennaia duma: Stenograficheskii otchet; Chetvertyi sozyv; Sessiia I; Zasedanie 66-oe. 6 iiunia 1913 g. (St. Petersburg, 1913), column 1019–1058, here column 1028. Abridged version in German: “Zur Balkankrise,” in Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukoff über Makedonien, 168.

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However, he was also aware that in praxis, autonomy meant expanded Bulgarian influence. Interestingly, regarding demands for national selfdetermination, he distanced himself from more empirical and analytical academic methods, instead taking a politician’s stance based on underlying, more subjective factors: The politician is only interested in a question whose answer requires simple information: how Macedonians define themselves. Since the appearance in 1870 of the first national Slavic church in the Balkans—that is, the Bulgarian church, the Exarchate—the Slavic inhabitant of Macedonia defines himself consciously, necessarily, as a Bulgarian.49

After the debacle in Belgrade, the commission had no choice but to travel on to Thessaloniki on August 27. In the Bulgarian colony of Thessaloniki, Milyukov was able to obtain reports on Serbification efforts in Macedonia that illuminated the causes of the Second Balkan War. He focused on SerbGreek relations, Brailsford on Greek-Turkish relations. However, on August 31 the local Greek governor prohibited further investigation. This time the action was directed less at Milyukov than at Brailsford, who had participated in the uprising on Crete in 1897. The commission subsequently divided, with only Milyukov and Godart traveling further in Greece. As head of the delegation, Godart took up residence in an Athens hotel, befitting his representative role. Milyukov initially found accommodation in a guest house in Piraeus, but press coverage caused him to take refuge in a shabby establishment “where no one read the papers.” Forced to spend his days in Athens as a tourist, he decided to travel alone to Constantinople, using his contacts there. His main task was to investigate Bulgarian war crimes committed during the conquest of Edirne. A report by the former Russian consul Mashkov, who had been working as a correspondent for Novoe vremia (The New Times), had drawn international media attention to the occupation.50 Milyukov pointed out weaknesses in accusations based on Greek sources, establishing that the attacks had taken place only on the first two days, but he sharply condemned the treatment of prisoners of war.51 At the beginning of September in Bulgaria—which, after the eruption of the Second Balkan War in late June, had fallen into international disrepute in the face of accusations of “Bulgarian war guilt” and “Bulgarian barbarianism”—Milyukov was received like a national hero. At every large station, a welcoming committee met the special train transporting him from 49

Ibid., Russian edition 1913, column 1029; German edition 1918, 169. Report of the International Commission, 109. 51 Milyukov, Vospominaniia, vol. 2, 134ff.; Report of the International Commission, 109–23. 50

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the border to the capital city. The commission was officially recognized in Sofia, and the material needed for its work had already been prepared by the Sofia-based professor Lyubomir Miletich, a former colleague of Milyukov who had been commissioned by the Bulgarian government. Milyukov attested to the Bulgarians’ impartiality in his memoirs. Ultimately, however, the information obtained there merely supported and augmented the previous findings. On September 21, the evening before his departure from Sofia, Milyukov was once again received by Tsar Ferdinand.52 The commission reconvened in Paris on September 15/28. Photographs and the exhaustive documentary material for the report, which was published in 1914, were selected by the assembled commission members. Official Serbian and Greek accounts could not be considered. The authors of individual chapters remained anonymous in the published text until today. Godart, Brailsford, and Dutton each wrote one chapter, while Milyukov, again making the largest contribution, wrote four essays: “The Origin of the Two Balkan Wars,” “Bulgarians, Turks and Servians,” “War and Nationalities,” and “War and International Law.” Unlike in all his other written and oral accounts, in this case Milyukov was at a remove from clear analysis. According to his memoirs, the report concluded that none of the warring nations were free of war crimes and barbarity.53 At any rate he was able to introduce wording condemning the Bucharest Peace Accords of July 28/August 10, 1913—perceived by Bulgaria as unfair—as a source of new conflicts. This led Milyukov to conclude that in so far as the treaty of Bucharest has sanctioned the illegitimate claims of victorious nationalities, it is a work of injustice which in all probability will fail to resist the action of time. . . . The question of the moment is not a new territorial division, such as would probably provoke that new conflict which the whole world wishes to avoid. Mutual tolerance is all that is required.54

Speaking before the Duma on May 10, 1915, he reiterated the demands for revision of the agreement and brought up issues of responsibility for the war: Also, formally the Bulgarians began the fight, but factually and morally not only the Bulgarians are guilty. Guiltiest of all are those who violated the treaty of February 29, the Serbian-Bulgarian treaty, that was concluded under the direct participation of Russia.55 52

Milyukov, Vospominaniia, vol. 2, 120, 136f. Ibid., 138. 54 Report of the International Commission, 206. 55 Gosudarstvennaia duma: Stenograficheskii otchet; Chetvertyi sozyv, Sessiia II. Zasedanie 80-oe. 10 maia 1914 g. (St. Petersburg, 1914), column 348–78, here 53

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In his statements before a special investigative commission of the provisional government in August 1917, Milyukov assigned partial responsibility for the eruption of World War I to Russia’s Balkan policy, specifically its adherence to the Peace of Bucharest and its failure to pull Bulgaria into Russia’s camp.56 And his memoirs refer to a conclusion he had drawn from the Balkan Wars: that Russia’s Balkan policy had made Russia’s traditional cultural protectorate obsolete, and hence “Russia should not engage in war for the Slavs.”57

Macedonia and the Turkish Straits in the Focus: World War I Following the outbreak of World War I, the Constitutional Democrats resolved to uphold a party truce with the tsar’s government. From then on, Milyukov focused all questions of Balkan policy on the Bosporus and Dardanelles, in keeping with the ideology of defensive, emancipatory war. This also influenced his position on Bulgaria. In the article “Russia’s Territorial Acquisitions,” published in 1915 in the context of the discussion surrounding Russia’s war goals, he defined Constantinople and its European hinterlands as part of Russia’s sphere of interest. As for Bulgaria, he concluded that strict neutrality or active support should be honored by the Russian government with concessions in East Thrace. He referred hereby to the Bulgarian special interest in the city of Edirne as a bargaining chip.58 When it came to the Bulgarian question, Milyukov was not swayed by emotions but rather by objective factors, as documented by his diary’s account of a confidential conversation he had with British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, when he travelled with a Russian parliamentary column 353 (quotation), column 365. Bulgarian translation: Rechʼ na Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov, proiznesena na 10 Mai 1914 godina v Ruskata Duma, v otgovor na ekspozeto na M-r Predsedatelia Sazonov (Ruse, 1914), 6, 14. 56 Padenie tsarskogo rezhima: Stenograficheskie otchety doprosov i pokazanii, dannykh v 1917 g. v Chrezvychainoi Sledstvennoi Komissii Vremennogo Pravitel’stva; T. VI. Doprosy i pokazaniia P. N. Ignaťeva i dr. pod red. P. E. Shchegoleva (Moscow/Leningrad, 1926), 366f. 57 Milyukov, Vospominaniia, vol. 2, 140. 58 Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov, “Territorial’nye priobreteniia Rossii,” in Chego zhdet Rossiia ot voiny: Sbornik statei, ed. Mikhail N. Tugan-Baranovskii et al. (Petrograd, 1915), 49–62, here: 57. See also Milyukov, “‘Neitralizatsiia’ Dardanel’ i Bosfora,” in Voprosy mirovoi voiny: Sbornik statei, ed. Mikhail N. Tugan-Baranovski (Petrograd, 1915), 532–48; Milyukov, “Konstantinopolʼ i prolivy,” Vestnik Evropy 52, no. 1 (1917): 354–81; no. 2 (1917): 227–59; nos. 4– 6 (1917): 525–47.

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delegation to allied countries. Asked to take a personal position regarding Bulgaria, Milyukov stated that Germany had now implemented the Russian program of 1878, that is, the cancelled Treaty of San Stefano. He concentrated his criticism on “Serbian megalomania” to which he assigned the question of responsibility for the war. Regarding the Bulgarian Tsar Ferdinand, whose position was secure only as long as he could achieve military successes, Milyukov did not take a direct position. However, he opined, the Russophilic feelings of the Bulgarian people would emerge with Ferdinand’s first failings. The prerequisite for such sentiments in combination with the support of an expected affiliation of Macedonia “within the boundaries of 1912, plus Üsküp (Skopje), but minus Niš, Vranje and Pirot” would offer the chance for the European powers to include Bulgaria in the entente.59 A lecture tour before the British public in August 1916 gave him occasion to expound on the notion that the Russians, by siding with Serbia over the course of the Berlin Congress, had bet on the “wrong horse.” In the lectures he repeated the thesis, developed on March 11 that year during debate in the Duma, that Bulgaria would have chosen the Allied camp from the beginning if only the Allies had signaled willingness to grant the Bulgarians guarantees regarding Macedonia in March 1915 instead of waiting until September.60 Milyukov’s tenure as foreign minister in the first cabinet of the provisional government lasted only two months after the February revolution of 1917. During that time he fought for external recognition of Russia’s democratization and of the validity of contractual agreements from the spring of 1915 concerning the straits. Internally, meanwhile, he had to defend the policy of victorious peace. In a note to the Allies on May 1, 59

“Dnevnik P. N. Milyukova,” with a preface by Ia. Berezin, Krasnyi arkhiv, nos. 54–55 (1932): 3–48, here: 47f. See “Russkaia ‘parlamentskaia’ delegatsiia za granitsei v 1916 g. Doklad P. N. Milyukova v Voenno-morskoi komissii Gosud. dumy 19 iiunia 1916 g. S predisloviem N. Vanaga,” Krasnyi arkhiv, no. 58 (1933): 3–23, here: 18 and 22. See also I. V. Alekseeva, “K predystorii konterrevoliutsionnoi politiki burzhuazii po voprosu o voine i mire: Poezdka russkoi parlamentskoi delegatsii v Angliiu i Frantsiiu v 1916 g.,” in Oktiabr’skoe vooruzhennoe vosstanie v Petrograde: Sbornik statei (Moscow, 1980), 306–15; Wolfgang-Uwe Friedrich, Bulgarien und die Mächte 1913–1915: Ein Beitrag zur Weltkriegs- und Imperialismusgeschichte (Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag, 1985). 60 Pavel Milyoukov, “The War and Balkan Politics,” in Russian Realities and Problems, ed. James D. Duff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917), 1– 24, here: 18, 23. See Gosudarstvennaia duma: Stenograficheskii otchet; Chetvertyi sozyv; Sessiia IV; Zasedanie 35-oe. 11 marta 1916 g. (St. Petersburg, 1916), column. 3250. See also I. V. Alekseeva, “K istorii odnoi poezdki: Po materialam neopublikovannogo dnevnika P. N. Milyukova (avgust-sentiabr’ 1916 g.),” Vspomogatel’nye istoricheskie distsipliny 21 (1990), 136–43.

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1917, he tried to avoid the Zimmerwald wording of a “peace without annexation and contribution,” preferred by the Petrograd Labor and Soldiers Council. This unleashed the new government’s first crisis, whereupon Milyukov was forced to resign. From the outset, though, the circumstances had ruled out talk of an active Balkan policy from a foreign minister.61 Correspondingly, Milyukov expressed reservations about Dimitǔr Rizov’s attempts to intervene. Rizov, a Bulgarian diplomat in Berlin on a travel to Scandinavia was gauging the possibility of a separate peace on behalf of the Germans in February and April 1917. Milyukov’s own overtures to Bulgaria, which he had begun making in March via Switzerland, also remained unfulfilled.62 As foreign minister, Milyukov failed, because he supported the question of war goals, especially in regard to the Turkish Straits. Macedonia no longer played a role.

Summary Milyukov, as a proponent of pragmatic positions, saw the “Oriental Question” as revolving initially around Macedonia, and then around the question of the Bosporus and Dardanelles. As a scholar always striving for objectivity, he considered the Macedonian question to be a Slavic question and deliberated in the interests of Bulgaria on the basis of ethnological, philological, and confessional considerations. But by approaching the social reality of Macedonia through the categories of the national thought of his age, he did not meet the needs of ordinary people and further exacerbated the conflict. From Milyukov’s perspective, Serbia had played out its historic role in the second half of the nineteenth century. Undeniably, Milyukov’s integration into Bulgarian scholarship and the honors conferred on him by the Bulgarian public left room to identify him with Bulgaria. As a journalist, he arrived at two different possible solutions to the Macedonian question. After the possibility of expanding self-governance in Macedonia proved illusory in the course of the Young Turk Revolution, he initially looked to the Balkan Council, including Turkey, to dampen Austrian influence in the crisis year of 1908–09. Then, during the Balkan 61

See A. V. Ignatʼev, Vneshniaia politika Vremennogo pravitel’stva (Moscow: Nauka, 1974), 152–64; Robert Harold Johnston, Tradition versus Revolution: Russia and the Balkans in 1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 27–36. See also Ronald P. Bobroff, Roads to Glory: Late Imperial Russia and the Turkish Straits (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006). 62 See Vasil Radoslawoff, Bulgarien und die Weltkrise (Berlin: Verlag Ullstein, 1923), 262–72; “Perepiska Milyukova i Tereshchenko s poslami Vremennogo pravitel’stva: S predisloviem I. Popova,” Borʼba klassov, no. 5 (1931): 84–88, here: 85f.

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Wars of 1912–13, he supported the Balkan countries’ confederation against the Young Turks and associated the national emancipation with a new distribution of roles in the Balkans. The great powers, in their role as keepers of the peace, had treated any new conflicts they observed as internal issues of the Balkan states. Milyukov undoubtedly provided the Carnegie Commission with prodigious specific competence, which no one else on the commission had, save Brailsford. In terms of substance, however, he contributed nothing more than a collection of materials to the investigative report. Value judgments—indeed, judgments of any kind—are so rare in the sections written by Milyukov that his Bulgarophilia is hardly expressed. As a politician, Milyukov fundamentally represented Russia’s national interests, and in that respect he was guided by utilitarian factors. In his conception, Bulgaria, as the supreme power in the Balkans, presented itself as Russia’s natural partner. But in the global-political context of separate Russian and Austrian spheres of interest in the Balkans, this arrangement had too frequently violated the national right to self-determination. After the outbreak of World War I, Milyukov propagated a reordering of the Balkans that would displace Turkey from Europe and put Russia in control of Constantinople and the straits. In this context, Bulgaria’s entry into World War I on the side of the Central Powers was only interesting strategically. Surprisingly, this shift in position did no harm to the positive image Milyukov had acquired in Bulgaria as an expert on Macedonia and a Carnegie man. As an émigré he was no longer concerned with the Balkans and never returned to the place he had been so closely associated with in his earlier travels.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The 1913 Carnegie Commission of Inquiry: Background, Fact-Finding, and International Reactions* Ivan Ilčev

In 1913, Bulgaria found itself surrounded by enemies on all sides. The Bulgarian army’s assault on its former allies (described by contemporaries as “criminal madness”) by order of the high command on June 16/291 led to the destruction of everything the common Bulgarian soldier and his superiors had risked their lives for in the First Balkan War. The errors and impulsive actions of politicians and above all of Tsar Ferdinand produced an outcome rarely achieved in the history of armed conflict and desired by no one: Bulgaria was suddenly surrounded by enemies and without a single ally.2 Bulgaria’s success on the battlefield had ground to a halt in mid-July. The Greek army, advancing north, nearly reached Razlog; the Serbian armies crossed the old Serbo-Bulgarian border; Turkish units moved into East Thrace (which under the Treaty of London was due to pass into Bulgarian control); and Romanian cavalry arrived near Sofia, the Bulgarian capital. There seemed to be no way out. In Sofia, members of the local intelligentsia set up a society for collective suicide, keen to end their lives rather than face the inevitable decline of the national ideal. The military defeats were exacerbated by the calumnies that former allies began to heap on the people of Bulgaria. The country was virtually *

This article was first published under the title “Karnegievata Anketa na Balkanite prez 1913 g.: Obstanovka, izvăršvane i meždunaroden otzvuk,” Istoričeski pregled 45, no. 10 (1989): 15–28. 1 The two different dates reflect Bulgaria’s switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. The first date corresponds to the old Julian style; the second, to the Gregorian calendar used nearly everywhere today. 2 Atanas Hristov, Istoričeski pregled na vojnata na Bălgarija sreštu vsički balkanski dăržavi 1913 g. (Sofia: Armejski voenno-izdatelski fond, 1924); idem, Vojnata meždu Bălgarija i drugite balkanski dăržavi prez 1913 g., Vol. 1 (Sofia: Armejski voenno-izdatelski fond, 1941); idem, Meždusăjuzničeskata vojna 1913 g. (Sofia: Voenno-istoričesko izdatelstvo, 1963).

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cut off from the rest of the world for almost three weeks in August 1913. Despite efforts launched that spring to protect Bulgaria’s national concerns from European public opinion, no headway had been made.3 Not even Bulgaria’s diplomatic representatives abroad were aware of what was happening on the southeastern peninsula or what the true intentions of the rulers in Sofia were. Tight budgets meant they could not afford to subscribe to the major news agencies’ specialized bulletins, so they had to rely on information from the daily press with its clearly antiBulgarian tone. Hardly any foreign correspondents were left in Bulgaria itself. Most of them had departed from the Balkans immediately after the fall of the fortress of Adrianople (Odrin/Edirne). Those who remained were rarely able to provide details about the nature and results of the fighting in a timely manner. During the war with Turkey, the army’s high command had failed to find a balance between the need for military secrecy and the benefits that well-intentioned journalists could have brought to the Bulgarian cause. Correspondents who arrived in autumn 1912 made no secret of their exasperation regarding the censors’ policy, which sentenced them to inactivity far from the front lines.4 Even if there had been correspondents travelling with the Bulgarian army, they would have been isolated from the outside world. For three weeks, Bulgaria’s only link with Europe was the shortwave radio station in the royal palace. The outbreak of the fratricidal war caught Bulgarian propaganda in a situation similar to that of the start of the First Balkan War: it was virtually non-existent. Despite plans revised on more than one occasion, there were no Bulgarian envoys—who could at least have tried to explain the reasons for Bulgaria’s stance—in any European capitals. In the war of information, Bulgaria’s defeat was inevitable. Belgrade and Athens had invested considerable time in preparing their propaganda campaign, which was intensified in spring 1913 and hit Bulgaria like a bombshell, exposing the population to all sorts of accusations.5 Serbian, Greek, and Romanian propagandists, who had been dispatched to the capital cities as soon as tensions rose between the allies of the First Balkan 3

On the development of propaganda in the states of Southeastern Europe, see Ivan Ilčev, Rodinata mi—prava ili ne! Vănšnopolitičeska propaganda na balkanskite strani (1821–1923) (Sofia: Universitetsko izdatelstvo “Sv. Kliment Ohridski”, 1995); Romanian translation: Are dreptate sau nu, e patria mea! Propaganda în politica externă a ţărilor balcanice (1821–1923) (Bucharest: Curtea Veche, 2002). 4 Hristo Lefterov, Balkanskata vojna: Spomeni i dokumenti: Po dnevnika na Cenzurnata sekcija pri štaba na dejstvuvaštata armija (Sofia: Voenno-izdatelski fond, 1938). 5 Ivan Ilčev, “Vănšnopolitičeska propaganda na bălgarskata nacionalna kauza po vreme na Balkanskite vojni,” Voennoistoričeski Sbornik, no. 4 (1982): 80–98.

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War, began filling the pages of newspapers with exaggerated stories about “Bulgarian atrocities” committed on the civilian population. In a sense, the Western readership had been conditioned to accept such news without suspicion. The Balkans were often viewed as a region far removed from Europe, certainly morally if not geographically. The violence and recklessness characteristic of politics there were regarded as normal features of coexistence on the Balkan Peninsula. Protests against the “Bulgarian atrocities” in 1876 had led to the Russo-Turkish War (1877–78). The murders of Alexander I of Serbia and his wife in 1903 had also been described in detail in the European press. And the national liberation movement in Macedonia and East Thrace, with its ruthless struggle against external propagandists, provided numerous examples of brutality, such as the assassination of George I of Greece just one month before the start of the Second Balkan War. Once fighting broke out in the Balkans, European newspapers abounded with accounts of war crimes. The detailed descriptions of massacres, women of all ages being raped, ears being cut off, and the like must have given Western readers a certain thrill, accustomed as they were to leafing through the tabloid press in search of lurid crime reports. European public opinion was particularly receptive to the widespread view that Bulgaria was solely responsible for the war. In this early part of the century, the continent was on the threshold of military conflict, with every international crisis threatening to slip into armed confrontation. An insignificant change in the balance between the great powers had already brought about one war in Europe—which was precisely what the Bulgarians had been trying to accomplish. And when the Bulgarian attack on June 29, 1913, triggered the Second Balkan War, Bulgaria was accused of demanding change in the solidarity among the allies and behaving as an aggressor willing to endanger European peace in pursuit of its own interests. Constantine I of Greece succeeded in influencing European public opinion by issuing an emotive appeal in the form of a long letter, published in European newspapers, in protest of the Bulgarians’ “barbarism.” Indeed, newspapers were flattered to see their front pages graced almost daily with letters written personally by crowned heads of Europe, and the Greek king’s accusations were reprinted worldwide. It mattered little that they contained hardly anything important or true.6 His appeal was undoubtedly

6

James David Bourchier, the Times correspondent in the Balkans, refuted the Greek king’s accusations. When it was reported in Athens that he had been bought by the Bulgarians, Bourchier proposed publishing documents that would prove Constantine either was mistaken or intended to mislead the public. Not one Greek newspaper printed this proposal, however. See L. Grogan, The Life of J. D. Bourchier (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1926), 150f.

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a propaganda success. The Greeks knew how to exploit the prestige and great social authority monarchs still possessed in those years. Frightened and confused, and unable even to properly assess the unprecedented nature and scope of the anti-Bulgarian propaganda campaign, the leaders of the new Liberal government of Bulgaria headed by Prime Minister Dr. Vasil Radoslavov tried to go on the offensive as soon as they came to power. In Paris the newly appointed Minister of Defense Dimităr Stančov, in an impassioned protest at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, denounced the acts of violence the Turks had committed when they retook East Thrace—albeit in vain.7 Tsar Ferdinand tried to follow his Greek counterpart’s example by writing personally to the president of France, Raymond Poincaré, but received only an impersonal and somewhat sarcastic response. The campaign by Bulgaria’s opponents seems to have been far more persuasive. Jean Jaurès, guided by mistrust of the aims of Russia’s Balkan policy, wrote in L’Humanité that the allegations of “Bulgarian atrocities” were probably true.8 The general agreement in the French press was tacitly supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which made not the slightest effort to explain the true state of affairs despite being fully aware of it. As early as July 22, 1913,9 the abbess of the French mission of the Sisters of Mercy wrote immediately on her return from Kilkis (Kukuš/Kılkış) in Macedonia that her nuns could not possibly remain in the city where the Greek army “had burned everything down bar the mission building.”10 The Bulgarians were forced to recall the maxim that the losers in war are friendless. The Liberals enjoyed a solitary, limited success with their publication of a small booklet containing facsimiles of letters written by Greek soldiers. Found on a Greek courier who had perished near Razlog,11 they described in detail the extreme violence that Greek soldiers had visited on the local Bulgarian population, often on direct orders from their superiors. Although the veracity of the letters was not doubted, they lacked the tone and sophistication of an article written by an experienced journalist. The Liberals had erred somewhat by assuming that the letters’ authenticity would obviate the need for any further comment. This was not the case, as several months had elapsed between the discovery of the letters

7

Archive diplomatique du ministère des Affaires étrangères (hereafter AMAE): MS Turquie, Vol. 278, 60f. 8 Jean Jaurès, Au bord de l’abîme: 1912–1914 (Paris: Editions Rieder, 1939), 284ff. 9 All dates here and below are based on the Gregorian calendar. 10 AMAE, MS Turquie, Vol. 78, 90. 11 Ljubomir Milétitch, Documents sur les atrocités grecques: Extraits du livre de M. le professeur L. Milétitch “Atrocités grecques en Macédoine” (Sofia: Imprimerie de l'État, 1913).

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and their publication. By the time they finally appeared, the Peace of Bucharest was already signed. All that remained for the politicians in Sofia was the bitter taste of defeat. The Bulgarians, who in recent decades had become used to comforting themselves with the notion that Europe took a benevolent view of their country’s progress, suddenly realized to their astonishment that the balance of European sympathies had shifted against them. Confused by the avalanche of contradictory statements from abroad that were all directed against the country, many previous supporters of Bulgaria did not stand up for the country. Few supported Bulgaria during the Romanian invasion, like pioneer of Slavic studies Louis Léger’s return of a significant Romanian medal awarded him by Bucharest. And when Radoslavov’s government launched an appeal to dispatch an impartial international commission to ascertain the truth behind the mutual accusations, it fell on deaf ears at the official level. But despite all this, one of Bulgaria’s oldest friends did not disappoint: the Belgian socialist Hubert Lagardelle proposed a fact-finding mission to investigate the atrocities.12 But given his sympathies for the country, the results of such an inquiry would have been predictable, and anyway there was no real need for Lagardelle to be involved, as doubts about the truth of the allegations, though not especially pronounced, were expressed even in the generally anti-Bulgarian Russian press.13 As strange as it seemed, support came from the other side of the ocean. It is not known whether Washington had heard the appeal of the Liberal government. Not a single mention of that appeal is to be found among the cuttings from European newspapers preserved in the archives of the Royal Institute of Bulgaria. And the available documents offer no certainty as to exactly who initiated the fact-finding mission to the Balkans.14 Whatever the case, as of July 1913 the name of the American billionaire Andrew Carnegie was forever linked to the history of the Balkan Wars. Andrew Carnegie’s life was a prime example of the American dream, and he often recalled his success with a naive self-satisfaction. Carnegie was born in Scotland in 1835 into a poor family of weavers. Politically, his father was close to the Chartists, and it was probably his economic ruin and the decline of the Chartist movement, coupled with increasingly difficult living conditions in Scotland, that prompted his family to leave their homeland for the USA.15 They settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which

12

Centralen Dăržaven Istoričeski Arhiv (CDIA), Fond 11, file 1, doc. 226, 1. V. Vodovozov, “Na Balkanah,” Sovremenik, no. 8 (1913): 306–22. 14 After the success of the Carnegie inquiry, many people claimed to have proposed it, but their assertions are not backed up by any documentary evidence. 15 Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), 25. 13

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since the mid-nineteenth century had been the heart of heavy industry in the United States. At the age of thirteen, Carnegie began working as a craftsman, scribe, and telegraph messenger, starting at a weekly wage of two dollars.16 Just one year later he was earning eleven dollars a week, which attests to both his abilities and the economic boom under way in North America at the time. In 1853, Carnegie began working as a telegraphist and clerk at the Pittsburgh branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. His lucky break came during the Civil War: instead of fighting on the battlefield, he was put to work organizing the transportation of troops and goods to the front line, and in doing so he established contacts that later proved indispensable to his business dealings. Upon becoming a millionaire, he combined his financial success with vague ideas of social equality, setting for himself the aim of becoming one of the just tycoons—which, to be sure, was easier said than done. In 1901, Carnegie founded the United States Steel Corporation, the first company in the world to reach a market capitalization exceeding a billion dollars. In the 1880s, he began donating large amounts to charitable causes and founded libraries, scientific institutes, schools, laboratories, universities, and the like. His contemporaries described him as anxious to ensure that nobody forgot who the donor was, joking that he would happily lend $100 million to Greece as long as the Acropolis was renamed after him. Pacifism was one of the key features of Carnegie’s worldview. By the end of the nineteenth century, he was providing material support to various American pacifist organizations, and in December 1910 he contributed ten million dollars to the establishment of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. The money was intended to help “the abolition of war, the foulest blot upon our civilization.”17 Carnegie’s death in 1919 left Americans with mixed feelings when it was ultimately revealed that despite having donated a large share of his vast wealth to charity, he had left his daughter only a few million dollars.18 *** In the early summer of 1913, the New York headquarters of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace realized that an investigation into the causes and nature of the armed conflict in the Balkans would be an excellent use for the newly established endowment. Apart from the Russo– 16

Joseph Wall, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 87. Carnegie, Autobiography, 286. 18 Burton Hendrick, The Life of Andrew Carnegie, vol. 2 (Garden City and New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1932), 337–42. 17

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Japanese War of 1904–05, the Balkan Wars were the new century’s first relatively significant conflicts. The International Relations and Education division, operating out of the Carnegie Endowment’s European Bureau in Paris, decided to assemble an international commission tasked with traveling as soon as possible to the Balkan countries and compiling an impartial report to inform the world of the facts about the two Balkan wars of 1912–13.19 Baron d’Estournelles de Constant, a French senator and president of the European Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was appointed president of the Commission of Inquiry and made responsible for selecting the mission’s participants, in liaison with the members of the European Bureau. Some of the invitees declined to take part for health or work reasons. The final membership of the commission was as follows: Austria was represented by Josef Redlich, a professor of public law at the University of Vienna; France by Justin Godart from Lyon, a lawyer and deputy in the French National Assembly; Germany by Walter Schücking, a law professor at the University of Marburg; and Great Britain by Francis Hirst, editor of the influential journal The Economist; and Dr. Henry Brailsford, an eminent journalist and expert on Balkan problems. Russia and the United States were respectively represented by Pavel Milyukov, the leader of Russia’s Constitutional Democratic Party, and Samuel Dutton, a law professor at New York’s Columbia University.20 Hirst, the well-known French Orientalist Victor Bérard, and the French sociologist Jean Brune were brought on as advisers regarding the commission’s activities, rather than full participants in the inquiry.21 Although the Carnegie Endowment reimbursed their travel expenses, the members of the commission were not paid for their work. Almost all the participants were known pacifists, which was why d’Estournelles de Constant chose them in the first place. As one of the initiators of the international peace movement, he had attended both Hague Peace Conferences (1899 and 1907), and his views matched those of Andrew Carnegie, also an assiduous adherent of pacifism. Some of the commission members had already spent years in the Balkans and were conversant with the nationality problems there. The most prominent and erudite of them was Pavel N. Milyukov,22 author of a series

19

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Year Book for 1913–1914 (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, undated), 76. 20 Ibidem, 77. 21 Columbia University Libraries, New York, Archives of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division for Intercourse and Education (hereinafter: ACEIP), II D-1914, 1218. 22 For more about Pavel N. Milyukov, see the article by Thomas Bohn in this issue.

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of articles on Macedonia in Vestnik Evropy (European Herald) in the late nineteenth century and the creator of three influential ethnographic maps of Macedonia.23 Brailsford had fought in the Cretan Revolt as a young man and in 1905 published Macedonia, a book based on his extensive travels through the area shortly after the suppression of the Ilinden– Preobrazhenie Uprising. And Bérard had already written over ten monographs on aspects of Hellenism. The commission was purposely composed of citizens of the great powers of Europe in order to counter any accusations that it represented only the views of a single military or political adversarial bloc. D’Estournelles de Constant remained in Paris to coordinate proceedings. Godart was regarded as his (unofficial) deputy in the Balkans. The lion’s share of the work was assigned to Brailsford and Milyukov, who knew Balkan languages and could therefore talk directly to interviewees, without interpreters.24 On August 13, 1913, most of the commission’s members met in Paris to plan the details of the mission.25 Their names were immediately reported in the Bulgarian press. The newspaper Mir (World) noted sadly that this was “Bulgaria’s first success in all these severe trials.”26 In fact, initial attempts had already been made to impartially verify the truth behind the accusations against Bulgaria. Irish correspondent J. Bourchier had interviewed refugees gathered in Rila Monastery. He wanted to develop an accurate picture of what had occurred, but for years he had already had a very clear idea of the sort of conflict that might break out in the Balkans, so he was hardly surprised.27 The commission left Paris on August 21 and, after a few meetings in Vienna, continued their journey to Serbia.28 The atmosphere in the victorious states of Serbia and Greece proved a considerable impediment to the commissioners’ work. Allowing the commission to enter their territory was inconceivable, tantamount to admitting that the accusations against Bulgaria were groundless. At the same time, the outside world could only interpret the countries’ barring entry to the commission as an admission of guilt. Thus, the only remaining option was also the simplest: the inquiry was rejected on the pretext that the commission’s members were not

23

Pavel N. Miljukov, Tri etnografičeskie karty Makedonii s tekstom (St. Petersburg, 1903). 24 P. N. Miljukov, Vospominanija (1859–1917), vol. 2 (New York: Izdatel’stvo im. Cediova, 1955), 131. 25 ACEIP, II D-1914, 1141. 26 Mir, August 3/16, 1913, No. 3962. 27 Mir, August 9/22, 1933, No. 3966. 28 ACEIP, II D-1914, 1142.

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impartial—that is, the participants were condemned, not the idea of the inquiry. Accordingly, even before they had set foot on Serbian soil, Milyukov was accused of being anti-Serbian, Brailsford was said to be antiGreek, and d’Estournelles de Constant was alleged to have a pro-Bulgarian stance. In his introduction to the Report of the International Commission, d’Estournelles de Constant remarked ironically that Godart and Dutton alone were not censured, possibly because they had not previously had anything to do with the Balkans. On August 26, the Commission of Inquiry reached Belgrade, where the Serbian government barely concealed its hostility. It was especially irked by the presence of Milyukov, whom Belgrade had regarded as an enemy of the Serbian cause ever since his expeditions through Macedonia in the late nineteenth century and the articles he had published on the country in Vestnik Evropy.29 Although the Serbian ambassador in Paris had been briefed about the commission’s intentions, Belgrade pretended it had not been notified. Prime Minister Pašić refused to receive the delegates, implying he was too busy.30 Meanwhile, the ongoing state of war served as a pretext for not permitting the commissioners to travel to VardarMacedonia. Serbian politicians’ sole helpful contribution was to allow the commission to continue to Thessaloniki.31 The commission met with even greater hostility from some of the Serbian politicians and journalists who were still caught up in the tumult of the recent victories on the battlefields. In Belgrade, students staged a demonstration against Milyukov at Café Moscow (incorrectly referred to in Milyukov’s memoirs as “Cafe Russia”). Given this state of affairs, the commissioners could do nothing but leave for Thessaloniki immediately. Professor Schücking, the German member of the commission, had been delayed for personal reasons but eventually also made it to Belgrade. He spent a few days in the Serbian capital before being hoodwinked by the authorities, who told him that the commission had abandoned its mission and been disbanded. Schücking therefore returned to Vienna. By the time he finally learned the truth, it was too late to join the others.32 On September 7, the Serbian government set out its opinion in an official press release, claiming that it would not reject an impartial inquiry and that it had accused the Bulgarians of committing atrocities before the

29

Stoyan Germanov, “Makedonija i Odrinska Trakija v pătnite beležki na ruski učeni i korespondenti (kraja na XIX—načalo na XX. v.),” Istoričeski pregled 44, no. 4 (1988): 67–68. 30 Mir, 7/30 August 1913, No. 3973; Svobodno Mnenie, September 1/14, 1913; Narodni prava September 5/18, 1913, No. 146. 31 Mir, August 15/28, 1913, No. 3972. 32 Carnegie Endowment, Year Book for 1913–1914, 77.

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whole world. But, it added, since the commission included an enemy of Serbia, its conclusions could not be considered unbiased.33 The crude behavior of the Serbian government and public aroused doubt and fear in the usually anti-Bulgarian element of the Russian press that normally supported the Serbian “mission” on the Balkan Peninsula. Birževie vedomosti (Stock Market News) concluded that even when taking Milyukov’s partiality into account, Serbia’s conduct should at least be regarded as “unethical.” The newspaper Den (The Day) commented that the war had taken Serbia’s rulers down the road to “complete cultural barbarism.”34 On September 1, the commission reached Thessaloniki (Solun/Selânik). In the first few days, it worked unhindered by the Greek authorities, who apparently had not yet received their instructions from Athens. The Bulgarian colony in the city deluged Milyukov with eye-witness accounts of allied armies’ behavior during the Balkan Wars. The sharpest protests were reserved for the Belgrade government’s attempts to “Serbianize” VardarMacedonia by driving out the entire Bulgarian intelligentsia.35 Brailsford and Miljukov also met with representatives of the Socialist Federation of Thessaloniki. One of them, Dimitar Vlahov, mentioned in his memoirs, written almost four decades later, that the two commissioners had been sympathetic to the federation’s objective, namely an autonomous Macedonia.36 Regardless of Vlahov’s later assessment, shaped by his subsequent political development, it was clear that the delegates could see at first hand the problems prevailing in the areas recently liberated from Turkish rule and united with Greece. In Thessaloniki, Milyukov and Brailsford divided the work between themselves: the latter addressed Greco–Turkish relations, while the former Bulgaro–Serbian relations. They did not start a moment too soon, for just four days later, Thessaloniki’s Greek governor ordered them to leave the city. This time it was Brailsford who was declared hostile, despite having taken up arms in the liberation of Crete in 1897. Athens was unwilling to forgive him for emphasizing the close collaboration between Greek irregulars (andartoi) and the Turkish rulers in his book about the battles for Macedonia.37 The Greek government quickly announced that it would not recognize the results of the inquiry, regardless

33

D’Estournelles de Constant, “Introduction,” in Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and the Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914), 10. 34 Reč, August 14, 15, 16/27, 28, 29, 1913. 35 Miljukov, Vospominanija, 132. 36 D. V. Vlahov, Memoari (Skopje: NIP “Nova Makedonija”, 1970), 183ff. 37 Miljukov, Vospominanija, 134.

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of the outcome, as the bodies had already been buried and the witnesses were scattered all over the world.38 This premature rejection spoke volumes, since no one could have realistically predicted the commission’s conclusions. Under these circumstances, splitting up was the best option for the commissioners. The US representative Dutton visited Serres, Drama, Kavala, and Doxato. Brailsford managed to evade the watchful eye of the Greek authorities and went to Kilkis, which he had known since the days of the Ilinden Uprising. Godart traveled to Sofia; Milyukov, to Athens.39 The Serbian and Greek authorities’ suspicions were not completely unjustified. For example, it is striking that the introduction to the report describes the commission’s detours and vicissitudes in Greece and Serbia in detail, yet does not refer to Bulgaria. Perhaps the authors feared that mention of the cordial reception in Sofia might foster doubts about their objectivity.40 While the campaign against Milyukov in Athens continued, he decided to go to East Thrace, which the Ottoman Army had recaptured during the Second Balkan War. To his surprise, he was comparatively well received in Istanbul by the then Minister of the Interior Talât Bey, who even lent him a car and an assistant so that he could travel wherever he wanted. Milyukov’s main assignment was to determine whether the reports of “Bulgarian crimes” during the seizure of Adrianople were true—a question raised by the popular pro-Turkish French writer Pierre Loti, who during the war had worked entirely in the service of Turkish propaganda. It turned out that many exaggerated witness statements had come from a single Greek source that failed to mention that the city’s Greek population had also participated in looting and acts of violence.41 Milyukov then continued his journey through East Thrace. The Serbian authorities’ refusal to cooperate meant that none of the commissioners managed to reach the Albanian settlements that had once again been ignored by Europe.42 On September 13, most of the commission reached Sofia, where both the public and the government welcomed them with open arms.43 Milyukov joined them two days later, after spending a few days in Turkey. This was his third visit to Bulgaria since the beginning of the war. At several railway 38

Mir, August 20/September 2, No. 3976; Reč August 19/September 1, 1913. Recent research on the work of the Carnegie Commission in Greece (see the chapter by Adamantios Skordos in this volume) shows that Godart traveled to Athens while Milyukov, who was unpopular in Greece, went via Thrace to Constantinople (editor’s note). 40 D’Estournelles de Constant, “Introduction,” Report of the International Commission, 11. 41 Miljukov, Vospominanija, 136f. 42 Mir, no. 4020. 43 Mir, September 1/14, No. 3988; Narodni prava September 14/27, 1913, No. 154. 39

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stations on his way to Sofia from the Turkish–Bulgarian border, he was welcomed with ceremonial speeches by local delegations. As he wrote in his memoirs, he found this “particularly touching, but also exhausting.”44 By early summer 1913, the growing realization that war might break out between the former allies compelled some public figures in Bulgaria to seek ways to convincingly disprove the accusations against their compatriots to their European audience. Atanas Šopov, a long-time diplomat and representative of Bulgaria in various consulates in the European part of Turkey, proposed Dr. Nikola Genadiev as the new minister of foreign affairs, considering him a suitable and extraordinarily ambitious politician. Compared to the policy of renouncing propaganda hitherto pursued in Bulgaria, their plan was morally suspect, for it entailed a massive propaganda campaign in Europe. The plan was foiled by the Second Balkan War, although at Genadiev’s urging (according to his brother Pavel) the Council of Ministers still resolved to provide a million lev from its extraordinary budget. Much of the money went toward accommodation for refugees; the rest funded “manifestly improper goals and requirements.” Nevertheless, significant sums were spent to dispatch Bulgarian propagandists to Europe and ensure good working conditions for the Carnegie Commission.45 “Good working conditions” did not by any means mean bribes, as the delegates belonged to a liberal generation, already dying out in Europe, that argued and fought for a fairer world. Instead, the quickly depleted funds were used to transport refugees to be interviewed by the commission members. In this respect, a key role was played by Professor Ljubomir Miletič, who had evidently been instructed by the government to ensure the commission’s wishes were fulfilled. The commission members planned to remain in Bulgaria until September 21, when they would return to Paris to prepare their report.46 They had conducted the main part of their inquiry in Sofia, to which numerous refugees had journeyed. The government had also provided Godart and Brailsford with a car to travel to Samokov and Dupnica and interview refugees there.47 According to the newspaper Mir, they managed to question only about 200 people in Samokov: escaped prisoners of war, teachers, and other refugees from Macedonia.48 They also investigated the conditions of Turkish POWs in Bulgaria.

44

Miljukov, Vospominanija, 137. CDIA, Fond 40, file. 1, doc. 48, 238–46. 46 Mir, September 3/16, 1913, No. 3992. 47 Mir, September 2/15, 1913, No. 3989; Narodni prava, September 8/21, 1913, No. 149. 48 Mir, September 6/19, 1913, No. 3993; Narodni prava, September 7/20, 1913, No. 148. 45

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Godart was the first to return to Paris. Before his departure, he paid a visit to Minister of National Education Ž. Bakalov in an attempt to dispel Bulgarians’ negative impressions of his publications in the French press. As the truth slowly came to light, Godart claimed, French newspapers would change their attitude to the Bulgarians.49 This statement, which may have been an honest private conviction, suited the general mood. On September 22, the rest of the Commission also departed.50 While in Sofia, Milyukov issued a series of public statements. For example, after meeting Dr. N. Genadiev, he declared in an interview with the Wiener Reichspost that he had collected ample credible material to be carefully studied in Paris and then distributed as widely as possible. According to Milyukov, the Peace of Bucharest was not “merely an injustice against Bulgaria, but also a great misfortune for the Balkan Peninsula.”51 After a brief stay in Paris, Milyukov returned to St. Petersburg on October 10 to write his part of the report.52 The commission’s activities officially ended on September 28, 1913. They had lasted just over five weeks.53 Obviously that was not nearly enough time to thoroughly document the background or the course of the armed conflict in the Balkans, so it proved helpful that two of its members had long been familiar with the complex problems and areas of conflict there. The British press’s attentive coverage of the commission’s work was owed above all to the diligence of James David Bourchier, who had reported regularly on the events.54 Bourchier evidently added the inquiry’s initial findings to his own information, impressions and knowledge in compiling a detailed article for the Times entitled “The Second Balkan War,” which objectively analyzed the reasons for the war and its course as well as the moral and ethical conduct of the warring parties.55 *** Toward the end of February 1914, news that the commission’s report was being prepared for publication filtered through to the Bulgarian press.56 49

Narodni prava, September 6/19, 1913, No. 47; September 7/20, 1913, No. 148. Mir, September 9/22, 1913, No. 3966 and September 10/23, 1913, No. 3997; Narodni prava, September 8/21, 1913, No. 149. 51 Mir, September 15/28, 1913, No. 4002; Narodni prava, September 5/18, 1913, No. 146. 52 Reč, September 27/October 10, 1913. 53 ACEIP, II D-1914, 1141. 54 The Times, July 21, 1913; May 18, 1914. 55 The Times, October 28, 1913. 56 Mir, March 24/April 6, 1914, No. 4180; L’Écho de Bulgarie, May 6/19, 1914, No. 250; Volja, February 12/25, 1914. 50

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Nowhere was it more eagerly anticipated than in Sofia. Initial excerpts from a report published in the French newspaper Le Matin immediately found their way onto the front pages of the Bulgarian daily press.57 Like the members of the commission, Carnegie gained name recognition in Bulgaria. A short biography of the billionaire appeared in Svobodno Mnenie (Free opinion), a newly founded journal oriented politically toward the Triple Entente states, with which the United States was also on close terms.58 Carnegie’s new book on public morality would have received scant attention, had it not received favorable reviews in the press. One reviewer concluded that it would open up “new world views, new horizons, new ideals.”59 On January 20, 1914, Sofia was the site of a gathering of representatives of Bulgaria’s “cultural institutions and cultural associations.” Exactly what organizations were covered by this term is unclear. At any rate, they sent the American billionaire a telegram claiming that: “In Bulgaria, we can hardly wait to welcome you, the protector and promoter of world peace, so that this difficult but noble goal can be achieved. The Bulgarian people calmly await the result of the inquiry. It wants just one thing—for the truth to come out.”60 Evidently, the “calmness” exhibited by the Bulgarian intelligentsia, if not the Bulgarian people, was due to the conviction that Bulgaria had nothing to be ashamed of regarding its conduct in the Balkan Wars, and that in any case the truth, whatever it was, could not possibly be worse than the lies heaped upon the Bulgarians. Delays in printing the inquiry’s report led to mounting dissatisfaction. H. Wallis, an expert on Bulgaria, lamented this sluggish publication process in the magazine Near East, expressing fears that the commission’s findings would not receive the public attention they deserved.61 Yet, the discontent over this delay was ultimately groundless. Only a few people were aware of difficulties in writing and printing the report. Not all the members of the commission had traveled to the Balkans, but they were all involved in analyzing the collected materials. Brailsford, Godart, and Dutton each wrote a chapter for the final version; Milyukov drafted its other four chapters.62 It was arduous to coordinate the work of four authors living several thousand kilometers apart and difficult to find printers willing to produce maps as supplements to the report. But the greatest share of time and effort was spent on lengthy corrections to the manuscript, which

57

Mir, May 9/22, 1914, No. 4222; Preporec, May 17/30, 1914, No. 110. K. Kračunov, “Karnegi,” Svobodno Mnenie 13 (1914): 208ff. 59 Mir, May 15/28, 1914, No. 4227. 60 Kračunov, “Karnegi,” 208–10. 61 Volja, August 16/29, 1914, No. 466. 62 Miljukov, Vospominanija, 139. 58

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contained a multitude of completely contradictory transcriptions of largely unknown names of geographical regions in the Balkans. This probably explains the reaction of the responsible editor at a presentation in Washington, who cried out in a voice dripping with relief: “At exactly four o’clock, we finished reading the last line of the galley proofs of the ‘Balkan Report.’ We thank the Lord for this.”63 The first attempts to discredit the report began before it was even printed. The Greek military attaché in Washington circulated a booklet, written back in the summer of 1913 by Greek professors in US political circles that inveighed against “Bulgarian atrocities.” In an interview, the attaché tried to cast aspersions on both the professional and moral conscientiousness of the report’s authors. Meanwhile, Belgrade said it was prepared to receive a genuine international commission, on condition that its composition be coordinated with the Serbian government. At last, the Carnegie Commission’s report came out in print in early July 1914, just a few days after the assassination in Sarajevo. The book contained 496 pages of text, five engravings, and eight maps. In Sofia, it was declared that the report would be translated into Bulgarian and published in a series of individual booklets.64 The first issues went on sale before 4 July.65 The book’s lengthy introduction was written by the commission’s president, d’Estournelles de Constant, whose defensive tone created a curious first impression. From the outset, he tried to refute all potential accusations. At first, he focused on the nature of the organization that had commissioned the international inquiry, emphasizing that the pacifism that had inspired the Carnegie Endowment was no paper tiger, for despite preferring to resolve conflicts through negotiation or settlements, it still respected the nations’ right to fight for their freedom. Second, he addressed possible doubts about the inquiry’s usefulness, seeming to fan hopes about the possible impact of the commission’s findings and posit from the start that the members of the commission “would give full satisfaction to none, and would displease everyone more or less.”66 Further, he argued against allegations that individual members of the commission were biased against certain nations. After listing the previous achievements of Milyukov, Brailsford, and Godart, he also mentioned his own activities to protect the Balkan nations. Finally, throughout the introduction (and later in the report itself), it was emphasized that the Balkan nations, as “young clients of civilization,” 63

ACEIP, II D-1914, 1012. Mir, June 23/July 6, 1914, No. 4264. 65 Preporec, June 21/July 4, 1914, No. 139. 66 D’Estournelles de Constant, “Introduction,” Report of the International Commission, 5. 64

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were deliberately treated leniently. The members of the commission, and especially their venerable president, seemed unable to believe that such terrible things could occur in civilized Europe—a conviction that would soon be overturned by reality. Though the report was written from an eminently objective position, Serbian and Greek propaganda seems to have left its mark on the introduction. For example, d’Estournelles de Constant viewed the Second Balkan War as a war of plunder for all those concerned without discrimination, even though it was evident from the sources set out in the report that it had been sparked by Bulgaria’s occupation and annexation of areas with a predominantly Bulgarian population. The authors of the final version let their excessive scholarliness get the better of them, although they probably did so deliberately. The documents in the appendix, official letters, and interviews with refugees, which took up more than half of the printed version, were verbose and very emotional. Determined to rise above their passions, the members of the commission deliberately played down the importance of their own text. The report explained in detail the events leading up to the conflict in the Balkans as well as the ambitions of the respective national bourgeoisie in the countries concerned. Professor Milyukov, who was well acquainted with the historical and political background of the Balkans, stressed that until the 1870s, no one in Serbia or Greece had seriously doubted that Macedonia was largely populated by Bulgarians. Even the Slavs in the region had little doubt about this. As Milyukov stated: “[A]t the close of the nineteenth century the overwhelming majority of the Slav population of Macedonia was sending its children to the exarchist Bulgarian school.”67 The report also included an analysis of the national liberation movement in Macedonia, portraying it as deeply rooted in the local Bulgarian population. Milyukov closely observed the conflict between the former allies, noting that continuing combat operations placed huge strain on all sides. In his opinion, the Peace of Bucharest was not viable and did not reflect the interests of the nations in the Balkan countries, least of all the interests of the population of Macedonia. The report drew particular attention to the nature of warfare, examining as closely as possible the conduct of regular and irregular troops toward the civilian population, attempts to violently alter the ethnographic situation in contested areas, the conditions of prisoners of war, and the economic repercussions of warfare. The commission came to the harsh conclusion that all the warring parties lacked humanity, a condition it attributed to the nature of the war itself (which had evolved into a transnational conflict) rather than any inherent qualities of the Balkan peoples. 67

Ibidem, 27.

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The report put many of the exaggerations spread during Bulgaria’s period of isolation into perspective. The members of the commission soberly recalled the Greek bishops of Dojran and Kavala as well as the director of the Orient Bank in Serres, who had all been portrayed by Greek propaganda as victims of violence but turned out to be alive and healthy. This pattern was repeated in connection with other incidents for which the Bulgarians were allegedly responsible. As the report concluded: “In none of these [five considerable Greco–Turkish towns] did the Bulgarians burn and massacre, though some acts of violence occurred. The wrong they did leaves a sinister blot upon their record, but it must be viewed in its just proportions.”68 In fact, the commission members were firmly convinced that what had triggered the cycle of violence must have been the Greeks’ burning down of Kilkis rather than the events in Sidirokastró (Demir Hisar), which according to Greek propaganda had been started by the Bulgarians. They recalled that on September 6, long after the Peace of Bucharest, Bulgarian refugees in Kilkis were still kept like prisoners in one of the few buildings to have survived in the town. If a balance of guilt could be applied, the authors emphasized, it was the Bulgarians who had behaved the best toward their enemies by making every effort to spare foreign lives and complying with human rights. The Carnegie Commission’s report was received with great interest all over the world, despite the assassination in Sarajevo—or possibly because of it. Thirteen thousand copies were printed in English, 10,000 of which were dispatched to addresses on a carefully selected list. The French edition of 5,000 copies was circulated by the Carnegie Endowment’s Paris Bureau. The report was also given to all the employees of the US Mission to European Turkey. A hundred were even sent to Japan. Vigorous American-style promotion also helped. While the report was still being prepared, Professor Théodore Ruyssen drafted a twenty-page summary of the commission’s findings for the main news agencies. Some published it in its entirety; others printed extracts containing the most important passages.69 The American Press Association also produced a synopsis of 1,500 words from the advance proofs and sent it to all major American newspapers. A total of 121 editors of periodicals all over the world received letters about the report and copies of it. According to figures published by the Carnegie Endowment, 333 reviews of the report were published in just six European countries and the United States: 216 in the USA, 92 in France, 13 in Germany, 5 each in Britain and Italy, and 1 each in Portugal and 68 69

Ibidem, 95. ACEIP, II E-1915, 2181.

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Denmark.70 In fact, the number of articles and publications is likely to have been higher, as only the American press was completely monitored. Generally speaking, the commission’s work received a positive assessment across the board. As the French newspaper La République put it: “There is no reason that leads us to believe that members of the commission have been guided by certain sympathies toward a particular nation rather than any other. What they have proved above all is the fact that no one is completely innocent.”71 Such a conclusion may not sound surprising nowadays, but on the eve of World War I, when the bourgeoisie was still assuring itself of its own morality and war was still considered an honorable business, it was unprecedented. The most benevolent reaction came from Sofia. Pastor Dimităr Furnadžiev wrote that Bulgaria had been acquitted in the commission’s “judgment.”72 This opinion was shared by most of the newspapers in the capital, where articles praising the report mushroomed.73 This interpretation was borne out by the indignant reactions of the Greek and Serbian authorities.74 Meanwhile, rumors spread in Sofia that the Serbian government had recruited British and French publicists to come to Belgrade and expose the commission’s conclusions as false. In addition, Greek envoys in Europe were said to be doing all they could to buy up copies of the report just to destroy them.75 These allegations were unfounded, however, the report was distributed free of charge. In Romania, complaints were aired that the report did not discuss the “civilizing role” of that country’s intervention in the Second Balkan War.76 Interestingly, the Bulgarian press did not mention the reactions in Istanbul. Either they were muted, or the Bulgarians were loath to offend their one remaining possible ally. In fact, the truth about the conduct of Bulgarian troops was not pretty. This was also reflected in the government newspaper Volja: We are not flattered by the conclusions [of the Carnegie Commission]; nor can we rejoice in the fact that we have been ascribed only the smallest share of the injustice committed, because a nation would not be worthy of respect if it were not ashamed of its proven lawlessness, regardless of its extent.77 70

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Year Book for 1915 (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1915). 71 Ibidem, 75. 72 Mir, May 23/June 6, 1914, No. 4234. 73 Svobodno Mnenie, 38 (1914). 74 Preporec, May 21/June 3, 1914, No. 3; Volja, May 20/June 2, 1914, No. 392 and May 31/June 13, 1914, No. 401. 75 Preporec, June 3/16, 1914, No. 123; Volja, July 2/15, 1914, No. 428. 76 Preporec, July 1/14, 1914, No. 147. 77 Volja, May 20/June 2, 1914, No. 392.

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Nevertheless, such sober assessments were few and far between. To journalists and not infrequently also politicians, depicting acts of violence committed in the Balkans as retaliatory to previous such acts seemed a good way to improve Bulgaria’s moral credibility. The Bulgarians therefore tried to maximize the benefit of the Carnegie inquiry’s findings. Radoslavov asked his Paris ambassador Stančov to send him 500 copies of the report in French. The president of the Franco-Bulgarian Society in Paris requested another 200 copies. Meanwhile, the consul in Istanbul insisted on about twenty copies, but received only two.78 The success of the book prompted its authors to consider publishing a second edition, an idea that was discussed in the autumn and winter of 1914–15. Further, having come to be regarded as a shining example, the Balkan Report inspired a similar international investigation into German war crimes in Belgium in autumn 1914 that was led by the respected diplomat, scholar, and socialite Viscount James Bryce.79 Ultimately, the planned second edition was scuttled when a fire at the printing works destroyed the typesetting. Resetting the entire report would have made the new edition very expensive.80 In 1915, the Macedonian (Bulgarian) People’s League of America held talks with the Carnegie Endowment about printing a Bulgarian translation of the report so that it could be distributed among the thousands of Bulgarian immigrants in North America. The question was whether the report should be reissued in its entirety, including the unpalatable aspects of Bulgaria’s military conduct. The Carnegie Endowment agreed to the proposal, which was also supported by Stefan Panaretov, the Bulgarian minister plenipotentiary in Washington. In the end, though, the émigré organizations proved unequal to the task, and only one small part was translated.81 *** The Carnegie Commission’s report, born of the conviction that human nature can be changed by facing up to oppressive facts, was one of the great deeds of early twentieth-century pacifism. Sometimes the pacifist activists were consistent; sometimes their deeds corresponded to ideas. In a sense, the report was an expression of the era’s naivety. For example, in his introduction, d’Estournelles de Constant asserted:

78

CDIA, fond 176, file. 2, doc. 1418, sheet 66: “Radoslavov—Stančov”; sheet 75, June 25, 1914: “Stančov—Radoslavov”; doc. 1403, sheet 171, August 9/22, 1914. 79 T. Wilson, “Lord Bryce’s Investigation into Alleged German Atrocities in Belgium, 1914–1915,” Journal of Contemporary History 14, no. 3 (1979): 369–83. 80 ACEIP, II E-1915, 2180. 81 ACEIP, II E-1915, 2143.

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What finally succeeds in bringing armed peace into disrepute, is that today the Great Powers are manifestly unwilling to make war. Each one of them, Germany, England, France and the United States, to name a few, has discovered the obvious truth that the richest country has the most to lose by war, and each country wishes for peace above all things.82

These words did not see the light of day until a few weeks before the outbreak of the First World War. Regardless, no one could seriously question the inquiry’s findings. They were subsequently referred to by all Bulgarian governments whenever relations in the Balkans entered a critical phase. The inquiry’s report is still among the main references cited in any book dealing with the problems in the Balkans in the early twentieth century. In this sense, the publication by Milyukov, Brailsford, Godart, Dutton, and d’Estournelles de Constant has become timeless. In late summer 1919, the idea of drawing on the experience of the Carnegie Commission for another expedition arose in correspondence between Milyukov and Brailsford, who proposed an international commission to investigate complaints about the latest “atrocities in the Balkans.” They believed it should be composed of members of the “old” commission as well as representatives of the Balkan Committee in London. Milyukov, Brailsford, and Hirst, arranged to meet with Edward NoelBuxton83 for this purpose, but nothing came of the idea. Now that retribution was on the agenda, the truth had become relatively meaningless to the victorious powers.

82

D’Estournelles de Constant, “Introduction,” Report of the International Commission, 17. 83 McGill University, “Miljukov—Noel-Buxton,” The Noel-Buxton Papers, McGill University Papers, Box 7, August 28, 1919.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Doomed to Fail: The Carnegie Commission in Greece Adamantios Theodor Skordos

On August 27/September 9, 1913,1 the Greek-language Thessaloniki newspaper Makedonia ran a front-page article on Pavel Milyukov, the Russian member of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, established by the American philanthropic Carnegie Endowment. The item—a Greek translation of an article that had recently been published in the Serbian newspaper Pijemont2—bore the headline “Mr. Milyukov,” and its introductory commentary emphasized that Serbian public opinion was crucial to any adequate assessment by the commission.3 Like the original article in Pijemont, which had characterized Milyukov as an “unscrupulous lawyer of the Bulgarians”—a phrase also used in the Greek translation—the piece in Makedonia denounced him and Henry N. Brailsford, his British colleague on the Carnegie Commission, as “Bulgarian agents.”4 At that point in time, the international commission of inquiry into atrocities committed during the two Balkan Wars of 1912–13 had already left Serbia and Greece, having unleashed the same reaction of outrage, indignation, and dismissal in both countries. Not only were Greece and Serbia on the same side of the military battlefield in the Balkan Wars, but they were also aligned on the

1

The double dates refer to Greece’s rather recent conversion from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1924. The first date corresponds to the old Julian style; the second, to the Gregorian one that is valid today. 2 For the history of the commission’s origins, see Nadine Lange-Akhund, “Die Interventionspolitik der Großmächte in Mazedonien vor 1914,” in Der Erste Weltkrieg auf dem Balkan, ed. Jürgen Angelow (Berlin: Be.Bra Wissenschaft, 2011), 13–34, 27–30; Lange-Akhund, “The Two Carnegie Reports: From the Balkan Expedition of 1913 to the Albanian Trip of 1921; A comparative Approach,” Balkanologie: Revue d’études pluridisciplinaires 14, nos. 1–2 (2012). 3 “O k. Milioukov,” Makedonia, August 27, 1913, 1. 4 Ibidem.

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question of how best to defend themselves against the seemingly adversarial Carnegie mission. The goal of this article is to present, for the first time, the Greek position regarding the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars. The primary resources are mainly contemporary reports from the Greek press as well as relevant materials from the Austrian State Archives. While vying with Russia for influence in Southeastern Europe, the Austro-Hungarian double monarchy had cultivated a strong interest in the Balkan Wars.5 Correspondingly, its numerous ambassadors in the Balkan states and Istanbul reported copiously to Vienna, not only about military developments on the Macedonian battlefield and diplomatic efforts toward the pacification of the Balkan region, but also about relevant topics like the Carnegie expert commission and its local explorations of the humanitarian and economic repercussions of the Balkan Wars.

The Balkan Wars and “Ethnic Cleansings” Despite mutual recriminations and declarations of innocence, none of the nations involved in the Balkan Wars were blameless for the numerous violations committed against both combatants and noncombatants in the course of the conflict. As the final report of the Carnegie Commission stated in the spring of 1914, all of the warring parties were to a greater or lesser extent involved in widespread violations of international humanitarian law: “There is no clause in international law applicable to land war and to the treatment of the wounded which was not violated, to a greater or less extent, by all the belligerents.”6 The most recent scholarship has treated the violent events of the Balkan Wars as the beginning of a high point of ethno-political violence in Europe that was primarily characterized by the “new” phenomenon of “ethnic 5

See Mark Mazower, Der Balkan, 3. Edition (Berlin: Berliner Taschenbuch Verl., 2007 [2000]), 178f.; Konrad Clewing, “Staatensystem und innerstaatliches Agieren im multiethnischen Raum: Südosteuropa im langen 19. Jahrhundert,” in Geschichte Südosteuropas: Vom frühen Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Konrad Clewing and Oliver Jens Schmitt (Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2011), 432–553; Holm Sundhaussen, Geschichte Serbiens, 19.–21. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2007), 131f.; Katrin Boeckh, Von den Balkankriegen zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996), 22; James J. Sheehan, Kontinent der Gewalt: Europas langer Weg zum Frieden (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008), 78–81. 6 D’Estournelles de Constant, “Introduction,” in Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914), 13.

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cleansing,” in which warring parties pursuing the goal of ethnic homogeneity in a recently acquired territory expel “foreign” ethnic groups by means of threats and violence. Disregarding the stipulations of the Hague Convention of 1907, which contained regulations for protection of civilian populations and humane treatment of prisoners of war, the armies engaged in the Balkan Wars committed atrocities against each other and forced hundreds of thousands of civilians to leave their homes and communities to find safety in their respective “own” nation-state. The methods utilized to carry out this policy of ethnic cleansing—which were meant to force unwelcome populations to flee—included looting, rape, and massacres; systematic destruction of private, public, cultural, and religious property; and the burning of entire villages to the ground.7 The main perpetrators of this violent expulsion were irregular troops that had waged a relentless guerilla war against each other in Ottoman Macedonia since the end of the nineteenth century and thereby amassed considerable experience in terrorizing civilians.8 These forces inflicted horrific violence on noncombatants, even though the very first article of the Hague Convention designated “militias” and “voluntary corps” as combatant parties, thereby subjecting them to the laws and conventions of war in their activities.9 In the majority of cases in which force was used against civilians, these paramilitary units did not act unilaterally, but rather in coordination 7

See Philipp Ther, Die dunkle Seite der Nationalstaaten: “Ethnische Säuberungen” im modernen Europa (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 71–80; Marco Sigg, “Die Balkankriege 1912/1913: Bulgarische Kriegsvölkerrechtsverletzungen im Spiegel der europäischen Kriegsberichterstattung und des Carnegie-Berichts,” in Am Rande Europas? Der Balkan – Raum und Bevölkerung als Wirkungsfelder militärischer Gewalt, ed. Bernhard Chiari and Gerhard P. Groß (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009), 105–19; Mark Biondich, The Balkans: Revolution, War & Political Violence since 1878 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 75–84; Michael Schwartz, Ethnische “Säuberungen” in der Moderne (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2013), 298–302. 8 Sigg, “Die Balkankriege 1912/1913,” 107ff.; Holm Sundhaussen, “Wie ‘balkanisch’ waren die ‘Balkankriege’ des 20. Jahrhunderts?,” Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte 13 (2012): 3–24, 8–11; Dimitris Livanios, “‘Conquering the Souls’: Nationalism and Greek Guerrilla Warfare in Ottoman Macedonia, 1904–1908,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 23 (1999): 195–221; Mujeeb R. Khan, “The Ottoman Eastern Question and the Problematic Origins of Modern Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide, and Humanitarian Interventionism in Europe and the Middle East,” in The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 and the Treaty of Berlin, ed. M. Hakan Yavuz and Peter Sluglett (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2011), 98–122. 9 Haager Landkriegsordnung, “Ordnung der Gesetze und Gebräuche des Landkrieges,” in Völkerrecht: Textsammlung, 4th edition, ed. Christian Tomuschat (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2009), 446.

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with the commanders of regular troops and local authorities, or at least with their acquiescence.10 During the Balkan Wars, the consistent pursuit of ethnic homogeneity in disputed areas meant that the “extent of the refugee movements . . . as well as the number of civil victims was unprecedented.”11 During the First Balkan War, it was primarily the Muslim populations in Kosovo, Macedonia, and Thrace that were victimized by ethnic cleansing.12 After fleeing the areas taken by Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria, they were evacuated to Istanbul and Asia Minor. Despite this wave of refugees, more than 200,000 Muslims are estimated to have died from violence, hunger, or illness in the First Balkan War.13 The Second Balkan War began with Bulgaria’s attack on Serbian and Greek defense positions on June 29, 1913, and by August had ended in the aggressor’s defeat. Despite its short duration, it was even more consequential, in terms of human casualties, than the preceding conflict between the Balkan League and the Ottoman Empire. Now it was Christians in the disputed areas who became the targets of ethnically motivated forced migration. In the formally multicultural Thessaloniki, for example, only a small remnant of the Bulgarian community remained, and it was exposed to strong Hellenic assimilation pressure immediately after the Greek capture. The majority, in contrast, were either deported from the city on a Bulgarian steamer or arrested by Greek security forces.14 Bulgaria and Serbia also systematically implemented forced migration with each other and with the Greeks. It is noteworthy that the Christian Balkan states relied on local Turkish militias’ assistance to carry out ethnic cleansing. During the Second Balkan War, the Ottoman Empire also participated in atrocities perpetrated against civilians for 10

Benjamin Liebermann, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 62; Biondich, The Balkans, 80f.; Wolfgang Höpken, “‘Blockierte Zivilisierung’? Staatsbildung, Modernisierung und ethnische Gewalt auf dem Balkan (19./20. Jahrhundert),” Leviathan 25 (1997): 529f. 11 Ther, Die dunkle Seite der Nationalstaaten, 73. 12 Berna Pekesen, “Vertreibung und Abwanderung der Muslime vom Balkan,” Europäische Geschichte Online, http://ieg-ego.eu/de/threads/europa-unterwegs/ ethnische-zwangsmigration/berna-pekesen-vertreibung-der-muslime-vom-balkan, Feb. 4, 2011. 13 Ibidem, 71. In addition to committing violence against Muslims during the First Balkan War, the Serbian troops also destroyed numerous Albanian villages in Kosovo and Macedonia. Biondich, The Balkans, 80; Schwartz, Ethnische “Säuberungen,” 300. 14 Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430–1950 (London: Vintage, 2005), 298.

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purposes of ethnic cleansing. In particular, in Eastern Thrace the Ottoman recapture of Adrianople/Edirne led to the expulsion of Bulgarians from that region. Local ethnic Greeks supported the Ottomans by expelling the Bulgarians.15 According to Paul Mojzes, ethnic cleansings during the Balkan Wars were so excessive that they can be characterized as genocidal, applying the current UN definition of genocide as well as the relevant judgments of the international Yugoslav tribunals.16 Today, the final report of the Carnegie Commission—which, as mentioned, accused all the warring parties of having committed war crimes against civilians—represents the most important source on the violence that took place in the course of the Balkan Wars.

A Fierce Propaganda Battle The great international interest in the Balkan Wars and above all the overwhelming numbers of civilian casualties had led to a fierce propaganda battle even before the Carnegie Commission was called into being.17 The 15

Paul Mojzes, Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 25–40. 16 Ibidem, 27f. 17 So great was the outrage, outside the region, over the above-mentioned paramilitary units’ attacks on civilians and injured and captured soldiers in the regions of Macedonia and Thrace that there was mention of “Balkan atrocities.” Holm Sundhaussen points out the “waves of indignation” that the Balkan Wars triggered in the “international public,” especially given the great hopes—raised by the passage of the Hague Convention Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land in 1907—for a more civilized kind of warfare in the future. During the Balkan Wars, which took place only five years later, the belligerent parties violated that convention’s most important requirements, in particular those concerning the protection of civilian populations, the treatment of prisoners of war, and the use of military force in an occupied enemy territory. They did so even though they were all among the signatories to the agreement. See Sundhaussen, “Wie ‘balkanisch’ waren die ‘Balkankriege’?,” 6f.; Sundhaussen, “‘Wir haben nur Missverständnisse geklärt’: Die Krisenregion Balkan,” in Am Rande Europas? Der Balkan – Raum und Bevölkerung als Wirkungsfelder militärischer Gewalt, ed. Chiari and Groß, 36. On the international legal significance of the Hague convention on land warfare, see Stephan Hobe, Einführung in das Völkerrecht, 9th ed. (Cologne: Bӧhlau Verlag, 2008), 547–50. Moreover, there was broad consensus in Western Europe that the warfare in the Balkan countries was far from modern European standards and comparable with that of the Middle Ages. On the great international interest in the Balkan Wars, see the works of Florian Keisinger, Unzivilisierte Kriege im zivilisierten Europa? Die Balkankriege und die öffentliche Meinung in Deutschland, England und Irland, 1876–

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negative turn the Carnegie men’s mission took on Serbian and Greek territory must above all be viewed against the backdrop of the attempt by all parties involved in the war to simultaneously hold opponent(s) responsible for war crimes and reject all such accusations leveled against themselves. The main object of the belligerent states was to influence the great powers in favor of their own interests. This characterization derives from numerous reports, announcements, oral notes, and similar materials conveyed to the Viennese Foreign Ministry and its head of missions and embassies in the Balkans over the course of the Second Balkan War, which documented the misdeeds of the belligerents in detail. Serbs and Greeks, on one side, accused the Bulgarians of committing atrocities against prisoners of war and innocent civilians; meanwhile the Bulgarians leveled the same accusations against Serbia and Greece. The Ottomans, for their part, accused Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia of targeted expulsion of Muslims in the disputed territories.18 The respective belligerents’ campaigns were supported by non-official actors who sent letters of protest to the great powers in order to inform them about injustices in the disputed areas. For instance, in mid-July of 1913 the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople submitted a complaint to the Austro-Hungarian head of mission at Yeniköy regarding Bulgaria’s attacks on the “Orthodox population of Macedonia and

1913 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schӧningh, 2008); Keisinger, “‘Near East, near Western Question’: Die Balkankriege 1912/13 in der englischen und irischen Presse,” Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte 13 (2012): 25–48. See also Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, updated edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3–20; Dan Diner, Das Jahrhundert verstehen: Eine universalhistorische Deutung (Munich: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1999), 33, 199. 18 See for instance, the Austrian State Archive, Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Politisches Archiv (hereinafter HHStA, PA) XII, Box 438 (Türkei, Liasse XLV/15, Balkankrieg), “Königliche Serbische Gesandtschaft Wien, an das Kaiserliche und königliche Ministerium des Äußeren, Wien, den 8/21 Juli 1913”; Ibidem, “Ambassade Imperiale Ottomane, Note Verbale, Au Ministère Impérial at Royal des Affaires Entrangères, Vienne, le 17. Juillet 1913”; Ibid., “Politischer Gegenstand No. 46, Graf Tarnowski an Seine Excellenz den Hochgeborenen Herrn Leopold Grafen Berchtold, Notizen des Auswärtigen Amtes über griechische, serbische und türkische Grausamkeiten gegen Bulgaren, 11 Beilagen, Sofia, am 2. August 1913”; Ibidem, “Politischer Gegenstand 59-B, Graf Tarnowski, Publikation des bulgarischen Ministeriums des Äußern über griechische Gräueltaten: Faksimiles von Briefen und Photographien der Verletzten, Sofia, am 26. September 1913.” On the enormous propagandist efforts undertaken by the parties involved in the war to lay blame for war crimes on each other, see also Boeckh, Von den Balkankriegen zum Ersten Weltkrieg, 365–76.

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Thrace.”19 Several weeks later, it was the Bulgarian Catholic Bishop of Macedonia Monsignore Epiphan Scianov who complained to the great powers about the “violence of the Greek army toward the BulgarianCatholic element in Macedonia.”20 In the course of the Greek offense in mid-July of 1913, the participants in large-scale protests against “Bulgarian atrocities” in the recently “liberated” cities of Thessaloniki and Ioannina included representatives of Muslim, Jewish, and Serbian communities who wanted to express their solidarity with the Greek demonstrators. The Austrian head of mission of Thessaloniki, August Ritter von Kral, reported the following from the Macedonian metropolis on July 17, 1913: [On] Monday the 14th there was a protest meeting in Salonich. The designated meeting place was conveniently located in the open terrain next to the “White Tower” and between the city and the campaign. In the name of the local Muslimists, Mehmed Nuri Bey [a publicist] mentioned that all of these atrocities were carried out by the same Bulgarians who had boasted of having come into the country as liberators and civilizers. The Jewish speaker [Mr. Sam. Carasso] praised the liberal sense of the Greek administration in contrast to the aggressive Bulgarian oppression. Dušan De∑ko, the representative of the small local Serbian community, made the perhaps strongest accented condemnation, comparing the Bulgarians and others to the Huns, and closing with acclaim for the associated Greek and Serbian monarchs and the civilized population of Macedonia. Finally, a resolution expressing loathing was passed in which those assembled protested to the civilized world against the atrocities of “the Bulgarian people, naturally criminally inclined” and demanded in the name of justice and humanity that Bulgarian rule should not be tolerated where the Bulgarian nationality was in the minority, and demanded the creation of broad guarantees for the national, religious, and cultural existence for those minorities who remained within Bulgarian borders after the war.21

19

HHStA, PA XII, Box 438 (Türkei, Liasse XLV/15, Balkankrieg), “Markgraf Pallavicini, Vorlage einer Beschwerdeschrift des ökumenischen Patriarchates betreffend bulgarische Ausschreitungen gegen die orthodoxe Bevölkerung Mazedoniens und Thrakiens, Jeniköj, 18. Juli 1913.” 20 Ibidem, “Politischer Gegenstand No. 150, Generalkonsul Kral an Seine Excellenz den Hochgeborenen Herrn Leopold Grafen Berchtold, Eingabe des bulgarisch-katholischen Bischofs für Mazedonien an einige Großmächte (Klagen über griechische Grausamkeiten), Salonich, am 9. August 1913.” 21 Ibidem, “Politischer Gegenstand No. 127, Generalkonsul Kral an Seine Excellenz den Hochgeborenen Herrn Leopold Grafen Berchtold, Proteste gegen die bulgarischen Grausamkeiten in Salonich, Salonich, am 17. Juli 1913.” See also ibidem, “Politischer Gegenstand No. 32, Freiherr von Braun an Seine Excellenz den Hochgeborenen Herrn Leopold Grafen Berchtold, Wien, Proteste in Epirus, resp. Südalbanien gegen die bulgarischen Gräueltaten, Athen, den 18. Juli 1913”; and ibidem, “Politischer Gegenstand No. 57, Vizekonsul von Meichsner, Bericht

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In contrast to the Greeks’ later refusal to work with representatives of the Carnegie Endowment, Athens was quite interested in the investigation of war crimes during and immediately after the end of the Second Balkan War. However, this interest extended only to cases that involved the need to establish the facts of Bulgarian atrocities. In mid-July of 1913, for instance, King Constantine I of Greece suggested the great powers should establish an international commission to investigate Bulgarian war crimes in South-Central and Eastern Macedonia, in particular in the cities of Serres, Doxato, and Drama.22 These areas, which had been taken by the Bulgarian army in the First Balkan War, were now under Greek control. During their retreat from Southern Macedonia, the Bulgarians had, as the report of the Carnegie Commission also later documented, carried out numerous massacres and set fire to the three named cities.23 Among the great powers, only the French accepted the Greek suggestion to establish an international investigative commission. The French assembled a mission composed of the secretary of the French ambassador in Athens, J. de Poulpiquet de Halgonet, and a military officer named Lepidi.24 They visited the devastated areas and, according to the head of the Austrian embassy in Athens, Karl Freiherr von Braun, came to the conclusion that the atrocities identified by the Greek side “were undoubtedly systematically organized by the [Bulgarian] army, but the massacres still did not have the colossal scope initially claimed.” Meanwhile, the two French representatives estimated the material damages to be “unexpectedly large.”25 Milyukov would later question the rulefollowing character of this mission into question during his stay in Thessaloniki, which in turn was interpreted as proof of his anti-Greek, or “Bulgarophilic,” perspective. Also, Belgrade attempted to convince the great powers of its Bulgarian opponents’ convention-violating war actions by proposing an inspection of the scenes of Bulgarian war crimes. At the über eine Protestkundgebung gegen die bulgarischen Gräueltaten, Janina, am 19. Juli 1913.” 22 Ibidem, “Politischer Gegenstand, No. 133, Generalkonsul Kral an Seine Excellenz den Hochgeborenen Herrn Leopold Grafen Berchtold, Französische Mission zur Untersuchung der bulgarischen Gräueltaten in Serres und Doxat, Salonich, am 24. Juli 1913.” 23 Report of the International Commission, 78–92. 24 HHStA, PA XII, Box 438 (Türkei, Liasse XLV/15, Balkankrieg), “Politischer Gegenstand, No. 133, Generalkonsul Kral an Seine Excellenz den Hochgeborenen Herrn Leopold Grafen Berchtold, Französische Mission zur Untersuchung der bulgarischen Gräueltaten in Serres und Doxat, Salonich, am 24. Juli 1913.” 25 Ibidem, “Politischer Gegenstand, No. 609, Telegramm, Baron Braun, 3. August 1913, Chiffre.”

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end of July 1913, the Austrian consul in Skopje, Dr. von Heimroth, reported to Vienna that he and his colleagues from Italy, England, France, and Russia had been invited to “personally convince themselves of the atrocities and mutilation committed by the Bulgarians.” In contrast to the other consuls, who accepted the invitation, the representatives of AustriaHungary and Italy stayed away from the macabre viewing. Von Heimroth explained this decision as follows: I do not want to deny that I in no way consider my personal impression unlikely that Bulgarian irregulars carried out atrocities, just as the Serbian Komitadjis did in the Albanian areas or even here. But claiming that officially . . . could have had the tinge of the partisan in the favor of the Serbs, which could have correctly been interpreted by the Bulgarians as violation of neutrality. In order to avoid this, that is why I preferred to decline the invitation without naming reasons.26

Bulgaria could hardly remain silent in this battle of accusations. Nearly simultaneously with the Greek king’s suggestion, Sofia launched an initiative to establish an international commission to investigate atrocities committed by Serbs, Greeks, and Turks. Like their opponents, the Bulgarians also submitted their request to the great powers, who were extremely reserved in the matter, largely for fear of creating a precedence case. In a consultation in Vienna, the British ambassador, Sir Fairfax Cartwright, informed the Austrian foreign minister, Leopold Graf Berchtold, about the reservations of Cartwright’s state secretary, Sir Edward Grey, regarding the Bulgarian suggestion: “If such a commission would assemble for the excesses committed by the Bulgarians, [then there must also be] a similar commission for the other atrocities committed by the Serbs, Greeks, and other warring parties.”27 Greek diplomats also encouraged the investigation of war crimes at the Bucharest peace conference in August 1913. It was there that the Greek prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, demanded that an international investigation be carried out to document the violations of war conventions committed during the Balkan Wars. In light of the Greeks’ later criticism that the Carnegie mission had been meaningless because of the late point at which it had taken up its task, it is worth mentioning that Venizelos did not propose a date by which the investigation he demanded should begin. On 26

HHStA, PA XII, Box 438 (Türkei, Liasse XLV/15, Balkankrieg), “Dr. von Heimroth an Seine Excellenz den Hochgeborenen Herrn Leopold Grafen Berchtold, Serbisches Verlangen nach Zeugenschaft des Konsularkorps, Üsküb, den 24. Juli 1913.” 27 Ibidem, Vienna, July 29, 1913, Note from the Austrian Foreign Minister, Leopold Graf Berchtold.

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the contrary, he even emphasized that from his perspective, when it was carried out was non-essential—the decisive issue was whether it would happen at all.28 The Greeks generally presented themselves as self-assured and confident of victory over the Bulgarians when it came to these matters, until the Carnegie Commission’s arrival in the Balkans. As the Thessaloniki mission head von Kral reported on July 17, 1913, “the Greeks aimed to derive political capital out of the terrible news about the crimes carried out on the non-Bulgarian population by the retreating Bulgarians.” Athens would not, the Austrian diplomat continued, forgo any opportunity to “thoroughly impress these atrocities on Europe and use the opening opinion of the entire civilized world as much as possible against the [Bulgarian] perpetrators.”29 The Carnegie Report confirms the veracity of this observation. The following is noted in the introduction to the commission report regarding the Bulgarian offensives: The charges brought by the Greeks against the Bulgarians are already painfully familiar to every newspaper reader. Unlike the Bulgarians, the Greeks welcomed war correspondents, and every resource of publicity was at their disposal, while Bulgaria itself was isolated and its telegraphic communications cut.30

The Greek campaign was successful over a greater period of time.31 Until the announcement of the results of the Carnegie investigation, which asserted a fairly even participation in the atrocities of the Balkan Wars, the Western public was largely concerned with the “Bulgarian inhumanity,” which reminded some journalists of the days of “Hun and Tartar invasions.”32 In July 1913, the British Daily Telegraph summarized the damage to Bulgaria’s image throughout the Balkans as follows: “The claim of the Bulgars to a superiority in matters of civilization in the Balkans is gone, and the respect of Europe with it.”33

28

Ibidem, “Politischer Gegenstand No. 41, Prinz Emil Fürstenberg an Seine Excellenz den Hochgeborenen Herrn Leopold Grafen Berchtold, Die CarnegieMission in Griechenland, D. Athen, den 6. September 1913.” 29 Ibidem, “Politischer Gegenstand No. 127, Generalkonsul Kral, Protestmeeting gegen die bulgarischen Grausamkeiten in Salonich, Salonich, am 17. Juli 1913.” 30 Report of the International Commission, 78. 31 See also the chapter by Ivan Ilčev in this volume. 32 As cited in Keisinger, Unzivilisierte Kriege, 46. 33 Ibidem, 46f.

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The Carnegie Commission in Greece Greece’s positive attitude toward the investigation of war crimes changed as soon as the four-man Carnegie Commission, consisting of Justin Godart, Samuel T. Dutton, Brailsford, and Milyukov, stepped foot in Belgrade on August 23, 1913. However, their mission in Serbia ended abruptly due to distrust on the part of the government formed by the Radical Party under the leadership of Nikola Pašić. The Serbians only agreed to participate in the investigation on the condition that Milyukov would be excluded, a demand the other commission members rejected. Ultimately, the Serbian authorities broke off all contact with the Carnegie team and refused to cooperate with them. The only assistance the commission ultimately received from Belgrade was immediate transport to Thessaloniki, their next stopping point, without delay.34 The Greek press reported at length on the Serbian qualms about Milyukov and considered them absolutely justified in light of his supposed Bulgarophilia. Even the fact that Serbian students had booed and shoved the Russian parliamentary politician was excused on the basis of his “provocative actions.”35 The large Athens newspapers ran disdainful and derisive commentaries before the arrival of the Carnegie mission in Thessaloniki. For instance, Empros (Forward), known for its affinity for the military, opined that the “infamous commission” would not have much more luck than in Belgrade, where it had been “happily” turned back at the door. Then, the writer continued, they could return to Sofia, where they had originally started, to convince the world of the fact that the Bulgarians were also supposedly the “Prussia of the East” in regard to their level of civilization.36 The newspaper Skrip argued that the Greeks should largely ignore the “infamous commission, including the two Bulgarophiles Milyukov and Brailsford.” Here it is important to recall that the Greek king’s emphatic demand that Bulgarian atrocities be investigated had fallen on deaf ears with the “various gentlemen of the international peace movement.” “Now, after they had finally awakened out of their winter slumber,” according to Skrip, is was too late. The results of the investigation had already been predetermined in favor of Bulgaria, the paper argued, and therefore Greece 34

D’Estournelles de Constant, “Introduction,” in Report of the International Commission, 9f. On the Serbian attitude to the commission, see also the chapter by Stefan Djordjević in this volume. 35 See “Oi scheseis Rossias kai Afstrias: To pathima tis diethnous anakritikis epitropis,” Empros, August 14, 1913, 1, 4; “5. proïni. I servia kai I epitropi dia tas thiriodias, 14.8.1913, 4. Empros, I Odysseia tis diethnous epitropis,” Empros, August 8, 1913, 5; “I Servia apokiryssei tin diethin epitropin dia tas omotitas,” Makedonia, August 8, 1913, 3. 36 “Kai eis ton politismon,” Empros, August 15, 1913, 3.

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was completely correct in its position and had a clean conscience.37 But it was not only the Greek press that received the commission members with antipathy—even state representatives expressed their distrust for the Carnegie men. According to Thessaloniki-based correspondents for the British Daily Telegraph, the commission members “were received with exceptional coolness on the part of the Greek authorities.” The representative of the Thessaloniki government Stefanos Dragoumis, said to have based his treatment of the Carnegie Endowment delegates on the Serbian example, was particularly hostile and declined to cooperate with the investigation.38 This report from the British correspondent is confirmed in the Carnegie Report: “The government of Greece was anxious above all things to base its attitude on that of its ally in Belgrade. The commission was therefore welcomed under the strictest reservations.”39 Given the Greek government’s great distrust toward the mission, the Daily Telegraph correspondent in question feared the commission would not achieve the goal of its visit in Greece.40 His fear proved well-founded. In fact, Athens’s lack of assistance forced the commission to prematurely declare an end to its mission. On August 18/31, the Greek government issued a press release explaining why it had rejected the commission’s inquiry.41 Above all it mentioned the “great uneasiness” that Brailsford and Milyukov had supposedly evoked in Serbia. Belgrade’s reaction was considered “completely justified” on the basis of the “globally acknowledged philoBulgarian intentions” of two members of the mission. The Greek side relied on the Serbian position to support its stance that the reasons for the failure of the Carnegie mission in Greece lay not with Athens but with the commission itself, in particular its pro-Bulgarian composition. Two countries had denied the commission their cooperation, expressing exactly the same reservations. From the perspective of Athens, this argument was a rebuttal of the possible accusation that Greece’s aim had been to thwart a war crimes investigation.42 37

“I kyria epitropi,” Skrip, August 15, 1913, 2. “Idiaitera tilegrafimata tou syntaktou mas. I epitropi tou karnezi,” Empros, August 18, 1913, 4. 39 D’Estournelles de Constant, “Introduction,” in Report of the International Commission, 10. 40 “Idiaitera tilegrafimata tou syntaktou mas. I epitropi tou karnezi,” Empros, August 18, 1913, 4. 41 Interestingly enough the Serbian government oriented itself to this Greek approach and issued belatedly, on September 7, an official communiqué very similar in content to the Greek press release. See the article by Ivan Ilčev in this volume. 42 “Neotera – Pos i Ellas apekrouse tin diethni epitropi,” Skrip, August 19, 1913, 2. 38

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To strengthen Greece’s position, the Athens press release drew attention to the fact that Greece had demonstrated interest in the investigation and examination of war crimes long before the Carnegie Commission was called into existence. The airtight evidence offered was an invitation, from Athens to the French and Austrian Consulates, to visit the central Macedonian city of Serres directly after its destruction in order to arrive at an independent, objective impression of “Bulgarian atrocity.” The release also claimed that throughout the Balkan Wars the Greek authorities had always supported foreign press correspondents, who enjoyed the right of unlimited movement in areas under Greek control. Despite this welldemonstrated interest in the examination of war crimes, the Greek government lamented, Greece could not provide support to the Carnegie Commission, not least because by the time it arrived to examine the atrocities committed, “all the corpses had already been buried and therefore the evidence destroyed.”43 The argument that the investigations had commenced too late was only mildly persuasive. The leading Austrian diplomat in Athens, Prince Emil Fürstenberg, characterized this Greek position as “quite strange” in his report to Vienna. He also considered it irritating because, as noted elsewhere, at the peace talks in Bucharest it had been the Greek prime minister, of all people, who demanded that any international investigative commission established should be open-ended in duration.44 Even if Athens’s reservations about the timing of the investigation are seen as a reflection of honest concerns and not merely an excuse for the government’s rejection of the inquiry, this could not have been the central reason for the Greek government’s refusal to work with the Carnegie Commission. This becomes clear in the second, more detailed part of the government’s statement, which was exclusively dedicated to Brailsford and Milyukov and their supposed Bulgarophilia. The statement expressed regret that it was impossible for the Greek authorities to cooperate with a commission consisting largely of members who “are known for their animus toward Greece, on the one hand, and their sympathy for the Bulgarians, on the other.” Milyukov, the government stated, had demonstrated his bias toward Bulgaria on several occasions, whether in statements in the Russian Duma about the majority Bulgarian population of Macedonia, or in his “numerous articles” in the Russian and Bulgarian press on the “supposed Greek and Serbian war crimes committed against 43 44

Ibidem. HHStA, PA XII, 438, Türkei (Liasse XLV/15, Balkankrieg), No. 41, “Prinz Emil Fürstenberg, Die Carnegie-Mission in Griechenland, an Seine Excellenz den Hochgeborenen Herrn Leopold Grafen Berchtold, Wien, D., Athen, den 6. September 1913.”

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Bulgarian civilians.” The Greek government went on to complain that in the “truth-twisting depictions” of the Russian parliament member and history professor, the Bulgarians were consistently depicted in the role of victim and never that of perpetrator. From the Greek perspective even Brailsford was considered an “infamous Bulgarophile” who had made a name for himself with his pro-Bulgarian publications. To back this claim, the Athens release cited his book Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future, published in 1906. In it, the British journalist vehemently argued in favor of Bulgaria’s territorial claims.45 The statement concludes by claiming these “warranted objections” regarding Milyukov and Brailsford had been presented to Justin Godart, the French member of the commission, to whom it was announced that Greece considered the participation of Milyukov in particular unacceptable,46 and that in response Godart had had turned down Athens’s suggested compromise of continuing the investigation without the two controversial participants and declared the mission of the Carnegie Endowment in Greece officially concluded.47 The Carnegie Report contains additional information about the circumstances that led to the investigation in Greece being aborted: At first, Mr. Dragoumis, the Governor of Salonica, informed the Commission that, following the example of Servia, his government declined to acknowledge Mr. Milyukov, but that all the members of the Commission should have entire liberty of action. Then Mr. Brailsford in his turn and even more directly, was refused; his liberty was restricted to the point of twice trying to prevent him from going to Kilkich, which efforts of the authorities met with the congratulations of the press.48

The Greek government’s declaration of the reasons for the failure of the Carnegie mission in Greece was not universally convincing. A report by the Austrian deputy head of mission in Thessaloniki, Dr. Gerent Pleinert, on “rejections of the international investigative commission sent by the Carnegie Endowment” is exemplary. The report casts doubt on the “official reasons” referred to by Athens and instead gives Pleinert’s explanation for the Greek position toward the Carnegie Commission: Naturally, the actions of the Greek government toward the commission do not appear to be sufficiently motivated by the official reasons named above. The

45

On Brailsford and his attitude regarding the Macedonian question, see the article by Stefan Troebst in this volume. 46 “Neotera – Pos i Ellas apekrouse tin diethni,” Skrip, August 19, 1913, 2. 47 Ibidem. 48 D’Estournelles de Constant, “Introduction,” in Report of the International Commission, 10.

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likely truth is that the Greeks, who were so deftly able to cast the truly despicable Bulgarian atrocities in the right light and thus in this way place the entire responsibility for all the horrors committed in the most recent war against Turkey on the shoulders of Bulgaria, not wanting to jeopardize their own good reputation. To the extent that it was a foreign enquiry with a limited program in the areas where the Greeks had nothing to be accused of, where truly everything heinous did originate with the Bulgarians, then the authorities and commanders did largely facilitate this enquiry. . . . However, in the present case the Greeks fear that the world will be astounded to hear, also from an impartial source, that in this war much had happened on the Greek side that could neither be brought in line with humanity nor international law.49

Regardless of the Greek government’s inability to convince the international community of the honesty of its objections, the domestic press received the news of the Carnegie mission’s failure in Greece with pleasure and in that tone presented this event as the abrupt end of the commission in general. For instance, two articles in Empros about the halt of investigatory work in Greece headlined “The Pitiful End of the Carnegie Commission” and “The Ceremonial Expulsion of the International Carnegie Commission from Thessaloniki.”50 In a similarly ironic tone, Makedonia, based in Thessaloniki, declared the “end of the Commission” was worthy of “religious commemoration.”51 Finally, Skrip lauded the Greek government for fending off the “international commission” and with that, delivering the “final coup de grace.”52 Interestingly, the Serbian authorities had similarly attempted to disrupt the fulfillment of the Carnegie mission—for instance, by announcing the dissolution of the commission and the premature termination of their work, or by keeping the German law professor Walter Schücking from joining his four colleagues in the Balkans.53 Although Athens had rejected all forms of cooperation with the Carnegie Commission and they had responded by officially announcing the termination of their mission in Greece, its members did not leave Greece immediately. Attempting to drive a wedge between the experts on the international commission, the Greek government had granted Godart and 49

HHStA, PA XII, Box 439 (Türkei, Liasse XLV/15, 16, 17, 19, 20, Balkankrieg), “Politischer Gegenstand, No. 170, Vizekonsul Dr. Gerent Pleinert, Die Zurückweisung der von der Carnegie-Stiftung ausgesandten internationalen Untersuchungskommission, Salonich, am 6. September 1913.” 50 “To oiktron telos tis epitropis Karnezy,” Empros, August 21, 1913, 1. “I diethnis epitropi Karnezi en Thessaloniki. I panigyriki apopompi tis,” Empros, August 19, 1913, 5. 51 “I makaria ti lixi epitropi,” Makedonia, August 25, 1913, 3. 52 “Neotera – Pos i Ellas apekrouse tin diethni epitropi,” Skrip, August 19, 1913, 2. 53 See Ivan Ilčev’s chapter in this volume.

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his American colleague, Professor Samuel T. Dutton, permission to conduct private—that is, outside the framework of the Carnegie mission— investigations, and both had done so: Dutton traveling to Serres and Godart to Athens.54 Interestingly, even Brailsford and Milyukov, who had been declared “unwelcome” in Greece, carried out interviews in Thessaloniki. Their interlocutors were mostly members of the city’s Bulgarian community, which had shrunk since Greece took the city. In addition, the two met with representatives of the Socialist Federation, including Dimitar Vlahov.55 Finally, they also questioned Greek eyewitnesses. This work by Brailsford and Milyukov created a furor in the Greek press. Particular anger was directed at the “naive locals” who had let themselves be drawn into conversations with the “Bulgarophilic” commission members and attempted in vain to convince “a Komitadschi leader like Milyukov of the Bulgarian atrocities.”56 The Greek press complained that Brailsford and Milyukov had been very provocative in their interviews in Thessaloniki. For instance, it was asserted that Brailsford received Greek eyewitnesses’ statements with great skepticism and even greater irony. He was said to have told the Thessaloniki correspondent of the English Times: To be able to convince me of the truthfulness of the allegations about the Bulgarian atrocities, one must show me the bodies of the victims. In addition, either the father or the brother of a deceased must assure me that the Bulgarians have actually caused his death. Of course, the witnesses should also be credible.57

Skrip reported that Milyukov, for his part, emphatically called into question the results of an earlier investigation a French delegation had carried out regarding the massacre of the Greek population in the EastMacedonian city of Doxato. The newspaper claimed to have been informed that the Russian commissioner had, in his expeditions in Thessaloniki, characterized the selection of the French delegation as an “obvious fraud”. In particular, Milyukov is said to have suggested that the French military attaché in Athens, Colonel Lepidi, was in fact a Greek officer named Levidis. According to Skrip, this last imputation by Milyukov greatly 54

HHStA, PA XII, Box 439 (Türkei, Liasse XLV/15, 16, 17, 19, 20, Balkankrieg), “Politischer Gegenstand, No. 170, Gerent Vizekonsul Dr. Pleinert, Die Zurückweisung der von der Carnegie-Stiftung ausgesandten internationalen Untersuchungskommission, Salonich, am 6. September 1913.” 55 See the chapter by Ivan Ilčev in this volume. 56 “Amerolipsiai,” Skrip, August 20, 1953, 2. 57 “I perifimos anakritiki epitropi. Kyniki prokatalipsis,” Skrip, August 20, 1913, 5. “To oiktron telos tis epitropis Karnezy,” Empros, August 21, 1913, 1.

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consternated Godart, the French member of the Carnegie Commission, who felt obliged to not only confirm that Colonel Lepidi was a highranking officer in the French army, but also defend his compatriot’s unbiased nature and sincerity. From the Greek perspective, cases like these only confirmed the assumption that Brailsford and Milyukov were definitely not neutral investigators when it came to Bulgaria. Skrip accused the two Carnegie commissioners of “cynical prejudice.”58 Presumably in response to public pressure, Dragoumis ordered the two men to leave the city after two days.59 Of all the commission members, Godart was most trusted by the Greeks. This enabled him to travel to Athens, as mentioned, and there be welcomed “pleasantly and warmly,” as he himself stated.60 There he spoke with the press, which was interested mainly in his opinion of Brailsford and Milyukov. Godart’s proclamation of his two colleagues’ unbiased nature was received with some degree of disappointment by the Greek public. Correspondingly, he was either not believed or people tried to “improve” him. Empros, for instance, explained to its readership that the French commissioner’s affirmation of the neutral perspective of Brailsford and Milyukov could only have been given on the basis of “collegial solidarity” and did not correspond with his honest opinion.61 According to Skrip, Godart even told reporters off the record that he was not at all sad to see the commission fail in Serbia and Greece, not least because two of its members had very quickly proven to be “extremely Bulgarophilic.”62 Godart’s alleged criticism of his colleague’s Bulgarophilia was in all likelihood completely fabricated by newspaper reporters. According to Pleinert, the Austrian deputy head of mission in Thessaloniki, Dutton and Godart were “always rather reserved despite various attempts to interview them and always answered in generalities, referring to their forthcoming report.”63 The Austrian diplomat’s statement is additional evidence that the Greek press was barely interested in factually or objectively reporting on the Carnegie Commission. The media were led astray by the deep popular disapproval of Brailsford and Milyukov and the urgent need to protect 58

“I perifimos anakritiki epitropi. Kyniki prokatalipsis,” Skrip, August 20, 1913, 5. See Ivan Ilčev’s chapter in this volume. 60 Report of the International Commission, 11. 61 “O k. Kontar peri tis dialytheisis epitropis: Ti ithelisan na exakrivosoun; Mia synentexsis meta aftou,” Empros, August 23, 1913, 3. 62 “I epitropi Karnezy: Katigoritirion kata tou polemou, Synentefxis me ton k. Gountar,” Skrip, August 22, 1913, 4. 63 HHStA, PA XII, Box 439 (Türkei, Liasse XLV/15, 16, 17, 19, 20, Balkankrieg), “Politischer Gegenstand, No. 170, Vizekonsul Dr. Gerent Pleinert, Die Zurückweisung der von der Carnegiestiftung ausgesandten internationalen Untersuchungskommission, Salonich, am 6. September 1913.” 59

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Greek interests from the “hostile” Carnegie Commission. Meanwhile, several newspaper reports were based purely on wishful thinking, for instance the assertion, on the occasion of Godart’s visit to Athens, that problems arising in Thessaloniki had ultimately led to the commission’s dissolution.64

The Reaction to the Report The members of the Carnegie investigative commission returned to Paris on September 28, 1913, after several of its members had visited Istanbul and Sofia.65 In Paris, they worked out the outline of the report, which appeared in English and French in May 1914.66 This report accused the Greek army and the irregular units fighting alongside them of numerous incidents of ethnic cleansing. Athens initially reacted to the report by ignoring it and taking no position on the war crimes documented within. The publication of the Carnegie Report was also initially completely ignored.67 Later the Greek press tried to undermine the report’s veracity and made sarcastic commentary on it. A telling example of the Greeks’ handling of the report is the lengthy interview with the well-known Lausanne-based criminologist Rudolphe Archibald Reiss in Empros in December 1914. Reiss had accepted Belgrade’s invitation to visit Serbia the previous October to investigate the war crimes of the Austro-Hungarian Army.68 Reiss was in no way a neutral observer, but rather an exceedingly controversial person who later admitted he was on the side of the entente powers.69 When his investigative work in Serbia was done, he moved on to Thessaloniki, where an Empros reporter asked him for his opinion of the report put forth by the Carnegie Endowment. The reporter reminded Reiss of his previous statement that part of the report was a copy of a propagandistic publication from the University of Sofia. Although the Swiss 64

“O k. Kontar peri tis dialytheisis epitropis: Ti ithelisan na exakrivosoun; Mia synentexsis meta aftou,” Empros, August 23, 1913, 3. 65 On the continuation of the mission and the further progress of the investigation in Bulgaria, see Ivan Ilčev’s chapter in this volume. 66 For more details on the report, see Lange-Akhund, “Die Interventionspolitik,” 30–33; Lange-Akhund, “The Two Carnegie Reports.” 67 See the Greek press coverage between April and September 1914. 68 Marie-Janine Calic, Geschichte Jugoslawiens im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck C.H., 2010), 72 f.; Daniel Marc Segesser, “Kriegsverbrechen auf dem Balkan und in Anatolien in der internationalen juristischen Debatte während der Balkankriege und des Ersten Weltkriegs,” in Der Erste Weltkrieg auf dem Balkan, ed. Jürgen Angelow (Berlin: be.bra Wiss. Verl., 2011), 203–6. 69 Ibidem.

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criminologist declined to go in detail, his judgment of the Carnegie Report was sufficiently scathing for the newspaper: I am very surprised at how one could write such a report, and especially that my English colleagues signed it. For I consider this report malicious. I conducted my own investigations in East Macedonia for 15 days and can only confirm the Bulgarian atrocities. I can also assure you that Muslims and Bulgarians have expressed no complaints about the behavior of the Greek administration to me. I am astonished at the fact that a report was written without conducting an indepth investigation. In a special chapter of my book, perhaps even in a separate monograph, I shall disprove every single inaccuracy which appears in the Carnegie report.

Empros published this statement by Reiss with enthusiastic commentary, emphasizing how it restored the truth of the situation and vindicated Greece’s sense of unjust treatment by the commission.70 At the time that the interview was given, Prime Minister Venizelos had presumably already invited Reiss to visit the territories Greece had conquered in the Balkan Wars, in order to make a humanitarian inspection of the situation of the civilians living there. The Swiss academic accepted the invitation and published the results of his study in his “Rapport sur la situation des Boulgarophones et des Musulmans dans les nouvelles provinces Greques,” published in Lausanne in 1915. In the report, Reiss advanced the position that the Slavs in the Macedonian areas of Greece were neither Bulgarians nor Serbs, but rather “Macedonian.” In light of today’s vehement Greek rejection of the existence of a particular Macedonian ethnic group before 1945, Reiss’s position appears puzzling at first glance, but it nevertheless served Athens’s interests in regards to the Macedonian question at that point in time: elevating Macedonia’s slavophonic population to an independent ethnic group was a way to foil Bulgarian and Serb attempts to appropriate this group and assert territorial claims to the Macedonian areas acquired by Greece in the Balkan Wars of 1912–13.71 In this context, it should be noted that in the mid-1920s, these kinds of political security strategies regarding Macedonian Northern Greece even moved Athens to produce the first primer, titled Abecedar, for school instruction of children in their native Slavic language. It attempted a codification of the (Slavo-) Macedonian language on the basis of the Bitola and Florina variations using the Latin alphabet.72 70

“Mia synentefxis meta tou doktoros Rais: Ai viaiopragiai ton afstriakon kata ton servon; I ekthesis Karnezy,” Empros, December 1. 1914, 1f. 71 Vasilis K. Gounaris, To Makedoniko Zitima apo ton 19. eos ton 21. aiona: Istoriografikes Prosengiseis (Athens: Alexandreia, 2010), 52f. 72 However, the textbook could not be successfully introduced into school teaching because of resistance from both the affected population group itself and Bulgaria.

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The content of Reiss’s report, which was probably commissioned by the Greek government, emphasized the distinct Macedonian character of the Slavs in Northern Greece, showing that the Greek uneasiness with the Carnegie Report was not only traceable to the listing and detailed description of Greek war crimes, but also closely related to the report’s depiction of an ethnological impression of Macedonia that had advantaged Bulgaria before the outbreak of the Balkan Wars. However, this aspect of the Carnegie Report—considered highly problematic from the Greek perspective—will be handled below, where the position of Greek historiography and Macedonian studies regarding the Carnegie Commission is discussed. Even though the Carnegie Report was initially ignored in Greece, eventually it was remembered, and in exclusively negative terms. The Athens press’s reaction to a petition submitted by Sofia regarding the Greek army’s execution of seventeen members of the Bulgarian minority in Macedonian Northern Greece is exemplary. The Greek government maintained that those killed were not innocent civilians but rather “Komitadji terrorists” killed in battle. Even before the League of Nations commission established to examine the case was able to present its report, it was discredited in Greece with reference to the precedent of the Carnegie mission. The following opinion appeared in Empros: The investigating commission’s method has not proved itself in the past. Who does not remember the infamous Carnegie report? Who does not remember this great American philanthropist, who was fooled by the Bulgarian propaganda and financed the publication of this international pamphlet of the Bulgarian agents in Europe? This report was so cleverly used by the Bulgarians in their own favor that probably every European would have believed in the injustice allegedly done to Bulgaria, had not the Great War broken out. For the sake of Greece, the Bulgarian insidiousness appeared there again.73

To date, Greek historical scholarship has devoted only minimal attention to the Carnegie Endowment’s inquiry into the causes and course of the Balkan Wars, and thus has not produced relevant in-depth studies. On the one hand, an eight-page article published in 2004 by the See also Lena Divani, Ellada kai meionotites: To systima diethnous prostasias tis Koinonias ton Ethnon, 3rd edition (Athens: Patakis, 1999), 148f; Tasos Kostopoulos, I apagorevmeni glossa: Kratiki katastoli ton slavikon dialekton stin elliniki Makedonia (Athens: Vivliorama, 2002), 88–111; Iakovos D. Michailidis, “Minority Rights and Educational Problems in Greek Interwar Macedonia: The Case of the Primer ‘Abecedar’,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 14, no. 2 (1996): 329–43. 73 “Oi deinopathountes Voulgaroi,” Empros, August 5, 1924, 1.

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Thessaloniki historian Iakovos D. Michailidis74 should be noted; four years later it was posted on the Internet in English translation on the HellenicMacedonian website Macedonian Heritage.75 It refers exclusively to nonGreek secondary literature, most prominently the aforementioned article by Ivan Il∑ev,76 so no new insights emerge from Michailidis’ contribution. In his rendering, the author takes up the main Greek objection to the commission in terms of its pro-Bulgarian position. He assigns responsibility to the “Bulgarophilic” commissioners Brailsford and Milyukov, who allegedly were the leaders of the commission. Michailidis reported that the two also did the lion’s share of the writing of the report, which was in fact the case. Four of the seven total chapters were written by Milyukov; Brailsford, Godart, and Dutton each wrote one.77 Michailidis’s most important evidence of the Carnegie Commission’s lack of objectivity was the fact that Milyukov’s information on the ethnographic composition of Macedonia came from statistics compiled by the Bulgarian school superintendent of Macedonia, Vasil Kun∑ev, around the year 1900. As a result, the report’s presentation of ethnic ratios was entirely biased in Bulgaria’s interest. Here the Greek historian accuses the Russian commissioner of intentional deception, stating that “Miljukov did not even pretend to be neutral.”78 Yet another renowned Greek historian of Macedonia, Vasilis Gounaris, similarly judges the Carnegie Commission harshly in a study that compares the treatment of the Macedonian question in Southeastern European historiographies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though spending only half a page on the subject, he accuses not only Brailsford and Milyukov of pro-Bulgarian bias, but also the orientalist Victor Bérard, who was only involved in the initial phases of the commission. With reference to the article by Michailidis and his examination of Milyukov’s pro-Bulgarian treatment of the situation of the Macedonian population, Gounaris accuses the Carnegie Commission of having accepted an ethnological depiction of Macedonia verbatim from the work of a Bulgarian history professor, Yordan Ivanov, whose analysis is based on Kun∑ev’s statistics.79 74

Iakovos D. Michailidis, “I epitropi Carnegie sti Makedonia,” in Praktika tou synedriou Florina 1912–2002: Istoria kai politismos (Florina: Paidagogiki Scholi Florinas kai Tmima Valkanikon Spoudon, 2004), 45–53. 75 Iakovos D. Michailidis, “The Carnegie Commission in Macedonia, Summer 1913,” Macedonian Heritage: An Online Review of Macedonian Affairs, History and Culture, http://www.macedonian-heritage.gr/Contributions/contr_Carnegie_1. html, June 18, 2013. 76 See Ivan Ilčev’s chapter in this volume. 77 Lange-Akhund, “The Two Carnegie Reports.” 78 Michailidis, “The Carnegie Commission.” 79 Gounaris, To Makedoniko Zitima, 52.

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The image conveyed in the Carnegie Report is one of Macedonia as a country largely settled by Bulgaria, which is likely the central reason that Greek studies of Macedonia have largely ignored the report to date, meaning that the literature on Macedonia pursues mainly political, or rather national, goals. An example is the study by the retired Thessaloniki history professor Konstantinos Vakalopoulos on “The Macedonian Question in Historiographic Analysis.” Here the author, one of the most renowned advocates and defenders of the Hellenic-Macedonian “historical master narrative,” examines the Hellenization of Aegean-Macedonian areas undertaken immediately after the Balkan Wars and the simultaneous lessening of the Bulgarian presence there. In doing so, he consistently avoids the topic of ethnic cleansing during the Balkan Wars, also neglecting to mention the Carnegie Commission and its report in this context.80 Several early studies from the interwar period, largely meant for the international public and aimed at historical and ethnological corroboration of Greece’s incorporation of Aegean Macedonia, offer exceptions to the overall image of Greek studies of Macedonia, which, as mentioned previously, do not mention the Carnegie Commission’s inquiry in the Balkans or use its report as a source. The authors of the early studies refer to the commission and its report, but do so exclusively in the context of their considerations of Bulgarian “falsification” of population statistics and Sofia’s “libelous propaganda” against Greece’s conduct in the Balkan Wars with respect to human rights violations. They accuse the commission of pro-Bulgarian bias and just as vehemently call into question the credibility of the inquiry’s results. A study by the Greek diplomat Vasileios Kolokotronis, published in French in 1918, is typical. In this “classic” of early Greek study of Macedonia, Kolokotronis says of the Carnegie Commission: The impression produced in Europe by these atrocities greatly motivated the patriots of Sophia. . . . Bulgaria then obtained that the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace set up a commission of inquiry, most of whose members were chosen from among the warmest Bulgarophiles. Mr. Milyukov and Mr. Brailsford were of course part of it. The Governments of Serbia and Greece, which were not informed in time of the establishment of this commission, demanded that it be reconstituted. Unfortunately, their demand was not accepted, which obliged them to declare in advance that they did not recognize a commission formed with such partiality. Nevertheless, M. M. Milyukov and Brailsford, as well as the other members of this Bulgarian assembly, went to Sophia and gathered there all the lies which the Bulgarian patriots communicated to them. The result of this unilateral (?) investigation was 80

Konstantinos Vakalopoulos, To Makedoniko Zitima kai i istoriografiki analysi (Thessaloniki: Ekdotikos oikos Ant. Stamatouli, 2006), 203–7.

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published under the pompous title: Investigation in the Balkans: Report presented to the directors of the Carnegie Endowment by members of the Commission of Inquiry, Paris, 1914.81

During the Cold War, Greek scholars and propagandists largely ignored the Carnegie Report, which, from their perspective, undermined the Greek position on the Macedonian question, especially in light of the prevailing ethnological stance on Macedonia before the Balkan Wars. In numerous publications focused on the “Slavo-Communist threat” in keeping with the tone of older studies from the interwar period, these academics argued that the majority of the population of the Southern and Aegean areas of Macedonia had already been Greek before the Balkan Wars. After being incorporated into the Greek state, Aegean Macedonia saw its ethnic composition change as Greeks were added to the population. These academics and propagandists made particular reference to the settlement of nearly a million Greeks in the first half of the 1920s in the wake of the “catastrophe in Asia Minor” and the Greek-Turkish population exchange agreed upon in Lausanne in 1923. Slavic-speaking Aegean Macedonians with a Bulgarian national consciousness were said by authors promoting the Greek official position to have “voluntarily” left the land because of the population exchange agreement made between Athens and Sofia in 1919. These works on the two Balkan wars mention ethnic cleansing only in regards to the atrocities of the “Bulgarian aggressors,” if at all. Such authors noted that Bulgaria had occupied Aegean Macedonian areas during both world wars, again violently expelling Greek populations. The Carnegie Report, which as already mentioned assumed Bulgarians were the majority population in Macedonia until 1913 and additionally implicated the Greek military leadership in numerous human rights violations during the Balkan Wars, contributed only slightly to the undermining of the Hellenic-Macedonian “historical master narrative” of an “eternal” Greek Macedonia.82 The Greeks’ original mistrust of the Carnegie Commission, which they had accused of being a tool of Bulgarian propagandists, led HellenicMacedonian propagandists of the postwar period to disregard the possibility of using the Carnegie Report to support their main historiographic concern after 1945, namely, the rejection of the historic foundations of the existence of an independent Macedonian nation. Had 81

Vasileios Colocotronis, La Macédoine et l’hellénisme: Etude historique et ethnologique (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1919), 429. The question mark is used by the author (V. Colocotronis) to question the neutrality of the Carnegie Commission. 82 See Adamantios Th. Skordos, “From ‘Russian Panslavism’ to ‘Soviet SlavoCommunism’: Slavicness as Enemy Concept in Nineteenth- and Twentieth Century Greece,” Memoria e Ricerca 59 (2018): 431–52.

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they engaged with the report in greater depth, they would surely have noticed that with few exceptions, the report’s authors, when speaking of “Macedonians,” “Macedonian refugees,” “Macedonian villages,” and so on, nearly always characterized the Slavic population in Macedonia as Bulgarian.83 Given the great interest of Greek propagandists in proving the “non-existence” of a Macedonian nation, it is surprising that they did not think to refer to the Carnegie Report in the dispute with their Macedonian opponents. As already mentioned, the “omission” is likely due to the Greeks’ early move to label the report pro-Bulgarian. Tarred with that brush, the Carnegie Report was consistently banned from the list of sources for Greek Macedonia studies. Whereas Greek scholars and propagandists have disregarded the “utility” of the Carnegie Report in their fight against Macedonianism, it has recently drawn the attention of their “opponents” in the Republic of Macedonia and among the many emigrants from Aegean Macedonia abroad who use it to bolster their depiction of Greece’s pursuit of ethnic cleansing against the “Macedonian people” during the Balkan Wars. As on the Greek side, the Macedonian interpretation of the Carnegie Report relies not on scholarly, but rather on political or rather national criteria. The 2010 article “Organized Persecution and Massacre of the Macedonian Population in the Kukush Region during the Second Balkan War,” by historian Ljubica Jan∑eva of Skopje’s Institute for National History, offers a characteristic example of how this takes place. According to the author, an Aegean Macedonian resident of Canada named Risto Stefov was responsible for translating it into English and supervising its online publication.84 Several excerpts from this article very clearly illustrate how the Carnegie Report has been interpreted and instrumentalized in the service of the Macedonian “historic master narrative”: The Macedonian people, during the course of their long history, have experienced many wars, suffering, organized persecutions and massacres. At the beginning of the last century, during the First and especially during the Second Balkan War, the Greek army conducted organized persecutions and massacres against the Macedonian population in the southeastern part of Macedonia, particularly in the Kukush and Demir-Hisar Regions. . . . Upon its invasion of the region the Greek army perpetrated unbelievable massacres against the Macedonian population with the destruction and burning of the cities and villages. The Greek terror was so severe that it prompted an investigation from the Carnegie Endowment Inquiry for International Peace. . . . In the report regarding the expulsion of the population from the southeastern part of 83 84

See for instance, Report of the International Commission, 25f., 32. For the author’s résumé and list of publications, see http://www.ini.ukim. mk/cv/4-5-cv-ljancheva.pdf.

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Macedonia, the Commission said the following: “. . . in the north and south actions taken for assimilation (of the non-Muslim population) are the same . . . the method of correcting is repeated in the eastern border of Macedonia. The only difference is that the methods of assimilation and cleansing are carried on less humanely.” . . . From all this we can conclude that the Carnegie Commission Report, published nearly a century ago, is a good example of how we should not behave and is one of the most eloquent and powerful summons for the recognition of all the stupidities which every war carries, for the essence of International peace, and for securing a better International Regime in a Europe without borders. In the course of the Second Balkan War, the Macedonian people again, who knows how many times, were pawns of the chauvinistic aspirations of the Great Powers. The Macedonian population in southeast Macedonia was the object of this kind of action conducted by the Greek army.85

It is noteworthy that the Macedonian historian consistently avoided quoting the report’s numerous passages on the destruction of Kilkis/Kukuš, which characterized the population affected by the ethnic cleansing as Bulgarian.86 In addition, the careful reader will also note that the relevant sections of the Carnegie Report—characteristically located under the subheading “The Bulgarian Peasant and the Greek Army”—makes no mention of a “Macedonian people.”87 Nowadays, the Greek-Macedonian conflict is largely carried out on the internet. The participants are mostly members of two large overseas diaspora communities, Greek and Macedonian, who actively antagonize one another in the field while also fighting over the Carnegie Report and the resulting conclusions. For instance, in several internet posts, the aforementioned Macedonian partisan Stefov reaches for the Carnegie Report to support his thesis of an ethnic cleansing carried out by Greeks against the “Macedonian people” that was so excessive in scope that it ranks as genocide. In his series of articles on “Greek Atrocities in Macedonia,” for example, he refers to the Carnegie Commission and its report as follows: When will the Greek State apologize to the Macedonian people for its 1912– 1913 genocide in Northern Greece? “Ethnic cleansing” may be a modern term but its meaning is well understood by the Macedonian people living in northern Greece. Ever since Greece took possession of Macedonia, in the early 20th 85

Ljubica Jancheva, “Organized Persecution and Massacre of the Macedonian Population in the Kukush Region in the Second Balkan War,” Macedonian Truth Forum, December 19, 2010, http://www.macedoniantruth.org/forum/showthread. php?t=5565. 86 See Report of the International Commission, 97ff. 87 Ibidem.

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century, Macedonian people have experienced first-hand ethnic cleansing. This series of articles will present evidence of atrocities perpetrated by the Greek State against the innocent Macedonian civilian populations prior to, during and after the Balkan wars. Most of the information contained in the articles is obtained from the 1913 Carnegie Inquiry and from Greek sources. When war broke out in the Balkans in 1912 and 1913, the Carnegie Endowment dispatched a commission on a fact finding mission. . . . Among them was the distinguished journalist Henry N. Brailsford, author of the book “Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future.” . . . The result of the work of the International Commission of Inquiry is contained in the following report. This report, which has been written without prejudice and without partisanship, is respectfully commended to the attention of the governments, the people and the press of the civilized world. . . . It is therefore our wish to highlight some of the commission’s findings in a series of articles and remind the world of the plight of the Macedonian people and the indignity they suffered at the hands of the Greek State.88

The Greek internet reaction to this Macedonian reading of the Carnegie Report does not touch on the depiction of the ethnic cleansing or genocide, but rather ignores it to focus instead on the report’s allegedly Macedonian “distortion” regarding the national identity of the Slavic-speaking population in Greek Macedonia. The comments of a blogger named Chris Philippou are characteristic of responses to the passages quoted from Stefov: Risto Stefov, who also publishes books under the name “Chris Stefou,” has used the 1914 Carnegie Commission Report on the Balkan Wars as a primary reference for many of his articles. He has written a whole series titled “Greek atrocities in Macedonia” which can be found on maknews.com. In these articles Stefov engages in a heavy dose of historical revisionism. He implies that the Carnegie Commission report describes atrocities committed against “ethnic Macedonians” when in fact the report made no mention of any ethnic “Macedonian” population. The fact that the report made no mention of “ethnic Macedonians” does not phase Stefov who shamelessly converts the Bulgarians the report described into “ethnic Macedonians.” Stefov retrospectively molds the population descriptions found in the report to adhere to his nationalist historiography. . . . Up to the period of the Balkan Wars the Slavic population of the region was largely regarded as Bulgarian. The 1914 Carnegie Commission report was authored by an international commission that spent time in the region. Their observations of the Slavic population of the region concur with a vast number of other contemporary first-hand accounts. Stefov and his nationalist cronies engage in a dishonest practice when they 88

Risto Stefov, “Greek Atrocities in Macedonia, Part 1, May 2005,” Narkive: Newsgrooup Archive, May 2005, http://alt.news.macedonia.narkive.com/ Lj0Xn3Vm/greek-atrocities-in-macedonia.

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misrepresent the commission’s first hand observations and reconstruct the Bulgarians described in the report as “ethnic Macedonians.” Implying that the Carnegie Commission failed to record what Stefov et al. allege was the largest ethnic group in the region is akin to a modern international commission going into Palestine and not recording any Palestinians!89

The Greek-Macedonian internet debate once again illustrates the continuing explosive political nature of the Carnegie Commission and its report. From the first day of their mission, Brailsford, Milyukov, and their colleagues in the Balkans showed themselves to be controversial personalities, and they remain so more than one hundred years later.

89

Chris Philipou, “Stefov Vs Carnegie Commission,” History-of-Macedonia.com, May 30, 2008, http://history-of-macedonia.com/2008/05/30/stefov-vs-carnegiecommission/.

CHAPTER NINE

The Carnegie Commission Reports and Serbia: Balkan Wars and their Legacies Stefan Djordjević

Introduction: Serbia and the Balkan Wars The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace twice investigated the activities of the Serbian army and government during the twentieth century: first after the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, and then following the Wars of Yugoslav Dissolution in 1992–1995. In both instances, an expansionist and intolerant Serbian nationalism earned the opprobrium of representatives of the Great Powers, who recoiled at the Serbian authorities’ blatant and horrifying policies of forced displacement and terror. In response, the Serbian government attempted to deflect blame and shift responsibility for its actions, hoping that it could thus avoid international censure and forestall a foreign intervention. During the Carnegie Commission’s fact-finding mission to the Balkans in 1913, the Serbian government and press coordinated a vicious campaign to discredit and stifle the Commission’s research. Serbian governmental elites and elements of the Serbian intelligentsia argued that the international investigative commission opposed the emancipatory principle of “The Balkans for Balkan peoples.” This steadfast refusal to recognize the authority of international monitoring bodies—combined with hostility to the principle of international justice informing the Carnegie Commission and a jealous defense of Serbia’s sovereignty (broadly defined)— characterized Serbia’s official and historiographic response to the War of Yugoslav Dissolution in the 1990s as well. The reception that the Carnegie Commission was afforded in 1913 established a precedent dictating the Serbian government and intelligentsia’s response to international criticism and potential censure. The response of Serbia’s intellectuals, political elites, and public to the work of the Carnegie Commissions was principally dictated by Serbia’s

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relationship with the Great Powers. Despite emerging from the Second Balkan War as a regional power, Serbia could not hope to stand alone against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Serbia’s only hope in a future struggle with the Dual Monarchy rested in securing the favor of a Great Power, so Serbian leaders were acutely sensitive to their state’s international image and feared that the Carnegie Commission’s Report might jeopardize Serbia’s security by alienating British and French popular and elite sentiment. The Serbian masses, flush with victory in the Wars and intoxicated by a nationalistic fervor coordinated by the government, were similarly loath to accept any foreign attempt to “rob them” of the fruits of their victory, especially after the Treaty of London forced the Serbian Army to evacuate Albania. As the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ) collapsed in 1992, Serbia—still united with Montenegro—remained the most militarily powerful Balkan state. Serbian extremist nationalist leaders hoped to translate Serbia’s local military supremacy into territorial expansion, at the expense of Bosnian Muslims in particular, facilitated by a policy of systematic ethnic cleansing. The success of their campaign, however, relied on the continued inaction of the EU and NATO for, despite their local superiority against Bosnians and Croats, Serbs could not hope to contain the power of the Western democracies, the United States above all. The Serbian media and government adopted many of the same strategies utilized in 1913–14—shifting blame on to its enemies, actively covering up its crimes, creating a counter-narrative of Serbian victimhood, stifling the activities of foreign dignitaries and investigators—to shield themselves from charges of malice and forestall any anti-Serb intervention by the Powers. The Carnegie Commission’s Report on the Balkan Wars, published in 1914, did not immediately have a meaningful influence on the Western Powers’ perception of Serbia. Just as the Balkan Wars were overtaken by the grander, more destructive drama of the Great War, so the perceptions of Serbia in London, Berlin, Paris, and Washington, D.C. were shaped by its status as an ally of the Entente and an enemy of the Central Powers. AngloAmerican and French reporting and popularly discourse commonly featured the motif of a “Gallant Serbia.” Serbia—more accurately, Yugoslavia— pursued a largely non-aggressive foreign policy between 1919 and 1941, while during the communist period the Titoist policy of “brotherhood and unity” checked the extremes of Great Serb and Great Croat nationalist aspirations. The onset of the Wars of Yugoslav Dissolution reawakened Western scholarly and popular interest in the Carnegie Commission Report and the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. Contemporary reportage occasionally labeled the Bosnian War as the “Third” Balkan War. In short, many Western commentators viewed the Carnegie Commission’s 1913–1914 critiques through the prism of the much later war taking place in the 1990s and

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arrived at an essentialized image of the Balkans as a region doomed to endemic violence. When the Carnegie Endowment dispatched a second expedition to study the effects of the Yugoslav Wars, the expedition’s members were keenly aware of the similarity between their mission and that of ďEstournelles and his colleagues in 1913. However, whereas the 1913 commission had sought damning evidence against war in general in the Balkan Wars, the 1995–1996 commission was foremost concerned with conflicts in the Balkan in particular, and Serbia’s specific role as the prime instigator of the bloodshed. With its victory in the First and particularly in the Second Balkan War, Serbia established itself as the most militarily powerful and internationally pedigreed Balkan state.1 However, the spoils of Serbia’s victory further aggravated her already sour relationship with Austria-Hungary as the Dual Monarchy feared the deleterious consequences of Serbia’s emergence as a self-appointed Balkan Piedmont.2 The reorganization of Balkan power relations in the aftermath of the Second Balkan War helped accelerate a mutual antipathy between Serbia and Austria that culminated in the catastrophe of the First World War.3 But with the founding of the Serbdominated Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Serbia reaped the fruits of her victory and Austria-Hungary’s dissolution in the wake of World War I.4 1

“The prestige of Serbia revived in Western Europe owing to the events of the Balkan Wars . . .”. R. W. Seton-Watson, “Serbia and the Jugoslav Movement,” History 6, no. 21 (1921): 37–42. A recent monograph supports the conclusion that the Serbian army in 1913–14 was a formidable force and, even on paper, a match for the forces the Habsburg Empire could commit to the Balkans: James Lyon, Serbia and the Balkan Front, 1914: The Outbreak of the Great War (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). It should be noted that although the Ottoman Empire fielded a larger army than Serbia in 1914, the bulk of its forces were deployed in the Middle East and the Caucasus. Its Balkan force was considerably weaker than Serbia’s or Bulgaria’s in 1914. 2 Vladimir Dedijer, The Road to Sarajevo (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966); Konrad H. Jarausch, “The Illusion of Limited War: Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s Calculated Risk, July 1914,” Historical Social Research 24 (2012): 53– 79; Andrej Mitrović, Prodor na Balkan: Srbija u planovima Austro-Ugarske i Nemačke, 1908–1918 (Belgrade: Nolit Beograd, 1981); Samuel R. Williamson Jr., “The Origins of World War I,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. 4 (1988): 795–818; Samuel R. Williamson Jr., Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War (New York: Red Globe Press, 1991). 3 Joachim Remak ambitiously characterized the First World War as the “Third Balkan War.” Joachim Remak, “1914—The Third Balkan War: Origins Reconsidered,” Journal of Modern History 43, no. 3 (1971): 353–66. 4 Mark Cornwall, “The Experiences of Yugoslav Agitation in Austria-Hungary 1917–1918,” in Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced, ed. Hugh

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The collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s initiated a new chapter in the history of the Serbian state and a revival of an aggressive, exterminatory Serbian nationalism.5 Yugoslavia’s violent break-up exposed this resurgence of ethnic nationalism as a malevolent influence on Yugoslav politics and the reason for the definitive collapse of the delicate equilibrium that by-and-large had kept the peace under Titoism. The Wars of Yugoslav Dissolution, sometimes called the Third Balkan War, resurrected stereotypes of the Balkans as the powder-keg of Europe and Europe’s semicivilized Near East that had been largely, if not wholly, suppressed during the communist period. The policy of ethnic cleansing practiced by Serb ultra-nationalists and their patrons in the government remained in effect until the NATO intervention. In 1995, a US-led intervention against Bosnian-Serb forces created the necessary preconditions for the Dayton Peace Talks, and in 1999 NATO bombers protected Kosovo’s Albanians and accelerated the downfall of Slobodan Milošević’s dictatorial regime. Ironically, an uneasy peace would return to the Balkans only in 1999 after the Great Powers’ forceful intercession, silencing the inspiring clarion call of the Balkan Allies in 1912 that had demanded “The Balkans for Balkan peoples.” The legacies of the Balkan Wars’ (of 1912–13 and 1992–1995) in Serbia are characterized by ambiguity. The victories in the First and Second Balkan Wars almost doubled Serbia’s territory, but the government struggled to integrate a large population of potentially restive ethnic and religious minorities and to reconcile the legal regimes of Kosovo and “Old Serbia” with the pre-war Serbian kingdom.6 The Pašić government quarreled bitterly with the parliamentary opposition and the Army over the governance of newly won territories, and it was only the outbreak of the Great War that kept the acrimonious recriminations between military and Cecil and Peter Liddle (London: Leo Cooper and Pen and Sword, 1996), 65–76; Miodrag A. Jovanović, “Serbia: From Ethnic Nationhood to Multicultural Citizenship,” in Statehood Before and Beyond Ethnicity, ed. Linas Erikonas and Leos Muller (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 319–40; Pavel Milyukov, “The World War and Slavonic Policy,” Slavonic Review 6 (1927/28): 268–90. 5 It is important to remember that Yugoslavia’s collapse in the April War against the Third Reich and its allies was also followed by a revival of Serbian nationalism in the form of the Chetnik movement. Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: The Chetniks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975). 6 Vardar Macedonia and Kosovo-Metohija formed the nucleus of the medieval Serbian kingdom under the Nemanjić dynasty. Because of this, Serbian nationalist historians described these territories as “Old Serbia” to differentiate them from the modern Serbian nation-state centered around Belgrade. However, newspaper accounts published from 1912 to 1914 describe the territories conquered and annexed during the Balkan Wars as “New Serbia.”

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civil authorities from coming to a head. Victory in the Balkan Wars jeopardized Serbia’s security in that it inflamed and inspired Serbian and Yugoslav nationalistic agitators in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and convinced the Habsburg political and military establishment that the time to settle accounts with Serbia was nigh. Macedonia proved a poisoned chalice for Belgrade, inviting Bulgarian antipathy and rendering Serbia’s and later Yugoslavia’s security dilemma insoluble in 1915 and 1941. Despite attaining its pre-war aims, save for an outlet to the Adriatic, Serbia’s triumph in the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 cost irreplaceable quantities of material and even-scarcer human resources and nearly triggered an existential crisis in Serbia’s political institutions. Serbian nationalists failed to accomplish their maximalist aims during the Wars for hegemony over Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. Bosnia and Herzegovina survives as an independent, multi-ethnic, and multiconfessional state. Similarly, Kosovo Albanians carved out an internationally recognized and sovereign state, albeit one whose independence is so far (and in the foreseeable future) unrecognized by Belgrade. Nevertheless, Bosnian Serbs gained a compact, homogenous, largely autonomous, and internationally recognized state within the Bosnian federation. The loss of Kosovo-Metohija even relieved the Serbian government of the burden of governing an economically depressed region peopled by a disgruntled national minority.

The 1913–14 Expedition: Discoveries and Controversies Otto von Bismarck observed that the Balkans mattered to international diplomacy only insofar as they affected relations between the Great Powers.7 The Balkans interested Western statesmen, historians, chroniclers, and linguists not because of their inherent fascinations, charms, and mysteries, but because of the role they were able to play in the century-long struggle for mastery in Europe, as put memorably by A. J. P. Taylor.8 We would do well to remember Bismarck’s dictum when appraising the motivations behind the 1913–1914 Carnegie Commission to the Balkans and its methodology. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s decision to research and document the horrors of the Balkan Wars reflected the personal passions of its illustrious associates, like French deputy d’Estournelles de Constant, 7

Cited in Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers 1804–2012 (London: Granta, 2012), 144. 8 A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for History in Europe: 1848–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954).

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internationalist and former US Secretary of War and State Elihu Root, and Columbia University president Nicholas M. Butler.9 The commission was dispatched to discover the specific causes of the Balkan Wars, with special attention to the second, fratricidal war between the Allies, the conduct of the war by the belligerents, and the war’s legacy in the region. However, d’Estournelles de Constant freely admitted that “the story of the misdeeds in the Balkans . . . do[es] not prove so much against the belligerents as against war itself.”10 The Balkan Wars had been the first major conflict to break out after Andrew Carnegie donated the impressive sum of 10 million dollars to the endowment that would bear his name, and the members of the commission, who believed that by cataloguing the atrocities waged by all the parties in the War they might stimulate greater support in the West (especially the United States) for pacifism and multi-national arbitration of intra-state conflicts, were hardly disinterested observers. The institute’s reputation, and the worthwhile causes it championed, could profit immensely by rendering judgment on a well-publicized conflict, closely followed by the major journals and dailies in the United States and on the Continent. As the Carnegie Commissioners assembled in Vienna for their highly publicized Balkan expedition, they nourished a confidence in the universal moral imperative behind their mission and hoped that the publication of their dreadful findings might contribute to a progressive, global denunciation of war. Belgrade was the first major Balkan stop in the Carnegie Commission fact-finding mission.11 The Commission’s arrival coincided precisely with the lavish celebrations staged to welcome Crown Prince Alexander and the victorious Serbian I Army to the Capitol.12 The Carnegie Commissioners 9

Dzovinar Kévonian, “L’enquête, le délit, la preuve: les ‘atrocités’ balkaniques de 1912–1913 à l’épreuve du droit de la guerre,” Le Mouvement social, no. 1 (222) (January–March, 2008): 13–40. 10 “Balkan Allies Guilty: All Shared in Atrocities, Says Carnegie Commission,” Washington Post, October 24, 1913; “Carnegie Fund to Investigate Balkan Question,” Christian Science Monitor, August 20, 1913; “World to Know All on Balkan Atrocities,” New York Tribune, August 20, 1913. The goal of the Carnegie Commission was defined by Andrew Carnegie as follows: “To hasten the abolition of international war, the foulest blot upon our civilization.” “$10,000,000 for Peace, New Carnegie Gift,” New York Times, December 15, 1910. 11 “Balkan Warfare Subject of Study by Carnegie Aides,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 20, 1913, 13; “La Rapport de la Mission d’enquete,” Journal Des Debats, June 7, 1914. 12 “We left Paris on Aug. 20 and arrived at Belgrade during the celebrations over the Servian victories” (Professor Dutton). “Peace Mission to Balkans Success: Prof. Dutton of Columbia Says Commission Met with No Opposition,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 5, 1913.

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were thus greeted at the very beginning of their expedition with a dramatic display of nationalistic raptures. In the days and weeks preceding the victory celebration, the leading Belgrade papers had roused the Serbian public to a vengeful frenzy. Daily graphic accounts of Bulgarian “bestiality” (zverztva) against innocent Serbs, Greeks, and Turks were published and corroborated by government sources. On August 3 (according to the Gregorian calendar), as the hostilities between the armies wound down, Belgrade’s leading daily Politika—whose chief editor Darko Ribnikar had served as a reserve officer in both Balkan Wars and would soon be killed fighting in the Great War—reported on a “massacre in a mosque” by the Bulgarian army that was followed by the forced Christianization of Turkish Muslims (even the imam was forced to renounce his faith) and a ban on men wearing the fez and women the hijab.13 The article contrasted the religious chauvinism and intolerance of the Bulgarians with the supposedly liberal acceptance of religious freedom by the Serbian government and its officials who safeguarded Muslim inhabitants’ freedom of conscience. While discussion of peace preliminaries continued in Bucharest, the Serbian government disclosed to the press that it was preparing a memorandum detailing “the unprecedented bestialities committed by Bulgarian officers and men against our wounded which have revolted all of Europe. Today, the consensus in the whole civilized world considers the Bulgarian crimes in this war to have superseded the barbarous acts of wild tribes from the Ancient and Medieval epochs.”14 The accusations leveled against the Bulgarian troops included burning civilians and soldiers to death, wide-scale looting and rape, and massacring wounded Serbian soldiers.15 The Serbian press fired vicious daily salvoes of accusations against Bulgaria even after the Treaty of Bucharest was signed on August 10 and Serbia’s Macedonian conquests were ratified and enlarged. Politika demanded the creation of a “Museum of Savagery” so that “images of the horrors committed by the Bulgarians in this war may be preserved for

13

“Pokolj u Džamiji,” Politika, July 21/August 3, 1913. Until the creation of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in December 1918, Serbia retained the Julian calendar. When citing pre-1918 Serbian sources, I provide the date in both the Julian and Gregorian calendars. 14 “Memorandum o zverstvima: Srpska vlada sprema memorandum o bugarskim zverstvima,” Politika, July 22/August 4, 1913. 15 Consider: “Srbi i Bugari: Plemeniost sprskih seljaka, Primitivnost bugarskih seljaka,” Politika, July 23/August 6, 1913; “Bugari peku i deru ljude” and “Bugarska zverstva: Rezultat istrage Fracuskog poslanika u Atini,” Politika, July 24/August 7, 1913; “Bugarki u pljački,” Politika, July 25/August 8, 1913; “Knjaževac i Belogračnik,” Politika, July 29/August 9, 1913.

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posterity.”16 Ironically, Politika would soon launch a rabid campaign against the actions of the Carnegie Commission, which had been summoned precisely to document war’s savagery in print! “Civilization” became a favorite motif in Serbian reportage: Serbian journalists equated “civilization” with “Europe,” claiming that Bulgaria’s wartime brutality placed the nation beyond the pale of European civilization and called for universal condemnation from “Europe.”17 Implicitly, this critique of Bulgaria allied Serbia with the ideal of European civilization and depicted Serbia’s victory over Bulgaria as a moral triumph of civility over barbarism. The Serbian Army’s victory parade was staged as a glorious apotheosis of Serbian national mythos. The program conflated the Serbian past and present, celebrating the victory in the wars against the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria as the fulfillment of Serbia’s national destiny and vengeance for historical wrongs perpetrated against Serbia by its hostile neighbors. Popular sentiment demanded that celebrations “should be the greatest Belgrade ever witnessed.”18 Reminders of past triumphs and defeats shared a ritualistic, symbolic space with the returning veterans of the Balkan Wars and throngs of cheering crowds. As the first members of the commission to arrive in the Balkans, Brailsford, Godart, Dutton, and Milyukov would have been eyewitnesses to Belgrade’s transformation from a bustling, growing, modernizing urban center into a veritable chapel dedicated to Serbia’s military virtue and righteous retribution.19 Temporary “triumphal gates” erected throughout the city center corresponded not only to the major thoroughfares of the city but also to the historical associations evoked by the avenues.20 Fittingly, the gate erected over Nemanić Street, named for the medieval Serbian royal dynasty, was adorned with an inscription celebrating the return of “Dušan’s Skoplje” and promising that the deeds of the Serbian army would be remembered “for centuries” as those of their medieval forbearers had been.21 The procession in Karađorđe Street, named for the leader of the failed First Serbian Uprising (1807) and devoted to the themes of liberation and vengeance portrayed the 1912 victory over the Ottomans as “avenging” Kosovo (1389), and victory over Bulgaria as “redeeming” the nationally catastrophic defeat at Slivnica

16

“Muzej Divljaštva,” Politika, July 31/August 12, 1913. “Protiv Bugara,” Politika, August 5/18, 1913. 18 “Trijumpfalne Kapije,” Politika, August 7/20. 19 The Serbian newspapers did not report the names of the Commission members accurately. Hutton was confused with a certain Dr. Deacon—“a professor from America”—and Godart identified as a London (rather than Lyon) deputy, see “Istraga u Mađedoniu,” Politika, August 12/25, 1913. 20 “Natpisi nad trijumfalnim kapijama,” Pravda, August 11/24, 1913. 21 Ibidem. 17

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during the ill-fated 1885 Serb-Bulgarian War.22 Contemporary and historical heroes were identified and commingled in a re-enactment of an idealized past in the present.23 The victory celebration culminated in the dedication of a newly erected statue of Karađorđe under the auspices of his grand-son King Peter I and Crown Prince Alexander. Speeches by Belgrade notables drew parallels between Karađorđe’s victories against the Ottoman Turks and the Prince-Regent’s victory against the Bulgarians. This celebration at the intersection between the past and the heroic present perhaps unwittingly demonstrated the malleability of Serbian nationalistic rhetoric as Bulgaria, recently an ally, became the equivalent of the Turks, the “eternal enemy” of the Serbian nation.24 As a rule, the Serbian press imbued the work of the Carnegie Commission with a conspiratorial intent and the shadowy influence of Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary. They sought to delegitimize the activities of the Commission, misrepresent its goals and methods, and impugn the veracity of its findings while publicizing and encouraging counter-narratives centered on Serbian victimhood and Bulgarian wartime atrocities. Throughout September and October 1913, Politika continued to detail Bulgarian savagery in new articles published virtually daily.25 Though Politika closely followed the commissioners’ activities, it failed to accurately report them to its readers. Because Belgrade perceived the actions of the Carnegie Commission as anti-Serb propaganda and considered the principle of international inspection and arbitration a potential limitation of, and therefore threat to, Serbia’s sovereignty, Serbian intellectuals produced counter-propaganda to defend against future accusations by the Commission. Aleksandar Belić, a 22

Ibidem. Milica Bakić-Hayden identified a similar occurrence in the language used by Serbian reporters in the early 1990s during the war in Bosnia, see Milica BakicHayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995): 917–31. Also see Homi K. Bhabha, National and Narration (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1990), 1. 24 In the decade preceding the First Balkan War, an alliance—or at least a friendly understanding—with Bulgaria was a central priority of Serbian foreign policy. In fact, Serbia could be described as the supplicant in its search for Bulgarian support: Andrew Rossos, “Serbian-Bulgarian Relations, 1903–1914,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 23, no. 4 (1981): 394–408. 25 For example: “Gde su Bugari prošli: Dokumenti o bugarskim zverstvima u Mađedoniji,” Politika, September 2/15, 1913; “Varoš Smrti: Demir Hasan posle bugarskog prelaska,” Politika, September 3/16, 1913; “Zverovi ne ljudi!,” Politika, September 3/16; “U Bugarskom Ropstvu: Pričanja jednog oficira,” Politika, September 10/13, 1913; “Bugarska Zverstva,” Politika, September 19/October 2, 1913. 23

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renowned linguist and future president of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU), was the most prominent intellectual to engage in this anti-Bulgarian and anti-Carnegie polemic. Adapting a series of articles he had written for St. Petersburg newspapers during the Balkan Wars, Belić rushed a short work titled Serbs and Bulgarians during the Balkan Alliance and Mutual War (Srbi i Bugari u Balkanskom Savezu i Međusobnom Ratu) in which he presented an ethnographic defense of Serbia’s Macedonian claims, portrayed the Bulgarian military and government as traitors to Balkan unity and brotherhood, and denounced “Bulgarian bestiality.”26 Contemporaries understood Belić’s as a contribution to the anti-Milyukov—and by extension anti-Carnegie—polemic. A reviewer commended Belić as a “protector” of Serbia’s national honor and the Balkan alliance from Milyukov’s invented and dangerous accusations.27 Well-read, well-traveled Serbians were especially aware of Milyukov’s popularity and esteem in French liberal circles.28 With Austro-Serbian relations openly deteriorating, an indictment of Serbia’s conduct during the Balkan Wars could plausibly jeopardize Franco-Serbian relations and rob Serbia of much needed Great Power support in its disputes with the Dual Monarchy. Serbian newspapers and intellectuals challenged the legitimacy of the Carnegie Commission by attacking its most prominent member with an alacrity that demonstrated their fear of both the conclusions the commission might draw and the moral international prestige it commanded. The Socialist-leaning daily Pravda articulated its opposition to the commission as a defense of the formula “the Balkans for Balkan peoples.”29 The welcome the Bulgarian authorities had shown to the Commission, coupled with Bulgaria’s simultaneous attempts to seek Great Power backing to recover Adrianople, which the Ottomans had seized in contempt of the Treaty of London, was castigated as a betrayal of the sovereignty of Slav and Balkan states. As a symbol of Great Power meddling in the actions of Balkan states and peoples, the commission was identified as a destabilizing regional influence that would aid Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian enforcement of Serbophobe policies.30 Pravda editors all leveled accusations against Serbian officers and men to false information spread by Austro-Hungarian government agents and allies in the press.31 The

26

Aleksandar Belić, Srbi i Bugari u Balkanskom Savezu i Međusobnom Ratu (Belgrade: S.B. Tsvijanović, 1913). 27 M. D. Milojević, “Belić, Srbi i Bugari,” Srprski Književi Glasnik, II-8, 1913, 710– 13. 28 Ibidem, 711–12. report. 29 “Ko zove Evropu na Balkan?” Pravda, August 12/25, 1913. 30 Ibidem. 31 “Karnedžijeva Komisija,” Pravda, August 15/28, 1913.

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government was counseled to guard itself against Austro-Hungarian attempts to “blacken” Serbia’s reputation, and Milyukov, unsurprisingly, was singled out as the most public and nefarious agent of the AustroBulgarian anti-Serb cabal.32 It is important to contextualize the Serbian public’s antipathy toward the Carnegie Commission and skepticism about its stated goals. During the First Balkan War, Serbia suffered more harshly from the diktats of the European Concert than did any of its fellow belligerents. Whereas Bulgaria achieved virtually all its strategic goals, except the occupation of Salonika, by force of arms, Serbia was not allowed to profit from its victories in northern Albania and was denied access to the Adriatic Sea, crucial to its independent economic development. Relations with Great Britain had been strained since the 1903 regicide, leaving Serbia with precious few potential Great Power patrons. Should the damning verdict by the Carnegie Commission be accepted by the Great Powers—especially if the commission represented those Powers’ moral judgment—Serbia’s security and survival could be threatened. Meanwhile, just as the commission members were arriving in the Balkans, Serbian civil and military authorities were engaged in an acrimonious struggle over the administration of newly won territories in Kosovo and Macedonia.33 For the first time in its modern history as an independent state, Serbia faced the challenge of ruling over and administering a region inhabited by large non-Serb minorities.34 Insisting that these territories should be placed under a military regime, the military leadership and the shadowy Black Hand organization instituted a de facto occupation authority. The Radical Party under Pašić’s leadership protested the Army’s scheme and attempted to organize a civilian government, albeit one that could hardly qualify as democratic or representative. Pašić and his colleagues issued a series of extra-legal executive orders (uredbe) restricting the right to self-government, representation in the Skupština, due process, and free press, justifying the crackdown with the fiction that residents of those regions needed time to develop the arts of responsible selfgovernment. In reality, residents of Kosovo and Macedonia had enjoyed greater local autonomy under the Ottoman regime than under Pašić’s. As the Commission’s Report concluded, “Macedonia . . . [was] viewed as a dependency, a sort of conquered colony, whose conquerors might

32

Ibidem. Miloš Jagodić, Uređenje Oslobošenih oblasti Srbije 1912–1914: Pravni Okvir (Belgrade: Istorijski institut, 2010); Andrej Mitrović, Serbia’s Great War, 1914– 1918 (West Lafayette: Hurst, 2007), 24. 34 S. G. Markovich, “Ethnic and National Minorities in Serbia and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia,” in Minorities in the Balkans: State Policy and Inter-Ethnic Relations, 1804– 2004, ed. Dušan Bataković (Belgrade: Institute for Balkan Studies, 2011), 92–93. 33

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administer at their good pleasure.”35 Meanwhile, the once-disorganized opposition—looking ahead to parliamentary elections scheduled for summer 1914—slowly reached an anti-Pašić consensus and identified evidence of the dangerous misgovernment of the new territories as an effective tool with which to bludgeon Radical deputies and candidates.36 As the Opposition parties threatened to close ranks against him, and as the military ignored sovereignty of the Skupština to pursue its own agenda, Pašić—whose decades-long political career was primarily defined by his skill at holding power37 rather than wielding it effectively or benevolently— obstructed the Commission, fearing that if his regime’s misgovernance and frequent recourse to expediency over legality were widely publicized, his government would collapse under reinvigorated international and internal pressure, if not immediately then during the 1914 elections.38 Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pašić declined to cooperate with the Carnegie Commission, citing Professor Milyukov’s prominent role in the organization. Pašić believed Milyukov was prejudiced against the Serbs and unduly favorable toward Bulgaria.39 He demanded Milyukov be expelled from Serbia and declined to grant the other commissioners freedom of movement within Kosovo and Macedonia, instead requiring that a Serbian military attaché accompany their tour of the battlefields of the Balkan Wars. Because the commissioners’ freedom of movement and inquiry were more constrained in Serbia than in other states they visited on the factfinding mission, it predictably proved difficult for the commissioners to unearth evidence of Serbian war crimes and excesses in Kosovo and Vardar Macedonia. Moreover, Milyukov’s absence greatly impaired the Commission’s work in Serbia. Without the talents of the only commission member fluent in a Slavic language, the Commissioners undoubtedly had to rely on the services of local interpreters and the military attaché the Serbian government had forced on the commission. 35

Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914). 36 Pašić did not succeed in hiding his electoral difficulties from the Commissioners: “The question of the administration to be erected in Macedonia displayed so wide a divergence between the views of Mr. Pachitch and his colleagues, apart from the military group, that Mr. Pachitch’s resignation was talked of.” Ibidem. 37 Alex N. Dragnitch, Serbia, Nikola Pasic, and Yugoslavia (New Brunswick, NJ: University of Rutgers Press, 1974); Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Serbia: The History of an Idea (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 125. 38 Fred Singleton, A Short History of the Yugoslav Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 114. 39 “Servia Starts Discord: Carnegie Commissioners at Odds over a Russian Member,” New York Tribune, August 28, 1913.

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The Serbian government’s obstructionism prevented the Carnegie Commission from producing a systematic account of Serbian atrocities against the Bulgarians during the Second Balkan War against Bulgaria and forced the Commissioners to rely on secondary sources, sometimes favorable to Serbia, to complete their report. In Chapter III of the Commission Report, the authors confessed that “the Commission is not so well provided with documentary evidence as to the excesses which may have taken place on the side of the Servian army during the combat.”40 Lacking access to Serbian sources, the commission was forced to rely on Bulgarian eyewitnesses’ accounts of Serbian wartime conduct.41 This exposed the commission to charges of partiality by the regime-affiliated Serbian press which accused the commission of carrying out its investigation “on Bulgaria’s account,” collecting testimony from “only Bulgarian refugees and [self-proclaimed] martyrs,” and “defending Bulgaria.”42 The charge was disingenuous, but technically correct; the Pašić government left the Commissioners no choice but to rely on non-Serbian sources to reconstruct the wartime actions of Serbian troops and authorities. The commission allayed charges of favoritism by incorporating photographs as well as personal accounts of the Balkan Wars by foreign journalists and military attaches. The report singled out Alain de Penennrun’s Forty Days of War in the Balkans (Quarante jours de guerre dans les Balkans) as a significant source.43 Penennrun, war correspondent for the prominent Parisian weekly Illustration (the first French newspaper to publish a photograph) and a general staff officer, repeatedly lauded Serbia’s “civilized sentiments . . . progressive culture . . . and the iron discipline of the Serbian army [based on] the inherent goodness and humility” of the Serbian people in his account.44 Serbia’s leading literary periodical, the Serbian Literary Herald (Srpski Književni Glasnik), whose editors enthusiastically supported Serbia’s nationalistic expansionism, described Penennrun as “one of the few qualified witnesses” to the wars and hailed his account as “a work of great and lasting importance.”45 However, even after the commission incorporated Serbophile records similar to 40

Report of the International Commission, 143. Ibidem, 137. 42 “Dokumenti o Bugarima,” Politika, September 3/16, 1913; “Maljukov i drugovi,” Politika, September 4/17, 1913; “Maljukov na poslu,” Politika, November 10/23, 1913. 43 Report of the International Commission, 136; Alain de Penennrun, Quarante jours de guerres dans les Balkans (Paris: Chapelot, 1914). 44 Penennrun, Quarante jours, 196–228. 45 M. D. Milojević, “Četrdeset dana rata na Balkanu: Srpsko-bugarska vonja u julu 1913, od Alena de Penenrena,” Srpski Književni Glasnik, II-11/12, 1914, 926–31. 41

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Pennenrun’s, the Serbian press twisted the Commission’s intentions and undermined its legitimacy. When it came out that Milyukov tried to purchase images of suspected Bulgarian war crimes photographed by a Russian journalist named Černov, Politika ran a headline accusing Milyukov of offering 40,000 Dinars for the photographs so he could destroy them and keep them unseen.46 A more plausible explanation for Milyukov’s offer is that he wished to acquire the images for publication in the Commission Report which was supplemented by forty-nine images. Serbian coverage of Milyukov’s role in the Carnegie investigation oscillated between highlighting his personal malice toward Serbs and emphasizing his role as pawn in a larger Austro-Bulgarian anti-Serb conspiracy. For example, Politika claimed that Milyukov had privately admitted to Černov “that Serbs, during both wars, committed the fewest crimes,” but that this knowledge would not be allowed to interfere with his anti-Serb agenda.47 News of Serbian and later Greek obfuscation and attempts to hamper the Commission’s efforts spread quickly. The Serbian government’s lack of cooperation elicited general disapproval in the international press and undermined its own credibility. The reporting of the Times of India is representative: But the inquiry did not suit the Greeks and Servians [sic] and they have been so effectively obstructive that the Committee appointed to make the investigation has had to abandon its task. Hence-forward, then, we must treat with the maximum of suspicion whatever either Greece or Servia has to say on the subject.48

Rumors of the commission’s failure circulated in the press, compelling the US State Department to issue a formal statement on behalf of the Carnegie Endowment denying “numerous published reports from Europe of the entire failure of the inquiry into the Balkan atrocities.”49 Still, the Pašić government could be reasonably pleased with its handiwork, for whatever censure the Serbian authorities received for their recalcitrance was mitigated by delaying the completion of the Carnegie Commission’s report and presumably by concealment of the worst excesses perpetrated by Serbian regular and irregular detachments, so as to leave Western audiences ignorant of specific Serbian atrocities. The commission members thus left Serbia knowing that the Serbian government and army were guilty of wretched crimes during the Balkan Wars, but without the tools necessary to persecute perpetrators of individual episodes. 46

“Maljukov na poslu,” Politika, November 10/23, 1913. “G. Černov u Beogradu,” Politika, November 16/29, 1913. 48 “Bulgarian ‘Atrocities’,” Times of India, September 2, 1913. 49 “Balkan Inquiry Goes On,” New York Times, September 5, 1913. 47

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The Carnegie Commission Report condemned the actions of Serbia’s army and auxiliary, irregular Chetnik detachments: the ill treatment of Bulgarian prisoners, the cruel and repressive occupational tactics employed in Albania, Macedonia, and Kosovo, wanton looting, destruction of property, and scourging of entire villages, as well as the ethnic cleansing of Muslim and Bulgarian communities in Serb-occupied territories.50 Accounts of Serbian troops’ near daily-acts of mismanagement, rape, terror, and nationalist-religious chauvinism sullied the reputation of the Serbian army and government. However, the report strove to demonstrate the shared guilt of the Balkan belligerents rather than weigh the moral culpability of one Balkan state against another, and an objective reader could not accuse it of having an anti-Serb bias. That said, there were few objective Serbian readers of the commission report, at least not in positions of authority. Nonetheless, an unintended consequence of the hesitancy of the authors of the commission report to blame all parties involved in the conflict rather than emphasize the crimes of any one belligerent over others allowed Serbophile Western journalists to downplay Serbia’s culpability.51 The hostility and suspicion shown to the Carnegie Balkan Commission by Serbian statesmen, journalists, and intellectuals arose from a confluence of factors. First, the general euphoria unleashed by victory in the Second Balkan War was predicated on a narrative of Serbian victimhood and cruel Bulgarian treachery—a triumphant corollary to and fulfilment of the Kosovo myth, arguably the founding myth of the modern Serbian state.52 This mythic retelling of Serbia’s national past and future was threatened by the reality of mutual atrocities committed in the name of Great Serbian and Great Bulgarian nationalisms during the Balkan Wars. Additionally, the Carnegie Commission’s arrival reminded Serbs of the Great Power 50

Report of the International Commission, 158–86. For example: “Serbia was charged with the least guilty crimes,” in “Les conclusions de la Commission Carnegie,” Le Croix, May 20, 1914. The Commission was accused of ignoring non-Bulgarian sources and of having ulterior motives, “La Rapport de la Mission d’enquete de la Dotation Carnegie dans les Balkans,” Journal des Debats, June 7, 1914. 52 The literature, scholarly and popular, on the Battle of Kosovo and its role in Serbian literature, culture, nationalism, and popular memory is voluminous. The following is representative, albeit certainly not comprehensive: “The Battle of Kosovo of 1389 and Serbian Nationalism,” in Paul Cohen, History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 1–32; Miloš Nikolić, “Kosovo in Historical Perspective: Past and Future,” SEER 1, no. 4 (1998): 7–29; Tim Judah, “The Serbs: The Sweet and Rotten Smell of History,” Daedalus 126, no. 3 (1997): 23–45; Bratislav Pantelić, “Designing Identities: Reshaping the Balkans in the First Two Centuries: The Case of Serbia,” Journal of Design History 20, no. 2 (2007): 131–44. 51

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meddling in Balkan affairs that had cost Serbia its Albanian conquests at London and initiated the sequence of events that culminated in the Second Balkan War. Although the commission was not affiliated with any of the Great Powers, its mandate and its members’ support for the creation of an international commission to monitor hostilities challenged the principle of “the Balkans for Balkan peoples,” the bedrock of Serbian foreign policy. The commission could deal a fatal blow to the Pašić government’s international prestige and domestic hegemony by publicizing the extent of Serbia’s wartime crimes or the failure of its administration of Kosovo and Macedonia. Finally, the specter of Austria-Hungary cannot be underestimated. The Dual Monarchy’s hostile intentions toward Serbia were barely disguised and posed an existential threat to Serbia’s survival as an independent state. The Carnegie mission’s findings had potentially grave implications on Serbia’s rivalry with its mighty neighbor: they might validate Austrian accusations of Serbian aggressive and illegal expansionism, dash Serbia’s hopes of French patronage, and invite the Great Powers to intervene in future Balkan quarrels on the grounds of “protecting civilization.” Serbian hostility to the work of the Carnegie Commission in 1913–1914 created a precedent that the Milošević regime would later revive and deploy against United Nations watchdogs, Western journalists, and critics during the “Third” Balkan War in the 1990s. Indeed, the Milošević government relied on the same old tactics of concealing its crimes by counterpublicizing atrocities committed by its enemies, as if mutual guilt somehow washed blood off their own hands, and hiding behind the cloak of “sovereignty” to excuse crimes against its own people.53 Similarly, the proregime Serbian media disparaged the legitimacy of international, nongovernmental institutions and trotted out conspiratorial fantasies to impugn the actions of the Powers during the 1990s, when the Balkans once more commanded the world’s attention in tragic circumstances.54

53

Authoritarian regimes frequently cite the pretext of sovereignty to excuse their disregard for human rights and the rule of law: Daniel W. Drezner, “On the Balance Between International law and Democratic Sovereignty,” Chicago Journal of International Law 2, no. 2 (September, 2001): 321–36; Rolf Schwarz, “The Paradox of Sovereignty, Regime Type and Human Rights Compliance,” The International Journal of Human Rights 8, no. 2 (2004): 199–215. 54 In 2011, the leading Serbian TV station—RTS—published a much belated but welcome apology for its coverage of the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts. For a decade the channel had served as the regime’s mouthpiece and apologist: “Serbia state TV apologizes for Milosevic-era propaganda,” The Guardian, May 24, 2011.

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Popular Memory and Historiography of the Balkan Wars in Yugoslavia, 1918–89 In the interwar period in Yugoslavia, commemoration of the Balkan Wars became intermingled with that of the First World War. Together, the three wars became mythologized as the “wars for liberation and unification” (oslobodjenje i ujednijenje). King Peter of Serbia (r. 1903–1921 de facto, 1903–1914, de jure) earned the sobriquet “The Liberator” and his son and successor Alexander was formally lionized as “The Unifier.”55 Neither the 1913 diplomatic volte-face between Serbia and Bulgaria nor the campaign of Serbianization pursued by the civil and military authorities in Kosovo and Macedonia could be reconciled within the heroic narrative of national liberation, so they were subsequently repressed. Thus, destructive course and ambivalent legacy of the Balkan Wars were transformed into a heroic narrative of suffering, sacrifice, and triumph that could be shared by all Yugoslavs not just Serbs. Two major war monuments in Belgrade—The Victor (Pobednik) and the Monument to the Unknown Hero (Spomenik Neznanom junaku)—aptly represent the continuity between the Balkan Wars and the First World War in Serbian/Yugoslav collective memory. The Victor, a monumental male nude towering over the apex of the Kalamegdan Fortress complex at the juncture of the Sava and Danube Rivers, was initially meant to stand at Terazije Square (briefly renamed in August 1913 to Crown Prince Alexander Square and one of the sites visited by the Carnegie commission) to celebrate victory over the Ottomans in the First Balkan War. However, an official contract was negotiated with Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović in October 1913, at which point the Victor (planned as a fountain) was changed to commemorate victory over both the Ottomans and the Bulgarians. And by 1927 when work on the monument restarted, the Victor had emerged as an emblem of Serbia’s victory in the Great War and South Slav unification.56 Plans for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, also designed by Meštrović, crystallized during the royal dictatorship of King Alexander (r. 1922–1934, as king-dictator from 1929–1934). The Tomb was intended as an eloquent and powerful symbol of national unity of all Yugoslavs and not

55

Milutin D. Lazarević, Naši Ratovi za oslobođenje i ujedinjenje, 4 vols. (Belgrade: 1929–1934); Dimitrije Popović, Borba za narodno ujednijenje (Belgrade: [undated, before 1941]). 56 Mileta Prodanović, Stariji i lepsi Beograd (Belgrade: Stubovi kulture, 2002); Christine Lavrence, “Between Monumental History and Experience: Remembering and Forgetting War in Belgrade,” Ethnologie francaise 37, no. 3 (2007): 441–47.

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just Serbs who fought in the wars of “liberation and unification.”57 The influential Zagreb journal Nova Evropa rapturously wrote: As we accept this symbol, this sublime memory of the Unknown Soldier, we unite and fuse, irrespective of race, creed, religion, class; we become one in pain and joy, in all universal human feelings that are also Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene—in one word, Yugoslav.58

The solitary inscription “1912–1918” at the base of the tomb testifies to the conflation of the Balkan Wars and the First World War in Interwar Yugoslav nationalistic commemoration. Because Alexander’s integral Yugoslavism was imagined as a supra-national official nationalism rather than an ethnic nationalism, victorious Serbs’ oppression of Turkish- and Albanian-speaking minorities in 1912–13 could be ideologically reconciled with liberation from the Ottoman yoke for all Yugoslavs, irrespective of their ethnicity or religion.59 Yugoslav historians typically characterized the Balkan Wars as “heroic national clashes for Yugoslav Unification and Liberation” and, along with the Great War, as “not just battles for Serbia’s survival, but for the fate of all Yugoslav peoples.”60 By entangling the histories of the Balkan Wars with the First World War, Yugoslav interwar historiography avoided discussion of the particulars of the Balkan Wars. Its task was instead to portray the wars as an episode in 57

The most detailed study of the monument is: Aleksandar Ignjatović, “From Constructed Memory to Imagined National Tradition: The Tomb of the Unknown Yugoslav Soldier (1934–38),” The Slavonic and East European Review 88, no. 4 (2010): 624–51. For an excellent recent treatment of Yugoslavism under the dictatorship, see Christian Axboe Nielsen, Making Yugoslavs: Identity in King Aleksandar’s Yugoslavia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). On the evolution of Yugoslavism: Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918–1992, ed. Dejan Djokic (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); Dejan Djokic and James Ker-Lindsay, eds., New Perspectives on Yugoslavia: Key Issues and Controversies (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). The standard study in Serbian remains: Ljubodrag Dimic, Kulturna politika Kraljevine Jugoslavie, 3 vols. (Belgrade: Stubovi Kulture, 1996). 58 R. Djermanović, “Smisao kulta Neznanog junaka,” Nova Evropa, 32 (1939): 15– 17. Cited in Ignjatović, “From Constructed Memory,” 627. 59 I am applying the category of “official nationalism” as defined by Benedict Anderson (“something emanating from the state, and serving the interests of the state first and foremost”) to interwar Yugoslavism under the dictatorship, in contrast to the mass, popular Serbian nationalism. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, [1983] 1991), 157. 60 Ferdo Šišić, Jugoslovenska Misao: Istorija Ideje Jugoslovenskog Narodnog Ujedinjenja i Oslobođenja od 1790–1918 (Belgrade: Balkanski Institut, 1937), 258–60.

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the project of Yugoslav liberation and chart what consequences of Serbia’s war victory had for the South Slavs in the Dual Monarchy and Belgrade’s relationship to Vienna.61 In such works, Austria-Hungary rather than the Ottoman Empire or Bulgaria emerge as Serbia’s true nemesis during the Wars. Despite unfavorable geography—other than Germany, no other European state was cursed with so many close neighbors—Yugoslavia largely managed to retain peaceful relations with its neighbors during the interwar period.62 The guiding principles of Yugoslav foreign policy was maintenance of its mutually beneficial alliance with Romania, active cooperation in the League of Nations, avoidance of conflict with expansionistic, fascist Italy (especially over Albania), and compliance with international arbitration treaties and negotiations. The Yugoslav Foreign Ministry, which was overwhelmingly staffed by Serbs, sought to retain the territorial status quo in the Balkans through membership in international and regional alliances: the League of Nations, the Little Entente, and the Balkan Pact.63 Despite intermittent disputes and controversies with Italy and Bulgaria, Yugoslavia’s readiness to submit local quarrels to international arbitration at the League of Nations and cement positive bilateral relations through regional alliances ensured its status as a stabilizing force in the Balkans. Near the end of his life, King Alexander could boast, with some justification, that he had accomplished “all [he] sought” in foreign policy.64 No longer the powder keg of Europe, Yugoslavia pursued (albeit unsuccessfully) a policy of neutrality that was able to delay but not prevent the global conflagration’s expansion to the Balkans. The first manifestation of Yugoslavia was consumed in the world catastrophe of 1941, and its successes, failures, and ideals discarded on the ash heap of history.65 61

Mihailo M. Živančević, Jugoslavija i Federacija (Belgrade: Privdreni Pregled, 1938), 65–70. 62 “Spoljni odnosi: Opšti deo (1926),” in Britani o Kraljevini Jugoslaviji: Godišnji izveštaji Britanskog poslanstva u Beogradu 1921–1938, vol. 1, ed. Živko Avramovski (Zagreb: Globus, 1986), 365; Bogdan Kzriman, “Vanjskopolitički položaj Kraljevine Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca godine 1919,” Časopis za suvremenu povijest 1 (1970): 23–60; B. Krizman, Vanjska politika Jugoslavenske države: 1918–1941: diplomatsko-historijski pregled (Zagreb: Skolska Knjiga Gagreb, 1975). 63 In 1931, Serbs held 164 out of 215 diplomatic and consular posts, along with 14 out of the 20 Foreign Ministry representatives with ministerial rank. Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Serbia: The History Behind the Name (London: Hurst & Company, 2002), 136. 64 Ivan Meštrović, Uspomene na Političke Ljude i Događaje (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1969), 233–36. 65 Yugoslavia was partitioned among the Third Reich’s allies following the April War of 1941, thus severing the country’s administrative and political continuity.

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Anglo-American scholarship on Yugoslavia and thus Serbia in the years between the end of the Second World War and the outbreak of the Yugoslav Wars was conditioned primarily by Yugoslavia’s internal development during WWII and its unique role in Cold War politics. Because Yugoslav communism had not been installed by Moscow—and especially because Tito emancipated himself from Moscow’s leash after 1948 and worked to establish the “non-aligned” movement and the doctrine of socialist “self-management”—Western scholarly and popular literature regarded Socialist Yugoslavia as legitimate and in fact superior to its interwar predecessor. Unlike its neighbors, Yugoslavia was remarkably open to Western scholars and welcomed Anglo-American academics, resulting in the publication of monographs containing generally favorable appraisals of Yugoslav socialism, Tito’s leadership, and the Yugoslav program of socialist self-management.66 In the eyes of most Western commentators, the Socialist Yugoslav Republics had gained moral legitimacy through their heroic struggle against Fascism and Stalinism. The Western Powers viewed Yugoslavia—and by extension Serbia—as a valuable potential ally.67 In the grand contest between Western capitalist democracy and Soviet Communism, the Balkans remained a dormant front for forty years, no longer qualifying as Europe’s “powder keg.” Yugoslav historiography under the Tito regime was guided by the twin pillars of Marxism and Yugoslav nationalism.68 Although Tito rejected the imposition of Soviet Communism—or more accurately objected to taking orders from Stalin and his successors—he cultivated socialism and the cult of worker self-management as pillars of the state until his death. Tito’s Yugoslavia defined itself in opposition to its Serb-dominated monarchical

Yugoslavia’s resurrection under the Communist Tito regime as a federation of socialist republics was barely comparable to its centralist, monarchical predecessors. John Keegan has convincingly argued that Yugoslavia’s dismemberment by the Axis Powers was a crucial Hitlerian strategic error. See John Keegan, The Second World War (New York: Viking, 1990), 494–95. 66 Phyllis Auty was allowed to interview Tito as early as 1951 and travelled the country extensively in the years almost immediately following the Tito-Stalin split, eventually producing a number of important works. See Phyllis Auty, Yugoslavia (New York: Walker & Co., 1965); Phyllis Auty, Tito (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970). Similarly, Dennison Rusinow lived in Yugoslavia from 1963 to 1973. 67 John E. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There was a Country (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 241–98; Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Tito: Yugoslavia’s Great Dictator; A Reassessment (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992); Richard West, Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia (New York: Basic Books, 1996). 68 Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution 1919–1953 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 150–88.

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predecessor. Subsequently, attempts to limit the political power of the Serbs—such as creating Vojvodina and Kosovo as autonomous regions— were paralleled in official Yugoslav historiography by a reluctance toward researching narrowly Serbian themes and by a harshly critical attitude toward Serbian nationalism and centralism. The Balkan Wars had been a Serbian victory, and the Tito regime saw Serbia’s conquests of Kosovo and Macedonia as expressions of Great Serb hegemony, so studies of the wars were few and their content dictated by ideology. Titoist-era historiography of the Balkan Wars recapitulated Serbian socialist intellectuals’ pre-First World War critiques condemning the Second Balkan War as a struggle between competing petty bourgeois interests and criticized Serbia’s attempted expansion toward the Adriatic in Albania. In a new edition of his Serbia and Albania published in 1946, the author Tucović characterized Serbia’s claims to Albanian territory as imperialist, signaling a profound change in the direction of the regime’s interpretation of the Balkan Wars.69 Yugoslav textbooks reinforced the thesis that the Balkan Wars arose from “the desire of bourgeois interests in each participating country for territorial aggrandizement and its economic expansion.” However, the narrow Marxist-materialist framework precluded discussion of the nature and expression of Serbian nationalism during the wars and Serbian atrocities—examined in the Carnegie Commission’s Report—were neither described nor debated in great detail.70 The regime-sponsored Yugoslav Encyclopedia (Enciklopedija Jugoslavije) compiled between 1955—1971 devotes ten pages to coverage of the Balkan Wars, but aside from parroting the official interpretation that the First War represented liberation from Ottoman feudalism while the Second War was a manifestation of bourgeois greed, militarism, and hegemony, it contains not a single reference to either the atrocities committed by Serbian and Montenegrin troops in occupied territories or to the Carnegie Report.71 The ten-volume History of the Serbian People (Istorija Srprskog Naroda), although published in the waning days of Yugoslav Socialism, is similarly dilatory in its coverage: the history of the Balkan Wars was relegated to a sub-section of a chapter describing sociopolitical conditions at the dawn of the twentieth century, the development of trade unions, and Serbian socialism.72 69

Saša Stanojević, “Balkanski Ratovi u Srpskoj Istoriografiji,” in Humanizacija Univerziteta: tematski zbornik radova, ed. Bojana Dimitrijević (Niš: Izdavački centar, Univerzitet u Nišu, Filozofski fakultet, 2013), 453. 70 John Georgeoff, “Nationalism in the History Textbooks of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria,” Comparative Education Review 10, no. 3 (1966): 449. 71 M. Lić, “Balkanski Rat,” in Enciklopedia Jugoslavije, vol. 2, ed. Miroslav Krleža (Zagreb: Leksikografski zavod 1956), 304–14. 72 Dimitrije Đorđević, “Na početku razdoblja ratova,” in Istorija Srpskog Naroda, volume VI-1 (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1983), 174–207.

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The Titoist regime’s slogan, “Brotherhood and Unity” (bratstvo i jedinstvo), demanded that Yugoslavs forget their histories and uncritically accept the regime’s interpretation of the past. Yugoslav historiographers internalized Ernest Renan’s dictum that “forgetting . . . is an essential factor in the creation of a nation.”73 The few who attempted to study the “fratricidal” Yugoslav conflicts—the Balkan Wars, and especially the Second World War—were forced to conform to official narratives.

The Carnegie Endowment Returns to the Balkans In 1993, the Carnegie Endowment published a new edition of the 1914 Carnegie Commission report with a revised introduction by George F. Kennan, the American doyen of European politics and former Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1952) and Yugoslavia (1961–63).74 The report was reissued on the eightieth anniversary of the Second Balkan War but its function was not solely commemorative. Rather, the report was intended to energize the international response to the on-going civil war in BosniaHerzegovina. Carnegie Endowment president Morton Abramowitz was inspired to read the 1914 report for the first time after reading “Letters from Bosnia: Original Virtue, Original Sin” in the New Yorker, an article by David Rieff that drew its epigraph from the Commission Report.75 Rieff’s analysis of the bloodletting in Bosnia was ambivalent: despite opening his article with a quoted passage from the 1914 report describing the Serbian and

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Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation? (11 March, 1882)” in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 41–55. 74 The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George F. Kennan (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1993). For more on Kennan, his long and prolific career as a public intellectual and foreign policy guru, and his influence, see John L. Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011); Walter L. Hixson, George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); John Lukacs, George Kennan: A Study of Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Wilson D. Miscamble, “George Kennan: A life in the Foreign Service,” Foreign Service Journal 81, no. 2 (May 2004): 22–34. 75 The Other Balkan Wars, 1; David Rieff, “Letter from Bosnia: Original Virtue, Original Sin,” The New Yorker, November 23, 1992. By 1995, however, Rieff abandoned the “inevitability of violence” thesis and concluded that Western intervention on the side of the Bosnian government was necessary to combat the Serbian policy of ethnic cleansing.

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Montenegrin troops’ brutality toward Muslims, Rieff ascribed responsibility for the “Balkan holocaust” to all participants. Massacres showed that “hatred was the real face of Yugoslavia’s warring nations, and that ethnic cleansing was its emblem. . . . There is savagery in every civil war.”76 Rieff described the Balkans as a wild region inhabited by a violent people whose destructive impulses could only be temporarily restrained. In short, the peoples of the Balkans were doomed to a self-perpetuating cycle of violence as past atrocities were recreated in the present. Spurred by Rieff’s article to read the Carnegie Commission report, Abramowitz concluded that Others should also have an opportunity to read it [the Commission Report]. It is a document with many stories to tell us in this twilight decade of the twentieth century, when yet again a conflict in the Balkans torments Europe and the conscience of the international community, and when our willingness to act has not matched our capacity for moral outrage.77

Given the self-evident parallels between the Balkan conflicts of the 1910s and 1990s, Abramowitz undeniably intended the reissue of the 1914 Commission Report to inspire moral outrage over the ongoing crimes in Bosnia and urgently summon its readers to action. Kennan’s introduction problematized the past and present Balkan Wars along civilizational lines,78 explaining that the roots of the present conflict “reach back, clearly, not only into the centuries of Turkish domination but also into the Byzantine penetration of the Balkans even before that time.”79 Relying on the Orientalist-Balkanist trope of the Balkans as a region simultaneously haunted by too much history and bereft of historical change, Kennan wrote that “eighty years of tremendous change in the remainder of Europe . . . have done little to alter the essence of the problem this geographic region [the Balkans] presents for Europe.”80

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Stjepan Meštrović, Genocide after Emotion: The Post-Emotional Balkan War (New York: Psychology Press, 1996), 133. 77 The Other Balkan Wars, 1. 78 My discussion of Kennan’s introductory essay owes a great debt to earlier work by Lene Hansen. Lene Hansen, “Past as Preface: Civilizational Politics and the ‘Third’ Balkan War,” Journal of Peace Research 37, no. 3 (2000): 345–62. 79 The Other Balkan Wars, 13. Kennan’s “ancient hatreds” argument was challenged by scholars emphasizing the roles of Yugoslav nationalistic elites that invented “traditional” and “ancient” enemies through their control and manipulation of the media and academia. See, for example, Stevan Majstrovic, “Ancient Hatreds of Elite Manipulation? Memory and Politics in the Former Yugoslavia,” World Affairs 159, no. 4 (1997): 170–82. 80 Ibidem, 12–13. For more on the Orientalist/Balkanist tradition in Western historiography, refer to Maria Todorova, “The Trap of Backwardness:

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Whereas Europe experienced “tremendous change”—equated with progress—“the excited peoples” of the Balkans remained as feral as they had been a near century ago.81 Kennan’s recommendations for a secure post-bellum settlement stressed the need for “a clearly accepted territorial status quo” and “certain greater and more effective restraints on the behavior of the states in the region” enforced by the threat of military action against non-compliant Balkan governments. This advice supplied the framework for the policy recommendations advocated for by the 1996 Carnegie Commission Report on the Balkans.82 Kennan’s brief guidance amounted to a radical proposal for an international system that would limit the sovereignty of states and hold them accountable by threatening them with violent reprisals for crimes committed against their own citizens within their internationally recognized borders. Kennan’s introduction re-conceptualized the 1914 Commission Report’s findings by framing them as an indictment of the horrors of Balkan warfare and Balkan nationalism rather than a denunciation of war as its authors had intended in 1913–1914.83 Before leaving for the Balkans in 1913, Samuel Dutton wrote to Columbia University president Nicholas Butler that if the atrocities “can be capitalized and all the machinery available for reaching human minds and human heart can be set in motion, it might almost seem that such a reaction would result as to make another war impossible.”84 In contrast, Kennan embraced the salutary capacity of violent force wielded by a state or organization that is “in the right” as a necessary corrective to the destructive, genocidal programs sponsored by nominally sovereign, but morally irredeemable, state actors. The 1993 republication of the Carnegie Commission Report introduced a new generation of journalists and scholars to the document and profoundly affected their perception of the modern-day conflict in Bosnia. Even Balkan specialists practically forgot the 1914 report until Abramowitz and Kennan “rediscovered” it. Classic works of Balkan historiography Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism,” Slavic Review 64, no. 1 (2005): 140–64; Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, Updated Edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 81 The Other Balkan Wars, 14. 82 Ibidem. 83 The goal of the 1914 report was described as “to render war odious.” “Le livre des massacres,” Le Rappel, May 18, 1914. The Aurore asked: “Is not all war sinister . . . and most lamentable?” M.V., “La Guerre atroce,” Aurore, May 21, 1914. 84 Dutton’s July 23, 1913 letter to Butler is cited in Nadine Akhund, “An Unexpected Outcome of the Balkan Wars: The Carnegie Report of 1913,” in The Balkan Wars 1912–1913: New Views and Interpretations, ed. Srdjan Rudić and Miljan Milkić (Belgrade: Istorijski Institut, 2003), 297–98.

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published between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Yugoslav Civil Wars, such as The Balkans Since 1453 by Leften S. Stavrianos and the two-volume History of the Balkans by Barbara Jelavich, do not reference the Carnegie Commission Report and limit description of atrocities in the Balkan War to a few phrases (or ignore them altogether).85 Eugene Michail discovered a solitary reference to the atrocities in the standard work by the leading German historian Edgar Hösch: “unmitigated violence that occurred in the sharing out of the booty.”86 Post-1993 Western studies differed on the significance of the report—Pavlowitch for example simply stated in a footnote “nobody was spared, by the war or by the report,” whereas Judah discussed at length how the horrors of the Second Balkan War should be seen on a continuum with the ethnic cleansing campaigns of the 1990s—but they could not fail to acknowledge its conclusions.87 The 1993 re-print unquestionably had a greater impact on Anglo-American Balkan historiography and reportage than did the initial printing of the report. The juxtaposition of the 1914 mission’s conclusion with the recent events in Bosnia crystallized the stereotype of the Balkans as doomed to violence—recall the dismissive mantra of the UN Commander in Bosnia Gen. Sir Michael Rose, “This is the Balkans, you know”—and indirectly absolved the “perpetrators, primarily the Serbian leadership, from individual responsibility and accountability.”88 The authors of the 1914 report had detailed the psychology they encountered that excused one’s own crimes by arguing that one’s opponents would inevitably have perpetrated the same horrors in their place and that all parties in the Second Balkan War had systematically

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Leften S. Stavrianos, The Balkans Since 1453 (New York: New York University Press, 2000 [1956]); Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 86 Cited in Eugene Michail, “Western Attitudes to War in the Balkans and the Shifting Meanings of Violence, 1912–91,” Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 2 (2012): 238. Michail cited from: E. Hösch, The Balkans: A Short History from Greek Times to the Present (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 142. 87 Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth, and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009 [1997]), 83–89; Stevan K. Pavlowitch, A History of the Balkans, 1804–1945 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 200. 88 Roger Cohen, “The World Past Reason; Yes, Blood Stains the Balkans; No, It’s not Just Fate,” New York Times, October 4, 1998. Stjepan Meštrović compares the “doomed to violence” conclusion of Western commentators to the Serbian strategy of justifying their actions not by denying atrocities per se, but insisting that all parties in the war were equal guilty and that no special opprobrium may be levied against Serbs. See Stjepan Meštrović, The Balkanization of the West: The Confluence of Postmodernism and Postcommunism (New York: Routledge, 1994), vii.

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flouted and violated the 1907 Hague Convention. Since its founding, the Carnegie Endowment for Peace had supported the creation of an international institution to supervise the conduct of armies in wartime and hold states accountable for their misdeeds.89 General Sherman’s dictum that “War is hell” may be applied to any conflict—especially a civil war— but in war, as in more mundane crimes, there exist gradients of magnitude and responsibility. Serbian apologists, taking their cue from the Milošević camp, countered well-documented accusations by claiming moral equivalency among all belligerent parties. Since all are guilty in war, they argued, it would be hypocritical to single out individual offenders. Furthermore, in the 1910s and 1990s alike, Serbian apologists objected to the establishment of a multi-national court or arbiter as a direct challenge to national sovereignty and a perversion of international law. As war raged and the campaigns of ethnic cleansing spread across Bosnia in the 1990s, the complacent attitude of many Western observers who viewed such episodes as “inevitable” or even “normal” in the Balkans mitigated against the moral outrage that could have fueled a speedier international response and held individual perpetrators to account. The convening of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993 and its (admittedly belated) successful persecution of notorious war criminals such as Republika Srpska’s president Radovan Karadžić proved the viability (and unfortunately the bureaucratic entanglement) of international judicial institutions.90 Serbia’s evolving relationship with the ICTY is further grounds for optimism. Even though

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Report of the International Commission, 233–34; “Carnegie Peace Idea: Believes Arbitration Eventually Will Become a Judicial Proceeding,” New York Times, December 16, 1916, 2; Martin David Dubin, “The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Advocacy of a League of Nations, 1914–1918,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 123, no. 6 (1979): 344–68; David S. Patterson, “Andrew Carnegie’s Quest for World Peace,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 114, no. 5 (1970): 371–83. 90 “International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia: International Arrest Warrants and Orders for Surrender for Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić,” International Legal Materials 36, no. 1 (1997): 92–99; Rachel Kerr, The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia: An Exercise in Law, Politics, and Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Marlise Simons, “Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb, Is Convicted of Genocide,” New York Times, March 24, 2016. Unfortunately, the wheels of international justice plod along slowly. It took the judges over a year to deliberate the verdict in the Karadžić trial, and that was after the Court was already in session for nearly 5,000 days. The most infamous Serbian war criminal, Slobodan Milošević, famously expired in a jail cell in the Hague before the persecution made any genuine headway.

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the ICTY was “publicly cast . . . [as] an anti-Serb instrument of Western power” under both the Milošević years and under his immediate successor Vojislav Koštunica, Serbian authorities, acting in complete compliance with Serbia’s judicial process, arrested Karadžić on July 21, 2008, by Serbian authorities and transferred him to the Netherlands by July 30 to stand trial for war crimes.91 The Serbian government’s (grudging) acceptance of the ICTY’s moral and legal authority demonstrated Belgrade’s shift from a policy of hindering the work of international commissions. For all its flaws, the ICTY as an institution has come closer than any other to fulfilling the 1914 Carnegie Commissioners’ impassioned pleases for an objective, unbiased, public war crimes tribunal. In 1995 the Carnegie Endowment and the Washington DC-based Aspen Institute in an unprecedented partnership with ten other US and European-based foundations including the King Baudouin Foundation, European Cultural Foundation, European Cooperation Fund, and Open Society Fund, formed an International Commission and “gave it the mandate of drawing up a report on the situation in the Balkans and of formulating long-term measures to contribute to the establishment of durable peace in that region.”92 The conflict in Bosnia and Croatia was now in its final stages, but without a clear conclusion, as negotiations of a permanent peace settlement had not yet begun at Dayton, Ohio. Supervised by former Belgian Prime Minister and European Parliament member Leo Tindemans, the commission took the 1913–1914 inquiry as its model and inspiration. It drew on the expertise of seven highly experienced ministers, parliamentarians, and multinational business executives from five European states (Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, and Poland) and the United States, mirroring the national diversity of the earlier commission. In homage to the 1914 report, the authors of individual chapters were not individually identified. Instead, the commission assumed authorship and responsibility for all aspects of the report. Additionally, the 1995–96 commission broadly mimicked the resource-gathering methodology of its predecessor by relying primarily on personal interviews conducted by commission members with Balkan

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Diane F. Orentlicher, Shrinking the Space for Denial: The Impact of the ICTY in Serbia (New York: Open Society Justice Initiative, 2008), 5–13. 92 Leo Tindemans et al., Unfinished Peace: Report of the International Commission on the Balkans (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1996). Kennan’s Pulitzer Prize winning memoirs remain a classic source on US policy at the beginning of the Cold War, but they chronicle the period before his tenures as ambassador and are not especially interested in developments in US/Yugoslav relations. George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1925–1950 (Boston: Atlantic-Little-Brown, 1967).

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politicians, intellectuals, and journalists.93 However, in a significant departure from the documentation of the 1913–1914 expedition, not a single acting military officer or soldier who witnessed or participated in the fighting firsthand is included in the comprehensive list of interviewees in the 1995–96 commission report.94 Despite Tindemans’s attempt to draw a clear line of cause and effect back to the 1914 report—he cites d’Estournelles de Constant at least three times on the first page of foreword—the underlying assumptions, content, and goals of the two reports differed considerably. Whereas the intent of the 1913–1914 expedition was originally to verify the chilling reports of atrocities being committed in the Balkan Wars, the primary goal of the 1995–96 expedition was to outline a roadmap that could provide a credible path to long-term peace, stability, and European integration for the Balkans. The 1996 report included no fewer than fifty-seven specific policy recommendations; covering everything from the founding of a Southeast European University to creation of a long-term security role for American troops in the Balkans.95 By September 1995, when the commission arrived in Albania to begin its interviews, a NATO-backed ceasefire had been imposed, but the peace negotiations that culminated in the signing of the Dayton Accords were still in progress. Virtually daily coverage of the Bosnian conflict on major television news channels like CNN and the BBC reached global audiences for more than three years before the Carnegie commissioners and their allies were dispatched to the region in 1995. Millions followed the epic siege of Sarajevo and (in the wake of the Srebrenica Massacre) became familiar with the oxymoron of “UN Safe Zones.”96 Journalists, foreign policy consultants, career diplomats, and scholars mediated on various aspects of the Bosnian War in massive corpus of texts.97 By contrast, the century since 93

Tindemans et al., Unfinished Peace, vii–x. Ibidem, 179–90. 95 Ibidem, 87–170. 96 David Rohide, Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre Since World II (New York: Penguin Books, 2012); Benjamin Žohar, “Misrepresentation of the Bosnian War by Western Media,” Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology 3, no. 2 (2012): 97–110; Garth Myers, Thomas Klak, and Timothy Koehl, “The Inscription of Difference: News Coverage of the Conflicts in Rwanda and Bosnia,” Political Geography 15, no. 1 (1996): 21–46. 97 Christopher Bennett, Yugoslavia’s Bloody Collapse: Causes, Course, and Consequences (New York: C. Hurst & Co., 1995); Robert J. Donia and John V. Fine Jr., Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Tradition Betrayed (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Janine di Giovanni, The Quick and the Dead: Under Siege in Sarajevo (London: Phoenix House, 1994); Misha Glenny, The Fall of 94

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the end of the Second Balkan War has produced only three AngloAmerican monographs on the First and Second Balkan Wars, of one of which devoted scarcely twenty-one pages to the wars themselves.98 The sheer ubiquity of pre-existing texts on the “Third” Balkan War nudged the 1995–1996 commission to produce an analytical and prescriptive rather than a descriptive report. D’Estournelles and his colleagues in 1913 had hoped their inquiry would prove a major triumph for the International Peace Movement by denouncing war generally rather than the Balkan War in particular. Tindemans and his colleagues set decidedly less lofty goals, focusing primarily on constructing a plan of action to ensure the survival of a sovereign, multi-ethnic, multiconfessional Bosnia and quell hitherto repressed ethnic tensions and conflicts in the Balkans before they ignited another inferno. The 1996 commissioners concluded a priori that the Trans-Atlantic Powers could and should exert a powerful conciliatory and stabilizing influence on the unpredictable and nationalistic Balkan governments. Unlike their predecessors, they retained confidence in the efficacy of European diplomacy and the necessity of armed deterrence (carried out almost exclusively by the United States), due to their affiliations with NATO-aligned governments and their support for the interventionist doctrine Kennan proposed in his introduction to the 1914 report. The two commission reports differ fundamentally in their understanding of the role of the European Powers in the Balkans. Whereas the 1914 report eviscerated the Great Powers for their self-interested interventions in the region and their catalyzing function in the destructive arms race that spread to the Balkan states in the late nineteenth century, the 1996 report portrays the European powers and the United States as positive exemplars for the feuding Balkan nations and as the only guarantors of regional stability in the short term. Brailsford, in his eloquent conclusion in 1914, had highlighted the Powers’ malign influence on the Balkans, cautioning them to “cease to exploit these [Balkan] nations for gain.”99 Consider Brailsford’s warning against the rising dangers of militarism in the 1914 report: Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1996); Branka Magaš, Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-up (New York: Verso, 1993); David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Vintage, 1995); Elma Softić, Sarajevo Days, Sarajevo Nights (St. Paul: Ruminator Books, 1996 [1993]). 98 Andre Gerolymatos, The Balkan Wars (New York: Basic Books, 2003); E. R. Hooton, Prelude to the First World War: The Balkan Wars 1912–1913 (New York: Routledge, 2000); Jacob Gould Schurman, The Balkan Wars: 1912–13 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1915). 99 Report of the International Commission, 273.

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Doubtless the greatest menace to the moral and social warfare of the Balkan States is the increasing tendency to militarism, whereby they become prey to the agents of the makers of guns and other war material, involving enormous expenses and leading to national impoverishment.100

During the 1912–13 Wars, the Balkan states relied mainly on heavy munitions manufactured in France and Germany.101 As the events of summer 1914 proved, militarism posed an existential threat to small and great powers alike. The Balkan states could not have successfully organized the large-scale mobilizations that sent more than 700,000 men to battlefields in 1912 and 1913 had they not had the examples of the great Prussian mobilizations of the Wars of German Unification or the massreserve army models that all the Great Powers save Britain had adopted by 1900.102 With this in mind, the Parisian daily Aurore’s review of the 1914 Commission Report condemned a divided and militaristic “Europe” rather than the Balkan States “as the most guilty” party in the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913.103 Subsequently, relationships among the Western Powers (including the United States) would be fundamentally transformed by their common membership in the NATO alliance, and by the European Union entailing a project of economic liberalism, aversion to armed conflict, and dedication to a diverse civil society. The self-proclaimed “hour of Europe” coincided with the outbreak of hostilities in crumbling Yugoslavia, making the Yugoslav War became a litmus test for the efficacy of a joint EU foreign policy.104 The diagnoses in the 1914 and 1996 Commission Report pointed to the same definitive source of violence in the Balkans: unchecked, exterminatory nationalism as a tool of state policy. Tindemans’s colleagues did not

100

Ibidem, 272. The French Schneider guns and the Krupp-manufactured German heavy guns were prized possessions in the arsenals of Balkan states, and according to French and German attaches deployed to observe the fighting, both performed superbly at their appointed task. Hooton, Prelude to the First World War, 134. 102 For more on the development of the mass-reserve army and for the dissemination of the mass-reserve model from Prussia (Germany) to other European states, see “The Rise of Prussia” and “The Battle of Sedan, 1870” in J. F. C. Fuller, The Military History of the Western World, vol. 3 (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1956), 90–135; and John A. Lynn, “The Evolution of the Army Style in the Modern West, 800–2000,” The International History Review 18, no. 3 (1996): 505–45. 103 “La Rapport de la Dotation Carnegie sur les Guerres des Balkans,” Aurore, May 19, 1914. 104 Dan Smith, “Europe’s Peacebuilding Hour? Past Failures, Future Challenges,” Journal of International Affairs 55, no. 2 (2002): 441–60. 101

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hesitate to identify the chief culprit: “It [the war] was primarily caused and relentlessly driven by Belgrade’s ‘Greater Serbia’ ambitions.”105 Having considered various popular explanations for the recent Balkan imbroglio— Great Power ambitions, ancestral hatreds, the clash of civilizations and religions a la Huntington—the commissioners arrived at virtually the same conclusion their predecessors had reached eighty years prior: the ethnic heterogeneity of the Balkans could not be reconciled with the formation of ethnically homogenous nation-states.106 The Serbs were neither the first nor the only Balkan people to attempt the creation of a homogenous “Great” nation-state, but the extent of Serbia’s maximalist territorial pretensions, systematic destruction of non-Serbian communities, and policy of ethnic cleansing, along with the Serbian regime’s complete rejection of democratic, representative institutions assured their guilt in the Commission’s eyes. Unsurprisingly, many Serbian readers rejected this verdict. For example, Professor Predrag Simić, in a tone reminiscent of Serbian intellectuals’ descriptions of Austria-Hungary’s malign influence during the Carnegie Commission’s 1913 expedition, concluded that the 1996 Carnegie Commission Report (An Unfinished Peace) exemplified a new era of Great Power hegemony and interference in the Balkans: “The West in the Balkans no longer seeks out partners; more and more, it seeks out mute supplicants.”107 To Simić and scores of other Serbian intellectuals, journalists, and political elites inoculated with the mythic pseudo-historic narrative of Serbian victimization, the 1996 commission’s findings barely differed from Serbophobe tracts published almost a century earlier.108 Caveats notwithstanding, the authors of the 1996 An Unfinished Peace believed in the potential for mutual understanding between Balkan states and regional tranquility. This guarded optimism was challenged by the 105

Tindemans et al., Unfinished Peace, 1. Ibidem, 30. 107 Predrag Simić, “Poslednji rat u dvadesetom veku, Karnegijeva komisija I,” Glas Javnosti, October 8, 2000. 108 Čedomir Popov’s Great Serbia: Reality and Myth (Velika Srbija: Stvarnost i Mit), first published in 2008 was already on its seventh printing in 2014, describes the genesis of the charges against Serbia as follows: “The arsenal of accusations levied against the Yugoslav state and the Serbian people is based on such untruths, conspiracies, and threats, that [Joseph] Goebbels’s ‘factory of lies’ appears naïve when compared to Western propaganda. And the crime for which Serbia was exposed to this destruction and demonization is that it dared to resist the segregation, disenfranchisement, and even the existential threat posed to the Serbian national community within the borders of Yugoslavia.” Čedomir Popov, Velika Srbija: Stvarnost i Mit, 7th ed. (Novi Sad: Izdavacka knjizarnica Zorana Stojanovica, 2008). 106

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deteriorating situation in Kosovo, and in 1998–1999 war threatened yet again to spill over the boundaries of the rump Yugoslav state. Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević again fanned the flames of Serbian nationalism by further escalating pressure on Kosovo’s Albanian population and, as authoritarian administration installed in Kosovo and Vardar Macedonia had done in 1913, established a de facto occupational regime. Milošević first rose to political power in Kosovo, whipping Kosovo Serbs into a frenzy with his incendiary nationalistic rhetoric that eventually propelled him to absolute power in Belgrade. Fittingly, the Milošević regime also made its last stand in Kosovo, where its campaign of ethnic cleansing was even more blatant than the effort spearheaded by Mladić and Karadžič in Bosnia-Herzegovina. With memories of the Bosnian War fresh, Milošević’s behavior proved intolerable to the Western Powers and culminated in a massive NATO bombing campaign that thoroughly dismantled the military and economic infrastructure of the Milošević regime albeit only after some 1.5 million Albanians were forced from their homes.109 The authors of the 1996 Commission Report would have been pleased by the decisiveness, and compared to the foot-dragging over Bosnia, the speed of the international response to the Serbian ethnic cleansing campaign. They would likewise have been heartened by the series of domestic events that finally forced Milošević out of power and gradually fostered an independent, assertive Serbian civil society.110

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Ivo H. Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (New York: Brookings Institution Press, 2001); Robert H. Gregory Jr., Clean Bombs and Dirty Wars: Air Power in Kosovo and Libya (Washington, DC: Potomac Books 2015); Stephen T. Hosmer, The Conflict Over Kosovo: Why Milosevic Decided to Settle When He Did (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2001); David H. Phillips and Nicholas Burns, Liberating Kosovo: Coercive Diplomacy and U.S. Intervention (Boston: MIT Press, 2012). For a critically negative appraisal of NATO’s role in the Kosovo crisis, see Iain King and Whit Mason, Peace at Any Price: How the World Failed Kosovo (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). 110 Florian Bieber, “The Serbian Opposition and Civil Society: Roots of the Delayed Transition in Serbia,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 17, no. 1 (2003): 73–90; Vojislav Koštunica, “Most Dangerous Path: Establishing the Rule of Law in Serbia,” Harvard International Review 25, no. 3 (2003): 99–100; Oleana Nikolayneko, “Origins of the Movement’s Strategy: The Case of the Serbian Youth Movement Otpor,” International Political Science Review 34, no. 2 (2003): 140–58; Ivana Spasić, “Civil Society in Serbia after Miločević: Between Authoritarianism and Wishful Thinking,” Polish Sociological Review 144 (2003): 445–61.

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Accepting Responsibility? Serbia in the Shadow of Yugoslavia Since the collapse of the Milošević regime, Serbia has rapidly rebuilt an independent civil society, strengthened its democratic institutions, normalized relations with neighbors, and become more receptive to engagement with Europe.111 The charred ruins of the former Yugoslav General Staff Headquarters, a defiant emblem of Serbia’s resistance to NATO “aggression” for almost two decades, was finally demolished in April 2016 to make way for luxury housing developments in Belgrade’s city center.112 This demolition symbolized the Vučić government’s decision to distance Serbia from the ghosts of its (oftentimes violent) past and engage in the present. If memory in the Balkans is truly as long as Western commentators insisted after the wars broke out in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo in the 1990s, the Serbian government’s recent attempts at forgetting may well be reason for optimism about the future. Nevertheless, considerable challenges have hampered Serbia’s transition to democracy and its relations with regional and European actors. Economic growth remains uneven, and is downright nonexistent in many key sectors, even as corruption, lack of respect for the rule of law, and the marginalization of minority groups like the LGBT community remain unresolved.113 Relations with Kosovo are still fraught and threaten a potential future flashpoint.114 Belgrade refuses to recognize Priština’s independence, declared in 2008. Serbia’s international image and prospects of joining the European Union would certainly improve if the Belgrade government abandoned the legalistic fiction that Kosovo is an “autonomous province”

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Serbia’s relationship with “Europe” remains circumspect in comparison to the views of its neighbors, principally due to the legacy of the Kosovo myth and the support most EU member states voice for Kosovo’s independence. See Jessica Greenberg, “‘There’s Nothing Anyone Can Do about It’: Participation, Apathy, and ‘Successful’ Democratic Transition in Postsocialist Serbia,” Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (2010): 41–64; Danisa Kostovica, “Post-socialist Identity, Territoriality and European Integration: Serbia’s Return to Europe after Milošević,” Geo Journal 61, no. 1 (2004): 23–30; Anna Di Leillio, “The Missing Democratic Revolution and Serbia’s Anti-European Choice: 1989–2008,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 22, no. 3 (2009): 373–84. 112 “Old General Staff building in Belgrade is being demolished,” B92, April 13, 2016, http://www.b92.net/eng/news/society.php?yyyy=2016&mm=04&dd=13& nav_id=97682, accessed March 4, 2017. 113 These are the central conclusions reached by the European Commission in 2016: Commission Staff Working Document: Serbia 2016 Report (Brussels: European Commission, September 9, 2016), 4–24. 114 Stefan Lehne, “Kosovo and Serbia: Toward a Normal Relationship,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Policy Outlook (March 2012).

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of Serbia. However, public opinion remains overwhelmingly hostile to a diplomatic recognition of Kosovo and no Serbian party could be expected to commit such an act of domestic political suicide. Although leaders of Serbia’s major political parties, the Progressives, Socialists, and Radicals, all played a part in the Milošević regime, the current President of Serbia Aleksandar Vučić and the Foreign Minister Dačić negotiate regularly with Kosovo and hope to normalize relations.115 For the time being, Belgrade has reached a modus vivendi with the EU and the United States to “agree to disagree” over Kosovo and prioritize negotiations over other, less intractable issues. Large-scale manifestations of aggressive Serbian nationalism have been noticeably absent from the public sphere in recent years, although tensions at sporting events remain high. In 2014, a men’s football match against Albania played at Belgrade’s Partizan Stadium turned into a brawl when a mysterious drone carrying an Albanian flag flew over the stadium and the Serbian Football Association was strongly censured and penalized by UEFA.116 Happily, such incidents occur in relative isolation and despite the irresponsible coverage by segments of the Serbian media that profit from the twenty-first century equivalent of “yellow journalism” in the wake of such episodes, the threat of local violence escalating into state action is effectively non-existent. Notwithstanding far-right nationalists’ barely suppressed resentment of NATO for the “aggression of 1999” and the ubiquity of “Kosovo is Serbia” t-shirts sold by street vendors at Terazije Square or Knez Mihailjova Street, all responsible Serbian politicians subscribe to the post-Milošević consensus that Serbia’s recent attempts to recognize its nationalistic and geo-political goals through the force of arms have proved calamitous. There is no appetite for disturbing the status quo, especially among the generation that still remembers the devastating display of NATO air power across the Serbian night sky. Serbia’s war-making potential was much reduced by the disbandment of its mass military reserves and the transition to a smaller, professional-technical army equipped for self-defense rather than offensive campaigns.117 The present government, albeit hounded by accusations of 115

Guy Dulauney, “Serbia Elections: Radical Seselj Back in Parliament,” BBC News, April 25, 2016. 116 Nick Ames and Sasa Ibrulj, “Serbia v Albania abandoned after players and fans brawl on pitch,” The Guardian, October 14, 2014; “Serbia v Albania: surreal provocation and violence show lessons not learned,” The Guardian, October 15, 2014; Nick Ames, “Serbia v Albania: Drones, flags and violence in abandoned match,” BBC, October 15, 2014. 117 The Serbian Army participated in its first ever joint surveying expedition in late April 2016 alongside US troops, see U.S. Army Europe Public Affairs, “Engineering exercise breaks new ground in U.S., Serbian military cooperation,” US Army, April 27, 2016, https://www.army.mil/article/166841.

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corruption and nepotism, enjoys broad support from the electorate and has adhered steadfastly to a subtle policy of harmonizing its pro-EU policy with its “historical” friendship with Russia while also courting the foreign investment needed to stimulate Serbia’s economy. Despite the constructive policies Serbian governments have adopted over the past decade to repair relations with the country’s neighbors and move toward membership in the European Union, Serbian popular discourse and historiography are sometimes hobbled by a simplistic, tragic interpretation of the nation’s history that paints Serbia as a victim. In the dying days of Socialist Yugoslavia, Serbian academics embraced their role as nationalist spokespersons and champions of Serbian interests.118 An infamous 1986 Memorandum by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts introduced “dominant mythic themes” of Serbian victimization and exclusively Serbian (as opposed to Yugoslav) national identity, which irrevocably changed Serbian historiography and public discourse.119 The NATO interventions of 1995 and 1999 reinforced the victimization narrative for many Serbs who saw their armed forces overwhelmed by a superior coalition for the third and fourth time, respectively, in the twentieth century.120 Leading Serbian archival, cultural, and educational institutions organized round-tables, panels, and conferences to commemorate the centenary of the Balkan Wars in 2012, stimulating a renewed scholarly examination of the wars and their legacy.121 It was then that many Serbian 118

Ljubomir Madžar, “Who Exploited Whom?” in The Road to War in Serbia: Trauma and Catharsis, ed. Nebojša Popov (Budapest–New York: Central European University Press, 2000), 160–88; Olivera Milosavljević, “The Abuse of the Authority of Science,” in The Road to War in Serbia, ed. Nebojša Popov, 274–302; Jasna Dragović-Soso, Saviours of the Nation: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2003); Jasna Dragović-Soso, “Rethinking Yugoslavia: Serbian Intellectuals and the ‘National Question’ in Historical Perspective,” Contemporary European History 13, no. 2 (May 2004): 170–84. 119 Christina Morus, “The SANU Memorandum: Intellectual Authority and the Constitution of an Exclusive Serbian “People,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 2 (2007): 142–65. 120 In Fall 1915, Serbia collapsed under a coordinated assault by the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria. During the 1941 April War, Yugoslavia held out for barely 12 days against Nazi Germany, Italy, and Hungary. 121 A major conference—The First Balkan War, 1912–13: Historical Processes and Problems in the Light of the Centennial Experience—was organized in partnership by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Matica Srpska, and Academy of Sciences of Arts of the Republic of Srpska on October 18–19, 2012, which produced an edited collection of short essays published in 2015. Other major conventions included: The First Balkan War 1912–1913: Social and Civilization

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scholars rediscovered the 1914 Carnegie Commission Report just as AngloAmerican scholars had done in response to the Yugoslav Wars of Dissolution. On the eve of its centenary, the 1914 report was frequently interpreted with reference to Serbia’s often antagonistic history with the Great Powers and the prevailing myths of Serbian victimization. Predrag Simić, for example, misinterpreted the 1914 report as an indictment “of the barbarism of Balkan people” and claimed that the report had “influenced Western policy and led to the NATO military intervention in the Western Balkans” during the 1990s.122 Simić overstated the report’s influence on Western policy; it had largely fallen into obscurity before the early 1990s, and its influence was more scholarly than political. Moreover, its conclusions arguably strengthened the arguments of non-interventionists who argued for Western neutrality in Balkan conflicts on the basis of an essentializing view of Balkan brutality and the “doomed to history” thesis. Simić identified the 1914 Commission Report as a key document in the development of a Balkanist discourse and warned against the temptation, which he saw in the 1996 Report, of viewing Serbia in the twenty first century through the lens of analogy without recognizing Serbian political, social, and economic changes in the interim decades. Serbian scholar Miroslav Svirčević characterized the Carnegie Commission Report as “propaganda against the Serbian army and state.”123 Internalizing the Serbian authorities and press’s critical reception of the Carnegie Commission in 1913, Svirčević portrayed the commissioners as hypocritical Serbophobes cloaked in a fictional “objectivity” in service of an Austria-Hungarian goal of liquidating Serbia’s independent statehood.124 Svirčević’s argument that the Carnegie expedition was the model for future so-called “humanitarian” interventions in the Balkans implicitly linked the Carnegie commissioners’ work to the 1999 NATO air campaign against Serbia. This analysis of the Carnegie Report’s legacy was informed by the bitter experience of the NATO bombings, which most Serbs today remember as the “NATO Aggression” (NATO agresija).125 Just as Western Significance (Niš University, et al.), Balkan Wars 1912–1913: New Views and Interpretations (Center for Strategic Studies and Historical Institute), Balkans and the Balkan Wars: A hundred years later (Institute of Contemporary History and Meiji University, Tokyo). 122 Predrag Simić, “Balkanski Ratovi nekad i sad,” Politika, October 26, 2012. 123 Miroslav Svirčević, “Propaganda protiv Srbije za vreme balkanskih ratova i posle njih 1912–1914,” Letopis Matice srpske 3 (2013): 289–305. 124 Ibidem, 305. 125 See “NATO agresija 1999” in the official website of the city of Belgrade: NATO agresija 1999: Grad Beograd, http://www.beograd.rs/lat/upoznajte-beograd/1269nato-agresija-1999/. Additionally, Boris Subašić, “NATO agresija: Vojna bruka i osveta nad stanovništvom,” Večernje Novosti Online, March 24, 2013.

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scholars sometimes fell into the trap of interpreting events in the Wars of Yugoslav Dissolution through the prism of the 1914 text, Serbian academics refracted the Carnegie Report through the prism of Serbia’s conflict with NATO. Scholarly interest in the Balkan Wars on the eve of their centenary did not translate into popular enthusiasm. In an editorial published several days before the hundredth anniversary of Montenegro’s declaration of war against the Ottomans, Politika bemoaned that “today’s generation unfortunately cannot comprehend this heroic epoch’s significance”: The lack of desire to adequately commemorate this great Serbian victory is obvious. . . . There is no celebratory academy in Serbia, no remembrance of heroes who won one of Serbia’s greatest victories. The Ministry of Culture and RTS (Radio-TV Serbia, the state-subsidized TV station) will not surprise us with a [new] fictional or documentary film, or even a series which might depict this glorious period of our history. This topic has not awakened the imagination of contemporary Serbian authors. . . . A century after glorious victories, descendants are acting as if they are shamed. Are they ashamed of themselves or of their ancestors? That is the real question.126

The centenary of the victorious wars inspired neither large scale manifestations of Serbian nationalism nor triumphant governmentsponsored festivities. For most Serbs the centenary of the Balkan Wars passed quietly and peacefully. Nonetheless, Serbian historian Dubravka Stojanović lamented that as late as 2009, the historiographical literature still described the Balkan Wars, characterized by mutual fratricidal treachery, the indiscriminate destruction of property, and ethnic cleansing as “the most popular wars in Serbian history.”127 Aware of the damage wrought by Serbia’s reputation as the instigator of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and the Kosovo conflict, the Serbian government chose to eschew nationalistic triumphalism in favor of Balkan conciliation. Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremić proposed that all states that had fought in the wars—Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Turkey, and Greece— jointly and solemnly commemorate war victims in the same way that France and Germany annually observe Armistice Day.128 Jeremić hoped to use the centenary as an opportunity “to pass from Balkan War to a Balkan Peace,” signifying Serbia’s commitment to repairing its standing with its 126

Miša Đurković, “Balkanski ratovi—vek kasnije,” Politika, October 3, 2012, http://www.politika.rs/sr/clanak/235400/Balkanski-ratovi-vek-kasnije. 127 Dubravka Stojanović, “U spirali zločina: Balkanski ratovi,” Helšinska Povelja 15 (March–April, 2009) 129–30, 13–14. 128 D. Milinković, “Neizvestan jubijlej balkanskih ratova,” Večernje Novosti Online, February 2, 2012.

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neighbors.129 The Serbian government’s conciliatory efforts and the apathetic popular reaction to the centenary suggest a general social consensus against the mythic nationalistic narrative of Serbian history as a cycle of victimization and vengeance that was so vividly enacted in Belgrade in late August 1913 and witnessed by members of the original Carnegie Commission.

Conclusion A stroll down Belgrade’s longest street, King Alexander Boulevard—or simply “the Boulevard” to locals—acquaints visitors with many of the city’s attractions and charms. Amidst the ubiquitous bakeries (pekara), bustling cafes, trendy boutiques, and restaurants stand many of the city’s most famous landmarks: the neo-classical Parliament of Serbia, the oppressive Post Office headquarters, the Russo-Byzantine St. Mark’s Church (the resting place of the unfortunate King Aleksandar Obrenović and his wife Draga Mašin), Belgrade’s city hall, the airy Tašmajdan Park, and Belgrade’s most famous hotel the Metropole. Unsurprisingly, most street names in the city center commemorate traditional Serbian heroes: Tsar Dušan, Svetozar Marković, Petar Njegoš, and so on. Yet, there is a notable exception to this rule: Karnegijeva Ulica (Carnegie Street) intersects the Boulevard some 100 meters west of the Belgrade University Library and passes the entrance to the State Archive of Serbia before intersecting with Ilija Garašin Street. Why would an American philanthropist who never visited Serbia personally—especially one whose eponymous endowment produced a devastating critique of expansionistic Serbian nationalism— receive such a public, salutary memorial? During the First World War, the Belgrade University Library suffered extensive damage and lost most of its collections. On February 18, 1920, the Executive Committee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace resolved to allot “the sum of one hundred thousand dollars . . . for the reconstruction of the devastated portions of France, Belgium, Serbia, Russia and the Near East . . . for the building and equipping of an appropriate library for the University of Belgrade.”130 The Endowment empowered one of its trustees, the respected American lawyer C. A. Severance, to “gather all possible information relative to the proposed new library building and talk with representative Serbians with regard to it.”131 129

Ibidem. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Year Book, 1921, no. 10 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1921), 41. 131 Ibidem, 42. 130

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Unlike the members of the 1913 Carnegie Commission, Mr. Severance “was received most cordially” by the Serbian authorities, who were thankful for “the gift of the Carnegie Endowment in commemoration of the heroic defense made by the Serbian people” during the Great War.132 Belgrade, Leuven, and Reims were the only three European “front line” cities to receive a Carnegie library in the 1920s, and to this day, Belgrade is home to the sole Carnegie Library in the Balkans. The Carnegie Endowment’s generous and much-appreciated gift to the city of Belgrade testified to a sudden shift in Western academic and popular opinion about Serbia, no longer a pariah state but an honored, long-suffering ally. The Carnegie Endowment’s greatest legacy in Serbia is unquestionably the Belgrade University Library, not the 1914 or 1996 Carnegie Commission Reports. Each year, thousands of students and scholars visit the library to study for exams, conduct research, or attend conferences. Since its building was completed in 1926, virtually every graduate of the University of Belgrade has passed through Andrew Carnegie’s bequest to Belgrade and the Serbian people. Libraries, Andrew Carnegie believed, were essential building blocks of a vibrant, democratic society and citizenry.133 While academics continue to debate the significance of the Carnegie Endowment’s Reports on the Balkan Wars, hundreds of students daily benefit from the intellectual nourishment they receive at Belgrade’s “Carnegie Library.” Serbia’s people and government are gradually moving on from the traumas of the country’s conflict-laden twentieth century and the litany of crimes suffered and inflicted. Now, more than a century later, they may feel securely confident that the Balkan’s most eloquent monument to the Carnegie Endowment’s ideals—open-mindedness, selfimprovement, and toleration—is at least as vital to Belgrade’s and Serbia’s intellectual and cultural life as it was in the maiden years of the twentieth century.

132 133

Ibidem, 43. “How Andrew Carnegie Turned His Fortune Into a Library Legacy,” NPR; August 1, 2013, http://www.npr.org/2013/08/01/207272849/how-andrewcarnegie-turned-his-fortune-into-a-library-legacy.

CHAPTER TEN

The Balkan Wars in Memory: The Carnegie Report and Trotsky’s War Correspondence Maria Todorova

The year 1993 saw the republications of two famous works: the Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars and Trotsky’s Balkan war correspondence.1 For the first time, the arch-revolutionary Bolshevik Trotsky and the 1909 Nobel Peace Prize winner, the redoubtable French aristocrat Paul-Henri-Benjamin Balluet d’Estournelles, Baron de Constant de Rebecque, who penned the introduction to the Report, would be mentioned together. After the 1990s these two works would often be filed in library shelves and in catalogues next to each other for the light they shed on the consecutive Balkan wars. The reason for this was the spurious analogy between the Balkan wars at the beginning of the twentieth century and the Yugoslav war of disintegration, named “a Balkan war” at end of the century. This would have been unthinkable at the time when the two works were produced in 1913 and 1914. It would have been even more impossible in the 1920s when Trotsky’s work would be catalogued under “Red Army,” “Bolsheviks,” “communists” and “permanent revolution,” far away from the established scions of the European aristocracy and university professors, filed under “peace,” “international system,” “law,” and “ethics.” In 1

The Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914), was reprinted with a new introduction by George Kennan as The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment and Brookings Institution, 1993); Leon Trotsky, The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky: The Balkan Wars 1912–13, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monad Press, 1993 [1980]). Trotsky’s war correspondence was also translated into German in the same period: Leo Trotzki, Die Balkankriege 1912– 13, trans. Hannelore Georgi and Harald Schubärth (Essen: Mehring Verlag, 1996).

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fact, as will be argued here, the original motivation and tenor of these works was not so very far apart, which explains why, despite the diametrically opposed political stance of their authors, they were evoked side by side in the 1990s. Both memory and political expedience inflect the assessment of historical facts that are decontextualized from their immediate historical mise-en-scène and inevitably seen in a presentist mode. In the particular case of these two works, what was highlighted after eighty years in the 1990s was almost exclusively their moralist register. Yet, there are significant differences in both content and form between these two publications. The present paper aims at bringing together and comparing these two important eyewitness accounts, and explaining how and why they later became notable loci of commemoration. In the early twentieth century, practically right up to the beginning of the Great War, the “civilized world” harbored the belief that devastating wars should and could be avoided, at least on European soil. Indeed, Karl Polanyi has defined the century as “the hundred years’ peace.”2 Jürgen Osterhammel qualifies this somewhat but only for Europe: “the hundred years from 1815 to 1914 in Europe was a period of relatively little violence among states, a peaceful interlude between the early modern age and the twentieth century.”3 It was also a period of regulated international relations, beginning with the Concert of Europe, and the adoption of the Geneva and the Hague Conventions, establishing the conduct of warfare and humanitarian relief. This is not to say that wars were not waged and there was no human sacrifice, but “they were neither protracted, nor ‘total.’ The distinction between combatants and civilians was observed to a greater extent than in earlier or later European conflicts or in wars fought outside Europe.”4 While the only total war of the nineteenth century was the American Civil War, the “epoch prepared the ingredients of total war but did not suffer its consequences until 1914.”5 Of course, outside Europe, horrific colonial wars were waged, but these were seen as no more than punitive expeditions.6 It was in this atmosphere that the brutality of the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913 shocked the leaders of the international community. This was a conflict on European soil and between whites, which challenged the peace

2

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 [1944]), 3. 3 Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 491. 4 Ibidem, 491. 5 Ibidem, 490. 6 Ibidem, 488.

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movements that were gaining strength in Europe and were beginning to be institutionalized. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, founded in 1910, established an international commission “to inquire into the causes and conduct of the Balkan wars.” The report of the commission, which consisted of well-known public figures from France, the United States, Great Britain, Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary, was published in 1914. The report was truly an outstanding achievement. Meticulously executed, it looked into the historical roots of the Balkan conflict, presenting the points of view and aspirations of the belligerents, as well as the economic, social, and moral consequences of the wars, and their relation to international law. It included an introduction by Baron d’Estournelles de Constant reiterating the main principles of the peace movement: “Let us repeat, for the benefit of those who accuse us of ‘bleating for peace at any price,’ what we have always maintained: War rather than slavery; Arbitration rather than war; Conciliation rather than arbitration.”7 There was a difference between the first and the second Balkan wars according to ďEstournelles. The first was defensive and a war of independence, “the supreme protest against violence, and generally the protest of the weak against the strong . . . and for this reason it was glorious and popular throughout the civilized world.” The second was a predatory war in which “both victor and vanquished lose morally and materially.”8 Still, for all their distinctions, both Balkan wars “different as each was from the other, finally sacrificed treasures of riches, lives, and heroism. We cannot authenticate these sacrifices without protesting, without denouncing their cost and their danger for the future.”9 While not optimistic about the immediate political future of the region, the commission concluded: “What then is the duty of the civilized world in the Balkans? . . . It is clear in the first place that they should cease to exploit these nations for gain. They should encourage them to make arbitration treaties and insist upon their keeping them. They should set a good example by seeking a judicial settlement of all international disputes.”10 As for the issue of culpability, ďEstournelles concluded: The real culprits in this long list of executions, assassinations, drownings, burnings, massacres and atrocities furnished by our report, are not, we repeat, the Balkan peoples. Here pity must conquer indignation. Do not let us condemn the victims. . . . The true culprits are those who mislead public opinion and take advantage of the people’s ignorance to raise disquieting rumors and sound the 7

Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 1914), 1. 8 Ibidem, 4. 9 Ibidem, 5. 10 Ibidem, 273.

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alarm bell, inciting their country and consequently other countries into enmity. The real culprits are those who by interest or inclination, declaring constantly that war is inevitable, end by making it so, asserting that they are powerless to prevent it. The real culprits are those who sacrifice the general interest to their own personal interest which they so little understand, and who hold up to their country a sterile policy of conflict and reprisals.11

The Report of the International Commission continues to be an important publication that has not lost its significance as a valuable primary source. At some 450 pages, this impressive volume contains the lengthy report itself (271 pages), which shines with all the qualities of a meticulously and rigorously researched scholarly work. Its detailed and nuanced analysis is penetrating. Carefully supported by documents, the efforts at verification are laudable, and its conclusions are even-handed and judicious. Aside from the referenced documentation of the report, it has nine rich appendices, ranging from comparative statistics of the different belligerents, to military and medical reports, and soldiers’ and politicians’ letters. The volume is also supplied with excellent maps reflecting the contestants’ claims and is richly illustrated with over fifty photographs and facsimiles of documents. The most impressive feature of this fact-finding mission is the length to which it went to collect personal testimonies, a truly ethnographic project. In a fine assessment of the contributions of the Carnegie Report, the anthropologist Keith Brown analyses a particular photograph of the commission as it listens to testimonies in the town square of the provincial Bulgarian town of Samokov: “What this picture demonstrates is an example of the process whereby oral narrative, the spoken word, is converted into textual record, the first draft of history, through the institution of the interview, and the presence of the note-taker.”12 While not explicitly commenting on its methods, the report’s authors used the inductive method of information-gathering and demonstrated a keen desire to corroborate the evidence from different sources in their aim to uncover “facts behind the propaganda campaigns waged by the different governments and their proxies.”13 What is most remarkable about the Carnegie Report is that, while it reported in great detail about the bestiality of the endless atrocities, it never fell into the trap of explaining them through the theory of atavistic “ancient hatreds” typical of the Balkan region. This changed 80 years later. In 1993, 11

Ibidem, 19. Keith Brown, “How Trauma Travels: Oral History’s Means and Ends,” in Balkan Nationalism(s) and the Ottoman Empire, vol. 2, Political Violence and the Balkan Wars, ed. Dimitris Stamatopoulos (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2015), 133. 13 Ibidem, 136. 12

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the Carnegie Endowment reprinted the Report, preceding the title with a gratuitous caption, “The Other Balkan Wars.” This time it did not launch a fact-finding mission. Instead, it added an introduction by George Kennan (1904–2005), former ambassador to the Soviet Union in the 1950s and to Yugoslavia in the 1960s, best known as the padre padrone of the US policy of containment vis-à-vis the USSR. For Kennan the greatest value of the report was that it revealed the deep roots of today’s problems. He saw the problems of the Balkans in the fact that they had been effectively separated from European civilization, “thrusting into the southeastern reaches of the European continent a salient of non-European civilization which has continued to the present day to preserve many of its non-European characteristics.”14 He went on to identify these “very deep historical roots”: “Turkish domination,” “Byzantine penetration,” and most of all the “deeper traits of character, inherited, presumably, from the distant tribal past. . . . And so it remains today.”15 Some of these traits could be encountered among other European peoples as well but It is the undue predominance among the Balkan peoples of these particular qualities, and others that might have been mentioned, that seems to be decisive as a determinant of the troublesome, baffling and dangerous situation that marks that part of the world today.16

This almost racist and clearly infantilizing verdict over whole peoples where “no particular country . . . wants, or should be expected, to occupy the distracted Balkan region, to subdue its excited peoples and to hold them in order until they can calm down and begin to look at their problems in a more orderly way”17 stands in stark contrast to the self-critical and wise conclusion of ďEstournelles: The real struggle in the Balkans, as in Europe and America, is not between oppressors and oppressed. It is between two policies, the policy of armaments and that of progress. One day the force of progress triumphs, but the next the policy of rousing the passions and jealousies that lead to armaments and to war, gets the upper hand. . . . The most suitable title for this report would have been “Europe Divided and her Demoralizing Action in the Balkans.”18 14

George Kennan, “The Balkan Crises 1913 and 1993,” in The Other Balkan Wars, 13. 15 Ibidem, 11. 16 Ibidem, 13. 17 Ibidem, 14. For the detailed critique of the 1993 publication, see Maria Todorova, “The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 453–82. 18 Report of the International Commission, 14, 19.

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The contrast is even more powerful when we keep in mind that ďEstournelles wrote before the outbreak of the First World War and Kennan wrote with the full knowledge of the butcheries of the two world wars committed by the civilized nations. The original Carnegie Report had the enviable quality not only of scrupulously drawing on original witness accounts, but itself being a monumental witness account of the era of the Balkan Wars. The Carnegie Report did not use, however, the eyewitness account of the long-term Russian correspondent to the Kiev-based journal Kievskaya Mysl, Leon (Lev) Trotsky. A simple lack of awareness of Trotsky’s dispatches or the language barrier could not have been an excuse, since there was a prominent Russian member on the commission, Professor Paul (Pavel) Milyukov, at the time the leading member of the Duma. A young participant in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, Milyukov (1859–1943) was an accomplished historian and member of the radical student movement. Imprisoned for political agitation, Milyukov went to Bulgaria after his release and taught at the University of Sofia until 1899 when he returned to St. Petersburg. He was considered the high authority on Balkan and Near Eastern affairs, jokingly referred to as “Milyukov of the Dardanelles.” He was the founder in 1905 and leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets), himself a moderate liberal but a right-wing Slavophile and promoter of Russian imperialism. Milyukov was editor-inchief of Rech, the organ of the Kadets, an opponent of the radical Kievskaya Mysl. Rech and Milyukov were the true bêtes noires of The War Correspondence. Not only would Milyukov, who considered himself a genuine specialist on Balkan matters, not consult Trotsky’s accounts, he would not refer to him at all. This intentional oversight, of course, was for ideological reasons.19 Given the fact that the Carnegie Report has received broad attention among historians and scholars of the Balkans, including in the present volume, yet Trotsky’s war correspondence has received practically none, this paper focuses more on the latter. In the fall of 1912, Trotsky was sent from Vienna to the Balkans as a military correspondent of Kievskaya Mysl to cover the events of the Balkan Wars under the pen name Antid Oto. Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, had escaped from his exile after the 1905 Russian Revolution and by 1907 had settled in Vienna. Most of his efforts were spent on reuniting the different Menshevik and Bolshevik factions in exile. From 1908 until 1912 he published the hugely popular 19

An intractable foe of Bolshevism, it was still Milyukov who, as a foreign minister in the Provisional Government, wrote an official request to the British and secured Trotsky’s release from the Amherst Internment Camp at Halifax in the spring of 1917 (National Post, July 11, 2014, retrieved April 8, 2017) http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/na0712-trotsky.

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Pravda (not to be confused with the later Leninist Pravda), which was smuggled into Russia.20 He also contributed to the Bolshevik (Proletary) and the Menshevik (Luch) papers, as well as to German and Belgian socialist periodicals. However, he earned his living, supporting his family as well as Pravda (co-edited and co-financed by Adolph Joffe and Matvey Skobelev), almost exclusively from the articles that he contributed to Kievskaya Mysl. At the time, this was the paper with the largest circulation in Kiev, and the most popular liberal and leftist paper in the south of Russia. Trotsky wrote on diverse topics, from Ibsen, Maupassant, and Nietzsche to the plight of the Russian peasantry. He jokingly coined the pen name Antid Oto, having stumbled across the Italian word “antidote,” in order to “inject the Marxist antidote into legitimate [sic] newspapers.”21 From October 1912 until November 1913, Trotsky wrote several dozen articles for Kievskaya Mysl, Luch, and Den. These correspondences, supplemented by some additional articles as well as a few unpublished items from his archive, appeared in book form in 1926 as the sixth of the twelve volumes of his uncompleted Sochineniya (Works), published between 1924 and 1927.22 The original title of volume six was The Balkans and the Balkan War (Balkany i balkanskaia voina) and it was part of the second sub-series On the Historical Threshold (Pered istoricheskim rubezhom) of his collected works. The editorial introduction of the 1924 volume provided a brief historical background to the Eastern Question and 20

Pravda had 25 issues between October 3, 1908 and April 23, 1912, and with its non-factional politics became popular with industrial workers as well as with different émigré factions. In 1910, for a brief period from January to August, it was made the central, and thus party-financed, organ of the temporarily reunified Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. 21 Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (New York: Charles Schribner’s Sons, 1930), 127. This is the official English translation, rendering the Russian “legal’nyi” as “legitimate.” A better translation would have been “legal.” 22 L. Trotskii. Sochinenia, Seria II., Pered istoricheckim rubezhom, vol. 6, Balkany i balkanskaia voina (Moscow/Leningrad, 1926). The collected works of Trotsky— Sochinenia—were conceived as a major enterprise comprising 23 volumes in seven series. Editorial work began in 1923 and the volumes began to appear from 1924 onward. In fact, only 12 volumes were published (3 appeared in two parts, thus 15 volumes altogether) before work was suspended in 1927 when Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In January 1928, he was banished to Alma Ata and in February 1929 was exiled to Turkey where he stayed until 1933. A digitized version of all volumes in Russian can be accessed at: http://www.magister.msk.ru/library/trotsky/trotsky.htm from Lubitz’ TrotskyanaNet (LTN). Volume 6 is at: http://www.magister.msk.ru/library/ trotsky/trotm083.htm.

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grouped Trotsky’s writing in three parts: the first, “On the Threshold of War” (U poroga voiny), comprising articles written between 1908 and 1912; the second on the war itself (Voina); and the third on postwar Romania (Poslevoennaia Rumynia). This volume was translated into English only in 1980 under the slightly misleading title The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky: The Balkan Wars 1912–13, highlighting the second and, granted, the largest part. It was reprinted in 1993 to great acclaim as a primary source on the Balkans, at the height of the Wars for the Yugoslav Succession, named the Third Balkan War.23 The War Correspondence has been hailed as a masterpiece, and Isaac Deutscher compared Trotsky’s experience “as a conscientious military correspondent [that] would one day be of use to the founder of the Red Army” to Edward Gibbon’s experience as a Captain of the Hampshire Grenadiers, which he utilized as a historian of the Roman Empire.24 When, seventeen years later, in 1929, Trotsky penned his autobiography in Istanbul, he reiterated the significance of his experience: “In many respects, this was an important preparation not only for 1914, but for 1917 as well.”25 Yet, he devoted barely a page and a half to this episode, and did not explain in any depth what it was that was so significant about it. He summarized his articles in one sentence as an “attack on the falsity of Slavophilism, on chauvinism in general, on the illusions of war, on the scientifically organized system for duping public opinion,” and on Bulgarian atrocities against wounded and captured Turks, which put him at odds with the Russian liberal press. This summary encapsulated Trotsky’s memory of his Balkan experience. While he cautioned that “memory is not an automatic reckoner” and “never disinterested,” he was disingenuous about the stated deficiencies in his memories of different types. He claimed that his topographical and musical memories were weak, his visual and linguistic memories fairly mediocre, but his memory for ideas was considerably above average.26 In fact, only some of his earlier ideas persisted, the ones that did not contradict the narrative persona that he constructed to make sense of his memory. His brilliant, biting, and not always fair attacks on liberals, both in The War

23

The phrase “Third Balkan War” is sometimes used by journalists and historians to refer to World War I (as in Joachim Remak’s famous 1971 article in The Journal of Modern History), but is mostly used to refer to the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s: Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War (New York: Penguin Books, 1992). 24 Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky: 1879–1921 (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 228. 25 Trotsky, My Life, 227. 26 Ibidem, viii.

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Correspondence and especially in My Life,27 neatly omitted the liberal persona he himself inhabited in 1912. The War Correspondence moves from analytical pieces to impressionistic dispatches, to what de facto amounts to interviews, and to political portraits. There are excellent surveys of the internal economic, social, and political situation in each of the belligerent countries (Serbia, Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire after the Young Turk Revolution, and Romania) as well as their mutual relations; a prescient section on the Armenian Question; colorful and well-informed portraits of a whole array of politicians and literary figures (Nikola Pašić, Lazar Paču, Stojan Novaković, Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Christian Rakovsky, Andranik Ozanian); and indepth analyses of great power interests, especially Russian diplomacy and its aims in the Balkans. Trotsky is especially informative on the state of social democracy, in particular in Bulgaria, where the socialist parties were strong. His descriptions of and conversations with wounded soldiers and officers as well as with prisoners of war are heart-rending. He also writes powerfully on the larger framework of the war, describing in detail the feelings in the rear, the queues, the anticipation, and the fear. Throughout, his prose shines with vitality, often with verbal brilliance, especially when his polemicist temperament is curbed. And still, one wonders what is left of these articles today, one hundred years after they were written? While the analyses are interesting, do they have a cognitive significance aside from their historical value of being written by such a major figure as Trotsky? Are they more informative than the dispatches of dozens of other war correspondents of major European papers? Were they revolutionary in their analyses even at the time? Apart from being a testimony to Trotsky’s rhetorical and polemical brilliance, would we care to go back to them? Some people actually did go back to 27

Trotsky wrote dismissively of the remarkable Georgian Menshevik Tsereteli (1881–1959), who had joined the Provisional Government after the February Revolution as Minister of Post and Telegraphs and returned to Georgia after the Bolshevik Revolution, from where he finally emigrated to Paris in 1923, that he “had a profound respect for liberalism; he viewed the irresistible dynamics of the revolution with the eyes of a half-educated bourgeois, terrified for the safety of culture. The awakened masses seemed to him more and more like a mutinous mob,” and “it took a revolution to prove that Tsereteli was not a revolutionary” (Trotsky, My Life, 289). And he did not mince his words about the tragic leader of the Provisional Government Alexander Kerensky (1881–1970), whom he thought “personified the accidental in an otherwise continuous causation. His best speeches were merely a sumptuous pounding of water in a mortar. In 1917, the water boiled and sent up steam, and the clouds of steam provided a halo” (ibidem). Trotsky’s greatest wrath, however, was heaped on Pavel Milyukov, the editor-in-chief of Rech and leader of the Kadets, who he saw as his true adversary.

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them in the 1990s, in order to find confirmation of their often completely opposing political preferences or prejudices.28 There are three aspects that make them interesting and relevant today. One is the very detailed information and personal evaluation that Trotsky gives of the socialist movement in the Balkans at the time. This, to my knowledge, has been little if at all utilized. Secondly, there are the several sections made from testimonies of wounded Bulgarian officers and soldiers, as well as witness accounts of Turkish prisoners of war, reproduced in extenso as quotes. There are also lengthy citations from the interviews with politicians. Lastly, there is the question of The War Correspondence’s formative significance on Trotsky himself as well as the question of memory in general, which is the principal topic of this article. What is most striking (and unexpected) about the tenor of Trotsky’s war correspondence is the curious mix of conventional Marxist dogma, Russian revolutionary patriotism with notes of condescendence toward the great powers and, most surprisingly, classical liberal posturing, including lofty praises for Western civilization reminiscent of rosy-eyed American professors over the last century. The first section of the volume provides the background to the Balkan Crisis of 1912 by collecting Trotsky’s newspaper articles on the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, as well as on issues of Balkan social democracy (mostly the Bulgarian but also partly the Serbian case). The two articles on the Ottoman Empire “The Turkish Revolution and the Tasks of the Proletariat” and “The New Turkey” came out in Pravda (#2, December 17/30, 1908) and Kievskaya Mysl (#3, January 3, 1909). Turkey, this “hornet’s nest of the Near East” had been a tyrannical state “from times immemorial”.29 It was unreformable; the epitome of backwardness, stagnation, and despotism. Its industrial development was obstructed because of the Sultan’s fear of the proletariat.30 Had the Young Turks read his writing, they would have been surprised to learn that their revolution was “the most recent echo of the Russian Revolution”’ of 1905, which 28

See readers’ reviews of the book on Amazon: www.amazon.co.uk/WarCorrespondence-Leon-Trotsky-1912-13/dp/0913460680 and www.amazon.com/ War-Correspondence-Leon-Trotsky-1912-13/dp/0873489071. Some read the book because it is “an indispensable background to the fighting going on in the region today,” providing a sense of déjà vu. Others appreciate it for its antiimperialist passion and materialist analysis. Still others see precursors of the Serbian mass murder of the Albanians or read it for the roots of anti-Semitism in Romania. Some are fascinated (or perhaps nostalgic given the dullness of today’s print journalism) by the profundity of Trotsky’s discourse, his ability to bring in complex analyses of the economy, politics, and religion in an expressive style. 29 Trotsky, The War Correspondence, 3–4. 30 Ibidem, 3, 12–13.

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caused a fiery surge of proletarian movements in Western Europe and woke up the peoples of Asia.31 Otherwise, Trotsky welcomed the 1908 revolution and the newly convened parliament, but in a succinct and prescient analysis clearly described the fault lines between centralizers and federalists. What to him was the only desirable solution for the Eastern Question—a democratic Turkey as the basis of a larger Balkan federation on the model of Switzerland or the United States of America—was passionately opposed by the Young Turks. Nevertheless, in these articles Trotsky primarily exposed the stance of the Russian government concerning the fate of the Serbs living under the Austrian occupation and who had been incorporated into Austria-Hungary when it annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. The tsarist government used liberal Slavophilism as a fig leaf to legitimize its imperial ambitions and Trotsky rightly pointed out that fellow Slavs, like the Poles, were faring far worse under Russian rule than the Serbs under Austrian rule. Trotsky’s writings on the Balkans and his war dispatches shed important light on the socialist tradition in the southeastern margins of Europe during the period of the Second International. Trotsky was no stranger to the region, having been sent there on several occasions, including as part of an unsuccessful mission of the Socialist International with Krîstiu (Christian) Rakovsky and Camille Huysmans to mend the split within the socialists’ ranks.32 He was particularly close to Bulgarian social democrats and lavished praise on their activities, their press, and other publications. He had been the Russian delegate to the congress of the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Narrows) in July 1910 in Sofia. He heaped praise on the Bulgarian socialists who had invited delegates from several Slavic social democratic parties—the Poles, Russians, Serbs, Czechs, and Ruthenians—as a counterweight to the allSlav congress, this “all-Slav comedy,”33 that had been convened a couple of weeks earlier in Sofia. They not only demonstrated that there were two Bulgarias, Serbias, and Russias, one reactionary-dynastic, the other revolutionary-proletarian, but also showed that “the only way out of the national state of chaos and the bloody confusion of Balkan life is a union of the peoples of the peninsula in a single economic and political entity, underpinned by national autonomy of the constituent parts.”34 This was the only way to rebuff the “shameless pretensions of tsarism and 31

Ibidem, 3. Dimitîr Genchev, Pîrvoapostolite na ideala (Sofia: Izdatelska kîshta “Khristo Botev”, 2006), 23. 33 Trotsky, The War Correspondence, 38. 34 Ibidem, 39. 32

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European imperialism” and enjoy the advantages of a common market of the Balkans.35 Trotsky’s belief that a common market was the best solution stemmed from the antipathy he shared with (or derived directly from) Marx and Engels toward Kleinstaaterei, especially the Kleinstaaterei of the southern Slavs. His derision toward the “Lilliputians,” the “dwarf states,” the “broken fragments of Balkan Slavdom,” and the “broken pieces” of the Balkan Peninsula, could be assuaged only by incorporating them into a unified federal republic in order to create a common Balkan market as a precondition for industrial development.36 The Balkan countries that he depicted in detail—Serbia and Bulgaria—were backward, and the trope of backwardness was ubiquitous: there was a “lag in Bulgaria’s historical development,” they had a low level of social differentiation,37 their literatures lacked tradition and were unable to develop their internal continuities, their cultures were “obliged to assimilate the ready-made products that European civilisation had developed,”38 their bourgeoisie, like the bourgeoisie in backward countries in general, was not organic,39 and, worse, “it had not yet managed to throw off its Asiatic features.”40 Sitting on the train to Belgrade, Trotsky commented derisively on the “multilingual, motley, culturally and politically confused East, an Austro-Hungaro-Balkan International!”41 The Bulgarian peasant democracy was primitive, because it was “rooted in elemental relations of everyday life, like our own Russian village community.”42 Trotsky knew very little about the peasant question in Bulgaria but assumed it followed the Russian model.43 It gave him, however, an opening to ridicule the Narodnik utopia of a direct way to socialism. Though much of his portraits of Balkan politicians were witty, they were deeply marred by his contempt for their peasant origins. In his subtle 35

Given the fact that Trotsky lived at the time and place of the blossoming of the highly sophisticated Austro-Marxism, his own views on the rise of the national ideal were deterministic, not to say dogmatic: “Economic development has led to the growth in national self-awareness and along with this a striving for national and state self-determination.” Ibidem, 157. 36 Ibidem, 12, 39–41, 152. 37 Ibidem, 49. 38 Ibidem, 82. 39 Ibidem, 76. 40 The Zaječar revolt in Serbia was brought down with “Asiatic ferocity.” Ibidem, 53. 41 Ibidem, 58. 42 Ibidem, 54, 157. 43 In the chapter on postwar Romania, however, he juxtaposes the Bulgarian army of “free, literate peasants, possessing the vote” and the “Romanian army of serfs.” Ibidem, 390.

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evaluation of Nikola Pašić as a politician, Trotsky insisted that he was primitive, since he spoke German, Russian and French badly,44 and Trotsky felt very much superior. In his autobiography, as in many of his articles, Trotsky constantly fended off criticisms of his attitude toward the peasantry. In Moya zhizn, he emphatically denounced the allegation that in 1905 he had ignored the peasantry.45 It is instructive, therefore, to read the unpublished memoirs of a Bulgarian activist of the agrarian party (The Bulgarian Agrarian National Union or BANU), Khristo Stoianov, a lawyer and later minister of the interior in 1923 during the time of Alexander Stamboliiski’s agrarian regime, who found refuge in Yugoslavia after the regime’s fall. Back in Bulgaria, following World War I, he was active in the left agrarian movement, which, however, opposed the communists. In the period preceding the Balkan Wars, he had been charged with closely observing the rival activities of the social democrats in the villages, and he was fairly well acquainted with Krîstiu Rakovsky, Trotsky’s close friend and collaborator. During the war, when Stoianov served as an officer, he spotted Trotsky, who had missed the train to Çorlu (in present-day Turkey), at a provincial railway station. Stoianov invited Trotsky to his tent, and Trotsky stayed there for eight days. Trotsky gave lectures on the workers’ movement, on the Second International, on Jules Guedes, Jean Jaurès, August Bebel, and Emile Vandervelde. Stoianov remarked: “Trotsky could not bear to be contradicted. He did not like the peasant movements and did not recognize the peasantry as a class. We did not contradict him. We were buying, not selling.”46 The most astonishing aspect about Trotsky’s war correspondence was that he actually did not see the heat of war; journalists as a rule were not allowed on the front line. The value of his dispatches comes from the eyewitness accounts he took from officers and soldiers, but also from interviewing prisoners of war: “We have to form our picture of the life and death of the army on the battlefields through interrogating participants, with the bias this inevitably implies.”47 Some of his informers were casual acquaintances, but most often they came from his own social-democratic circles, “men of high principle who had proved their personal courage and high character both in their political struggle and on the battlefield,” and Trotsky gave their accounts greater credence.48 The evaluation of these texts as a rare primary source is not easy. That most are not attributed is understandable given the restrictions of wartime. 44

Ibidem, 73–74. Trotsky, My Life, 204; Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, 155–57. 46 Bulgarian Central State Archives, TsDA, Sp 3049 B, 35–37. 47 Trotsky, The War Correspondence, 117. 48 Ibidem, 288. 45

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We read about “A Wounded Man’s Story,” “An Officer’s Story,” “Two Monologues” about the political parties and the war, “Among Officers [and] Prisoners,”49 direct quotes “From the Stories of Participants,” “Conversation with a Bulgarian Statesman,” ”Behind the Curtain’s Edge,” but all of these sources remain anonymous. It is unclear whether the large amount of direct quotes can be taken literally in a period when journalists did not go around with tape recorders, though Trotsky explicitly states that he knew stenography.50 Some of the testimonies are suspiciously well crafted, almost philosophical. They display an educated authorship, either Trotsky’s own or that of his Bulgarian comrades. In any case, although they are a rare glimpse into the genuine voices of the time, they should be approached with a proper dose of skepticism. The subsequent two world wars have produced such an enormous amount of literature, both documentary and fictional, that illuminate all aspects of war at the front and in the rear, which Trotsky’s dispatches, while extraordinarily moving, can add little to in terms of knowledge about war trauma, atrocities, or the psychology of the soldiers. Yet, when they appeared at the time, the detailed first-hand accounts must have been a rarity. Being Russian, Trotsky had no difficulty understanding Bulgarian and Serbian but, more importantly, he constantly had with him some socialist friend who would be his interpreter, and often his informer. In fact, a few of the articles in the volume are not dispatches, but fragments from Sketches of Bulgarian Political Life by Trotsky and Kabakchiev,51 a book published in 1923 and to a great extent authored by the latter.52 Comparing the stories of wounded soldiers and prisoners, Trotsky remarked that their views were extremely subjective and prone to simplistic generalizations, since they had seen only a small patch of the battlefield and had no idea of the complex strategic operations. There was, however, one significant difference. While the Turkish prisoners of war were already demoralized from the outset of the war,

49

In this article Trotsky describes prisoners, some of whom were officers and who enjoyed special treatment, and others who would be ordinary soldiers. 50 Ibidem, 134. 51 Khristo Kabakchiev (1878–1940) was a leader of the Bulgarian Workers’ Social Democratic Party (the “Narrows”). Educated as a lawyer, he was the editor-inchief of its print organ Rabotnicheski vestnik (1910–23). In 1927 he emigrated to the USSR. 52 L. Trotskii, and Khr. Kabakchiev, Ocherki politicheskoi Bolgarii (Moscow: State Publishing House, 1923). The articles in question are “The Balkan Countries and Socialism” and “Echoes of the War,” in Trotsky, The War Correspondence, 29–37 and, 213–25.

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the Bulgarian soldier regarded this war as necessary and just, as his own war. . . . The terrible burden of militarism is accepted by every Bulgarian, right down to the most ignorant peasant, as a burden that has been placed on Bulgaria’s shoulders by Turkey. . . . For the ordinary man in Bulgaria, therefore, the concept of Turkey combines the Turkish tyrant, official and landlord of yesterday, with today’s oppressor of his Macedonian brethren, and, finally, with the primary cause of the burden of taxation in Bulgaria itself.53

The accounts given by Christian soldiers (Greeks, Bulgarians, and Armenians) in the Ottoman army are heartbreaking. They complained of constant abuse by their Muslim superiors.54 On the other hand, the inclusion of Christians in the army “inevitably destroyed the belief that Islam is the one and only moral bond between the state and the army, thereby introducing the gravest spiritual uncertainty into the mind of the Muslim soldier.”55 Standing out among the articles is “An Officer’s Story,” which came from Trotsky’s archive and was first published in his War Correspondence. The six printed pages are extremely well written and are presented as a single quote. This could be the diary of a highly educated Bulgarian officer, who may have given it to Trotsky. It gives an account of the Bulgarian army’s advance to Lüle Burgas and the discrepancy between military theory and practice. It paints a disturbing picture of a wounded soldier expecting death, and is full of incisive psychological reflections on fear: Fear? You feel no fear while you are fighting—that is, when you are actually under fire. Before and after, though, you are extremely frightened—it’s the same sort of fear that you feel, even if not so badly, when you have to sit for an examination, or make a speech in public. . . . Fear vanished completely, and its place is taken after a certain time by indifference. Cowards and high-strung men sometimes have sudden moments when they seem quite heroic. . . . Fear, as an acute response to mortal danger, disappears, but through the whole organism, through all your muscles and bones, there spreads a languor of fatigue. You are dreadfully, unbearably, infernally tired. . . . As every day draws to its close you think: this is the end, things can’t go on like this any more. But then another day passes, and another. You find yourself longing for the sight of the enemy.56

Trotsky exposed the horrors of war and the atrocities committed by the allied forces of Serbs and Bulgarians.57 While he did not doubt that the 53

Trotsky, The War Correspondence, 194. Emphasis in original. Ibidem, 194–97. 55 Ibidem, 194. 56 Ibidem, 211–12. 57 Ibidem, 117–31, 266–71. While Trotsky does not acknowledge his source, this was most likely Dimitrije Tucović, the founder of the Serbian Social Democratic 54

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Greeks and the Turks committed comparable massacres (he did give appropriate accounts), he protested that the Russian Slavophile press ignored the reports of Bulgarian and Serbian acts of violence and wrote only of the rest.58 His indignation was strongly argued, especially when he defended himself against accusations of not having checked the smallest of details: But however little and insufficient my knowledge, am I not obliged to raise my voice in protest to the Russian press? Is a journalist a prosecutor drawing up an indictment on the basis of investigation of all the conditions and circumstances of the crime committed? Is a journalist an historian who calmly waits for materials to accumulate so as to be able, in due course, to put them in order? Is a journalist only a belated bookkeeper of events? Doesn’t his very description come from the word journal, meaning a diary? Doesn’t he take upon himself obligations towards the very next day?59

This was a passionate and eloquent manifesto on the duties of moral journalism. And yet there was some truth in the allegation by Ivan Kirillovich, a Kadet, scientist, and journalist, when he exclaimed listening to Trotsky: “For you, it seems history exists for one purpose only, in order to demonstrate the illusoriness, reactionariness and harmfulness of Slavophilism.”60 Trotsky was especially livid about the Bulgarian military censorship, which wanted to “keep from the eyes of Europe’s reading public all facts and comments which . . . might show the seamy side of any department of Bulgarian social life whatsoever, whether connected to the war or not.”61 Several times he successfully challenged the censors, explaining that he was reporting on issues removed from purely military matters. He wrote several fiery articles against the stupidity of the censorship and the compliant press which “is tuned to make a cheerful sound,” while the “opponents of the war have been reduced to complete silence.”62 Trotsky’s particular vitriol was directed toward the chief military censor Simeon Radev, whom he described as a “former anarchist” greedy for power, “a thoroughly demoralized creature,” “a vulgar careerist,” who did everything “his

Party and the editor of Borba and Radničke Novine. During the Balkan War in which he was mobilized, Tucović wrote extensively about atrocities against the Albanians, later published as Srbija i Albanija: jedan prilog kritici zavojevačke poliike srpske biržoazije (Belgrade: Kultura, 1946). 58 Trotsky, The War Correspondence, 287–312. 59 Ibidem, 304–5. 60 Ibidem, 329. 61 Ibidem, 258. 62 Ibidem, 26–261.

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uncouth nature is capable of to poison the existence of the European journalists who were obliged to have dealings with him.”63 He wrote also against his erstwhile acquaintance Petko Todorov,64 a romantic poet who only two years earlier had stood next to Trotsky protesting the Pan-Slav Congress in Sofia and now participated alongside other intellectuals in imposing the military censorship. Trotsky’s blanket pontification on the war censorship, in a rhetoric almost as if lifted from present-day liberal think tanks, provoked the wrath of Petko Todorov, who sent him a letter that Trotsky published in Kievskaya Mysl on November 30, 1912 alongside his own response. Todorov protested that all reproaches that you level against Bulgarian democrats, and me in particular, are due to the misunderstanding that constantly arises between us and the Russians who come to Bulgaria, and which results from the facts that all of you, to employ a splendid Russian saying, try to apply your own rule in someone else’s monastery.”65

In a style paralleling Trotsky’s own liberal pathos, he extolled Bulgaria’s democratic traditions, its constitutionalism, rule of law, and civic discipline. In a war that had been viewed widely as a patriotic enterprise, even by the anti-war parties and individuals,66 foremost among them the socialists and the agrarians, Todorov saw his participation as the fulfilment of his duty as a citizen: 63

Ibidem, 263–64, 282. Given the eminent stature of Simeon Radev (1879–1967), one of the major political and intellectual figures in the modern history of Bulgaria, this abuse is especially jarring. Trotsky admits that Radev was “a journalist not without talent” (ibidem, 263), but his condescending dismissal is ridiculous. By 1912 Radev, who had graduated in law from the University of Geneva and was an active journalist and diplomat, as well as a highly cultivated intellectual, had published his major history of post-1878 Bulgaria The Builders of Modern Bulgaria, a work that is still widely considered a masterpiece. 64 Petko Yurdanov Todorov (1879–1916) was a major poet, dramatist, and writer. As a high school student, he was influenced by socialist ideas and was in contact with Jean Jaurès. He studied law in Bern and literature in Leipzig and Berlin. In 1905 he became a co-founder of the Radical-Democratic Party. In 1912 he was on Capri where he befriended Maxim Gorky. He died in 1916 from tuberculosis. 65 Trotsky, The War Correspondence, 277. 66 To his credit, Trotsky saw the Balkan War as having “more in common with the Italian War of Liberation of 1859 than it has with the Italian-Turkish War of 1911–1912” (ibidem, 152). He even agreed with a Bulgarian officer, who admonished Trotsky that “the duty of Russian journalists, and especially of those who are combating the reactionary nonsense of the Slavophiles, is to explain the role and significance of a free, independent, and strong Bulgaria for the destiny of Southeastern Europe” (ibidem, 346–47).

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Just as hundreds of thousands of my fellow countrymen have been sent, some to fight at Çatalca, others to besiege Odrin, so I have been placed in a position where I am entrusted with the safeguarding of our task of liberation from all those conscienceless spies and marauders with whom the press organs of Europe’s usurers have now inundated our country.67

He accused Trotsky of irresponsibility and intransigence and contrasted this to a sense of proportion, which was the most valuable legacy bestowed by the Ancient World: You see how far we Bulgarians are from your Russian flight from responsibility. We, unlike you, see in this the very foundation of our civic spirit, and it is with this sentiment that we, like European democracy, seek to secure our rights as men and citizens. Similarly alien to us is your uncompromising attitude, which we are inclined to see as an anomaly that has been fortified in you by the regime under which you are obliged to live without rights; though also, it seems to me, behind this intransigence of yours, you hide from yourself your social impotence and lack of any practical sense.68

Trotsky dismissed this as “a very primitive level of political culture.”69 He confronted Todorov with the crimes committed by the Bulgarian army “that must evoke shudders and nausea in every cultured person, in everyone capable of feeling and thinking.”70 He further detailed the atrocities: the destruction by artillery fire of a Pomak village along with its entire population; the killing of prisoners and of the peaceful Turkish inhabitants of Dimotika; the particularly heinous deeds of the Macedonian Legion; the corpses lying on the path of the victorious army; the stabbing to death of wounded Turkish soldiers in the fields with the knowledge and under the orders of Bulgarian commanders. All this he had learned from the returning Bulgarian officers and soldiers who had told him these stories with “complete frankness . . . turning their eyes away.”71 Some told the stories of stabbing to death wounded men and shooting prisoners “with instinctive disgust, others ‘in passing’ and indifferently, yet others with conscious moral indignation.”72 Trotsky’s indictment was as harsh as it was just: 67

Ibidem, 278. Ibidem. 69 Ibidem, 279. 70 Ibidem, 282–83. 71 Ibidem, 283–84. 72 Ibidem, 304. Trotsky evidently used the dispatches of Vasil Kolarov from his diary as an officer in the Balkan War, which he published regularly in Rabotnicheski vestnik. They were published separately only in 2001 as Pobedi i porazheniia: Dnevnik (Sofia: Izdatelstvo “Khristo Botev”, 2001). Kolarov (1877– 1950) was a lawyer and one of the leaders of the Bulgarian Workers’ Social 68

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You, the radical, the poet, the humanist, not only did not yourself remind your army that, besides sharp bayonets and well-aimed bullets, there exist also the human conscience and that doctrine of Christ in whose name you are alleged to be waging your war—no, you also tied the hands of us European journalists behind our backs, and placed your military censor’s jackboot on our chest! Light-heartedly you put on your poet’s head a uniform cap with a censor’s cockade in it you assumed responsibility to and for your general staff, to and for your diplomacy, to and for your monarchy. Whether your red pencil contributed much to the extension of Bulgaria’s frontiers, I don’t know. But that the Bulgarian intelligentsia was a fellow traveller, and therefore an accomplice in all those fearful deeds with which this war will for a long time yet, perhaps decades, poison the soul of your people—that will remain an indelible fact that you will be helpless to alter or to delete from the history of your country. Your public life is still only in its cradle. Elementary political and moral concepts have as yet not been established among you. All the more obligatory is it for the advanced elements of your people to watch intransigently over the principles of democracy, the politics and morality of democracy.73

Was this one of the important lessons Trotsky carried over into preparations for 1914 and for 1917? He clearly shared this state of mind at the beginning of the Great War in 1914. Immediately after the end of the Balkan War, he commented that civilization inspires the false confidence that “the main thing in human progress has already been achieved—and then war comes, and reveals that we have not yet crept out on all fours from the barbaric period in our history.”74 This was the viewpoint of the peacetime liberal habitus Trotsky inhabited at the time in Vienna, and it came in a period when he was enamored by a modernizing and civilizing pathos. Deutscher describes this stage as the mission of all Marxists to “Europeanize” Russian socialism, but each faction in the fight followed its own way. This cry to Europeanization came most naturally from Trotsky, as the most “European” of the Russian émigrés, according to Deutscher.75 To the surprise of Deutscher, his close ties were not to Luxemburg, Liebknecht, or Mehring, “but to the men of the centre group.”76 He continued his internationalist stance as one of the leaders of the Democratic Party (the “Narrows”). Following 1923 he lived in emigration in the USSR. 73 Ibidem, 284–85. 74 Ibidem, 148. The famous report of the Carnegie Commission came to a similar conclusion that “war suspended the restraints of civil life, inflamed the passions that slumber in time of peace, destroyed the natural kindliness between neighbours, and set in its place the will to injure. This is everywhere the essence of war.” Report of the International Commission, 108. 75 Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, 180–81. 76 Ibidem, 182–85.

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Zimmerwald movement. As legend has it, Karl Kraus, when told that Trotsky organized the Red Army and saved the revolution, exclaimed: “Who would have expected that of Herr Bronstein from Café Central!”77 This state of mind was in apparent contrast to another celebrated war correspondent of the Balkan Wars, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876– 1944). The author of the 1909 “Futurist Manifesto” wrote for the Parisian daily L’Intransigeant. Earlier he had covered the Italo-Turkish War in Libya (1911). Arriving in Sofia, he seemed to have had much better luck than Trotsky, because not only was he allowed on the front, but he was flown in an airplane during the siege of Odrin (Adrianople) (November 1912– March 1913). He had already been aware of the new role of aerial war during the bombing of Ain Zara in Libya in 1911, the first use of airplanes in war. The following year, the Bulgarian army experimented with airdropped bombs and conducted the first night bombing on November 7, 1912. As a result, Marinetti started looking at “objects from a new point of view, no longer head on or from behind, but straight down, foreshortened; that is, I was able to break apart the old shackles of logic and the plumb lines of the ancient way of thinking.”78 In 1912 he published his “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” where he promoted parole in libertà (“words-in-freedom”), foregrounding sound and sensation over meaning. He himself said that words-in-freedom were born in the battlefields of Tripoli and Adrianople. Marinetti’s experience in Adrianople inspired him to start working on a visual and verbal account, a combination of letters, pictures, and sound, whose very title, “Zang Tumb Tumb: Adrianople 1912: Words in Freedom,” evoked the sounds of bombs, artillery shells, and explosions.79 He finished his work in 1913 and performed it in London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, before publishing it in 1914. For Marinetti, neither the Balkan Wars, nor the ensuing First World War were a rupture. Already in the “Futurist Manifesto” Marinetti had proclaimed that We want to glorify war—the only cure of the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and 77

Cited by Slavoj Žižek, “Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism, or, Despair and Utopia in the Turbulent Year of 1920,” in Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (London: Verso, 2007), vii. 78 F. T. Marinetti, ”From the café Bulgaria in Sofia to the courage of Italians in the Balkans and the military spirit of désarrois,” quoted in Inventing Abstraction 1910– 1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, ed. Leah Dickerman (New York: Thames & Hudson Limited, 2012), 136. 79 F. T. Marinetti, Zang Tumb Tumb: Adrianopoli: Ottobre 1912: Parole in libertà (Milano: Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia,” 1914).

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contempt for woman. We want to demolish museums, libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunism and utilitarian cowardice.80

He might have wanted (and succeeded) to shock, but he was also serious not only in his aesthetics but also in his politics. In many ways, some disagreements with the specific policies of Mussolini’s regime aside, he remained consistent in his views and support for fascism to the end, although his individual radicalism was blunted. Similarly for Trotsky, and despite his own verdict, neither 1912 nor 1914 served as a breakthrough. Until his final return to Russia in May 1917, he remained loyal to his liberal democratic beliefs. Only half a decade after the Balkan War, however, he had become a very different person. At Brest-Litovsk as the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and as the leader of the Red Army he was framed as a barbarian. He refused to allow the Red Cross to move across the fighting lines, despite Lenin’s permission, so as not to let them witness the devastation from the bombardment of Kazan.81 Trotsky had “forgotten” some of his own ideas that he had previously espoused in 1912. Trotsky’s most strident attack on the illusions of liberal democracy came in 1920, at the height of the Civil War in Russia, when he published his Terrorism and Communism as a polemical response to Karl Kautsky’s book of the same title.82 Kautsky had made the prophetic statement that, while bolshevism had triumphed in Russia, socialism had suffered a defeat.83 He lamented the violence of the “Tatar socialism” and wrote that “when communists assert that democracy is the method of bourgeois rule . . . the alternative to democracy, namely dictatorship, leads to nothing else but the method of the pre-bourgeois law of the jungle.”84 His conclusion about world revolution asserted that it would be fulfilled not through dictatorship, cannons and guns, and the destruction of political and social adversaries, but through democracy and humanity. “Only thus can we reach this higher form of life, whose creation is the historical task of the proletariat.”85 80

Le Figaro, February 20, 1909, English translation by James Joll, Three Intellectuals in Politics (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 140. 81 Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, 421. 82 Leo Trotskii, Terrorizm i kommunizm (Moscow: State Publishing House, 1920). The book was immediately translated into English and published as Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism) (New York: Workers’ Party of America, 1922). It was republished, with a foreword by Slavoj Žižek, also by Verso in 2007. Online access: www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/terrcomm/index.htm. 83 Karl Kautsky, Terrorismus und Kommunismus: ein Beitrag zur Naturgeschichte der Revolution (Berlin: Verlag Neues Vaterland, 1919), 133. 84 Ibidem, 152. 85 Ibidem, 154.

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Trotsky’s response was devastating. While this is not the place to evaluate this most controversial of Trotsky’s works, suffice it to say that it was a passionate defense of the ruthlessness (besposhchadnost) of revolutionary methods. In chapter 4, “Terrorism,” Trotsky confronted the accusation that his tactics differed little from the tsarist ones. His response was that tsarist terrorism was directed against the proletariat, while the revolutionary terror shot landlords, capitalists, and generals who strived to restore the capitalist order. Here there was no mention of “human conscience” and “the principles of democracy, the politics and morality of democracy” from his diatribe against Petko Todorov seven years earlier. All of this is not intended to establish and expose Trotsky’s alleged “inconsistencies,” let alone his bloodthirstiness. The latter is based on the naïve belief in the immutability of some basic core identity. Nor is it intended to enter into the intractable debate about revolutionary terror and the dictatorship of the proletariat. It seeks to make one simple point: the Revolution was Trotsky’s war. Our wars are usually capitalized: they are the Civil Wars, the Wars for Independence, the Liberation Wars, the People’s Wars, the Peasant Wars, the Revolutionary Wars, the Great Patriotic War, the War on Terror, even the Great War, and they are mostly just wars. Other people’s wars, whose motif is unclear or not immediately appealing, are just wars, calamities. With time this befalls gradually the capitalized wars too, once they pass from memory into history. This happened both with the Balkan Wars and with the October Revolution. *** There are some obvious points and conclusions to be made. Firstly, memory alone is meaningless. We make sense of it through a framework. In the first chapters of his memoirs on his early years, Trotsky did not want to impose a framework, a “meaning” to his childhood, yet his narrative is full of vivid memories that belie his claim that memories are weak in the absence of ideas. The impressionistic character, however, cannot be subsumed in a single consistent narrative, which begins only with his adolescence when he is swept up by revolutionary ideas, after which “the revolution” becomes the overarching framework of his whole life. Memory thus is “packaged” and the historian’s task is to un-pack it, but, even more importantly, to study the packaging itself in its different forms: autobiography, biography, memoirs, academic histories, popular histories, journalism, novels, poems, monuments, cemeteries, museums, each having their specific narrative sways and consistencies. Equally, the Carnegie Report was “remembered” in the framework of the Yugoslav wars, but extracting from it almost the opposite of what its authors had set out to do. By selectively using its assembled facts, George Kennan and other

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politicians and journalists started a wholesale discrediting, demonization, and condemnation of a whole region, all this (but not always) in the framework of the specific policies pursued by the USA, the EU, and NATO. Secondly, “making sense” of memory comes at a moment of rest, sometime after the event, usually during peacetime, or as Trotsky himself called it a moment of “pause in the author’s active political life.”86 For him this was the year 1929 in Istanbul. It is at relative moments of peace, after the bloodshed in Kenya in the 1950s, the atrocities in Yugoslavia, the genocide in Rwanda, the war in Iraq, that the effects of trauma come to the fore. It is in this context that Keith Brown sketches the continuing importance of both the content and the form of the Carnegie Report, especially for trauma studies and for work on commemoration, which can “redirect the study of traumatic history toward forms of resolution.” “The challenge—as it was for the producers of the Carnegie Inquiry,” Brown writes, “is to reflect on the outcomes we anticipate for our inquiries into a troubled past.”87 And, finally, there is the all too obvious conclusion that it is immediate experience that not only most decisively inflects memory, but that also most decisively legitimizes commemoration. Witness accounts may not necessarily be the most accurate testimony, but they have a particular legitimacy. History offers accurate accounts of past events and has credibility, but witness accounts, just like myths, possess both credibility and authority.88 The power of personal testimony, its authority, has been at its height for three generations. There is the Swahili saying that the deceased who remain alive in people’s memory are the “living dead.” It is only when the last to have known them passes away that they are pronounced completely dead.89 Thus, the premium of immediate experience goes beyond the individual who has experienced an event; it also anoints those who have had immediate knowledge of that person. But it can go even further and anoint any testimony that has the aura of a witness account even as the emotional reaction it evokes would subside with the growing distance of time. It is for this reason that both the Carnegie Report and Trotsky’s dispatches were used as powerful

86

Trotsky, My Life, v. Brown, “How Trauma Travels,” 141. 88 I am adapting the argument by Bruce Lincoln on fables, legends, history, and myth. Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 24– 25. 89 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 195. 87

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legitimizing proof by the western political elite to muster emotional and political support during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.90 The memory of war today is a formidable business. This is true in a very literal sense, with extensive tourism at historic battlefields (principally of the First and Second World Wars, but also going as far back as the Napoleonic Wars, and in some rarer cases medieval battles), as well as through commissions to sculptors, architects, filmmakers, fiction writers, and academics to commemorate war. The most lucrative topic in US history is the Civil War; one can be certain to find work with this topic in any American bookstore and with its paraphernalia, violence, and containment of the enemy. All of this is meant to serve the noble appeal “learn in order to prevent.” There is undoubtedly an idealistic element in this appeal, but one suspects that underlying it there is also a certain degree of voyeurism about violence, garnished with a puritan moralizing and hectoring. Pierre Nora has become an obligatory footnote to any study of memory, but few pay attention to the fundamental distinction he made between lieux and milieux de mémoire. English does not translate milieux, although there are quibbles over lieux, ranging from “realms” to “sites” to “places” to simply preserving the French original. Milieu indicates sites of living or lived memory, or rather sites that provide direct access to living traditions. Once these traditions have passed away, the sites evoke only intimations, often nostalgia. Nora uses lieu to designate the exterritorialized sites of collective memory. Speaking specifically about contemporary France, he maintains that a shift has occurred from a kind of naturalized collective memory to a self-conscious, uninspired, and rather mechanistic rituals of preserving memory. He thus posits a transformation from sites of internalized social collective memory to fixed, externalized locations. These sites form an exhaustive inventory, consisting of architectural and textual artefacts: monuments and shrines, histories and textbooks, museums and archives. Commenting on the lieux, Nora says, “It is no longer genesis we seek but rather the deciphering of who we are in light of who we are no longer.”91 This seems to be happening with the Balkan Wars. For the centenary between 2012 and 2013, there was a proliferation of celebrations,

90

Interestingly, the Carnegie Report received its first full translation into Bulgarian only in 1995 (and it was from the later reprint, with the Kennan preface). Trotsky is yet to be translated, but he will probably have to wait, since his name has little (neo)liberal appeal. 91 Pierre Nora, “Entre mémoire et histoire,” in Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), xxxiii, cited in Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover: UPNE, 1993), 148.

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commemorations, and documentary and photo exhibits in all the participating countries. Now, but to a lesser extent, the First World War has joined this commemoration. There have been school and academic competitions on the topic. Academics organized workshops and conferences all over Europe and North America. There were reprints and new publications, especially memoirs and other eyewitness accounts.92 The press in the Balkan countries did not miss the opportunity to publish interviews with historians, literary scholars, and politicians. The web was a particularly rich source of activities.93 However, no new monuments were erected, and there have merely been calls to repair the older ones that have been allowed to crumble. It seemed that they had lost their function as milieux, and now there was a desire to turn them into attractive lieux. The passage from milieux to lieux is inevitable, because in the broadest sense it hinges on the immediacy of lived experience. There is nothing tragic about it. If only it were possible in the future that “war and memory” would be enshrined solely in lieux de mémoire!

92

In Bulgaria, alongside a plenitude of other minor publications, the Institute for Historical Research published a de luxe edition of war memoirs Balkanskite voini 1912–1913: Pamet i istoriia. (Sofia: Akademichno izdatelstvo, Prof. Marin Drinov, 2012). 93 Bulgaria alone has more than 700 websites dedicated to some aspect of the centennial. A game by Joseph Mirand, Balkan Wars, can be downloaded. It is only on these websites that one can gauge the reaction of the younger people to the anniversary, ranging from the openly nationalistic to being critical of any display of jingoism. Even these blogs, however, are relatively subdued.

Contributors

Nadine Akhund-Lange is Research Associate, Sorbonne-Identities, International Relations and Civilizations of Europe (SIRICE). Works include En Guerre pour La Paix (Paris: Alma Editeur, 2018) and, with co-author S. Tison, “L’appel à l’Amérique: L’action de Nicholas Butler et Paul d’Estournelles de Constant en faveur de la paix,” in Les Défenseurs de la Paix, ed. R. Fabre (Rennes: PUR, 2018). Thomas M. Bohn is Professor of East European History at Justus Liebig University Giessen. Major works include Russische Geschichtswissenschaft von 1880 bis 1905: Pavel N. Miljukov und die Moskauer Schule (Cologne/Weimar/Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1998); The Vampire: Origins of a European Myth (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2019). Katja Castryck-Naumann is Senior Researcher at the Department “Entanglements and Globalization” of the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) Leipzig. Recent works include the edited volume Transregional Connections in the History of East-Central Europe, (Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2021). Stefan DjordjeviΔ holds a BA in History at Northwestern University a MA in History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is finalizing his dissertation on competing theories of Yugoslav identity and post-imperial legacies in the interwar Yugoslav Kingdom He currently serves as the Academic Advisor in the Illinois Department of History. Ivan Il∑ev is Professor of Modern History of the Balkan Peoples at St. Kliment Okhridski University, Sofia, Bulgaria, and Member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. His books include The Rose of the Balkans: A Short History of Bulgaria (Sofia: Colibri, 2005). Isabella Löhr is Deputy Director of the German-French research institute Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. Major works include Globale Bildungsmobilität 1850-1930: Von der Bekehrung der Welt zur globalen studentischen Gemeinschaft (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2021).

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Contributors

Dietmar Müller is Invited Professor of East European Cultural History at the University of Leipzig. Major works include Bodeneigentum und Nation: Rumänien, Jugoslawien und Polen im europäischen Vergleich, 1918– 1948 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2020). Helke Rausch is Assistant Professor in 20th century European and American History at the History Department of the University of Freiburg. Major works include the edited volume, with co-editor John Krige, American Foundations and the Coproduction of World Order in the 20th Century (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012). Adamantios Theodor Skordos is Assoc. Professor (Privatdozent) for European Studies at the University of Leipzig and Research Coordinator at Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO). Main publications include Südosteuropa und das moderne Völkerrecht: Eine transregionale und globale Geschichte im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2021). Maria Todorova is, since 2007, Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of History at the University of Illinoist at Urbana-Champaign. Recent books include The Lost World of Socialists at Europe’s Margins: Imagining Utopia, 1870s–1920s (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), and Scaling the Balkans: Essays on Eastern European Entanglements (Leiden: Brill, 2018). Stefan Troebst is, since 1999, Professor of East European Cultural History of Leipzig University and deputy director of the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, also in Leipzig. Book in print: The Other Lung – Europe’s Eastern Half: Collected Essays (Leiden: Brill).

Index

A Abdulhamid II, Sultan, 5, 159, 160, 284 Abramowitz, Morton, 1–3, 256–58 Adanır, Fikret, 159 Adrianople (Edirne, Odrin), 134, 140, 176, 179, 181, 188, 197, 211, 244, 292, 294 Adriatic Sea, 239, 245, 255 Africa, 96, 114, 115 Ain Zara, 294 Akami, Tomoko, 90 Åland Islands, 112 Albania, 6, 130, 151, 152, 159, 160, 236, 245, 249, 253, 255, 262, 268 Alexander I of Serbia (King Aleksandar Obrenović), 189, 272 Alexander I of Yugoslavia (Crown Prince Alexander), 240, 243, 251, 252, 253, 272 Alexander II of Russia, 174 Allock, John, 151 America; North, 80, 192, 205, 299 (see also United States of America); Central and South, 36; Latin, 35, 84, 96, 114, 115 Andrews, John B., 107 Arendt, Hannah, 83 Armenia, 122, 127, 130, 141, 152n, 283 Asia, 86, 90, 96, 101, 114, 115, 285; Asia Minor, 210, 229; East, 35; Southeast, 36, 84 Athens, 11, 131, 134, 143, 161, 176, 179, 188, 189n, 196, 197, 214, 216– 24, 225, 226, 229

Australia, 114 Austria-Hungary, 5, 119, 120, 127, 133, 159, 150, 163, 176, 183, 184, 193, 215, 237, 243, 250, 253, 265, 269, 270, 277, 285 Aydelotte, Frank, 102 B Bajkić, Delimir, 125 Bakalov, Ž., 199 Bakhmetev, Georgi P., 169–70 Balkans, 2, 5–8, 10, 13, 16, 17, 20, 21, 29, 39, 53, 56, 119, 123–25, 127, 129–32, 147–48, 150–51, 156, 162–65, 168, 170, 172–75, 177, 179, 184, 188–95, 199–201, 205, 206, 212, 216, 221, 228, 232– 33, 235–40, 242, 244, 245, 250, 253, 256–70, 273, 277, 279–80, 282–86 Balugdžić, Živojin, 176 Banac, Ivo, 151 Banaroya, Avraam, 161 Barnes, Harry E., 106, 108 Bebel, August, 287 Belgium, 126, 205, 261, 272 Belgrade, 11, 131–34, 140, 143, 150, 156, 160, 178, 179, 188, 195–96, 201, 204, 214, 217–18, 224, 238n, 239, 240–41, 242, 243, 251, 266, 267, 268, 270, 272–73, 286 Belić, Aleksandar, 243–44 Bérard, Victor, 10, 130, 156, 193, 194, 227 Berchtold, Leopold Graf, 215

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Index

Berlin, 11, 17, 128, 156, 162n, 183, 236, 291n, 294; congress of, 5, 140, 175, 182; treaty of, 147, 151, 175 Bideleux, Robert, 152 Bismarck, Otto von, 239 Bliss, Tasker H., 111 Bolivia, 112 Borchard, Edwin Montefiori, 105 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 5, 6, 122, 174, 175, 239, 243n, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 263, 266, 267, 271, 285 Bosporus, 181, 183 Boston, 44, 100 Bourchier, James David, 189n, 194, 199 Bradley, William, 42 Brailsford, Eva-Maria, née Perlman, 164–65 Brailsford, Henry Noël, 128–29, 157– 60, 164–66, 194; as co-author of the report, 14, 135–36, 138, 139, 140, 162–63, 180, 200, 227, 263; as member of the Commission, 10–11, 119, 132, 140, 142, 145, 156, 160– 61, 165, 178, 184, 193–94, 242; Greek perception of, 11, 133–34, 143, 161, 179, 195, 196–97, 217–18, 220, 222–23, 227, 228; Macedonian perception of, 232; pro-Bulgarian stance of, 11, 157, 136, 142, 161, 207, 219, 227; reception of in Bulgaria, 162, 198; Serbian perception of, 133, 217–18; views on Macedonia, 157–58, 163, 164, 196; and the idea of a new commission, 206 Brailsford, Jane, 158–60 Braun, Karl Freiherr von, 214 Brentano, Lujo, 125 Brest-Litovsk, 295 Bronstein, Lev Davidovich. See Leon Trotsky Brown, Keith, 278, 297 Brown, Philip, 29 Brune, Jean, 193 Brunnbauer, Ulf, 152 Bryan, William Jennings, 42, 45 Bryce, James, 205

Bucharest, 215, 219, 241; treaty of, 119 131, 134, 142, 147, 151, 180, 181, 191, 199, 202 Budapest, 132, 134 Bulgaria, 5–7, 9–12, 17, 20, 28, 29, 61, 62, 122, 124, 129, 131, 134, 138, 142, 147, 151, 155, 157–64, 167–69, 172–77, 179–84, 187–94, 197–205, 210–12, 215–17, 219–21, 223–29, 237, 241–47, 251, 253, 269, 271, 280, 283, 286–87, 289–93, 299n Butler, Nicholas Murray, 9, 15, 37–38, 70, 98, 121, 140, 148, 156; as head of CEIP, 37, 55, 56, 69; wordldview/policy views of, 19, 34, 40–41, 43, 47–48, 54, 57, 59, 71, 99, 102, 103, 116, 121, 123, 133, 148, 149; role in setting up the Commission, 9–10, 37, 38–39, 124–31, 132, 139, 151, 156, 240; role in the publication of the report, 12, 135–36, 137, 139, 148, 149–51; views of concerning the mission of the Commission, 10, 38– 39, 125, 126, 141, 142, 145, 147 Buxton, Edward Noel, 163, 164, 206 Byron, Lord (George Gordon Byron), 161 C Canada, 230 Carasso, Sam, 213 Caribbean, 35 Carmen, Harry J., 104 Carnegie, Andrew, 120, 191–92; and the Commission, 121, 124, 143, 155, 240n; and the Endowment, 15, 33– 34, 38, 65, 67, 82, 123, 240; correspondence with, 127, 147, 150; financing of the Peace Palace, 15n, 18n; philanthropism of, 192; worldview/policy views of, 30, 32, 33, 40, 65, 67, 82, 192, 193, 273 Cartwright, Sir Fairfax, 215 Çatalca, 292 Caucasus, 169 Černov, G., 248

305

Index Chamberlain, Joseph, 105 Chicago, 174, 176 China, 35, 127, 137 Churchill, Winston, 72 Clark, John Bates, 43, 125 Cleveland, Ohio, 102 Cologne, 132 Constantine I of Greece, 189, 214 Çorlu, 287 Coss, John J., 103, 104 Crane, Charles R., 174, 176 Creel, George, 47 Crete, 122, 130, 140, 141n, 179, 196 Croatia, 260, 267, 271 Cuba, 101 D d’Estournelles de Constant, Paul-HenriBenjamin Balluet, 121–22; and the forming of the Commission, 9, 124– 30, 139, 156, 160, 177, 193, 239; and the mission of the Commission, 130, 132, 142, 145, 152, 239; and the publication of the report, 137; and the working of the Commission, 10, 12, 127, 131, 132, 133, 134, 140, 161, 194; as co-author of the report, 14, 15–16, 135–36, 142–43, 201, 275; worldview/policy views of, 16, 20–21, 121, 147, 193, 199, 202, 205–6, 277–79 d’Yxcoull, Varvara (Baroness Üxküll von Hildenbrand), 140 Daase, Cindy, 14 Dačić, Ivica, 268 Dalmatia, 174 Danube, 251 Dardanelles, 181, 183 Dayton, Ohio, 261; peace talks/accords, 238, 262 Dečko, Dušan, 213 Denmark, 204 Deutscher, Isaac, 282, 293 Dimităr Furnadžiev, 204 Dimotika, 292 Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Constantin, 283

Dojran, 203 Doxato (Doksat), 131, 134, 145–46, 162, 197, 214, 222 Dragoumis, Stefanos, 11, 133, 218, 220, 223 Drama, 131, 134, 162, 197, 214 Duggan, Stephen P., 105, 107, 109 Dunning, William E., 101 Dupnica, 198 Dutton, Samuel Train, 127, 156; as coauthor of the report, 14, 135, 138, 139, 180, 200, 227; as member of the Commission, 10, 11, 119, 129, 131, 132, 134, 142, 143, 156, 160, 178, 193, 197, 242; policy views of, 147, 150–51, 258; reception of in the Balkans, 134, 195, 217, 222, 232; views of regarding the mission of the Commission, 132, 133, 142, 144, 258 E Earle, Edward Mead, 57 Edman, Irwin, 104 Engels, Friedrich, 286 England, 113, 120, 206, 211, 215. See also Great Britain Epirus, 6 Europe, 9, 13, 21, 22, 31, 36, 41, 45, 47, 48, 55, 57, 80, 83, 84, 94, 96– 97, 101, 112, 113, 122, 124, 130, 138, 149, 150, 151, 184, 188, 189, 191, 197, 198, 202, 204, 208, 216, 226, 228, 231, 238, 239, 240, 242, 248, 253, 254, 257–58, 264, 267, 276–77, 286, 290, 293, 299; Eastern, 57, 82; Southeastern, 2, 4–5, 7, 12– 13, 21, 30, 57, 63, 106, 170, 174, 208, 227, 291n; Western, 12, 113, 211n, 237n, 285; Concert of, 8, 21, 108, 110, 173, 245, 276

306

Index F

Ferdinand I of Bulgaria (Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha), 134, 162, 170, 175–76, 180, 182, 187, 190 Filene, Edward A., 44 Finland, 112 Ford, Henry, 45 Foucault, Michel, 13 France, 114, 120, 123, 127, 130, 135, 136, 140, 160, 190, 193, 203, 206, 215, 261, 264, 271, 272, 277, 298 Frank, Glenn, 106 Fried, Alfred H., 66 Fürstenberg, Emil, Prince, 219 G Genadiev, Nikola, 161, 198, 199 Geneva, 55n, 111, 291n; convention, 276 George I of Greece, 189 Georgov, Ivan, 169 Germany, 11, 17, 34, 51, 57, 86, 119, 120, 123, 126, 127, 132, 137, 156, 163, 164, 182, 193, 203, 206, 253, 261, 264, 271, 277 Gibbon, Edward, 282 Ginio, Eyal, 144 Glenny, Misha, 152 Godart, Justin, 130; and the mission of the Commission, 133; and the working of the Commission, 11, 134, 140, 142, 143, 160, 178, 179, 194, 197, 198–99, 220, 222, 223–24; as coauthor of the report, 14, 135–36, 138, 139, 144–45, 148, 180, 200, 227; as member of the Commission, 10, 119, 131, 132, 156, 193; general views of, 150; receptions of in the Balkans, 134, 195, 217, 221, 223 Gounaris, Vasilis, 227 Great Britain, Britain, 6, 10, 17, 83, 101, 119, 127, 158, 159, 193, 203, 245, 261, 264, 277 Greece, 4, 5, 6–7, 9, 10, 11, 14, 17, 20, 61, 129, 131, 134, 135, 147, 151,

155, 158, 160–61, 163, 179, 192, 194, 196–97, 202, 207, 210, 212, 217–24, 225–26, 228, 230, 231, 248, 271 Grey, Sir Edward, 181, 215 Grotius, Hugo, 84, 87 Guedes, Jules, 287 H Hague, the, 15, 18, 31, 32, 39, 260n; Convention, 4, 16–17, 19, 20, 21, 31, 39, 61, 66, 97, 109, 209, 211n, 259, 276; Court, 15, 19, 128, 149; peace conferences, 15–19, 36, 38, 54, 67, 68, 81, 98, 101, 108, 120n, 123, 144, 148, 177, 193 Harding, Warren, 53 Haskell, Henry, 126, 139, 147 Hawaii, 32 Hawkes, Herbert E., 101, 103 Hayes, Carlton J. H., 107–8 Hazen, Charles D., 101 Heimroth, Dr. von, 215 Hirst, Francis W., 10, 129, 133, 135, 136, 142, 148, 156, 163, 193, 206 Hobson, John A., 107, 110, 115 Holt, Hamilton, 55 Höpken, Wolfgang, 7 Hösch, Edgar, 259 Hudson, Manley O., 74–77, 79, 80, 81, 84, 89 Huysmans, Camille, 285 I Ibsen, Henrik Johan, 281 India, 164 Ioannina, 213 Iraq, 112, 297 Istanbul, Constantinople, 20, 29, 127, 131, 134, 156, 171, 179, 181, 184, 197, 205, 208, 210, 212, 224, 282, 297 Italy, 17, 203, 215, 253, 269n Ivanov, Yordan, 161, 227 Izvol’skii, Aleksandr, 175

307

Index J Jackson, Robert H., 80 Jajce, 164 Jančeva, Ljubica, 230 Japan, 35, 86, 120, 137, 203 Jaurès, Jean, 190, 287 Jelavich, Barbara, 259 Jeremić, Vuk, 271 Joffe, Adolph, 281 Johnstone, Andrew, 71, 80 Judah, Tim, 259 K Kabakchiev, Khristo, 288 Kalkandelen (Tetovo), 158 Karađorđe (Đorđe Petrović), 242–43 Karadžić, Radovan, 260–61, 266 Karavelov, Petko, 169 Kautsky, Karl, 295 Kavala, 131, 162, 197, 203 Kazan, 295 Kendrick, Benjamin B., 104 Kennan, George F., 1, 151, 162, 256– 58, 261n, 263, 279, 280, 296 Kentucky, 42 Kenya, 297 Kévonian, Dzovinar, 123n, 144 Kiev, 171, 280, 281 Kilkis. See Kukuš Kirillovich, Ivan, 290 Kohn, George F., 110 Koliševski, Lazar, 164 Kolokotronis, Vasileios, 228 Kondakov, Nikodim P., 172 Koskenniemi, Martti, 63 Kosovo, 6, 210, 238–39, 242, 245, 246, 249, 250, 251, 255, 266, 267–68, 271 Koštunica, Vojislav, 261 Kral, August Ritter von, 213, 216 Krehbiel, Edward B., 107 Kukuš (Kukush, Kukuch, Kilkis, Kılkış, Kilkich), 161, 134, 190, 197, 203, 220, 230, 231 Kunčev, Vasil, 227

L La Follette, Robert, 48 La Fontaine, Henri, 66 Lagardelle, Hubert, 191 Lammasch, Heinrich, 10, 128 Lansing, Robert, 48 Laqua, Daniel, 66 Larissa, 158 Lausanne, 224, 225, 229 Le Mans, Department of the Sarthe, 123, 140 Léger, Louis, 191 Lemkin, Raphael, 73–74, 84 Lenin, Vladimir, 295 Leonard, Larry L., 84, 85, 87, 88, 90 Lepidi, Colonel, 214, 222–23 Leuven, 150, 273 Leventhal, Fred, 157, 158, 160, 165 Levermore, Charles Herbert, 51, 140 Libya, 294 Liebknecht, Karl, 293 Lingen, Kerstin von, 79 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 51 London, 78–80, 129, 131, 132, 140, 156, 158, 160, 163, 164, 165, 166, 206, 236, 242n, 250, 294; charter of, 78–79; peace conference, 28, 75; treaty of, 187, 236, 244 Loti, Pierre, 197 Lowell, Abbott Lawrence, 43, 98, 105 Lüle Burgas, 289 Luxemburg, Rosa, 293 Lyon, 10, 130, 156, 193, 242 M Macedonia, 5–7, 14, 28, 29, 122, 126, 129, 131, 136, 138, 141, 151, 152n, 157–66, 168, 170–73, 175, 178–79, 182–84, 189, 190, 194, 195, 196, 198, 202, 209–210, 211n, 213–14, 219, 225–33, 239, 245–46, 249, 250, 251, 255, 266. See also Vardar Macedonia

308

Index

Macedonian question, 129, 138, 157, 163, 165, 167–68, 169, 172–73, 183, 225, 227, 228, 229 MacLaurin, R. C., 101 Maksim Maksimovich Kovalevsky, 129, 142, 156, 178 Malinov, Aleksandǔr, 169 Marinetti, Filippo Tomasso, 12, 294 Maritsa, 176 Marmara (Sea), 176 Marx, Karl, 286 Mashkov, Viktor Fedorovich, 179 Mašin, Draga, 272 Maupassant, Guy de, 281 Mazower, Mark, 82, 83, 144, 151 McBain, Howard Lee, 101 McCaughey, Robert, 101 McKinley, William, 35 Mehring, Franz, 293 Meštrović, Ivan, 251 Mexico, 41 Michail, Eugene, 259 Michailidis, Iakovos D., 227 Middle East, 57, 114, 175, 209, 237 Miletich, Lyubomir, 169, 180, 198 Miller, David Hunter, 111 Milošević, Slobodan, 238, 250, 260, 266, 267, 268 Milyukov, Pavel N., 129, 167–84, 193– 94, 280, 283n; and the idea of a new commission, 163, 206; and the working of the Commission, 134, 140, 145, 160, 161, 178–79, 194, 222; as co-author of the report, 14, 135, 137–39, 148, 180, 199, 200, 227; as member of the Commission, 10, 119, 132, 156, 177, 184, 194; Bulgarian reception of, 161–62, 167, 169, 176, 179–80, 184, 197–98; Greek perception of, 11, 14, 133, 142, 143, 179, 196–97, 207–8, 217, 244, 245, 246, 248; pro-Bulgarian bias of, 11, 133, 136, 142, 161, 168, 183–84, 217, 219; Serbian reactions to, 11, 14, 133, 142, 161, 178, 195–96, 207–8, 217, 244, 245, 246, 248; travel to Turkey, 20, 134, 197; views of the

mission of the Commission, 17, 131, 143; views on the Bulgarian question, 181–82; views on the Macedonian question, 129, 167–68, 170–73, 178–79, 183–84, 202; worldview/policy views of, 17–18, 19, 147, 175, 180–81, 184 Mladić, Ratko, 266 Mojzes, Paul, 211 Monastir (Bitola), 6, 138, 158 Montague, Andrew Jackson, 34n, 48 Montenegro, 5, 6–7, 9, 61, 62, 121, 127, 151, 174, 236, 271 Moon, Parker T., 110 Moore, John Basset, 105 Moscow, 77, 169, 254, 294 Mosul, 112 Mussolini, Benito, 295 N Near East, 238, 272, 284 Netherlands, 40n, 128, 261 New England, 32 New York, 33, 47, 51, 123, 139, 156; CEIP office in, 17, 120, 192 New Zealand, 114 Nicholas I of Montenegro, 127 Nicholas II of Russia, 169 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 281 Niš, 182 Nora, Pierre, 298 Norway, 126 Novaković, Stojan, 283 Nuremberg, 76, 78 Nuri Bey, Mehmed, 213 O Ogg, Frederic Austin, 108 Ohrid, 159 Osterhammel, Jürgen, 276 Otlet, Paul, 66 Oto, Antid. See Leon Trotsky Ozanian, Andranik, 283

309

Index P

R

Pacific, 90; Asia-Pacific, 86; North, 85 Paču, Lazar, 283 Painleve, Paul, 135 Palestine, 233 Panama Canal, 101 Panaretov, Stefan, 205 Paraguay, 112 Paris, 10, 12, 13, 119, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 139, 143, 150, 151, 156, 178, 180, 190, 194, 195, 198, 199, 205, 224, 229, 236, 240n, 247, 264, 283n, 294; CEIP bureau in, 9, 38, 120, 122, 127, 128n, 129, 130, 131, 135, 139, 147, 151, 152, 156, 193, 203; peace conference, 4, 31, 50, 52– 54, 69, 72, 102, 105, 163; treaty of, 21 Pašić, Nikola, 11, 195, 217, 238, 245– 46, 247, 248, 250, 283, 287 Paszkowski, Wilhelm, 11, 17, 128, 156 Pavlowitch, Stevan K., 259 Penennrun, Alain de, 247 Peter I of Serbia (Petar I Karađorđević), 243, 251 Peter the Great, 167 Philippines, 32 Philippou, Chris, 232 Pijade, Moša, 164 Piraeus, 179 Pirot, 182 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 191, 192 Pleinert, Gerent, 220, 223 Poincaré, Raymond, 190 Poland, 261 Polanyi, Karl, 276 Portugal, 203 Poulpiquet de Halgonet, J. de, 214 Prague, 167 Prince, Dyneley, 127 Priština, 267 Pritchett, Henry S., 47 Prudhommeaux, Jules, 129, 131, 135, 139, 147

Radev, Simeon, 290 Radoslavov, Vasil, 190, 205 Rakovsky, Krîstiu (Christian), 283, 285, 217 Razlog, 187, 190 Redlich, Josef, 10, 11, 17, 128, 129, 132, 133, 135, 140, 143, 156n, 193 Reims, 150, 273 Reiss, Rudolphe Archibald, 224–26 Renan, Ernest, 256 Riazan, 169 Ribnikar, Darko, 241 Rieff, David, 256–57 Riesenfeld, Stefan, 84–88, 90 Rietzler, Katharina, 70, 86 Rila Monastery, 176 Rizov, Dimitǔr, 174, 183 Rockefeller, John D., 29 Rodosto (Tekirdağ), 176 Rogers, Lindsay, 105 Romania, 5, 7, 9, 16, 28, 29, 61, 62, 151, 155, 191, 204, 253, 282, 283, 284n, 286n Roosevelt, Franklin D., 72 Roosevelt, Theodore, 32, 35, 38, 98 Root, Elihu, 10, 15, 34–37, 43–47, 50, 51–53, 59, 68, 69, 121, 124, 148, 240 Rose, Sir Michael, 259 Russia, 4, 6, 10, 32, 35, 54, 119, 123, 127, 159, 167, 168, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 180–82, 184, 190, 193, 208, 215, 269, 272, 277, 281, 284, 285, 295 Ruyssen, Theodore, 130, 203 Rwanda, 297 S Saar Basin, 112 Said, Edward, 13 Samokov, 162, 198, 278 Sarajevo, 201, 203, 262 Sava, 251 Scandinavia, 183

310

Index

Schneider, Herbert W., 104 Schücking, Walter, 11, 17, 127–28, 130, 132–33, 156, 193, 195, 221 Scianov, Monsignore Epiphan, 213 Scotland, 120, 124, 158, 191 Scott, C. P., 158 Scott, James Brown, 36–37, 47, 68, 72, 73, 122, 124 Segesser, Daniel Marc, 21 Sellars, Kirsten, 77 Serbia, 4, 5, 6–7, 9, 11, 14, 17, 20, 61, 62, 122, 125, 131, 134, 135, 147, 151, 155, 160, 163, 172, 182, 183, 189, 194–97, 202, 207, 210, 212, 217, 218, 223, 224, 228, 235–39, 242–55, 260– 61, 265–73, 283, 285, 286 Serres (Sjar), 131, 134, 162, 197, 203, 214, 219, 222 Severance, C. A., 272–73 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 260 Shipka Pass, 176 Shishmanov, Ivan, 169 Shotwell, James T., 48–50, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59, 90, 99, 100, 105, 111, 116, 123, 125n Sidirokastró (Demir Hisar), 203 Simić, Predrag, 265, 270 Skobelev, Matvey, 281 Skopje. See Üsküb Slivnica, 242 Smiley, Albert, 33 Sofia, 7, 11, 131, 134, 157, 161–62, 167, 169, 172, 176, 180, 187, 188, 191, 197–201, 204, 215, 217, 224, 226, 229, 280, 285, 291, 294 Šopov, Atanas, 198 South Dobruja, 6 Soviet Union (USSR), 71, 86, 164, 256, 279 Spain, 32, 101 St. Petersburg, 156, 172, 174, 199, 244, 280, 294 Stalin, Joseph, 254 Stamboliiski, Alexander, 287 Stančov, Dimităr, 190, 205 Stavrianos, Leften S., 259 Stefov, Risto, 230–33

Stockdale, Melissa Kirschke, 140 Stoianov, Khristo, 287 Stojanović, Dubravka, 271 Suárez, José Léon, 85 Sundhaussen, Holm, 152 Svirčević, Miroslav, 270 Sweden, 112, 126 Sweetser, Arthur, 110, 111 Switzerland, 151, 183, 285 Syria, 127, 130 T Taft, William Howard, 43, 45 Talât Bey (Mehmed Talaat), 197 Taylor, A. J. P., 239 Thessaloniki (Solun, Selânik, Salonica), 6, 11, 131, 132, 133–34, 135n, 143, 156, 161, 162, 176–77, 179, 195, 196, 207, 210, 213, 214, 216, 217– 18, 220–24, 227, 228 Thrace, 6, 159, 163, 197n, 210, 213; East Thrace, 181, 187, 189, 190, 197, 211 Tindemans, Leo, 261, 262, 263, 264 Tito, Josip Broz, 164, 165, 236, 238, 254–55, 256 Todorov, Petko, 291–92, 296 Todorova, Maria, 151 Tokyo, 76 Trainin, Aron, 78–79 Tripoli, 294 Trotsky, Leon (Lev), 12–13, 177, 275, 280–97 Tucović, Dimitrije, 255 Tugwell, Rexford, 111 Turkey, 29, 112, 151, 159, 160, 176, 183, 184, 188, 197, 198, 203, 221, 271, 281n, 284–85, 287, 289 Tǔrnovo, 175 U United States of America (America), 3, 9, 13, 14, 15, 19, 22, 27, 28–30, 31– 38, 40–59, 65, 67, 69, 70, 71, 75, 77, 79, 80, 83, 86, 89, 93–99, 101,

311

Index 102, 105, 107, 109, 110–14, 116, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132n, 134, 135, 136, 137, 146, 148n, 149, 151, 155, 171, 174, 191–92, 193, 200, 201, 203–4, 205, 206, 236, 240, 248, 254, 259, 261, 262, 263, 264, 268, 276, 277, 279, 285, 297, 298, 299 Upenskii, Fiodor, 171 Üsküb (Üsküp, Skopje), 131, 133, 138, 157, 158, 165, 182, 215, 230 V Vakalopoulos, Konstantinos, 228 Vandervelde, Emile, 287 Vardar Macedonia, 157, 161, 195, 196, 238n, 246, 266 Vazov, Ivan, 170 Velichkov, Konstantin, 169 Venizelos, Eleftherios, 215, 225 Vienna, 17, 131, 132, 160, 194, 195, 208, 215, 219, 240, 280, 293 Villard, Oswald Garrison, 47 Virginia, 47 Vlahov, Dimitar, 161, 196, 222 Vojvodina, 255 Vranje, 182 Vučić, Aleksandar, 267, 268

W Wallis, H., 200 Washington, DC, 42, 46, 201, 205, 236, 261; CEIP headquarters in, 49, 73, 120 Weibel, Ernst, 152 White, Andrew Dikson, 123 Wilson, Woodrow, 28, 41–42, 45, 47, 49, 50–54, 59 Winn, Joseph W., 69 Wisconsin, 48 Woodbridge, Frederick J. E., 101, 103 Woolf, Leonard, 115 Y Yeniköy, 212 Yorkshire, 158 Yugoslavia, Socialist Federal Republic of (SFRJ), 1, 164–65, 236, 238–39, 251–56, 257, 260, 264, 265n, 267, 269, 279, 287, 297 Z Zumbansen, Peer, 64