The Routledge Handbook of Balkan and Southeast European History 1138613088, 9781138613089

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of contents
Maps
Contributors
Preface
Introductory overview: Premodern borders and modern controversies
References
Part I The early modern Balkans as imperial borderlands
Overview: The Balkans divided between three empires
1 Ottoman Albania and Kosovo, Albanians and Serbs, sixteenth–eighteenth centuries
Contesting the Ottoman conquest
The formal and informal power structure
Legal plurality
Migrations
Religion
Albanian Sunni Muslims as a pillar of Ottoman rule
Selected Readings
2 The Venetian-Ottoman borderland in Dalmatia
Ottoman attacks
Fortifying borderlands
Religious interactions
Cross-border trade
Wars and Venice’s victory
Selected Readings
3 The Phanariot regime in the Romanian Principalities, 1711/1716–1821
The Phanariot regime in power
From Greek origins and Byzantine influence to the Phanariots
Challenging the Pharariot regime
Selected Readings
4 Ottoman Bosnia and the Bosnian Muslims
Introduction
Urbanization and the vakufs
Population and Islamization
The land regime
Military borderland
The ayans
Tanzimat
Ottoman modernity
Peasant uprisings and the end of Ottoman rule
Selected Readings
Part II Nation- and state-building, 1815–1914
Overview: Nations and states between changing borders
5 Nineteenth-century national identities in the Balkans: Evolution and contention
European circulations of ideas
Nationhood and visions of progress
Articulations of the nation
Selected Readings
6 Bulgaria from liberation to independence, 1878–1908
The establishment of a modern Bulgarian state
Unification and disenchantment with Russia
Prince Ferdinand’s personal rule and partizanstvo
The national agenda
Selected Readings
7 Croatian political diversity and national development in the nineteenth century
Civil Croatia and Slavonia
Dalmatia and the Military Border
From neo-absolutism to new national ideas
Politics under dualism
Selected Readings
8 Montenegro as an independent state, 1878–1912
The Treaties of San Stefano and Berlin (1878) and state building
Modernization: administration, military, infrastructure, education, culture
International relations, neighbor states, and the Great Powers
Political life
The Balkan Wars, 1912–1913
Selected Readings
9 The agrarian question in Romania, 1744–1921
Landlord-peasant relations
Revolt and reform
Selected Readings
10 Slovene clerical politics, cooperatives and the language question to 1914
From the April Manifesto to the Ausgleich, 1848–1867
Slovene education and culture under Taafe’s “Iron Ring” government, 1878–1893
Political parties, the cooperatives, and the National Movement
Selected Readings
11 Serbia’s promise and problems, 1903–1914
Laws and institutions
The golden age of Serbian democracy?
Ideals and realities in everyday political life
Political parties
The one-party state
Elections
Functioning of institutions
Relations between the majority and the minority
A deep state
The impact of foreign affairs on domestic policy
Conclusion
Selected Readings
12 The Macedonian Question: Asked and answered, 1878–1913
Great Power background: Russian aspirations and Ottoman decline
Neighboring states and religious identities
Alternative futures and the spread of violence
Selected Readings
13 Austria-Hungary and the Balkans
Consequences of the Berlin Congress
Balkan political relations
Economic and cultural relations
Selected Readings
14 Bosnia-Herzegovina under Austria-Hungary: From occupation to assassination, 1878–1914
Occupation
The Kállay era: bureaucratic absolutism
Movements for autonomy
Easing the state’s restrictions
Annexation and a constitution
The Bosnian assembly
Student activists and the road to imperial ruin
Selected Readings
Part III The Balkan Wars and the First World War, 1912–1923
Overview: Armies and occupations, peace settlements and forced migrations
15 Bulgaria’s wars and defeats, 1912–1919
The Balkan Alliance and the First Balkan War
Failed peace and the Second Balkan War
The First World War
Selected Readings
16 After empire: The First World War and the question of Albanian independence
National associations in the late Ottoman Empire
National associations in wartime
Postwar challenges at the Peace Conference
Selected Readings
17 Greece from national expansion to schism and catastrophe, 1912–1922
The two Balkan Wars, 1912 and 1913
The First World War from the National Schism to the Salonica Front
The Anatolian campaign and catastrophe, 1919–1922
Selected Readings
18 Habsburg South Slavs in peace and war, 1912–1918
Yugoslav nationalism and its rivals before and during the Balkan Wars
1914–1915: the World War begins
1915–1918: toward the end
Selected Readings
19 From Salonica to Belgrade: The emergence of Yugoslavia, 1917–1921
The Salonica Front
South Slav politics
The final weeks of the war
Unification
Interim institutions
Paris Peace Conference
Selected Reading
Part IV Southeastern European states and national politics, 1922–1939
Overview: The interwar decades from parliamentary struggles and international pressures to authoritarian regimes
20 Interwar ideas and images of nation, class, and gender
Defining the nation: integrating and othering
Nation in space and time
Nation and state
Nations and nationalism
Nation and religion
Class identities: parallel realities and the search for coherence
Peasantry
Urban elites
Intelligentsia
Workers
Images of gender between tradition and modernism
Selected Readings
21 Interwar women’s movements from the Little Entente to nationalism
Regional cooperation and the international community
Entangled nationalisms: Romania and Yugoslavia
Nationalism and the limits of women’s transnationalism: Bulgaria
Greek reluctance and dissolution
Conclusion
Selected Readings
22 Interwar Greece: Its generals, a republic, and the monarchy
The Second Hellenic Republic and the continuing National Schism
Hellenization and the new lands
Metaxas and 4th of August regime
Conclusion
Selected Readings
23 Bulgaria from Stamboliiski and IMRO to Tsar Boris, 1919–1943
Stamboliiski rules
The overthrow of Stamboliiski and authoritarian rule after 1923
From the 1934 coup d’état to royal dictatorship and World War II
Selected Readings
24 The Legion “Archangel Michael” in Romania, 1927–1941
The Legion’s ideology
The Legion’s political trajectory
Social structure and membership
The Legion in power
Selected Readings
25 Albania between Fan Noli, King Zog, and Italian hegemony
Setting the scene in the early 1920s
The Noli-Zogu confrontation
Zogu in the ascendant
Selected Readings
26 The Croat Peasant Party: From Stjepan Radic to Vladko Macek
The Radic brothers and the origins of the HSS
Radic and the HSS, 1918–1928
Radic’s murder
Macek and the late Yugoslav period, 1929–1941
Selected Readings
27 Serbia, Kosovo, and Macedonia from revolt and resettlement to repression
The struggle to integrate “South Serbia” (1918–1929)
Political and economic instability in the 1920s
Culture and education
The Banovina period (1929–1941)
Selected Readings
28 Yugoslav identity in the interwar period
Antecedents
The turbulent first decade
The royal dictatorship
From dictatorship to war
Selected Readings
Part V Economies and societies, 1878–1939
Overview: Challenges of change. Economic and population growth, social and cultural transformations up to World War II
29 Demographic growth: Patterns and problems, 1878–1939
Introduction
Population figures and structure
Population movements
Selected Readings
30 Financing economic growth and facing foreign debt, 1878–1939
Founding financial systems and state loans, 1878–1914
The costs of war and interwar financial debt, 1914–1929
Financial retreat and industrial recovery in the 1930s
Conclusion
Selected Readings
31 Modern manufacture, state support, and foreign investment: Comparing Balkan textile industries, 1878–1939
1878–1914: from proto-industrial to modern manufacture
1918–1939: state support and joint-stock incorporation
Conclusion
Selected Readings
32 Neighbors into foreigners: the Greeks in Bulgaria, 1878–1941
The evolution of Bulgarian national ideology
Who is a Greek? National ambiguities and conflicting identities
Growing pressures from an emerging nation state, 1878–1900
Hardening national lines through insurgency and war, 1900–1918
From “voluntary emigration” to an “actual exchange,” 1919–1925
Erasing ambiguities in the 1920s and 1930s
Selected Readings
33 Southeastern European overseas migration and return from the late nineteenth century until the 1930s
The rise in pre-1914 emigration
Return migration and decline of emigration in the interwar period
Selected Readings
34 Eugenics and race in Southeastern Europe
Selected Readings
35 Sofia and Plovdiv between the world wars
Re-building a capital city
Plovdiv: the limits of de-Ottomanization
Postwar politics and urban transformations
Ambiguous urbanities
Trade, industry, proletarianization
Selected Readings
Part VI From the Second World War to the establishment of the postwar regimes, 1939–1949
Overview: Collaboration and occupation, resistance and civil war, regime change
36 The Albanian Communist Party from prewar origins to wartime resistance and power
The new diaspora
The Comintern compromise
The Second World War and the Communist rise to power
Selected Readings
37 Romania in the Second World War
Reorientation to Berlin, 1939–1940
Territorial losses of 1940 and the new regime
Romania’s parallel war against the Soviet Union
The persecution of Jews and Roma
From German economic “cooperation” to switching sides
Soviet occupation and establishment of the Communist regime
Selected Readings
38 The Ustaša regime and the politics of terror in the independent state of Croatia, 1941–1945
The origins of the Ustaša movement
The new state, racial laws and the “Revolution of Blood”
Economic destruction, mass deportations and the second wave of “cleansing”
Forced assimilation, institutionalized mass killing and the “Revolution of the Soul”
Return to the “Revolution of Blood”
Selected Readings
39 Partisans and Chetniks in occupied Yugoslavia
Origins of resistance
Partisan and civil war
Allied support and Partisan victory
Selected Readings
40 An oppressive liberation: Yugoslavia 1944–1948
The Partisans’ take-over of power
Postwar repressions
Consolidating Communist rule
From cooperation with the Soviets to the Tito-Stalin split
Selected Readings
41 Greece from occupation and resistance to civil war, 1941–1949
The origins of the civil war
The battle of Athens and British intervention
Civil war and American intervention
Selected Readings
Part VII Cold War division and European transition, 1949–1989
Overview: Communist regimes and the Greek exception
42 The collectivization of agriculture in Southeastern Europe
State of research
Preconditions
The collectivization process from 1949 onward
Impact and repercussions to 1989
Conclusion
Selected Readings
43 The Soviet factor in Bulgaria’s foreign policy
Historical antecedents
The Soviets and the Communist takeover
1944–1947: Soviet occupation
1948–1956: the Stalin period
1956–1985: “the most loyal ally”
1985–1991: the twilight of Bulgarian-Soviet relations
Selected Readings
44 Enver Hoxha’s Albania: Yugoslav, Soviet, and Chinese relations and ruptures
Identity crisis: 1944–1948
Premature Stalinists: 1949–1960
The uses of China: 1960–1976
The price of self-reliance: 1976–1990
Selected Readings
45 Ceau.escu’s National Communism as National Stalinism
Introduction: conceptual clarifications
The Romanian cult of personality
Short-lived liberalization, 1965–1971
Re-Stalinization, 1971–1979
The parallel cults
Ceausescu’s Stalinism and his last decade
Conclusion
Selected Readings
46 Yugoslavia’s third way: the rise and fall of self-management
The Tito-Stalin split and the rise of self-management
Self-management, non-alignment, and the challenge to the Soviet Bloc
Self-management, market reforms, and shocks from the global economy
The decline and fall of self-managed Yugoslavia
Selected Readings
47 Greece’s Cold War: Exceptionalism in Southeastern Europe
The formation of an anti-communist state
Economic growth
First challenges to the illiberal status quo
Military rule, 1967–1974
Transition to democracy and political reconciliation
Greece at the end of the Cold War
Conclusion
Selected Readings
48 Yugoslavia’s political endgame: Serbia and Slovenia in the 1980s
The crisis of the 1980s and the Serbian-Slovenian debate
Enter the “critical intelligentsias,” 1985–1988
The end of the road: “national homogenization,” 1988–1989
Selected Readings
49 Changes of social structure from the late 1940s to the 1980s
Demographic change
Industrialization, rural exodus, and urbanization
Gender relations
Selected Readings
50 Financing industrialization, 1949–1989: From foreign aid to foreign debt
Financing industry from foreign aid to foreign loans, 1949–1965
Financing industry from domestic bank credit, 1965–1979
Financing foreign debt, 1979–1989
Conclusion
Selected Readings
Part VIII Epilogue
Epilogue: Southeastern Europe after the Cold War
51 Yugoslavia’s wars of succession 1991–1999
The war in Croatia
Bosnia-Herzegovina
Kosovo
Selected Readings
52 From foreign intervention to European integration: Southeastern Europe since 1989
European integration
Historical legacies of communism and the 1990s
Economic woes
Appraising international intervention
Selected Readings
Index

Citation preview

i

T H E R O U T L E D G E HA N D B O O K O F BA L K A N A N D S O U T H E A S T E U R O P E A N H I S T O RY

Disentangling a controversial history of turmoil and progress, this Handbook provides essential guidance through the complex past of a region that was previously known as the Balkans but is now better known as Southeastern Europe. It gathers 47 international scholars and researchers from the region. They stand back from the premodern claims and recent controversies stirred by the wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Parts I and II explore shifting early modern divisions among three empires to the national movements and independent states that intruded with Great Power intervention on Ottoman and Habsburg territory in the nineteenth century. Part III traces a full decade of war centered on the First World War, with forced migrations rivalling the great loss of life. Part IV addresses the interwar promise and the later authoritarian politics of five newly independent states: Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Separate attention is paid in Part V to the spread of European economic and social features that had begun in the nineteenth century. The Second World War again cost the region dearly in death and destruction and, as noted in Part VI, in interethnic violence. A  final set of chapters in Part VII examines postwar and Cold War experiences that varied among the four Communist regimes as well as for non-​Communist Greece. Lastly, a brief Epilogue takes the narrative past 1989 into the uncertainties that persist in Yugoslavia’s successor states and its neighbors. Providing fresh analysis from recent scholarship, the brief and accessible chapters of the Handbook address the general reader as well as students and scholars. For further study, each chapter includes a short list of selected readings. John R.  Lampe is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park and Global Europe Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC. He is the author of a dozen books, including two editions of both Balkans into Southeastern Europe and Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country. Ulf Brunnbauer is Director of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg. He is also Professor of Southeast and East European History at the University of Regensburg. He is author and (co-)editor of more than twenty books, mostly on the history of Southeastern Europe since the nineteenth century, among them Globalizing Southeastern Europe: Emigrants, America and the State since the Late 19th Century (2016).

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THE ROUTLEDGE HA N D B O O K O F BA L K A N AND SOUTHEAST E U R O P E A N H I S T O RY

Edited by John R. Lampe and Ulf Brunnbauer

iv

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, John R. Lampe and Ulf Brunnbauer; individual chapters, the contributors The right of John R. Lampe and Ulf Brunnbauer to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Lampe, John R., editor, author. | Brunnbauer, Ulf, 1970– editor, author. Title: The Routledge handbook of Balkan and Southeast European history / edited by John R. Lampe and Ulf Brunnbauer. Description: First edition. | New York: Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020023119 (print) | LCCN 2020023120 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138613089 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429464799 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Balkan Peninsula–History. Classification: LCC DR36 .R69 2021 (print) | LCC DR36 (ebook) | DDC 949.6–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023119 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023120 ISBN: 978-1-138-61308-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-46479-9 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

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CONTENTS

List of maps  List of contributors  Preface 

xi xii xv

Introductory overview: premodern borders and modern controversies  John R. Lampe and Ulf Brunnbauer PART I

The early modern Balkans as imperial borderlands  Overview: the Balkans divided between three empires  John R. Lampe 1 Ottoman Albania and Kosovo, Albanians and Serbs, sixteenth–​eighteenth centuries  Oliver Jens Schmitt 2 The Venetian-​Ottoman borderland in Dalmatia  Josip Vrandečić

1

7 9

18 26

3 The Phanariot regime in the Romanian Principalities, 1711/​1716–​1821  35 Constantin Iordachi 4 Ottoman Bosnia and the Bosnian Muslims  Leyla Amzi-​Erdogdular

v

42

vi

Contents PART II

Nation-​ and state-​building, 1815–​1914  Overview: nations and states between changing borders and the Great Powers in the “long” nineteenth century  John R. Lampe 5 Nineteenth-​century national identities in the Balkans: evolution and contention  Diana Mishkova 6 Bulgaria from liberation to independence, 1878–​1908  Roumen Daskalov 7 Croatian political diversity and national development in the nineteenth century  Iskra Iveljić

51 53

63 72

80

8 Montenegro as an independent state, 1878–​1912  John D. Treadway

89

9 The agrarian question in Romania, 1744–​1921  Constantin Iordachi

98

10 Slovene clerical politics, cooperatives and the language question to 1914  Gregor Kranjc

104

11 Serbia’s promise and problems, 1903–​1914  Dubravka Stojanović

113

12 The Macedonian question: asked and answered, 1878–​1913  Keith Brown

122

13 Austria-​Hungary and the Balkans  Roumiana Preshlenova

128

14 Bosnia-​Herzegovina under Austria-​Hungary: from occupation to assassination, 1878–​1914  Robert J. Donia

vi

135

vii

Contents PART III

The Balkan Wars and the First World War, 1912–​1923 

145

Overview: armies and occupations, peace settlements and forced migrations  John R. Lampe

147

15 Bulgaria’s wars and defeats, 1912–1919  Richard Hall

155

16 After empire: the First World War and the question of Albanian independence  Lejnar Mitrojorgji

163

17 Greece from national expansion to schism and catastrophe, 1912–​1922  Stefan Papaioannou

172

18 Habsburg South Slavs in peace and war, 1912–​1918  Rok Stergar 19 From Salonica to Belgrade: the emergence of Yugoslavia, 1917–​1921  Dejan Djokić PART IV

Southeastern European states and national politics, 1922–​1939  Overview: the interwar decades from parliamentary struggles and international pressures to authoritarian regimes  John R. Lampe

181

191

201 203

20 Interwar ideas and images of nation, class, and gender  Balázs Trencsényi

213

21 Interwar women’s movements from the Little Entente to nationalism  Marijana Kardum

223

22 Interwar Greece: its generals, a republic, and the monarchy  Katerina Lagos

231

23 Bulgaria from Stamboliiski and IMRO to Tsar Boris, 1919–​1943  Roumen Daskalov

240

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Contents

24 The legion “Archangel Michael” in Romania, 1927–​1941  Constantin Iordachi

248

25 Albania between Fan Noli, King Zog, and Italian hegemony  Robert C. Austin

257

26 The Croat Peasant Party: from Stjepan Radić to Vladko Maček  Mark Biondich

263

27 Serbia, Kosovo, and Macedonia from revolt and resettlement to repression  272 Vladan Jovanović 28 Yugoslav identity in the interwar period  Christian Axboe Nielsen PART V

Economies and societies, 1878–​1939  Overview: challenges of change. Economic and population growth, social and cultural transformations up to World War II  Ulf Brunnbauer

280

289 291

29 Demographic growth: patterns and problems, 1878–​1939  Siegfried Gruber

301

30 Financing economic growth and facing foreign debt, 1878–​1939  John R. Lampe

308

31 Modern manufacture, state support, and foreign investment: comparing Balkan textile industries, 1878–​1939  Jelena Rafajlović and John R. Lampe 32 Neighbors into foreigners: the Greeks in Bulgaria, 1878–​1941  Theodora Dragostinova 33 Southeastern European overseas migration and return from the late nineteenth century until the 1930s  Ulf Brunnbauer

318 325

334

34 Eugenics and race in Southeastern Europe  Marius Turda

342

35 Sofia and Plovdiv between the world wars  Mary Neuburger

346

viii

ix

Contents PART VI

From the Second World War to the establishment of the postwar regimes, 1939–​1949  Overview: collaboration and occupation, resistance and civil war, regime change  John R. Lampe 36 The Albanian Communist Party from prewar origins to wartime resistance and power  Lejnar Mitrojorgji 37 Romania in the Second World War  Vladimir Solonari 38 The Ustaša regime and the politics of terror in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–​1945  Rory Yeomans

355 357

365 373

383

39 Partisans and Chetniks in occupied Yugoslavia  Heather Williams

392

40 An oppressive liberation: Yugoslavia 1944–​1948  Zoran Janjetović

401

41 Greece from occupation and resistance to civil war, 1941–​1949  Ioannis D. Stefanidis

409

PART VII

Cold War division and European transition, 1949–​1989  Overview: communist regimes and the Greek exception  John R. Lampe and Ulf Brunnbauer

419 421

42 The collectivization of agriculture in Southeastern Europe  Arnd Bauerkämper

431

43 The Soviet factor in Bulgaria’s foreign policy  Mihail Gruev

439

44 Enver Hoxha’s Albania: Yugoslav, Soviet, and Chinese relations and ruptures  Elidor Mëhilli ix

447

x

Contents

45 Ceauşescu’s National Communism as National Stalinism  Vladimir Tismaneanu and Marius Stan

456

46 Yugoslavia’s third way: the rise and fall of self-​management  Vladimir Unkovski-​Korica

463

47 Greece’s Cold War: exceptionalism in Southeastern Europe  Othon Anastasakis

472

48 Yugoslavia’s political endgame: Serbia and Slovenia in the 1980s  Jasna Dragović-​Soso

481

49 Changes of social structure from the late 1940s to the 1980s  Ulf Brunnbauer

490

50 Financing industrialization, 1949–​1989: from foreign aid to foreign debt  498 John R. Lampe PART VIII

Epilogue 

507

Epilogue: Southeastern Europe after the Cold War  John R. Lampe and Ulf Brunnbauer 51 Yugoslavia’s wars of succession 1991–​1999  Marie-​Janine  Calic

509 514

52 From foreign intervention to European integration: Southeastern Europe since 1989  Klaus Buchenau

521

Index 

529

x

xi

MAPS

0.1 0.2 4.1 14.1 14.2 19.1 41.1 50.1

The Balkans, ca. 1475  10 Balkan imperial borders, 1682–​1739  13 Borders after the Treaty of San Stefano and the Berlin Congress, 1878  58 Borders before the Balkan Wars, 1912  149 Borders after the Balkan Wars, 1913  150 Southeastern Europe after World War I, 1918–​1923  205 Southeastern Europe after World War II, 1945–​1947  422 Southeastern Europe today  510

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CONTRIBUTORS

Anastasakis, Othon. Director of Southeast European Studies at Oxford (SEESOX) and Senior Research Fellow, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford Amzi-​Erdogdular, Leyla. Assistant Professor of History, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Newark Austin, Robert C. Professor, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto Bauerkämper, Arnd. Professor of Modern History, Friedrich-​ Meinecke-​ Institut, Free University of Berlin Biondich, Mark. Adjunct Research Professor, Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa Brown, Keith. Professor of Politics and Global Studies and Director of the Melikian Center: Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe Brunnbauer, Ulf. Professor of Southeast and East European History, University of Regensburg, and Director, Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg Buchenau, Klaus. Professor of Southeast and East European History, University of Regensburg Calic, Marie-​Janine. Professor Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität

of

Eastern

and

Southeastern

European

Daskalov, Roumen. Professor of Modern History, New Bulgarian University, Sofia Djokić, Dejan. Professor of Modern History, Goldsmiths, University of London

xii

History,

xiii

List of contributors

Donia, Robert J. Research Associate, Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Dragostinova, Theodora. Associate Professor of History, Ohio State University, Columbus Dragović-​Soso, Jasna. Professor of International Politics and History, Goldsmiths, University of London Gruber, Siegfried. Researcher, Section of Southeast European History and Anthropology, University of Graz Gruev, Mihail. Director of the Bulgarian State Archives, Sofia Hall, Richard. Professor of History, Georgia Southwestern State University, Americus Iordachi, Constantin. Professor of History, Central European University,Vienna and Budapest Iveljić, Iskra. Professor of History, Philosophical Faculty, University of Zagreb Janjetović, Zoran. Principal Research Fellow, Institute for Recent History of Serbia, Belgrade Jovanović,Vladan. Senior Research Associate, Institute for Recent History of Serbia, Belgrade Kardum, Marijana.Teaching and Research Assistant, Faculty of Teacher Education, University of Zagreb Kranjc, Gregor. Associate Professor of History, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario Lagos, Katerina. Professor of History and Director of Hellenic Studies, California State University, Sacramento Lampe, John R. Professor Emeritus of History, University of Maryland, College Park, and Global Europe Fellow, Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies, Washington, DC Mëhilli, Elidor. Associate Professor, History Department, Hunter College, New York City Mishkova, Diana. Professor of History and Director, Center for Advanced Study, Sofia Mitrojorgji, Lejnar. PhD in Balkan and European History, Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park Neuburger, Mary. Professor of History and Director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of Texas, Austin Nielsen, Christian Axboe. Associate Professor, School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University Papaioannou, Stefan. Associate Professor, History Department, Framingham State University, Framingham, Massachusetts xiii

xiv

List of contributors

Preshlenova, Roumiana. Professor of History and Director, Institute of Balkan Studies and Centre for Thracology, Bulgarian Academy of Science, Sofia Rafajlović, Jelena. Assistant Professor of History, Philosophical Faculty, University of Belgrade Schmitt, Oliver Jens. Professor of Southeast European History, University of Vienna, and President, Division of Humanities and the Social Sciences,Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna Solonari, Vladimir. Associate Professor of History, University of Central Florida, Orlando Stan, Marius. Research Director, Hannah Arendt Center, University of Bucharest Stefanidis, Ioannis D. Professor of Diplomatic History, School of Law, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Stergar, Rok. Associate Professor of Modern History, University of Ljubljana Stojanović, Dubravka. Professor of History, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade Tismaneanu, Vladimir. Professor of Government and Politics, University of Maryland, College Park Treadway, John D. Professor Emeritus of History and International Studies, University of Richmond, Virginia Trencsényi, Balázs. Professor of History, Central European University,Vienna and Budapest Turda, Marius. Professor of History, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford Unkovski-​Korica, Vladimir. Lecturer in Central and East European Studies, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow Vrandečić, Josip. Professor of History, Philosophical Faculty, University of Split Williams, Heather. Independent Scholar, University of Southampton Yeomans, Rory. Independent Scholar, School of History, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

xiv

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PREFACE John R. Lampe and Ulf Brunnbauer

Since 1989, Southeastern Europe has frequently been in the news but identified still as the Balkans. The wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, centered in Bosnia, revived references to the assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 that started the First World War. The subsequent struggles of the successor states and Albania, dubbed the Western Balkans, the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the European Union called premature, and the debt crisis in Greece –​all have helped to preserve the pejorative Balkan reputation as a region separate from Europe, backward as well as bloody. Meanwhile, the region continues to aspire to European institutions and to receive recognition for its long-​standing European characteristics and connections. Regional resentment of past European oversight also continues, fed by the recent NATO and IMF interventions but also by historical grievances against their near neighbors and their Great Power supporters. Populations in the region but also political elites have been repeatedly frustrated about the persisting gap in wealth and power between Southeastern Europe and the neighboring areas in the north and west. Bouts of popular dissatisfaction about the failure to close this gap help to explain why hardly any other part of Europe has witnessed such persistent emigration. This Handbook seeks to disentangle the region’s complex history of turmoil and progress before 1989, so often oversimplified to blame or praise one side or the other, foreign or domestic.These biases have served post-​1989 public policy and opinion to preserve an enduring stereotype of ethnic rivalry, recklessness, and economic stagnation. Regional controversies over ethnic origins and territorial claims cannot be ignored, although interethnic violence was almost entirely absent until the twentieth century. Neither the First nor the Second World War was started or wished for by Southeastern Europe, but their legacies of massive violence and population displacement can be felt until today. Nor was it the region’s choice to be one of the major flashpoints of Cold War confrontation, impeding regional cooperation and a more coherent economic development. By the nineteenth century, the region became not only the object of Great Power designs but also the recipient of institutional frameworks from a changing configuration of European standards, more often than not in disregard of local conditions and needs. This tension between domestic efforts to become a subject of history and foreign intervention in the region as an object for reform only increased after the two world wars and the Cold War. European history cannot be properly understood without incorporating the past of this part of the continent.

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The Handbook’s seven parts focus on the region’s history to 1989 and beyond towards its European integration, forward from the early modern division between three surrounding empires to state-​and nation-​building through the nineteenth century and into prolonged involvement in two world wars. In the two postwar periods that followed, roughly the same set of borders mark out a set of states now best described as Southeastern Europe. The editors’ Overviews review the chronology of changing borders and foreign intervention or oversight in which the region’s own history was obliged to take place. Our 52 chapters devote themselves to the region and its constituent parts in peace and war, to its political transformations, its religious dimensions and ideologies, and to its economic and social frameworks. From the long efforts and aspirations within the region, mixed with frustration and failure, emerge a longer and deeper set of European connections than the enduring stereotypes of Balkan conflict or foreign domination suggest. A Handbook of brief chapters by multiple authors has a major advantage over a single-​ authored volume. It would be a daunting challenge for a single scholar to write such a volume, going beyond the single country, people, or period on which he or she has typically concentrated. Most comprehensive regional histories have confined themselves lately to the twentieth century. Witness therefore the long shelf-​life since 1958 of L. S. Stavrianos The Balkans since 1453, still in print from New York University Press and long the only postwar volume covering this long period and the entire region. Only in 2019 does Marie-​Janine Calic reach back much further and then past 1989 to challenge the Balkan stereotype in her The Great Caldron, A History of Southeastern Europe (Harvard University Press). She and other authors assembled for this Handbook represent the wide range of recent scholarship from regional and German as well as Anglo-​American historians. Many of them draw on archival evidence unavailable before 1989. Their chapters here balance this new evidence with recent regional scholarship to provide accessible accounts of crucial events and issues, without tying them to the footnotes and references, many in local languages that our intended readers would not need or be able to consult. Each chapter, as well as the Overviews, adds instead a brief bibliography of relevant scholarship in English, German, or the local languages. Our handbook provides a complementary alternative to the much longer and less accessible handbook of Southeastern European history in process from the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg. To be published in German in seven volumes, each with hundreds of pages, its more detailed, massively annotated entries are intended for scholars and regional specialists. Both editors of the Routledge Handbook have been closely involved in the German project as well. Yet both of us are convinced that there is not only space but also an urgent need for a more accessible summary of modern scholarship on crucial issues of Southeastern European history. For students and teachers, public officials, and private interests, the experience of this region addresses fundamental problems of state-​building in a peripheral region of a world in which power is not equitably distributed. A massive work like such a Handbook would not be possible without the help of many. First, the editors want to thank Robert Langham, Dana Moss, and Tanushree Baijal, of Routledge, Kawiya Bakthavatchalam of Newgen and Rosemary Morlin, our copy-editor, for their continued support from the first discussion of the Handbook idea to its final production. We are also grateful to Edvin Pezo at the Leibniz Institute in Regensburg for sharing experience and information from his role as managing editor of the institute’s handbook, and to Johannes Nüßer for help with technicalities. The institute has also provided the maps that we can use in this volume. Further assistance in identifying contributors and farming the chapters came from Mark Cornwall at Southampton University, Vladan Jovanović at the Institute for the Recent History of Serbia in Belgrade, Vjeran Pavlaković at the Philosophical Faculty of Rijeka University, xvi

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Theofanis Stavrou at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and Balázs Trencsényi at the Central European University in Budapest. Last not least we thank our many authors who joined us on this ambitious endeavor, some of whom taking on last-​minute assignments by the editors. A note on the maps: Their place names are largely rendered as in English today, but some historic names are also provided, especially where a modern name only would be misleading. Readers should be aware of the fact that in many places, changing regimes and populations with different languages have used different names over time for the same place. On our regional maps, we cannot fully account for these important local sequences.

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INTRODUCTORY OVERVIEW Premodern borders and modern controversies John R. Lampe and Ulf Brunnbauer

Preceding the region’s early modern and modern history, dominated first by the Habsburg, Venetian, and Ottoman empires and then by native state-​buildings efforts, there was about half a millennium of overlapping forms of internal political rule and intrusion from outside. Native regimes emerged as the East Roman (Byzantine) Empire was losing much of its hold over Southeastern Europe.The region’s mixed populations evolved under a series of shifting religious and political borders from the tenth into the sixteenth centuries after a millennium of migration and moving settlement, Roman advance and retreat. Armed conflicts that were responsible for shifting borders rarely pitted the native regimes against each other and were never generated by conscious ethnic antagonism. The initial warfare came from internal disputes or confrontation with the hegemony of the Orthodox Byzantine Empire and then the Latin Hungarian kingdom. But none of these native polities survived the expansion of Ottoman, Habsburg, and Venetian political and religious authority from the late fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.Their three-​ sided Balkan Wars, as detailed by David Tracy (2016), centered on the Ottoman advance across Bosnia and its reduction of Croatian lands under Hungarian oversight. Aiding the advance was an Ottoman alliance, mainly for trade, with the Venetian enclaves on the Dalmatian coast. To follow the repeated and sometimes uncertain border changes before then required more than a dozen maps in the Palgrave Historical Atlas of the Balkans (2001).To follow the medieval political fortunes and the religious or linguistic intersections only through the fifteenth century took over 600 pages for the still standard study by John Fine (1987), including present-​day Greece but not Romania. The recently published first volume of the Handbuch zur Geschichte Südosteuropas (2019) takes more than 1,000 pages to cover the political history of the region from antiquity to the Ottoman conquest, its length indicating how complex and challenging it is to pin down the premodern history of the region. Now, the initial chapter in a new history of Southeastern Europe by German historian Marie-​Janine Calic (2019) does reach back authoritatively from before the Roman Empire through the subsequent centuries in which its legions advanced from the Adriatic through Illyrian and Thracian populations to the Dacians in modern Romania, where they left Latin as a base for the native language. The Romans left visible legacies not only manifest in the presence of speakers of Romance languages but also a road network that is visible until today. Yet, the Albanians and the Greeks can trace their languages to idioms spoken in the region even before it became part of the Roman Empire. Then came the South Slav migrations of the seventh 1

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century. In what was to become Bulgaria, their numbers soon absorbed the military advance from Turkic Central Asians at the same time. The same large Slav advance to the west had also absorbed the Serbs and Croats, both coming from small but separate corners in Central Asia as well. Large-​scale migration movements in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages combined with a lack of historical sources to turn questions of ethno-​genesis, as questionable as they might seem from a scholarly perspective, into topics of ferocious debate and of pseudo-​academic assertions. So have the origins and evolution of the spoken languages that stand as markers of national identities and justify modern territorial claims. Southeastern Europe is a classic case of how deeply nationalist disputes can be grounded in questions of origins and continuity, especially if they articulate conflicting claims for the same territory. Foreign as well as domestic scholars or politicians often cite these claims in choosing sides on historical or contemporary issues. And more generally, these controversies have helped to preserve for the general public and public opinion the image of the region as a contentious, eternally divided region, making “Balkanization” a synonym for any regional disorder. The lasting legacies of ancient and medieval political configurations are evident not only as subjects of contemporary debate and patriotic agitation. The division of the Roman Empire into western and eastern halves in 395, for example, largely preconfigured the border between Western and Eastern Christianity in Southeastern Europe. The ancient Greek political framework, divided by the time of Alexander the Great in Macedonia, had come together again under the Byzantine Empire. Its commercial network and the Patriarchate in Constantinople extended its authority up to the Danube. A series of wars with the emerging Bulgarian Khanate pushed it back and forth, as did conflicts with Venice on the Dalmatian coast. The final Byzantine split with the Roman Papacy in 1054 introduced religious division between Latin and Orthodox Christianity to the region. A separate Serbian kingdom was soon contesting Byzantine authority as a Croatian regime came to terms with Hungarian suzerainty. But they did not fight each other, facing instead the same Ottoman, Habsburg, and Venetian advance that also swept away the Byzantine, Bulgarian, and Hungarian regimes. Our Handbook starts by examining the subsequent, early modern period of imperial domination, which would give way to native efforts of nation and state-​building.We intend to move beyond the stereotype of the Balkans as a region permanently mired in conflict and interethnic strife. The chapters of the Handbook review an early modern and modern history that is more promising yet still problematic, a crossroads for foreign influence and intervention mixed with domestic ambitions and initiatives. Recent scholarship from the region has started to appraise the attraction to multi-​ethnic accommodation during periods of imperial reform and then through the nineteenth century to the separate nation-​state, inspired first by liberal nationalism in the wake of the Enlightenment and then turned to a corporatist, potentially organic national identity (see Mishkova 2009). Before reviewing the major questions left to these evolving and contentious national narratives, we must call attention to the continuing influence of the region’s distinctive physical geography. Its predominant uplands discouraged cultivation and scattered settlement. Mountains have also long impeded the establishment of efficient state control and the creation of denser networks of communication, as is evident even today.Their natural divisions created uncertainty over premodern borders, languages, and populations. Controversy followed as early modern division among imperial borderlands gave way to a modern set of nation-​states. Designation as the Balkans began not with the later stereotype for political division and unrest but with the Balkan Mountains that divide northern and southern Bulgaria as did other ranges the rest of Southeastern Europe.The Rhodopi Mountains separate Bulgaria and Greece, the longer Dinaric 2

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chain divided the Adriatic and Mediterranean coasts from fertile lowlands within the former Yugoslavia and down to Greece. The higher Carpathians separated the plains of Wallachia and Moldova from the mineral resources of Transylvania. These fertile lowlands of Romania’s two Principalities were however plagued by a low average rainfall, less than half the West European average, and repeated droughts. Elsewhere, the predominant mountains and their uplands did not allow arable cultivation of grain.Yet none of these ranges were high or continuous enough, like Switzerland’s, to prevent a foreign army from invading or to keep displaced populations from migrating. The region’s one major river, the Danube, ran west to east and emptied into the Black Sea, far from the Mediterranean let alone the Atlantic and its booming trans-​Atlantic trade. Potentially more fertile lowland areas, especially along the coasts, were often swampy and malaria-​infested. Through the premodern period, these limitations kept the total population small, under 5 million, and helped to prevent the emergence of any one native state to dominate these Balkans. The resulting divisions left a long list of conflicting claims, starting with the debate over the Ottoman conquest itself. The essays assembled in Oliver Jens Schmitt (2018) review the different interpretations and recent research. At least half a dozen other major questions about origins, borders, and belonging are still disputed. Who can reasonably claim an exclusive right on specific legacies? •

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The Macedonian question between Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and what is now recognized as North Macedonia: Two earlier Bulgarian empires and the thirteenth and fourteenth-​ century Serbian empires overlapped in Vardar Macedonia.The Bulgarian claim to introducing the Orthodox religion and the Bulgarian language as a basis for modern Macedonian dates from this period, followed by the Serbian claim from its fourteenth-​century expansion under Tsar Dušan with Skopje as its capital and Kosovo as the center of its own Orthodox clergy and churches. Greek claims point to the ancient Macedonians of Alexander the Great and the Byzantine tradition, while national Macedonian narratives construct the medieval Bulgarian polities on its territory as Macedonian states. The Greek questions over its population’s origins in Ancient Greece and territorial claims from Greek settlement originating in the Greek-​dominated Byzantine Empire: The claim to continuous demographic descent from Ancient Greece on the peninsula is well supported by Greek historians and archeologists against the denial by an early-​ nineteenth century German ethnographer. Open to more doubt were Greek claims in the late nineteenth century for much of Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean, called the Great Idea and based on the full reach of the Byzantine imperial dominion in the centuries preceding the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman advance in 1453. These claims ended with the Greek defeat in Anatolia by Kemalist Turkey in 1922. Recently the fourth century bc expansion under Alexander the Great, originating from Aegean Macedonia, is claimed for non-​Greek Macedonians. Official historiography of the post-​1989 successor state to the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia has incorporated Alexander the Great in their own national narrative. The Kosovo question for Serbia and Albania: It starts with the date of arrival and the later proportion of ethnic Albanians in what was in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the center of a Serbian kingdom and its Orthodox churches and monasteries. Claiming original state and religious rights to Kosovo, the Serbian argument maintains that Albanian migration into Kosovo began only after the Ottoman conquest and then grew after the Great Migration of Serbs following the 3

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Ottoman defeat of a Habsburg advance in 1683.The Albanian argument emphasizes settlement in the Balkans long before the Serbs and at least some Albanian presence in Kosovo before the Ottoman conquest. In the absence of state rights, the Albanian argument rests on religious evidence of their Christian conversion, particularly from the records of their Catholic clergy. The pace and origin of the Albanian increase under the Ottoman regime in the early modern period to an early twentieth century majority continues to be debated, in the absence of clear political borders before the Ottoman conquest and a clear ethnic census afterwards. The Bosnian questions around a set of disputed legacies: The territorial legacy of the separate Bosnian state of the fourteenth century reached into the Croatian territory of its twelfth-​century kingdom.The religious legacy was divided between Latin, Orthodox, and separate Bosnian churches.The ethnic legacy was controversially debated between Serbian and Croatian, later also Boniak historians arguing over the disputed timing of Orthodox Serbs assimilating the non-​Slav Vlachs of Herzegovina, originally separate upland clans relying on transhumant livestock herding for trading and their horses for banditry and arms for hire, pushed back before the Ottomans. A second ethnic debate concerns the forced versus voluntary conversion of a large, disputed number of the Christian Bosnian population to Islam under the Ottoman regime, joined by Bosniak historians exploring a pre-​Ottoman Muslim presence. The Croatian question: The rise of tenth-​to twelfth-​century Croatia to cover western Slavonia and Dalmatia, minus only several ports and islands held by Venice, also included Bosnia as a potential future claim. The ruling nobles’ agreement in 1104 to accept Hungarian suzerainty over all of Slavonia is also disputed, either as voluntary and preserving the right of a separate regime or a forced submission to Hungarian domination that ended Croatia’s standing as an independent state. The Transylvanian question between Romania and Hungary over its original settlement and governance: The Romanian claim rests on original settlement by the Romanized Dacians, predating the Hungarian migration from the tenth century, and then remaining as a majority of the population.The Hungarian claim rests on a better documented record of governance from its noble estates, joined by the earlier Hungarian related Szeklers and the German Saxon immigrants but with no representation for the Romanian majority, to form the three recognized “nations” of the Principality of Transylvania in the fourteenth century. This hegemony was briefly interrupted –​but long remembered –​by the Romanian Michael the Brave’s proclamation of union with the two Principalities of Wallachia and Moldova at the start of the sixteenth century.

These questions continue to provoke disagreement among professional historians, as shown in Brunnbauer’s survey of history writing (Brunnbauer 2004). Their salience not only points to the importance of history as a political argument but also the fundamental fact that only little historical documentation has survived from late antiquity and the Middle Ages, leaving space for imaginative “inventions of tradition.” Conflicting interpretations of events from the nineteenth and especially the violent first half of the twentieth century often rest on alleged earlier divisions. Historical writing and popular perceptions of history in Southeastern Europe have indeed created the image of an inherently antagonistic past, overlooking the many similarities in historical development and shared legacies devoid of initial ethnic conflict. Some of the most important scholarly initiatives after the wars in the former Yugoslavia attempted to overcome 4

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nationalistic bias in history writing. Under the guidance of Christina Koulouri (2005), for example, a set of new regional textbooks emerged to promote a balanced view on contested topics from Balkan history. Our Handbook looks past these debates about premodern origins to the region’s early modern and modern history, to the promise and problems that have shaped its ongoing transition from the Balkans into Southeastern Europe.

References Brunnbauer, Ulf, ed. (Re)Writing History. Historiography in Southeast Europe after Socialism. Münster, 2004. Calic, Marie-​Janine. The Great Caldron. A History of Southeastern Europe. Cambridge, Mass., 2019. Fine, John.V. A. The Early Medieval Balkans,The Late Medieval Balkans. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1984 and 1987. Hupchick, Dennis P. and Harold C. Cox. The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of the Balkans. New York, 2001. Koulouri, Christina, ed. Teaching Modern Southeast European History: Alternative Educational Materials, 4 vols. Thessaloniki, 2005. Mishkova, Diana, ed. We the People. Politics of National Peculiarity in Southeastern Europe. Budapest and New York, 2009. Mitthof, Fritz, Peter Schreiner, and Oliver Jens Schmitt, eds. Handbuch zur Geschichte Südosteuropas, vol. 1: Herrschaft und Politik in Südosteuropa von der römischen Antike bis 1300. Munich, 2019. Schmitt, Oliver Jens, ed. The Ottoman Conquest of the Balkans:  Interpretations and Research Debates. Vienna, 2018. Tracy, David. Balkan Wars: Habsburg Croatia, Ottoman Bosnia and Venetian Dalmatia, 1499–​1617. Lanham, Md., 2016.

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The early modern Balkans as imperial borderlands

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OVERVIEW The Balkans divided between three empires John R. Lampe

Imperial borders and warfare By the early seventeenth century, the Balkan Peninsula was divided between the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Venetian empires. Their imperial regimes had largely settled on the borders between them after a century of warfare with each other and an earlier struggle to overcome the native Greek, South Slav, and Albanian regimes, as noted in the introduction. The Muslim Ottoman regime served to separate the religious conflict between Rome’s Latin Church and the Greek-​led Byzantine empire which had spread Orthodox Christianity across the peninsula. Its mountain ranges and predominant uplands, while encouraging native division and discouraging trade, were not high or consistent enough to prevent the Ottoman Turkish conquest that began, as seen in Map 0.1, in the fourteenth century. Already controlling most of the peninsula, two Ottoman campaigns had reached the gates of Vienna in 1529 and 1683. Once a Habsburg army had driven the Ottoman forces back from historic Hungary, Transylvania, and Croatia-​Slavonia, the two empires signed a treaty at Karlowitz in 1699 and another one at Passarowitz in 1718. It fixed the border between them for the next century, changed only by the brief Habsburg incursion into Serbia and Kosovo (1718–​39). Population grew, and by 1780, as seen in Map 0.2, the two empires and Venice’s Dalmatian coast were at least connected by a considerable number of trade routes. Muslim converts had multiplied only in Albania, Bosnia, and mountain areas of Bulgaria. With full Ottoman credentials, they could rise in military and administrative positions but were also open to branding as Turks by the Serb and Croat population. Between the Balkans and the Black Sea, the two Romanian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldovia forged a brief union with Habsburg Transylvania at the start of the seventeenth century. Then the advancing Ottoman forces obliged the ruling Romanian Princes to pay increasing tribute. By the eighteenth century, a series of Phanariot (Orthodox Greek) overseers from Constantinople were allowed to bid for the position of Prince and keep enough of the tribute to profit from their bid. A less formal practice of tribute allowed more local autonomy in Montenegro. Most of the Istrian Peninsula, the Dalmatian coast, and the Adriatic islands remained underVenetian rule.The nearby upland peasantry were tied to Italian coastal merchants by share-​cropping.The one exception was the independent city-​state of Dubrovnik. Good trade relations across the Ottoman border helped to preserve the Venetian-​style regime there from

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Map 0.1  The Balkans, ca. 1475.

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Habsburg incursion, if only until the end of the century. By then, Habsburg incursions into Serbia had resumed with the warfare of 1788–​91, as discussed below. Also challenging the imperial regimes of the early modern period were a set of internal divisions. The oppressive land regimes and religious divisions were storing up problems that would weaken imperial defenses against local unrest and national aspirations in the nineteenth century. At the same time, the towns and the trading networks of the imperial borderlands were not large enough to promote the economic growth and interconnection that would help the Habsburg center to hold through the next century. Nor could they overcome the religious divisions that urban commercial life typically set aside around the region. This Overview compares land regimes, trade relations, and religious divisions in the three imperial borderlands and reviews the Russian and French interventions that upset them at the turn into the nineteenth century. The chapters below examine an important set of specific cases. Oliver Jens Schmitt follows the easier Ottoman conquest of Albania into Kosovo, and the harder relations between Serbs and Albanians created by Albanian conversion to Islam and religious antagonism with the Orthodox Serbs. Albanian advancement in the Ottoman military with the land rights noted below would seed a further ethnic antagonism. Josip Vrandečić finds more constructive trade relations and migration between Venice’s Dalmatian coastal holdings and the Ottoman borderlands into Herzegovina but details the repeated warfare and resulting military borders. Their forces also confronted each other with rival confessions, here Catholic and Muslim. Constantin Iordachi acknowledges the survival of the Romanian nobility and the Romanian Orthodox Church under the Greek Phanariot rulers sent from Constantinople to collect tribute from the two Romanian Principalities and examines the reputation for corruption and foreign imposition as the primary Phanariot legacies to Romanian historical memory. Although the Ottoman regime allowed the Serbian Orthodox Church to survive in Bosnia as in Kosovo, the Islamic conversion of large numbers placed Bosnian Muslims in positions of military and administrative advantage that would feed Orthodox resentment and their own ethnic identity as Serbs for Vlachs as well in the large Orthodox population. Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular traces the initially equitable landholding regime under Bosnian Muslims to its widespread abuse by the eighteenth century and the several failed efforts by the Ottoman regime to rein in the local autonomy of large landholders in the nineteenth century.

Land regimes Land regimes for the region’s overwhelmingly rural population subjected most of them to a variety of feudal or military obligations. Within the remaining Ottoman borders from Bosnia to Bulgaria and Greece, the original system for the arable lowlands had broken in two by the eighteenth century. Arable land had been state, i.e. the Sultan’s land, divided into districts (timar) administered without inheritance by designated cavalry officers (sipahi). Sometimes locally recruited, they were to collect only a limited share of peasant crops for wider army use and leave the rest to the local population. Less was left to this peasant majority and to the state under the two successor regimes of chiftlik and ayan which in some regions predominated by the eighteenth century. In the southern Balkans, cavalry and some infantry (janissary) officers became local warlords who took village lands as inheritable chiftlik, taking the largest part of peasant crops and some livestock for their own use or sale. Bosnian and Albanian Muslim as well as Turkish landholders took advantage of these chances. More broadly across the Ottoman Balkans and overlapping with chiftlik villages, were villages whose crops and livestock were raised by the communal 11

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zadruga of the extended local family. To recover its share for the state and the army from these villages, Ottoman authorities turned to communal non-​Muslim notables as tax farmers. These ayan enjoyed intermediate authority between Ottoman oversight and the local population; then some abused their positions and became warlords themselves. Most of them took a share of the collection for themselves. The lowland peasantry under the chiftlik regimes particularly in Macedonia fled to the ample but nonarable uplands.There they could at least raise livestock. Sheep and goats could be moved to avoid taxation and exploit the rocky, nonarable uplands, already the practice of Vlachs in of Herzegovina. Banned for Muslim consumption, pigs were especially favored in Serbia, where they might be traded across the border to Habsburg markets. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, over one third of the population converted to Islam in the decades following the Ottoman conquest. The Ottoman regime chose converted feudal landlords and village leaders instead of their cavalry officers to assure local and border security. These kapitanate appointments were also responsible for tax collection from the non-​Muslim peasant majority in their district. They used their independence from central Ottoman authority as higher beg or lower aga landholders to impose chiftlik share-​cropping on their peasantry by the eighteenth century. Supporting this transition to local authority was the original Ottoman practice of religious autonomy outside of the Muslim monopoly for positions of administrative and military authority. Orthodox or Jewish but not Catholic clergy could minister to their members and also acted as judges in cases not involving Muslims. This millet system was already in place to authorize local tax collection, sometimes by the clergy themselves, especially in southern Greece. In recaptured Croatia-​Slavonia, the Habsburg rural regime was also divided. In “Civil” (or “Banal,” after the name of the governor’s office, Ban) Croatia, the land regime was typically feudal, with noble landlords and dependent peasants. However, to populate a newly established military border against Ottoman Bosnia from the sixteenth century onward, Austrian authorities had attracted Croat and Serb peasants to small upland grants with tax exemptions and no feudal overlords in return for 25  years of service in Habsburg border regiments. Croats were drawn to escape the weekly days of service and other feudal obligations on the noble estates, German and Hungarian as well as Croatian. These covered the fertile lowlands of civil Croatia-​Slavonia. Serbs came from Bosnia to escape the share-​cropping regimes of Bosnian Muslim landholders as noted above. From 1762, the Habsburg military border was extended to Transylvania’s border with the Romanian Principalities. There some Romanian peasants also left the feudal obligations on their nobles’ estates for the Habsburg land grants and regimental service. The military advance to the border of Ottoman-​held Serbia in 1699 prompted the only Habsburg land grants not tied to military service. To keep the large fertile lowlands known ever since as the Vojvodina from being taken over by Hungarian estates, the Austrian authorities offered land with tax exemptions that soon attracted a mixed population of migrants. Catholic Germans came from war torn Swabia, Protestant Slovaks fleeing the counter-​reformation, and some Orthodox Serbs and Greeks from Ottoman territory.The major Serb migrations followed the Habsburg retreats in 1690 from Kosovo and in 1737–​8 from Serbia.

Towns and trade networks The eastern border between Ottoman and Habsburg territory at the Danube and Sava rivers, re-​established after 1739, allowed more trade and transit than the mountainous western border between Bosnia-​Herzegovina and Croatia-​Slavonia. Their southern Habsburg borders with Venice’s Dalmatian coast gave them access to the Adriatic and hence the Mediterranean. The 12

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Map 0.2  Balkan imperial borders, 1682–​1739.

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main ports reached from Trieste in the north down to Split and the city-​state of Dubrovnik. Here and in other trading and fishing towns on the coast and the islands, Italian merchants mixed with some Croats and a few Serbs, while the Croatian cultural renaissance of the sixteenth century proceeded ahead. Missing in Austria, after the suppression of Slovene Protestants in the sixteenth century, was Ottoman religious tolerance. Its Bosnian regime had allowed the Serb Orthodox Church its own Patriarchate in Peć that facilitated the consolidation of a conscious Serb identity in Bosnia. Towns were typically small, at most a few thousand people, but their trading networks helped Sarajevo grow to some 50,000. Its population included Orthodox Serbs as well as Turks and Bosnian Muslims. Sephardic Jews fleeing persecution in Spain and Portugal were welcomed there and especially in Salonica in northern Greece. The port’s population of 70,000 was the peninsula’s largest, linked to the Mediterranean as well as the considerable Ottoman trade networks reflected in Map 0.2. Salonica’s Jewish population outnumbered Turks, Albanians, and also Greeks. Elsewhere, through towns in Macedonia and into Bulgaria and Serbia, Greek merchants and Greek as a commercial language predominated. Yet urban numbers remained small and accounted for barely 10 percent of the population. For the Ottoman Balkans, the total population rebounded during the eighteenth century from less than 4 million to 5 million. Only Plovdiv and Belgrade approached half the populations of Sarajevo and Salonica. These towns all shared a mixed population, with Jews, Greeks, Armenians and South Slavs outnumbering Turks. They were centers for trade networks that grew along with the total population in the relatively greater security after 1700. Plovdiv’s textiles and tobacco could reach Salonica and Constantinople. Belgrade’s livestock could reach Novi Sad across the Ottoman-​Habsburg border. Similar access attracted the wares of Greek, Armenian, and Jewish traders in Bucharest, its population already 60,000 by 1700. The textile trade moved across to Braşov in Transylvania and on to Leipzig, prompting its continuing designation for a district in Bucharest.

Religious divisions The mixed populations and religions in these few urban centers and the trade networks that linked them were not connecting rural majorities with each other. Locally, the countryside was separated by upland terrain and low population density. More broadly they were separated by the religious affiliations by which they identified themselves. Conscious ethnic identity would come later. In the Habsburg lands, the Latin Catholic hierarchy in Vienna was strong enough to suppress the German Protestants that tried to establish themselves in Slovene lands in the late sixteenth century. They were not able, however, to prevent the Romanian majority in Hungarian Transylvania from adopting the Uniate accommodation with Orthodoxy. Called Greek Catholics, they would be a base for later demands for unification with Romania. In Croatia and Bosnia, and down into Venetian Dalmatia, the original Christian conversion here with a non-​Latin local alphabet with married priests struggled from the medieval through the early modern period to survive with its rural peasant base. On the landed estates, the Croatian nobility and their Hungarian and German counterparts, mainly in Slavonia, led the allegiance to the Latin church of Rome and Vienna. Down the Adriatic coast,Venetian dominance helped the Latin Catholic church incorporate Croats and some Albanians. Greek Orthodoxy had reached the Albanian coast as well, before the Christian rivalry helped to encourage conversion to Islam after the Ottoman conquest. In the Ottoman lands, there was sizeable conversion to Islam only in Bosnia-​Herzegovina and among the Albanians as well as in the Rhodopi mountain range in Bulgaria. For the large Orthodox population, their original tolerance relied on the privileged position given to the 14

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surviving Greek Patriarchate in Constantinople. In mainland Greece, its authority strengthened the position of the local clergy, and helped them to dominate local affairs through the millet rights also given to Jews and Armenians. The Patriarchate also accepted a Serbian Patriarch in Peć (in today’s Kosovo) to help consolidate religious control of Kosovo and Bosnia. Its clergy’s efforts became the base for a spreading Serbian identity in Bosnia, celebrating the medieval Serbian empire and its religious base in Kosovo. From 1766, the Greek Patriarchate in Constantinople denied South Slav Orthodox churches and their Patriarchates, including the Bulgarian one in Ohrid, their separate rights. The Serbian and Bulgarian clergy resisted the efforts to install Greeks and Greek liturgy in their place. A nexus for Orthodox reform had emerged in the mid-​eighteenth century from the Greek monasteries predominating on Mount Athos, a spit of land jutting into the Aegean Sea south of Salonica. An Athonite Academy promoted open study and discussion that included readings from the French Enlightenment. But by 1761 its leader had been forced to depart, and other Greek monks turned back to the Byzantine fundamentalism also endorsed by the Patriarchate. There were also rival Serb and Bulgarian monasteries on Mt. Athos. One Bulgarian monk defied the Patriarchate’s newly Greek hegemony just before it was imposed on the local South Slav churches. Father Paiisi’s history of pre-​Ottoman Bulgaria, its own imperial heritage and a language separate from Orthodoxy’s Old Church Slavonic, would serve as a base for the promotion of the Bulgarian national identity and resistance, especially against the Greek Patriarchate’s and its Ottoman alliance. By the early nineteenth century, Greek monks on Mount Athos would defy the Patriarchate and join the Greek revolt against the Ottoman regime. Only Montenegro was free from this sort of division, insulated by its ties to the Russian Orthodox Church since the sixteenth century. Overall, accommodating these religious divisions helped the Ottomans to maintain their political regime. The Habsburg efforts to impose a single religious regime under the Latin Catholic church were relaxed only in the Vojvodina and the Military Border. Retaken from the Ottomans in 1699 but seeking to prevent its reincorporation into Hungary,Vienna encouraged non-​Hungarian immigration, including Slovak Protestants and Orthodox Serbs and Vlachs as well as German Catholics.

From Russian and French intervention to Balkan resistance and state-​building Tsarist Russia fought a series of wars with the Ottoman Empire to reach the Black Sea and by 1783 the Crimea, entering the Romanian Principalities four times from 1711 forward. A peace treaty with the Porte in 1774 established the precedent for Russia as a primary representative of the Orthodox peoples across the Ottoman Balkans. Then the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars of French expansion stirred resistance in the Balkan peoples themselves. Napoleon’s seizure of the Ionian Islands from Venice in 1797 encouraged a Greek demand for a wider uprising in 1798. It went unheard, but the military experience of Serbian volunteers with Habsburg regiments fighting in the 1788–​91 war on the Ottoman border raised the capacity for a domestic uprising. Ottoman janissaries, first usurping the rights of tax collection from Serbian village ayan and then murdering a number of them, provoked the initial Serbian revolt in 1804. Intended at first to restore proper Ottoman authority, its leader Karadjordje and others with Habsburg military experience survived the initial Ottoman attempts to suppress them.Then in 1806, another Russo-​Ottoman war pulled Ottoman forces away. Even before the Russian occupation of the Romanian Principalities in 1810, a Russian mission to Karadjordje promised military support.Tsarist troops never came, but the war with the Ottomans continued 15

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until 1812 when Napoleon invaded Russia. The brutal Ottoman suppression of what would be honored in Serbia as the First Uprising led to a Second Uprising in 1814–​15. In the face of restored Russian influence following Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815, it ended only with the Ottoman concession of informal autonomy to a reduced Serbian territory. In the preceding years, Napoleon’s advance into Habsburg territory led to the brief but later celebrated French occupation extending from the Dalmatian coast through Istria to the future Slovenia. The initial Habsburg warfare with the French Directory had lost some of its western lowlands but won Venice’s Dalmatian holdings as compensation in 1797. By 1804, however, the retreating Habsburg Empire was forced to cede these holdings to French occupation. Expanded in 1806 to include Dubrovnik, they became known as the Illyrian Provinces. The French administration championed the ideals of national liberation from the French Revolution for the largely South Slav population. They were to live under the Napoleonic Code, promising equality under the law and an independent judiciary. A new Marshal arriving in 1810 promoted tax and land reform. He encouraged newspapers and opened schools using a single local language, here an early attempt to combine Croatian and Serbian. The residents were however expected to pay for these schools. In the former Yugoslavia, their joint experience was cited as a precedent for a single South Slav state. The more certain precedent was the framework of centralized administration for the Illyrian Provinces under a single Department responsible to a single set of Napoleonic ministries. Cut short by the return of Habsburg rule in 1813, this pattern of ministerial state-​building from a single capital city would prevail across the region for the rest of the century.

Early modern imperial legacies All three early modern empires left their marks on the modern history of Southeastern Europe. Recent historiography resists the temptation to dismiss them in favor of initial ethnic origins and early native polities. These national memories remain powerful and surely informed the independence movements of the nineteenth century. These movements took place, however, in a framework based on two imperial legacies. One legacy was each empire’s provision of enough space and security for population to grow and mix, for commerce and even culture to advance in peacetime, if not in wartime. The other legacy came from the borders fixed between them, sometimes encouraging trade and free movement but more often creating military borders, then changed by force of arms or forced civilian migration. After earlier losses from war and disease, population was increasing across all three imperial territories by the eighteenth century. Commercial travel had become more secure. Foreign trade benefited from Ottoman connections to the Middle East, the Habsburg base in Central Europe, and the Venetian network around the Mediterranean and into Western Europe. The mixed urban populations include Greeks, Jews, Armenians, and South Slavs. Sarajevo, Plovdiv, and Salonica were market centers on the Ottoman side, Split, Zadar, and the free city of Dubrovnik in Venetian Dalmatia, through Zagreb and Novi Sad as royal free cities, Trieste as the emerging Austrian free port, to Buda, Pest, and Vienna. A similar ethnic mixture assembled in the region’s largest city, Bucharest in Wallachia, one of the two Romanian Principalities under Ottoman oversight. The multi-​ethnic commerce, sometimes across the three borders, was the region’s most positive imperial legacy. None of the imperial borders were set as ethnic borders. The military borders between them and what were then seen as their religious distinctions left the most damaging legacy. The Ottoman and Habsburg military borders began assembling troops and fortifications in the sixteenth century but the border they shared with Bosnia-​Herzegovina hardened by the 16

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eighteenth century. Serbs and Croats were recruited to staff the Habsburg border but did not mix in villages or in marriage despite serving in the same units. Bosnian Muslims rather that Turks staffed the Ottoman border, leaving Orthodox Serbs and assimilating Vlachs powerless in the interior. The Venetian coastal border mobilized Croats and Vlachs from Dalmatia and Herzegovina against another Ottoman border, where its defenders were increasingly led by Bosnian Muslims. Add to the damage a series of forced migrations, making the later demarcation of ethnic borders more uncertain and open to question. These imperial borders thereby set the stage for conflict and rival claims from the nineteenth century forward that would reach into the two world wars and the wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution. They continue in some places to reverberate today.

Selected Readings Calic, Marie-​Janine. The Great Caldron, A history of Southeastern Europe. Cambridge, Mass., 2019. Faroqui, Saraya, Bruce McGowan, Donald Quataert, and Sevket Pamuk, eds. An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, Vol. II, 1600–​1914. Cambridge, 1994. Ingrao, Charles W. The Habsburg Monarchy, 1615–​1815, 2nd ed. Cambridge, 2002. Ivetic, Egidio, ed. Tolerance and intolerance on the triplex confinium. Approaching the other on the borderlands. Eastern Adriatic and beyond, 1500–​1800. Padua, 2007. Kaser, Karl. Freier Bauer und Soldat: Die Militärgrenze der agrarischen Gesellschaft an der kroatischen-​dalmatischen Militärgrenze, 1577–​1881. Vienna,  1997. Koller, Markus. Bosnien an der Schwelle zur Neuzeit. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Gewalt (1747–​1798). Munich, 2004. Mazower, Mark. The Balkans. A Short History. Cambridge, 2002. Sugar, Peter. Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule. Seattle, Wash., 1977. Stoianovich, Traian. Balkan Worlds.The First and Last Europe. Armonk, NY, 1994. Wolff, Larry. Venice and the Slavs.The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment. Stanford, 2002.

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1 OTTOMAN ALBANIA AND KOSOVO, ALBANIANS AND SERBS, SIXTEENTH–​ EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES Oliver Jens Schmitt

Contesting the Ottoman conquest The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans was a prolonged process characterized by considerable regional variation. There was stiff resistance over decades and ensuing demographic disruption in some regions, and a relatively less contested establishment of Ottoman rule where warfare had been more limited in space and time in other regions. Ottoman conquest in Albania started in ca. 1385 and ended in 1479 when Venice had to cede its territory, after a protracted war (1463–​79), around the fortress of Shkodra in northern Albania. The Republic of St Mark lost its last outposts in present-day Montenegro (Dulcigno/​Ulcinj, Antivari/​Bar) in 1570. Bulgaria (1393), Kosovo (1455), and Serbia (1459) had already been taken. With the Ottoman capture of Belgrade from the Hungarians in 1521, the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans was complete. Like in other regions occupied by the Ottomans, also in the Albanian context it would be misleading to describe the Ottomans as Muslim Turks from Asia Minor who invaded foreign territory. Some Ottoman military leaders and many of their troops belonged to the regional society which was split, as in other parts of the Balkans, in a pro-​Ottoman and an anti-​Ottoman camp. This cleavage ran through important Albanian noble families (Zenebish, Muzaki, Balsha, Dukagjin, Kastriota). Islamisation in the first phase of conquest and Ottoman domination (until the first half of the sixteenth century) was not a necessary condition for joining the Ottoman imperial system. Nevertheless, an Islamized local elite emerged, mainly in return for rights to occupy holdings in the conquered land under the timar system. Beside Islamized sipahi (cavalry), Ottoman regional troops consisted also of Orthodox auxiliary units. The bitterness of regional warfare can also be explained by old feuds that were carried out under the umbrella of Ottoman conquest. Warfare was centered in central and northern Albania. The Ottomans eventually oppressed regional resistance by adopting drastic measures that led in central Albania to the disappearance of over two thirds of the population after two major campaigns led by Sultan Mehmed II in person (1464/​67). Enslavement, mass flight, and massacres changed the social structure in central (Mati, Dibra) and northern Albania. 18

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The Catholic culture which had been dominant in northern Albania and its emerging humanist culture closely related to Adriatic models was almost destroyed. Catholic Albanian refugees settled in Venice where Albanian scholars such as Marinus Barletius published widely read historiographical works in Latin, while Orthodox Albanians from central Albania and from the Peloponnese  –​where they had immigrated at the beginning of the fifteenth century –​moved to Southern Italy (Kingdom of Naples). There, they formed a distinct community (Arbëresh) which exists until the present day. Southern Albania was less affected by Ottoman attacks, guerrilla warfare, and Ottoman counterattacks than other parts of the Southwestern Balkans. Ottoman conquest came to a preliminary end in 1417 when the coastal town of Vlora fell, and its results were stabilized in the mid-​1430s after a failed uprising of local Orthodox Albanian noblemen in southern and central Albania. Although the Ottoman advance destroyed parts of the regional demographic network, the area up to the river Shkumbin was soon organized as an Ottoman province (Sancak-​i Arvanid). One of the oldest Ottoman tax registers covers this area. Southern Albania did not join the resistance in central and northern Albania led by George Kastriota Scanderbeg (1405–​68). Macedonia served since the conquest of Skopje (1392) as a base of Ottoman marcher lords who pushed conquest northwards and westwards. Kosovo was eventually integrated into the Ottoman provincial system only in 1455 when Novo Brdo, the most important silver mine of the Balkans, was conquered. The short-​lived Serbian Empire of Stefan Dušan (tsar from 1346 to 1355) which comprised also Macedonia, northern and central Greece, did not survive the Ottoman onslaught. A  coalition of his successors had survived the indecisive but legendary battle of Kosovo Polje against Ottoman forces in 1389 but kept reduced territory and authority mainly in present-​day central Serbia with residences in Belgrade and Smederevo on the Danube until 1459. Sporadic local and regional resistance accompanied Ottoman rule until it ended in 1912. The motivation of Albanian rebels did not change considerably over time. They refused to pay taxes, they declined to accept imperial law instead of regional oral traditions (different regional versions of kanun), they demanded home rule, and they wished to keep out imperial representatives especially if they were foreigners. Christian and Muslim Albanians did not differ substantially in their refusal to accept centralized imperial rule. However, until the end of the eighteenth century, only Christian Albanians in mountainous coastal areas followed Scanderbeg’s example and sought wider support for armed opposition. Especially in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, they pursued ties with the Catholic powers, Habsburg Spain with its dependencies in Southern Italy, and Venice. Traditional historiography of the Balkan national states cultivated the idea of permanent national uprisings against Ottoman rule as a decisive proof for a proto-​national identity. New approaches to Ottoman studies downplaying resistance that contested the legitimacy of the Ottoman Empire have led some research to the other extreme. Recent interpretations avoid projecting back national interpretations but acknowledge resistance for a complex of local motives. The most important resistance was framed by the two Ottoman campaigns against the Habsburg monarchy and its allies in the Holy Roman Empire. Both had reached the gates of Vienna. After they were repulsed in 1529, the Ottomans still held most of Hungary and Croatia. Failing in their second advance on Vienna in 1683, they were then forced out of Hungary and Croatia in the Habsburg counteroffensive. In the long intervening years, uprisings against the Ottomans had been confined to remote and isolated mountain areas not close to the Adriatic Sea (Himara in southern Albania, parts of Epirus, Montenegro, Catholic tribes in northern Albania). Both in Orthodox and Catholic areas, local clergymen played an important 19

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role in maintaining communication channels with Southern Italy and Venice. In times of war, mainly around 1600, Balkan Christian adventurers and pretenders were roaming European courts advertising projects for bringing down Ottoman rule in the Balkans. Uprisings at the Adriatic periphery were never a serious threat to Ottoman rule since they remained confined to small areas. When however Habsburg troops conquered Belgrade in 1688, the key Ottoman fortress protecting access to the south, they quickly penetrated into the core of the Ottoman Balkans (present-​day Serbia and Kosovo). They burned Skopje in 1689. For the first time since 1448, Christian troops advanced into the central Balkans. This triggered extended uprisings of the Christian population, both Orthodox and Catholic, in an area from northern Bulgaria to Kosovo. Since Habsburg troops had overstretched their supply lines, the Ottomans could suppress the rebellions, and many rebels followed the retreating Habsburg troops. The Balkan Christians, mainly Orthodox Serb refugees but also Catholics, numbering some 40,000, were settled in the recently reconquered territory of the present-​day Vojvodina in northern Serbia. Remembered in Serbia as the Great Migration, a far larger number came from an initial account, since discounted, of 40,000 households. The exodus still left a substantial number of Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo, in subsequently disputed proportions, but weakened the Christian capacity for further resistance. Ottoman rule in the Balkan southwest was challenged more in the eighteenth century by regional Muslim warlords than by Orthodox insurgents.A renewed Ottoman offensive reclaimed northern Serbia in 1739. But the last two decades of the eighteenth century were a period of general weakness for the Ottoman Empire. Muslim regional warlords emerged in southern Albania/​ Epirus (Ali Pasha, died 1822, with his center in Ioannina), northern Albania (the Bushatlliu family, around Shkodra), and Kosovo (Begolli, Rrotullaj). Ali Pasha who had acquired his wealth by extorting merchants and pastoralists, was appointed by the Sultan governor of Thessaly in 1785 and occupied Ioannina in 1788. His power was based on a private army and an extended network of trading towns. Like other warlords he benefited from the tax farming to which the Ottoman regime had been forced to resort. Around 1800, Ali was probably the richest political leader in the Balkans owning some 900 estates and over 1 million cattle. Between 1820 and the early 1830s, the Ottoman Empire successfully suppressed these regional power centers and re-​established the authority of its imperial center, which however remained challenged by regional forces. In this respect, the Balkan southwest was not an exception. From Bosnia and the Danube provinces to the Arab parts of the Empire, regional warlords were challenging the authority of the Sultan at the turn of the century.

The formal and informal power structure The southwestern Balkans served several geostrategic functions in the Ottoman Empire. The area was a springboard to attack Southern Italy (in 1480–​1 an Ottoman expeditionary force conquered Otranto in Apulia); its ports (mainly Avlonya/​Vlora) controlled the entrance into the Adriatic Sea and threatened Catholic (Venetian, Spanish) seaways in this sensitive area; mainly in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, Muslim corsairs from the entire Mediterranean used the port of Ulcinj as base against Christian sea trade. On the other hand, the area protected the western periphery of the Empire against the Catholic powers in the Mediterranean. The major transport route linking the port of Durrës to Salonica and Constantinople, the Via Egnatia, remained under imperial control until 1912.The importance of the Balkan southwest is reflected in the early establishment of direct Ottoman rule.The provincial system of southern and central Albania was organized as Sancak Arvanid (1415/​17); in 1455 the Ottomans installed the Sancak of 20

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Vushtrri/​Vučitrn (or Prishtina/​Priština) in central Kosovo, and in the same year the Sancak Prizren in western Kosovo. Northern Albania and parts of Kosovo were organized as Sancak Shkodra. As in other parts of the Empire, imperial rule was concentered in the plains and in urban centers, while mountainous rural areas enjoyed a certain degree of self-​government. The mountainous part of present-​day Montenegro traditionally boasted of continuous home rule. Recent scholarship has however found evidence that around 1500 the Ottoman Empire penetrated even remote mountain areas in northern Albania and Montenegro and enforced, at least temporarily, direct imperial rule. However, costs of direct rule stood in no relation to potential benefits. This explains why, in the long run, the Ottomans preferred, as other Empires before them, indirect rule in such areas. Regional and tribal leaders (bayraktars) promised loyalty and provided troops or auxiliary warriors, and in exchange the Empire did not interfere in the internal affairs of mountain areas at the local and micro-​regional level. This limited self-​ government was confined to less accessible areas and did not affect imperial rule in the strategically and economically more important plains.

Legal plurality The Balkan southwest had lived since the Middle Ages in a system of coexisting legal traditions. In the Serbian kingdom/​empire/​despotate which had controlled the area between the late thirteenth and the fifteenth century, royal/​imperial law was codified in Stefan Dušan’s Zakonik. It co-​existed with urban statutes of Adriatic city communities, oral customary law in the mountains, and special privileges for foreign miners and merchants in mining towns. Ottoman rule did not radically alter this system of legal plurality. However, there were changes within this system. Urban autonomy in the Adriatic towns disappeared, and the northern Albanian coastal towns were disconnected from the Adriatic legal space with its codified law and city councils. The Ottomans introduced Islamic law (şeriat) and imperial law (kanun) and tolerated the legal self-​administration for the Orthodox communities according to ecclesiastical law. Oral customary law (örf) prevailed in remote mountain areas. Indeed, this customary regime was boosted by Ottoman conquest and the retreat of many lowlanders to the mountains of central and northern Albanian.The roots of the different regional oral legal traditions (kanun, not to be confused with the imperial law) are hard to ascertain, but they already existed by the initial period of Ottoman conquest. The best known, the kanun of Leka Dukagjin (ascribed to the head of a kin group in central Albania, d.  1481)  prevailed in northern Albania, while the kanun of Skanderbeg and the kanun of Labëria (a south Albanian microregion) were applied in central and southern Albania respectively –​all these traditions were codified only in the twentieth century. The oral legal tradition spread into the lowlands with the continuous migration from the mountains to the plains. Its application depended on the strength of imperial authorities which differed over times. Customary law was perceived by many Albanians as a pillar of their political identity. Until 1912 the Ottoman Empire failed to establish an all-​encompassing imperial legal system.

Migrations Migrations during and after the Ottoman conquest are until the present day the object of political controversies. This is particularly true for Kosovo, whose demographic history is hotly contested by Serbian and Albanian historians. The entire area of the Balkan southwest experienced migrations which typically cannot be quantified. Serbian migration to southern Hungary started in the fourteenth century because of the Ottoman advance. Serbian noblemen, 21

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including the despot (prince), received feudal rights from the Hungarian crown. Orthodox Vlachs were pushed into the northwest of the Balkans (Herzegovina and Bosnia), Catholic and Orthodox Albanians fled, as we have seen, across the Adriatic to Italy. Peasants from lowland northern Albania retreated to the mountains and formed tribal societies. Tribes referred to a common mythical ancestor and possessed their own territories. This system was a reaction to destructive Ottoman warfare that has disrupted traditional agriculture in the plains. In the densely populated highlands, only tightly knit groups of pastoral-​warriors could survive in the competition for scarce pasture-​land and water.The tribal system encompassed the area stretching from central Albania (Mirdita) to the Great Highlands (Malësia e madhe) and Montenegro. Confessional (Catholic, Muslim, Orthodox) and linguistic (Albanian, South Slavic) differentiation marked the highlands. However, their inhabitants shared a common way of life (pastoral economy) and of values (warrior ideals), and even clashes between Muslim Albanian and Orthodox Montenegrin tribes were glorified in a similar way with epic songs. Unlike the Balkan southeast (Thrace, Bulgaria, Macedonia,Thessaly), there were no major Muslim Turkish settlements in the southwest. Muslim communities emerged mainly as a result of conversions among the local population.The Ottoman central authority intervened only in sensitive border areas.There it built new fortresses (Elbasan in 1466) or replaced the population by Muslims (Shkodra in 1479). A major influx of new settlers did not come from Anatolia, but from Spain and Portugal. At the end of the fifteenth century, Sephardi Jews immigrated mainly to the major port of Vlora, where they had their own quarters by the early sixteenth century. Most of them moved on to Salonica, making it the major center for Spanish and Portuguese Jews in the Balkans. One of the most neglected population movements with consequences for the entire peninsula affected central Serbia in the mid-​sixteenth century. Some regions lost over half of their inhabitants. These mainly Orthodox Serbs had been attracted by the Ottoman settlement strategy in the fertile plains of central Hungary, turned into a province after 1541. To secure this border area, the Empire invited its Muslim and Orthodox subjects to take over former Hungarian property and offered tax exemptions and other privileges. A major exodus from central Serbia also encouraged migration from the upland, less fertile areas of the southwest, and from Macedonia and even from parts of Bulgaria. While these major population movements can be traced in recorded sources, the much more common internal migrations of smaller groups (extended families) were barely noted in Ottoman sources. They are attested in reports of local Catholic clergymen to the Congregatio de propaganda fide (established in Rome in 1622), especially when people were moving towards the Adriatic coast where the Catholic Church had preserved parts of its organizational network. One has to distinguish between seasonal migration of herdsmen between summer and winter pastures, and permanent emigration.The latter was prompted by economic pressure (bad harvests) and often by blood feuds, which forced people to leave because they felt threatened by acts of revenge. Most of these minor movements originated in the mountains of central and northern Albania and were directed both to the West (Adriatic coast) and the east (Kosovo, western Macedonia). The multi-​layered Albanian dialects in western Macedonia demonstrate that Albanians had immigrated in different stages into an area that was inhabited by Albanians since antiquity. In Kosovo, the Albanian population consisted equally of resident Albanians and newcomers from central and northern Albania.

Religion Since the early Middle Ages, the southwestern Balkans had been a frontier area between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Since the emergence of Bulgarian and Serbian ecclesiastical 22

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traditions, Balkan Orthodoxy consisted of three power centers (Constantinople, Peć, Ohrid) and liturgical cultures. Southern Albania and parts of Macedonia were influenced by the Byzantine (Greek) culture of the Patriarchate of Constantinople; Bulgarian and Serbian ecclesiastical influence overlapped in central and northern Macedonia with spill-​overs to southern Albania. Its share in Bulgarian ecclesiastical culture goes back to the Slavic missionary activities emanating from Ohrid in the late ninth and tenth centuries. Northern Albania, mainly its coastal parts, belonged to the Roman Catholic Church’s Adriatic world. Central Albania constituted a borderland with areas of blurred transition between the confessions. Local noblemen changed their confessional loyalty according to the political situation. In Kosovo, Serbs, Albanians, and Vlachs were almost exclusively Orthodox, adhering to the Patriarchate of Peć, which had been authorized against the wishes of the Byzantine Patriarchate of Constantinople by the Serbian Tsar Stefan Dušan as rival ruler of Serbs and Greeks in 1346. The tiny medieval Catholic community in Kosovo consisted of Saxon miners, merchants, and investors from Dubrovnik and northern Albanian Catholic clergymen. As elsewhere in Islamic states, conquest did not lead to immediate Islamization (with the exception of Shkodra). In the Balkan southwest, Islamization was a protracted process that was stopped only by the collapse of Ottoman rule in 1912. It most affected areas which suffered massive destruction in the fifteenth century, mainly central Albania, while the Orthodox framework in the south remained fairly intact. In the northwest, the partial destruction of the Catholic ecclesiastical network facilitated, as it did in Bosnia, the advance of Islam. However, also as in Bosnia, Catholic (mainly Franciscan) monasteries survived, and despite serious difficulties, the Roman Church held its outposts in tribal mountain areas. Ties with the Bosnian Franciscans were strong and resulted in cultural exchange (the first Albanian book, Gjon Buzuku’s Missale, published in 1555, was printed in a script influenced by the Bosnian Cyrillic alphabet used by the Bosnian Franciscans). Islamization gained momentum in the seventeenth century when the majority of Albanians converted to the imperial religion. There were several reasons for this. Because of their long wars against Venice and the Habsburgs, the Ottomans had to increase taxes, a burden which fell mainly on Christian subjects. Changing religion was often the only way to avoid economic disaster. In certain cases, as a reprisal after failed uprisings as in 1689, forced conversions and deportations contributed to Islamization.The Catholic Church was perceived by the Ottomans as a political threat and had to suffer much more than the Orthodox church from politically motivated restrictions. Recent research highlights also the impact of Sunni Konfessionalisierung (confessionalization) starting in the late sixteenth century, namely an increase of intolerance towards Christians and a renewal of the “holy war” (against Venice in 1645, against the Habsburgs in 1683) inspired by the Kadızadeli movement, a conservative and militant Sunni movement with strong anti-​Sufi and anti-​Christian tendencies.The impact of this phenomenon on the Balkan southwest still deserves to be studied more in detail. The Islamization of the majority of Albanians was a remarkable phenomenon in modern European history. Around 1700, a new self-​denomination of the Albanians emerged. Shqiptar (from the verb shqiptoj, to speak in a way that can be understood) designated an Albanian society whose very nature had been radically altered by the adoption of Islam and a cultural reorientation towards the Islamic East. The term was gradually also adopted by Christian Albanians and replaced the term Arbër. The latter represented the Christian tradition of the Albanians now deemed obsolete. In a regional context, only Serbs adopted shqiptar (šiptar, with a pejorative connotation nowadays), while all other European peoples and the Ottomans continued to use terms derived from Arbër to designate the Albanians (e.g. the Greek Arvanites or the Italian Albanesi). 23

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The Orthodox church of the Byzantine rite accommodated to the Ottoman system. Southern Albanian developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into a flourishing Orthodox regional culture with its own printing center in the Vlach trading town of Voskopoja/​ Moschopolis in the mid-​eighteenth century. The Serbian Patriarchate of Peć vanished after the end of Serbian statehood (1459), but it was restored in 1557 as Ottoman political leverage for bringing all Slavic Orthodox people in the Balkans under its control, including potentially Orthodox Slavic subjects of Venice and the Habsburg Monarchy, the regional Catholic powers. Only when the Serbian patriarchs repeatedly supported uprisings against the Empire did the Ottomans support the decision of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to abolish the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć and the autocephalous archbishopric of Ohrid in 1766/​67. Greek clergy were appointed to bring all Orthodox of the Ottoman Balkans under the direct rule of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. In terms of numbers, Islamization mainly affected Balkan Orthodox Christians (Serbs, Bulgarians, Albanians, Vlachs). While Catholic priests reported continuously on cases of defection from the much smaller Catholic communities, conversion processes are less known in their case. In the late nineteenth century, Serbian nationalists advanced the idea that Kosovo Muslim Albanians were in fact Islamized and Albanianized Serbs (so-​called Arnautaši). This idea links Islam to the Albanian language and implies that adopting Islam meant automatically switching to the language of the largest Muslim group in Kosovo. Religious groups were marriage pools. Muslims chose mainly Muslim partners (or Christian women who had to adopt Islam voluntarily or forcefully). Orthodox married other Orthodox (marriages with Muslims unavoidably led to conversion to Islam). Religion prevailed, not language. The Islamic and the Orthodox communities were both multilingual. In Kosovo, Serbian idioms were dominant among Orthodox, while most Muslims spoke Albanian. People usually adapted to the dominant linguistic environment of their respective religious group. While Orthodox Albanians married into Slavic Orthodox families, converted Slavs had to find partners in the Muslim community. Both tendencies could lead to linguistic acculturation. These processes certainly happened, but they cannot be quantified. However, neither Kosovo Albanians nor Kosovo Serbs constituted ethnically “pure” groups as propagated by modern nationalists of both sides. Although modern concepts of ethnic identity should not be mechanically projected back into the early modern period, it would also be misleading to ignore identity patterns that were related to language and culture. Albanians obviously felt their linguistic distinctiveness in comparison with surrounding communities. Muslim Albanian identity in Kosovo and Macedonia evolved around language, customary law, faith, and Ottoman Muslim privileges, such as the right to bear arms, a dominant social position in daily life, legal privileges in lawsuits against Christians, and virtual immunity in cases of violence against Christians. The Orthodox had none of these privileges, placing them clearly in an inferior position to the Muslims. In the Adriatic lands, however, especially in northern and central Albania, language did not divide Christians and Muslims. In southern Albania, Albanian Orthodox were well integrated in the Orthodox community dominated by Greeks and Vlachs. In the multiple churches of the Serbian Patriarchate, frescoes commemorated medieval Serbian kings, and church tradition constantly referred to medieval Serbian statehood. However, there is almost no non-​religious evidence for the ethnic identity of Orthodox peasants in early modern Kosovo. In southern Albania, Orthodox clergymen such as Kosmas Aitolos (died 1779)  insisted on clear demarcation of the multilingual Orthodox flock from Catholics and Jews. Ethnic difference existed in early modern Balkans, but it did not gain political importance as national identity until the late

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nineteenth century. Religious communities constituted the main frame of reference, and they sometimes bridged differences in language.

Albanian Sunni Muslims as a pillar of Ottoman rule It took the Ottomans more than 150 years to take full control of Albania, the historical region stretching from Lake Shkodra to Epirus. As already noted, nowhere in the Balkans had resistance been stiffer than in parts of this area. However, nowhere in the Balkans had conversion to Islam led to such a clear Muslim majority. By 1800, Christians had almost completely disappeared in central Albania. In Kosovo and Macedonia, the remaining Catholic Albanians constituted a tiny minority. In southern and northern Albania, Christianity had survived a little better. The reasons for this massive conversion to Islam, which made the Albanians (next to the Bosniaks) the only modern European nation with a Muslim majority, are the object of ongoing debates in the region. By the fifteenth century, Albanians had started to join the Ottoman army and administration. Together with Bosnian Muslims, they formed a powerful interest group in Constantinople by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As also in the case of the Bosnian Muslims, these kinship-​based networks could include Christian relatives. Communication with the major powers of early modern Europe, from the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires to Spain and Venice, was facilitated by the multi-​religious Albanian family networks stretching across the eastern and central Mediterranean and into Southeast and East Central Europe. Muslim Albanians became prominent in the Ottoman ruling hierarchy, and dozens of Albanians rose to the position of Grand Vezir. Koca Sinan Pasha from the highland of Luma (west of Prizren) conquered Georgia (1580), built a mosque in Cairo, but also remembered his homeland by creating a religious foundation in the strategically important defile of Kaçanik. Muslim Albanians played a significant role in Ottoman campaigns in Hungary in the seventeenth century. The Kreshnik epic song demonstrates that Bosnian and Albanian Muslims shared common memories. Other epic songs in Albanian celebrate Ottoman warfare against Habsburg troops on the Pannonian plains. The prominent position held by of Sunni Albanians helps to explain why Orthodox Serbs have equated Albanians with the resented Ottoman regime, an early modern legacy that remains an obstacle to regional reconciliation.

Selected Readings Bartl, Peter. Der Westbalkan zwischen spanischer Monarchie und Osmanischem Reich. Wiesbaden,  1974. Bartl, Peter. Albania Sacra, 4 vols. Wiesbaden, 2007–​2017. Ćirković, Sima M. The Serbs. Oxford, 2004. Duka, Ferid. Shekujt osmanë në hapësirën shqiptare. Tirana,  2009. Đurđev, Branislav. Turska vlast u Crnoj Gori u XVI i XVII veku. Sarajevo, 1953. Hysa,Ylber. Shqiptarët dhe të tjerët. Nga Madona e Zezë deri te Molla e Kuqe. Prishtina, 2009. Malcolm, Noel. Kosovo. A short history. London, 1998. Nadin, Lucia. Albania ritrovata. Recuperi di presenze albanesi nella cultura e nell´ arte del cinquecento veneto. Tirana, 2012. Schmitt, Oliver Jens. Die Albaner. Eine Geschichte zwischen Orient und Okzident. 2nd ed., Munich, 2018. Schmitt, Oliver Jens and Eva Anne Frantz, eds. Albanische Geschichte. Stand und Perspektiven der Forschung. Munich, 2009.

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2 THE VENETIAN-​OTTOMAN BORDERLAND IN DALMATIA Josip Vrandečić

In a speech at the Roman Academy di Notte on June 13, 1594, the Secretary of Papal State Minuccio Minucci mentioned 22 Asia Minor and Balkan kingdoms, from Trabzon to Hungary, which Turks had gradually swallowed. Among them he did not mention Dalmatia, where he had spent two years as a boy on the eve of the Cyprus War and was about to return in 1596 as the Archbishop of Zadar. Dalmatia, the narrow belt of land with an archipelago stretching from the island of Krk to the Bay of Kotor on the eastern Adriatic coast, was the cradle of the Croatian medieval state. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, with the exception of Dubrovnik, the province came under Venetian rule.When the Ottomans conquered the Dalmatian hinterland at the beginning of the sixteenth century,Venice became the only power that could save the coastal communities from the Ottoman threat. The maritime Republic had gained strategically important Dalmatia for two reasons. The eastern Adriatic coast represented a necessary base for communicating with its possessions in the eastern Mediterranean. It was also a springboard for its commercial ambitions in the Balkans where the Republic was competing with Dubrovnik and Florence. By conquering Dalmatia,Venice achieved both objectives but then faced an unexpected challenge. The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans forced the Republic to expand its mission in the province from a trading outpost to a military border. During the seventeenth century,Venice probed the weakness of the Ottoman border and at the beginning of the next century liberated the Dalmatian hinterland from Ottoman rule. The relationship between the two border societies and the exploitation of Ottoman weaknesses in Dalmatia are the main subjects explored below.

Ottoman attacks The first Ottoman attacks on the hinterland of Dalmatian communes occurred in 1415, while more frequent raids began after Bosnia fell under Ottoman rule in 1463. From Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Ottomans began to threaten Venetian power in Dalmatia by moving their borderlines southward, to the territory of the Croatian counties at the far end of the Hungarian-​ Croatian kingdom. This area had served as a buffer zone for the Dalmatian communes. Since the distant Hungarian kings of the Jagiełłon dynasty could not protect this vulnerable belt, the Venetians assisted local Croatian nobles and built up their fortifications to resist the mounting Ottoman pressure. 26

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In numerous attacks, the Ottoman border guard martolosi, local Christian freebooter infantry soldiers siding with the Ottomans, and akinci, the irregular light cavalry used for raiding, plunged deep into the Dalmatian territories. According to Venetian chronographer Marino Sanudo the most intense period of devastation occurred from the Second Ottoman-​Venetian War of 1499–​ 1503 to the fall of Klis in 1537, the last Croatian fort in Dalmatia. In that period, the Ottomans attacked the Zadar (Zara) communal areas 57 times and those of Šibenik (Sebenico) 67, Split (Spalato) 22, and Trogir (Traù) 16 times. The devastation brought the Dalmatian communes to the limits of their economic and demographic endurance. After the invasion in June 1499, Zadar’s authorities recorded 2,100 persons missing in recent raids and 40,000 missing head of cattle. The commander of the Venetian fleet Vitturi in 1525 was shocked by the “desert” he saw in the Zadar hinterland. The poet Juraj Šižgorić of Šibenik described in his Elegia de Sibenicensis agri vastatione (Venice, 1477)  the scale of the devastation of the surrounding villages by the Ottoman irregulars and the famous Croatian writer Marko Marulić depicted the devastation of the hinterland of Split. The War of the Holy League 1537–​40 marked the turning point in Venetian politics. After suffering defeat in the maritime battle at Prevese in Greece and the fall of Klis in Dalmatia, Venice sought to establish peaceful long-​term relations with the Ottomans as part of its new policy of neutrality in both Italy and the Mediterranean. The fall of the Croat rump zone and the neighborhood of the Ottomans imposed numerous challenges on Venetian authorities. The displaced population from the hinterland filled Dalmatian coastal cities to full capacity. Venice organized resettlement of the refugees to Istria, Italy, or the more secure Dalmatian islands under her control. After the Cyprus War,Venetian accounts noted the lowest ebb of Dalmatian population in the century, down to only 60,000 people in the coastal communities. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, there had been 7,000 inhabitants in the Split municipality but in 1553, there were only 3,100. In the Zadar commune, 80 percent of the entire district population lived within the city walls, and a smaller percentage in other coastal communes. The consequences of the Ottoman advance were also evident in the economy. After the conquest of Dalmatia,Venice had taken away the freedom of the local elite to engage in profitable activities such as salt and textile production, shipbuilding, and maritime trade. The Republic limited them to agriculture but farming was also diminished once the demarcation line of 1540 reached almost to the city walls. Upon arriving in Zadar in 1596, the aforementioned Archbishop Minucci wrote to a friend Coriolan Garzadoro that he had never seen such misery in his entire life. Some of his fellow citizens were forced to sell one son to the Turks to keep other children alive. Under the pressure of this harsh reality, Venice was forced to liberalize its state mercantilism and to allow Dalmatian merchants to export their local products directly to Italian cities without having to sail to Venice first. For Venice, the most important thing was to keep the state budget for Dalmatia balanced. The military and administration expenditures which had averaged around 100,000 ducats a year were covered by profits from the salt works of Pag, the largest in the Adriatic.

Fortifying borderlands After the aforementioned War of the Holy League,Venice avoided military confrontation with the Ottomans. It still had to invest considerable resources in the modernization of the walls of Dalmatian cities whose medieval fortifications could not withstand Ottoman artillery. After the war, Venice began the construction alla moderna of new-​style fortresses with uneven lines like the teeth of a saw with angled bastions built lower and thicker behind wide ditches. Owing to the costly construction of fortresses on Corfu, Cyprus, and Crete during the sixteenth century, 27

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the bastion-​building program in Dalmatia remained limited to Zadar and to certain forts such as Saint Nicholas at the seafront of Šibenik. Even greater challenges lay before the Ottoman administration on its side of the border.The consequences of the Ottoman conquest were so profound that the domestic population had disappeared. The Turkish land registry defter dating from 1534 did not mention one resident in the previously vibrant town of Sinj. The Ottomans hence were eager to return life to the strategic western border areas facing Venice and Habsburgs. The conquered area of the Croatian counties including the parts of the occupied districts of Dalmatian towns were incorporated into the sancaks of Herzegovina, Livno, and Krka, which together had stretched from the Adriatic deep into Bosnia. The most reliable source for the settling of the deserted area were Balkan Vlachs, probably descendants of the Romanized Illyrian population, part of whom were Slavicized during the Middle Ages. The Vlachs were particularly suited to Ottoman needs, not only because they were mobile because of their transhumant sheep farming and horse breeding and trading but also because they had a strong military tradition.The Ottomans allowed them to keep their right to carry weapons, otherwise denied to non-​Muslims in the Empire.Vlachs paid a symbolic tax of one ducat per family (resmi filuri), but they were expected in return to provide military service in wartime. Instead of a salary, they were allowed to plunder enemy territory. Unlike medieval Vlachs who lived in the area under the rule of the Hungarian-​Croat Crown (Wolachi banatus regni Croacie) who were of Catholic faith, the Vlachs who moved to the Dalmatian border during Ottoman rule were predominantly Christian Orthodox. The Ottoman defters of the sixteenth century confirm the existence of Orthodox monasteries in Dalmatia: Dragović, Krupa, and Krka. Although Ottoman laws prohibited the construction of new Christian churches in the Empire, the Ottoman sources from the century witnessed the rise of Christian Orthodox churches in the Dalmatian hinterland, either newly built or erected upon the ruins of Catholic churches. The devastating attacks of the Uskoks, the Adriatic pirates operating under Habsburg auspices in Senj on the northern Adriatic, forced some Vlachs to resettle in Venetian or Habsburg areas. In order to strengthen the border zone, the Ottomans tried to advance Islam on the fringes of the Empire. Converts to Islam then became Ottoman soldiers located in small towns and villages. Some of them were former Christian prisoners. Murat Tardić, the first sandcak-​beyi of Klis, a native of Šibenik, was a liberated prisoner who after converting to Islam around 1560, received a large land holdings in central Dalmatia. The Ottomans attracted Muslim settlers by building Islamic institutions and buildings. Sultan Suleiman I.  ordered sancak-​beyi of Klis Ferhad Sokolović to build mosques and schools and to organize trade fairs within the strategically important region. It was normal for wealthy men to allocate land in perpetual trust to secure income for a religious charity foundation, known as vakif. These institutions were of vital importance for the development of all Ottoman towns. In Sinj, Klis,Vrlika, Knin, Hrvace, Zemunik, and Vrana, there were religious-​ charitable foundations established for mosques, schools, inns, baths, and bridges. Islamization was nonetheless a very slow process. Christians had predominated in the villages (karye), and only in the towns did Islam begin to take root. According to the report of the Venetian providore in Dalmatia Jacopo Foscarini from 1572, the Dalmatian part of the sancak Klis listed 6,860 Christian households and only 560 Muslim ones. Foscolo thereupon proposed to the government to attract even more Christians from the Ottoman side to the Venetian area. At the beginning of the Ottoman conquest, there were no settlements on the Ottoman side of the border that would merit the status of a town, that is, kasaba or varoş. Nevertheless, during the sixteenth century, the number of Muslim houses in the towns had increased as the result of the concentration of their military, administrative, and trade elites. At the beginning of the 28

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seventeenth century, there were 100 Muslim houses in Sinj, 85 in Vrlika, 200 in Drniš, 300 in Knin, and 200 in Skradin. Until that time, Sinj, Klis,Vrlika, Drniš, Knin, Zemunik, and Hrvace reached the status of kasaba and Vrana. Nadin and Ostrovica obtained a higher status of varoş.

Religious interactions Religious worlds in the sixteenth century were still open. Many people converted to Islam, and both authorities tried to attract as many people as possible on their side to strengthen their own rule and weaken that of the other. The state border divided a homogeneous whole, and many people, often from kinship relations, were naturally drawn to one side. Christians called local Muslims “the Turks,” regardless of the fact that there were almost no ethnic Turks among them. As Christians had done since the Crusades, they identified the entire Islamic world first with the Turks-​Seldshuks and later with the Ottomans. Archbishop Minucci believed that Islam’s dissemination was helped by its theological simplicity and social equality that attracted peasants. The prospect of social advance attracted the feudal elite as well. Islamic theology was based on the common Abrahamic tradition as well as on the faith in the immortality of the soul and responsibility of the individual for his own salvation, rejecting clerical hierarchy, church services, and sacraments, and the fundamental Christian truth about the divine nature of Jesus Christ. With the transition to Islam, many hoped for privileged status in the Ottoman Empire. There were also those who, because of the abuse of ecclesiastical and secular laws in the Dalmatian communes, fled across the border to the Ottoman side. The Muslims were in outside the city gates (sotto porte) and visited them on market days, going to see churches because many were related to their Christian roots. In Zadar, they particularly worshiped the Chest of Saint Simeon the God-​receiver. Many listened to the sermons, attended the processions, and traded and ate with Christians. According to Minucci’s letters to the Holy See, every day around twenty Muslims descended across the borders and were to be found in Zadar. They had to leave the guns outside the city gate, but they were walking and trading freely around the city. The ecclesiastical authorities felt obliged to regulate relations with Muslims. The twelfth chapter of the 1598 Synod of the Zadar Archdiocese, named De Turcis eorumque Consuetudine, set rules for the Muslims who came to town every day for purchase, sale, or other work. It was determined what kind of food the Muslims had to be served in taverns or private homes. Mingling with Christian women, even with prostitutes, were strictly prohibited. They did not allow Muslims to enter churches or to observe shrines, paintings, or other objects of devotion. God’s service in their presence did not need to be celebrated, but they had to be commanded to leave the church. No souvenirs were to be available for display to them, even if they asked for them. Sermons outside the church could be listened to freely. When public prayers were held, and especially during a procession when carrying the consecrated host, the transcendent Body of Christ, one of the clergymen would command any Muslims on the street or outside taverns and workshops to leave so they would not observe or ridicule church rituals. The Dalmatian bishops complained that their faithful sinned on a daily basis against the papal bull In Coena Domini (“At the table of the Lord”) which since 1363 regulated the relationship between Christians and non-​Christians. The bull strictly prohibited the supply of Saracens, Turks, and other enemies of Christianity with weapons, ammunition, and war material.That sin brought about the instantaneous extradition from the Catholic Church from which only the Pope could provide absolution. Dalmatian bishops complained that their faithful nonetheless continued to sell weapons to the Muslims. Punishment could trigger flight across the border. They therefore asked Rome to give them the power to absolve those who erred. 29

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Cross-​border  trade After the end of the Cyprus War in 1540, there was growing and widespread co-​operation between the “two Dalmatias,” ranging from trade to personal relations. Coexistence did not preclude armed incidents, robberies, kidnapping, espionage, but it also included everyday communication through trade, visits, personal friendships and even love affairs. Such was the story of Christian girl Mara and the Ottoman boy Adel, who had met at the city-​market in Split. The stabilization of political relations with the Ottomans made it possible to revitalize trade on both sides. Before the official end of the War of the Holy League, in 1539, the local Ottoman authorities offered the export of grain from their area to Dalmatian cities. In the mid-​century, Dalmatian communes needed 450,000 stari of wheat (one star equals 83.3 liters) and they could not produce more than 100,000. No Dalmatian commune could produce enough grain for feeding itself for more than six months, so wheat had to be imported from Apulia, or Sicily, or from the hinterland. At the same time as the Dalmatian cities imported grain from the hinterland,Venetians sold salt to the Ottoman subjects. Salt attracted Ottoman subjects to Dalmatian cities bringing grain, meat, cheese, and other products. In 1631, the three neighboring Ottoman sancaks Krka, Klis, and Herzegovina spent around 300,000 ducats annually for Venetian salt. The most prominent Venetian salt works in Pag produced nearly 7,500 tons annually. In comparison, the Dubrovnik works in Ston produced around 5,000 tons, while several run by Ottomans in the south Adriatic yielded less than 1,000 tons.The profit from Venetian salt export had to be shared with the Sultan and revenues were collected by the Turkish customs office at the border of each Dalmatian municipality. Venetian authorities estimated that by the middle of the sixteenth century the annual value of trade with the Ottomans in Dalmatia was 400,000 ducats. From that total, Šibenik’s trade with the hinterland averaged around 50,000 ducats annually. This local trade was elevated when in 1592 a warehouse (scala) was opened in Split that linked Venice with Balkan trade. In 1580 the Venetian office of the Magistrato dei cinque savi alla mercanzia accepted the proposal of the Jew from Split, Daniel Rodrigo, to turn Split into an international link between the Ottoman Empire and Venice, which would attract traders from Italy to Persia. After losing its monopoly in spice trade in the Mediterranean, Venice sought to compensate at least in part by increasing trade with the Ottoman Balkans. Its efforts also aimed to reduce the strong commercial presence of Dubrovnik. In a Venetian report from 1590, it was emphasized that the Split port, where new docks were still waiting to be built, was already attracting traders from India, Persia, and Armenia. The port was called the “golden ring” connecting the Orient and Venice. In 1626, the trade volume in Split was fully one quarter of Venice’s. Two thirds of Balkan merchandise coming to Venice went through Split. Both economies benefited. In 1639, the Bosnian treasury received 50,000 ducats from Split. Traders from Sarajevo, Banja Luka, as well as those from Constantinople and Ankara, operated through Split, sharing large Jewish and Armenian communities. Split became attractive for Italian merchants such as the Kavanjin (Cavagnini) family from Castrazzone near Lake Garda. They permanently settled in the city and ran its own merchant fleet with trade partners in Sarajevo. The trade routes between Split and the Balkans ran along ancient Roman routes and caravans composed of horses and mules enjoyed secure passage and accommodation. At the turn of the seventeenth century, however, the first cracks in the Ottoman social system were more noticeable in the borderlands. The classical Ottoman world was already in decay in the last days of Suleiman I, affecting the two most important Ottoman institutions, timar landholdings for its cavalry and the military recruiting system. During the sixteenth century, the Ottoman border regime set up kapetanije (kaptanlik). These military-​administrative units were each led by a kapetan or captain charged with raising troops or recruits, checking 30

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travelers who crossed the border, keeping roads safe from bandits, and performing various police and administrative duties. As the century progressed, the captains, members of prominent local families, increased their local authority and sought to pass on their positions to their sons, a violation of the original timar regime. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the descendants of Halil-​beyi, from the Durakbegović family, acquired the captaincy of Vrana. In addition, the families of Filipović and Atlagić also secured hereditary rights in Ottoman Dalmatia. Under this corruption of the institution, a layer of prominent local elite was formed, more interested in staying on their land and trading with Dalmatian and Italian merchants, than departing for bloody wars against ever stronger Habsburg forts in Pannonia. They privatized the non-​ hereditary military-​feudal tenures and turned them into chiftlik, the private estates where sharecropping peasants were reduced to little more than subsistence. The local aristocracy kept the large estates in full, hereditary ownership. They had also leased from the state the management of state mills and customs offices and increased their revenues. They asked their peasants to pay their taxes in produce instead of money which lost its value because the Ottoman currency was decreasing in value due to inflation. Foreign merchants and those in coastal communes paid for food in stable Venetian currency. Grain prices as well were much higher in Dalmatian cities than in the Ottoman hinterland. In the mid-​sixteenth century, 100 pounds of grain in the Ottoman region of Dalmatia cost 25 akchas while in the Venetian area it was three times more expensive. This price difference triggered the struggle for grain surplus between the Ottoman tenure owners and their peasants who wanted to sell the grain across the border. The trade with the Dalmatian cities started to monetize the Ottoman economy while attracting their peasants to Venetian Dalmatia. Ottoman authorities and the local elite tried to tie the movable cattle-​breading Vlachs to field cultivation and to force them pay tithes in produce instead of paying resmi filuri or one golden ducat yearly. The Vlachs resisted, leaving the Ottoman lands and moving to the Venetian or Habsburg side or a safer area of the Empire. The Venetian official Mateo Zane recorded in 1595 that Ottoman owners had taken up to a third of the products from their peasants. This classic phenomenon, known as “second feudalism” that the Christian West had already experienced a century ago, weakened the Ottoman Empire and especially its western borderlands.

Wars and Venice’s victory This was already evident during the Long War (1593–​ 1606) in Pannonia between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. Although Venice did not join the Habsburgs, riots disturbed the Ottoman interior, especially Serbia, Wallachia, Transylvania and Moldova. The war affected the Ottoman borderland in Dalmatia since the local forces had to take part in the warfare far away from their homes. Many of the recruits were looking to the Venetian area and trying to escape with their families. In his letters to Rome, Archbishop Minucci reported that many “Turks” came to Zadar during these war years. Minucci saw the opportunity for their conversion since many of them remained bound to their Christian roots. He joined his clergy in their catechization and baptism. He needed greater Venetian support for them to be permanently moved to Istria or Italy, away from the Ottoman authorities, who were eyeing them and hoping to lure them back. In addition to the influence of a capitalist economy on Ottoman border society, the military revolution in artillery also worked in favor of Venice. It was most visible in the aforementioned modernization of Zadar, whose walls had been completed by the end of the sixteenth century. Along with the building of the Zadar bastions, the armament and the training of local Dalmatian units, cernida, were also improved. The War of Candia (1645–​69) caught Venice 31

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unprepared but successful in defense because the walls of all the Dalmatian towns were brought up to the standard set by Zadar.Venice in Dalmatia had no offensive ambitions anyway, in line with its political ambitions to preserve the coastal cities as the center of finance and trade. Controlling of hinterland had no special appeal.Venice was determined and also able to defend only the posts which could be supported by artillery fire from the sea on which she enjoyed the advantage over the Ottomans. On receiving the news of the outbreak of the war, the Dalmatian population hastily remodeled their walls with the assistance of Venetian military engineers. By the end of the war the bastion system around the Dalmatian cities was in place; the semi-​circular and triangular bastions keeping the Ottomans at the bay for most of the war. At the outset, the commander of the Ottoman forces in Dalmatia, Ibrahim-​pasha Tekeli had received a command from Sultan Ibrahim I that he must conquer the Dalmatian cities with the help of local forces and regular Ottoman troops that had arrived via Belgrade and Bosnia. Faced with this threat, the Venetians destroyed their own town of Nin near Zadar in 1646 with artillery fire from galleys, reckoning that they could not hold it. The Ottoman attack on the city of Zadar in the summer of 1646 then failed because the city was heavily fortified and because the Ottomans did not have a navy to blockade it from the sea. In February 1647, the Providore general Leonardo Foscolo exploited the deep snow that blocked mountain passes between Bosnia and Dalmatia and attacked the strong Ottoman fortresses in the hinterland of Zadar. Thanks to artillery fire and experienced European mercenaries who arrived from Venice, he unexpectedly conquered Novigrad, Zemunik, Karin, Nadin, and Vrana. Low morale in both Venice and Dalmatia now rose. The Ottomans returned in the summer when Tekeli-​pasha attacked Šibenik with 40,000 soldiers. The conquest of Šibenik was of particular interest to the Ottomans because by overcoming the city defense they would split Dalmatia into two and could set up there an arsenal to build their own fleet in the Adriatic. After having sustained a month of the siege, the defenders of Šibenik repelled the final attacks in mid-​September thanks to support from the sea. After Šibenik, the Venetians had the upper hand in the war in Dalmatia yet could not exploit it due to revolts among the underpaid mercenary troops. In March 1648, they still occupied the Ottoman fort of Klis, representing the biggest victory for Venice in the province. Success was achieved thanks to a massive amphibious disembarkation of soldiers in the Salona Bay, artillery fire on the fortress walls, and the engagement of both professional and domestic soldiers. After the siege of Šibenik, both sides saw the Dalmatian battlefield as of secondary importance. In the course of the war, the Ottomans had relied on the local elite led by the Durakbegović, Filipović, and Atlagić families that took the brunt of the war effort in the province. They had to face the local militias and the Christians from the Ottoman Empire who had moved on the Venetian side. The Christians demanded from Venetian authorities the extensions of military operations deep into Ottoman territory to help them to liberate their villages and to settle their families under Venetian rule.The Venetians however relied only on sudden strikes, burning and destroying the walls of Ottoman strongholds. They did not dare to continue, fearing that Ottoman attacks from Bosnia would overrun isolated posts manned by valuable and expensive professionals. Foscolo’s unsuccessful attack on the South Adriatic in 1649 and the Venetian defeat under Knin in 1654 confirmed the strategic weakness of the Venetian war model. The passive policy of “scorched earth” did not pay off, despite the territorial gains that the Republic achieved in the war in Dalmatia. After postwar demarcation, only the fortress of Klis remained in Venetian  hands. A turnaround occurred during the ensuing First War of Morea (1684–​99). After the Ottoman defeat at the siege of Vienna in 1683, Venice decided to join the allied Christian forces of the Pope, the Habsburgs, and the Poles. Pushing the reluctant Republic to take part were Ottoman 32

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Christians who had gone to war bearing Habsburg and papal flags. During the first years of the war,Venice remained without significant military success in Dalmatia. Foreign mercenaries were otherwise engaged in the Peloponnese, and the aforementioned lack of an offensive strategy prevailed. Two unsuccessful Venetian sieges of Sinj, in 1684 and in 1685 succeeded only when they finally integrated the local Christian population into its military force. Then the Republic forces broke through to conquer Sinj in 1686 and Herceg Novi a year later.Venice now enjoyed complete mastery of the strategic Bay of Kotor. The crucial momentum for Venetian siege campaigns came from the increasing defection of local Ottoman auxiliaries. Thousands of militia and former Ottoman irregulars tipped the balance in favor of the Republic. The former Ottoman subjects were key forces in occupying Sinj in 1686 and Knin in 1688, thus permanently liberating the hinterland of Dalmatian cities. After these successes, Venice used the troops in the south in an effort to encircle Dubrovnik, denying it to any potential Habsburg advance.The prospect of a Habsburg port on the southern Adriatic became a real threat to Venice’s mastery at sea, especially after the imperial armies had reached Kosovo and Macedonia in 1689. A French offensive in the Rhineland derailed imperial ambition and forced the Habsburgs to divert their Balkan armies to the West. The Venetian victory in Dalmatia was, in sum, the result of the military revolution, the social and political crisis of Ottoman society and most importantly, the participation of former Ottoman subjects who had switched sides and forced Venice to pursue a more ambitious strategy in the Adriatic. According to the peace treaty at Srijemski Karlovci in 1699,Venice gained new territory in Dalmatia with the exception of Dubrovnik and its hinterland. The Great Powers saved Dubrovnik from the Venetian embrace. The Ottomans tried to retaliate during the Second War of Morea (1714–​18) because they could not accept the loss of Peloponnese and Dalmatia. In Greece, they easily recovered previous losses, but in Dalmatia, they experienced complete defeat. In 1715,Venetian professional troops with the help of the local population managed to defend Sinj from a large Ottoman army coming from Bosnia.Two years later, Providore general Domenico Mocenigo conquered Imotski, whereby Venice further expanded its territory in Dalmatia. The conquered territory in the hinterland was organized as a separate military border zone (Krajina) to oppose Ottoman Bosnia. The military area was placed under the Venetian government and relied on the service of local officers: harambaši, serdari, and koluneli.Venice distributed its new state land to free peasant-​soldiers in exchange for tithes and military service. The most attractive landholdings were assigned to the local Dalmatian military elite in order to bind them even more strongly to Venetian rule. Their peasants soon found themselves bound to restrictive sharecropping arrangement that would persist under Habsburg rule in the nineteenth century.

Selected Readings Buzov, Snježana. “Vlach Villages, Pastures and Chiftliks: The Landscape of the Ottoman Borderlands in the 16th and 17th Centuries.” In Triplex Confinium Ekohistorija (1500–​1800), ed. Drago Roksandić. Split, 2003, 227–​42. Hrabak, Bogumil. “Turske provale i osvajanja na području današnje severne Dalmacije do sredine XVI stoleća,” Radovi Instituta za hrvatsku povijest 19 (1986): 69–​100. Kreševljaković, Hamdija. Kapetanije u Bosni i Hercegovini. Sarajevo, 1980. Mayhew, Tea. Dalmatia between Ottoman and Venetian Rule. Contado di Zara, 1645–​1718. Rome, 2008. Moačanin, Nenad. Turska Hrvatska: Hrvati pod vlašću Osmanskoga Carstva do 1791. godine. Zagreb, 1999. Schmit, Oliver. “Das Venezianische Südosteuropa als Kommunikationsraum (ca. 1400–​ca. 1600).” In Balcani occidentali, Adriatico e Venezia fra XIII e XVIII secolo /​Der westliche Balkan, der Adriaraum und Vendig (13.–​ 18. Jahrhundert), eds. Gherardo Ortalli and Oliver Jens Schmitt.Venice and Vienna, 2009, 77–101. Šabanović, Hazim. Bosanski pašaluk. Postanak i upravna podjela. Sarajevo, 1982.

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Josip Vrandečić Traljić, Sead. “Tursko-​mletačko susjedstvo na zadarskoj krajini XVII. stoljeća,” Radovi JAZU u Zadru 4–​5 (1959): 409–​24. Vrandečić, Josip. “Islam Immediately beyond the Dalmatian Coast:  The Three Reasons for Venetian Success.” Balcani occidentali 1 (2009): 287–​307. Vrandečić, Josip. Zadarski nadbiskup Minuccio Minucci i njegova jadranska misija. Zagreb, 2017.

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3 THE PHANARIOT REGIME IN THE ROMANIAN PRINCIPALITIES, 1711/​1 716–​1 821 Constantin Iordachi

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the two Romanian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia were placed under a new legal-​political order for over 100 years (1711–​1821), generically referred to as the Phanariot regime. The establishment of that regime was the result of a gradual but steady decline in the status of the two Principalities within the Ottoman legal system. As it is well known, soon after their establishment, Wallachia (1420) and Moldavia (1456) fell under Ottoman suzerainty but enjoyed a special status, as one of the “well-​protected dominions” under tributary protection. Under the Islamic Law of Peace, Moldavia and Wallachia were treated as tribute-​paying states in the Dar al-​’ahd (the House of Peace), a legal space between the Dar al-​Islam (the House of Islam) and the Dar al-​Harb (the House of War). According to the terms of the agreements signed between the Sultan and native princes, the Principalities were forced to pay an annual tribute (haraç) to the Sublime Porte and to renounce attributes of formal sovereignty, including the right to conduct an independent foreign policy. In exchange, the Principalities were granted Ottoman military protection. They were allowed to choose their own native princes but with the Sultan’s express approval and to enjoy domestic legal, administrative, and religious autonomy. The Principalities thus had a distinct, somewhat privileged, status in comparison to “regular” Ottoman territories in Central Europe and the Balkans. They avoided direct Ottoman military occupation and preserved their traditional sociopolitical organization. Their major state institutions, such as the office of the princedom, the Orthodox Church, and administration at all levels remained under the control of the local aristocracy. In addition, unlike other Ottoman Balkan provinces, the Principalities retained control of their borders and were not subjected to Muslim ethnic or military colonization. The terms of the agreements were not fixed but changed according to the general military and geopolitical balance in Eastern Europe. Beginning in the sixteenth century, to control the Principalities more effectively, the Ottoman High Porte forced local princes to dismantle their internal fortifications and their army. Then in the seventeenth century, the border separating Moldavia and Wallachia from the Ottoman Empire became blurred, as the Porte occupied and fortified several riparian strong points across the Danube, from the Moldavian Black Sea 35

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city-​ports of Chilia and Cetatea Albă to Turnu, Giurgiu, and Brăila on the Wallachian Danube. These enclaves served as commercial outlets for Ottoman merchants but also as bridgeheads for military actions. The increased Ottoman control affected also the nature of the princes’ regimes.Traditionally, the princes of the two Principalities (called domni or later hospodars) were elected by the assembly of estates of the local aristocracy or the Princely Council (called the Divan), from among the male descendants of former princes (both legitimate and illegitimate). In the seventeenth century, the Porte gradually altered this practice. In 1633, the Porte striped the local boyars of the right to elect the prince, assuming the right to nominate directly. In 1669, the Porte decided to select princes not exclusively from the scions of princely families, but from other categories of loyal Constantinople-​based candidates as well. Ultimately, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, reacting against the Moldavian prince Dimitrie Cantemir’s political alliance with the Russian Tsar Peter the Great and his military defection during the 1710–​11 Russian-​Ottoman War, and the Wallachian prince Constantin Brâncoveanu’s (r. 1688–​1714) secret alliance with the Habsburgs, the Porte entrusted the office of prince to the Greek families living in the district of Phanar in Constantinople.They were closely tied to the Porte’s financial and geopolitical interests and were thus expected to be more loyal to the Sultan. The “Phanariot” elite consisted of a small number of families distinguished by their wealth and influence in the Ottoman administration. Their main resources were their officially endorsed monopolies over certain offices (most importantly, that of the Dragoman of the Porte). The Phanariot oligarchy was appointed by the Sultan and was thus an “oligarchy of office.” Membership in this group was not strictly limited to a small clique based on ethnicity, noble origin, or social position. Although most of these families claimed aristocratic Byzantine lineage, some of them were in fact Hellenized Romanians (the Racovițăs and the Callimachis) or Albanians (the Ghicas).

The Phanariot regime in power The Phanariot regime was a period of societal upheaval and contradictory pressures. On the one hand, the regime was in a state of almost continuous crisis: the Porte’s constant interference in local affairs led to endemic political instability, compounded by recurrent wars, lost territory, and long periods of foreign occupation. Political disarray and economic exploitation in the Principalities fed social unrest, and demographic upheaval. During this long century, there were no less than 31 rulers in Moldavia and Wallachia. Among them, only seven died in power, while three princes were executed by the Porte: Constantin Racoviță (1762), Scarlat Ghica (1766), and Grigore Ghica III (1777). This endemic political instability reflected the precarious political position of the Phanariot princes. To be nominated a prince, Phanariot candidates had to bid for investiture by the Porte. Once in power, they needed to receive regular confirmation, provide tribute and other financial obligations to the Porte, reimburse their creditors, assure the well-​being of their clientele, and accumulate personal wealth. This double pressure promoted a corrupt and venal regime, whose immediate aim was the extraction of material revenues for the benefit of the Porte, the Phanariots, and their clientele. On the other hand, the Phanariot regime was also a period of wide-​ranging reforms. The drive for reforms was, first and foremost, pragmatic. The political survival of the Phanariot princes depended on their ability to extract taxes, so they needed to build a more efficient, modernized framework for tax collection.Yet the Phanariots’ reformist drive was also influenced by the principles of enlightened absolutism, following the Habsburg and Russian models. Prince Constantin Mavrocordat, who ruled six times in Wallachia (r, 1730, 1731–​3, 1735–​41, 36

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1744–​8, 1756–​8, 1761–​3) and four times in Moldavia (r. 1733–​5, 1741–​3, 1748–​9, 1769), is the most representative Phanariot political figure in this direction. During his multiple terms in power, Mavrocordat implemented major sociopolitical reforms. Acting along the lines of a constitutional project for the Principalities that he published in France in 1741, he reorganized their administration, reclassified the nobility and redefined their privileges, abolished serfdom as a juridical status, centralized the state apparatus, regulated the status of the monasteries, and attempted to stabilize demographic settlement. By and large, the reforming activity of Mavrocordat and of the other Phanariot princes advanced on four interrelated fields. First, the Phanariots introduced fiscal reforms.Traditionally, taxation was levied on the head of the family, while clergy and boyars were exempted from financial obligations. These privileges and the corruption of tax collectors resulted in a discretionary and irregular tax system. Fiscal reforms concentrated on introducing a unified and centralized budget policy, the regularization of tax and financial obligations, and efforts to reduce the boyars’ fiscal immunity. Second, in order to reform the corrupt and highly unstable administration of the country, the Phanariots implemented administrative training and educational requirements for officeholders, abolished the system of selling offices, separated personal income from the office budget, and introduced fixed salaries. Third, in order to advance centralization, the Phanariots promoted a campaign of legal codification, based on a combination of Byzantine and local legal practices, occasionally supplemented by foreign influences. The campaign started with the adoption of the Pravilniceasca Condică in Wallachia by Prince Alexandru Ipsilanti in 1780 (and in effect until 1817), and the Recoil of Alexandru Donici, applied in Moldavia until 1818. It culminated in the adoption of new civil codes –​Legiuirea Caragea in Wallachia (1817) and Codul Calimach in Moldavia (1818). The two codes had contradictory features. They adopted the modern legal theory of civil statuses, while simultaneously preserving slavery and the existing feudal and religious distinctions. They remained in effect in the Principalities for almost half a century, until the promulgation of a unified Romanian Civil Code in 1865. In addition, Phanariot princes supported the development of education. The most important initiatives in this respect were the recurrent reorganizations of the Princely Academies (Academiile Domnești) established in Bucharest and Iași in 1689 and 1707, respectively, following the model of the Greek Academy of Phanar in Constantinople. Their curriculum focused on the Greek-​ Roman classical heritage, but also on Enlightenment philosophical and scientific thought, mostly under French influence. They also stimulated the study of Romanian culture and language, thus contributing to the formation of a modern national identity and the rise of nationalism.

From Greek origins and Byzantine influence to the Phanariots The advent of the Phanariots and their wide-​ranging reforms also changed the structure and status of the nobility. First, the princes’ office was monopolized by 11 major families: Mavrocordat (Mavrocordatos) –​a family who provided six distinct rulers during this period, Ghica (Ghika) –​ with five rulers, Callimachi –​with four rulers, Caragea (Karatzas) –​with four rulers, Racoviță –​ with three rulers, Șuțu (Soutzos) –​with three rulers, Khantzeris (Hangerli) –​with two rulers, Ipsilanti (Ypsilantis) –​with two rulers, Moruzi (Mourouzis) –​with two rulers, and Rossetti and Mavrogheni (Mavroyenis) –​with one ruler each. These families had their access to the princely office legally inscribed in the Hatt-​ı Şerif of 1774. By 1804, the Porte had granted a monopoly to only four main families. Second, Phanariot princes came accompanied by a large entourage and rewarded them with positions in the state apparatus. Elite migration was not an entirely new phenomenon. 37

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Yet, the Phanariot oligarchy greatly expanded the pool of Levantine Greeks already active in the Principalities since 1575. Initially, Greek migrants were mostly merchants or creditors of the Prince originating from Epirus, Macedonia, Chios, and the Ionic Islands; they settled predominantly in Wallachia. Their migration was facilitated by the strong and multifaceted Byzantine influence in the Principalities, manifest mainly in the fields of political ideology, state and Orthodox Church organization, canon and canon-​civil law, art and architecture. In the second half of the sixteenth century, however, the pressures for a more direct Ottoman rule increased the number of Ottoman Greeks migrating to Moldavia and Wallachia, leading to their more direct involvement in the administration of the Principalities. Greek migrants began to be recruited from prominent Constantinople-​based elite networks and gradually penetrated the political life, traditionally monopolized by the local boyars. The high political status of the new Ottoman-​Greek immigrants who infiltrated the ruling class as members of the prince’s camarilla threatened the political monopoly of the local nobility. In response, the boyars put out an anti-​Greek rhetoric, first advanced in chronicles at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Resentments against the Greeks grew also from wider social grievances of the lower and middle strata of the urban population as well as the boyar class seeking confirmation of privileges. The conflict degenerated into violent anti-​Greek riots, and prompted legal measures meant to remove these “unwanted foreigners” and to prevent their future naturalization. Such anti-​Greek measures were passed by the Wallachian assembly of estates in 1631, under Leon Tomșa, and in 1669, under Prince Radu Leon. These legal measures were only intermittently applied and were therefore largely ineffective. The influence of the Constantinople-​based Ottoman Greeks continued to grow steadily and reached its peak during the Phanariot regime. It should also be noted that Greek penetration into the local aristocracy fluctuated greatly during Phanariot rule, from a maximum of 32 percent under Ion T.  Callimachi (r. 1758–​61) to only 5.5  percent under Scarlat Callimachi (r. 1812–​19) in Moldavia, and from 34.3 percent under Nicolae Mavrocordat (r. 1716, 1719–​30) to 12 percent under Ioan A. Mavrocordat (r. 1716–​19) in Wallachia. Overall, the percentage of seats held by Ottoman Greeks in the princely Divan of the Principalities amounted to a share of over 30 percent under five princes; between 20 and 30 percent under the rule of 21 princes; between 10 and 20 percent under ten princes; and under 10 percent under only four princes. Overall, although Phanariot rule greatly advanced the Ottoman Greeks’ political role in the Principalities, local boyars continued to dominate the Divans in numerical terms. Between 1715 and 1800, the most important state offices were held by a total of 89 families. Among them were 37 Moldo-​Wallachian families, seven naturalized families, and 44 foreign families, mostly Greeks. Moldo-​Wallachian, or naturalized families made up 50.5 percent of great officeholders and cumulatively held office for a total of 512 years, while foreigners made up 49.5 percent of the number of officeholders but cumulatively held office for only 176  years. During the same period, 65.62 percent of the second-​rank offices were held by Moldo-​Wallachians (125 Romanian and 22 naturalized families), while 34.4 percent were held by foreigners (77 families). The local boyars thus continued to provide the social and political basis for the new regime. Although the Ottoman Greeks were still in minority as compared to the number of the local boyars, in practice they monopolized the most important state offices.These positions gave the Phanariot families the upper hand in public affairs.

Challenging the Pharariot regime Phanariot rule ended in 1821 under pressure from both external and internal forces. Externally, the Phanariot regime had led to a further decline in the international standing of the 38

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Principalities. During its tenure, Moldavia and Wallachia were increasingly assimilated de facto as regular Ottoman provinces, their internal autonomy was severely curtailed, their ruling princes were no longer elected by, and from the local boyars, and their nobility was further infiltrated by Greeks from the Ottoman Empire.Their financial obligations to the Porte grew significantly, becoming a major economic burden. Starting in the second half of the eighteenth century, the international status of the Principalities did gradually improve as they became subject to European attempts to regulate the borderlands between Tsarist Russia, the Habsburg Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. Russia’s westward territorial advance spawned a long series of wars between the three powers between 1768 and 1834. Moldavia and Wallachia served as a battleground for the Russo-​Turkish or Habsburg-​Ottoman wars in 1768–​74, 1787–​92, 1806–​12, and 1828–​34, and suffered military occupation for 19 of these 66 years. Most importantly, the two Principalities suffered significant territorial losses. In 1775, the northern part of Moldavia, called Bukovina, was annexed by the Habsburg Empire. In 1812, the eastern part of Moldavia between the Prut and Dniester rivers, subsequently called Bessarabia, was annexed by Russia. In addition, the Principalities became an international diplomatic issue and their status was regulated by successive treaties between Russia and the Ottoman Empire at Küçük Kaynarca (1774), Sistova (1791), Iași (1792), and Bucharest (1812). By these treaties, Russia increased its political influence in the Principalities as part of its general diplomatic offensive against the Ottoman Empire, wrapped in the banner of Orthodoxism and early pan-​Slavism. The starting point was the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774), which granted the Principalities the right to be represented at the High Porte by special diplomatic envoys or chargés d’affaires of the prince. Russian interference also followed from the request of Moldavian and Wallachian boyars, who hoped that the Tsar’s diplomatic “protection” would assist in asserting the autonomy of the Principalities. Starting in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the Moldavian and Wallachian great boyars addressed some 300 collective memorandums to Russia, the Porte, and to other European powers, asking for the restoration of the rights Moldavia and Wallachia held under the terms of the old treaties signed with the Porte. Internally, the fight for political hegemony between the local boyars and the Ottoman-​ Greek immigrants led to political turmoil. In order to uphold their corporate privileges, local boyars tried to reactivate former restrictions on naturalization for Greeks. These efforts were resisted by Phanariot princes, who were committed to keeping their Greek-​speaking entourage. The boyars also tried to resist the centralizing campaign of the Phanariot princes. By and large, the political conflict between the prince and the boyars was informed by two rival views on the political organization of the Principalities: the Phanariots promoted an autocratic political order based on the central powers of the prince, while the boyars pressed for the establishment of a “nobility’s regime” (stat boieresc), resembling the (former) Hungarian or Polish models. The local boyars revolted repeatedly against those princes who displayed centralizing tendencies and relied too heavily on the Greeks, as shown by riots against Matei Ghica (r. 1752–​3), Constantin Racoviță (r. 1756–​7), Constantin Mavrocordat (r. 1756–​8 and 1761–​3), and Ștefan Racoviță (r. 1764–​5) in Wallachia, and against Scarlat Ghica (r. 1757–​8), Ioan Teodor Callimachi (r. 1758–​61), and Grigore Calimachi (r. 1767–​9) in Moldavia.These five revolts in Wallachia and three in Moldavia ended, almost invariably, with the removal of the prince from office. Also undermining Phanariot rule was the emergence of modern Romanian and Greek nationalism. The Romanian national movement had its origins in the seventeenth century, in a Moldavian pro-​Polish and anti-​Greek cultural orientation. The Moldavian chroniclers Grigore Ureche and Miron Costin, and later the Moldavian scholar and prince Dimitrie Cantemir articulated the first arguments for the Romanians’ Latin origin. In the eighteenth century, these ideas found fertile soil in the activity of the “Transylvanian School” of 39

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Romanian Greek-​Catholic (Uniate) intellectual centers. Influenced by the ideas of the German Enlightenment, scholars such as Gheorghe Șincai, Petru Maior, and Inochentie Micu Klein transformed the idea of the “pure” Latin origin of the Romanians into a political weapon for the emancipation of the Romanians in Habsburg-​ruled Transylvania. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, this militant ideology was disseminated in the Principalities, as well, and directed against the Phanariots. The Transylvanian Gheorghe Lazăr (1779–​1823) and Aaron Florian (1805–​87) migrated to Wallachia and initiated a program of national awakening through education. This cultural program was continued by Wallachian and Moldavian scholars, most prominently Simion Marcovici (1802–​77), Ion Heliade Rădulescu (1802–​72), Nicolae Bălcescu (1819–​52), and Mihail Kogălniceanu (1817–​91). These political thinkers and revolutionary activitsts prepared the ground for a major cultural shift from (neo-​)Greek to a pro-​Western (mostly French) and anti-​Phanariot cultural orientation. At the political level, the Greek and Romanian national discourses moved apart after the anti-​Ottoman revolt instigated in 1821 by the conspiratorial Greek organization Philiki Hetaireia (Society of Friends). Drawing on its influence over the Phanariot princes, Hetaireia used the Principalities as an organizational base for launching a campaign for the liberation of Greece. Though initially collaborating with Hetaireia, the Wallachian revolt in 1821 led by Tudor Vladimirescu went ahead in an autonomous, anti-​Phanariot direction.Vladimirescu demanded comprehensive sociopolitical reforms but also the restoration of the “ancient rights” of the Principalities, the removal of Phanariot rulers, and the election of princes from the ranks of local boyars. Ultimately, the collaboration of the Phanariot princes with the anti-​Ottoman Hetaireia and the Wallachian revolt undermined the credibility of the Phanariot regime in the eyes of the Sultan. Following the defeat of the Hetaireia in 1821, the local boyars intensified their campaign to delegitimize their Ottoman-​Greek rivals in order to end the Phanariot regime. An 1822 memoir to the Sultan on behalf of the Moldavian boyars and urban strata denounced the “invasion of Constantinople-​based Greeks” portraying them as “infidels,” disloyal to the empire and harmful to the Principalities. The plea of the local boyars was successful, the Porte appointing to the throne the native princes Ioniţă Sandu Sturdza in Moldavia (r. 1822–​8) and Grigore Dimitrie Ghica in Wallachia (r. 1822–​8). Following the end of Phanariot rule, the local princes took significant steps toward consolidating the Principalities’ internal autonomy, such as the elimination of the Ottoman trade monopoly in the Principalities, the formal delimitation of the border with the empire on the Danube, and the creation of a local militia (1829). At the same time, reflecting the steady increase of Russian political influence, the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829 placed the Principalities under the dual authority of the Ottoman Empire, as the suzerain power, and of Russia, as the protecting power. The end of the Phanariot regime eliminated the Phanariot princes and their entourage. They were replaced by an estate regime of the local nobility, as authorized by the Organic Statutes during temporary Russian occupation (1828–​34) that followed the Russo-​Ottoman War of 1828–​9. Under this new aristocratic regime, the frictions among local versus Ottoman-​ Greek factions of the great nobility lost political relevance, the distinctions between the two groups being gradually attenuated by assimilation and matrimonial alliances. Culturally, the post-​Phanariot period was dominated by an emerging Romantic nationalist movement of “regeneration.” Arguing for the unification and the modernization of the Principalities following Western models, the proponents of this movement criticized the Old Regime as a period of decline and degeneration at the hands of foreign exploiters, equated with the Phanariots.Thus, despite the fact that Phanariot rule had come to an end, the anti-​Phanariot discourse continued to figure prominently in the emerging Romanian national ideology. The 40

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program of the 1848 Revolution, in particular, stigmatized the Phanariot rule as a corrupt, decadent, and largely anti-​national regime. But the anti-​Phanariot rhetoric extended well beyond this period, into the era of parliamentary democracy instituted in 1866. Notwithstanding the disappearance of the Phanariots as political actors, they continued to be scapegoated in vitriolic political pamphlets as greedy exploiters, social corrupters, and parvenus who made their fortune by ruthlessly exploiting the peasantry. The main carriers of this discourse were various strata of the lower nobility: eager to share into the privileges of the great nobility, the lower nobility articulated a patriotic yet often also xenophobic discourse meant to eliminate competition for resources from rival groups, by denouncing them as non-​national. Negative stereotypes on the Phanariots as retrograde Oriental elites, as anti-​national elements, and as an obstacle to progress penetrated history textbooks for primary and secondary schools as well, shaping the historical imagination of the new generations. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the historiographical discourse on Phanariot rule became, gradually, more nuanced. Neo-​Hellenist scholars such as Constantin Erbiceanu and historians of a new generations such as A. D. Xenopol, V. A. Urechea, and Nicolae Iorga attempted to “normalize” the Phanariot period by integrating it into a longer-​term historical perspective and by putting into balance negative as well as positive aspects of the Phanariots’ rule. More recently, the history of the Phanariot regime has been addressed by Romanian, Greek, and foreign historians from new methodological and historiographic perspectives. All this has done little to alter the negative and deeply entrenched stereotypes in popular culture. In modern Romanian political language, “Phanariot” continues to be a term of opprobrium associated with corruption, venality, and opportunism.

Selected Readings Drace-​Francis, Alex. The Making of Modern Romanian Culture:  Literacy and the Development of National Identity. London, 2012. Georgescu, Vlad. Political Ideas and the Enlightenment in the Romanian Principalities, 1750–​1831. Boulder, Colo., 1971. Georgescu,Vlad. Istoria ideilor politice românesti, 1369–​1878. Munich, 1987. Hitchins, Keith. The Rumanians, 1774–​1866. Oxford, 1996. Iordachi, Constantin. Liberalism, Constitutional Nationalism, and Minorities:  The Making of Romanian Citizenship, c. 1750–​1918. Leiden, 2019. Institute for Balkan Studies. L’Époque phanariote. Symposium, 21–​25 octobre 1970. Á la mémoire de Cléobule Tsurkas. Thessaloniki,  1974. Iorga, Nicolae. Cultura română supt fanarioţ. Bucharest, 1898. Kitromilides, Paschalis M. and Anna Tabaki, eds., Relations gréco-​roumaines. Interculturalité et identité nationale. Athens, 2004. Philliou, Christine M. Biography of an Empire:  Practicing Ottoman Governance in the Age of Revolutions. Berkeley, Cal., 2010. Pippidi, Andrei. “Nicolas Soutzo (1798–​1871) et la faillite du régime phanariote dans les Principautés Roumaines,” Revue des études sud-​est européennes 6 (1968): 313–​38. Pippidi, Andrei. Tradiţia politică bizantină în ţările române în secolele XVI–​XVIII. Bucharest, 1983. Țipău, Mihai. Domnii Fanarioți în Țrile Române (1711–​1821). Bucharest, 2008. Xenopol, A. D. Epoca fanarioţilor 1711–​1821. Iaşi, 1892.

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4 OTTOMAN BOSNIA AND THE BOSNIAN MUSLIMS Leyla Amzi-​Erdogdular

Introduction Ottomans were in Bosnia even before Constantinople became the Ottoman imperial capital. Strategic territorial incursions, interference in regional politics, and trade links with Venice, along with itinerant Sufi preachers and lodges, all made the Ottoman presence felt in Bosna by the turn of the fifteenth century. Incorporation of the medieval Bosnian territories into the Ottoman Empire was completed by the end of the century when Bosnia became the springboard for further expansion north, conquering Hungary and reaching the gates of Vienna in 1529. Bosnian Slav inhabitants accepted Islam in larger numbers than in other regions of the Balkans, becoming a majority and developing a distinct sociocultural identity tied to their region and dialect. While administrative borders and provincial arrangement shifted over the centuries, the Ottoman province of Bosnia remained within the current borders of Bosnia-​Herzegovina. Until the nineteenth century, it included the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, inhabited by a Slav Muslims and Orthodox Christian population, now divided between Serbia and Montenegro. The province of Bosnia also included Ottoman territories in Slavonia, Lika, and Dalmatia at the height of Ottoman expansion. With the loss of these lands to the Habsburgs in the last years of the seventeenth century, Bosnia became the westernmost province of the Ottoman Empire, as well as the fortified borderland against a growing adversary, the Habsburg monarchy. Being an important part of the Ottoman sociopolitical and economic system helped to integrate Bosnia and its inhabitants into the Ottoman polity, yet an exceptionalism parallel to this integration allowed for significant autonomy to the province and its peoples. Significant strides were made in implementing the nineteenth-​ century Ottoman reforms in Bosnia-​Herzegovina, despite resistance by the local Bosnian Muslim notables. Finally, this Ottoman province was awarded to Austria-​Hungary at the Berlin Congress in 1878. Full annexation in 1908 ended any formal connection to the Ottoman Empire.Yet many Ottoman continuities lasted well into the twentieth century and are visible also today.

Urbanization and the vakufs The first larger settlements in Bosnia, Sarajevo, and Novi Pazar, reached the status of towns in the fifteenth century as part of Ottoman consolidation that included rapid creation of cities, 42

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and building of roads and bridges. Their purpose was to improve communication and trade networks across Bosnia to Dalmatia and Venice in the west and Hungary in the north, also linking them to Salonica and Constantinople. Sultan Mehmet II, the great city’s conqueror in 1453, led the Ottoman forces himself in 1463 to complete the occupation of the Bosnia sanjak, the Ottoman military-​administrative unit, later expanding to Herzegovina. Urban facilities were established by imperially decreed pious endowments (vakuf) and similar efforts by governors and other high officials. Imperial mosques were built in most major cities in Bosnia with endowments containing public baths, schools, soup kitchens, public water fountains, inns, dervish lodges, aqueducts, bridges, mills, and guesthouses. The first neighborhoods were then built around these mosques, situating them at the city center. In Bosnia, as in the rest of the empire, caravanserais –​inns within towns and along the roads were built to enable travel and trade. Bazaars –​urban covered markets where merchandise was sold –​were also erected as pious endowments. Local crafts and the guild system characteristic of Ottoman urban environments developed in Bosnia too, often affiliated with the Sufi orders. Networks of roads and bridges built by the Ottomans facilitated the uninterrupted flow of goods and peoples and prompted the growth of cities and their economic activities, also enhanced by imperial exemptions from various taxes and obligations. The celebrated Ottoman travel writer, Evliya Çelebi (1611–​82), described Banja Luka as having 300 shops and a covered bazaar with 100 shops. In this city alone, the sixteenth century governor of Bosnia and later Hungary’s Buda, Ferhad Pasha Sokolović (d. 1586) built 216 public buildings through his own pious endowment –​the most prominent being the Ferhadija Mosque, razed by Bosnian Serbs campaign in the war of the 1990s, and reconstructed with UNESCO assistance in 2016. Similarly, Isa Beg Ishaković (d. 1470?), the founder of Novi Pazar and Sarajevo, endowed sprawling building complexes of which some are still in use.Yet another governor’s endowment, that of Gazi Husrev Beg (1480–​1541), advanced Sarajevo’s development as a regional center and defined the city’s Old Town, still a distinctive feature of the city today. Educational institutions were likewise financed by pious endowments, as was the practice in much of the Muslim world. Mekteb elementary schools were widespread, while schools of higher learning, the medresa existed in major cities. The institutions in Sarajevo, Mostar, and Prusac became renowned for the quality of the education they offered. Known for its iconic bridge, Mostar had ten madrasas at the end of the seventeenth century. Ottoman pious endowments played a central role in the infrastructural, urban, and institutional development of Bosnia-​ Herzegovina, making it a relevant trading, educational, and cultural center in Southeastern Europe.

Population and Islamization The Ottoman state oversaw its diverse population through the millet system that provided substantial autonomy to the non-​Muslim religious communities and their institutions, and power to their ecclesiastical hierarchies. While in Bosnia in 1463, Sultan Mehmed Fatih himself guaranteed extensive freedom in a charter to the Bosnian Catholic Franciscans. Bosnian Orthodox Christians were under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate in Constantinople and also the Peć Patriarchy. It was in fact in the Ottoman period that Orthodox Christianity penetrated beyond eastern Bosnia, where a number of Orthodox Christian churches and monasteries were built and spread Orthodox Christianity in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Orthodox Christian numbers were further increased by resettlement of peasants on arable lands, in particular from Montenegro as well as transhumant Vlachs. Sephardi Jews, fleeing persecution in the Iberian Peninsula settled in

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Sarajevo, Salonica, and Constantinople in large numbers, adding to the cosmopolitan character of these cities.Virtually no significant Turkish settlement took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Islamization there and in other parts of the Balkans was a gradual process. Conversions to Islam in Bosnia-​Herzegovina were more intensive in the first two centuries after the establishment of Ottoman rule and continued, though to a lesser degree as late as the nineteenth century. Bosnian and Albanian native populations became the only ones predominantly Muslim in the Balkans. Their Islamization was closely related to enhanced communication, developing urban environments, and the incorporation of the province and Muslim converts into the Ottoman sociopolitical and administrative core, especially where no strong religious alternative or church oversight existed. Dervish lodges were established in almost all the early settlements, reflecting the role of Sufi brotherhoods in the spread of Islam. Ottoman census records show that Bosnian cities were overwhelmingly Muslim, followed by surrounding villages and settlements along the main roads and rivers. Until the twentieth century, however, the majority of all Bosnians, including Muslims, were peasants living outside the towns and cities. Bosnians were also conscripted into the devshirme, the Ottoman practice of recruiting young Christian boys, mostly from its Balkan provinces, converting them to Islam and educating them in the Palace for imperial service. Since many in Bosnia-​Herzegovina had converted to Islam, an exception was made to include them in the system. Such an exception was also made for Albanian and Abaza Muslims. Already in the fifteenth century, Bosnians attained some of the highest positions in the Ottoman Empire. Such was Gazi Atik Ali Pasha (d. 1511), the illustrious military commander, administrator, Grand Vizier, and patron of many educational and religious establishments. Perhaps the best-​known was Sokollu Mehmed Pasha (Sokolović) (d. 1579), the Grand Vizier who served three Sultans. He was one of the most influential men of his time in the Empire, hailing from a prominent family network rooted in the Ottoman system. Rising through the ranks, men from Bosnia-​Herzegovina served in the military and the administrative apparatus of the Empire up until its very end: they were governors of far flung provinces and fought in Ottoman wars as far away as Persia and the Caucasus. Only in the second half of the sixteenth century, nine Bosnians held the office of the Grand Vizier, the most powerful office in the Empire after that of the sultan. A Bosnian religious scholar was appointed Şeyhülislam, the chief religious authority in the Ottoman Empire, as late as the mid-​nineteenth century. In addition to serving in the military-​administrative system, Bosnian Muslims made their mark in literature. They wrote in Arabic, Persian, and the Bosnian vernacular, contributing to Islamic science and scholarship as well as literature. The Bosnian Slavic language was written in western Cyrillic also known as Bosančica in the medieval period, but it was replaced by a modified Arabic-​Persian script with the arrival of the Ottomans. Writing Bosnian in Arabic script became known as Arebica and classified as Aljamiado literature, while Bosančica continued to exist in correspondence. The first Bosnian-​Ottoman dictionary was compiled in 1631 and Bosnian remained the dominant language in the province throughout the Ottoman period. Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Persian were included in an educational system that enabled Bosnian Muslims to participate in the Muslim literary and later publishing world into the twentieth century. Sevdalinka, a corpus of traditional poetic-​performances original to Bosnia-​ Herzegovina also emerged in the Ottoman era. The earliest written record of this orally transmitted poetry sung in Bosnian and historically attributed to Bosnian Muslims date back to the early eighteenth century, although its performance and composition was not limited to them. The memoir of Ahmet Cevdet Pasha (1822–​95), an Ottoman High Inspector in Bosnia-​ Herzegovina, described the central role of Sevdalinka songs and music in the relations between young people and their courtship, finding it remarkable that the young women could thereby marry by courtship rather than by parental arrangement. 44

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The land regime Bosnia, including Herzegovina, became one of the core provinces of the Empire early in Ottoman expansion. It benefited from the establishment of the classical Ottoman state apparatus, land organization, and rapid infrastructural development. Bosnia was included in the Ottoman timar system of land holding. The Sultan granted non-​hereditary rights to land tied to military service, making up the Ottoman sipahi cavalry officer corps, which in its early formation included Muslims as well as Christians, soon required to convert. The timar-​holding sipahis had a right to collect a specified profit from the land and held an administrative role as representatives of the state in their domain. Whereas the Ottoman legal, administrative, and military system was rather consistent, it was flexible enough to be adjusted to various provinces and their existing socioeconomic structures. In Bosnia alone, as in the rest of the Balkans, land and taxation arrangements took account of variations in agricultural production, considerations of topography, land productivity, and transhumant pastoralism. Unlike the other Ottoman provinces, however, the exceptions to the structures introduced in Bosnia had long-​lasting consequences. Already in 1516, an imperial edict confirmed that the timar-​holders in Bosnia could only be locals, diverging from the Ottoman practice of assigning timar lands in various parts of the Empire and sometimes rotating them in order to prevent the development of locally entrenched elites. Furthermore, the timar lands in Bosnia became hereditary –​ the so-​called ocaklık-​timar was not only inherited by the male progeny of the original timar-​holders but over time by the extended family, including women. Bosnia and Herzegovina also had kapetanije, a system of captaincies that served as border administrative-​military units, led by hereditary notables who protected the borders and roads in their districts. With the Ottomans firmly established in Bosnia, the province became the base for further Ottoman expansion into Hungarian lands. Bosnian and Croatian forces participated with the conquering Ottoman armies, most prominently in the decisive Battle of Mohács in 1526. They also took part in the administration and rule of the new provinces. Over 20 governors of Buda were Bosnian. Migration for settlement, land tenure, and creation of pious endowments that financed other institutions in Bosnia and across the empire now spread northward.

Military borderland By the end of the seventeenth century, however, costly wars with Austria forced the Ottomans out of Hungary, Slavonia, and Dalmatia. Worn down by participation in these and other frequent Ottoman wars, bandit and Austrian incursions, one of which under Prince Eugen of Savoy torched Sarajevo, the Bosnian population was further decimated by several bouts of plague. Bosnia’s economy suffered from the territorial contraction, loss of revenues, the disruption of trade, and also currency inflation troubling the entire Ottoman Empire. Muslims in the lost lands were expelled or forced to convert, their properties lost, and place names changed.The experience left an impression on the inhabitants of Bosnia who expected any further Austrian expansion to impact them, now in the first line of defense, in the most detrimental way. Becoming a border region, Bosnia-​Herzegovina underwent administrative and military reorganization. Focusing on defense, old forts were re-​enforced and new ones built. Provincial communication and infrastructure were strengthened to create a succession of border and inland military zones led by local notables who were to mobilize their own forces. The number of captaincies increased, spreading even in the interior. New wartime taxes were introduced. As the wars with Austria continued and the bandit incursions from Dalmatia and Montenegro disrupted trade and threatened safety in the areas of the province far beyond the border regions, 45

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more local Muslim peasants were recruited to fight and received tax exemptions. War readiness was the main task of Bosnian governors. They relied heavily on local manpower as well as leadership by the Bosnian district notables, with whom the governor began to hold a regular council. A brief incursion by Austrian forces into Serbia in 1737 cut Bosnia off from Constantinople and military reinforcement, but the governor led the Bosnian notables and their local armies to defeat singlehandedly a coordinated Austrian attack on the northwestern city of Banja Luka.

The ayans The developments in Bosnia-​Herzegovina overlapped with Empire-​wide difficulties. By the eighteenth century, the institutions on which the Ottoman state rested had been transformed. The Janissaries, whose recruitment by devşirme ceased, increasingly became obsolete in the battlefield and focused on maintaining their salaries, and tax and other legal exemptions. Some Muslims began illicitly buying membership of the Janissary corps in order to acquire these benefits without participating in the military campaigns. The sipahi corps, whose timar revenues and therefore their numbers diminished, also lagged behind in adopting new military technology based on artillery. As the Ottoman expansion slowed down and no new lands were being added, chiftlik holdings proliferated. Sipahis appropriated village lands as their own and forced peasants to work the land under conditions that were more restrictive than the timar system. They often included requirements of unpaid peasant labor for the chiftlik owner and other burdens to which the peasants reacted with rebellions and flight. The collection of taxes became a dominant focus for the state and its provincial governors, who increasingly relied on the local notables, ayan, to institute the reformed tax system. The Ottoman regime gradually introduced lifetime leases for tax farming to collect the state’s share and to prevent overtaxing the peasants who worked the land. While the new practice achieved satisfactory results in the short run, tax farming created new problems for the state. Despite Ottoman efforts to centralize the appointment and control the conduct of the ayans and their district councils, the ayans were successful in exploiting their interrelated positions as landowners, tax-​farmers, local tax assessors, and military recruiters in their regions. The institution of the vakıf was also distorted to transfer land and buildings into an endowment that primarily benefited the donors and their descendants. The original religious and charitable purposes of the endowments were set aside. In certain areas of the Empire, including the Balkans, leading tax-​farmer ayans presided over their councils and proceeded independently from a central government that had little recourse when they challenged it. Given the range of exemptions that Bosnia already had in terms of land, taxation, and sovereignty of the provincial elites, the new measures made Bosnian notables even more independent from central oversight. Their unprecedented autonomy in the province opened the way to rampant abuse of power, excessive taxation, nepotism, and the like, as well as the freedom to freely interpret and evade imperial orders. For instance, Bosnian notables resisted the call from the Porte to participate in yet another military campaign in Ukraine in 1770, citing the need to protect their own border region from imminent Austrian attack. It took four years even to force the collection of a war tax. After a peace treaty by which Austria returned all but one of the border fortified towns to the Ottomans in 1791, local notables refused to allow the marking of the new border. Taking advantage of the French-​Austrian conflict in Dalmatia, they retook the fort on their own accord, but sought the Porte’s help when they were caught in between the two powers. It is therefore no surprise that the Bosnian Muslim notables defied the broad-​spectrum reforms, known as reordering (Tanzimat), which were announced by Sultan Selim III at the turn of the nineteenth century and implemented by Mahmud II beginning in 1826. 46

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Tanzimat Resistance to the new military order, the reorganization of the tax system, and the abolition of the Janissaries under the Tanzimat reforms was particularly strong in Bosnia-​Herzegovina. Its independent notables and numerous Janissaries rejected the Ottoman reforms that would curtail their political power and economic privileges. Anticipating resistance, the Ottoman central administration even attempted to fill the newly reconfigured provincial positions from among the notables, but they unanimously refused, united in safeguarding their independence. Led by Husein-​kapetan Gradaščević (1802–​34), Bosnian ayans confronted and defeated the imperial army of Sultan Mahmud II in 1831. The Ottoman governor was forced to flee, and Gradaščević declared himself governor of Bosnia. The ayans claimed that the reforms were un-​ Islamic and demanded that no such reforms be implemented in Bosnia. They demanded that their properties, rights, and exemptions as they already existed in the province be protected and that future governors be appointed from their number. Bosnian ayans were in communication with other like-​minded Balkan ayans, turned warlords such as Işkodralı Mustafa Pasha Bushatli, who similarly resisted the implementation of imperial reform measures. The Sublime Porte also found evidence that some ayans received monetary aid from the Serbian leader Miloš Obrenović and the ruler of Egypt, Mehmed Ali, the latter hoping that the central authorities would be busy in the Balkans letting him expand in the Middle East without interruption. Forces led by Gradaščević were soon defeated. He fled to the Habsburg territories and was eventually exiled to Constantinople. The most powerful Bosnian ayans were politically and physically eliminated by 1850. Bushatli was also defeated and exiled, then served as governor in Anatolia and later Herzegovina. These notables’ actions and demands were aimed at protecting their power and privileges but never stepping away from an Ottoman framework, on which they based their legitimacy. The center continued trying to reintegrate them into the new state structures. The notables lost direct control of their land and tax exemptions but preserved their regional authority and wealth. The state had reasserted itself but then still relied on the notables in the reordering. Participation by Bosnians in the new Ottoman army was accepted but only after the notables negotiated that the soldiers serve only within Bosnia, only under local commanders, and for limited years of service.

Ottoman modernity Although short lived, the Tanzimat period in Bosnia introduced measures and set foundations for modernizing all aspects of society, especially in cities, from legal and administrative organization, economy, infrastructure, and secularization of the shariʿa law to modern education, printing presses, and notions of civil rights, constitutional government, and the power of public opinion.The provinces of Bosnia and Danube in Rumelia were the first to experience the new vilayet form of regional organization. The most important feature of the new system was the introduction of representative councils at different levels of administration that included both elected and appointed members. Along the traditional schools, mekteb and medrese, modern elementary and higher schools were introduced based on a modern curriculum. In a short time, administrative (Mekteb-​i hukuk) and teachers’ (Dar ul-​muallimin) schools opened in Sarajevo, educating the first generation of modern bureaucrats and teachers in the spirit of the Tanzimat. During the tenure of Topal Şerif Osman Pasha (1861–​9), Bosnia-​Herzegovina’s enlightened Ottoman governor, the province experienced the most successful application of the Tanzimat. In addition to reorganizing the province and building roads, railways, schools, hospitals, and libraries, Topal Şerif Osman Pasha instituted an inter-​confessional provincial assembly and 47

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executive council. The intensity of anti-​Ottoman nationalist propaganda coming from Croatia and Serbia, especially through the textbooks for confessional schools and the publications imported to Bosnia-​Herzegovina, as well as in a number of missionary schools established in this period, impelled the governor to introduce comparable local sources of Ottoman influence. His longest-​lasting effect on cultural reform in Bosnia was the setting up of the official vilayet printing press in 1866 and the launching of two newspapers Bosanski vijesnik (Bosnian Herald) in Bosnian Cyrillic script, and Bosna (Bosnia) in Bosnian and Turkish.The vilayet press published books and other publications in Turkish and Bosnian until 1878. The printing of the Salname-​i vilayet-​i Bosna, the Ottoman official yearbook for the vilayet of Bosnia, was initiated the same year and continued until 1892, with a three-​year interruption after the Habsburg occupation in 1878. An official paper of the Herzegovina vilayet was Neretva, published in 1876. At the request of Mehmet Šakir Kurtćehajić (1844–​72), the governor approved the launching of another paper, Sarajevski cvjetnik (Gülşen-​i saray) in 1869. In this paper, Kurtćehajić, a journalist and educator, member of the provincial assembly, and mayor of Sarajevo, expressed his views on identity and patriotism based on contemporary intellectual currents in the Ottoman Empire. A longtime supporter of modernization, Kurtćehajić and his peers followed the trends in Istanbul, in particular Young Ottoman thought. Its dedication to multicultural citizenship in the Empire was very much applicable in multi-​religious Bosnia-​Herzegovina. Governor Topal Şerif Osman Pasha, just like the Habsburg governor Benjamin Kállay some decades later, encouraged the idea of Bosnianism. They both saw it as a form of regional identity that would counter the nationalistic propaganda threatening the province and endangering imperial rule in the Balkans in general.

Peasant uprisings and the end of Ottoman rule Ottoman reform measures featured introduction of equal citizenship and a uniform agricultural tax rate but were, paradoxically, received with displeasure as the state encroached upon the life of all the subjects as never before. It aggravated the Bosnian Muslims who saw their privileges lost, while the Christian populations resented the new obligations and the intrusion of the state. The ecclesiastical hierarchies lost the power that they had held for centuries as part of the millet system. The state became ever present through widespread administrative oversight, telegraph communication, conscription, new roads, and railroad lines. The central government confronted the overwhelmingly agricultural Ottoman domains with its land surveys, recording of deeds, and taxation of both the landlords and the peasants. The fact that the majority of the peasants were Christian and the landlords Muslim, set the struggle in religious and subsequently, national terms. Abuses of position and power were however more from class than from religious differences. As the process of creating chiftlik land holdings spread in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the nineteenth century, several peasant rebellions were reactions to the excessive burden and exploitation by the landlords. The Ottoman Land Law of 1858 was intended to address these abuses directly. It introduced greater oversight of agricultural land distribution and usage, promoted stable tenure, and fair, reliable taxation.This law, later adopted by the Habsburg administration in Bosnia, became the basis of land claims in the first decades of the twentieth century in Austria-​ Hungary and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.Yet the initial implementation was slow and difficult as the notables worked to retain their lands, their produce, and their power over Muslim and Christian peasants. When the tax collectors insisted on making their collections despite the bad harvest in 1875, the Christian peasants in Herzegovina rose against the landlords. The uprising spread to other 48

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regions, northwestern Bosnia in particular. Some peasants left for Habsburg territory and used it as a safe haven from which to conduct attacks on Ottoman Bosnia.They were joined by Serbian and Montenegrin volunteers and commanders and supplied with weapons from Serbia. The Ottoman army struggled to handle simultaneous insurrections in the province’s north, east, and south, as well as attacks from Serbia which soon declared war. The insurgents disrupted normal life, agriculture, trade, and personal security and caused migrations within and from Bosnia and Herzegovina. An agreement between Russia and Austria-​Hungary promised the province to the Habsburgs in return for their non-​involvement in the impending Russo-​Ottoman war. Serbian support for the insurgents ceased after their hopes for incorporating Bosnia and Herzegovina into the Serbian lands were thus dashed.The Ottoman forces managed to establish order in most regions although some banditry continued. The insurgents were offered amnesty and repatriation. Remaining bandit groups perpetuated the state of rebellion by destroying homes, infrastructure, and crops, and posing a threat to the returnees.The insecurities and unrest especially in the border regions of the province caused enough migration, murder, disease, and hunger to decimate the population. The censuses from 1870 and 1879 recorded a 35 percent decline in the number of Muslims. Owing to this uprising and unrest, the European Great Powers yet again became involved in the Ottoman Balkans, and Bosnia-​Herzegovina became part of the Eastern Question. At the Berlin Congress in 1878, the Ottoman representatives resisted the otherwise unanimously approved plan to allow a Habsburg mandate in Bosnia and Herzegovina.They based their argument on the fact that Bosnia-​Herzegovina had been Ottoman territory for hundreds of years, and that Muslims were a majority in the province. They also claimed that the Bosnian people wished to stay under Ottoman administration. Failing in their appeal, the Ottomans accepted the Habsburg mandate with the caveat that the sovereign rights of the Sultan in Bosnia and Herzegovina would be maintained and that the occupation was temporary in nature. Since the unique and legally vague status of such an administration was also new, the Habsburg and Ottoman empires with their shared Bosnian subjects all had opportunities to exploit the ambiguities of this situation to their benefit until Austria-​Hungary eventually annexed the province in 1908, in the turmoil of the Young Turk Revolution in the Ottoman Empire.

Selected Readings Aščerić-​Todd, Ines. Dervishes and Islam in Bosnia: Sufi Dimensions to the Formation of Bosnian Muslim Society. Leiden, 2015. Grandits, Hannes. Herrschaft und Loyalität in der spätosmanischen Gesellschaft: das Beispiel der multikonfessionellen Herzegowina.Vienna,  2008. Hajdarpasic, Edin. Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–​1914. Ithaca, NY, 2015. Hickok, Michael R. Ottoman Military Administration in Eighteenth-​Century Bosnia. Leiden, 1997. Karčić, Fikret. The Bosniaks and Challenges of Modernity. Sarajevo, 1999. Koller, Markus and Kemal H. Karpat. Ottoman Bosnia: A History in Peril. Madison, Wis., 2004.

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PART II

 

Nation-​ and state-​building, 1815–1914

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OVERVIEW Nations and states between changing borders and the Great Powers in the “long” nineteenth century John R. Lampe

By the last decade before the First World War, five independent states stood in place of the Ottoman regime whose Sultan had been the sovereign ruler of their considerable territory at the start of the nineteenth century. In 1912, Albania joined Greece, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Montenegro as the sixth post-​Ottoman state. National armies supported the sovereignty of these states. Legislative assemblies elected by increased male suffrage and from established political parties contested for, or shared power with European-​style monarchies and ministerial bureaucracies. In the Habsburg borderlands, similar domestic assemblies and parties were challenging governance under Austrian rule in Carniola, Dalmatia, the Vojvodina and the Bukovina, Hungarian rule in Croatia-​Slavonia and Transylvania, or the joint administration in Bosnia-​Herzegovina. Contested issues of national identity continued to divide the independent states from each other and ethnic groups within the remaining borderlands, as reviewed in Diana Mishkova’s chapter below. These divisions had not however prevented the emergence of more representative government and greater public order in the independent states. A largely free press challenged persisting political corruption, and several parties now represented the huge peasant majority. Only Ottoman Macedonia saw the ethnic violence and the internal disorder of the contemporary Balkan stereotype.There, however, Slavic speakers mixed with speakers of Greek, Turkish, Albanian, and Aromunian provided the ground for the violent politicization of ethnicity. Religious divisions extended from Muslims to separate Orthodox Churches for Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs. Divisions in Bosnia-​Herzegovina between settlements of Bosnian Muslims, Serbs, and Croats remained to be managed for the new Habsburg administration after its transfer from Ottoman rule to Austria-​Hungary in 1878. The large Romanian settlement overlapping with Hungarians in Austro-​Hungarian Transylvania posed a similar problem. This Overview concentrates on the turning points in foreign relations and compares the resulting Balkan state-​building in borders that repeatedly changed. Regional borders were changed not by internal disorder but by warfare, upheavals, or retreat in the surrounding Ottoman or Habsburg Empires and by intervention from the Great Powers. After the Russo-​ Ottoman War of 1827–​8 and the Ottoman reforms of 1839, a series of further turning points began with the abortive European Revolutions of 1848, continued with the Crimean War 53

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of 1854–​7, and concluded with the Habsburg restructuring into Austria-​Hungary in 1867. The most portentous turning point came from the broader settlement of the Russo-​Ottoman War of 1877–​8. The Berlin Treaty redrew regional borders to Balkan national advantage and Ottoman territory suffered the further loss of Bosnia-​Herzegovina to Austria-​Hungary. With fixed borders in place (see Map 4.1), the Great Powers made only joint interventions until 1906. Then French financial diplomacy helped Serbia win its 1906–​11 tariff war with Austria-​ Hungary. In 1908, the Young Turk Revolution and the Austro-​Hungarian decision to annex Bosnia-​Herzegovina constituted a final set of turning points, disrupting the post-​1878 balance between the independent states and the remaining imperial borderlands. The disruption also brought Russia, just allied with the Anglo-​French Entente, into confrontation with Austria-​ Hungary and its German ally. The nine chapters below that follow Mishkova’s regional review concentrate instead on the specific dynamics of nation and state-​building in both the independent states and the Ottoman and Habsburg borderlands. Roumen Daskalov addresses Bulgarian politics and Constantin Iordachi the issue of land reform in Romania. Iskra Iveljić follows Croatian politics across the nineteenth century, Gregor Kranjc starts with Slovenian culture and its cooperative movement later in the century, and Dubravka Stojanović concentrates on the promise of the last pre-​ 1914 decade in Serbia. Keith Brown reviews the violent rivalries challenging Ottoman rule in Macedonia. Robert J. Donia appraises the Austro-​Hungarian occupation and annexation of Bosnia-​Herzegovina, and Roumiana Preshlenova the monarchy’s role across the region. On the role of public finance in state-building, see Chapter 30.

1829–​1847: Balkan nations and states after Ottoman retreat and reform National government within a European state framework started in Serbia, Greece, and the Romanian Principalities in 1829 after Ottoman defeat in its war with Russia forced the Sultan’s regime to make formal concessions to self-​rule. Armed revolts against Ottoman rule in Serbia and Greece had already provided military experience and stirred national pride. After a First Serbian Uprising was brutally suppressed in 1813 and its leader Karadjordje exiled, a Second Uprising in 1814–​5 forced the Ottoman Porte to grant informal autonomy within reduced borders.The new leader, Miloš Obrenović saw Karadjordje only as a rival and had him killed in 1817. Serbia would thereby enter the rest of the century with claims to the throne from both of their descendants. Greece would not have even one family with such a claim. The Greek diaspora there mounted a failed military expedition from Russia but found support in mainland Greece from the armatoloi, the same armed upland bands as in Serbia. They launched their own revolt. No single leader emerged in their internal struggles with the civilian and clerical notables from the Peloponnese south and its sea traders over two abortive constitutions. To win agreement on a third constitution in 1827, they turned for their first president to the Greek diaspora and Ioannis Kapodistrias, who had risen to ministerial rank in Tsarist Russia. The mainly British naval victory at Lepanto a few months later and then the Russian military victory again over the Ottomans in 1828–​9 prompted Great Power recognition of Greece’s independence in 1829. Both the Serbian and Greek leaders tried and failed to address the challenge of civil governance. Prince Miloš’s Serbia won formal autonomy in 1830 and a further Ottoman concession restored the pre-​1813 borders in 1833. Proudly illiterate, he continued his arbitrary rule as before, consulting only a few advisors but winning support for land offered free to Serb immigrants. His personal powers included a trading monopoly, however, that met increasing domestic resistance. Encouraged by a British counsel, opponents including members of the Karadjorjević family forced him to sign a constitution limiting his powers in 1838 and then 54

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to abdicate in 1839. The Constitutionalists were able to use the appointment of Aleksander Karadjordjević as new Prince in 1842 to begin the formation of European-​style ministries. Serbian migration from Habsburg Novi Sad made up for the shortage of educated candidates. These prečani (from across the river) joined with others from the first Serbian schools and a military academy to become the largest part of Belgrade’s growing population. In Athens, chosen as the capital for its heritage from ancient Greece, Kapodistrias struggled to establish public administration, an army, and new schools. Facing opposition from competing groups, he tried to govern arbitrarily until assassinated in 1831. The guaranteeing powers of Britain, France, and Russia stepped in to reach agreement with the Porte in 1832 on a hereditary monarch chosen from lesser European nobility. The young Wittelsbach prince Otto of Bavaria arrived with his own troops and three Bavarian regents to govern until his majority in 1835. Under a mixture of Bavarian and Greek appointees, they filled out the state ministries. Greek opposition appealed to the British, French, or Russian Embassies for support. In 1843, an army coup forced out Bavarian ministers and diaspora appointees. Otto stayed under the new constitution of 1844. It promised universal male suffrage but left representatives to the resulting parliament dependent on patronage from the three embassies. Political reform was left to the growing state ministries. In the Romanian Principalities, a peasant revolt in 1821 made little headway and did not leave a military legacy as in Serbia and Greece. Modernizing reform started instead with the Russian Protectorate and the changes imposed from 1830 to 1834 by its able administrator, Count Pavel Kiselev. He quickly established a set of six new state ministries for each of the two Principalities and enforced a new legal code based on the Russian version of Napoleon’s Organic Regulations. The landed Romanian nobility, the boyars, resisted his elimination of their rights to venal appointments and tax collection. A single new head tax gave his ministries enough revenue to establish a public health service and a grain reserve. After his departure, a joint-​Russo-​Ottoman commission agreed on a Romanian ruler (hospodar) for each Principality for a term of seven years. They maintained separate ministries but agreed on a customs union between the two of them by 1847. In Ottoman Bulgaria, a national revival had already begun before the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms of 1839 allowed further initiatives, still short of armed resistance or political autonomy. The monk Father Paiisi had written to celebrate the Bulgarian language and pre-​Ottoman history as early as the 1760s. By the 1830s, it was the spread of printed Bulgarian that led a revival based on language rather than religion. The prosperity from textile manufacture and trade in the upland Bulgarian towns, far from the restrictions of the Ottoman land regime in the lowlands supported a growing number of reading rooms. Artisan guilds organized chitalishte (reading rooms) to provide material printed in Bulgarian to promote adult literacy and from 1835 opened primary schools which taught in Bulgarian. From 1841, these towns took advantage of the Tanzimat reform that permitted local councils to organize and bargain with the Ottoman designated tax collector, usually a Bulgarian.

1848–​1875: political parties and politics after the European revolutions A second transitional period began with the 1848 revolutions.They started in Paris with echoes from 1789 and the French Revolution, then spread to challenge Habsburg authority in Prague, Budapest, and even Vienna. National challenges to Hungarian revolutionary authority from Croatia and Transylvania failed but left their mark. Russian intervention suppressed Romanian and Hungarian independence by 1849, but Tsarist defeat in the Crimean War of 1854–​7 set back the reassertion of Russian authority. Habsburg authority then suffered after the Austrian 55

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defeat in its 1866 war with the Prussian-​led German confederation. Hungarian demands for internal autonomy forced the monarchy to accept reconstitution as Austria-​Hungary in 1867. After comparable Hungarian concessions to Croatia-​Slavonia in 1868, its domestic political parties and politics began to take modern shape there. Absent Austrian concessions, Slovenian political parties would not emerge until the 1890s. The revolutions of 1848 resonated foremost for young Romanians studying in France. They returned to set up a brief regime in Moldavia and one that lasted into the summer of 1848 in Wallachia. Its leaders sought to break with the Russian Protectorate and unite the two Principalities, also reaching out to Transylvania where its Greek Catholic (Uniate) clergy led an assembly calling for full unification. Ottoman troops joined the Russian military intervention to restore Tsarist authority by May 1849. A Russian occupation returned in 1854, when Tsarist claims to the Holy Places in Palestine provoked the outbreak of the Crimean War. The subsequent Russian defeat and the French-​led peace settlement, its European Concert of 1856, ended the Russian Protectorate. Occupying Austrian and Ottoman forces were also forced to withdraw, and both Principalities were placed under the Concert. Free to choose their own leaders in Wallachia and Moldavia, the Romanian nobles nominated the same person for both positions. A French 48er himself, Alexander Cuza proceeded from this informal unification of the Principalities in 1859 to pursue a single administration. After the two assemblies rejected his land reform in 1864, he dissolved them. Rising conservative opposition to his executive authority forced him to abdicate in 1866. The Concert chose a Hohenzollern Prince as King Carol I. In Croatia-​Slavonia, the 1848 revolutions fed the cultural ferment from the 1820s for South Slav rights and a common language and created an Illyrian Party. It faced objections from Croatian nobles speaking Latin in the Sabor and from neighboring Carniola over forfeiting Slovenian. Then the Hungarian revolution sent its forces to occupy Croatia-​Slavonia and the Vojvodina.Vienna turned to Josip Jelačić, a Croatian colonel in their border regiments. He led the expulsion of the Hungarian forces and then assumed the position of Ban. Remembered as a liberator in Croatia, he was unable to agree with the Illyrian leaders and Croatian nobles on how to undo the hard, authoritarian Austria regime that followed. The Sabor remained closed, but an easier regime in Vienna after 1860 allowed political debate to return, now including a new idea for South Slav unity by the Catholic Bishop Josip Strossmayer. Active Croatian politics had to await the Austrian defeat in its 1866 war with the rising German coalition under Bismarck’s Prussia. By 1867, Hungarian representatives forced the weakened Austrians to accept equal status in the Ausgleich that created Austria-​Hungary. Now with sole rights over Croatia-​ Slavonia, the Hungarians were obliged by Croatian pressure into a partly comparable Nagodba in 1868. A Hungarian Ban still held overall authority, but there was enough internal autonomy to make the Sabor in Zagreb an arena for the Croatian party politics and debate detailed in Iskra Iveljić’s chapter below. After 1860, modern party politics also emerged in Greece and Serbia. Weakened by his failure to expand the borders or win protecting Great Power support, King Otto of Greece was finally forced to abdicate in 1862. As his successor, the European Concert chose a Danish Prince. In 1864, George I began a half century on the throne, initially supported by the British cession of the Ionian Islands to Greece. A  new constitution endorsed both his powers and those of an elected parliament. Internally, however, he struggled for the first decade with a series of divided governments supported by a combination of parties. Their members relied on local patronage available in official favors or appointments. Reform came only with a 1874 agreement that the King was obliged to appoint the leaders of the largest party in parliament to form a government. There would however be no challenge to the leading patronage party 56

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under Theodoros Delivannis until the New Party, led by a modernizing reformer Kharilaos Trikoupis, won a parliamentary majority and took office in 1881. Serbia’s two new constitutions made comparable changes, advanced in 1869 by a new Liberal Party and in 1881 by a new peasant-​based Radical Party. Advances in modern government came only after a new Serbian Prince had strengthened the monarchy and modernized its army and administration. In 1860, Mihailo Obrenović succeeded after his father Miloš’s brief return and brought his European education and experience in exile with him. He introduced domestic currency and by 1867 negotiated the departure of the last Ottoman troops from their Danube river fortresses. He also raised standards for officials in his ministries, now supported by more candidates educated in Serbia. Raising the size and improving the training of the standing army, he was persuaded by his Foreign Minister to pursue alliances with Greece and Montenegro aimed at Ottoman Bosnia. He declined to invade Bosnia, despite the urging of his Foreign Minister. Ilija Garašanin had advocated a Greater Serbia including Bosnia since the 1840s. Mihailo’s centralizing reforms proceeded in the face of a new opposition party. The rising Liberals had no hand in his assassination in 1868 but pushed through a new constitution in 1869, authorizing annual sessions and giving more power to the elected assembly (Skupština). Belgrade-​based governments of Liberals or Progressives ruled for the next decade. Mihailo’s weak successor. Prince Milan provided the main avenue for foreign influence, now Austria-​Hungary. Modern political institutions or practices were slow to appear in the small Principality of Montenegro. Its Orthodox bishops in Cetinje still relied on Russian subsidies and bargaining with a dozen upland clans to maintain autonomy from Ottoman rule through the first half of the nineteenth century. Their last clerical leader Petar Petrović Njegoš left a powerful poem, “The Mountain Wreath,” looking toward Serbia and endorsing the killing of Muslims as a literary legacy. Yet he also started state-​building, opening schools, and creating a police force. His first secular successor Danilo established a legal code and a standing army in 1851, even slightly increasing the landlocked territory before being assassinated in 1860. Russian subsidies continued under his successor Nikola, even after independence followed from the Russo-​ Ottoman War of 1877–​8 as noted in John D. Treadway’s chapter below.

1876–​1905: the Great Powers, state formation, and national frustration The Congress of Berlin in 1878 resolved the Russian-​Ottoman War and set aside an initial Russian treaty creating a large Bulgarian state. The borders drawn at Berlin, as seen in Map 4.1, would remain largely unchanged until the Balkan Wars of 1912–​13. The most fateful postwar change was to transfer Bosnia-​Herzegovina from Ottoman to Austro-​Hungarian rule. The Russian-​Ottoman War itself did not have its origins in the attacks from Montenegro and Serbia into Bosnia in 1876 to support a Bosnian Serb revolt against Ottoman tax collection.The cross-​ border intervention from Serbia did include informal support from a Tsarist general and Russian volunteers but better trained Ottoman forces, including Bosnian Muslims, easily repulsed them. It was instead an 1876 uprising in Ottoman Bulgaria and its unusually brutal suppression, which had triggered Russia’s declaration of war. Urged on by rising Pan-​Slavic sentiment in Russia, the Tsarist forces were favored by the widespread popular support missing in Bosnia. The Bulgarian national revival from the 1830s had moved ahead from Ottoman concessions for local councils in 1841 to the land reforms of 1859. Bulgarians and Greeks could now buy property in the fertile lowlands. The Porte’s interest in greater tax collection also prompted its experiment with the Danubian Vilayet and a semi-​autonomous Bulgarian Muslim governor. Midhat Pasha, from 1864 to 1867. A last Ottoman concession in 1870 recognized the Bulgarian 57

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Map 4.1  Borders after the Treaty of San Stefano and the Berlin Congress, 1878.

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Orthodox Church as autocephalous, cutting its ties to the Greek Patriarchate in Constantinople and giving it free rein in Macedonia as well. But none of this persuaded the young generation of Bulgarians educated in Russia or based in Belgrade or Bucharest to abandon their revolutionary committees. The Ottoman regime put down their efforts in Bulgaria and hung their most renowned leader Vasil Levski in 1873. His memory helped to inspire the uprising in the upland town of Koprivshtitsa in 1876, prompting the harsh Ottoman response. The victorious Russians quickly convened a peace conference and obliged the Ottoman representatives to sign the Treaty of San Stefano. It created a large Bulgaria state that included Macedonia broadly defined (see Map 4.1) and promised the throne to a Russian candidate. Only months later, the Great Powers of Britain and France, with Germany replacing Russia, assembled in Berlin to overturn these harsh terms. Macedonia and southeast Bulgaria, now called Eastern Rumelia and including Plovdiv, were restored to Ottoman authority.The smaller Bulgarian state seen in Map 4.1 was only granted autonomy as a Russian-​Ottoman Protectorate but under a non-​Russian Prince. Bulgarian resistance to Russian military oversight began under the liberal but unenforceable Tŭrnovo Constitution of 1879. It continued under the autocratic regime of young Prince Aleksandar of Battenberg from 1881–​5. Under pressure from the new parliament led by a surviving leader from the 1860s, Liuben Karavelov, Aleksandar approved the Bulgarian seizure of Eastern Rumelia in 1885. Tsarist objections forced him to resign and Russian officers were removed from the new Bulgarian army. It nonetheless repulsed a Serbian invasion, and the Berlin Powers agreed to recognize the annexation.Their new Prince, Ferdinand of Saxe-​Coburg and Gotha, would remain on the throne through the First World War. He struggled from 1887 to 1894 with his first Minister President, another surviving leader from the 1860s Stefan Stambulov. Afterwards, Ferdinand won some popular support by converting to Orthodoxy and took advantage of the increasing number of political parties to divide and rule. Through partizanstvo, as described by Roumen Daskalov, a favored party was allowed to distribute appointments to the ministries and election commissions in advance of elections that it then controlled. Like Stambulov, Ferdinand relied on good Ottoman relations to keep both Russian influence and Bulgarian irredentism over Macedonia in check. The Berlin Treaty also recognized the formal independence of Serbia, Romania, and Montenegro. Each received new territory, including access to the Adriatic Sea and an expanded northern border for Montenegro. Serbia was awarded the southern Niš triangle and Romania the southern Dobrudja (see Map 4.1). By 1881, Greece won the agreement of the Protecting Powers to advance its border north to the grain-​g rowing plains of Thessaly. Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and from 1886, Bulgaria all bordered Ottoman Macedonia or Kosovo. Their competing ambitions would create territorial claims and conflict whose course Keith Brown traces until they culminated in the Balkan Wars of 1912–​13. Adding to the flash points were Albanian claims that extended into Kosovo. At the time, Ottoman arms were able to suppress the domestic League of Prizren but could not prevent the Albanian diaspora in Italy and elsewhere from promoting the same demand for autonomy or statehood. Austria-​Hungary’s occupation of Bosnia-​Herzegovina under the Berlin Treaty increased its political, economic, and cultural leverage over the newly independent states (see Roumiana Preshlenova’s chapter below). In 1881, the Dual Monarchy obliged Serbia’s Prince Milan Obrenović to sign to a favorable trade protocol that also included a secret agreement providing oversight of its foreign policy. Romania’s Hohenzollern King Carol kept Romania from pressing the issue of Transylvania with Austria-​Hungary. Britain as leader of the Protecting Powers stood by Greece and the Ottoman Empire as their debtors and as barriers against Russian influence. By 1893, however, Greece’s debts incurred from the European loans for railway construction under several Trikoupis governments forced the state to declare bankruptcy. Some temporary 59

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relief was cut short in 1897 when a more expansionist Delivannis government launched an invasion of Crete. It was quickly defeated by Ottoman forces. Budget deficits from the military expenses forced Greece to accept an International Financial Commission, as the Ottoman Empire had in 1881. Its rights included tax revenue to service the debt. By 1902, Bulgaria was obliged to accept a similar Great Power commission. In 1903, a last agreement between Austria-​ Hungary and Russia tried but failed to replace Ottoman repression of an internal uprising in Macedonia with police reform. This first international peacekeeping mission only invited further Serbian, Bulgarian, and Greek intervention as described in Keith Brown’s chapter. The major internal issues revolved around more representative government. The death of Trikoupis in 1896 set back any alternative to Delivannis until his own death in 1905. In Bulgaria, the drought crisis 1899–​1901 opened the way for a genuine peasant movement. Led by Aleksandar Stamboliiski, the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BZNS) began organizing its own rural cooperatives and demanding tax reform. Strikes in Sofia supported the creation of a small Socialist Party in 1903 on the model of the Russian Bolsheviks. The established parties, using their afore-​mentioned leverage from partizanstvo in controlling parliamentary elections, kept these new movements from entering elections as parties. Cooperative movements also formed in the Habsburg borderlands, first in Slovenian Carniola and then in Croatia-​Slovenia, where peasant unrest in the dissolved Military Border had already broken out in 1883. In 1904, the brothers Stjepan and Ante Radić led the founding of the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS).Their common demands with the BZNS for a wider franchise went unmet. In Romania, a narrow franchise remained after the limited land reform for peasants on state land initiated in 1905 by the ruling Liberal government against Conservative Moldovan opposition, as described here by Constantin Iordachi. Exploitative share-​cropping remained the rule on the large Moldovan private estates, typically leased by their noble owners to Jewish managers forbidden to own land. Absent any political representation, the peasant revolt that followed in 1907 took up to 10,000 lives when army troops suppressed it. Already in 1881, a new Radical Party in Serbia promising peasant representation in an expanded national assembly had already confronted the ruling Progressives and King Milan’s ministries in Belgrade. Their leader was the Swiss trained engineer Nikola Pašić. After followers in his native Timok region resisted an army reform disbanding their local militia, he was forced to flee to Bulgaria in 1883. He returned in 1888 after Milan allowed other Radicals to return. They won a majority in new elections. The Radicals passed a new constitution in 1888 that widened the franchise to non-​taxpaying males and gave the national assembly the power to initiate legislation and approve the state budget. The press was proclaimed free, and local village councils received rights of self-​government. Milan was forced into exile in 1889 and finally denied influence in 1893. His young successor Aleksandar Obrenović ignored the new constitution and tried to govern again by royal favor. A conspiratorial band of newly recruited army officers assassinated him and his unpopular wife in 1903. Called back from European exile, his successor from the rival royal family was Petar Karadjordjević. Abiding by the new 1903 Constitution, his reign and the return of the Radicals and Nikola Pašić to power began a decade of multi-​party promise and its subsequent frustration (see the chapter below by Dubravka Stojanović).

1906–​1911: political promise and prewar disruption The last prewar years began with political promise across the region, but only some of it was realized. In Serbia, a new Independent Radical Party had come forward to balance the Radical predominance. A new Socialist Party won a majority of seats in Belgrade’s municipal 60

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government in the 1906 elections. By this time, a set of European-​style ministries and a partly elected national assembly had convened in Montenegro under the 1905 constitution imposed on Prince Nikola. In Croatia-​Slavonia, elections under a wider franchise gave a new Croat-​ Serb Coalition the chance to form a government devoted to ethnic and regional reconciliation. Under formal authorization since 1903, the Slovene cooperative network spread into Dalmatia. In Slovene Carniola’s booming economy, Liberal and Social Democratic parties now challenged the majority clerical parties, as noted by Gregor Kranjc. Founded in the mid-​1890s, they competed for the region’s seats in the Austrian Reichsrat. In Bosnia-​Herzegovina, its new Austro-​Hungarian Minister from 1903 allowed Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, and Croats to form the political parties that his predecessor had not (see the chapter by Robert J. Donia). The three ethnic parties won all the seats in the initial parliamentary elections in 1910.They all promised to cooperate, in coalitions initially between Bosnian Muslim and Serb delegates and then between Bosnian Muslims and Croats. In Bulgaria, demonstrations in Sofia against Ferdinand’s dismissal of university professors forced him to reinstate them and to relax censorship of the press. He also agreed to appoint the pro-​Russian Aleksandar Malinov as Minister President. A few months later, Malinov’s Democratic Party won a majority in parliamentary elections. A wider franchise, allowing both the Agrarians and the Socialists to win seats would come only in 1911 with a Grand National Assembly to revise the constitution. Greece also staged more open elections in 1910, with all males entitled to vote by secret ballot. A Military League of officers protesting royal appointments had displaced the sitting government in 1909. They stood back however as a new Liberal Party promised to end the patronage and political malaise that the alternating Trikoupis and Delivannis regimes had left. Their leader, the charismatic Eleftherios Venizelos, came from disputed Crete. This domestic promise took initial advantage from new disruption in the Ottoman and Austro-​Hungarian border lands and from Great Power rivalry. Serbia prevailed in the Austro-​ Hungarian Tariff War of 1906–​11 with two new Paris loans to cover the new arms it would now receive from a French firm instead of a supply from Austrian Bohemia. The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 began with its promise of political reform in the Ottoman Balkans, including parliamentary representation for the predominantly Muslim Albanians. To preclude such promise in Bosnia-​Herzegovina, the Austro-​Hungarian leadership decided to end the occupation and announced its annexation. The Pašić government rejected the annexation and appealed to Russia for support. His Radicals consolidated their political control, and the military faction that had assassinated King Aleksandar began bringing Bosnian Serbs into their organization. The joint Russo-​Austrian policing of Ottoman Macedonia ended unceremoniously in failure. Albanian hopes for representation in a new parliament in Istanbul also ended by 1910. Bulgaria gained by the Young Turk Revolution, as Malinov’s new government seized the chance to declare independence from the Ottoman-​Russian protectorate, thus requiring the afore-​mentioned Grand National Assembly by 1911. The turn to Turkish nationalism by the Young Turk regime provoked resistance from disappointed Albanians in Kosovo and revived Bulgarian, Serbian, and Greek ambitions in Macedonia. The Balkan Wars of 1912–​13 lay ahead, leading to a new round of border changes (Maps 14.1 and 14.2)..

Selected Readings Crampton, Richard J. Bulgaria. Oxford, 2007. Gewrych, George. The Crescent and the Eagle. Ottoman Rule, Islam and the Albanians, 1874–​1913. London, 2006. Hitchins, Keith. Rumania, 1866–​1947. Oxford, 1994.

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John R. Lampe Jelavich, Charles and Barbara Jelavich. The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804–​1920. Seattle, Wash., 1977. Kent, Marian, ed. The Great Powers and the End of the Ottoman Empire. London, 1994. Koliopolis, John S. and Thanos M.Veremis, Modern Greece. A History since 1821. London, 2010. Mishkova, Diana, ed. We the People. Politics of National Peculiarity in Southeastern Europe. Budapest, 2009. Pavlowitch, Stevan K. A History of the Balkans, 1904–​1945. London, 1999. Petrovich, Michael B. A History of Modern Serbia, 1804–​1918, 2 vols. New York, 1976. Roberts, Elizabeth. Realm of the Black Mountain. A History of Montenegro. London, 2007. Rogel, Carole. The Slovenes and Yugoslavism, 1890–​1914. Boulder, Colo., 1977.

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5 NINETEENTH-​C ENTURY NATIONAL IDENTITIES IN THE BALKANS Evolution and contention Diana Mishkova

Defying the still prevailing ethnocentric treatment of collective identity, a growing number of historians uphold that prior to the nineteenth century people in the Balkans identified themselves primarily with a religious and not with an ethnic community. The multi-​ethnic Orthodox Christian community in the Balkans, variously named an “Orthodox Commonwealth,” “Orthodox cultural union,” or “Romaic community,” emerged from the combined policies of the Ottoman sultans, who divided their subjects into religious categories with no regard for ethnic distinctions, and of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which strove to cultivate ecumenism, religious coherence and solidarity above and beyond linguistic or ethnic differences. A sense of ethnic affiliation had certainly existed, but it was subsumed under far more important moral obligations defined by religious, familial, professional, or class allegiance. Such was in brief the sociocultural canvas and the starting point for the processes of nation construction in (post) Ottoman Southeastern Europe that set off in the late eighteenth century and continued into the twentieth. It was only in the nineteenth century that nationalism and the emerging nation-​states brought ethnicity, and ethnic-​based nationhood, to the fore as the basic principle of community-​building. They did so with overwhelming force that made ethnicity or “nationality” appear, for a long time to come, as the primordial and universal form of social organization and collective self-​identification.

European circulations of ideas The philosophy of cultural peculiarity, which underlay this shift and the emergence of nationalism, was not merely an export from the West to the Balkan East. It drew upon circulating cultural resources across Europe whereby local folk traditions became paradigmatic for the entire European flow of ideas. (Consider, for example,Vuk Karadžić’s role in promoting this “universalism of the particular” and the European Romantic canon generally.) What we are confronted with under the headline of ideational or conceptual transfer has never been a one-​way street, as commonly implied by terms like “influence,” “import,” “adoption,” but a circulation of ideas. 63

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Their complex trajectories of interaction and modes of involvement with the recipient culture occupy center stage. In the spread of nationalism, furthermore, regional intellectual networks and institutions were often more crucial than direct contact with or intervention by the West. This does not revoke the disparity in radiation and reception between the two ends of the cultural interaction. A number of asymmetries constrained the autonomy in the Southeast European societies’ construction of self and other, from imbalances in political power and access to technology to even the vocabulary of identity. Most importantly, in all these cultures “Europe” and the “West” participated as a major semantic constructor of the national. Binary self-​projections such as “we” and “Europe,” local tradition and foreign imports, authenticity and imitation, backwardness and civilization constituted the rival bases for the identity languages in the region and set the stage for the perennial battles over the representation of the nation. The underlying notions of “lack” and “lag” had proved as formative of the protagonists’ agendas across the ideological spectrum as they did for latter-​day interpretations of (South) East European nationalism. However important the asymmetries and their receptions, they help us little in addressing the various “self-​constitutive strategies” chosen by the people of the region or the “constitutive result” achieved. For there was anything but a deficit of creativity and diversity in the politics of self-​description. Indeed, the modalities of identity discourses –​on an intraregional and intranational level –​have proved incredibly diverse. Significantly, while the greater part of the constitutive elements were in some way present in all these contexts, they interacted differently with the local traditions and discursive milieus, thus giving rise to mutations and innovations which, with hindsight, appear as having been latent in the original “Western” ingredients themselves, but which were unlocked precisely under the pressure of the local environment. The dynamics of national self-​images –​of the way the Balkan societies have described and evaluated themselves –​demonstrate a social and ideological functionality that can hardly be understood in terms of Western hegemony over the local production of self-​narratives. Powerful intellectual currents, however, often did not come from selected Western cultures but were exerted through intermediaries closer to home. Often those who took part in nation-​ building and were disseminating knowledge about modernity acquired that knowledge in the educational institutions in the periphery of Europe, not from its center.This no doubt facilitated the assimilation of certain “lessons” but also encoded, from the very start, certain formative conceptions and frustrations in the make-​up of the local national cultures. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Greek schools played a key role in the spread of new ideas of the modern age throughout the Ottoman Empire. Prior to being disseminated further into the Balkans, the ideas in question were filtered through a Greek process of selection and adaptation. Such transmissions had not only influenced the recipient’s agenda. Indeed, it is well-​known that the Bulgarians had fully borrowed the “awakening” and “patriotic” action plan of the Greeks. But during the mid-​nineteenth-​century revival, the very visions they held of their national identity in relation to European civilization, albeit shaped in competition with the Greeks, were largely modeled on the Greek rather than some Western European pattern.This process of “defense through mimicry,” i.e. the generation of Bulgarian ideas through the appropriation of analogous Greek constructs, appears in a number of guises in the course of the nineteenth century. Most radical, and fanciful, was Georgi Rakovski’s attempt to supersede Greek antiquity by locating the motherland of the Bulgarians in India and asserting that the Bulgarians were “pure” Aryans, that is, Indo-​Europeans, who were the first to leave Hindustan and come to Europe. More often than not, Western European Romanticism, liberalism, and nationalism reached the Balkan Slavs in a form “translated” and adapted by Russian radicals. The nature of the Russian civilizational matrix, however, was hybrid and competitive, torn not only between the 64

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Orthodox Slavdom and “Europe” and marked by the conflict between cultural uniqueness and cultural inferiority but also by receptiveness to Western models. Similar to the Greek transmission, what we are confronted here with is a refracted transfer via other peripheral cultures whereby the new ideas could undergo significant changes in the course of their journey and arrive at their “destination” already in a significantly modified form. These examples point to the paradoxical condition of the formation of national ideologies and identity politics. Discourses of national uniqueness were forged in a context of intense international exchanges and a common pattern for producing difference. The phenomenon at issue concerns the universalization of the notion and the discourse of national uniqueness –​ the existence of a narrative of national authenticity available and utilized across Europe, whose authority lay precisely in its transnational reference points. Transnational discourse was, in other words, what shaped and legitimated nations and established their supposed differences. Furthermore, similar to Fredrik Barth’s definition of ethnic groups, we can argue that national ideologies cannot be understood except in relation to and interaction with each other; they can only be defined through their dialectical relationship with one another. Which does not mean that the boundaries between them –​or rather the material of which these boundaries were built –​could not prove rigidly real and insurmountable, building on a series of practices of mutual separation and exclusion. Prior to the First World War, we can roughly set out two phases of major structural and ideational changes that had affected the circulation of ideas and political models. The end of the eighteenth century until around the mid-​nineteenth century were marked by the emergence of modern Balkan nationalism as a cultural-​political project at a time when faith in the universality of (Western) progress and civilization held sway as a lingering echo of the Enlightenment over reformers of different political convictions seeking to formulate answers to issues of national self-​assertion and of a national culture. Receptivity to European ideas among earlier generations of Balkan intellectuals and political activists was linked to a critical analysis of the Ottoman society whereby aspirations to social change and political emancipation often took the form of cultural criticism, pushing for the adoption of “European” culture and institutions. With varying fervor and consistency such adoptions were initiated by the Bavarian regime in the Kingdom of Greece and the quasi-​independent princely bureaucracies of Serbia and Romania. The prevailing attitude toward European imports was positive, dominated by the conviction that transfer was the fastest route to modernization. Opinions differed as to the speed in adopting certain innovations and their conformity with the “good national traditions.” In a broader European perspective, this period saw the heyday of national Romanticism and national liberalism, marked by a curious intertwining of the project of modernity with the project of conserving the specificity inherent in national cultures. Already before the advent of Romanticism, the “people” came to be thematized as a constitutive concept of politics (or anti-​politics). Arguably, the Rousseauian, and in some ways even the Herderian constructions were posing an internal challenge to the Enlightenment canon of philosophical anthropology. Some of the implications of these ideas reached the Eastern and other parts of Europe rather early, but the full blossoming of the local versions of the philosophy of cultural peculiarity is indeed connected to Romantic discourse. Significantly, this period was marked by the emphatic appearance of the “folk” in the political discourse. While for Herder the Volk, rather than humanity, was the carrier of culture and progress, and the Volksgeist was found to cause all human values and understandings, his views of the organic, historically specific cultural-​linguistic community was not political –​it was in fact anti-​political, different from and even opposed to nationalism. It was the Romantic revolutionaries with their expanding networks of followers across Europe who were primarily responsible for imbuing 65

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Herder’s valuation of membership in a group or a culture with political meaning. “You should have no joy or repose as long as a portion of the territory upon which your language is spoken is separated from the Nation,” Mazzini clamored for while prognosticating the rise of “The Countries of the People, defined by the voice of the free.” Along with the fully-​fledged appearance of this set of new themes, the first decades of the nineteenth century also introduced the European “constructivist” re-​evaluation of the archaic self and the new sense of historicity. Far from being unidirectional, the interaction of the European margins and the core meant that some of these local lore became paradigmatic for the entire European circulation of ideas, such as the Nordic or Balkan epic traditions. While “exporting” the terminology and the underlying philosophical theories to these cultures, the European cultural mainstream integrated a number of Southeast European cultural contexts, describing them as peculiar loci of authenticity.The overall outcome of all this was a shift in the arrangement of cultures from being defined by their position “in time” –​hence being thought of as more or less primitive or more or less civilized –​to positioning them “in space,” where cultures become equal by virtue of their origin. Here was an undoubtedly modern, even revolutionary ideology destined to have a long political and intellectual career.

Nationhood and visions of progress There is a long-​standing tradition in nationalism studies to classify national identities, especially during their formative nineteenth-​century stage, into good Western (civic, liberal-​democratic, and universalistic) and bad Eastern (ethnic, anti-​ liberal, and xenophobic), and of national discourses into “progressivist” (underlying universalist and activist agendas) and “conservative” (stressing continuity, organic development, and tradition). Many scholars have relied on the convention of construing both nationalism and the Southeast European political cultures in terms of binary opposites. As it happens though, such professed counter-​positions converged, exposing the range of normatively incompatible options and ideological hybrids inherent in the national-​Romantic discourse. The Enlightenment quest for improvement and social solidarity had already posed the question of the boundaries of the community entitled to their exercise and, at least by implication, about the space of patriotism and, eventually, of nationhood. But the pre-​existence or otherwise of institutional and ideological traditions, upon which that nationhood could be erected, mattered critically for the answers given. In the historically named countries of the European “core,” inadvertent nation-​making and the rise of the doctrine of popular sovereignty followed the creation of centralized “national states.” In Southeastern Europe, on the other hand, the pressure towards defining the boundaries of the national community eroded the existing dynastic state framework through politicization of culture and of the popular frameworks. The inescapable antinomy of national determination –​the impossibility of “the nation” to decide on the identity and the boundaries of the national self until someone decides who are the nation  –​was an obvious predicament. The national framework, furthermore, emerged as something which “had to be created, retrieved, wrested over and continuously safeguarded from not only the power instruments of the existent dynastic state framework but also the indifference of a part of one’s own population and the shakiness of national consciousness.” This is what István Bibó bemoaned as the “misery of the small East European states,” with the implication that nation-​building in this part of Europe entailed first of all the “making of ethnic majorities” by creating normative national identities and winning over hesitant populations for the national idea before facing up to the task of acculturating ethnic minorities. 66

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It is this condition that made many national-​liberal and radical movements in nineteenth-​ century Southeastern Europe especially susceptible to more than just defining the nation in cultural terms. It made them link in one inseparable whole the “inner freedom,” that is democratic rule, and “outer liberation and unification,” that is the boundaries of the demos –​in other words, the internal (civic) and the external (irredentist and ethnic) nationalism. Popular sovereignty and the national self stood out thereof as two facets of a single meta-​language –​that of national-​Romantic liberalism. It was this ideological concoction that shaped the normative core of Southeast-​European modernity. To be sure, the complementarity between civil society and cultural homogeneity was above all a pragmatic one. As John Locke had long before observed, a (limited) government built on the will of the people and civic equality required a culturally “consensual” polity. It is therefore not surprising that the various versions of national liberalism, seeking political, social, and cultural emancipation and Europeanization, were marked by the curious intertwining of the project of modernity with the project of conserving the specificity inherent in “national culture.” The Romantic imagery of the folk infiltrated a wide range of modernist discourses throughout the nineteenth century and was frequently used to legitimate modernizing projects and reforms. For the Southeast European nations, folk tradition and folk culture, as an embodiment of the specificity and vitality of the nation, became a condition of modernity rather than an object of modernist extinction. A far-​reaching and tenuous paradox thus emerged: the collective individuality of the nation, mobilized for the emancipation of its historical being and admission into the modern world, could remain the same collective individuality only by “playing out” its original and ahistorical specificity. The nationalists of the liberal-​Romantic era tried to overcome this conundrum not by preaching a return to the ahistorical organic, but by essentializing and historicizing the national community’s propensity to progress. In their ethno-​pedagogical offensive, they extracted the norms of modernity from the nation’s “hidden self,” which was then employed to reconstruct the nation’s corrupted present condition, indigenizing in the process the essential attributes of civilization of which the West was so proud. The Serbian and the Bulgarian liberal nationalists mined the past in search for the rudiments of the Western liberal institutions, presenting the modern democratic arrangement they aimed to create as the return of their peoples to their historical character, and the “Western model” as re-​actualization of a normative past and a normative “national character.” But since progress was also seen as imposed from outside and a threat to the national organic, a clash emerged, and was with time exacerbated, between those who called for wholesale “import of civilization” and those who self-​styled themselves as custodians of local tradition. The real challenge from the point of view of the nation-​builders was how, at the backdrop of major historic ruptures, to conceive of national cohesion and “regenerate” the national community on behalf of values which were not of the community’s making. Remarkably, the bulk of actual ideological solutions to this problem selectively blended rather than replicated the two opposing positions by offering various recipes of regulated progress and variedly balanced mixtures of Western “import” and national “authenticity.” The result was a broad array of narratives seeking to reconcile modernity and archaism, foreign models and local traditions, the universal and the particular, whereby the civic connotations of belonging permeated the ethnic ones. In the radical-​ democratic thought of Nicolae Bălcescu, the leading ideologist of the Romanian 1848, the a-​historicity and resilience of the Romanian peasant culture was what made it a repository of the Romanian national character and a source for national regeneration. In a similar vein, the Ottoman ethnic awakener Shemseddin Sami and the Albanian critical nationalist Faik Konitza saw the “savage” and archaic Albanian mountaineer as the incarnation 67

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of Albanian authenticity and stronghold of Albanian language and nationality. These and many other national canon-​builders juxtaposed past heroic glory, military valor, and Golden Age to the dismal corrupted present, brought about by foreign domination and influences. At the same time all of them, despite their otherwise divergent ideological convictions and political agendas, envisioned national history and identity within a vigorously evolutionist, sometimes staged theory of progress, whose providential fulfillment was crowned by the (“emancipated,” “unified,” “civilized”) nation’s state. To wit, in their exertions to validate their nation’s readiness for modernity, modernizers across Southeastern Europe showed little reverence for distinguishing between the liberal and the Romantic, the universal and the particular, the politically modern and the antiquarian. What they had offered instead was a remarkable mixture of classical liberal and citizenship precepts (equality of rights, “enlightenment for all,” equal political representation and local self-​government or democracy, respect for property, rejection of hereditary privilege, principle of association), the language of nationalism (“fraternal union” marked by “origin, language, and national feeling”; national rights, freedom, independence), and Romantic celebration of tradition. Assertions of historical continuity and providentialist visions, furthermore, enfolded within a fundamentally modernist consensus. The linkage between social regeneration (or “social revolution”), modernization (“progressive development”) and nationalism (“national unity” and a viable nation-​state) was a generic one across the region during its liberal phase.The national-​Romantic idiom itself came to signify the fusion of pre-​existent, traditional forms of social organization and self-​government with the notions of modernity and progress.The liberal nationalists of the nineteenth-​century Southeastern Europe could thus legitimate their project as universal and rational, on the one hand, and local and patrimonial, on the other. Nineteenth-​ century political modernity in Southeastern Europe was, as a matter of fact, in a large measure the outcome of this fusion. This is not to argue that the representations of the national possessed the stability and coherence that national historiographic and literary canons tend to ex post assign to them. Rather than being defined by presumed continuities, they are better thought of as battlefields of permanent contestation, struggle, and negotiation. Both within and outside the Romantic nationalist mainstream there emerged divergent “national pasts” and “national essences” to support different political projects (liberal, democratic, conservative, or socialist); to underscore different religious distinctions (Greek-​Orthodox, Catholic, Greek-​Catholic, Protestant, or Muslim, a-​ religious, or pantheistic); to frame different political geographies (nation-​statist, irredentist, or (con)federalist). Normative discourses of the national self, historical narratives, and political projects permeated and shaped each other, underscoring the close connection between alternative pasts, cultural self-​definitions, and modernities. Several major contextual elements eventuated the variety of scenarios.

Articulations of the nation The social resources for articulating the nation, or the fit between class and ethnicity, could vary significantly across our disparate environments. Thus the Romanian version of liberal nationalism, which devoured its social radicalism after the unification of the two Danubian principalities, differed considerably from the ethno-​populist (narodnik) version endorsed by the Serbian and the Bulgarian political elites. Nevertheless, the image of the peasantry as the embodiment of national authenticity, and of peasant culture as the cohesive material binding together the national community, was a common one. It had two sources. The peasant ideology of Romanticism was one of them, and it cut across the liberal-​conservative spectrum –​a situation 68

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that explains the central function assigned to folklore. The other was the massive predominance of the rural population in these societies which, among other things, conferred social respectability to both left-​agrarianist and conservative-​organicist sociological theories. While nation-​ states and their institutions were pressing to align the rural “substance” with the imported “forms” by transforming peasants into national subjects, newborn citizens were being construed as “ideological peasants,” “as the subjects of a national myth-​system incorporating and forever reproducing the primary ingredients of rurality, blood and soil.” Clearly, peasants and peasant culture lent themselves to various, sometimes opposing representations of national personality, and the “nation” received no consensual location in the march of progress. Obviously, the politico-​institutional environment of the different “national revivals” was in many respects vital in shaping the content of the individual national projects. It mattered greatly whether the program of national “awakening” was taking place in the framework of a sovereign state (Greece), a quasi-​state (the Serbian and the two Romanian principalities), or imperial structures (as in the case of the Bulgarian, the Albanian, and the Macedonian “revivals”). In environments such as the Albanian or the Macedonian, where the legal and institutional means of defining the national were least favorable for doing so in terms of political legitimacy and citizenship, identity drifted heavily toward “non-​political” markers such as history, language, and religion. In both those cases references to the political dimensions of national organics and agencies of the people’s will, such as popular representation and its institutions, were conspicuously absent. The relative weight of the ethno-​cultural markers of identity within each national community in the making  –​language, confession, “culture,” “ethnic descent,” self-​identification (sentiment and loyalty), history  –​changed with time, depending on not only the timing of nation-​building and sociopolitical conditions but above all on the encounters with rival national claims and strategic readjustments to the circumstances of particular irredenta. When language began working in favor of the Bulgarians, who, during the conflict over the identity of the Macedonians, claimed the Macedonian Slav dialects as Bulgarian, the Greeks replaced the erstwhile focus on language with other markers of Greekness, such as consciousness (gauged by the allegiance to the Patriarchate of Constantinople), cultural Hellenization and historical rights. Bulgarian identity –​and the notion of “rights of nationality” –​was most closely related to language, whereas Orthodoxy, due to its equation with Hellenism and instrumentalizing on behalf of the Greek irredentist program, was relegated to a subordinate position. This in turn explains why language became the key argument in the Bulgarians’ intransigence against the existence of a Macedonian national identity. At the same time, this did not prevent Bulgarian nationalists from claiming as ethnic Bulgarians not only the Bulgarian-​speaking Muslims (the Pomaks) but also the Turkish-​speaking Christians (the Gagauz) –​in the same way as the Albanian-​speaking Arvanites and the Orthodox Albanians outside Greece were typically treated as Greeks. Politicization of language and religion was, indeed, characteristic of the identity formation in all Balkan countries.This is hardly surprising considering the starting point for nation-​making in the region: the similarities and centuries-​long mutual influences between the various languages, ushering in the so-​called “Balkan linguistic area,” and the common confessional belonging in the framework of an institutionalized religious community, the Orthodox Christian millet-​i rum, within the imperial Ottoman structure. Politicization of language and confessional belonging resulted from the thrust to do away with such commonalities and turn them into key signs of national distinctiveness, as well as national unity. Rather than evidencing the spontaneity of the native tongue as an identity marker, as the national activists tried to argue, the imposition of an unspoken archaized idiom as the official norm in Greece, the efforts at creating a single Albanian alphabet, the codification of Serbian and Croatian as a single language, the re-​Latinization of 69

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Romanian, and the struggles over the choice of dialect as an official norm and orthography in Bulgaria point to the close connection of language policies to national-​identity formation and the politicization of the problem in the service of particular political or ideological agendas. Similar was the logic of nationalizing and politicizing religion. The secession of the Bulgarian Church from the “Greek” Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1870 is considered to be the first major act on behalf of the liberation of the Bulgarian nation from the “spiritual yoke” of the Greeks and the political one of the Turks. Allegiance to the Bulgarian exarchate in parts of Macedonia was assumed to be a sign of their Bulgarian identity, much like that to the Patriarchate was considered to be a sign of Greekness. The failure of budding ethno-​ political Albanian nationalism to nationalize the four confessional groups among the would-​be Albanian nation, on the other hand, goes a long way in explaining the strikingly large variety of constructions vying for dominance in the discourse on Albanianness well into the twentieth century. By contrast, the conversion of the Orthodox Church into a “national institution” made allegiance to Orthodoxy and especially the institution of the Serbian Orthodox Church the core of the Serbs’ self-​identification. In most of the countries in the region the period from around the 1860s–​70s onwards was marked by re-​evaluation of the liberal-​nationalist tradition and the emergence of a post-​ Romantic anti-​liberal nationalism. Again, this trend was concurrent with and reinforced by broader changes in the European intellectual milieu.The economic depression of 1873 to 1896 conjoined with what some historians have dubbed, variably, cultural crisis, intellectual revolution or a wave of “cultural despair.” Modernism in art came to interrogate what Burckhardt called “the culture of old Europe.” In the human sciences, it questioned and subverted Enlightenment ideas of reason, history, philosophy, and mastery of nature and society. Currents of thought that emphasized non-​rationalism and vitalist ideas as well as holistic and organic concepts drawing upon biological analogies gained a vogue. Ferdinand Tönnies’ dichotomy between “community” and “society,” Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of rationalist modernity and its canons, and the racist determinism of Social Darwinism held sway over intellectual and scientific milieus far beyond Southeastern Europe.The paradigm of Völkerpsychologie or psychologie des peuples relating the individual-​psychological categories to the characteristics of the ethno-​cultural community was also a product of new research in anthropology and social psychology across Europe. Underpinned by positivism, it accentuated human differences and promoted relativist attitudes. In the region, this period coincided with the establishment and the consolidation of the institutions of the nation-​state (even if the Balkan states emerged, as fully or semi-​independent political entities, at different points in time) and the first serious attempts at modernization from above. It was marked by an intensive “import” of the institutions of political modernity and implementation of various state-​driven programs of social and cultural reform. But it was widely believed that the transformation and the adaptation of the Balkan societies and cultures of the time lagged far behind the transformation of their political infrastructure and legal framework. This perception exacerbated the polemics on the paths and objectives for the national development. The hitherto optimistic, progressivist worldview, ingeniously combining Romantic identity visions, evolutionary historicism, and Western imports, began to crack in the face of a new, critical cultural-​political discourse. The challenge was not external to the national-​liberal paradigm itself in that the nexus between nationalism and Europeanization was anything but free of tension. Many nineteenth-​century nationalists were deeply concerned with the deleterious effects of Western ideas and institutions on the organic national culture. The top-​down enforcement of modern “codes” unleashed sweeping dislocation of traditional structures and modes of social (self-​)ascription, bringing up a series of critical questions about the identity of the community. On the one hand, it led to “misplaced” forms and veritable mutants of the 70

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Western civilizational framework. On the other hand, it spelled a growing alienation between nation-​building elites and rural “peoples” and raised the question of the available modes of incorporating the latter in the national high culture. The impact of these developments reveal certain peculiarities with roots in the previous, national-​Romantic phase of state-​building. Cultural and institutional efforts to specify the “national essence” used both political and scientific approaches. Under the auspices of the nation-​building project there emerged, in the course of the latter half of the century, a set of “national sciences” aimed at systematizing and institutionalizing the knowledge of different aspects of national life (folklore, history, archaeology, ethnography, geography). In this configuration, the Romantic understanding of the national community not only proved capable of withstanding the positivist direction of the turn-​of-​the-​century intellectual environment. Indeed, while according scientific status to the study of society, positivism became a major vehicle for the institutionalization of the Romantic narrative and the nationalization of science. A rupture with the nineteenth-​century modes of self-​narration nonetheless became manifest in the attack against the erstwhile symbiosis between liberalism and nationalism and the emergence of a new organicist understanding of nationality. Both were meant to offset what many saw as a social malaise resulting from the loss of continuity with the past and social alienation. From around the turn of the century, disparate manifestations of anti-​liberal ethno-​nationalism came together in an expanding ideological constellation centered on appeals to continuity, idealization of the peasantry as the living canon of national character, and ethnic interpretation of social history. Racialization of identity, such as tying together language and blood and intermingling “natural languages” and racial typologies, rose in prominence precisely at this juncture. The deterministic theories of racial and cultural evolution boosted the tendency of using “nation” and “race” interchangeably, underscoring the bio-​medical foundation of both. The political and scholarly field of ethno-​genesis became the privileged area for applying this “mystical racism.” It derived not from physically observable characteristics, but from historical, cultural, or linguistic distinctiveness declared to be encoded “in the blood.” These changes prefigured and compounded the crises of liberalism, evolutionary progressivism, and collective identity in Europe as a whole after the First World War. The feverish search for new political and cultural models to fit “national specificities” would characterize the European intellectual climate in the decades leading to the Second World War.

Selected Readings Bibó, István. Misère des petits états d’Europe de l’Est. Translated by György Kassai. Paris, 1986. Clayer, Nathalie. Aux origins du nationalisme albanais: la naissance d’une nation majoritairement musulmane en Europe. Paris, 2007. Ersoy, Ahmet, Maciej Gorny, and Vangelis Kechriotis, eds. Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770–​1945), vol. III/​1:  Modernism  –​The Creation of Nation-​States; vol. III/​ 2: Modernism –​Representations of National Culture. Budapest and New York, 2010. Mishkova, Diana, ed. We the People, Politics of National Peculiarity in Southeastern Europe Budapest and New York, 2009. Todorova, Maria, ed. Balkan Identities. Nation and Memory. London, 2004. Trencsényi, Balázs and Michal Kopeček, eds. Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770–​1945), vol. I: The Late Enlightenment –​Emergence of the Modern “National Idea;” vol. II: National Romanticism –​The Formation of National Movements. Budapest and New York, 2006 and 2007.

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6 BULGARIA FROM LIBERATION TO INDEPENDENCE, 1878–​1 908 Roumen Daskalov

The establishment of a modern Bulgarian state Bulgaria emerged as a state after the Russian-​Ottoman war of 1877–​8. The preliminary San Stefano peace treaty of March 3, 1878, created a Greater Bulgaria that would have established Russian predominance in the Balkans. Britain, France, Austria-​Hungary, and Germany, the other Great Powers, hastily convened a congress in Berlin (June 13 to July 13, 1878) and concluded a much more restricted settlement. The Berlin Treaty divided the San Stefano territories into a small Bulgarian state north of the Balkan range including Sofia up to the Danube, which was to be an autonomous Principality under Ottoman suzerainty but a de facto Russian protectorate; the Province of Eastern Rumelia south of the Balkan range with Plovdiv as the main city was established as an autonomous province within the Ottoman Empire, whereas Macedonia was returned to direct Ottoman rule. “San-​Stefano-​Bulgaria” became the national ideal and long-​ term political objective of subsequent Bulgarian governments, justified by the claims of the Bulgarian national revival movement to these territories in the 1860s. In the short run, there was a sizeable emigration from Ottoman Macedonia to Bulgaria as a consequence of the peace settlement in Berlin. The Bulgarian state embarked on its semi-​independent course under Russian provisional administration for the next few years. Under Russian tutelage, a constitution was to be drafted and major state institutions set up. At the Constitutional Assembly of 1879 in Tŭrnovo, the Bulgarian delegates adopted a rather liberal document. The Principality was to be a hereditary but constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament. Modeled on the Belgian constitution of 1830, it was considered one of the most advanced at the time because it provided for a single chamber and a male franchise without qualifications, plus a series of civil rights. Yet the monarch’s prerogatives were overarching. Beyond being head of the state in international relations and supreme commander of the army, he was empowered to appoint and dismiss the prime minister (Minister President) who was accountable to him as well as to the National Assembly (Narodno sŭbranie). He also had the power to convene and dismiss the National Assembly and to countersign laws as a precondition for their enforcement, plus some juridical powers. During the entire existence of the Tŭrnovo constitution, its precise mandate was legally and publicly debated, ranging from democratic attempts in the first decade of the twentieth century to interpret it as providing for a purely parliamentary regime where the monarch 72

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would be obliged to appoint the leader of the victorious party as prime minister, to a strictly monarchist interpretation under the non-​party governments in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In the heated debates of the Constitutional Assembly two major parties emerged, the Conservatives led by moderates educated in Western Europe like Konstantin Stoilov, and the Liberals, led by popular leaders coming from the former nationalist or revolutionary milieux but some with radical and “nihilist” leanings acquired in Russia. Their leaders were the journalist Petko Slaveikov and Petko Karavelov, a Bulgarian national revolutionary who had studied in Moscow, and Dragan Tsankov, a former advocate for the national struggle through peaceful means. In fact, the Bulgarian Conservatives are better described as classic Liberals in the Western sense, while the so-​called Liberals were actually Populists. Alexander of Battenberg, a young German nobleman and a relative of the Russian emperor, was elected as prince of the Bulgarian Principality and thus given considerable powers. Political life started along the lines of liberal democracy set down in the constitution. However, the autocratically minded Prince Alexander was revolted by some excesses of “democracy” during the initial government of the Liberals. He soon staged a coup d’état, dismissing Minister President Karavelov and appointing the Russian General Ehrenroth in his place. He was to conduct elections for a Grand National Assembly in order to change the constitution. This was approved by the new Russian Tsar Alexander III, who had just succeeded Alexander II.The elections were held in an “extraordinary situation,” and harassment of the Liberals ensured the desired result. The Grand National Assembly convened in the town Svishtov and passed all constitutional modifications requested by the Prince. It created the paternalist system also desired by the Conservatives:  giving the Prince full powers for seven years to create a new “state council” as executive authority.The National Assembly was to be reduced in number and elected on an indirect franchise and civil liberties were curtailed. This attempt at authoritarian (or paternalistic) rule lasted only a little more than two years (1881–​3). The Prince tried to rule with the Conservatives but had to turn to the heavy-​handed Russian generals in Bulgarian service for authority. Conflict was inevitable. After the resignation of the leading Conservative Konstantin Stoilov, followed by others, the regime became untenable. The clumsy actions and overbearing behavior of the Russian generals offended Bulgarian national sensibilities. Finally, an agreement between the Liberals and the Conservatives forced Alexander to restore the Tŭrnovo Constitution. The Liberals came to power but not without a breach between their more compromising Tsankov on the one hand, and Karavelov and Slaveikov on the other.

Unification and disenchantment with Russia The next major event was the unification of Eastern Rumelia with the Bulgarian Principality on September 6, 1885, for which propaganda and preparations had been ongoing. Endorsed by Prince Alexander, it was carried out entirely on Bulgarian initiative in violation of the Berlin Treaty and without Russia’s consent. The Tsar’s government objected. It also provoked a Serbian attack on Bulgaria. Despite the absence of Russian officers, who were withdrawn to weaken the Bulgarian army, Bulgarian troops decisively repelled the Serbian offensive. This further antagonized the Russian government, which started working toward deposition of Prince Alexander. The Bulgarian ruling circles and society at large was divided, for or against the “liberator” Russia which was still held in high respect. With encouragement from Russian diplomacy, a group of Bulgarian army officers conducted a coup d’état against the Prince on August 9, 1886, and forced him to abdicate. However, a successful counter coup, headed by the resolute Stefan Stambolov, president of the National Assembly and a former national revolutionary, 73

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restored him to office. On the advice of the Russian Tsar, however, Prince Alexander resigned on his own accord. The state was then left to be governed by a regency. Dissatisfied with the presence of anti-​ Russian personalities in power, Russian representatives interfered in various ways. Bulgarian-​ Russian relations were finally disrupted after several revolts of pro-​Russian army officers broke out and were resolutely suppressed. The greatest danger for Bulgarian autonomy ended when its political leaders found a new prince, Ferdinand of Saxe-​Coburg-​Gotha and elected him on June 25, 1887. He did not however receive international recognition, and his regime initially fell under the authoritarian rule of Stambolov. Support from the other Great Powers, Great Britain in particular, allowed this anti-​Russian government to stay in power. The heavy-​handed Stefan Stambolov established a virtual dictatorship in Bulgaria (1887–​94) largely in response to the external threat from Russia and the resulting internal divisions. His regime cracked down hard on Russophiles and other political enemies, suppressed any potential opposition, and persecuted any independent personalities. At the beginning, there was some justification from external dangers but over time, the arbitrary regime united all forces, Russophile and Russophobe alike, against the dictator. Stambolov’s rule did however see the beginning of economic modernization and support of education; Sofia University was founded in 1888. Stambolov also advanced the national objectives, gaining several Ottoman permissions (berat) for Bulgarian eparchies in Macedonia.Yet he was opposed to giving the Macedonian movement free rein and thus alienated its more revolutionary-​minded adherents. All said, Stambolov is regarded more favorably at present, after the end of the Soviet ban on any positive judgment of him. Some accounts rank him as a great statesman, perhaps even as a kind of Bulgarian Bismarck. The ambitious Prince Ferdinand stayed long in Stambolov’s shadow. Yet with the receding external danger and rising domestic opposition to Stambolov, he secured the support of the army and managed to force him out of office. Shortly afterwards, Stambolov was brutally assassinated by a Macedonian. Konstantin Stoilov became Minister President at the head of a coalition government (1894–​9). After the death of the Russian Tsar Alexander III, relations with Russia improved. It helped that Boris, Ferdinand’s son and successor to the throne, was baptized as an Orthodox Christian with the Russian Tsar Nicolas II acting as godfather on February 2, 1896. Then came Ferdinand’s recognition by Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and the other Great Powers. Stoilov’s government continued the economic modernization and educational advance initiated by Stambolov. He was however succeeded by a series of “transitional” governments devoid of broader public support and easily replaced by bargains with the Prince. This strengthened Ferdinand’s position, establishing his so-​called personal regime. At the same time, Bulgarian foreign relations could take some advantage by maneuvering between Russia and Austria-​Hungary in the efforts to achieve Bulgaria’s national goals.

Prince Ferdinand’s personal rule and partizanstvo The two initial parties of Liberals and Conservatives had split into a number of parties. Their initial division on constitutional principles soon died out and gave way to unprincipled political struggles in striving to win power. The spoils of office consisted mostly in positions in the state apparatus for one’s adherents and in using power for personal gain. These parties differed in their foreign political orientation (Russia versus Austria-​Hungary and Germany), their attitude toward the Prince, some being entirely subservient and others more reserved, in their attitude toward social reforms (conservative versus reformist), and their social background (in private business or the public professions). In general, a party consisted of one or a few publicly known personalities, a circle of interested people around them, and a loose structure of their 74

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“friends” in the countryside.When not in office, the party was largely inactive. During elections, the parties were activated by the struggle for power. Parties were named after their leaders, reflecting the personal character of the party and lack of ideological commitments. Only three parties were exceptions, having an ideology and being opposed to the Prince’s court and the political system at large. The Social Democratic Party was created in 1891 as a party of the urban working class (then almost non-​existent) and split in 1903 into the more orthodox “narrow” socialists (like Lenin’s Bolsheviks in Russia) and the reformist “broad” socialists (sympathizers of Eduard Bernstein in Germany). The Bulgarian Agrarian National Union or BANU (Bŭlgarski zemedelski naroden sŭyuz) was created in 1899 to lead a rising peasant protest against changing the tithe tax from kind to money. Its leader Aleksandar Stamboliiski would in future spell out peasant grievances as well as demand the right to nominate candidates for the parliament. A third party at least aspiring to ideological distinction was the small Radical-​Democratic party (or Radicals). It consisted of academics and lawyers who opposed the personal rule of Ferdinand and were in favor of policies to protect a middle class consisting of artisans and middling peasants as well as civil servants. Ferdinand’s personal regime in these years was criticized many times by its opponents. It meant appointment and change of the governments by the monarch without responsibility to the majority in the parliament, let alone any vote of no confidence in the current government. The political practice, which existed also in some other European states, was the following: the monarch first created a new cabinet by appointing a Minister President, who designated his ministers. The cabinet then dissolved the National Assembly and organized elections in which it assured itself a majority of seats in the new assembly. After enough time for resentment against the government to accumulate, the monarch dismissed the Minister President with or without cause and gave another party leader the mandate to form a government. He gave the mandate to the various parties almost in turn, so that they all could expect that their turn would come.This routine practice gave the monarch great leverage, the more so as he himself conducted foreign policy and commanded the army. Even though some of the parties deplored his personal rule, as they could hardly come to power any other way because of their organizational weakness and unlikely chances to prevail in a fair election.The strategy of the monarch was thus to rotate the spoils of office between the “hungry” parties, and not to let any party stay in power for too long. Parliamentary authority was formal and false because the cabinet was formed not by the majority in the National Assembly but the other way round. In the words of one observer, parliament derived from the cabinet, not the cabinet from parliament. The principle of responsibility of the ministers to the National Assembly and the provision for a vote of no confidence remained dead letters because the majority of deputies were obedient to the ministers, who had got them in the National Assembly. The members of the opposition were also cautious, because they did not expect to get into the next assembly if the government fell.Voting rights and control over the budget were subject to the same abuses. Apart from Ferdinand’s arbitrary rule, this system was characterized in more general terms by the predominance of the executive over the legislature, of the ministers over the parliament, and of the ruling politicians over all other branches of government. Almost all elections in the period prior to the wars were manipulated. The whole administrative machine including the gendarmerie and the police was put at the disposal of the party that conducted the elections. Their abuses were accompanied by violence on the part of the party that conducted the elections but also the opposition. Election victories were assured by staffing local election bureaus with party supporters, by barring the opposition voters from access, by letting one’s own voters vote several times, finally, if needed, by the falsification of results and the cancellation of opposition deputies from parliament on various pretexts. One 75

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characteristic violation of the freedom of elections was disbanding the local councils of the previous government and appointing new temporary committees from would-​be mayors and council members to conduct the election. The so-​called governmental dowry consisted of a mass of voters prone to follow the likely winner for whatever personal advantage. They were thus at the disposal of any party conducting its elections. Women were de facto excluded from voting because even though the constitution provided for universal franchise with no mention of sex, in practice women did not go to the polls. (Women would receive the right to vote in local elections in 1937 and in parliamentary elections in 1938, ironically under another authoritarian royal regime.) Finally, all elections were followed by a law for pardoning those who had committed offenses during them. Every party had a following of job-​hunters expecting positions in return for services rendered in the electoral process. This meant that every change of a governing party was accompanied by a massive change of personnel in the central and local government to make room for one’s own adherents. This practice was known in Bulgarian as partizanstvo (the Bulgarian equivalent of clientelism), meaning more broadly the power to distribute spoils of various kinds. Party patronage to fill these offices reflected very negatively upon administrative performance, not only because of unqualified appointees but also because the insecurity of their tenure pushed civil servants –​placed under the threat of “hungry years” –​to increased corruption in preparation for surviving such years. The political practices described above frustrated the stability and professionalization of the civil service because once in office every party had to rush its adherents into these positions. Not all offices were affected by the system of partizanstvo to the same degree: it was rampant in local government, in the police and the departments dealing with the customs duties, and to a certain extent in schools. On the other hand, military officers were well paid and enjoyed a secure position and fair prospects for promotion. It was the army that was expected to solve the “national question.” It therefore was largely untouched by the infamous partizanstvo. Its support grew with its victory in the Serb-​Bulgarian war of 1885, which defended the unification of the Bulgarian Principality with Eastern Rumelia. In its number of troops and arms spending per capita, Bulgaria surpassed all of its neighbors by 1900.This military buildup earned it the reputation as the Prussia of the Balkans. Corruption elsewhere became all-​pervasive both at the central and local level as a series of coteries were replacing each other at the state table. Higher gains from corruption were found among the higher officials. They took a “commission” from state loans and deliveries and various state deals (armaments, materials for railroads, and building projects) and from prearranged auctions.They used so-​called “unaccountable funds” put at their discretion for their own needs. Buying urban real estate and leasing various state assets (forests, lakes, buildings, etc.) were among the most profitable deals. There was some progress in the electoral process in the years before the Balkan Wars, moving away from electoral violence to more refined forms of influencing voters, ironically called “moral” influencing. This was partly the result of improvement of the composition of the election bureaus and making use of the army instead of the corruptible local police on election day. Yet, the introduction of the seemingly more democratic proportional system in 1911 in place of a majoritarian system did not live up to expectations. In fact, it soon became clear that the new electoral system was not a panacea. It was soon replaced by a mixed system.

The national agenda For Bulgaria, the period up to the Balkan Wars can be broadly described as time for pursuing national independence and further unification. Foreign policy took priority over economic, 76

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social, and cultural domestic development. The policies of the state in the economic sphere were limited to weak intervention, i.e. tax and tariff privileges for the “encouragement” of domestic industries. Still, because of the lack of private capital the economic role of the state loomed large in providing credit from the Bulgarian National Bank, founded in 1888, and in contracting loans to build railways and port facilities. Considerable attention was given also to education. On the eve of the Balkan Wars, Bulgarian army recruits had a higher rate of literacy than in the neighboring states. Some social questions were called to public attention, especially the “workers’ question” as pressed by socialist intellectuals. The BANU as led by Aleksandar Stamboliiski put the “peasant question” on the political agenda arguing that the peasantry was not only a valuable “estate” but also the largest in the country. The “women’s question” was posed by women intellectuals. There were also professional “questions,” such as the “teachers’ question,” the “civil servants’ question.” All this was accompanied and aided by considerable economic growth in the first decade of the twentieth century (after a prolonged recession since the 1880s). There were several intermediate stages before the formal assertion of independence in 1908. After the unification with Eastern Rumelia in 1885, the Bulgarian Principality concluded trade agreements with Austria-​Hungary, Russia, Great Britain, France, and Italy in 1896–​7. These freed Bulgaria from the confining conditions of the agreements between the Ottoman Empire and the European states, the so-​called “capitulations.”  Then followed new trade agreements with Russia and a number of other European states in 1905, which further weakened the privileges and exemptions of foreign traders and investors as provided in the capitulations.They also allowed support to the national industries. Then, the Young Turk coup d’état in July 1908 set Ottoman suzerainty over Bulgaria aside. Bulgaria proclaimed its independence on September 22, 1908, just as the weakened Ottomans were obliged to cede sovereignty over Bosnia-​Herzegovina to Austria-​Hungary. After protracted diplomatic negotiations with Russia’s mediation, Bulgarian independence as a sovereign state was acknowledged by the Young Turk regime and the Great Powers in 1909. Of course, attaining formal independence is one thing and actual weight in international relations is something else. Only the so-​called Great Powers, supported by their joint consultations in the pre-​1914 Concert of Europe had real autonomy and the ability to act independently within certain limits defined by the balance of power. As a small and dependent state, Bulgaria had to look for a protector and guarantor among them and at best to maneuver between the interests and contradictions between them in trying to attain its own objectives.The very creation of the Balkan states through secession from the Ottoman Empire, though driven by internal national movements, had come about only because European Great Powers agreed as a function of their own interests and conflicts, without regard to ethnic claims. The central international event in defining Bulgaria’s fortunes, and those of other Balkan states, had after all been the Berlin Congress in 1878. Its decisions defined the starting points for the Bulgarian national agenda and the direction of future national efforts. From unification with Eastern Rumelia in 1885 through independence in 1908, the Bulgarian national project envisaged the “liberation” of Macedonia, considered as territory whose majority defined themselves as Bulgarians. Foreign policy was devoted to this objective, and domestic policy to a large extent served the accumulation of material resources in order to achieve it, e.g. by expanding the army. The policies toward Ottoman Macedonia consisted of asserting its Bulgarian character and waiting for a favorable moment to annex it. The project began with a great advantage over the other interested states (Serbia, Greece, and also Romania) because of the activities of the Bulgarian Exarchate, created with Ottoman permission in 1870. The Exarchate acquired a number of eparchies in Macedonia at the expense of the Greek 77

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Patriarchate. A step forward in the Bulgarian national cause was the acquisition of new berats (permissions) for church communities from the Sultan (four by Stambolov and three by Stoilov) in the 1890s. The Serbian acquisition of the berat for a metropolitan of the eparchy of Skopje was considered by the Bulgarians as a setback. The Orthodox Church in the Ottoman Empire was a substitute for national self-​determination. Serving this purpose, the Bulgarian Exarchate set up schools and developed educational activities in the Bulgarian language and on Bulgarian history. Parallel to the peaceful activities of the Bulgarian Exarchate, a national revolutionary movement sprang up:  the Internal Macedonian-​ Adrianople Revolutionary Organization (Adrianople was later dropped from the title). What became IMRO, was set up in Thessaloniki in 1893 by Gotse Delchev, Dame Gruev, Hristo Tatarchev, and others. In the following years, it formed cheti (armed bands). In 1895 another armed organization was formed in Bulgaria, the Supreme Macedonian Committee, connecting Macedonian associations with army officers in Bulgaria. It sent its armed bands from Bulgaria to Macedonia, causing embarrassment to the Bulgarian government. A rivalry soon emerged between “internal” activists, more locally based in Macedonia, and “Supremists.” In 1903, IMRO organized an uprising, later called the “Ilinden Uprising” (after the Slavonic name for St. Eliajah’s Day on August 2, when it broke out).The uprising in Macedonia and in Thrace was harshly suppressed by the Ottoman authorities, while Bulgaria remained inactive.There followed a new exodus of Macedonian emigration to Bulgaria. A subsequent Ottoman reform in Macedonia proceeded with support from the Great Powers under an agreement between Austria-​Hungary and Russia. It struggled to make progress between 1903 and 1908 but so armed violence only increased. IMRO fell into crisis in disputes with the Supremists over relations with the Bulgarian state and the political future of Macedonia either as autonomous entity in the Ottoman Empire or included in Bulgaria with or without autonomy. In Macedonia itself, a rift emerged between the radicalized IMRO and the Exarchate, which preferred peaceful church and educational activities. Greek and Serbian armed bands used the weakening of Bulgarian activity after the suppression of the Ilinden Uprising to strengthen their own presence and stage a series of attacks in Macedonia (see Keith Brown’s contribution). In response, there were Bulgarian pogroms against the Greek population in several towns in Bulgaria. The situation in Macedonia radically changed after the Yong Turk revolution, carried out by the Committee “Union and Progress” in July 1908. There was initial euphoria for “equality between the peoples,” as declared by the new government, and by allowing political activities and organizations of non-​Muslims and non-​Turks who entered local councils and the newly established parliament. However, it was soon replaced by hardline, Turkish-​dominated centralization policies by the government, which showed little appetite to grant local autonomies or respect nationality rights. Until 1911, the Bulgarian government followed a strict policy of advocating only autonomy for all of Ottoman Macedonia, presuming a Bulgarian majority population and rejecting Serbian proposals for the division of Macedonia. Retreat from this policy began once Ottoman weakness was exposed by the Italian seizure of Libya and internal division in Istanbul. In order to reach their national objectives in a war against the Ottoman Empire and to insure themselves one against the other, the comparatively small Balkan states had to form a coalition.The Balkan Alliance between Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro was formed under Russian aegis. Bulgaria placed itself in a difficult position in the coalition. Convinced of its own historical and political rights across the region, its maximalist demands left no room for compromise with the more flexible positions of the Serbs and the Greeks. The agreements for going to war did not 78

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resolve these differences nor did they unambiguously set down the prospective territorial gains. The agreement with Serbia left a so-​called “disputed area” to be decided eventually through Russian arbitration, and the agreement with Greece did not define the divisions in Macedonia at all; but perhaps no agreement would have been possible without such ambiguities.

Selected Readings Black, Cyril. The Establishment of Constitutional Government in Bulgaria. Princeton, 1943. Brunnbauer, Ulf and Klaus Buchenau. Geschichte Südosteuropas. Ditzingen, 2018. Chary, Frederick B. The History of Bulgaria. Santa Barbara, Calif., 2011. Crampton, Richard. Bulgaria 1878–​1918. A History. New York, 1983. Crampton, Richard. Bulgaria. Oxford, 2007. Daskalov, Roumen. Debating the Past. From Stambolov to Zhivkov. Budapest and New York, 2011. Daskalova, Krassimira, with Karen Offen. “The Source: The Tensions within the Early Twentieth Century Bulgarian Women’s Movement,” Aspasia. The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 9 (2015): 113–​25. Höpken, Wolfgang. “Zentralstaat und kommunale Selbstverwaltung in Bulgarien 1880–​ 1910. Zur Anatomie eines Modernisierungskonflikts.” In Probleme der Modernisierung Bulgariens im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Zwetana Todorova. Sofia, 1994, 24–​39. Perry, Duncan M. The Politics of Terror: The Macedonian Liberation Movements, 1893–​1903. Durham, 1988. Rekun, Mikhail S. How Russia Lost Bulgaria, 1878–​1886: Empire Unguided. Lanham, Md., 2019.

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7 CROATIAN POLITICAL DIVERSITY AND NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Iskra Iveljić

Long exposed to frequent warfare and subsequent waves of migration, the Croatian lands were divided between Venetian, Habsburg, and Ottoman rule through the early modern period. The regional heterogeneity was compounded by noted geographic and cultural differences, ranging from Mediterranean influences in Dalmatia and Istria, the hostile Karst environment in the hinterland, to the Pannonian plains in the East. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Croatian lands passed largely to the Habsburg Monarchy, with only a small historically Croatian part of Bosnia remaining under Ottoman rule. Historic Croatia remained divided socially and culturally among inhabitants from different ethnic and religious groups and even among Croats speaking three different dialects. This diversity presented a challenge which the Croatian national movements would have to address.

Civil Croatia and Slavonia The “long” nineteenth century of Croatian history was characterized by ongoing national integration and modernization, on the model of Western Europe but hardly at the same pace. Civil Croatia led the way, trailed by Slavonia, the Habsburg Military Border, and Dalmatia and Istria under a separate Austrian regime. The traditional autonomy (iura municipalia) of Civil Croatia as a part of the Hungarian kingdom included its own representative assembly (Sabor) along with an appointed governor (Ban). The Hungarian national movement had encroached on this autonomy since the end of the eighteenth century by imposing the Hungarian language and trying to control Slavonia, which was not protected by Civil Croatia’s autonomy. The core of the traditional Croatian elite, the landed nobility, as natio politica, defended its autonomy and the official status of Latin. It could not yet promote Croatian since there was no standard language given the three regional dialects (Kajkavian, Štokavian, and Čakavian). It took the new generation of intelligentsia, inspired by European national movements, Romanticism, and the interest in Slavic languages, to overcome this division and challenge Hungarian hegemony. In the 1830s the Croatian national revival (preporod) established the Štokavian dialect as the standard language 80

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and adopted the new phonetic orthography based on the Czech model, as set down by Ljudevit Gaj in his Kratka osnova horvatsko-​slavenskog pravopisanja (“Short Basis of the Croatian-​Slavic Orthography,” 1830). Then came newspapers published in Croatian in 1835 with a cultural supplement Danica from 1836, and political programs. The outpouring encouraged the start of a modern literature in Croatian. The dominant new intelligentsia was diverse in its own right, socially among the middle class, nobility, priests, and army officers, ethnically among Serbs, Slovenes, and Slovaks, and confessionally between Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, and Protestant. Its Hungarian counterpart relied instead on its own lesser Protestant nobility. The Croatian leader was Ljudevit Gaj seconded by Count Janko Drašković, with a number of later famous writers and politicians following suit, including the later Bans Josip Jelačić and Ivan Mažuranić.The revival adopted the notion that all South Slavs were descendants of the ancient Illyrians providing a broader frame of reference for multi-​ethnic integration in order to unite all of the Croatian lands. At the same time, it sent a message to the Hungarians that Croatia had its Slavic brethren as allies. The concept of a mutual Slavic identity was wholeheartedly embraced by prominent linguists like Ján Kollár, Pavel Josef Šafárik, and Josef Dobrovsky. Followers successfully created their own visual and auditory identity. Symbols like the crescent and the morning star and patriotic songs were omnipresent in public gatherings. They began theater performances given in Croatian and dressed using elements of folk costumes. They also founded a series of national associations from reading clubs to Matica ilirska and an agricultural society. The movement mobilized women who became “visible” by participating in associations and social events, even founding their own society. Some of them like Dragojla Jarnević took to writing. The Illyrians were much influenced by German Romanticist authors like Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schlegel, whose concept of a cultural nation demonstrated that a nation can exist without its own state.Yet, Illyrians were keen on pitting Croatian national culture against foreign influences, especially the German ones upon which the elite of Croatia and Slavonia had been brought up. The 1840s saw political confrontation between Illyrians (organized in the Illyrian, later National Party) and their pro-​Hungarian opponents, the Croatian-​Hungarian Party. The, so-​ called Magyarons consisted of the petty nobility, a few magnates, and some of them mostly non-​Slavic urban elites. They favored the Hungarian connection and rejected Štokavian since Kajkavian was the dialect of Civil Croatia. Contrary to Illyrians, the Magyarons relied only on traditional political fora: the counties, the Croatian and Hungarian Sabor, and on their allies, the reform Hungarian nobility. The conflict between Illyrians and Magyarons resulted in bloodshed in Zagreb in July 1845. The Croatian victims instantly became national martyrs. Political tensions led the Viennese court to forbid using the Illyrian name. But when cooperation between the National Party and Hungarian conservative magnates changed the Austrian perception of the movement as Pan-​Slavic and potentially dangerous to the dynasty, the Illyrian name was allowed in culture. The liberal-​conservative dividing line did not follow the national one, so liberals and conservatives were scattered on both sides. By 1848, the national movement achieved some important goals. The Croatian Sabor proclaimed Croatian as the official language in 1847, creating a web of new associations, formulating a concept of national culture, and politicizing the public. Its followers created modern literature and theater pieces (drama and opera) in Croatian and laid foundations of future cultural institutions. Starting as a rather small group, they gained wider elite support and started spreading their influence beyond Civil Croatia.Yet their Illyrian program did not go that far, as Slovenian and Serbian national movements took their own course. The so-​called Spring of Nations in 1848–​9 was the apogee but also the end of the initial revival. A  March 25, 1848, assembly in Zagreb voted to accept the National Demands, 81

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comparable to the Hungarian Twelve Points. Their modernizing demands asked for the abolition of feudal estates and broad national autonomy. An additional demand was to unite the historical Triune Kingdom (Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia). Then the Sabor, convened in June 1848, also included Istria, which could only be claimed by ethnic rather than historical rights. In 1848–​9, the National Party held sway and enjoyed the support of the new Ban, Baron Josip Jelačić, who descended from a line of high officers and was currently stationed in the Military Border. By April, Hungary declared its separate standing within the Monarchy, and the otherwise liberal new Hungarian laws foresaw the autonomy only of Civil Croatia. Slavonia and the port of Rijeka would be Hungarian. The new Ban thereupon broke with Hungary and turned towards Austro-Slavism, advocating with his followers a new federal unit that would consist of united Croatian and Slovenian lands plus the Serbs’ newly proclaimed Serbian Vojvodina. The gap between Hungary and Croatia was now unbridgeable, and in September of 1848, the Ban went to war against Hungary. Later taking part in suppressing the October revolution in Vienna, Jelačić gained the reputation of a reactionary, determined to save the dynasty. But the revolution’s German character prompted even South Slav liberals to applaud putting it down. After Jelačić disobeyed the King’s order in May 1848 not to convene the Croatian Sabor, it is difficult to see him as entirely loyal to the dynasty. The Croatian Sabor, which now included elected as well as appointed members, confirmed the Ban’s initiatives and articulated a broad Croatian autonomy in charge of all administration except foreign affairs, the military and finances. The soon suppressed Spring of Nations in 1848–​9 was all the same a new stage in the Croatian national movement. Its detailed national and reform programs also set national agendas in motion in civil Slavonia, the Military Border, Dalmatia and to some extent in Istria.

Dalmatia and the Military Border In Dalmatia, another province with a Croatian-​ speaking majority, national movements emerged as well. Dalmatia, like much of Istria, had been under centuries-​old Venetian rule and culture, based on the traditions of Mediterranean communal society. Its urban elite of patrician nobles and merchant middle class and its high clergy were predominantly of South Slav, mostly Croatian origin, but were brought up in the Italian language and culture. In this small territory several competing identities emerged before 1848, not just Slavo-​Dalmatian and Italo-​Dalmatian but also Illyrian, Serbian, and Croatian. They were articulated by various elites, ranging from Orthodox priests and merchants to Catholic patricians. At that time, only the Serbian movement based ethno-confessionalism reached rural areas. Both the Slavic-​ Dalmatian and Italo-​Dalmatian ideology claimed that Slavic ethnic foundations had been enhanced by Italian language and culture, turning Dalmatia into its own entity which could not be integrated into the historical Triune Kingdom. The former saw Slavic language and identity as separate from the Italian one. The latter, inspired by the Italian Risorgimento, as articulated for example by the writer Niccolò Tommaseo, was based upon culture and language, promoting the hybrid but singular Italo-​Slavic identity. The Illyrian orientation stressed a broader Illyrian, South-​Slavic context with a language called Slavic or Illyrian. These orientations could be combined with other identities. For example, the newspaper Srbsko-​dalmatinski glasnik (Serbian-​Dalmatian Messenger), founded in 1836, promoted Serb identity but stayed open also to elements of Illyrism in an attempt to reach nonSerbs. In 1848, August Kaznačić of Dubrovnik put forward an Austro-​Slavic plan of federalizing Austria, with an Illyrian unit of Lower Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, Istria, and Dalmatia, leaving the door open for union with Croatia-​Slavonia. The national movement in Croatia gained influence with a Dalmatian group of intelligentsia gathered around 82

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the journal Zora dalmatinska (1844) edited by Ante Kuzmanić. Yet this circle did not share all the ideas of Illyrians in Croatia, propagating different versions of orthography but promoting a Croatian national identity and the union with Croatia. The Dalmatian hinterland was a rural, patriarchal society, ethnically Croatian and Vlach/ Serbian, and underdeveloped. In its oral culture, a major role was played by the clergy, especially the Franciscans among the Catholics. Given its location at the border of the Ottoman Empire, anti-​Ottoman and anti-​Muslim sentiment was a major layer of identification both for Serbian and Croatian ethnic communities. A  third part of the province was the former republic of Dubrovnik. Its celebrated tradition of independence was based on an elite consisting of nobility, merchants, and entrepreneurs. The highly valued old Dubrovnik Štokavian literature was for the Illyrians in Croatia an argument for introducing this dialect as the standard language. The famous writer Ivan Gundulić was regarded as a forerunner of the movement. Finally, the Bay of Kotor (now in Montenegro) was a tiny maritime belt with a significant Catholic element, surrounded by mountainous rural hinterland, that was dominated by Orthodox inhabitants. This split between rural and urban communities in Dalmatia was evident in different types of identification, ethnic or ethnic/​confessional in the rural hinterland versus the coastal cultural and linguistic identities of the urban elite. The 1848–​9 movement launched the initiative for integrating Dalmatia into Croatia, yet a majority of Dalmatian municipalities voted against attending the Croatian Sabor. The pro-​ Croatian annexationists, also including some Serbs, were even weaker in Istria. Its ethnic Italians constituted a strong cultural, political, and economic elite but only a small number of Croat priests and teachers were receptive to revival ideas. The Military Border was originally founded in the sixteenth century as a bulwark against the Ottoman advance. It turned into a Habsburg military camp of free peasant-​soldiers under military administration from Vienna. Peasant-​soldiers (krajišnici) obtained hereditary right to farm the land and enjoyed tax privileges, in return they had to provide military and border protection services. This system was formalized during the reign of Maria Theresa and amended in 1807 by granting the krajišnici free disposal of part of their land. Since the Military Border was, like the Dalmatian hinterland, populated by different migrants from the Balkans, its ethnic and confessional structure was mixed, Catholic and Orthodox, Croatian, Vlach/Serbian, plus some mostly Austrian officers. Under the influence of the Orthodox priests the Vlachs identified themselves as Serbs, thus constituting almost a half of the population. In 1848–​9, the krajišnici sent their demands to the Croatian Sabor, hoping to improve their position, but they were rejected. The final abolition of the Military Border and the restrictions it set on its inhabitants came only in 1881.

From neo-​absolutism to new national ideas The Habsburg reaction to the events of 1848 proceeded from the imposed constitution of March 1849 to the neo-​absolutist regime of 1851. Unpopular because of Germanization and centralization, it also introduced modernizing reforms in administration, the judiciary, education, and the economy. Although national and political activity was strictly controlled during the 1850s, new Croatian ideologies were formulated and implemented in the more relaxed 1860s, namely those of Yugoslavism and of the Croatian state right (pravaštvo). The Yugoslav ideology, devised by the priest Franjo Rački and the Bishop of Bosnia and Syrmia, Josip Juraj Strossmayer, aimed at setting up a tight cooperation of Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes primarily from cultural ties but not excluding a later political framework for a Yugoslav state. The ideology functioned on two levels, practical politics on the one hand, and future, often vague goals on the other. 83

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The first level was in play from 1861 in the activities of the National Liberal Party, supported by the middle class, especially the intelligentsia, the priesthood, and part of the nobility. Its political program was focused on integrating Croatian lands on the basis of Croatian state rights and going on to achieve broad autonomy in a federalized Habsburg Monarchy. Strossmayer and Rački launched their concept of national culture, combining modern West European and national traits.They promoted the founding of crucial modern institutions, such as the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1866 and the University of Zagreb in 1874, both with the task of becoming scientific and cultural centers for all Southern Slavs. Strossmayer and Rački also advocated the union of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, having in mind the substantial size of the Serb population in the Croatian lands but also the strengthening Christian values in a modernizing society. Contrary to Yugoslavism, the ideology of the Croatian State Right had an exclusive, Greater Croatian character, denying the very existence of Slovenes and Serbs, who were seen as Alpine and Orthodox Croats respectively. Its founders Ante Starčević and Eugen Kvaternik argued that Croatia had long preserved its independent position both toward Hungary and the Habsburgs. They interpreted the decision of the Croatian Sabor in 1527 to accept the Habsburg dynasty as a state contract between equals.Their ideology was influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and later romantic and liberal authors, but it was permeated with Greater Croatian assumptions. Starčević was also provoked by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić’s Greater Serbian ideas claiming that all speakers of Štokavian were actually Serbs. After the Croatian Sabor of 1861 their political organ was the Stranka prava (Party of Right), but Starčević thought of pravaštvo as a movement, since party politics would be made possible only in an independent Croatian state. Initially, pravaštvo relied on radical students and the lower middle class, endangered and frustrated by modernization. Starčević was a typical ideologist, focused on the distant goal of Croatian independence, and not on political practice. After Kvaternik was killed 1871 in a futile anti-​Habsburg uprising, Starčević remained the key figure. According to him, Germandom was the most dangerous enemy of Croats, so he even advised against drinking beer. He fiercely attacked the proponents of Yugoslavism and all politicians who left Croatia in a subordinate position with the Great Powers, calling them servants of Hungarians and (Austrian) Germans. The restoration of constitutionalism in 1860 allowed all political and national groups to address their relationship to Hungary and the Monarchy. The Sabor of 1861, dominated by Strossmayer’s followers, decided to re-​enter the union with Hungary solely on the basis of equality. It refused to send delegates to the Reichsrat (the parliament in Vienna) and to acknowledge common affairs. The pro-​Hungarian National Constitutional Party voted for an unconditioned union with Hungary. Only the Pravaši demanded independence claiming that Croatia should discuss its position only with the King. In 1861, Dalmatia and Istria were granted representative bodies (in Zadar and Poreč respectively), structured differently from the Croatian Sabor with curias (interest groups), as in Austria. Dalmatia, and Istria were represented also in the Reichstag. At the same time, the political scene in Dalmatia was divided between two major groupings:  the nationals (narodnjaci) and autonomists (autonomaši). The National Party’s program revolved around union with Croatia and the status of the national language. Its leaders came from a nationally conscious middle-​ class intelligentsia and lower or ordained priests, especially Franciscans. Its social base came from lower, predominantly rural layers. They favored a Yugoslav orientation and included Serbs in their ranks. The narodnjaci had opened a large number of reading clubs, established a Dalmatian Matica in Zadar, and published their newspaper (Il Nazionale, 1862) in Italian with a supplement in Croatian, in order to reach the urban elite. 84

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Their opponents promoted Dalmatian autonomy, Italian language, and culture, but they were a mixed group, consisting of nobility still embedded in territorial identity, high clergy, and modern bourgeoisie. The autonomaši dominated urban centers, but as the mayor of Split, Ante Bajamonti launched communal projects obtaining wider support. His defeat in 1882 marked the end of the initial phase of the Croatian movement in Dalmatia. In 1873, Croatian was nonetheless introduced into the judiciary and in 1883 made the official language of administration. Both parties had gone through changes since the late 1860s. The dualism of Austria-​Hungary from 1867 represented a blow to the National Party, since it impeded a Dalmatian union with Croatia. Furthermore, Serbs founded their own party in 1879, which cooperated with the autonomaši and stressed their connection with Bosnia-​Herzegovina (occupied by Austria-​ Hungary in 1878), not one with Croatia. To make the matters worse, the clash between the two most prominent National Party members, Miho Klaić and Mihovil Pavlinović, was brought out into the open. They were exponents of two Croatian variants of national ideologies:  based on the urban elite and intelligentsia (Klaić) or on the peasantry (Pavlinović). Moreover, the liberal-​bourgeois Klaić cooperated with Austrian Prime Minister Eduard Taaffe, hoping to gain economic benefits for Dalmatia. More conservative Pavlinović opposed this policy and moved toward Croatian state rights ideology, stressing that Serbs could not constitute a political nation in Croatian lands. He did not however deny the ethnicity of Serbs. Pavlinović announced the coming of pravaštvo to Dalmatia, initially with clerical ties.The Autonomous Party in turn was much influenced by the unification of Italy, which encouraged irredentism both in regards to Dalmatia and Istria. A part of the Dalmatian autonomaši shifted toward italianitá and irredentism and joined the Italian club in the Austrian Reichsrat. In the late 1860s, a national movement was launched in Istria as well, with the first national reading-​club in the town of Kastav in 1866 and the newspaper Naša sloga (Our Harmony), published in Trieste from 1870. Since Croats and Slovenes belonged predominantly to the lower layers of society, the movement was led by priests and teachers, the leader being the Bishop of Parenzo (Poreč) and Pola (Pula), Juraj Dobrila. He and his circle promoted Strossmayer’s Yugoslav idea. In contrast to these efforts at mobilizing Croatian-​speakers, the Italian elite was powerful, privileged, and well organized. After the unification of Italy, it also began to support irredentism. The cooperation of Croats and Slovenes, as manifest in the political society Edinost (Unity), was therefore vital. In the 1870s, they held several big meetings in the open (so-​called tabori), at least to discuss language or economic issues, since the discussion of political issues was forbidden. With a weak social, economic, and political basis (relying on the Sabor on three priests as its appointed members) and unable to ward off the dominant Italian Liberal party, the movement’s success was rather meager until the 1880s. Then, the second generation of its supporters included middle-​ class intelligentsia, and the idea of pravaštvo spread to Istria, in a moderate version without Great-​Croatian traits. By the late nineteenth century, the movement had nine members in Istria’s Sabor. In 1883, Croatian was introduced as an official language in the judiciary and in 1887 de facto accepted also in the Sabor. The Association of St. Cyril and Methodius financed national schools and the first Croatian gymnasium in Pazin opened its doors in 1899. Very important were also economic initiatives such as small savings banks that provided loans to small manufacturers and rural cooperatives. The introduction of universal male suffrage in Austria in 1907 finally changed the political structure of the Istrian Sabor in favor of the South Slavs, reflecting their population numbers.

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Politics under dualism Dualism also brought change to Civil Croatia and Slavonia, which gained subordinate autonomy within Hungary in 1868, under the Croatian-​Hungarian Compromise (Nagodba). Autonomy extended to internal affairs, the judiciary, education, and religion. This limited autonomy still under Budapest did not suit either the narodnjaci or the pravaši. The national narrative therefore remained very much anti-​Hungarian up to 1918. The National Liberal Party realized that federalization was not on the cards and reluctantly accepted Nagodba as political reality. As a part of the compromise with the new Hungarian Prime Minister, it included pro-​Hungarian unionists within its ranks, in exchange for a slight revision of the Nagodba and its member Ivan Mažuranić becoming the Ban in 1873. Mažuranić succeeded in implementing major liberal reforms in administration, judiciary, and education, but the Hungarian government under Kálmán Tisza meddled in the internal affairs of Croatia in violation of the Nagodba. Most visible for the public were violations of the language ordinances, which had made Croatian the language of joint Hungarian-​Croatian institutions if they were on Croatian territory. A  dispute over national symbols in 1883 led to demonstrations in Zagreb that turned into a broad national movement, only suppressed by a royal commission led by an Austrian general. Eventually, the new Ban Count Károly Khuen-​Héderváry (1883–​1903), acted as an exponent of the Hungarian government and of the King. Khuen-​Héderváry was unpopular but successful in keeping the political situation under control. He skillfully (mis) used various conflicts and open issues such as the rivalry between Croats and Serbs to suppress Strossmayer’s Yugoslavism. The Serbian question was of primary importance for all major political and national groups. The Serbs were a large ethnic group in civil Slavonia, the Military Border and Dalmatia, their identity grounded in Orthodoxy. Serbian autonomy differed from Croatian. It was based upon traditional privileges in religion and education. In comparison to the Croatian Sabor, the Serbian assembly (Crkveno-​narodni sabor) consisted not just of priests and urban elite but also peasants, minus the nobility that was the original core of the natio politica in Croatia. Now the question was who was the carrier of Croatian statehood, Croats alone or Croats and Serbs together? The answer ranged from cooperation and compromise (e.g. in 1861 the Croatian Sabor dominated by narodnjaci proclaimed the Yugoslav language as official, in 1867 it acknowledged Serbs as equals), to the radical denial of Serbian ethnicity by the pravaši. After the incorporation of the Military Border in 1881, the stronghold of Serbian movement in the Monarchy moved from southern Hungary (Vojvodina) to Civil Croatia and Slavonia.The percentage of Serbs in Croatia was now roughly one quarter and added to their political weight. Ban Khuen-​Héderváry legalized Serbian autonomy in 1887–​8 in order to reward his political allies. There were however differences between the Serb National Radical and the Serb National Independent Party. The Independents began moving closer to the Croatian opposition against the Ban, whereas the Radicals retained a firm Serbian stand. The turn of the century was another time of change, with new political differentiation and the arrival of a new generation of policy makers. The political landscape added social democrats on the left and the Catholic movement on the right. Since the 1880s, pravaštvo had taken a more moderate direction, so in 1895 a new party, the Pure Party of Right (Čista stranka prava) seceded from it. Under Josip Frank, it accepted the Habsburg framework and was backed by a circle around Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Slovene clerical politicians. They sought to unite Croatian and Slovenian territory on the basis of the Croatian state right in a trialist reconstruction of the Dual Monarchy. The core of the old Party of Right eventually fused with the Independent National Party forming the Croat Party of Right, much as in Dalmatia.

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The turn of the century was marked as well by the politicization of young people, especially students. After demonstratively burning the Hungarian flag on the occasion of the King’s visit to Zagreb in 1895, student activists moved to Vienna and Prague. There they adopted modern ideas on politics, culture, and art, especially influenced by Tomáš G. Masaryk, later the first president of Czechoslovakia. They soon returned to Croatia to promote democratic ideas and new policies and parties. One was a progressive peasant party. The Croat Peasant Party founded by Stjepan Radić and Antun Radić in 1904 sought to mobilize peasants for the national agenda, changing the approach of old parties which had neglected the peasantry (see Mark Biondich’s chapter). The influence of the new generation was felt in Dalmatia as well, where the Croatian Democratic Party founded by Josip Smodlaka in 1905 posed the agrarian question for the first time.The young pravaši Ante Trumbić and Frano Supilo took pravaštvo out of clerical waters and toward cooperation and fusion with the National Party. The crisis of dualism in the Monarchy and in Croatia –​visible in a new wave of demonstrations in 1903 because of the violation of the Nagodba –​ encouraged Trumbić and Supilo to promote a so-​called New Course policy in 1905. Its aim was to use political turbulence in the Monarchy to Croatian advantage. It saw the Hungarian opposition (the Independent Party of Ferenc Kossuth) as an ally. Croatia would support Hungary’s right to independence, consequently claiming its own right. But trying to come to terms with Italians posed problems for the policy in Istria. Still, the leaders of the New Course were realistic, speaking of both short-​term and long-​term goals. They promoted democratic ideas (universal suffrage, civic rights) and Yugoslavism, so their policy was accepted by Serbs. Their new Croat-​Serb Coalition won the majority of seats in the Sabor in 1906, with the franchise widened in 1910 to include some of the rural peasantry. The New Course effectively united Croats and enough Serbs to run on a common platform. The Serb Radicals soon withdrew and supported the Hungarian government, while actually looking to Belgrade. The Serb Independents sought instead to cooperate with Croatian politicians. But when Svetozar Pribićević replaced Supilo as the head of the Coalition in 1909, the Coalition took an opportunistic course and cooperated with Budapest. In spite of political divisions, all of these parties had a national character (Serbian or Croatian). Their differences came from liberal/​democratic vs. traditional/​conservative, radical vs. moderate national standpoints, and also in the mode of operating and their social basis. The churches, especially the Catholic Church, were still a major force. At the turn of the century a separate Catholic movement appeared. Its more radical partisans stood for founding a Catholic party as a means of re-​Christianizing society at all costs.Yet others wanted to avoid an open conflict. For both sides, Catholicism and Croatianhood were indivisible.The current Hungarian government that promoted liberal reforms including civic marriage had no sympathy for such a movement, turning many Croatian priests into political anti-​Hungarians. The onset of the twentieth century was marked by crises for Austria-​Hungary stemming from its Balkan policies, starting with the annexation of Bosnia-​Herzegovina (1908) and culminating in the Balkan Wars (1912–​13). The wars left a territorially enlarged Serbia, hostile to the Monarchy and newly encouraged to raise the South Slav question in the Croatian lands and in Bosnia-​Herzegovina. Already in 1909, the authorities in Vienna had tried to brand Croatian Serbs as supporters of anti-Habsburg terrorists. But the notorious High treason trial in Zagreb failed to prove its charges against members of the oppositional Serb Independent party. The Monarchy’s legal system avoided embarrassment, but the acquittal did not calm public opinion. After the Balkan Wars, Yugoslav options ranging from moderate to radical attracted more attention. Genuine terrorists among the so-​called Nationalistic Youth now resorted to violence and assassinations. Politics was no longer the province only of an urban elite in traditionally 87

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secluded venues but broader agendas promoted in public. In Croatia, young people now entered debates and disputes as in the general strike of students and pupils in 1912. On the eve of the First World War, the national question turned into one of the most important issues in the Monarchy, and in the Croatian lands as well. The Yugoslav option was becoming more attractive, mostly in its non-​unitary, federal form. This does not mean that the Monarchy was seen as an anachronistic state doomed to perish, since many of the debated proposals remained within some sort of Habsburg framework. But after 1918, any viable Habsburg legacy was dismissed by the new states.These promoted their own narratives, concentrating on their nation-​state and its own national struggle.The greater complexity of the prewar Croatia experience would pose challenges for the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which rested heavily on an anti-​Habsburg foundation. These new narratives also diminished the pre-​1918 multiculturalism of Austria-​Hungary, downgrading and simplifying the Habsburg legacy. Recent scholarship has re-​interpreted and upgraded this legacy, shedding new light on pre-​1914 Croatian history as well.

Selected Readings Banac, Ivo. The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics. Ithaca, NY, 1984. Behschnitt, Wolf Dietrich. Nationalismus bei Serben und Kroaten 1830–​1914. Analyse und Typologie der nationalen Ideologie. Munich, 1980. Cipek, Tihomir and Josip Vrandečić, eds. Nacija i nacionalizam u hrvatskoj povijesnoj tradiciji. Zagreb, 2007. Clewing, Konrad. Staatlichkeit und nationale Idenitätsbildung. Dalmatien in Vormärz und Revolution. Munich, 2001. Gross, Mirjana. Die Anfänge des modernen Kroatien. Gesellschaft, Politik und Kultur in der ersten dreißig Jahren nach 1848.Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 1993. Kaser, Karl. Slobodan seljak i vojnik. Povojačeno društvo (1754.–​1881.). Zagreb, 1997. Kessler, Wolfgang. Politik, Kultur und Gesellschaft in Kroatien und Slawonien in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Munich, 1981. Markus, Tomislav. “The Serbian Question in Croatian Politics 1848–​1918,” Review of Croatian History 6 (2010): 165–​88. Stančić, Nikša. Hrvatska nacija i nacionalizam u 19. i 20. stoljeću. Zagreb, 2002. Trogrlić, Marko and Nevio Šetić. Dalmacija i Istra u 19. stoljeću. Zagreb, 2015.

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8 MONTENEGRO AS AN INDEPENDENT STATE, 1878–​1 912 John D. Treadway

The Treaties of San Stefano and Berlin (1878) and state building 1878 was the year when Montenegro, which for many decades had already defied Ottoman rule, became internationally recognized as an independent state. In that year, its ruler was 37-​ year-​old Nikola I of the house of Petrović-​Njegoš. Born in 1841, Nikola served as his country’s knjaz (prince) and gospodar (lord) for well over half a century, becoming Montenegro’s first –​ and, practically speaking, only –​king in 1910. In 1921, he died in exile at Cap d’Antibes, France, at the age of 79. It was during Nikola’s long reign that Montenegro evolved from a fragmented, clan-​dominated land into a more modern, albeit chronically impoverished, polity and an active participant in European political life. Educated in France, Nikola built upon the foundations laid by his immediate predecessors –​ Montenegro’s last prince-​bishop, Vladika Petar II Njegoš (1830–​51), famed as both politician and poet, and Danilo II/​I (1851–​60), who separated secular from religious authority and established the hereditary principality of Montenegro in the direct male line. Following Danilo’s lead at the time of the Crimean War in the 1850s, Nikola sought to obtain formal Great Power recognition of Montenegrin independence, finally achieved as a result of treaties ending the Russo-​Ottoman War of 1877–​8. Nikola also followed the tested dynastic principle to marry into influential families. He paired many of his numerous children (12 in total: nine daughters, two of whom died early, and three sons) with the sons and daughters of European royalty, in the process earning for himself the nickname “father-​in-​law” of Europe. In 1883, Nikola’s eldest daughter, Russian-​educated Ljubica (better known as Zorka), married Peter Karadjordjević (who 13 years after her death at the age of 25 in 1890, became Peter I of Serbia). Daughters Milica and Anastasia (Stana) married the Russian Grand Dukes Peter Nikolaievich and Nikolai Nikolaievich in 1889 and 1907, respectively. Nikola’s third-​eldest daughter, Jelena (Elena/​Helena), married the Prince of Naples (later King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy) in 1896.Three years later, Crown Prince Danilo (born 1871) married Augusta Charlotte Jutta (after her marriage and conversion to Orthodoxy generally known as Milica), daughter of the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-​Strelitz. The marriage policy indicated the new international standing of this small, albeit independent country. Its independence had been first recognized by the Treaty of San Stefano, negotiated in March 1878 but never became implemented. The San Stefano Treaty trebled 89

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Montenegro’s size (at the expense of the vanquished Ottoman Empire), doubled its population, and gave it a considerable stretch of Adriatic coastline. In June and July, however, the Treaty of San Stefano was replaced at the Congress of Berlin, hosted by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who had offered his good offices as “honest broker.” Article 26 of the new Treaty of Berlin confirmed Montenegro’s independence, but other articles (notably Article 28) provided for only a two-​fold increase in territory and reduced its coastal frontage. Nevertheless, the fact that Montenegro now had access to the sea was of considerable importance. Montenegro was permitted to retain the port of Bar (Antivari) and its seaboard –​but only after it accepted Article 29, which neutralized the harbor and limited the types of vessels that could be anchored there. Moreover, Montenegro had to promise not to construct or maintain any warships and to permit Austria-​Hungary to patrol the Montenegrin coast. Austria was given control of the coastal commune of Sutomore (Spizza/​Spič), which became the southernmost town of the Habsburg Empire  –​together with the surrounding heights, which overlooked Bar and put the tiny port at a decisive military disadvantage. Montenegro also had to tolerate the Austro-​ Hungarian occupation of neighboring Herzegovina, which Nikola considered his family’s ancestral homeland, as well as the garrisoning of Habsburg troops in the Sandžak (Sanjak) of Novi Pazar, the strategic swath of land north of the Tara River that separated Montenegrin from Serbian controlled territory for decades to come. As a result of the Treaty of Berlin, Montenegro acquired the towns of Nikšić, which would soon begin its development as an important economic and cultural center; Žabljak, Montenegro’s capital under the fifteenth-​century Crnojević dynasty; Podgorica, the country’s current capital; as well as Kolašin and Spuž. In 1881, after lengthy negotiations, Montenegro also formally acquired Ulcinj with its substantial Albanian population and a stretch of Adriatic coastline extending to the Bojana River, in exchange for two mostly Muslim districts engaged in ongoing frontier disputes. Montenegro’s borders remained essentially fixed from 1881 until the Balkan Wars of 1912–​13. According to various estimates, before its territorial expansion in 1878, Montenegro’s ­population had numbered between 140,000 and 200,000. By 1912, on the eve of the First Balkan War, it had grown to over 300,000  –​still over 90  percent rural and approximately 94  percent Orthodox, 4  percent Muslim, and slightly under 2  percent Roman Catholic. Article 27 of the Treaty of Berlin pledged Montenegro to honor freedom of religion, but the Orthodox Church in Montenegro (the Metropolitanate of Cetinje) enjoyed the status of official state church. Within the new eastern borders, the Muslim population also grew. In 1878, the Islamic Community of Montenegro (Islamska zajednica Crne Gore) was formally established to represent Muslim interests. Even so, many Muslims chose to emigrate from Montenegro’s newly acquired territories. A large number of Podgoriçani (originally from Podgorica) crossed the new Ottoman-​Montenegrin border and settled in and around Shkodër (Shkodra/Scutari in present-​day Albania). A small Catholic population lived on Montenegro’s southern coast, especially in and around Bar, as well as in the highlands along the country’s indeterminate border with Ottoman Albania. In 1886, the Montenegrin government signed a Concordat with the Vatican endorsing the Archbishopric of Bar. Over the course of decades, Nikola, like his predecessors, did what he could to promote a special Montenegrin national identity –​but one, which was nevertheless somehow connected to the notion of Greater Serbdom. From its adoption in 1870 until the end of World War I, the country’s national anthem was Obavoj u nam Crnoj Gori (To Our Beautiful Montenegro). On the other hand, Nikola composed the lyrics to “Onamo, ’namo da vidju Prizren” (There, over there, that I may see Prizren [the capital of Stefan Dušan’s medieval Serb empire]). Sometimes 90

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referred to as the “Serbian Marseillaise” (Srpska marseljeza), it called for the liberation of all Serb lands, a goal Nikola frequently mentioned to foreign diplomats resident in Cetinje. In keeping with the practice of other European countries, Montenegro introduced a number of state and dynastic distinctions in the course of the nineteenth century. The best known was the Order of Danilo, established in 1853 by Nikola’s uncle and predecessor. Recipients included two Russian tsars, the Habsburg emperor, and, in 1895, the renowned engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla. While many Europeans (especially Britons) recalled W.  E. Gladstone’s and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s adulatory and often moving descriptions of Montenegro and its gallant, mountain-​ warrior population, the international respect that Nikola sought for himself and his country continued to be elusive. In December 1905, the same month that the Montenegrin constitution was proclaimed, the fictional Ruritanian country of Pontevedro (loosely based on Montenegro), was lampooned in Franz Lehárs’s witty and popular operetta Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow), resulting in protests outside the Austro-​Hungarian embassy in Cetinje.

Modernization: administration, military, infrastructure, education, culture The years 1878–​1912 saw major changes in Montenegrin political, economic, and social life. While in the eyes of some, Nikola practiced a kind of despotism in keeping with Montenegrin tradition –​continuing, for example, to dispense justice while sitting under a tree in front of his modest palace in Cetinje –​he nonetheless promoted important reforms. These introduced many of the trappings of a modern state together with political changes that would ultimately undermine his own authority. In 1879, Nikola abolished the old Senate and introduced a new State Council. Its six ministries (actually departments under an umbrella ministry) were joined by a supreme court consisting of five members.The country was divided into ten nahije (districts or counties) which in turn were divided into kapitanije (captaincies). Some Montenegrin tribal leaders, whom Nikola consulted less frequently in years to come, balked at the changes, seeing in them an infringement on their own traditional power. From 1879 until the introduction of constitutional rule at the end of 1905, Nikola’s cousin Božo Petrović-​Njegoš (formerly head of the Montenegrin Senate) served as president of the new Ministerial Council. Between 1878 and 1905, the country’s legal system was modernized, perhaps the most important reform being the adoption of the General Property Code (Opšti imovinski zakonik) in 1888. The year 1881 saw the introduction of a new civil ensign –​together with a naval ensign –​both red-​blue-​white striped, strikingly similar to the tri-​colored Serbian flag. Prince Danilo is credited with organizing Montenegro’s first “modern” army, but it was Nikola who oversaw the more essential military modernization after 1878. All Montenegrin men between the ages of 18 and 62 were obliged to serve in the country’s militia on which the army was based. Regular military exercises began in 1881. In 1884, 14 Montenegrins were sent to other countries (notably Russia and Italy) for formal officer training. In 1895 the first permanent NCO school (for infantry) opened in Podgorica –​and the first school for regular officers in Cetinje the following year. In 1910 the Law on Army Organization was approved and Nikola issued a decree requiring all Montenegrin males to carry firearms. Despite these efforts at modernization and Russian gifts of guns and artillery, the Montenegrin army, consisting of some 35,000 men on the eve of the Balkan Wars, was ill-​equipped and poorly trained compared to the armies fielded by most other Balkan states. Between 1878 and 1912, considerable strides were made also in modernizing the country’s infrastructure. Between 1882 and 1905 about 450 kilometers of new roads were constructed, 91

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and in 1908 the country’s first railroad line opened between Bar and Virpazar (on the western edge of Lake Shkodër), covering a distance of some 43 kilometers. Nothing came of negotiations with the Ottomans in the 1880s to regulate Lake Shkodër, by which Montenegro might secure additional arable land. A postal service existed in Montenegro as early as 1841, the year of Nikola’s birth, and the first Montenegrin postage stamp was issued in 1874. At the time of Nikola’s coronation as King in 1910, the country had some 20 postal and 23 telegraph offices, and by 1914 the number of postal offices had grown threefold and the number of telegraph offices more than doubled.The first Marconi radio transmission in the Balkans (between Montenegrin Bar and Italian Bari) took place in August 1904, and in 1907 the country’s first telephone service was introduced. In 1901 the country’s first bank opened, the Prva nikšićka novčana zadruga, with a founding capital of 200,000 Austro-​Hungarian crowns. In 1906 Montenegro introduced its own currency, the Montenegrin perper. Yet, despite a few modern features, Montenegro’s economy remained an overwhelmingly traditional one, with stockbreeding and farming being the principal occupations. Rural overpopulation and unemployment were serious problems. Domestic industry was virtually nonexistent. Two exceptions were the breweries in Nikšić, which began production in 1896 and 1911, respectively. Most of the country’s more important economic enterprises (including the operation of the port of Bar and the Montenegrin railroad), were in foreign, mostly Italian and Austrian, hands. Because of the endemic poverty, thousands of Montenegrins migrated to other lands, notably to America and Serbia, in search of a better life –​and the Montenegrin government remained dependent upon the traditional largesse of the Russian government and financial loans from European banks (chiefly Russian and Italian, but also Austrian and Ottoman) in an ongoing effort to maintain a precarious solvency. One area where the government faced an increasing need for money was education.Vladika Peter II Njegoš had established the country’s first public primary school in 1834 –​the same year a modern printing press which the Montenegrin ruler had purchased in St. Petersburg began operation in Cetinje. By the 1870s, the principality had approximately 50 primary schools and two higher-​level schools, including a school for the education of girls, founded in 1869 and named in honor of its principal benefactress, Maria Alexandrovna, the wife of Tsar Alexander II. The Cetinje Seminary, also founded in 1869, evolved into the Cetinje Seminary-​Normal School in 1887. In 1888 a public school for girls was opened in Podgorica, and in 1901 in Bar. The last decade of the nineteenth century saw the opening of the short-​lived Podgorica Agricultural School. The 1879 Law on Primary Education provided for free and compulsory elementary education for most children aged seven or older.The law was loosely enforced, especially in Montenegro’s predominant uplands. Still, by 1910, over 40 percent of Montenegrin children were attending primary school on a fairly regular basis. By the end of the century, the number of secular primary schools exceeded 100, including 26 private schools. By 1906 the number of schools had increased to 112 and students to 10,000. Montenegro relied on many “outsiders” from across Europe –​Russia, France, Austria-​Hungary, and, especially, Serbia –​to serve as teachers, advisors, and government functionaries. One especially important foreign-​born notable was Jovan (Jovo) Pavlović, a Serb from the Vojvodina, who became Montenegro’s first Minister of Education. In part because of the various educational reforms, the period between 1878 and the Balkan Wars saw a rapid increase in Montenegrin literacy –​and a parallel rise in all kinds of publications. The country’s first newspaper, Crnogorac (The Montenegrin) appeared in 1871 and served as the official publication of the Montenegrin court and government throughout Nikola’s reign. Renamed Glas Crnogorca (Voice of the Montenegrin) in 1873, it ceased publication only in 1922, when it functioned as the voice of the Montenegrin government-​in-​exile. 92

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A literary companion to Crnogorac/​Glas Crnogorca known as Crnogorka also appeared for the first time in 1871. On the eve of the First Balkan War, several newspapers were being published in the Montenegrin capital, including the Cetinjski Vjesnik, which began publication in 1908. Newspapers were also published elsewhere in Montenegro, notably in Nikšić, where Nevesinje (1898–​9) and Onogošt (1899–​1900) appeared at the turn of the century. For a short while, in 1906–​7, the Nikšić-​based Narodna misao (People’s Thought) challenged the Montenegrin status quo, calling for more political reform than Nikola was willing to concede. A similar opposition newspaper, Slobodna riječ (Free Word) appeared briefly in Cetinje in 1907. The period after 1878 saw a cultural blossoming, to which Nikola himself, a prolific poet and playwright, contributed personally. Among his many works, Balkanska carica (Empress of the Balkans), a drama in three acts, is perhaps best known. Other prominent writers and poets of the period included the first editor of Crnogorac, Simo Popović, a celebrated clan chief who learned to read and write in his fifties and who parted company with Nikola in 1882. The Zetski dom, the oldest theater in Montenegro, was established in Cetinje in 1884. The National Library of Montenegro was established in 1893, on the 400th anniversary of the Crnojević printing press, the second oldest in the Slavic world. The National Museum in Cetinje opened in 1896, the same year as the country’s first public reading room. Other Montenegrin towns, notably Nikšić, experienced similar developments.

International relations, neighbor states, and the Great Powers Chronic penury notwithstanding, in the years between 1878 and 1912 (and 1914, for that matter), Montenegro exercised a role in European political life far greater than its diminutive size might have suggested. Before the outbreak of the First Balkan War, all of Europe’s Great Powers maintained legations in Cetinje, which boasted a population of less than 6,000 in 1912. For its part, Montenegro could not afford to maintain representations in more than just a few European capitals. On the other hand, Nikola, who in his youth had attended the Lycée Louis-​ le-​Grand in Paris, made periodic trips outside Montenegro after the Russo-​Ottoman War of 1877–​8, notably to Istanbul in 1883 and 1899, Belgrade and Russia (to attend the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II) in 1896, Great Britain in 1898, and Austria-​Hungary in 1908. Despite its small size and limited finances, Montenegro nonetheless gradually emerged as an active participant in broader European affairs. In the late 1890s, the country sent approximately 100 constables to Crete as part of an international gendarmerie established to maintain law and order on the troubled island, and, for a time, Božo Petrović, the King’s cousin, was considered for the post of governor of Crete. During Nikola’s reign, Montenegro joined several newly founded international organizations. In 1875, it became a charter member of the Universal Postal Union, and in 1886 of the International Union for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (from which it withdrew in 1899 because of budgetary considerations). Montenegro’s especially close relationship with Russia dated from the early eighteenth century, when St. Petersburg began to extend annual subsidies to Montenegro, subsidies which continued, with few interruptions, through World War I. Indeed, Russian subsidies were often the principal source for the Montenegrin state budget and other projects. In announcing the General Property Code for Montenegro in 1888, for example, Nikola noted that “in this undertaking we were successful only because the Brightest Imperial Crown of Our great Brother Russia, in its infinite kindness to Montenegro, offered to cover a significant part of the necessary and major costs.” Over the course of decades, Russia likewise lent financial backing to any number of Montenegrin schools –​and sent tens of thousands of guns to the Montenegrin army. 93

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On numerous occasions, including the War of 1877–​8, Montenegro had supported Russia in campaigns against their mutual Ottoman foe, and in 1889, Tsar Alexander III remarked that the prince of Montenegro was “Russia’s only true and faithful friend!” In 1904–​5, a number of Montenegrin volunteers fought on Russia’s side during the Russo-​Japanese War. During his long reign, the Montenegrin ruler bestowed the Order of Danilo upon Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II and in 1910, Nicholas II returned the favor, making the Montenegrin ruler an honorary field marshal in the Russian army, an honor previously bestowed upon only one other foreigner, the Duke of Wellington. In the wake of the Austro-​Prussian War of 1867,Vienna turned its attention more and more to the Balkan Peninsula. In the years between 1878 and 1912, Austro-​Montenegrin relations were generally cool, though usually correct. Although Vienna provided financial and technical assistance in the years before the outbreak of the Balkan Wars, it considered Montenegro to be a Russian pawn. The Habsburg Empire represented the principal stumbling block for any territorial expansion. Even so, Austria-​Hungary was Montenegro’s most important trading partner (as well as an important source of loans), and on those occasions when relations between Cetinje and St. Petersburg took a turn for the worse,Vienna was usually ready to provide Montenegro with financial incentives. In 1876, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had remarked that the Balkans were not worth the healthy bones of a Pomeranian grenadier. In the years that followed, Berlin generally was content to let Austria-​Hungary, its principal ally, take the lead in Balkan (and Montenegrin) affairs. In 1906, Germany was the last of Europe’s Great Powers to establish a legation in Cetinje. From 1878 onward, Rome was especially interested in Montenegrin affairs (even before Nikola’s daughter Jelena married the Prince of Naples in 1896). Positioned across the Adriatic Sea from Montenegro, Italy was an important source of much needed capital and technical expertise. Italian engineers, for example, led the project to build Montenegro’s first railroad and develop the port of Bar. On the other hand, some Montenegrins objected to primacy of the Compagnia di Antivari in Montenegro’s economic life and the fact that Italians enjoyed a monopoly on the country’s tobacco production. Moreover, Italian political and economic interests in neighboring Ottoman Albania were often at cross-​purposes with Nikola’s plans for territorial expansion in the same region. France’s economic interests in Montenegro were minimal, but in keeping with its role as a European Great Power, the government of the Third Republic closely monitored developments in the mountain principality (working increasingly with Russia after the establishment of the Franco-​Russian alliance in the 1890s) and constructed an imposing art-​nouveau embassy in Cetinje, which now houses the special collections of the Montenegrin national library. Like France, Britain’s interests in Montenegrin affairs were limited.Though initially wary of Russia’s “special relationship” with Montenegro, Britain, like France, was generally willing to concede St. Petersburg pride of place (if not a free hand) in Montenegrin affairs after the establishment of the Triple Entente in 1907. When necessary, the members of both the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente could act in concert to restrain Nikola’s occasional attempts at territorial aggrandizement.This was notably the case after Montenegrin forces occupied the Albanian city of Shkodër in the early stages of the Balkan War in 1912. American interests in the political life of Montenegro were more circumscribed than those of any of Europe’s Great Powers –​but there were important points of contact, nonetheless. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, upwards of 30,000 Montenegrins emigrated to the United States, especially to Colorado and Alaska, as poignantly referenced by Nikola in his poem “Bol Crnogorca u Americi” (The Pain of a Montenegrin in America). Over time,

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some of these emigrants made their way back to their Montenegrin homeland with notions that challenged the country’s prevailing political and economic system. American trade with Montenegro was minimal, but the Singer Sewing Machine Company began sending sewing machines and instructors to Montenegro in 1903. Two years later, formal diplomatic relations were established, and in 1909 the American government declined Nikola’s curious offer to have the United States use the port of Ulcinj and the Bay of Noce as a naval station, presumably as a counterweight to Europe’s Great Powers. Most Montenegrins considered the Ottoman Turks to be their hereditary foe, and one of the traditional aims of Montenegrin policy was to evict the Turks from the central Balkans once and for all. Between 1878 and 1912, however, Ottoman-​Montenegrin relations were generally good, and the two sides signed a number of agreements that addressed border issues and secured financial loans for Cetinje. Indeed, a close personal relationship developed between Nikola and Sultan Abdul Hamid beginning with the Montenegrin prince’s initial visit to Istanbul in 1883. Still, it was clear to all concerned that if Montenegro were to acquire additional lands after 1878, it would most probably be at Ottoman expense. Over the course of many years, most Montenegrins had traditionally identified with Greater Serbdom, and Montenegrins had fought with Serbia against the Ottoman Empire on numerous occasions in an effort to throw off the “Ottoman yoke.” Because of their mutual interests, common ethnic origins and the Orthodox religion, Serbian and Montenegrin relations were usually close. There was, nevertheless, always an undercurrent of rivalry between the rulers for leadership in Serbian and South Slav affairs. This held true whether Serbia’s sovereigns came from the House of Obrenović or Karadjordjević. When Obrenović princes occupied the Serbian throne, it was easier for Nikola to put himself forth as the leader of the Serb world, which he readily did. In 1877–​8, Montenegro and Serbia had fought as allies against the Ottomans –​and the two countries would again join forces during the Balkan Wars of 1912–​13. However, the Serbo-​ Montenegrin connection remained a problematical one, especially after 1903, when Peter Karadjordjević, Nikola’s son-​in-​law, became Serbian King and soon replaced Nikola in the Pan-​ Slavic affections of the Russian government. Official Serbo-​Montenegrin relations were anything but uniformly close in the decade before the outbreak of World War I and many younger Montenegrins, especially those educated in Serbia, looked more to Belgrade than Cetinje for political leadership and inspiration.

Political life In 1905, Montenegro became one of the last European countries to adopt a constitution. Proclaimed on October 31, the new Montenegrin constitution went into effect on December 19, 1905. It created a national parliament (skupština), consisting of 14 ex officio members and 62 elected by manhood suffrage. The constitution was a deliberately conservative instrument, providing for a ministerial council accountable to the sovereign –​not to the parliament, which had limited legislative authority. Indeed, members of the assembly that approved the constitution in December were not given the opportunity to debate or amend the document. Lazar Mijušković, former finance minister, was appointed head of Montenegro’s first constitutional government, but the experiment with constitutional rule and parliamentary democracy was not an unqualified success. Montenegro’s first parliamentary elections took place in September 1906. Mijušković stepped down as prime minister in November and was succeeded in office first by Marko

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Radulović and then Andrija Radović, both of whom pursued policies at odds with Nikola’s and incurred his political wrath. Forced to step down in April 1907, Radović was succeeded by Lazar Tomanović who remained prime minister until June 1912. With the introduction of constitutional rule, Montenegrin political parties now appeared. An opposition party, the Narodna stranka (People’s Party) evolved from the “Club of People’s Representatives,” led by Radulović and Radović.Their supporters, known as klubaši (“Clubmen”) advocated political reform along the lines of Serbia’s Radical Party, more reform than provided in the constitution of 1905, also calling for a future union with Serbia. In the course of 1907, the government suppressed the klubaši, who chose not to participate in the skupština elections scheduled for October. (Supporters of the King had destroyed the press of the opposition paper Narodna misao in Nikšić in September.) A  pro-​Nikola party then came to power and dominated Montenegrin political life from 1907 until 1914. This was the Prava narodna stranka (Real People’s Party), whose adherents were known as pravaši. In June 1907, liberal Montenegrin students in Belgrade published an incendiary proclamation critical of Nikola. Five months later the Montenegrin government announced it had uncovered a plot to assassinate the prince. He held the Narodna stranka (as well as the Serbian government) responsible for what became known as the “Cetinje Bomb Affair,” so named because a number of bombs manufactured at the Serbian military arsenal in Kragujevac had been discovered in Cetinje. Nikola initiated a harsh crackdown against critics at home and severed official ties with Belgrade. Over 100 Montenegrins were brought to trial. Among them was the former prime minister, Andrija Radović. Initially sentenced to 15 years in prison, he was pardoned in 1913. In 1908, on the sixtieth anniversary of Francis Joseph’s reign as Habsburg emperor (and one day after Bulgaria had proclaimed its total independence from the Ottoman Empire), Austria-​ Hungary formally annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. For a short while the Montenegrin and Serbian governments set aside their differences in the face of what they both perceived as an egregious violation of the Treaty of Berlin. Sabers were rattled by all sides, but a major Balkan war was avoided. In the end, Austria-​Hungary agreed to lift the restrictions imposed upon Montenegro by Article 29 of the Treaty of Berlin. In exchange for international recognition of its full sovereignty in Bosnia-​Herzegovina, the Dual Monarchy also agreed to withdraw its forces from the Sandžak of Novi Pazar, which was returned to full Ottoman control. The question was for how long. The possibility of a future war to expel the Turks from the Sandžak/​Raška and the rest of “old Serbia” loomed large, as did the possibility of a future Serbo-​Montenegrin union, in whatever form it might take. During the Annexation Crisis, the klubaši and the pravaši (like the Serbian and Montenegrin governments) had entered into an uneasy truce. It came to an end after yet another anti-​Nikola plot was uncovered. Once again, the government cracked down hard on the conspirators as well as members of the klubaši in general. Over 150 were tried for treason in a military court. Most were found guilty and sentenced to death or terms of imprisonment. As it had done at the time of the Cetinje Bomb Affair, the official Montenegrin press attacked the Serbian government, especially the Serbian prime minister, Nikola Pašić. Austria-​Hungary did what it could to take advantage of the bitter war of words between Cetinje and Belgrade to ingratiate itself with the Montenegrin prince, who was contemplating a promotion of sorts.

The Balkan Wars, 1912–​1913 In 1910, on the fiftieth anniversary of Nikola’s rule, Montenegro was elevated to the status of kingdom –​and Nikola, who had assumed the style of “Royal Highness” in 1900, formally 96

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became King. Despite the country’s limited finances, the royal promotion was celebrated with lavish fanfare that only added to the apprehensions of Nikola’s political opponents. Later in 1910 and throughout much of 1911, the new King, ever hopeful of expanding his influence and possibly acquiring additional territory, helped to promote anti-​government unrest among the Catholic population of neighboring northern Albania. Although the Young Turk government settled this unrest by August 1911, war broke out the following month between expansion-​ minded Italy and the Ottoman Empire, leading to a much greater Balkan crisis. Encouraged by Ottoman setbacks in the Ottoman-​Italian War over Libya in 1911–​12, Montenegro and Serbia set aside their political differences once again in 1912 to join with Greece and Bulgaria in the anti-​Ottoman Balkan League. On October 9, 1912, Montenegro shelled Ottoman positions along the Montenegrin border with Ottoman-​controlled Albania, the opening salvo in what became known as the First Balkan War. In short order, Montenegrin forces crossed into the southern Sandžak and northern Albania, eventually taking, at great loss of life, the strategic city of Shkodër, one of Nikola’s long-​term territorial desiderata, which Europe’s Great Powers forced the King to abandon in 1913. The Balkan Wars of 1912–​13 resulted in Montenegro’s first substantial territorial expansion since 1878. The country acquired the southern Sandžak and much of Metohija, save for Prizren. Montenegro’s new territorial gains posed something of a conundrum for Nikola and his supporters, as the prospect of a Belgrade-​led union of Montenegro with Serbia excited his opponents. On the one hand, Nikola hoped that his new acquisitions would contribute to his kingdom’s economic and political viability. But as was the case after Montenegro’s territorial expansion in 1878, many of Nikola’s new subjects were simply not committed to the Montenegrin state or ruling house. Many Orthodox residents of the Sandžak inclined more toward Belgrade, while Muslims and especially the Albanians thought of themselves as neither Montenegrin-​Serb nor Serb-​Montenegrin. In fighting the two wars, Montenegro’s army had lost some 10,000 men, over one quarter of its force. The physical exhaustion of the Balkan Wars put it at a disadvantage in the much larger struggle that would break out in 1914 and would ultimately lead to Montenegro’s end as an independent state.

Selected Readings Andrijašević, Živko M. and Šerbo Rastoder. The History of Montenegro from Ancient Times to 2003. Podgorica, 2006. Fleming, Thomas. Montenegro: The Divided Land. Rockford, Ill., 2002. Jelavich, Charles and Barbara Jelavich. The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804–​1920. Seattle, Wash., 1977. Morrison, Kenneth. Montenegro: A Modern History. London, 2008. Morrison, Kenneth and Elizabeth Roberts. The Sandžak: A History. London, 2013. Pavković, Aleksandar and Christopher Kelen. Anthems and the Making of Nation States:  Identity and Nationalism in the Balkans. London, 2016. Pavlović, Srdja. Balkan Anschluss: The Annexation of Montenegro and the Creation of the Common South Slavic State. West Lafayette, Ind., 2008. Raspopović, Radoslav, Konrad Clewing, Edvin Pezo, and Senka Raspopović, eds. Montenegro und das Deutsche Reich. Dokumente aus dem Politischen Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts in Berlin, 1906–​1914, 2 vols. Podgorica and Berlin, 2018 and 2019. Roberts, Elizabeth. Realm of the Black Mountain. A History of Montenegro. London, 2007. Treadway, John D. The Falcon and the Eagle: Montenegro and Austria-​Hungary, 1908–​1914. West Lafayette, Ind., 1983.

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9 THE AGRARIAN QUESTION IN ROMANIA, 1744–​1 921 Constantin Iordachi

For most of their history, the Romanian population like the rest of Southeastern Europe was predominantly a rural peasantry.The rural share of the population exceeded 80 percent through the interwar period, and an urban majority appeared only as late as 1981. Given the longstanding peasant majority and the paramount importance of agriculture for the country’s economy, agrarian relations formed the basis of Romania’s social order. The agrarian question –​focusing mostly on the issue of land ownership, the relationship between boyar nobles and peasants, the relationship with the emerging industrial sector, and the integration of the peasantry into political life –​repeatedly generated heated debates in parliament and society.

Landlord-​peasant relations The origins of the peasant-​centered agrarian question can be traced back to the Phanariot Regime, a period of intense exploitation of the peasantry in order to meet the growing taxation and labor obligation toward the Ottoman Sublime Porte. Political instability, recurrent wars, the massive depopulation of certain border areas, the growing economic demands of the Porte, and the generally low productivity of farming pushed agriculture in the two Principalities into a state of perpetual crisis. Reacting to the systemic socio-​economic and demographic crisis in agriculture, but also animated by Enlightenment ideals, Constantin Mavrocordat abolished serfdom in both Principalities, first as Prince of Wallachia (r. 1744–​8) and then as Prince of Moldavia (r. 1748–​9). As a result, serfs were legally emancipated and became, in theory, free land laborers. In practice, however, economic dependence replaced personal legal subordination. Since most peasants owned no land themselves, they were forced to enter an onerous economic relationship with the landowners. According to these unequal contracts, free but dependent peasants had the use of one third of the lord’s land, while the other two thirds were reserved for the benefit of the landowner. In exchange for using these land shares, peasants had to pay in kind a part of their harvest, a fee for using grazing lands, and were obligated to work a number of days on the owner’s two thirds “reserve.” In addition to these obligations to the landlord, peasants had to pay state taxes and to fulfill numerous communal duties. The end of the Phanariot regime in 1821 set into motion major sociopolitical changes in the Principalities, affecting greatly the agricultural sector. On the one hand, massive demographic growth and the acceleration of urbanization increased the domestic demand for agricultural 98

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products. On the other hand, the gradual opening of the lower Danube for European commercial navigation and the lifting of the Ottoman monopoly over the grain trade of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1829 enabled the two Principalities to take part in international trade. Combined, these factors prompted the fast commercialization of agriculture, as reflected mostly in the growing volume of grain export to the West. England was particularly interested in this new source of grain supply, due to difficulties to provide for its population in the time of the Irish Famine and the repeal of the Corn Laws. To meet this demand, in addition to opening virgin lands for agricultural exploitation, the boyars imperiously needed to secure a continuous supply of peasant labor. In this context, the Organic Regulations adopted in the two Principalities in 1831/​1832 under Russian oversight assured the sociopolitical domination of the great boyars over the countryside. The Regulations regulated in detail the relationship between dependent peasants (called clăcaşi, from clacă, meaning corvée) and landowners. In exchange for the usufruct of household and agricultural plots, peasants had to work 12 days on the landlord’s land reserve (four days per season, excluding winter), and to fulfill other obligations, such as the supply of wood for the winter season. In addition, the peasant majority of the population, consisting of some 640,000 families in both Principalities, paid dues to the state as well, while the boyars, clergy, the academic body, and state employees were exempt from taxation. In the next two decades, the regime instituted by the Regulations was challenged by revolutionary concepts of citizen rights, advanced by a new generation of enlightened boyars and members of the emerging intelligentsia. The new revolutionary program was first put forward in political pamphlets, petitions, and constitutional projects, and later found its political expression in the programs and proclamations which emerged during the 1848 revolution. These documents proposed an inclusive and egalitarian definition of citizenship, including the promise of gradual enfranchisement of the peasantry. The proclamation of June 9, 1848, in the village of Islaz (Oltenia) marked the beginning of the revolution in Wallachia. It called for the abolition of all aristocratic titles and privileges.The electoral law for the legislative assembly, issued by the revolutionary government in June 1848, did not proclaim universal suffrage but was modeled on the local regime of social estates, intended to assure the representation of all strata of society. The third estate was reserved for the peasantry, represented by one deputy for every 3,000 inhabitants. In Moldavia, the list of demands from March 27, 1848, known as the Petiţiunea-​proclamaţiune asked for a “rapid improvement in the situation of dependent peasants.” In the same vein, Dorinţele partidei naţionale, authored by the liberal Moldavian politician Mihail Kogălniceanu in August 1848, demanded broader reforms to represent the interests of all socioprofessional categories, namely “property, trade, office holders, capacity, and farming.” The Wallachian revolutionary government (June–​September 1848) set up a commission on agrarian relations (called the Commission on Property), chaired by Nicolae Bălcescu. Owing to internal disputes and then its military defeat in September 1848, the revolutionary regime did not succeed in restructuring the relationship between peasants and large landowners. Ten years later, however, following the Congress of Paris (1856), the Great Powers drafted the Convention of Paris (1858) in order to reorganize the two Principalities, abolishing all aristocratic titles, privileges, and monopolies, and mandating equality before the law. It also demanded a revision of the relationships between peasants and landowners. During the union of the two Principalities under the rule of Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza (r. 1859–​66), prolonged political debates concentrated mainly on the agrarian question. The foundation of Cuza’s reform program was the emancipation of the peasantry and its integration into the legal and political framework of the newly built nation-​state, from voting and property rights to integration into the newly forged national institutions, most importantly schools and 99

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the army. The emancipation of the peasantry posed complex economic, political, and juridical challenges, however. It involved reform of the administration in rural areas, massive land redistribution, the opening of the electoral system, and the restructuring of civil relations through secularization and codification. The ambitious scope of these reforms spawned an intensive confrontation between Cuza and the conservative landholding oligarchy, who dominated the political system. The need for land reform was proclaimed by Prince Cuza as early as December 6, 1859. To this end, in 1860 the Central Commission in Focşani was entrusted with the harmonization of the legislation of the two former principalities. Drafted mainly by the Conservatives, its bill for agrarian reform still left peasants as renters, denying them property rights over the land they were working, transforming them into tenants obliged to pay dues to the landlord. Peasants could become landowners only by buying small plots from the state but not at the expense of private landed property. The only concession granted to peasants was the right of free movement from one estate to another. The reaction to the Conservative bill generated a series of peasant revolts. In January 1862, Mircea Mălăieru, a former deputy in the Wallachian ad hoc Divan, initiated a protest movement in the vicinity of Bucharest. The Conservative government was quick to repress the revolt by force, fearing that it might reach the national capital. The Central Commission’s agrarian bill divided the parliament into two irreconcilable ideological camps, the Conservatives and the Liberals.The latter proposed a counter-​project granting peasants full property rights over their homesteads and providing for land redistribution to the pauper peasants from state-​held lands. After two years of heated debate, the Conservatives’ parliamentary majority adopted the agrarian bill on June 11, 1862. Prince Cuza refused to promulgate it, however, on the grounds that it did not take peasant interests into account. Instead, he prepared the legal-​political ground for a top-​down implementation of a comprehensive agrarian reform. A first major precondition for his agrarian reform was the reorganization of the state administration, following a centralized French model but also including local participation. Under the previous system, great landowners had direct control over local administrators. As Prime Minister of the United Principalities, Mihail Kogălniceanu reorganized the administration at the newly created single national level. He introduced a new administrative framework, instituting a network of prefects, sub-​prefects, and mayors as local representatives of the government, assisted by elected community councils at communal and county levels. Adopted on April 12, 1864, a new Communal Law introduced mass enfranchisement at the local level.This system provided for government control over the local administration but allowed community councils a certain degree of autonomy. Beyond this reform, Kogălniceanu urged prefects to improve their attitude toward the peasantry. Another preparatory measure was the secularization of monastic property. The Orthodox Church was a major landowner, possessing almost 28  percent of the total land of Wallachia and 22  percent in Moldavia. A  special concern was the status of the dedicated monasteries, administered by foreign representatives of holy places in the Middle East. These monasteries possessed 11 percent of the land of Wallachia and 12 percent in Moldavia. Adopted in December 1863, the “Law on Secularization” of the property of monasteries declared the lands of all monasteries, including the dedicated ones, to be state property. The reform of state administration and the nationalization of dedicated monasteries’ land enabled Prince Cuza to tackle the peasant problem again. After several attempts to appease the Conservative parliamentary resistance, Cuza decided to dissolve the assembly and to establish a personal regime on May 2, 1864. He now had a free hand to implement systemic reforms from above. To provide a political basis of the new regime, the Prince issued a new Constitution, entitled Statutul Dezvoltător al Convenţiei de la Paris. Modeled on the 1852 Constitution of 100

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France, the Statute replaced the parliamentary regime set up under the 1858 Convention of Paris with his personal rule. It preserved the parliament and the separation of powers but concentrated decision-​making in the hands of the Prince. To ensure a broad political base for his personal regime, Cuza enlarged peasant voting rights from around 4,000 under the 1858 Convention to an estimated 570,500 in 1864. This unprecedented extension of the franchise was nevertheless diluted by the division of the electorate into direct and indirect voters, based on income qualifications. Finally, on August 14, 1864, Prince Cuza promulgated the Legea rurală (Rural Law), which abolished peasant servitude. It recognized peasant ownership of the lands of their house and garden, as well as agrarian plots of different sizes, according to the region in which they lived and the number of cattle they owned. In order to appease the landowners, the state granted them financial compensation for the servitude lost.The state was to retrieve these funds from the peasantry over a period of 15 years.The law redistributed 1,810,311 hectares of land to 463,554 peasant families, with two thirds from private estates (1,194,281 hectares), and the remaining third from state land. Overall, a total of 402,903 peasants were granted agricultural land and gardens (1,798,224 hectares in total), while 60,651 peasants received only small plots for houses and gardens (12,087 hectares). Although the 1864 land reform transformed the peasants into small farmers, the land assigned to them was still insufficient to assure their economic independence, forcing many peasants to contract additional plots from larger landowners. In the long run, therefore, the reform created a sharecropping peasantry working under burdensome labor contracts. Moreover, since mechanization was slow to appear and Romanian agriculture was highly labor intensive, landowners remained dependent on a substantial supply of peasant labor on their remaining estates. The state’s agrarian policy did prevent the selling of small plots in order to prevent land accumulation that would have led to the further pauperization of the peasantry. As a result, the nascent industry and certain sectors of agriculture could be only partially sustained by the internal migration of landless peasants, and had to rely on labor imports from abroad, mostly from the Balkans. While the law satisfied the peasant majority’s urgent need for land, more than 53,000 peasants remained landless, mostly newly married couples. Although the law stipulated that these peasants, as well as war and army veterans, had a right to land, some of them were granted plots only in 1879, as a reward for their successful contribution to Romania’s war of independence against the Ottoman Empire (1877–​8). Poor and landless peasants formed a nucleus of constant rural discontent. Reacting to this grass-​roots pressure for change, leading members of the ruling Liberal Party reaffirmed the need for electoral and land reforms in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. However, the Conservative Party remained firmly against any reform, fearing that these changes would reduce their rural domination over the peasantry. Despite their resistance, the Liberal politician C. A. Rosetti initiated a major political debate in August 1882 over the extension of the franchise.Yet the modification of the electoral law in 1884 privileged mostly urban voters. Apart from these minor reforms, the political system proved largely unreceptive to the emancipation of the peasantry.

Revolt and reform In the next decades, rapid population growth fed the fragmentation of peasant property, raising the demand for more land and triggering recurrent peasant revolts in 1888, 1889, and 1900. After the turn of the century, the Liberals launched a sustained new campaign to emancipate the impoverished sharecropper peasantry and transform them into independent farmers.To this end, the Liberals created a vast network of rural cooperative banks, intended to consolidate a 101

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solid stratum of middle landowners as the basis for a prospective internal market necessary to absorb the products of state-​sponsored industry.The Liberal campaign had no more success than Stolypin’s comparable “wager on the strong” in Russia and instead unleashed social tensions in the countryside. The unrest culminated in the great peasant revolt of 1907, the last Jacquerie in modern Europe. The revolt started in Botoșani county, in northern Moldavia, but soon spread across the country. Peasants attacked large estates but also major cities, demanding land and better living conditions. Facing a revolt against Romania’s sociopolitical system, the Liberal government declared a state of emergency and mobilized the army against the rebels. In the harsh military repression that followed, the troops killed some 10,000 peasants, while many other thousands were tried and imprisoned for rebellion. The revolt challenged the legitimacy of the officially endorsed Romanian national ideology, which glorified the peasantry as the foundation of society and guardian of national values (see Nicolae Iorga’s semănatorism, a Romanian version of Russian narodniks). In response, leading Romanian politicians blamed the exploitation of the peasantry on Jewish leaseholders (arendași) who managed landed estates on behalf of the absentee landowner. These attempts to link the Peasant Question to the Jewish Question in Romania could not obscure, however, the structural crisis of Romania’s agrarian relations created by the huge inequality in the size of properties. In 1905, large landowners owned 48.7 percent of the total arable land, although they represented only 0.6 percent of the country’s rural population. Medium-​size landowners possessed 11 percent of the land representing 4.01 percent of the rural population. At the same time, 920,080 peasant families, that is, 92 percent of the rural population, owned 40.3 percent of the total arable land, distributed in small properties of up to a maximum of 10 hectares. Alarmed by the prospect of continuous social unrest, the Liberals stated their determination to go ahead with a sweeping land reform. Facing stiff political resistance from the Conservatives, these reforms were limited to adjusting the system of agricultural contracts, accompanied by the distribution of state land to certain categories of impoverished peasants. The need for comprehensive land reform was further revealed in the course of the Second Balkan War in 1913. Although the Romanian Army was not involved in extended combat, the mass mobilization of the peasantry boosted their claim for agrarian and electoral reforms. In addition, Romania’s military incursion into northeastern Bulgaria allowed the peasant soldiers to witness the more prosperous conditions of the Bulgarian peasantry. Newspapers in Bucharest also highlighted the contrast between the economically independent Bulgarian farmers and Romania’s pauperized sharecropping peasantry. By late 1913, the opposition Liberal Party had initiated plans for substantial land reform and universal suffrage. These reforms were animated by a new generation of politicians, at the forefront of whom was the Party’s new leader Ion I.  C. Brătianu. Brătianu argued for new agrarian and electoral laws and an expansion of the educational system that together would lead to the emancipation of the peasantry and their transformation into active citizens. The Liberal campaign once again met tough resistance from the ruling Conservative Party, who accused the Liberals of consciously subverting the economic efficiency of the great estates. In their view, the great estates were the driving force behind Romania’s economic development and its massive agricultural exports. They needed to be supported rather than undermined, since they brought prosperity to the economy and provided means of subsistence to a large dependent peasantry. In January 1914, the Liberal Party again took power, but the outbreak of World War I soon interrupted the Liberals’ plans for electoral and agrarian reform. After the war, the Liberals were able to implement their vision based on the adoption of universal male suffrage and a new land reform. In 1921, Romania enacted one of the most radical land expropriations in 102

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interwar Europe, transferring 2,776,401 hectares from large estates to small peasant properties. Smallholders now possessed 81.4 percent of the agricultural land; properties between 10 and 100 hectares held 10.8 percent, while the share of large estates of over 100 hectares was greatly reduced to only 7.8 percent. As a result of these changes and its wartime alliance with the Central Powers, the landlords’ Conservative Party disappeared from the political stage. In its stead, a newly formed Peasant Party became a major force in Romania’s political life, advocating the ideology of agrarianism. In 1926, this party joined the National Party of Transylvania to create interwar Romania’s second largest mass party, the National-​Peasant Party. It ruled the country almost continuously from 1928 to 1933. Although the 1921 reform assured the subsistence of peasant households, this type of small land property did not prove economically viable, being undermined by the interwar economic crisis and post-​World War II upheaval and hardship. In 1945, the pro-​Communist government led by Dr. Petru Groza initiated a last new, ideologically driven land reform. Its purpose was not to consolidate an independent peasantry but to dismantle the remaining large landholdings. The 1945 land reform expropriated 1,122 large estates, distributing 62,377 hectares of land to 18,187 peasant families that received, on average, 2.87 hectares per household. The reform did reduce the number of impoverished landless families but was only a temporary measure to win peasant support against the remaining non-​Communist parties. Soon after its consolidation, the Communist regime launched a prolonged collectivization campaign from 1949 to 1962, as detailed in the chapter by Arnd Bauerkämper below. The attendant political repression enabled the Communist administration to establish firm economic and political-​ideological control over rural Romania by the early 1960s. It had nonetheless taken more than a decade to end the individual peasants’ rights and their property that had been largely won after the First World War in a long struggle, as we have seen, since the eighteenth century. Moreover, in the long run, the Romanian peasantry managed to survive the Communist experiment in social engineering: in 1989 collective farms were spontaneously abolished and pre-​1945 property relations reinstated.

Selected Readings Adăniloaie, Nichita and Dan Berindei. Reforma agrară din 1864. Bucharest, 1967. Eidelberg, Philip Gabriel. The Great Romanian Peasant Revolt of 1907: Origins of a Modern Jacquerie. Leiden, 1974. Giurescu, Constantin C. “Suprafaţa moşiilor mănăstireşti secularizate la 1863,” Studii: Revista de istorie XII, no. 2 (1959): 149–​57. Giurescu, Constantin C. Viaţa şi opera lui Cuza Vodă. Bucharest, 1966. Iordachi, Constantin. Liberalism, Constitutional Nationalism, and Minorities:  The Making of Romanian Citizenship, c. 1750–​1918. Leiden, 2019. Iordachi, Constantin and Dorin Dobrincu, eds. Transforming Peasants, Property and Power.The Process of Land Collectivization in Romania, 1949–​1962. Budapest and New York, 2009. Jowitt, Kenneth, ed. Social Change in Romania 1860–​1940: A Debate on Development in a European Nation. Berkeley, 1978. Marin, Irina. Peasant Violence and Antisemitism in Early Twentieth-​Century Eastern Europe. London, 2018. Mitrany, David. The Land and the Peasant in Rumania:  The War and Agrarian Reform (1917–​ 1921). London, 1930. Roberts, Henry L. Rumania: Political Problems of an Agrarian State. Hamden, Conn., 1969.

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10 SLOVENE CLERICAL POLITICS, COOPERATIVES AND THE LANGUAGE QUESTION TO 1914 Gregor Kranjc

Described in classic studies of Habsburg history as a people “without history,” the Slovenian subjects of the Emperor were an overwhelmingly peasant population with no native aristocracy at the start of the nineteenth century. Nor did they have any independent medieval or early modern state to look to as an inheritance in the era of developing nationalism. The existence of the early medieval Slavic state of Karantanija, centered in the Klagenfurt/​Celovec basin, remained only as a hazy legend.Yet this seeming historic insignificance was however a blessing in disguise, as the Habsburg authorities remained tolerant, or benignly neglectful of the Slovene cultural renaissance in the first half of the nineteenth century. The ruling Habsburg dynasty in Vienna and the privileged German minority in Slovene-​populated lands did not see them as posing any political threat to the integrity of the Empire. A major shot in the arm to the fledgling Slovene national movement came from Napoleon Bonaparte, whose French administration in the short-​lived Illyrian Provinces (1809–​14) put forward ambitious plans for Slovene educational and administrative reform, even though little was actually done. This brief window of Slovene prominence –​perhaps most importantly using Slovene as a language of instruction from primary education to new high schools –​heartened the tiny cultural elite. It consisted mainly of Catholic priests and some nascent urban elements. At the same time, French taxation and conscription sapped the enthusiasm of others. Despite the re-​imposition of the Habsburg regime by the conservative administration of Metternich (1815–​48), a foundation for the Slovene language was nonetheless established during this era. It was led by the famed linguist Jernej Kopitar, who wrote a critically important Slovene grammar in 1808, and continued by the Romantic poet France Prešeren and the Slavic philologist Franc Miklošič. Thanks to their efforts, the Slovene language was codified by the mid-​nineteenth century. These achievements contributed to the Slovene rejection of linguistic union urged by the Illyrian movement in the 1830s, a cultural precursor to twentieth-​century Yugoslavism. Rather than adopting the štokavian dialect of Herzegovina (the future Serbo-​Croat language), most Slovenes forged ahead with their own “national” language. By the 1840s, the name “Slovenia” to describe Slovene-​speaking lands began to replace earlier terms such as Kranjci 104

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(literally inhabitants of the Habsburg crownland of Carniola/​Kranjska). The earliest printed use of “Slovenija” dated from 1841.

From the April Manifesto to the Ausgleich, 1848–​1867 The revolutions of 1848 injected the destabilizing contribution of Slovene political activism. Lacking any historic dynastic rights to the existing Habsburg crownlands, such as the Czechs had to Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia, Slovene national demands, as voiced in their April 1848 petition to the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand I, had to rely on an ethnic principle. It called for the “abolition of the historic crownland frontiers and fusion of our Slovene territories, following the language frontiers, to one land and […] to one nation.” This primary demand of the April Manifesto, the so-​called United Slovenia program (Zedinjena Slovenija), thus aimed to unite into one ethnic crownland Slovene-​speakers who in 1848 inhabited six Habsburg crownlands and regions  –​Carniola, Styria, Carinthia, the Austrian Littoral (the counties of Gorizia, Trieste, and Istria),Venetia and two eastern counties of the Hungarian kingdom. Sensing correctly that Vienna could interpret demands for a United Slovenia as a challenge to Austria’s administrative and political structure, the Slovene activists of 1848 took a more cautious approach. Many were Catholic clergy, and most adhered to Czech historian František Palacky’s famous dictum in his letter to the Frankfurt German Assembly in April 1848 that if Austria had not existed, it would “have been in the interests of Europe and indeed of humanity” to create it. For Slovenes and other “small” non-​Germanic peoples, the revolutions of 1848 exhibited the power of German nationalism, and it was only within the continued existence of a polyglot Habsburg Empire that they could develop their national and cultural uniqueness safe from ascendant Germandom. Thus, a future United Slovenia would exist firmly and loyally under the scepter of the Habsburgs. The Slovenes’ April Manifesto of 1848 urged closer economic and cultural cooperation with the South Slavs of the Empire, but this was presented as a way for Vienna to renew its relationship with the avowed Austro-​Slavism of its Slovene and Slavic subjects. As already pointed out in Palacky’s 1848 letter, Slovene Austro-​Slavism viewed the Habsburg Empire as the protector of a unique Central European Catholic Christian civilization that was shared by most of its South Slav subjects. It was in equal parts a rejection of German liberal (and Protestant) nationalism and Russian Orthodox pan-​Slavism. Indeed, it was in the spirit of Austro-​Slavism that Palacky and other organizers convened the Slavic Congress in Prague in June 1848, which would establish a set of shared Slavic goals in these revolutionary times. In mid-​June 1848, the suppression of a Czech uprising in Prague by imperial forces led by Prince Alfred I Windischgrätz, many of whose estates were located in Slovene lands, effectively ended the Slovenes’ 1848 aspirations. The 1848 dream of a United Slovenia remained the ultimate aim of the Slovene national movement in the remaining decades of the empire’s existence, despite the fact that most Slovene politicians would refrain from publicly demanding it as impractical. In the 1850s, it was impossible as Slovene lands and the rest of the crownlands fell under the neo-​absolutist regime of the Austrian Interior Minister Baron Alexander von Bach. Centralism and tighter censorship curtailed Slovene publications and political activism. Administrative centralism and its increasing complexity led to an expansion and a professionalization of the empire’s civil service that included some Slovenes. The completion in 1857 of the Vienna-​Trieste railway, which ran through the Slovene-​inhabited cities of Maribor (Marburg), Celje (Cilli), and Ljubljana (Laibach), opened up the trade and industrial potential of the region. However, railways and 105

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improving infrastructure provided immediate benefit to those sectors of the economy that were mostly dominated by non-​Slovenes, particularly larger merchants and export-​driven industries. Yet everything was not so unpromising. Beginning in the 1860s, the political evolution of the Habsburg Empire became more responsive to Slovene political demands. An almost decade-​ long transformation of the Empire began in 1859 and ended with the Austro-​Hungarian Compromise (Ausgleich) of 1867. Austria’s humiliating defeat in the 1859 Second Italian War of Independence put an end to post-​1848 neo-​absolutism. Austria’s seismic defeat in the Austro-​ Prussian war of 1866 decided this question, as Vienna cut a deal with the Hungarian aristocracy, transforming the Empire into a dualist Austro-​Hungarian state in 1867. Several thousand Slovenes found themselves under Italian rule when Venetia was ceded from Austria to Italy in 1866, while some 75,000 Slovenes in the Prekmurje region, which made up the western fringe of the Hungarian kingdom, came under Hungarian authority (and its accelerated Magyarization policies) after the Compromise. Yet, the vast majority of Slovenes remained within Cisleithania (the Austrian “half ” of the Dual Monarchy). Like the other inhabitants, they were promised important legal protections in the Austrian Constitution of 1867, which transformed subjects into citizens. Article 19 declared that “all the races of the state shall have equal rights, and each race shall have the inviolable right of maintaining and cultivating its nationality and language,” and also recognized “the equality of the various languages in the schools, public offices, and in public life.” Living up to these promises proved to be more difficult, however. For example, the Slovene demand for a Slovene-​ language university in Ljubljana, to counteract the Germanization that dominated, was never accepted by Vienna. Its founding in 1919 had to await the collapse of the monarchy. Opposition to Slovene demands was not just the legacy of a bureaucracy that traditionally paid little heed to the “small peoples” of the Empire. The very existence of the Slovenes was an obstacle to the pan-​German desire for access to the Adriatic, while the demand for the equality for the Slovene language in education and administration challenged the long-​held privileging of the German minority in Slovene lands.

Slovene education and culture under Taafe’s “Iron Ring” government, 1878–​1893 For the first decade after the Compromise of 1867, Emperor Franz Josef generally relied on a partnership with German liberals in his cabinet.While enacting a number of liberal reforms (for example, in the area of compulsory secular education), the liberals were no allies of Austria’s Slavs. In fact their opposition to the Austrian decision to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, a move that German liberals condemned as only adding to Slavic predominance in the Empire, persuaded the Emperor to cut his ties with them. Taking a different direction, the Emperor turned to Count Eduard Taaffe as his prime minister. Taaffe would build an enduring coalition of federalist-​oriented German aristocrats, conservatives, and Catholic Slavs that would last until 1893.The longest serving cabinet of Franz Josef ’s reign became known as Taaffe’s “Iron Ring,” hemming in German liberal influence. Slovenes were part of Taaffe’s Iron Ring, and it was only at this juncture of Austrian political history that Slovene demands were for the first time taken seriously, if out of political expediency. Under the Austrian practice of political horse-​trading, Slovene parliamentarian support for Taaffe would be rewarded with administrative and cultural concessions for the Slovenes. These gains, it must be emphasized, were hardly radical but did help to implement the cultural equality promised by the Austrian Constitution. Slovene cautiousness was visible in the bearing of its post-​Ausgleich political elite. While the establishment of formal Slovene political 106

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parties only occurred in the 1890s, Slovene conservatism, or clericalism, as it is most commonly designated, was already prominent in the 1860s. Known as the Old Slovenes and led by Janez Bleiweis, they would couch their demands for Slovene equality with pronounced deference to the Habsburgs, the Catholic Church, and Austro-​Slavism. The clericalists believed that the Habsburgs had a historic role as defenders of the Catholic faith in Central Europe, a conviction that was only strengthened with the rise of a German goliath in 1871 and its subsequent anti-​Catholic Kulturkampf. In 1892, the clerical movement would establish its first political party, the Catholic National Party, which changed its name in 1905 to the Slovene People’s Party (Slovenska Ljudska Stranka, SLS). Claiming to speak for the conservative Catholic countryside, the party’s championing of the cooperative movement would also win it significant support among workers, craftsmen, and merchants, making it the most influential Slovene party until World War  II. Opposition to the Old Slovenes came from a collection of more liberal-​oriented Slovenes, who in the immediate post-​1867 era were known as the Young Slovenes, a designation taken from a similar political faction among the Young Czechs. Led by the writer Fran Levstik, the Young Slovenes agreed with the Old Slovenes on national demands, but differed on tactics and values. Borrowing a phrase from the Czechs, they criticized the Old Slovenes’ submissive “policy of crumbs,” by which Vienna meted out meager cultural concessions to the Slovenes as rewards for propping up the government. The Young Slovenes demanded a more confrontational approach with the Habsburgs, making a more vigorous demand for United Slovenia. As liberals, they could also not support the clericalist championing of Catholicism in society. Nevertheless, the Old and Young Slovenes of the 1860s and 1870s existed in an era before mass politics. As tiny elites they were able to compromise and cooperate in a manner that would seem rather quaint to the turn-​of-​the-​century Slovene parties with their hardened ideological positions. By 1893, the more radically liberal faction of the Young Slovenes would form the core of the new liberal National Progressive Party. Political rivalries aside, the Slovenes were in fact thrown some significant crumbs for their support of Taaffe’s Iron Ring. Slovenes were able to unseat the Germans from their controlling majorities in the municipal council of Ljubljana in 1882 and in the Diet of Carniola a year later. Ljubljana set off on its path to becoming a Slovene cultural capital city. Both the current home of the Slovene national museum (1885) and the opera house (1892) were built during the Taaffe era. After the devastating earthquake of 1895, the long-​serving liberal mayor of Ljubljana Ivan Hribar (1896–​1910) oversaw the building of additional national institutions, many in the fashionable Secession style, including the Slovene Narodni dom (cultural center) in 1896, which would later become the national gallery. While unable to achieve their goal of a Slovene university, and while the first classical gymnasium (lycée) to use Slovene as a language of instruction (a private Catholic gymnasium in Ljubljana) was only opened in 1905, Slovene instruction in primary schools, mandated for eight years by the 1869 Austrian Primary School Act, made significant progress. With the exception of a German-​speaking area (Kočevje/Gottschee), all primary schools in Carniola and most schools in the Slovene-​inhabited Gorica county taught in Slovene by the end of the Taaffe era. Some tentative successes were also achieved in disputed Carinthia, Styria, and the Littoral. In the southern Styrian city of Maribor, a ministerial decree of 1888 introduced Slovene as the language of instruction in its grammar schools, helping in return to secure Slovene parliamentary support for Taaffe’s budget. Another ministerial decree in 1892 declared the Carinthian capital of Klagenfurt to be a “mixed” community, requiring the official use of both Slovene and German, despite German-​speakers greatly outnumbering Slovenes. In the Austrian Littoral, where Italian, Croat, and Slovene-​speakers rubbed shoulders, Taaffe’s ministry granted the three 107

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languages equal status for use in law courts in 1883. With the unification of Italy and rising irredentism among the Italian minority, Vienna appeared to be actively supporting the status of Slovene as an official language in the Littoral, dictated in part by the more loyal disposition of Slovenes. While this effort was stymied by Italian municipal authorities in Trieste proper, the Slovene-​majority suburbs were the scene of an active Slovene national movement, buoyed by the thousands who had recently migrated here in search of economic opportunity. (In fact, until World War I, Trieste was the biggest “Slovene” city.) The robust network of Slovene primary schools bore fruit in the next two decades –​by 1910 some 85 percent of Slovenes were considered literate, scoring slightly higher than the average literacy rate in Western Europe at the time. Moreover, about half of Slovene primary school teachers were women by the end of the nineteenth century, a contribution in itself to the national movement. As with the Italians in the Littoral, the Germans of Styria and Carinthia became increasingly alarmed by the string of concessions awarded to Slovene-​speakers during the Taaffe era, a practice which continued in fits and starts after Taaffe’s fall in 1893. Perhaps the most striking example of German pushback came in 1895 when German liberals withdrew parliamentary support and brought down Prince Alfred III Windischgrätz’s government (the grandson of Alfred I Windischgrätz, who crushed the Czech uprising of 1848).They withdrew after learning of his promise to Slovene coalition members that Slovene would become a language of instruction at the secondary school in the southern Styrian town of Celje. Indeed, feuding between Slovenes and Germans in southern Carinthia and Styria had reached fever pitch by the late nineteenth century, drawing comparisons with disputes between the Germans and the Czechs in Bohemia.The national struggle against Slovenes in the late Austro-​Hungarian Empire played no small role in the strong interwar receptivity by Styrian and Carinthian Germans to Nazism. The increasing political confidence of the Slovenes in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was underpinned by a maturing of Slovene national culture. Publications in the Slovene language multiplied during the latter half of the century, building upon the pioneering work of pre-​1848 linguists. Slovene newspapers, the first of which, Lublanske novice (Ljubljana News), had appeared in 1797, began to proliferate after the 1860s, growing with rising Slovene literacy rates and the liberalizing political climate. The bifurcation of the Slovene national movement in the 1860s into liberal and clerical streams led to the publication of the first Slovene daily, the liberal Slovenski narod (Slovene Nation, 1868–​1943), followed by the equally influential and longstanding voice of Slovene clericalism, Slovenec (The Slovene, 1873–​1945). The emergence of these and other politically partisan papers eclipsed Bleiweis’ Kmetijske in rokodelske novice (Peasant and Craftsmen News), published between 1843 and 1902. A number of literary and cultural magazines were also established alongside these newspapers. One of the earliest was the monthly Slovenski glasnik (The Slovene Herald), which was published in Klagenfurt from 1858 to 1868. Perhaps the most influential was the long-​running liberal literary monthly Ljubljanski Zvon (Ljubljana Bell, 1881–​1941); its published pieces read as a who’s who of fin-​de-​siècle Slovene literature. Challenging the decadence of modernism, Dom in Svet (Home and the World, 1888–​1944) promoted literary production that appealed more to the conservative Christian-​nationalist ethos of the clerical movement. Another critically important cultural milestone was the publication of Slovenka (Slovene Woman), the first women’s and early feminist magazine, from 1897 to 1902, which initially appeared as a supplement of Edinost (Unity, 1876–​1928), the newspaper of Trieste’s Slovene minority. Assisting in the publication and dissemination of Slovene literary and scientific works was an increasing array of cultural societies. The oldest Slovene publishing house, Mohorjeva družba (Society of St. Hermagoras), was established in Klagenfurt in 1851 on the initiative, in part, of Anton Martin Slomšek, the bishop of the diocese of Lavant (based in Maribor after 1859), and 108

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with the financial assistance of the Habsburg ruling house. Slomšek was an energetic advocate for the Slovene national movement, pushing for the general education of the Slovene population of Carinthia and Styria, as well as instructing seminarians in the Slovene language. While retaining its Catholic character, by 1914 Mohorjeva družba had nonetheless printed millions of copies of books from a politically diverse range of writers. An equally critical society was the Slovenska matica, which was established in 1864 in Ljubljana. Similar to other Slavic Matice that were established in the Czech lands (1831), Croatia (1842), Slovakia (1863), and elsewhere, the Slovenska matica published both original literature and translations, provided desperately needed textbooks for newly established Slovene schools, and published original scientific works. Slovenska matica also established networks with European universities, which helped pave the way for the founding of a Slovene university after World War I. Formed in 1884, the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius campaigned against Germanization and Italianization. Among its many activities, it opened a number of Slovene kindergartens in Styria and the Littoral. Developing a different facet of the national “body” was the establishment in 1863 of the Slovene Sokol (Falcon), a patriotic gymnastic organization modeled on the Czech society of the same name founded a year earlier in Prague. In addition to physical exercises, the Sokol promoted nationalist education and agitation. While the Sokol officially stood above politics, the SLS would develop its own rival gymnastic organization in 1906 known as Orel (Eagle), distancing itself from what it viewed as the liberal orientation of the Sokol.

Political parties, the cooperatives, and the National Movement The collective efforts of these cultural societies helped connect the Slovene national movement with the Slovene masses. This was also assisted by the democratizing trend in Cisleithania. In a series of electoral reforms in 1873, 1882, 1896, and 1907, the last of which introduced universal male suffrage, the concerns and challenges of the newly enfranchised laboring classes were increasingly brought to the attention of Austria’s political institutions and the Slovenian political elite. The establishment of formal clerical and liberal political parties in the Slovene lands in the 1890s was undertaken in part to better mobilize a wider electorate.The appearance in 1896 of the first Slovene socialist party, the Yugoslav Social Democratic Party (Jugoslovanska socialnodemokratska stranka, JSDS), championed the emerging industrial working class in Slovenia, yet it made only limited inroads before World War I. Its greatest support came from Slovene workers in Trieste and a few other urban areas, and from the coal miners of Idrija and Trbovlje. The urban proletarian bias of the JSDS’s Marxism had little appeal to the Slovene rural majority, firmly behind the Slovene People’s Party (SLS) from the 1890s onwards. In addition, they were not attracted to the lukewarm “internationalist” position of the JSDS on nationalism (evident in the party’s Yugoslav name). Indeed, the rock solid rural plus significant urban support for the SLS was predicated upon the party’s willingness to act upon the socio-​economic grievances of “ordinary” Slovenes. The Long Depression of the last quarter of the nineteenth century was overlain upon the already existent difficult transition from serfdom to more market-​oriented agriculture, as well as the ever smaller subdivisions of farms that undermined more productive agriculture. The results were disastrous  –​indebtedness led some 15  percent of Slovene rural households to declare bankruptcy between the 1860s and the 1890s, while Slovene emigration (mostly to the United States, Western Europe and industrial centers of the Habsburg Empire) absorbed about half of the natural population growth rate of Slovene lands, one of the highest percentages of out-​ migration in Europe. The responses to these late nineteenth century economic trends, which 109

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appeared to advantage German and foreign penetration of Slovene lands, would come to define the Slovene national movement in the twilight of the Habsburg Empire. This was most evident in the Slovene People’s Party championing of the cooperative movement, which recognized that Slovene-​speakers and German-​speakers not only inhabited two different cultural milieus, but also two disparate socio-​economic spheres. At the turn of the twentieth century, Slovene was still the language of the peasant underclass and of rural and urban laborers, while German remained the language of wealthy merchants and craftsmen, landlords, and high government officials. While the influx of Slovene rural labor into cities in search of work was contributing to the Slovenianization of what had previously been largely German-​speaking urban islands, some two-​thirds of the Slovene population on the eve of World War I still worked in farming. The general poverty of the agricultural sector was evident in rampant indebtedness, bankruptcies, and emigration. Thus a number of Slovene thinkers, most notably those of a Christian Socialist persuasion, had already recognized in the closing decades of the nineteenth century that the strengthening of the Slovene national movement and the socio-​economic betterment of the Slovene rural masses, were two sides of the same coin. The best known of these advocates was the priest, scholar, and SLS politician Janez Evangelist Krek. He was much influenced by Pope Leo XIII’s famous 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which demanded the amelioration of a laboring class impoverished by Darwinian liberal capitalism and thus prone to the inroads of godless socialism. Krek argued for local cooperative savings banks and loan societies in order to achieve peasant financial emancipation and thus fortify Slovene national autonomy within the Habsburg monarchy. As he noted in 1895, only a cooperative movement of the Slovene peasants can stop the Germanization and Italianization of our territory […] If the Slovene peasants had already had their own loan institutions and savings banks, they would not have had to sell their land or borrow from foreign usurers. While there were differences in how loan societies operated, they allowed peasant communities to pool their own capital and to lend it at far more favorable interest rates. The cooperative principle was also expanded into consumer goods, by collectively purchasing and then selling or lending needed products at more affordable prices. Machine cooperatives were particularly useful to small farmers as they allowed them to benefit from collectively owned labor-​saving mechanization, otherwise prohibitively expensive to individuals. It would be a mistake, however, to see cooperatives as only benefiting struggling farmers. The cooperative principle was also effective for Slovene craftsmen and artisans in need of capital to survive and expand in competition against more established and wealthier (and often German-​owned) shops. The cooperative movement spanned the clerical-​liberal political divide. The best known early promoters of savings and loan societies were the liberal activist brothers Josip and Mihael Vošnjak. They were particularly active in Styrian towns and cities, especially Celje, where the socio-​economic struggle between Slovenes and Germans was more acute than in majority Slovene-​inhabited Carniola. The Vošnjaks’ efforts paved the way for the establishment in 1872 of the first Slovene loan society in Ljutomer, a town that was almost 50  percent German-​ speaking. An 1873 Austrian law that made it easier to establish cooperatives helped boost their numbers in Slovene lands, and between 1884 and 1894, loan cooperatives increased from 21 to 72. The biggest increase in cooperatives occurred as Krek’s rural-​oriented movement, which accelerated its activities in Carniola at the turn of the century. From 1895, the year that the overseeing organization of the clerical Union of Carniolan Loan Societies was founded, until 1912, more than 560 cooperatives were initiated in Carniola alone. While the dream of having one 110

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Slovene governing body for all Slovene cooperatives never materialized, sundered by political and regional loyalties, the cooperative movement in Slovene lands had by the early part of the twentieth century become a much-​heralded model for economic and national self-​sufficiency. The Slovene cooperative movement was motivated in part by the recognition that the Slovenes were a small and vulnerable people living on the ethnic frontiers of much larger and, in the early twentieth century, aggressively expansive German and Italian national movements. The same perception motivated Slovenes to seek the strength in numbers offered by solidarity with culturally similar South Slavs. While each of the three main Slovene political movements (clericalism, liberalism, and socialism) had different motivations and conceptions in regard to South Slav unity, all of them envisioned any possible unification only within the confines of the Habsburg monarchy.With the exception of only a handful of thinkers and students, Slovene politics never openly mused about Slovenes or the Empire’s South Slavs breaking away to form their own independent political unit until well after the outbreak of World War I. The SLS’s Yugoslav program was an outgrowth of its loyalty to the Emperor and his historic role as defender of the Catholic faith in Slovenia and Central Europe. Shut out of Italy and Germany by the wars of Italian and German unification, the clericals believed, like Vienna but for different reasons, that Austria’s destiny lay in the Balkans, which was just emerging from the “darkness” of Ottoman Islamic rule. Seasoned with more than just a little of the “Orientalist” prejudices as theorized by Edward Said, the clericals pursued, along with the like-​minded Croatian conservative right, a so-​called “trialist” solution to Austro-​Hungarian dualism in the final decade of its existence. A third South Slav entity would join with the existing Austrian and Hungarian portions of the Empire to act as a cultural and political magnet for the less civilized South Slavs living outside of the monarchy. Not surprisingly, the clericals celebrated the annexation of Bosnia-​Herzegovina in 1908 as a fulfillment of Austria’s Christian civilizing mission. What is surprising was some clericals’ willingness to abandon the Slovene literary language and adopt Serbo-​Croatian as a way to better appeal to the Balkan South Slavs. Their thinking came from their clerical mindset, believing Slovene cultural specificity was revealed not so much in the language of the Slovenes, but in their Catholic religious practice. While the Catholic civilizing mission of the clericals was obviously anathema to Slovene liberals, their intense fear of Germanization persuaded liberals of the role that South Slav solidarity could play as a counterweight to German and Magyar chauvinism. Slovene liberals built networks with like-​minded Serbs and Croats living within the Hungarian kingdom, who were calling for the democratization and federalization of the monarchy. Abiding by both the nationality program and the Austro-​Marxist framework of its parent organization, the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria, the JSDS also advocated a form of federalization for Austria-​Hungary. This federation would not only include the existing South Slavs of the monarchy but also, like the clerical position, those Balkan South Slavs living outside its borders. Following its own Marxist civilizing mission, the more socio-​economically advanced status of Austria privileged it to absorb and improve the “feudal” standing of Balkan society.The socialist tendency to underestimate nationalism, however, backfired at the 1909 Tivoli Conference in Ljubljana, when the JSDS accepted the cultural amalgamation of all South Slavs “regardless of name, religion, alphabet and dialect or language.” A faction of the JSDS that included Ivan Cankar, one of Slovenia’s greatest writers and the founder of Sovenian literary modernism, rejected the resolution. For them, the Yugoslav question was driven by shared political and economic grievances; however, each component Yugoslav people should be able to develop and exercise their own unique cultural individuality. Before World War I, the very likelihood of South Slav unification, let alone plans for what it would look like and what it could hope to achieve, existed in theoretical and polemical 111

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projections from a relatively narrow strata of the Slovene political and intellectual elite. For most Slovenes in early 1914, governance by the Habsburgs seemed as permanent and predictable as the spring sowing season. The history and character of the Slovene national movement since its inception in the early nineteenth century was in many ways a reflection of Habsburg crises, advances, and experimentation. It should therefore not be surprising that on the eve of World War I that would destroy the Austro-​Hungarian monarchy, Slovenes of all political stripes could scarcely envision a future that did not include the Habsburgs.

Selected Readings Černič, Barbara. “The Role of Dr. Janez Evangelist Krek in the Slovene Cooperative Movement,” Slovene Studies 11, no. 1–​2 (1989): 75–​81. Čuček, Filip. “Razmišljanja o demokraciji v avstrijski ustavni dobi in njeni recepciji na Slovenskem,” Prispevki za novejšo zgodovino 54, no. 2 (2014): 7–​29. Kann, Robert A. The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and National Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848–​ 1918. New York, 1964. Kordiš, Ivan. “Peter Kozler and his Map of the Slovenian Land and its Provinces (1849–​1871),” Imago Mundi 68, no. 2 (2016): 212–​31. Pech, Stanley Z. “The Nationalist Movements of the Austrian Slavs in 1848: A Comparative Sociological Profile,” Social History 9, no. 18 (1976): 336–​56. Plut-​Pregelj, Leopoldina, Gregor Kranjc, Žarko Lazarević, and Carole Rogel. Historical Dictionary of Slovenia. 3rd ed. Lanham, Md., 2018. Poniž, Katja Mihurko. “Slovenke in narodno gibanje v slovenski publicistiki 19. stoletja,” Zgodovinski časopis 63, no. 1–​2 (2009): 174–​95. Rogel, Carole. “The Slovenes and Political Yugoslavism on the Eve of World War I,” East European Quarterly 4, no. 4 (1971): 408–​18. Šuštar, Branko. “The Historical Development of the Formation of the Elite in the South of the Habsburg Empire: Slovenes and the Schooling of the Intellectual Class in the Late 1800s and Early 1900s,” History of Education & Children’s Literature 10, no. 1 (2015): 505–​26. Urbanc, Mimi, Jerneja Fridl, Drago Kladnik, and Drago Perko.“Atlant and Slovene National Consciousness in the Second Half of the 19th Century,” Acta geographica Slovenica 46, no. 2 (2006): 251–​69.

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11 SERBIA’S PROMISE AND PROBLEMS, 1903–​1 914 Dubravka Stojanović

In Serbian historiography and historical consciousness, the period of 1903–​14 is known as the “golden age of Serbian democracy.” This period of Serbian history began with a coup on June 11, 1903, in which a group of conspiring officers murdered King Aleksandar Obrenović and Queen Draga, the last members of the Obrenović dynasty, and restored the rival Karadjordjević dynasty.This ended the dispute between the two “people’s” dynasties, founded by two leaders of two Serbian uprisings (Karadjordje in 1804 and Miloš Obrenović in 1812), a dispute which for nearly a century, in a series of coups and dynastic shifts, frustrated the already strained Serbian political scene. The cruel killing of 1903 was the beginning of a period that contemporaries called the New Age, and this period was expected to realize a long-​awaited advance. Some said at the time said that after a bloody start, Serbia’s next decade was a bloodless democratic revolution, catching up with other European democracies.This reputation has endured, despite doubts from recent scholarship.

Laws and institutions The beginning was indeed promising. Constitutional government was restored the day after the coup. The “revolutionary government” convened the assembly, reintroduced the previous constitution, and elected Petar Karadjordjević as the new King.These steps were taken to prove that after the coup the French parliamentary model prevailed in Serbia, with an elected assembly as its central institution. The election of King Petar reinforced this hope. He had spent the previous decade exiled in Switzerland, so it was believed that he knew the rules of democracy well and would keep out of day-​to-​day politics in the parties and the assembly. That would be unprecedented for a Serbian monarch, where rulers, precisely because of their native origins, played a strong political role, meddling in party conflicts and compounding the already chronic instability. The constitution that came into force after the coup was essentially the constitution of 1888, revised in 1894. The document was modeled with minor changes on the Belgian constitution of 1831, which was considered at the time to be the most liberal constitution among the European parliamentary monarchies.The constitution provided for a clear separation of powers and the introduction of democratic procedures conforming to the highest standards of the time. Personal and political rights and freedoms were guaranteed –​freedom of religion, inviolability 113

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of private property, freedom of the press and association, equality before the law, the secret ballot, universal voting rights for males over 21 limited only by a low property franchise. The constitution affirmed that the central institution was to be the National Assembly. Not long after, legislation was passed specifying these provisions, promising that democracy would be secured and liberties guaranteed. One of the fundamental democratic freedoms, the freedom of association, was first provided as early as 1881, authorizing the formation of modern political parties and associations.This was only six years after the founding of the British Liberal Party, sometimes considered to be the first modern political party. Such a framework meant party discipline, a clearly profiled parliamentary group, and the power to nominate its slate of candidates in elections. The parties that emerged in Serbia in 1881 looked formally like a very successful translation of their European models. They borrowed well-​known names from the contemporary European political landscape. The People’s Radical Party referred to a French model, the Progressive Party was inspired by the European Conservatives, and there was a Liberal Party. The latest was the Social Democratic Party, founded in 1903 after the coup. In addition to the borrowed names, the parties took over the programs of their European role models almost word for word. Under the liberal laws of 1881 and 1903, a number of associations emerged as the first manifestation of civil society. The first organizations of this kind began to emerge in Serbia at the same time as it did for their European counterparts, in the mid-​nineteenth century. As civil society and its needs developed before the First World War, approximately 100 associations were founded, dedicated to various social and political issues, from the protection of orphans, to national minorities, animal protection, and temperance to professional or political associations. Their number and variety testified to the increasing pluralization of society. The law on freedom of the press was among the most liberal in Europe. Its first article simply read “In Serbia, the press is free.” Censorship was allowed only in the case of offending a domestic or a foreign monarch, a standard restriction under the European monarchies of the time. This law gave birth to a rich media landscape; some 50 new newspapers were launched in 1903 alone. The number of daily newspapers also grew, from five in 1905 to 23 in 1911. While many of them had only a few pages and were short-​lived with little circulation, a dozen reputable dailies survived in the decade before the First World War. This was a significant number for any European country at the time. The elections law was also among the most liberal in Europe at the time. It gave suffrage to all males over 21. The afore-​mentioned property requirement meant that only a small number of the poorest citizens did not have the right to vote. The constitution deviated from the Belgian model in that it gave the winning party the votes of the parties that failed to reach the electoral threshold of 4 percent.This provision was intended to promote the stability of the new government.

The golden age of Serbian democracy? The structural promise for domestic politics in Serbia in the decade before the First World War led to its designation as the “golden age of Serbian democracy” in historiography and public historical consciousness. Serbian historians based their judgment on conventional published sources, such as the constitution and laws, party programs and proclamations. They concluded that Serbia was comparable to France, whose government was the model for a Serbian elite largely educated in Paris. This myth of the golden age resonated strongly with the Serbian public, as historians claimed that positive myths about national history were important, because they stimulated and motivated people. This myth would also play a significant role in more 114

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recent political life, especially in the 1990s. It was then said that the Serbia of 1903–​14 was on a par with the most developed European countries of the time, but that it had lost its way because of the creation of the Yugoslav state in 1918 and the Communist government imposed in 1945. This encouraged the assumption that Slobodan Milošević’s government was also just accidental and that Serbia would easily return to its democratic traditions as soon as it stepped away from Yugoslavia. This myth would play a large part in missing the opportunity to address underlying problems in Serbia’s democratization, problems that can be traced back to the celebrated pre-​ 1914 decade. Despite the strength of this myth, the 1980s nonetheless saw a scholarly reassessment of the interpretation of Serbian domestic politics. New research showed how the political stage really performed, how the institutions functioned, and how formal procedures and law enforcement actually worked. The new historiography paid particular attention to the ideologies in circulation and the dominant political culture, to the prevalent debates and narratives. To reach these deeper layers of political reality, recent studies used previously unconsulted sources, such as proceedings from the National Assembly, letters of political actors, diaries, memoirs, and press coverage. This new wave of historiography showed that reality was far removed from lofty political proclamations and that institutions, soon after they were introduced, deviated from their models and adapted to their new surroundings. Political practice turned out to be very different from the principles invoked by the party elites.

Ideals and realities in everyday political life Political parties Although political parties emerged very early in Serbia borrowing programs and ideals from their European role models, they were, in essence, very far removed from them. Serbian political parties did not emerge as an expression of interest from certain sections of society. They were formed instead by the members of a narrow, Belgrade-​based, largely intellectual elite. Most of these people were university professors who were also the most educated section of society.The problems came from dependence on employment as government officials, a dependence on the state which in essence narrowed their freedom of speech, despite all their high intentions. What is more, the party founders usually had personal ties with each other, whether they were friends, relatives, or knew each other from school or their home town. This meant that the parties were more like private clubs, where not even substantive political issues were sufficiently discussed. Later this led to fierce internal conflicts and splits. These splits were also consequences of parties not familiar with internal democracy and transparent procedure. They were characterized by an almost military subordination within a pyramid structure, with an inviolable and unchangeable leader on top, followed by a narrow circle of his trusted men and a broad base which supported them. Such a system of party organization did not tolerate pluralism within the party, or even creation of factions, which meant that disagreements led to splits, the formation of new parties and political fragmentation. The period 1903–​14 was marked by just one such split, when a group of younger members left the ruling People’s Radical Party under its undisputed leader Nikola Pašić, forming the Independent Radical Party.This split occurred in 1904, and the huge majority of Radical voters that made up over 70 percent of ballots cast were divided into two virtually equal halves. Such a division could in itself have been beneficial for the development of democracy, but in the event, precisely because of personal ties between former party leaders, it led to ferocious political conflicts. This turned the political scene into an arena for personal insults that filled newspaper 115

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columns and the debates in the National Assembly, trapping conduct of state business. The split in the ruling party was the primary cause of government instability in this period. There were 18 governments in only 11 years, each of them averaging less than eight months in power.

The one-​party state In appraising the state of Serbian democracy in the early twentieth century, one key fact is that, beginning in the 1880s, the People’s Radical Party created what one could call its own state. This populist practice identified the people with the state through an all-​powerful ruling people’s party that held a vast majority of parliamentary seats (88 percent). The state became almost the only way of realizing party political and personal interest, eventually becoming fully subordinated to it. It should also be noted that the People’s Radical Party remained in power for almost half a century, until Nikola Pašić’s death in 1926. Such a system meant that the ruling party had great power, controlling not only the political appointments but most of state spending in an otherwise poorly developed economy. This again meant that joining a party and demonstrating unconditional loyalty was the easiest way to social mobility, a way to get a better job, to move from village to town, from town to city. This is how the party’s clientelist system was created, and its tentacles extended to the whole of society and its deepest possible corruption, where most livelihoods depend on the state and the ruling party. This is why pre-​1914 Serbia can be called a vanguard of populism. By the end of the nineteenth century there was a system in place in which the party leader and his organization, on behalf of the people, ruled outside formal institutions and laws as we will see. Nikola Pašić was shaken by the breakaway of the Independent Radical Party in 1904 but by the election of 1906, the Radical Party had recovered and regained a large strong majority in the National Assembly. The party-​state was revived.

Elections As mentioned, the election law in Serbia after the 1903 coup was very liberal and this is one of the common arguments for claiming that this was a democratic state. In practice, however, elections were more part of the problem than their solution. As a result of political instability, elections were not held in regular cycles as the law required; there were as many as five elections held in the 11  years after 1903, with the sixth scheduled for the summer of 1914 and only prevented by the start of the First World War. Frequent and early elections do not necessarily mean a weakened democracy, but the problem in Serbia was that elections obstructed the work of government institutions for several months, primarily because the verification committee had to rule on the many irregularities reported.The reports of the verification committees testify to the widespread use of violence during elections, as well as violations of the legal guarantee of a secret ballot. There are numerous examples of police standing next to ballot boxes, opposition boxes having a metal floor that resounded when a ballot was dropped, and open threats not to vote for the opposition. All the elections were marked by outdated and disorganized electoral rolls. Their deficiencies allowed the ruling party officials to count the deceased, the votes of “dead souls” as the press called them at the time.

Functioning of institutions The next question is how did the institutions work? Two factors were crucial: the separation of powers did not exist in practice, and power rested with the institution controlled by the 116

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strongest party leader. Although the constitution designated the National Assembly as the responsible center of the system, opposition representatives said it was merely an ornament, allowing the obedient majority to vote in favor of all government proposals. The government headed by Nikola Pašić kept its parliamentary majority under total control. It also used a few legal “innovations” allowing it to advance its interests even when a parliamentary majority was lacking. Most often it resorted to issuing statutory decrees, by which the government took over the power to legislate, breaking the principle of separation of powers as enshrined in the 1903 Constitution. Another device was the institution of discharge petitions, which meant that government approved bills, usually on matters of major importance (for example, the trade agreement with Austria-​Hungary ending the tariff war of 1906–​11), only to send them to the National Assembly for approval a few months later, although they were already in effect. The most serious undermining of the Assembly’s authority was contained in the provision of the 1903 Constitution, under which the King had the option, in special, critical circumstances, of indefinitely extending the last year’s budget by decree. Here was the greatest deviation of the Serbian constitution from the Belgian model. It undermined parliamentary power precisely on the most important issue that allowed the assembly to bring down the government by rejecting the budget proposal.The King exercised this right twice, on Nikola Pašić’s insistence, extending the previous year’s budget in 1908 and 1909, although the circumstances were not as critical, as the constitution required. The reason instead was that the government had lost its majority and was in danger of having to resign if its budget was not passed. Thanks to this royal act, the government secured two more years of power, contrary to parliamentary procedure elsewhere in Europe. In doing so, the liberal King Petar took sides in the conflict between the government and the assembly, something that a proper constitutional monarch should not have done.

Relations between the majority and the minority Parliamentary best practice and even democracy were threatened most of all by the state of majority-​minority relations. The all-​powerful ruling majority understood democracy as limitless power, undermining one of the basic correctives preventing the so-​called terror of the majority, its limitation by the rights of the minority. In political practice, the opposition was openly advised that “the minority has one right only:  to become the majority again and as long as it does not succeed, it must surrender to impotence and exclusion.” The rights of the majority were not restricted even by the laws it itself had passed. A rationale according to which the majority has the right to violate existing law cited the general national interest as justification: “Under special circumstances, and when it comes to a major interest of the state, the government (supported by the majority) not only can, but sometimes must do things beyond the law to protect that interest.” As with discharge petitions provided for by the constitution in special circumstances, the “right” to violate laws was used much more often than “special circumstances” allowed. This completely derogated the power of the assembly, and contrary to the constitution, to the hands of the executive –​that is to say, Nikola Pašić as the unquestioned leader. This is how all principles of parliamentarism were dismantled in practice, and the government was reduced to decisions by one man and his narrow circle, unaccountable to any institution. Together they maintained a one-​party state, wholly subordinated to its interests. Unable to resist the majority within the institutional framework, the opposition opted for obstruction, primarily in the National Assembly and almost continuously from 1906 to 1908, that is to say, during the very significant years of the Customs War and the Bosnian Annexation crisis. Majority abuses were countered by minority obstruction, which further hindered the state’s administration and opened the door to extra-​institutional solutions. 117

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A deep state Extra-​institutional arrangements were further reinforced by the actions of a group of officers who carried out the May 1903 coup. It is true that power was returned to the institutions the next day and that the constitution was restored, but the conspirators remained, operating from the shadows and influencing even the most important state decisions. Officials were appointed under their approval, and they had the power to dismiss ministers and even governments. Ignoring the assembly, they influenced the choice of judges and they also intervened in foreign policy. The opposition called them “irresponsible actors” because their power was constantly felt, but they were not part of the system or accountable to any institution. Not only did they derive their strength from the fact that they had brought a new dynasty to power, but also because after the split of the Radical Party, both parties, the People’s Radical Party and the Independent Radical Party, tried to form an alliance with the conspirators. There is also the disputed claim that King Petar, pressured by the conspirators, twice brought down governments that held a parliamentary majority. Their influence grew after 1911, when the conspirators founded a secret organization called Unity or Death (“Black Hand”), and especially after the Balkan Wars, when they gained control of the newly annexed territories of Kosovo, Sandžak, and Macedonia, effectively turning them into their fiefdoms.Victories in the war gave the conspirators additional political power, which was most prominent in the crisis between military and civilian authorities in early 1914, leading to King Petar’s abdication. With his son Aleksandar’s appointment as regent, the conspirators thought he would become an instrument of their power. One evidence of the toxicity of their influence was one member’s training of the Young Bosnia conspirators in handling weapons and facilitating their trip to Sarajevo in June 1914. There they assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, an assassination that triggered the First World War. In such circumstances, with institutions captured by the strongest party and military conspirators directly threatening civilian authorities, the possibility for implementing freedoms guaranteed by law were narrow. Freedom of the press was indeed guaranteed by the highly liberal law, which led to a number of high-​quality dailies and magazines, but the freedom of the press was otherwise controlled. There were numerous examples of police seizing newspapers in the morning if they believed they crossed the line of permissible criticism. Reliable sources show that during the day the court would release the newspapers and allow their distribution, which also testifies to judicial independence in this area. On the other hand, freedom of the press was “regulated” by violence, most strikingly when unknown groups broke into the printing shops of independent newspapers and broke the printing presses, or when the owner of the independent Štampa, Svetomir Jakšić, was held captive by unknown armed persons for four days. The people who “regulated” freedoms in this manner were never captured or prosecuted, but it is clear that the freedoms guaranteed by law faced serious threats of physical violence. In addition, the dominant media discord was a major problem that impeded freedom of expression. The language was extremely harsh, full of insults and personal invective, leaving the impression that newspapers served primarily as an arena for battling political opponents, and not a way to raise important political issues and present various arguments. Contemporaries have called the phenomenon a “foam of words,” with today’s insults immediately answered with more violent accusations the next day, to the detriment of substance and the public interest. In that foam of words, no specific words had any weight, nor what anyone said have any authority. Thus, in a paradoxical way, the freedom of the press hampered its freedom, turning it into another weapon of the government, with genuine criticism no longer having an impact in the deafening avalanche of words. 118

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The same could be said of another central freedom, freedom of association. Also guaranteed by law, civil society centered in Belgrade did create a large number of associations. But it was the army conspirators who threatened the principle of freedom of association. Two cases illustrate the threat. First was the public beating that the Progressive Party representative and editor of the opposition newspaper Pravda, Pavel Marinković, received from several widely recognized army officers. There were hundreds of witnesses because it happened in the middle of the day on the busiest street in Belgrade, but the officers were never charged. It was clear that they were beyond the law, that civil institutions had no powers to deal with them. The second, more shocking case occurred in 1907. The greatest opponent of the conspirator officers, Milan Novaković, was murdered in Belgrade’s Central Prison, although he himself was an officer but also founder of the Association for the Legal Solution of the Conspiratorial Issue. Founded in 1904, it advocated removing the conspirators from the military, stripping them of their rank and prosecuting them for regicide. Shortly after it was founded, his association was banned, contrary to the liberal law on freedom of association, and the printing presses in which he printed his newspaper were smashed. Then Milan Novaković was arrested and killed in prison, along with another convict. Although an attempt was made to cover up the case and kill the suspects themselves, it was soon revealed that the murder was done with the police minister, the Belgrade police commissioner, and prison warden present. This incident opened one of the most dramatic institutional crises in the prewar period.The disciplined assembly majority rejected the opposition’s request for dismissing the police minister, and the debate showed that no arguments or evidence affected the opinion of the Radical Party majority. After a four-​year trial, the court ruled that the murder had been ordered by the police minister, triggering a new parliamentary debate that lasted for months.Yet neither this debate nor the court ruling could bring about change. The government did not fall, and the minister remained in office. The case demonstrated the overriding power of “irresponsible actors,” the conspirator officers. The murder case showed that neither the court nor a parliamentary inquiry, nor the entire opposition and an independent press raising the issue could limit the power of those members of the army who in 1903 overthrew the old dynasty and brought a new one to power.

The impact of foreign affairs on domestic policy The example of Serbia in the early twentieth century also reflects the interdependencies of foreign and domestic policy. After gaining independence in 1878, Serbia embarked on the development of an ambitious national program that came down to the slogan “Liberation and Unification.” It preached that the Serbian people, and over time other South Slavs, should liberate themselves from the rule of the neighboring Ottoman and the Habsburg empires, and unite with Serbia. Because this opened up the possibility of war with the neighboring empires, Serbia began arming for the realization of this national program. This prospect gave the army a special place in political life. Indispensable in preparing to realize the national goal, the army acquired special authority in society and strengthened its position in relation to the civilian authorities. Furthermore, focusing on the idea of national liberation enabled the ruling elite to constantly delay social reforms, including democratization. This external instability and threat from neighboring powers gave the ruling party room to deliberately restrict certain liberties, primarily freedom of expression. As for social reforms, the excuse was that it was “not the right moment,” as the country was preparing for a major historical shift, and the priority was to solve the national question. Samouprava (1905), the ruling party’s daily newspaper, maintained that 119

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“Serbia more than ever needs unanimity so that it could rise to the task of the events at hand, and ‘independent’ Serbian newspapers are trying to obstruct her on her path.” Ever intensifying propaganda against “external enemies” enabled the continual verbal abuse of political opponents, who were constantly accused of treason, of receiving money “from Vienna,” of being “Austrian lackeys.” These smears represented a serious accusation in an atmosphere of heightened patriotic fervor. They made political opponents into easy targets. Labeled as national traitors, political opponents became illegitimate in the eyes of the public, and there was a threat they could be punished beyond the law. With time, this instrumentalization of foreign policy to eliminate opponents intensified, especially after the tariff war with Austria-​Hungary (1906–​11) and the annexation crisis of 1908. Political passions were at their peak, especially after Austria-​Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This decision in Vienna marked the end of Serbia’s ambitions in the west, across the Drina River, which deepened national frustration and strengthened the position of military actors. A new space for political interference of military men opened up after the creation of the Young Bosnia youth organization, which maintained close relations with the secret society Black Hand. In an atmosphere of increasing confrontation with Austria-​Hungary and preparations for the Balkan Wars (1912–​13), Serbia was looking for allies who opposed the alliance of the Central Powers (formed between Germany and Austria-​Hungary in 1879; with Italy joining in 1882). Seeking the support of the Great Powers with which it had no existing or potential territorial disputes, Serbia was getting closer to the states that by the turn of the century formed the competing alliance, the Entente.This was partly because of the ideological proximity of the People’s Radical Party with Russia, but also because of a rational need to approach France and Great Britain. It was believed that they would support Serbian interests against Austria-​Hungary and Germany.This ironically strengthened the need for a reputation as a parliamentary democracy, in a belief that it would be easier to obtain the support of the two European leaders of the democratic world if Serbia were to accept such a political order. The potential instrumentalization of domestic reform for foreign policy aims had little effect before the Balkan Wars and none in the territories taken from Macedonia and Kosovo. Both remained under military rather than civilian rule, despite opposition demands that the rights of the 1903 constitution should apply.

Conclusion The case of Serbian domestic politics during 1903–​14 is instructive for any broader study of democracy. Prewar Serbia raises a critical question of democratic theory. Is democracy a plant that can thrive on any soil or is it one that requires complex conditions to flower? Serbia is an important case because in a small, poor, and largely illiterate country, there was a political and intellectual elite well acquainted with contemporary political philosophy and the various systems of government that existed in Europe at that time. From the existing systems, this elite chose to introduce parliamentary democracy, although different forms of authoritarian order dominant on the continent might have been chosen not only to control the predominant rural peasantry but also because of the neighboring models of Austria-​Hungary and Russia. The Serbian example is significant because it testifies to the willingness and desire of the elite to restructure the country, despite all the limitations which it knew well, in the most modern framework of the time. We are still left with the question of whether such a system would work in social conditions quite different from those in countries whose parliamentary systems and democratic rights had evolved over several centuries of social, cultural, and political development. 120

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Recent research into the way that Serbian institutions or the way freedom promised by the constitution and laws worked in practice suggest that it was a “façade democracy.” It was a system with all the necessary legal and institutional conditions, but one in which the political culture played a damaging role in decision-​making and political relations, keeping political practice far away from the proclaimed principles. Contemporaries were well aware of this problem and very often wrote about it in the independent press. Opposition representatives often tried to describe the deficiencies in their assembly speeches. They wrote that democracy only served as an ornament, that the established system was merely form without substance.They wrote that “Serbia receives from the West the latest achievements of the human spirit, but it receives them only in form, not in substance. Its laws serve only as a luxury ornament, not a real necessity.” The Serbian democratic endeavor from the early twentieth century shows that the advance of political culture is more important for a functioning democracy than laws passed or institutions established. Political culture gives tone to political life and influences how the system will work. The democratic system was primarily threatened by the model of the popular state, which necessarily turned into the model of a one-​party state, with virtually unlimited power for the ruling party, also exercised outside the institutions. This system was best described by an opposition representative who said that Serbia has a system where “those who control the government control the state; those who control power control freedom.” Such an understanding of politics left no room for political pluralism, and the political opponent was seen as an enemy against whom any means were allowed, as the opposition often said. Such a view of the political “other” rendered the constitutional guarantees meaningless, and political violence became the final resort in restricting the scope of those freedoms. Perhaps this situation is best described by the opposition daily Pravda: It is a system in which citizens formally have all the rights, but cannot use any, it is a particular hybrid of a regime … Formally it is very free-​minded, but in reality it is a negation of all freedom.

Selected Readings Kazimirović,Vasa. Nikola Pašić i njegovo doba, 2 vols. Belgrade, 1990. McKenzie, David. Apis: The Congenial Conspirator. The Life of Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević. New York, 1989. Popović-​Obradović, Olga. Kakva ili kolika država. Ogledi o političkoj i društvenoj istoriji Srbije XIX-​XX vek. Belgrade, 2008. Popović-​Obradović, Olga. The Parliamentary System in Serbia, 1903–​1914. Belgrade, 2013. Protić, Milan. Between Democracy and Populism:  Political Ideas of the People’s Radical Partiy in Serbia (The Formative Period 1860’s to 1903). Belgrade, 2015. Stojanović, Dubravka. Srbija i demokratija. Istorijska studija o „zlatnom dobu srpske demokratije” 1903–​1914. Belgrade, 2003 (2nd edition, 2019). Stojanović, Dubravka. Populism the Serbian Way. Belgrade, 2017. Stokes, Gale. Politics as Development.The Emergence of Political Parties in Ninteenth Century Serbia. Durham,  1990. Sundhaussen, Holm. Geschichte Serbiens, 19.–​21. Jahrhundert.Vienna,  2008. Touraine, Alain. Qu’est-​ce que c’est la democratie. Paris, 1994.

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12 THE MACEDONIAN QUESTION Asked and answered, 1878–​1913 Keith Brown

In 1876, British opposition leader W.  E. Gladstone published an influential pamphlet titled “The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East.” He argued there that British support for Ottoman rule in the Balkans should be withdrawn. In 1897, as a private citizen, he wrote in a letter to the head of the Byron Society, posing the question “Why not Macedonia for Macedonians, as well as Bulgaria for Bulgarians and Servia for Servians?” This “Macedonian Question” was a recurrent theme in European politics in the period 1878–​1913. It acquired urgency after the Uprising and reprisals that occurred in Ottoman Bulgaria in 1876–​7, and the subsequent war between the Russian and Ottoman Empires that made clear the fragility of Ottoman control of its Balkan provinces. It was highlighted by the territorial ambitions of four new countries  –​Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania  –​that celebrated their own liberation from Turkish rule in the nineteenth century, and used a variety of means to press their claims to annex more land and people as the Empire weakened further. And it caused the greatest loss of life and property in the first decade of the twentieth century. All the inhabitants of Ottoman Macedonia, and especially members of the rural Slavic-​speaking Orthodox Christian plurality who aspired to greater control of their own destinies, contended with the escalation in armed violence as Ottoman authorities, nationalist paramilitaries, and revolutionary insurgents fought an extended guerrilla war that transformed into inter-​state conflict in the Balkan Wars of 1912–​13. This chapter addresses this period, starting with the two distinct treaties of San Stefano and Berlin, signed in March and July of 1878 respectively, which marked the conclusion of hostilities between Russia and the Ottoman Empire and a subsequent revision of the terms. Similarly, our end-​point of 1913 was also marked by two separate treaties, separated from each other by war rather than renegotiation. The 1912 Albanian revolt was followed by the First Balkan War, launched by Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro attacking Turkish forces. The Treaty of London approved the creation of an independent Albania and the division of former Ottoman territory among the victors. Bulgaria then launched the Second Balkan War against Serbia and Greece in an attempt to secure more territory. Bulgaria’s gambit failed, and the Treaty of Bucharest set in place borders which, apart from readjustments during World War I  and World War II, remained substantially unchanged until Yugoslavia’s dissolution. In 1992, the Republic of Macedonia declared independence from federal Yugoslavia, and after a protracted dispute with Greece, has adopted as its constitutional name the Republic of North 122

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Macedonia. Here we focus on the period from 1893 to 1908, which extends the period that Greek historiography defines as the Macedonian Struggle. 1893 marks the formation of the Secret Macedonian-​Adrianople Revolutionary Organization, while 1908 was the year of the Young Turk Revolution, also launched in Macedonia.

Great Power background: Russian aspirations and Ottoman decline In January 1853, Tsar Nicholas I of Russian dubbed the Ottoman Empire “the sick man of Europe.” In the same year Russia attacked the Empire, ostensibly to protect Orthodox Christian subjects of the Sultan. Russia lost the Crimean War after Great Britain and France supported the Ottomans; but Nicholas’s characterization stuck. From the high-​tide of Ottoman territorial gains in Southern and Eastern Europe, when the army had besieged Vienna in 1683, by the late nineteenth-​century the Empire’s European frontier had retreated significantly. The Empire’s linguistic and religious heterogeneity, and tolerance for internal diversity had once been a source of strength –​especially evident when many Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 found refuge within the Empire, and played a key role in the emergence of Thessaloniki and Izmir as cosmopolitan hubs of global commerce. But the revolutions and republican ideals of the early nineteenth century established a new template for popular sovereignty in the form of the nation-​state. Under the banner of emancipation and autonomy, Serbia (1804–​17) and Greece (1821–​32) had already rebelled against Ottoman rule. Serbia achieved the status of autonomous principality in 1830 and Greece, with significant assistance from the navies of Great Britain, France, and Russia, became an independent Republic in 1832. Russia intervened again in 1877–​8, under the leadership of Nicholas’s son Tsar Alexander II, to deliver independence for Romania and Bulgaria.

Neighboring states and religious identities All four newly constituted political units were smaller when first carved out of Ottoman territories than their current namesakes. Leaders in all four, though, aspired to extend their borders. They set their sights, in particular, on populations and territories in the remaining Ottoman provinces in Europe which they claimed as “theirs” on the grounds of history, religion, language, or culture. And they built their capacity to advance their claims by creating modern armies, investing especially in US- and European-​produced artillery and rifles. They also engaged in protracted campaigns to foster a sense of shared national identity among their target population of Orthodox Christian subjects of the Sultan inside the Ottoman Empire. Central to these efforts to win hearts and minds were churches and religiously sponsored schools. Competition increased when in 1870 the Sultan issued a decree, or firman, recognizing a Bulgarian millet, or people, with the right to establish an autonomous Bulgarian church, the Exarchate. This provided the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Balkans with an alternative to the longer-​ established Patriarchate in Constantinople, which was identified as Greek. A further blow to the Patriarchate’s dominance came when in 1905 the Sultan extended the same recognition and religious rights to Romanians within the Empire, which provoked further tensions in towns with Vlach heritage. These efforts by Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and (to a lesser extent) Romania constituted the regional backdrop for what became known as “the Macedonian Question” in the late nineteenth century. To understand their activities, though, it is necessary to trace the broader power politics around the Russo-​Ottoman War of 1877–​8. As the brief timeline laid out above suggests, Russian foreign policy in the Balkans was consistent throughout the nineteenth century, shaped 123

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by geopolitical considerations and Great Power rivalries. Russia’s Empire was land-​ based, stretching from Eastern Europe across Eurasia; but year-​round access to the high seas was an enduring aspiration. The Russian Black Sea Fleet had to pass through the Dardanelles to reach the Mediterranean Sea: if Russia’s European rivals were to gain control of Ottoman territory, and base their fleets there, they would be able to blockade Russia’s only warm-​water port. Together with Russia’s sense of religious and linguistic brotherhood with the Slavic Eastern Orthodox Christian people of the Balkans, the impetus to prevent any other power benefiting from the Ottoman Empire’s weakness shaped the conflicts of the late nineteenth century. Conversely, in the zero-​sum calculations that dominated imperial foreign policy-​making, the European powers with interests in the Adriatic, Mediterranean, and Aegean Seas –​especially Austria-​Hungary and Great Britain –​were anxious to prevent Russian influence expanding in the Balkans. The Russo-​Turkish War of 1877–​8 followed local uprisings in Herzegovina, Bosnia, and Bulgaria  –​all of which were Slavic-​ majority areas under Ottoman sovereignty. With its Crimean War allies maintaining neutrality, the Ottoman Empire was defeated, requesting peace terms in January 1878. Signed in March, the Treaty of San Stefano established Serbian independence and granted autonomy to Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the promise of further reform. In addition, the treaty called for the creation of an autonomous Bulgaria far larger than any observers had anticipated, extending beyond the city of Ohrid to the West, and to the Aegean Coast and Thessaloniki in the South. The principality would thus incorporate almost all Ottoman subjects whose preferred language at home or in their church was part of the South Slavic language family. It would also include Greek, Albanian, Vlach, Turkish, Rom, and Ladino speakers for whom Ottoman Macedonia was home. Nominally under Ottoman rule, San Stefano Bulgaria would develop its own armed forces under Russian tutelage, with a clear path to full independence.

Alternative futures and the spread of violence Europe’s Great Powers balked at the prospect of this “Greater Bulgaria.” Their objections owed more to geopolitics than concern for the future of non-​Bulgarians in a Bulgarian state. At the Congress of Berlin in June–​July 1878, the map of the Balkans was redrawn to demarcate three separate territories; a new autonomous Bulgarian Principality, an Ottoman province of Eastern Roumelia, and the remainder of San Stefano Bulgaria restored to Ottoman control, divided between the administrative regions or vilayets of Uskub (modern Skopje), Manastir (modern Bitola), and Selanik (modern Thessaloniki). These vilayets were frequently referred to collectively as Macedonia, and after the Congress of Berlin the following four decades were marked by a sustained period of insecurity, with recurring outbreaks of dramatic violence. The primary tension in this period was between Greece and Bulgaria. The firman of 1870 polarized relations among once-​fellow Christians, for whom “Patriarchist/​Greek” and “Exarchist/​Bulgar” became mutually exclusive and antagonistic identities. This zero-​sum perspective was confirmed when the leadership of the Patriarchate declared the Exarchate schismatic in an attempt to combat its appeal among Slavic-​speakers across Macedonia. Church hierarchies that operated with the blessing of the Ottoman Sultan, and were headquartered in Constantinople to serve Ottoman subjects, pursued policies that served the secular leadership in the aspirational nation-​states of Greece and Bulgaria. High-​profile church leaders on both sides professed ideals of tolerance and opposed violence. For example, the head of the Exarchate, Exarch Josif, asserted in 1903 that “revolution will not rescue Macedonia, only evolution and education.” But intra-​faith rivalries grew 124

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more bitter and deadly even as the rival churches sponsored schools which privileged their respective languages. Radicalization was often spearheaded by students, teachers, and other young professionals who had embraced ideas of national liberation circulating in Europe. Especially among young men who had studied or worked in Sofia or in Bulgarian-​sponsored high schools elsewhere, the Great Powers’ intervention to block the Greater Bulgaria created in the Treaty of San Stefano was a betrayal of the Bulgarian national cause. In the 1890s, young men formed a range of secret societies and brotherhoods with a shared goal: to end Ottoman rule and create some form of sovereign state in Macedonia where Slavic Christians controlled their own destiny. Among the best-​known of these various organizations was the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (MRO) founded by six young men in 1893. The Treaty of Berlin had included a clause calling for Ottoman provinces, especially those inhabited by Christians, to be granted substantial autonomy. The Sultan’s refusal to enact this clause prompted revolutionary activism in many areas of the Empire, including Armenia and Crete. The MRO’s immediate goal when first formed was to insist on the implementation of this clause. Over the next ten years, this organization won significant support among the Slavic-​ speaking communities of Macedonia. From the start, it had to deal with a fundamental tension between two terminal goals. Some leaders and members were committed to an ideal of political autonomy for Macedonia as a new and distinct entity. Others fervently pursued the unification of all Bulgarians in a single, powerful nation-​state. The Organization maintained solidarity by focusing on shared aspirations, including putting an end to Ottoman exploitation and misrule, and combating Greek influence. However, the Organization’s relations with the Bulgarian government, the Exarchate, and other Bulgaria-​based institutions were always complicated. Disagreements around tactics and strategy came into stark relief in the years 1901–​3, as the Organization scaled up activities including recruiting, fund-​raising, and equipping and training its own armed forces to confront the Ottoman state. MRO orchestrated and led the Ilinden Uprising of August 1903, in which around 20,000 armed members took to the field, driving out Ottoman garrisons from several mountain towns and engaging in several larger-​scale battles. MRO’s leaders, though, were not in full agreement on the Uprising’s purpose and on how to proceed. Some noted the template offered by the Bulgarian Uprising against the Ottomans of 1876, which triggered state-​sponsored atrocities against the Christian population, that in turn prompted both W. E. Gladstone’s pamphlet, and direct Russian military intervention. For some then, civilian casualties were thinkable and acceptable because of the international attention they would arouse. Others took the view that revolution would come from within, and argued that after capturing headlines in their initial daring attacks, the Organization should take pains to reduce civilian casualties both among the Christian population it served and among Turks and other Muslims. By quickly standing down its members in order that they would escape identification, capture, or death, the Organization would thereby remain a force-​in-​waiting for future operations among an energized and encouraged Christian population. Greece had far fewer core dilemmas to resolve in determining engagement with the Macedonian Question. Even before the Ilinden Uprising, the Greek government had formally sponsored or less formally encouraged and incentivized small bands and larger armed groups to cross into Ottoman Macedonia, while also continuing to support schools and churches. One of the largest border incursions took place in April 1897, when around 3,000 Greek irregulars entered Ottoman Macedonia and engaged with Turkish forces as a prelude to the Greco-​Ottoman War, in which Greece was defeated. Then the unrest of 1903 served as the impetus for a substantial escalation in Greek efforts to counter the use of force by the MRO against Greek priests and teachers, and the publics they served. Greek military officer Pavlos 125

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Melas took an armed band into Macedonia in July 1904. He was killed by MRO forces, but his example, together with the active mobilization efforts by Greek clergy and diplomats, inspired many more Greek citizens to take up the fight. Cretan paramilitaries –​with experience in their own uprising against Ottoman rule on the island –​were very often deployed into Ottoman Macedonia against MRO insurgents. Britain, France, Germany, and Austria all maintained consular representation in Macedonia (usually in Monastir, or Bitola) and together with a substantial number of European journalists who covered the Uprising and its aftermath. Their reports provide a vivid picture of the day-​ to-​day cost to the local population of the various foreign interests in their homeland. These accounts also make clear the high levels of tension and insecurity. From 1903, Ottoman forces recognized the scale of public support for the MRO, and the need for a vigorous counter-​ insurgency effort. That same year, after the meeting between Emperor Franz Josef and Tsar Nicholas II as described in the chapter by Roumiana Preshlenova, Austria-​Hungary and Russia led a Great Power project to oversee reforms in Ottoman administration. These reforms were designed to protect the rights of Christians, including the appointment of Christians to the gendarmerie. Yet the levels of violence were not significantly reduced, and this first international effort at Balkan peacekeeping was abandoned by 1908. Besides the increasing involvement of Greek paramilitary forces –​often coordinating their efforts with the Ottoman state –​MRO was engaged in its own civil war in the post-​Ilinden period. The factional split over ties to the Bulgarian church and state also shaped intense recriminations over the failure of the Uprising to improve conditions for Macedonians, and the long-​term costs –​in terms of fighters killed, weapons and ammunition depleted, and supporters’ homes destroyed and their confidence shaken –​that the Organization had incurred. Infighting escalated, reaching a dramatic high point when two influential leaders in the early movement and the Uprising, Ivan Garvanov and Boris Sarafov, were assassinated in Sofia in December 1907 by fellow MRO-​member Todor Panitsa. Combined with the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, this high-​level schism in the revolutionary movement marked a turning point in discussions of the Macedonian Question. Nationalist thinking had come to dominate the thinking of politicians and much of the public, both in the region and beyond.They now envisaged Macedonia as home to identifiably separable populations of “Greeks,” “Bulgarians,” “Serbs,” “Romanians (or Aroumanians),” “Albanians,” and “Turks.” These could be defined in different ways, but most salient were the language they used at home or in their places of worship, and their religion. These were taken as reliable predictors for the political state or unit with which they felt the closest affinity. Once the population were viewed with these classificatory criteria in mind, the Macedonian Question could be answered in a way that satisfied the leaders of the land-​hungry states that bordered on the Ottoman territory. They all pursued partition, combined with some form of resettlement for those residents who “belong” to another political unit; and some form of national assimilation or acculturation for those who did not feel they belonged to any of those named groups. This was the logic by which the world answered W. E. Gladstone’s question. In the middle of the twentieth century –​when the creation of a new federal Yugoslavia raised the question again –​American political scientist Joseph Roucek summed up that logic in his 1947 article “The Eternal Problem of Macedonia” in the following words Although a perennial object of contention, Macedonia has remained a vaguely defined area, never forming a racial, linguistic, or even political and administrative unit. The fact is that Macedonia has been a political problem rather than a geographical entity. 126

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Roucek here succinctly distills the view that Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria came to agree on when they formed an alliance to carve up Ottoman territory in the First Balkan War. And this logic, combined with recognition of the new reality created by armed conflict, drove the Treaty of Bucharest at the end of the Balkan Wars. The Macedonian Question was answered by banishing the geographical term from the maps of the region, and compelling people who applied the term to themselves to choose another for their nationality. The result was to drive a different answer and logic –​as hinted at by Gladstone, and as advanced by the MRO –​underground for much of the twentieth century.

Selected Readings Adanir, Fikret. Die Makedonische Frage: Ihre Entstehung und Entwicklung bis 1908. Wiesbaden,  1979. Brown, Keith. Loyal Unto Death: Trust and Terror in Revolutionary Macedonia. Bloomington, Ind., 2013. Dakin, Douglas. The Greek Struggle in Macedonia, 1897–​1913. Thessaloniki,  1966. Gounaris, Basil G. “Social Cleavages and National ‘Awakening’ in Ottoman Macedonia,” East European Quarterly 29, no. 4 (1995): 409–​27. Hopkins, James Lindsay. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Boulder, Colo., 2009. Karakasidou, Anastasia. Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870–​1990. Chicago, 1997. Kofos, Evangelos. Nationalism and Communism in Macedonia:  Civil Conflict, Politics of Mutation, National Identity. New Rochelle, NY, 1993. Lange-​Akhund, Nadine. The Macedonian Question, 1893–​1908, from Western Sources. Boulder, Colo., 1998. Perry, Duncan M. The Politics of Terror: The Macedonian Liberation Movements, 1893–​1903. Durham, NC, 1988. Yosmaoğlu, Ipek. Blood Ties: Religion, Violence and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878–​ 1908. Ithaca, NY, 2013.

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13 AUSTRIA-​H UNGARY AND THE BALKANS Roumiana Preshlenova

The moving principles of the Habsburg Monarchy’s political and economic pivot to the neighboring Balkans in the second half of the nineteenth century were pragmatic. Defeated by Prussia and Italy in 1866, the Habsburgs lost their Italian territories. Then came German unification in 1871 under Prussian leadership, excluding Austria. The loss of Lombardy and Venetia to Italy, the unification of Germany, pressure by neighboring imperial Russia to the north and east, and the lack of colonies combined to leave Southeastern Europe as the only possible direction for expanding Vienna’s influence and control. The Empire’s approach to the region was also facilitated by its domestic reconfiguration, which for some time eased internal tensions: in 1867, Emperor Franz Joseph I reached a compromise (Ausgleich) with the Hungarian political elites in order to transform the Empire into a dualistic state functioning as a real-​political and customs union. The two constitutive parts of the Monarchy, Austria (Cisleithania) and Hungary (Transleithania), which included Croatia-​Slavonia, were unified in foreign relations under the name Austria-​Hungary. In internal affairs, they had autonomy except for the common finance and war ministries. As will be seen, the conflict of interests between Austria and Hungary, despite their unified foreign policy, impacted also the Balkan policies of the Dual Monarchy. The extraordinary political, military-​strategic, and economic interests of Austria-​Hungary in the Balkans in the last quarter of the nineteenth and in early twentieth century resulted from the confluence of political and strategic considerations. Favoring the Dual Monarchy were geographical proximity and the traditionally extensive economic and cultural ties with the region. From the 1870s, Austro-​Hungarian diplomacy promoted its primacy in the Balkans as a partial compensation for its failure to acquire a dominant position in now unified Germany and for the lack of colonial possessions. For Vienna and Budapest, the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of independent nation-​states in its Balkan territories made the Dual Monarchy’s active participation in the competition for regional hegemony inevitable.

Consequences of the Berlin Congress The massive political involvement of the Dual Monarchy in the Balkans began with the mandate from the Congress of Berlin in 1878 to occupy and govern the unsettled Ottoman province of Bosnia-​Herzegovina. Great Britain and Germany supported this transfer to counter Russian influence. Thus, Bosnia-​Herzegovina became the Habsburg’s little Orient as one observer put 128

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it.The occupation of Bosnia-​Herzegovina provided a common border with Habsburg Dalmatia and also secured the entire province against potential Serbian claims. From that moment, the province became an apple of discord between Vienna and Belgrade. As detailed in Robert J. Donia’s chapter, Bosnia-​Herzegovina’s occupation, administration, and final annexation in 1908 by the Dual Monarchy is often regarded as Austria-​Hungary’s fatal Balkan entanglement. It eventually ended in the assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo in June 1914 and the following outbreak of World War I. Some confrontation with Serbia was inherent in the two mutually exclusive assessments of Austro-​Hungarian rule in Bosnia-​Herzegovina, the Habsburg mission to spread “civilization” in the region versus anti-​Slav exclusion as seen from the Serbian and Russian point of view. At the Congress of Berlin, the Great Powers had recognized the emancipation of Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia from the Sultan, granting full independence to the latter three countries and autonomy to Bulgaria. The Austro-​Hungarian leadership now had to take them into account in dealing with the Ottoman Empire and the competing Great Powers, Russia in particular. The new nation states’ ambitions, rivalries and especially their irredentist aspirations complicated their relations with the Dual Monarchy. This was particularly true for Serbia and Romania, sharing common borders with and having co-​nationals in the Habsburg Monarchy. The strategy of the Dual Monarchy toward the Balkans after the Compromise in 1867 consisted of two constant and interrelated principles. The first envisaged territorial expansion into the Western Balkans in its vicinity and the strengthening of Austro-​Hungarian influence in other parts of the region. The second concerned restricting potential or real Russian influence, specifically preventing the formation of a large South Slav state or a state under the auspices of the Russian Emperor that would advocate Russian interests. The policy of further territorial expansion into the Balkans was in the background of its occupation of Bosnia-​Herzegovina.Yet this decision was made only after serious internal disputes because some of the leadership in Vienna and Budapest considered it a threat to the Monarchy’s ethnic balance as ratified in the recently achieved reorganization under dualism. The occupation of Bosnia-​Herzegovina added more than a million South Slavs to the multinational Monarchy. The economic advantage of its natural resources outweighed poor infrastructure, little industry, and an agricultural regime based on a late-​feudal Ottoman system of share-​cropping for Muslim landlords. Vienna and Budapest also argued about the future place of the province in the delicate constitutional set-​up of the Dual Monarchy. Eventually, the province came under the reign neither of the Austrian nor the Hungarian government but became a third unit, directly governed by the Joint Minister of Finance. After the Berlin Congress, Austria-​Hungary preferred to maintain the status quo until a more convenient moment when the international constellation would allow the fulfillment of its ultimate strategic goal: to secure an outlet to the Aegean Sea at Thessaloniki and to extend in the Adriatic its influence down from the Dalmatian coast. Political influence and economic expansion were thus regarded by the elites in the Dual Monarchy as the most appropriate means of penetrating the Balkans. To extend its economic influence, Vienna took a leading role in reestablishing under the Berlin agreement of 1878 the International Danube Commission. Originally created by the Concert of Europe in 1856, the Commission now included Austria-​Hungary as the one representative of the Great Powers and representatives of the riparian states of Romania, Serbia, and Bulgaria. They would set regulations on the river from the Iron Gates to Galatz. The Austro-​ Hungarian deputy would be the chair but without a tie-​breaking vote. By this time, an Austrian 129

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company, The First Danube Steamboat Shipping Company (Erste Donau-​Dampfschiffahrts-​ Gesellschaft), established in 1829, dominated shipping on the river. By the 1880s, it had become the largest inland navigation company in the world for transporting passengers and cargo. Also favoring the Dual Monarchy was an agreement by the Great Powers at the Congress of Berlin obliging Serbia, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire to help complete the construction of the railway line from Vienna and Budapest via Belgrade and Sofia to Constantinople with a link to Thessaloniki. Service on this railway started in 1888. International relations provided a more uncertain base for the Austro-​Hungarian influence in the Balkans. They started well both with rapprochement with Great Britain and then with the agreement with Russia in the League of the Three Emperors (Dreikaiserbund) of the monarchs of Germany, Austria-​Hungary, and Russia in 1873–​80 and 1881–​7. Up to the Annexation (Bosnian) Crisis in 1908–​9,Vienna and St. Petersburg were bound by their common interest to preserve the status quo in the Balkans. After the brutal Ottoman suppression of the uprising in Macedonia and Thrace in August 1903, Franz Joseph I and the Russian Tsar Nicholas II agreed at the Austrian town of Mürzsteg on a reform program in Ottoman Macedonia in October 1903. The series of reforms envisaged improvement of the administration and the policing in the vilayets of Thessaloniki, Bitola (then Monastir), and Skopje to discourage their detachment from the Ottoman Empire. The reform package under international supervision failed, as described in the chapter by Keith Brown. The Great Powers’ intervention in Macedonia in 1903–​8 was the peak and the “swan-​song” in the agreement between Austria-​Hungary and Russia in the Balkans.

Balkan political relations In the relations with the Balkan nation-​states, the Dual Monarchy’s influence had early success in secret conventions with Serbia of 1881 and Romania of 1883 and 1892. Under King Carol I, scion of the German Hohenzollern-​Sigmaringen dynasty, Romania had already joined the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-​Hungary, and Italy from 1882. During this period, Greece and Bulgaria did not sign a political agreement with the Habsburg Monarchy. Greece traditionally remained in the orbit of British influence. Austro-​Hungarian attitude toward Bulgaria turned with the country’s rapprochement or confrontation with Russia, which had kept military representatives with political oversight over the young principality until 1886. Afterwards, the diplomatic relations between Sofia and St. Petersburg were broken for ten years due to the Tsar’s disapproval of the unification of Bulgaria with Eastern Rumelia in 1885, the province that had been maintained as an Ottoman province at the Congress of Berlin.The diplomacy of the Dual Monarchy perceived the national liberation movements in Macedonia and Bulgarian claims to Macedonia as threats to the established status quo. Consequently, it condemned the Bulgarian politicians who supported these claims and expressed constant reservations toward Bulgaria. Nevertheless, on the eve of the annexation of Bosnia-​Herzegovina by Austria-​Hungary on October 6, 1908, Emperor Franz Joseph confirmed the simultaneous proclamation of Bulgaria’s independence from the Sultan. Both actions violated the status quo as established by the Congress of Berlin, but responded to the Young Turk intention to modernize the Ottoman Empire and thus secure its integrity.The Bosnian Crisis in 1908–​9, resulting from these acts, was the culmination of the tensions accumulated in international relations in the early-​twentieth century Balkans, particularly manifest in the animosity between the Dual Monarchy and Serbia. The annexation of Bosnia-​Herzegovina revealed that Austria-​Hungary was able to enforce its own interests in the region only with foreign support. German diplomatic intervention to deter Russian objections added to significant financial compensation from Vienna to the 130

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Ottomans for the lost territory. The further antagonism between Vienna and Belgrade during the Annexation Crisis prompted a change in the strategic plans of the Dual Monarchy for the Balkans. Bulgaria and not Serbia was now assigned the role of the “natural heir” to the Ottoman Empire. Insulated by independence from Russian political domination, Bulgaria became the “natural ally” of Austria-​Hungary. Not without some controversy, a majority of the Bulgarian political leadership also shared the perception of complementary economic interests with Vienna on the eve of the Balkan Wars. Before 1912,Vienna had regarded most national movements in the Ottoman Empire as separatist and undesirable. However, the attitude of the Habsburg Monarchy to the Albanians was an exception. The Albanians were seen as a counterweight in the Eastern Adriatic coast to the claims of Montenegrins, Serbs, Greeks and Italians. Not interested in occupying or annexing Albanian territory, Austro-​Hungarian foreign policy-​makers favored instead the creation of an Albanian state as an Austro-​Hungarian protectorate. Such a state would prevent the partition of the Eastern Adriatic coast between the rival Balkan states in what seemed to be the imminent collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The prospect of an autonomous province of Albania within the Ottoman Empire or of an independent Albanian state had already been discussed in the secret agreements between Franz Joseph I and the Russian Tsar Alexander II before the Russo-​Ottoman war of 1877–​8. The idea of Albanian autonomy was mentioned only in confidential Austro-​Hungarian diplomatic correspondence, not to arouse the suspicions of Ottoman authorities who associated this notion with loss of territories based on their experience with Eastern Rumelia and Crete, where autonomy had been a code word for escalating demands at separation. The so-​called Eastern Crisis in 1875–​8 had already posed a threat to the integrity of the Albanian-​populated territories. In 1878, the preliminary Treaty of San-​Stefano between Russia and the Ottoman Empire envisaged the inclusion of some Albanian-​populated territories in Bulgaria. In opposition, the Prizren League, an assembly of Albanian Muslim notables, mostly large landowners, was hastily convened. They asked the Congress of Berlin to preserve the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and of the “territories of Albania.” Albanians spoke different dialects of their language and were divided among three religions, Muslim, Catholic, and Orthodox. Their family-​based tribal divisions also retarded the development of common national identification, especially among Muslims who made up about three quarters of the Albanian speaking population and enjoyed some privileges. The idea of the Albanian nation was fostered by the intelligentsia, some of whom were educated in Central and Western Europe. It was further stimulated by the national programs of the neighboring countries Montenegro, Serbia, and Greece, which were rightly perceived as a threat by the Albanians. The Dual Monarchy used a network of diplomatic missions in the Ottoman territories with compact Albanian population:  in Skopje, Bitola, Prizren, Vlora, Durres, and Shkodra, and it installed observers in towns like Mitrovica, Tirana, and Berat. From these bases, Vienna and Budapest provided assistance for the construction of schools and hospitals, putting special emphasis on Tirana, the center of influential Albanian beys. To win sympathy among their leaders, Austro-​Hungarian consuls offered generous economic support, including aid for needy Muslims. The Dual Monarchy discretely supported the belated process of nation building among the Albanians by stimulating the publishing of historical works, calendars, textbooks, and other literature in the Albanian language. They were distributed clandestinely among Albanians and contributed to the formation of a standardized Albanian language as well as to their national awareness. And from 1897 to 1909, the Austro-​Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs financed and sponsored Faik bej Konica, who edited and published in Brussels, Paris, and London the periodical Albania under the pseudonyms Trank Spiro Bey and Trank Spiro Beg. With similar 131

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publications in Constantinople, Bucharest, and Sofia, Albania contributed to the dissemination of the national idea among Albanians through focusing on Albanian folklore, poetry, history, and Skanderbeg as medieval evidence of their own statehood. In the process,Vienna and Budapest became leading centers of emerging Albanian studies (Albanology).

Economic and cultural relations Austria-​Hungary also expanded its trade relations in the Balkans during the last decades before the First World War, concluding about 20 commercial contracts, conventions, and agreements. On the other hand, beholden to Hungarian agricultural interests,Vienna conducted three tariff wars with Romania (1886–​91), Serbia (1906–​11), and Montenegro (1908–​10) as well as a series of smaller trade controversies with the Balkan countries. The tariff wars between the Dual Monarchy and the three Balkan states were not unique. Similarly severe conflicts occurred between France and Italy in 1888–​98, Switzerland and France in 1893–​5, and Germany and Russia in 1893–​4. The clashes between Vienna/​Budapest and Bucharest, Belgrade, and Cetinje resulted from the protectionist trend across Europe since the 1870s. The most common issues stemmed from the Serbian, Romanian, and Bulgarian desire to continue exporting hogs and cattle to the Dual Monarchy, in direct competition with the large Hungarian farming sector.The pretext of closing its borders for this reason because of real or presumed disease reflected also Austro-​Hungarian concerns for following the veterinary regulations of neighboring Germany, the biggest export market for Habsburg livestock and agricultural products. But the largest part of such produce, mostly from the Hungarian half, was sold in the Austrian part of the Dual Monarchy. The primary reasons for its trade wars with Romania in 1886–​91 and Serbia 1906–​ 11 on these pretexts were therefore Austrian concessions to Hungarian demands for import restriction under a threat from Budapest not to renew the duty-​free customs agreement with the large Austrian market that was due every ten years, including 1886 and 1906. In the tariff war with Serbia, its hastily assembled facilities for meat packing found an alternative to Austria-​ Hungary in a German market that had itself recently banned livestock imports. The average value of Serbia’s commodity turnover for the entire period under review underscores the importance of trade with the Dual Monarchy. It accounted for 88 percent of Serbia’s exports and 59 percent of its imports for 1891–​5, although falling to 41 percent by 1911 after the tariff war. In Romania, the peak shares for exports and imports values were 35 and 44 percent in 1883–​5, falling to 9 and 24 percent by 1911. Austro-​Hungarian imports to Montenegro fluctuated between 50 and 76 percent of total imports, by far the highest share. The Dual Monarchy was the second leading trade partner for Bulgaria, with 4 to 10 percent of Bulgarian exports and 24 to 36 percent of its imports. For Greece and the Ottoman Empire, Austria-​Hungary rated third among foreign trade partners. As a whole, the Dual Monarchy was a net importer in its trade with the Balkan countries, due to its more developed economy facing countries with nascent processes of industrialization and with peasant majorities and limited urban demand. Trade companies from the Dual Monarchy did however supply a wide range of products from machinery, fuel, and raw materials for fledgling industry to furniture, everyday goods, clothes, food, and musical instruments. As the closest symbol of “Europeanness,” Austria-​Hungary was a prestigious source of supply for the modernizing urban elites in the Balkan nation-​states. In clothing for instance, fashion from Vienna and Budapest set the standard. The influx of engineers, architects, entrepreneurs, musicians, artists, teachers, craftsmen, merchants, etc. facilitated the adoption of “European” patterns of living in the conservative Balkan environment. The participation of Austro-​ Hungarian engineers, architects, and entrepreneurs in the re-​construction of the major cities in 132

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the region left remarkable traces and contributed considerably to the modernization of urban areas. A number of these architects played a part in urban planning for Sofia and Belgrade on the model of Vienna. Native architects educated in Vienna or Prague followed in their footsteps, adding to Austro-​Hungarian artistic influence. On the other hand, Balkan merchants in Vienna, Graz, Budapest, Trieste, and Novi Sad established colonies which facilitated trade with their homelands and the exchange of information of any kind. Another more dynamic and influential group of mediators for the dissemination of new “European” patterns were students. Thousands of young Bulgarians, Romanians, and Serbs attended the various educational institutions in the Dual Monarchy, first of all in Vienna. Many of them finished their education and afterwards returned to participate actively in the processes of modernization in their native countries. This traffic was supported to a certain degree by their respective governments, which granted state stipends for the education of young people abroad in specific subjects. The majority of students, though, were supported by their families. In contrast to Russia, Austria-​Hungary did not pursue an explicit policy of attracting young people from the Balkans with financial benefits in order to create supporters of its political interests in the region. On the contrary, applicants from the Balkan states for the universities and higher schools in the Dual Monarchy had to follow a strict admissions procedure and, after 1906, some restrictions were imposed because of the huge number of foreign students. One exception were again the Albanians, who enjoyed preferences. In 1902 the Austrian Ministry of Commerce created a special dormitory for young poor Albanian boys in Vienna, Shtepija e Shqypetareve. In the following years, it granted further 12 to 15 scholarships to Albanians to learn German. The Austro-​Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs promoted this support to attract young Albanians, hoping to turn the dormitory into a hub for Albanian students and trainees. The Hungarian Ministry of Commerce organized analogous support. The multifaceted influences that emanated in the Balkans from urbanization, culture, education, and everyday life in the Dual Monarchy did not come from its diplomatic intervention. Nor did they promote its strategic aspirations in the Balkans. Both political penetration and social impact produced instead a complex Austro-​Hungarian entanglement with Southeastern Europe. Proximity and the differences in their economic and cultural development promoted continuing mutual interest and stimulated frequent contacts between the two regions. The Monarchy’s own internal contradictions complicated its relations with the nation-​states in the region and the Ottoman Empire.The problems came from its multinational makeup and dualist divisions. Austrian political and business circles faced strong Magyar opposition to closer trade relations with the Balkan countries seen by Hungarian commercial interests as competitors in its own agricultural market in the larger urban centers in the Austrian half. Even infrastructure projects in the Balkans often created hostility. Political representatives of the Balkan states perceived the policy of the Dual Monarchy in the Peninsula as incompatible with their own national interests. They therefore opposed, openly or in secret, Austria-​Hungary’s claims to lead the regulations of Danube shipping or to link its territory with the most important cities in the area of the Dual Monarchy’s “vital interests” by railways. Yet during the long years between 1792 and 1914, the Habsburg Monarchy never fought an actual war in Southeast Europe. It relied instead on diplomatic and financial leverage. The Monarchy’s responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War continues to be debated, as noted in the Overview to this section. It is nevertheless worth considering as well whether Tsarist Russia’s ambivalent co-​operation with the Habsburg Monarchy and its explicit support for Serbian irredentist ambitions does not share responsibility for the explosive rise of tensions in the Balkans in 1908–​9, 1912–​13, and finally in 1914. 133

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Selected Readings Armour, Ian D. Apple of Discord:  The “Hungarian Factor” in Austro-​Serbian Relations, 1867–​1881. West Lafayette, Ind., 2014. Ćorović,Vladimir. The Relations between Serbia and Austria-​Hungary in the 20th Century. Belgrade, 2018. Džaja, Srečko M. Bosnien-​Herzegowina in der österreichisch-​ungarischen Epoche (1878–​1918). Die Intelligentsia zwischen Tradition und Ideologie. Munich, 1994. Judson, Pieter M. The Habsburg Empire. A New History. Cambridge, Mass., 2016. Lampe, John R. and Marvin R. Jackson. Balkan Economic History, 1550–​1950: From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations. Bloomington, Ind., 1982. Maior, Liviu. In the Empire:  Habsburgs and Romanians. From Dynastic Loyalty to National Identity. Cluj-​Napoca,  2008. Milojković-​Djurić, Jelena. The Eastern Question and the Voices of Reason:  Austria-​Hungary, Russia, and the Balkan States, 1875–​1908. Boulder, Colo., 2002. Preshlenova, Roumiana. “Austro-​ Hungarian Trade and the Economic Development of Southeastern Europe before World War I.” In Economic Transformations in East and Central Europe: Legacies from the Past and Policies for the Future, ed. David F. Good. London and New York, 1994, 231–​60. Schanderl, Hanns Dieter. Die Albanienpolitik Österreich-​Ungarns und Italiens 1877–​1908. Wiesbaden,  1971. Wandruszka, Adam and Peter Urbanitsch, eds. Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–​ 1918, vol. 6/​ 2. Die Habsburgermonarchie im System der internationalen Beziehungen. Vienna,  1993.

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14 BOSNIA-​H ERZEGOVINA UNDER AUSTRIA-​H UNGARY From occupation to assassination, 1878–​1914 Robert J. Donia In the predawn hours of July 31, 1878, advance units of the Habsburg Imperial Army crossed into the Ottoman province of Bosnia and Herzegovina at four points from adjacent Austro-​ Hungarian provinces. The Imperial troops were charged with fulfilling the first part of the Empire’s mandate from the Congress of Berlin to “occupy and administer” the province that had been under Ottoman governance for over four centuries. They were the vanguard of hundreds of thousands of the Emperor’s subjects, both military and civilian, who contributed over the next 40 years to Austria-​Hungary’s governance and development of the province. This chapter describes the major political events and societal changes during Austria-​Hungary’s administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the Imperial troops’ entry in 1878 until the historic assassination of Habsburg heir-​apparent Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914. The country acquired its distinctive triangular shape in 1865 owing to Ottoman administrative reforms that combined the previously separate areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina into the single, dually named province of Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter “Bosnia” in reference to the entire province). Although the Ottomans also made some improvements in communications and transportation infrastructure and encouraged its nascent lumbering and mining industries, Bosnia in 1878 was still a semi-​feudal, largely agrarian society. Most Bosnian inhabitants belonged to one of three ethnoreligious communities: Serbian Orthodox (43 percent of the total population in 1879), Muslim (39 percent), or Catholic (18 percent). A small number of Jews (around 3,400) lived mostly in the province’s widely scattered towns. Almost everyone spoke one of three nearly identical languages that together were later called Serbo-​Croatian and today are abbreviated BCS (for Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian). Each ethnoreligious group underwent changes in identity during the decades of Austro-​ Hungarian rule. Serbian Orthodox Christians identified themselves in small but growing numbers as Serbs by nationality; a small but also growing number of Catholics self-​identified as Croats. Muslims did not claim to constitute a secular nation, so some elite Muslims declared themselves Serb or Croat by nationality. Still, the Muslims of Bosnia became a more cohesive community and retained political clout under the Christian-​dominated Austro-​Hungarian Empire.

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Occupation Commanders of the Austro-​Hungarian units entering Bosnia naively expected that their troops would encounter no resistance and be greeted as liberators by the local populace. Those expectations soon collapsed. A charismatic Sarajevo Muslim craftsman-​turned-​bandit, Hadži Lojo, led a successful coup in Sarajevo against Ottoman authorities in March 1878 and then headed up a loosely organized but effective resistance to the entry of Imperial troops. Joined by some Orthodox and a few Catholic Christians, Muslim warriors employed guerrilla warfare to halt or slow the advance of troops through Bosnia’s rugged mountain passes. Only after mobilizing 265,000 Imperial troops and losing 5,000 lives in two months of difficult warfare did the Imperial Army subdue the resistance. The Bosnian forces were doomed to defeat when Feldzeugmeister (Field Marshal) Joseph Freiheer Philippovich ordered his troops into the capital city of Sarajevo on August 19, 1878. The next day, key leaders of the Sarajevo-​based rebels swung from the gallows (all except Hadži Lojo himself, who was spared and later pardoned) as Phillipovich imposed military rule throughout Bosnia in the name of the Emperor. Discarding the idea of permanent military rule, the Habsburg Emperor in 1878 bestowed responsibility for ruling Bosnia on the civilian Joint Minister of Finance (JMF), one of only three Austro-​Hungarian ministers to head a bureaucracy that served the entire Monarchy rather than only its Austrian or Hungarian part. The Emperor also decreed creation of a Provincial Government (Ger. Landesregierung, BCS Zemaljska vlada), headquartered in Sarajevo, to administer Bosnia under the JMF’s supervision.The Emperor designated a military Governor as titular head of the Provincial Government with the title of Landeschef, an office held by nine senior military officers from 1878 to 1918. For most of the Empire’s 40-​year rule, greater power was vested in the office of Civil Adlatus, a post created by the Emperor in 1878 and held by four men until 1912, when it was retitled the Landeschefstellvertreter and subsequently occupied by three additional incumbents. Both the 1878 incumbent JMF, Leopold Friedrich Freiherr von Hoffman (JMF 1876–​80), and his immediate successor, Jószef Szlávy von Okány (1880–​82) supported efforts to strengthen Austria-​Hungary’s legal-​political control of Bosnia. In the Novi Pazar Convention of April 1879, Austria-​Hungary acquired sweeping powers to govern without Ottoman interference in exchange for acknowledging the Ottoman Sultan’s de jure sovereignty over the province. Shortly thereafter, Austro-​Hungarian diplomats secured for the Emperor the right to appoint or review the chief religious functionaries of the province’s three major faiths.The Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople granted to the Emperor the right to appoint and remove Orthodox bishops in Bosnia. In the Papal Bull of 1881, the Pope granted to the Emperor the right to nominate candidates for Catholic bishoprics and to require that they execute loyalty oaths to Austria-​Hungary. Despite these policy triumphs, neither Hofmann nor Szlávy developed consistent, long-​term policies to govern Bosnia.The deficiencies of such ad hoc rule became embarrassingly apparent in 1881, when thousands of Serbian Orthodox peasants in Eastern Herzegovina rose in resistance to Austria-​Hungary’s imposition of mandatory male conscription in Bosnia. The rebellion was eventually suppressed by Imperial troops, but the uprising highlighted the perils of irresolute governance and the failure to address Bosnia’s unique situation. After Szlávy’s resignation in 1882, the Emperor recognized that the primary responsibility of the JMF was to govern Bosnia. He sought a Joint Minister of Finance with the background and ability to do so.

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The Kállay era: bureaucratic absolutism As Imperial troops were completing their suppression of the uprising against conscription in June 1882, Emperor Francis Joseph appointed as Joint Minister of Finance an ambitious and able Hungarian nobleman, Benjamin Kállay von Nagy-​Kálló. Kállay knew Bosnia. A  fluent speaker of Serbian, he had served as Austria-​Hungary’s General Consul to the Principality of Serbia from 1867 to 1875, and in 1876 had published in German a widely read history of the Serbian people. Kállay was enamored of the ideals of Western colonialism and believed passionately that Austria-​Hungary had a civilizing mission in Bosnia. “Austria is a great Occidental Empire charged with the mission of carrying civilization to Oriental peoples,” he once told an interviewer. With the Emperor’s support, Kállay ruled the province from Vienna with a stern but steady hand from 1882 until he died in office in 1903. Faithful to his convictions, he treated Bosnians paternalistically and administered Bosnia as a colony of the Austro-​Hungarian metropole. He envisioned his own role as the manager of a benevolent bureaucracy expected “to make the people content.” Kállay first set out to complete the unfinished task of bringing the Islamic religious hierarchy under the Emperor’s control by appointing a Bosnian-​based head of the Islamic religious hierarchy.Tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims had already emigrated from Bosnia to Muslim-​ majority lands to the east, fearing that the Christian regime might subject them to religious persecution. Alarmed Austro-​Hungarian officials, led by Kállay, won the Emperor’s approval in October 1882 for a plan to create the office of the Reis-​ul-​ulema to be the supreme Islamic religious authority in Bosnia.The Emperor then designated the Ottoman-​appointed incumbent Mufti of Bosnia as the first Reis, giving him a dual role in which he recognized the sovereignty of both the Emperor and the Sultan. Having established Imperial control over religious authorities, Austro-​Hungarian officials lavished all three communities with attention, resources, and prestige in the hope that Bosnians would be diverted from Serb and Croat nationalism by practicing their respective faiths. Religion was expected to absorb all their energy and immunize them from Serb and Croat nationalist influences. In an attempt to discourage Bosnians drifting from their religious preoccupations to nationalist movements, government officials forbade any public manifestations of nationalism including the use of national names such as Serb and Croat in the title of any organization. Instead, Kállay promoted a supra-​confessional Bosnian identity (bošnjaštvo) which was based on the territory and the common history of its people, and not on ethno-​confessional traditions. Kállay implemented impressive reforms in the areas of industrialization (particularly in extractive industries), modern municipal services, public schools, scientific institutions, transportation infrastructure (roads and rail lines), and communications. But though he directed fast-​paced modernization and Europeanization, he left intact the semi-​feudal social order based on the privileges of the Muslim landowning elite to collect rents and taxes from the mainly Christian peasants known as kmetovi (sing. kmet). Ever a believer in legally-​based bureaucratic rule, he codified the landlords’ existing privileges in law and had local officials police landlord-​ kmet relations in the hope of deterring landlord abuses. Even with regulation, the archaic sharecropping system remained a heavy burden on the mainly Christian peasants and an incendiary political issue. To implement bureaucratic authoritarianism, Kállay recruited an army of civil servants from the Austro-​Hungarian metropole to serve in Bosnia. The administration officials followed Ottoman precedent in appointing mayors and councilors as titular heads of local governments

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without granting them any significant authority. Imperial officials awarded honorary offices to the most “prominent, respected, Emperor-​friendly” citizens. Almost all mayors were Muslims drawn from the landowning class, while council members were drawn from all religious communities to assure some token role in governance for each. But the true rulers of Bosnia, Kállay’s bureaucrats, governed their assigned communities with strict regulation, relentless surveillance, close personal ties with local dignitaries, and selective favors and rewards. For the first decade of Kállay’s rule, Bosnian political life consisted of observances of the cult of the Imperial family by appointed local Bosnian dignitaries and their followers. Councilors, mayors, and religious functionaries led delegations of thanks to high-​ranking Imperial authorities on anniversaries of the birth, coronation, marriage, and death of members of the House of Habsburg. After a delegation presented a gift of gratitude to the highest-​ranking local official, the Emperor and his family were feted at religious services, often followed by parades or musical performances that included the Imperial anthem sung in the local language.

Movements for autonomy Kállay’s vigilant bureaucratic surveillants blanketed the province and swiftly but deftly doused the embers of potential dissent. Their heavy-​handed rule succeeded in eliminating dissenting voices during the first decade of his tenure, but in the mid-​1890s, some in Bosnia’s religious hierarchies became restive and demanded government action to control occurrences of conversion from one faith to another. In the instances of the Serbian Orthodox and Muslims, local protesters came together to establish province-​wide organizations that included representatives from each administrative unit. Though limited in their activities by Kállay’s strict regulatory regime, the autonomy movements yielded results and also served as incubators of province-​ wide national political parties that formed after Kállay’s death. The Serbian autonomy movement was initiated by leaders of local Serb Church and School Communes that had existed in many Bosnian cities since the last decades of Ottoman rule. Serbs in Mostar, led by Vojislav Šola, formed a delegation in November 1896 to deliver to the Emperor a petition demanding greater Serb control over local Orthodox schools and religious bodies. About the same time, Sarajevo Serbs under the leadership of Grigorije Jeftanović similarly led a petition-​bearing delegation to Vienna. Once in Vienna, the two delegations merged to form a coordinating committee to demand greater autonomy. The protesters delivered petitions to the Emperor in 1896 and returned to Vienna in 1897 and 1900 to present additional grievances to the Emperor. As the province-​wide movement gained momentum and won additional supporters in Austria-​Hungary, Kállay relented and in February 1902 authorized government officials to open negotiations with the protesters. Not until August 1905, two years after Kállay’s death, did the talks bear fruit when the Emperor granted statutory autonomy to all Serb Church and School Communes in Bosnia. The Muslim movement for autonomy arose in response to incendiary incidents of young Muslim women converting to Catholicism with the overt encouragement of the Catholic Church. In 1899, the family of a Catholic groom kidnapped a young Muslim woman, converted her to Catholicism, hurriedly carried out a wedding, and spirited her from Bosnia to Dalmatia with the aid of priests and the approval of the Sarajevo Catholic Archbishop Josip Stadler. They left in their wake Muslim villagers seething with rage at what they considered an attack on the Muslim community and on Islam itself. The aggrieved Muslim villagers found support from the mercurial Mufti Ali Džabić of Mostar, who persuaded prominent Muslim landowners to join Islamic religious functionaries in dispatching a petition-​bearing delegation to Vienna in October 1899. Hoping to end the protests, officials dismissed Džabić from his post, provoking 138

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him and a small group of embittered hodžas to emigrate to Istanbul in protest.With Džabić out of the picture, Muslim landowners assumed leadership of the nascent movement and redirected religiously-​inspired protests into a campaign to solidify their social positions and dominant roles in collecting kmet dues. No organized autonomy movement arose from Bosnia’s Catholics, but the stern Archbishop Stadler, the senior Catholic Church official in Bosnia, acted increasingly autonomously during his 40 years in that office (1878–​1918, the entire Austro-​Hungarian period). He capitalized on strong support from Catholics within Austria-​Hungary, including members of the Imperial family, to aggressively promote Catholicism in Bosnia.The government was engaged in a massive building campaign to erect a new Catholic church in nearly every Bosnian town, but Stadler wanted more. He encouraged Catholics to carry out bride thefts and to shelter perpetrators in churches and monasteries throughout the province. The rise of Serb and Muslim autonomy movements, along with Stadler’s increasingly unruly behavior, laid bare the futility of Kállay’s muscular bureaucratic authoritarianism. As Kállay’s bureaucrats intruded ever deeper into interpersonal affairs with detailed new regulations, leaders of each confessional community demanded that the regime intervene to defend those of their faith from religious rivals. Finding themselves with similar grievances and a shared need to acquire greater say in their own religious affairs, Muslim and Serb activists entered into an informal political alliance that lasted for a decade and collapsed only in the second year (1911) of the Bosnian assembly.

Easing the state’s restrictions As the autonomy movements gained support both in Bosnia and in the Austro-​Hungarian metropole, Kállay reluctantly acknowledged that his surveillance-​based Rechtsstaat had failed to stem the rise of organized province-​wide protests. After the turn of the century, he eased his administration’s more draconian measures and opened negotiations with movement leaders to discuss their demands. His successor, István Freiherr Burián von Rajecz (governed 1903–​12 and 1916–​18), accelerated the liberalization and allowed organizations to use national names as part of their titles. Burián also legalized the formation of nationally-​named political parties after 1906, clearing the way for Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims to form single-​nation political parties. The Serb People’s Organization (SNO, Srpska narodna organizacija) was formed in 1907 under the leadership of Milan Skršić, a young Sarajevo attorney who strategically married a daughter of the influential businessman and landowner Gligorije Jevtanović and won his father-​in-​law’s backing for the new organization. Bosnian Muslim landlords led by Alibeg Firdus, Mayor of Livno in western Bosnia, formed the Muslim People’s Organization (MNO, Muslimanska narodna organizacija) in December 1906 with a program that demanded preservation of their right to collect peasant dues and manage their own Muslim charitable foundations. A few small parties were formed and headed by individual Serbs and Muslims, but they were dwarfed in followers by the behemoth SNO and MNO. Alone among the three largest confessional communities, Catholics formed two sizeable competitive parties with very different ideas about the relationship between Catholicism and Croat nationality. Nikola Mandić, another up-​and-​coming Sarajevo attorney, became leader of the Croat People’s Union (HNZ, Hrvatska narodna zajednica), a party of Croatian urban professionals and merchants that promoted a secular Croatian national awareness and welcomed both Catholics and Muslims into the fold of the Croat people. Archbishop Stadler, unwilling to accede to the idea that Muslims could be Croats, formed a rival party, the Croat Catholic 139

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Association (HKU, Hrvatska katolička udruga). It was dedicated to the principle that Catholicism was essential to Croatian identity.

Annexation and a constitution The Emperor and his advisors had long contemplated the idea of formally annexing Bosnia to establish Austria-​Hungary’s full de jure and de facto control. The idea acquired urgency when the Young Turks came to power in the Ottoman Empire in 1908 and threatened to invite delegates from Bosnia to join the Ottoman Parliament. On October 6, 1908, the Empire struck back by proclaiming the annexation unilaterally, a bold act that drew vociferous diplomatic protests but no armed response from either neighboring states or the Great Powers. Political leaders of the Muslims and Serbs, who had been expected to organize opposition to the annexation, reluctantly accepted the declaration in the ensuing months and dispatched delegations to the Emperor to convey their consent and gratitude. The annexation cleared the way for the government to promulgate the province’s first constitution in 1910 that included provisions for an elected assembly (sabor). The franchise for assembly elections was highly restrictive. Men could vote only if they were at least 24 years old, owned property, and had lived in the province for at least one year; women who paid at least 140 crowns in property taxes annually could also vote. The assembly was composed of 72 elected delegates, plus 20  “ex officio” (virilist) delegates who included key leaders from each of the confessions, a few jurists, and two representatives from Sarajevo. Delegates and the voters who selected them were divided into four confessional curia, and further subdivided into four occupational curia. The curia system awarded disproportionate representation to the elites of all three groups. In the landowners’ curia, one delegate was elected for each 381 voters, while in the “village” curia for peasants, 10,224 voters selected a single delegate. Despite being grossly underrepresented, a total of 276,852 peasants in the village curia, 80 percent of registered voters, cast ballots in 1910, attesting to a yearning for electoral democracy that the Austro-​Hungarian colonizers had denied them. Each of the three major national parties was led by elite members of their ethno-​confessional community, so even delegates chosen in the village curia generally supported their group’s dominant party.

The Bosnian assembly The assembly opened with great fanfare amidst high hopes that a new, democratic era had dawned in Bosnia. The Emperor himself visited Bosnia from May 30 to June 3, 1910, and on May 31, personally issued the Imperial rescript calling the assembly into session. The largely ceremonial first session on June 10 proceeded peacefully. Marijan Varešanin, head (Landeschef) of the Provincial Government, addressed the assembly’s opening on June 10, 1910, with an optimistic forecast of the assembly’s achievements. But the mood quickly soured. As Varešanin crossed a Sarajevo bridge while returning to his office, he was shot dead by a radical Serb nationalist youth, Bogdan Žerajić. The Emperor appointed Feldzeugmeister Oskar Potierok to succeed Varešanin. Parties of all three groups in the assembly condemned the attack, but it remained a portent of more nationally-​inspired violence to follow. The assembly functioned more as a debating forum than a decision-​making body. At the first sessions, delegates criticized the constitution and urged changes to give their own body more authority. They argued about the relationship of Bosnia to the rest of the Monarchy. Some argued that Bosnia should have the same legal status as the Austrian and Hungarian parts of the Monarchy, while others sought autonomy for Bosnia as a unique crownland. The 140

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government freely disregarded these proposals. No decision of the assembly could become law unless approved by the Emperor and the legislatures of the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the empire. Delegates freely criticized the government and each other, but many in the end voted for legislation proposed by the government. The assembly’s primary challenge was to alleviate the onerous collection of dues and taxes by mainly Muslim landowners from mainly Christian peasants. By 1910 virtually all politically-​ conscious Bosnians had concluded that the semi-​feudal system was untenable and were prepared to consider land reform. The assembly considered two options: a mandatory transfer of land ownership to peasants along with governmental compensation to the landowners, and a voluntary system whereby peasants could buy land from their overlords with the aid of long-​term, low-​interest government loans. On its face, the issue seemed a clear-​cut choice between the landlord-​dominated MNO, which would logically favor voluntary sales or none at all, and the leading Serb and Croat politicians who would favor freeing their peasants from semi-​feudal obligations to Muslim landlords. But with the dawn of party politics in the first decade of the 1900s, the issue became laden with class, cultural, and political considerations that thrust upon delegates the obligation to find coalition partners among other ethnoreligious groups. The landlord-​dominated MNO had won all Muslim seats in the assembly by persuading Muslim peasant and urban middle-​class voters that threats to privileged Muslim landowners also endangered all Bosnian Muslims and Islam itself. Once seated in the assembly, MNO delegates vigorously opposed mandatory solutions for the vexing questions of land ownership and peasant dues, but they eventually and unenthusiastically accepted the alternative, voluntary sales, thereby aligning themselves with the government. A small group of Muslim progressives outside the MNO favored mandatory reform as a Western-​style progressive act and believed that supporting mandatory reform would preserve the Muslim coalition with the dominant Serb party, the SNO.The democrats, however, held no seats in Parliament and could do nothing more than voice their pro-​mandatory views from the sidelines. In the assembly sessions of 1910, leaders of the Serb and Muslim parties turned their informal alliance into a majority coalition that initially left the two Croat parties isolated. But in 1911, disagreements over landlord-​peasant relations ended the Serb-​Muslim coalition and led to a realignment of the major parties. Delegates of the SNO were torn between their desire to preserve their coalition with Muslim leaders and their national impulse as Serbs to support mandatory reform to hasten an end to the semi-​feudal burden on Serb peasants. They were drawn to mandatory reform by the politically active poet Petar Kočić and a small group of followers who unequivocally favored it. Croats, the least numerous of the three ethnoreligious communities, were in greater need of a coalition partner to secure their national objectives in Bosnia. After the election their leader, Nikola Mandić, concluded an agreement with the SNO to support mandatory land reform, but he soon yielded to pressure and agreed to a new coalition with Muslims based on their mutual support for a voluntary land reform. The widely differing delegate positions forced the parties to conduct intense behind-​the-​ scenes negotiations that decided the issue of land reform before it ever came to the floor. The talks took place under the influence of the government’s preference for voluntary reform and a disturbing strike of Christian peasants in northwest Bosnia who refused to pay their Muslim landlords the legally mandated dues. The strike raised the specter of wider unrest and was soundly denounced by all political actors. Under pressure of fast-​moving events, the assembly debated land reform for a single day, August 4, 1911, and on August 5 hastily voted by an absolute majority to approve the government-​prepared program of voluntary land reform. All but 12 SNO delegates voted against voluntary reform, believing it to be mere codification of existing practices that would only shift land ownership to Christian peasants at a glacial pace. 141

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The vote itself was of little consequence, as it only rubber-​stamped the government’s preference for voluntary reform, but it generated far-​reaching political consequences.The delegates bared their own dependence on governmental support and their opportunistic quest for coalition partners among other ethnoreligious groups. Most delegates turned their backs on long-​ suffering peasants of their own ethnoreligious group and disregarded the increasingly restive movements outside the assembly that were clamoring for meaningful change and advocating revolutionary ideas. The MNO emerged from the land reform debate having abandoned their alliance with Serbs and established a new alliance with Croats. Most Serb delegates bemoaned the end of their cooperation with Muslims but accepted their new role as the primary parliamentary opposition to the Croat-​Muslim coalition and the government. More fundamentally, the vote exposed the many barriers to successful ethnoreligious politics in a tripartite, multi-​religious land with no absolute majority. Like the entire four-​year term of the assembly, the reform vote brought to light the many cross-​cutting cultural, national, political, and economic issues that complicated this and subsequent efforts to install functional democracy in Bosnia. The assembly was unceremoniously prorogued in 1914, having failed to enact a single significant policy different from what the government required.

Student activists and the road to imperial ruin Well before the assembly convened, Bosnia’s relatively few educated youths began to organize secret societies in public schools and came to pose a threat to the Provincial Government and to Austria-​Hungary itself.The extra-​institutional political activism was primarily the work of an increasingly restive generation of youth seized by the very ideologies that Kállay had fought so hard to keep out of Bosnia. Most were students, recent graduates, teachers, dropouts, or itinerant intellectuals, mostly from public, government-​established schools, but many were born and raised in villages and small towns of Bosnia.The disparate, inchoate groups of politicized youths became known as Young Bosnia.The movement included Serb and Croat nationalists, supporters of Yugoslavism (the hope for a unified, independent state of some or all South Slavs), Trialism (a plan to create a third, South Slav entity to make a tripartite Monarchy), and anarchism. Many, deeply antagonistic to the Monarchy, all but ignored ideology and embraced instead the “propaganda of the deed” to justify periodic violence.The Kingdom of Serbia’s triumphs in the Balkan Wars of 1912–​13 set off a wave of fervent Serb nationalism. Muslims, on the other hand, felt disappointed with the Ottoman Empire’s defeats. Young rebellious youths emerged in public in February 1912 in demonstrations in Sarajevo that followed the Hungarian government’s appointment of Count Slavko Cuvaj as Ban (governor) of Croatia. The newly appointed Joint Minister of Finance, Leon Ritter von Bilinski (governed 1912–​15), authorized police attacks with sabers on Croat students demonstrating in downtown Sarajevo on February 18, sending many to hospitals and casting a pall over the political future. Bosnian Serb youths were inspired by Serbia’s victories in the Balkan Wars to step up their activity and demand that Bosnia be among Serbia’s territorial acquisitions. Serbian youths received encouragement, limited training, and a few weapons from a shadowy group of senior officials close to the government of Serbia. When Serb forces approached Bosnian territory in 1913, General Oskar Potiorek, military Landeschef of the Provincial Government, dissolved the Bosnian assembly, suspended civil courts, and increased the government’s surveillance and monitoring efforts. Nevertheless, a small group of Young Bosnians prepared for action upon learning that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir-​apparent to the aged Emperor Franz Joseph, would visit Bosnia in late June 1914. 142

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The Archduke’s assassination by the Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914, set off international diplomatic efforts to curb the aggressive ambitions that arose after the killing. The regime’s reaction to the assassination transformed life in Bosnia. Governor Potiorek instituted harsh repressive measures against anyone suspected of pro-​Serb activities, turning Bosnia into a wartime military dictatorship. The guns of August roared to life some six weeks after the assassination and led to global warfare, almost 20 million dead (soldiers and civilians), and vast destruction in much of Europe. Even though little armed conflict took place in the territory of Bosnia, the First World War ended Austria-​Hungary’s only colonial venture and swept away the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires.

Selected Readings Bataković, Dušan. The Serbs of Bosnia and Herzegovina: History and Politics. Paris, 1996. Donia, Robert J. Islam under the Double Eagle: The Muslims of Bosnia and Hercegovina, 1878–​1914. Boulder, Colo., 1981. Imamović, Mustafa. Bosnia and Herzegovina:  Evolution of its Political and Legal Institutions (ed. Francine Friedman; trans. Saba Risaluddin). Sarajevo, 2006. Okey, Robin. Taming Balkan Nationalism: The Habsburg “Civilizing Mission” in Bosnia, 1878–​1918. Oxford, 2007. Ruthner, Clemens, Diana Reynolds Cordileone, Ursula Reber, and Raymond Detrez, eds. Wechselwirkungen: Austria-​Hungary, Bosnia-​Herzegovina, and the Western Balkans, 1878–​1918. New York, 2015. Ruthner, Clemens and Tamara Scheer, eds. Bosnien-​Herzegowina und Österreich-​Ungarn, 1878–​1918. Annäherungen an eine Kolonie. Tubingen,  2018. Sugar, Peter F. The Industrialization of Bosnia-​Herzegovina. Seattle, Wash., 1963. Velikonja, Mitja. Religious Separation and Political Intolerance in Bosnia-​Herzegovina. College Station,Tex., 2003.

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The Balkan Wars and the First World War, 1912–​1923

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OVERVIEW Armies and occupations, peace settlements and forced migrations John R. Lampe

A long decade of death and disruption began with the First Balkan War in 1912, continued through the First World War and ended with the Greek defeat and forced evacuation from Anatolia in 1922. They left more than one and a half million deaths, military and civilian, and still more survivors forced to migrate. After the wars, occupations, and peace settlements, five independent states replaced the prewar Balkan states and the Ottoman and Austro-​Hungarian borderlands that had surrounded them. Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and a Yugoslav Kingdom also incorporating Montenegro entered the 1920s under regimes whose aspirations put them in the broader context of interwar Europe’s struggles with modernity and democracy. The region’s designation as Southeastern Europe, not the separate Balkans, began at this time. This Overview proceeds chronologically through the decade, dividing the sweep of events into four distinct periods. These divisions, 1912–​13, 1914–​15, 1916–​17, and 1918–​22, provide a path through the region’s combined experience with war and occupation, the warring Great Powers and each other. The chapters below reach across the full decade to address a series of issues now receiving deserved attention after the long and continuing concentration on two issues, how the First World War started after the assassination in Sarajevo and how it ended with the Paris Peace Treaties. Richard Hall examines the long and losing Bulgarian war effort, Rok Stergar the experiences of the southern territories of Austria-​Hungary before and during the war from Slovenia and Croatia to Bosnia, and Stefan Papaiannou the divided Greek entry into the war and postwar defeat in Anatolia. Lejnar Mitrojorgji tracks the long Albanian struggle from early notional independence and prolonged occupation to independence again. Dejan Djokić follows the Serbian army’s revival on the Salonica Front to its royal regime’s role in founding the first Yugoslavia. After the two Balkan Wars in 1912–​13, the First World War began with the failed Austro-​ Hungarian invasions of Serbia in 1914 and continued with the Dual Monarchy’s successful conquest in 1915, now supported by Germany and Bulgaria. Austro-​Hungarian forces occupied Albania and divided the occupation of Serbia and Kosovo with Bulgaria. Romania and a politically divided Greece remained neutral until 1916. Through 1917, military stalemate and civilian suffering under occupation or forced mobilization prevailed. With the war’s end in the fall of 1918, the Austro-​Hungarian and Ottoman Empires collapsed. The treaties agreed at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 fixed some new borders, left others unsettled, and the bulk of the forced migration to follow. 147

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1912–​1913: the Two Balkan Wars The Balkan League came together after Serbia and Bulgaria persuaded Greece and Montenegro to join them in attacking Ottoman Macedonia and Kosovo in October 1912 challenging the territorial status quo (Map 14.1). The Serbian government of Nikola Pašić was newly concerned about the prospect of an independent Albania claiming Kosovo. The Bulgarian claim to Macedonia was long standing. Serbia shared the expectation of Russian support with Bulgaria and Montenegro against an Ottoman regime weakened by the loss of Libya in 1911. Despite a prewar agreement with Bulgaria to divide Vardar Macedonia under the Russian Tsar’s arbitration, the Serbian army quickly advanced to take the entire territory. The equally large Bulgarian army had instead moved east, almost reaching Istanbul before Ottoman lines stiffened and forced an armistice by December. Their absence also allowed advancing Greek forces to take Salonica, the prize of Aegean Macedonia.The pro-​Russian Bulgarian government, minus the expected Russian support, was obliged to sign the Treaty of London with the other belligerents in May 1913. The Second Balkan War soon followed, the “first catastrophe” in the long Bulgarian war effort detailed below by Richard Hall. A  new Bulgarian government, urged on by Tsar Ferdinand and his military staff, launched an invasion of Serbia in order to reverse the result of the first war in Macedonia. With Greek troops joining from the south and Romanian forces from the northeast, the Bulgarian offensive was quickly defeated. By August 1913, the Bulgarian government was forced to sign the Treaty of Bucharest. Its terms left the Aegean coast of Thrace to Bulgaria but otherwise ceded the southern Dobrudja to Romania and more of Macedonia to Serbia, as reflected in Map 14.2. These border changes started the series of forced migration that followed. A postwar agreement between the two sides displaced 50,000 Bulgarians from Aegean Macedonia and 150,000 Greeks from Thrace. The toll of war dead also began, 9,000 for Greece, 32,000 for Bulgaria, and 38,000 for Serbia. The First World War cost many more lives, now civilian as well as military. Greece lost 150,000 civilians plus 26,000 army deaths, Bulgaria 100,000 plus 90,000 soldiers. Romania’s military dead totaled 355,000. Combined with a roughly estimated 300,000 civilians, Montenegro’s total of 25,000 was the same share of its much smaller population. None of any combatant’s share was larger than Serbia’s, 350,000 military deaths plus at least half a million civilians, largely from the 3 million people in its pre-​1912 territory. In the Austro-​Hungarian army, Croatian war dead approached 200,000 and Slovenian 40,000.

1914–​1915: starting the First World War The largest part of the immense scholarly literature on the origins of the First World War concentrates on growing Great Power rivalry and Austro-​Serbian antagonism that culminated in the assassination of the heir to the Dual Monarchy’s throne in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Its alliance with Germany pitted Austria-​Hungary against an Anglo-​French Entente which Russia had joined in 1907. The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, and his co-​conspirators were Bosnian Serbs who had indeed received arms and encouragement in Belgrade. The primary source was a member of the secret society in Serbian military intelligence whose motto was “Union [with Bosnia] or Death.”The Austrian response assumed that the Serbian government of Nikola Pašić knew or approved of the plan.Whether the Austrian position was justified or not is still debated (see Gordon Martel in the bibliography below for a balanced appraisal). In any case, the Austrian leadership and the Emperor in Vienna seized on the assumption to eliminate the Serbian threat to newly annexed Bosnia-​Herzegovina. Rok Stergar’s chapter below addresses the complex play of prewar and wartime forces in Slovenia and Croatia. 148

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Map 14.1  Borders before the Balkan Wars, 1912.

The First World War started in early August 1914 when Austria-​Hungary attacked Serbia after its refusal to accept an ultimatum on the Sarajevo assassination. Russia responded by declaring war on Austria-​Hungary. Its German ally followed with declarations of war against France as well as Russia. It only remained for the German invasion of Belgium to bring Britain into the Entente facing the two Central Powers. They were joined by the Ottoman Empire in November but not Italy, as their presumed ally remained neutral. For Austria-​Hungary, its war against Serbia had begun badly. An initial invasion in August was quickly pushed back. A more concerted campaign in November captured Belgrade and reached into southern Serbia before its troops were again forced out of Serbia. Earlier in December, at the nadir of Serbian fortunes, the Pašić government signed the Niš Declaration, its first statement of support for a South Slav state rather than a Greater Serbia if Austria-​Hungary were defeated. Dalmatian Croat émigrés had formed their own Yugoslav Committee in London. They took limited notice of Serbian interest until learning of Britain’s postwar promise in 1915 of coastal Dalmatia to Italy in the Treaty of London. By then, however, the Central Powers had persuaded Bulgaria to join them in another offensive against Serbia. Their rebuilt army invaded from the east in September, joining the German and Austro-​Hungarian divisions under German command who attacked from the north. The 149

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Map 14.2  Borders after the Balkan Wars, 1913.

Serbian army managed to save half of its remaining 300,000 troops in a legendary retreat across Albania to Corfu. By then a typhus epidemic spread from the army to the civilian population, adding another 300,000 to what would be half a million dead by 1918. Bulgaria and Austria-​ Hungary divided Serbia and Kosovo and left Macedonia to Bulgarian occupation. In Albania, a last effort of the joint European Concert of Ambassadors had tried in March 1914, by sending the young Prince William of Wied, to consolidate the fragile independence declared in 1912. With no authority outside of Durres where he landed, the Prince faced renewed demands for territory from its surrounding neighbors once the First World War began. He was forced to leave in October. The ensuing disorder ended only with Austrian occupation in December 1915. In Greece, the Liberal Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos was returned to office by a June election victory. He had been forced to resign by King Constantine in March for refusing a concession of territory to Bulgaria. An aborted army coup by Venezelist officers in northern Greece had forced him to leave Athens for his native Crete and then to Salonica. British and French troops from the ill-​fated expedition to force the Dardanelles had landed there in October 1915. The King forced him to resign again in the face of his request to send Entente troops to aid Serbia. So began the National Schism between two sets of political leaders and army officers, 150

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one loyal to the King and his southern supporters, who favored neutrality, and the other from the Venizelist north ready to join the Entente. Stefan Papaioannou’s chapter follows its course, which continued into and past the interwar period, to 1922.

1916–​1917: enduring war and occupation Away from the Western and Russian fronts, the First World War also continued on three other fronts. In addition to the Entente’s Salonica Front against Bulgaria, a retreating Romanian army was able to stabilize a Moldovan front against the Central Powers, and Austria-​Hungary advanced on its Italian front. The civilian population between and around these military fronts suffered a variety of privations under occupation or mobilization. By early 1916, a new French command had assembled some 150,000 troops, British and Russian as well as French, on the Salonica Front. In a final break with King Constantine, the Venizelist regime arranged for French transport to bring the 150,000 Serbian troops from Corfu to Salonica. Their refitting went slowly, and the mobilization of Greek divisions could not begin until after Venizelos had forced Constantine to leave Athens and declared himself Prime Minister of Greece later in 1917. Meanwhile, the military stalemate prompted the British press to dub the Entente’s Army of the Orient “The Gardeners of Salonica.” The city center endured a huge fire in August 1917, destroying the entire Jewish quarter. Its civilian population faced a French-​mandated mobilization of civilian labor. Forced labor was also imposed on the Bulgarian side of the front, where the army’s death toll approached 90,000. Away from the front, in Sofia and other Bulgarian cities, price controls on food supplies and their diversion to Germany under export controls, first under a state and then an army commission, fed growing food shortages and a black market. Moving into Macedonia had not maintained initial local support when the Bulgarian administration remained under army control from Sofia. Food shortages followed also from the missing farm labor in the Bulgarian army. In the occupied Morava valley, its largely Serbian population faced grain requisition and a harsh campaign of Bulgarization. By 1917, rural Serbian bands, already known as Chetniks, launched a series of armed revolts. They were not sufficiently coordinated to overthrow the Bulgarian occupation, but the suppression further strained its resources. Romania’s entry on the side of the Entente in 1916 and the response of the Central Powers had created another military stalemate. The initial success of Russia’s Brusilov offensive in July 1916 persuaded the Liberal government of Ionel Bratianu to declare war on Austria-​Hungary and invade Transylvania at the end of August. The large but poorly supplied Romanian army could advance only a short distance. A Bulgarian attack from the south, soon followed by an Austro-​Hungarian and German counterattack from the west, forced a retreat by October. By December, Bucharest was in German hands, where it would remain well into 1918. Wallachia and western Moldavia were under a joint regime of occupation. The Romanian government had retreated to Iaşi, where it found Russian support to hold a new line while rebuilding its army on a Moldovan front. After losing 235,000 dead in 1916, Bratianu mobilized support with the promise of postwar land reform and the army reassembled a force of 400,000 men. Its renewed campaign in the summer of 1917 made limited progress, at the cost of another 100,000 men. Then the Russian troops left in response to revolutionary turmoil on their home front. Russian and Romanian revolutionary demands in Bessarabia further strained a Liberal government that simply wished to incorporate the province. In early 1918, Romania was forced to conclude a preliminary peace treaty with the Central Powers and to accept German occupation. The major military campaign and war effort for Austria-​Hungary was not on the Moldovan but the Italian front. Persuaded by the promise of Dalmatia from the Treaty of London, Italy had 151

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abandoned its neutrality and joined the Entente in July 1915. To reach Dalmatia, its forces had to fight through the Dual Monarchy’s defenses in the Julian Alps.These defenses were supported mainly by troops drafted from the Slovenian, Croatian, and Bosnian borderlands. By 1917, they comprised 17 percent of the Monarchy’s army, despite their loss of some 30,000 killed or captured in the initial attack on Russia in 1914. Serbs had defected or been rejected, but a Bosnian Muslin division and large Croatian and Slovenian numbers struggled in the mountain stalemate. A German-​led breakthrough to Caporetto in September 1917 would be reversed by 1918 but not before the combined South Slav losses approached 250,000. Internally, these losses and food shortages were also taking their toll on public support. In Bosnia-​Herzegovina, the new Ban, the Bosnian Croat General Šarkotić, conducted an anti-​Serb campaign that arrested 5,000 and displaced 100,000. In Slovene Carniola, a cultural campaign for Germanization extended to the Slovenian language and closed the national theater. Austrian oversight also sparked political opposition from the clergy and their prewar political party. Requisitions, price controls, and army oversight in Croatia-​Slavonia restricted the food supply, even after the severe restrictions in occupied northern Serbia were relaxed in 1917 (intended for Vienna and the army, a lack of transport kept the increased crops in Serbia). Little grain from Croatia-​Slavonia reached the Dalmatian coast, aggravating its food deficit. The Dalmatian leadership in the Yugoslav Committee in London reacted to discontent within the Monarchy and the fear of postwar Italian claims by turning to Serbia and its Anglo-​ French ties in Salonica. Led by Ante Trumbić, they met with the Pašić government in July 1917 and signed the Corfu Declaration.The specific regional rights they sought were left unspecified in agreement on a postwar Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes; others like Macedonians or Albanians were not mentioned. There was specific agreement only on a Serbian monarch and individual rights under its 1903 constitution. A constituent assembly would then determine territorial representation.

1918–​1923: ending the war and settling the borders The armistice ending the First World War on November 11, 1918 followed in the wake of the Entente’s breakthrough on the Salonica Front in September. There were no Austro-​Hungarian forces capable of stopping a French drive to Vienna or keeping the Serbian divisions from moving past Macedonia and Serbia into Bosnia.The French command turned instead to move through disintegrating Bulgaria to link up with the Romanian army from the Moldovan front. Together they expelled the Austro-​German occupation from Wallachia. Before a peace conference could be convened in Paris, Italian forces were advancing to claim Istria and Dalmatia as promised by the Entente to Italy in the Treaty of London. Compounding the Italian advance was the spread of domestic disorder from rampaging Green Cadres of the Monarchy’s demobilized troops. The quickly merged National Councils in Ljubljana and Zagreb had no alternative but to ask the Serbian army to intervene. The Yugoslav Committee joined them in going to Belgrade and accepting the terms of the Corfu Declaration for a single state on December 1. As the chapter below from Dejan Djokić explains, a long internal struggle over regional rights, an interim parliament and a constituent assembly lay ahead for the newly created Yugoslav state. The large German and Hungarian minorities, half a million each, were ruled not eligible to vote. The Croatian Republican Peasant Party (HRSS) and the new Communist Party, founded in 1919 with returning POWs from Russia joined by Belgrade and Zagreb workers, had won one quarter of the seats in the 1920 election. Both abstained from voting on the constitution in 1921, as did some smaller parties. The remaining majority passed the centralist constitution 152

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on largely Serbian Radical terms. They were joined by the Bosnian Muslin (JMO) and Kosovar Albanian (Çemiyet) delegates on the promise of compensation for displaced Muslim landlords. By then, four peace treaties had been signed in the wake of the 1919 Paris conference of the victorious powers, Britain, France, the United States, and Italy. They all left problems behind. Saint Germain for Austria in September 1919 failed to agree on the Italian border with the Yugoslav Kingdom. Its separate agreement with Italy in 1920 did keep the Dalmatian coast but left Istria and more of the Slovene-​populated territory as well as some islands to Italy. A plebiscite in 1920 also gave Carinthia to Austria. Separate negotiations with Italy were also needed for its withdrawal of its 100,000 troops occupying Albania at the end of the war. After declaring independence in 1912, the wartime and postwar Albanian struggles with competing occupations until declaring its own independence again in 1920 are described in the chapter by Lejnar Mitrojorgji. For the Yugoslav Kingdom, Vardar Macedonians like Kosovar Albanians received no minority rights as provided by the League of Nations’ clauses for minority protection because they had been part of pre-​1914 Serbia. Over 220,000 refugees from there and the Aegean Macedonia fled into defeated Bulgaria and the hard terms it faced under the Neuilly Treaty of November 1919. In addition to losing its access to the Aegean Sea and more western territory to the Yugoslav Kingdom, it faced huge reparations under the treaty. This new catastrophe added to postwar pessimism and disorder. Tsar Ferdinand abdicated in favor of his son Boris. The prewar parties were swept aside in the elections of 1919 and 1920 by Aleksandar Stamboliiski’s Agrarians, its government challenged not only by the left Socialists, renamed the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1918. Bitter opposition was also rising among the irredentist leadership of the Macedonian refugees and the officer corps in an army reduced to 20,000 under the peace treaty. Roumen Daskalov examines their coup in 1923 and Bulgaria’s subsequent struggles in his chapter. Romania on the other hand was able to add Transylvania to its gains of the Bukovina and Bessarabia in the Trianon Treaty that Hungarian representatives reluctantly signed in June 1920. Ionel Bratianu had already argued hard for Transylvania at the Paris Peace Conference, buoyed by the large Romanian assembly at Alba Iulia in December 1918 demanding union with Romania. The four major powers rejected his aggressive tactics but then found themselves facing a Communist Revolution in Hungary. Bela Kun led a radical regime that was able to launch an invasion into the Hungarian-​populated region of Slovakia with hopes of assistance from Trotsky’s Red Army. With no French or other troops available, the conference had to call on the Romanian army. It duly advanced, overthrew the Bela Kun regime, and occupied Budapest by September. To secure its withdrawal, the conference powers had to offer Romania a western border that cut rail links to Budapest and included a minority of 1.2 million Hungarians.The final borders from Transylvania to Bessarabia also included Saxon German and Jewish minorities of half a million. The impending challenge for multi-​ethnic representation to a Romanian ethnic majority of 72 percent was less daunting than for the Serbian plurality of 38 percent. Both of them fell short of Bulgaria’s 83 percent for the ethnic majority, and Albania’s and Greece’s 92 percent. The ethnic Greek majority was large not only because of the Macedonians and Bulgarians who had fled or been forced north but also because of the failed postwar military campaign to move beyond largely Greek Smyrna into the interior of Anatolia.The Greek project had started when the Paris Peace Conference failed to address the dissolution of the defeated Ottoman Empire. Its belated treaty of Sèvres in August 1920 had already been overtaken by events. In addition to the British and French mandates in the Middle East, the four conference powers proposed to divide Anatolia into zones of initial occupation between themselves. When Italy declined to go beyond a permanent claim to the Dodecanese Islands, Greece’s Prime Minister 153

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Venizelos accepted the urging of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George to take Italy’s place. The Greek army was already moving inland against little opposition when Venizelos and his Liberals were defeated in the elections of December 1919. King Constantine returned to Athens with a conservative southern majority in parliament. Against expectations, his government proceeded with the campaign. Deep into Anatolia with extended supply lines by 1922, the Greek army now faced a newly constituted Turkish army. It was led by the redoubtable Kemal Ataturk, later the first President of the Republic of Turkey. In the ensuing rout, the Greek forces were not able to defend even Smyrna. In the next months, some 1.2  million Greeks from Anatolia joined the 200,000 from Macedonia or Bulgaria that flooded into the north of Greece or Athens. Their absorption would pose a challenge for Interwar Greece comparable to Bulgaria’s with its refugees. The 1923 Peace Treaty of Lausanne not only settled the final border between Greece and Turkey but also mandated an exchange of population. The Greek Orthodox population had to leave Turkey (bar those in Istanbul), totaling almost 1.5 million people (most of whom had already left prior to the treaty), and the half a million Muslims of Greece, with the exception of Western Thrace, were resettled to Turkey. This forced exchange of population would set a dangerous precedent in the years to come, not only for the Balkans.

Selected Readings Banac, Ivo, ed. The Effects of World War I: The Rise of the Communist Parties in East Central Europe, 1918–​ 1921. Boulder, Colo., 1983. Boeckh, Katrin. Von den Balkankriegen zum Ersten Weltkrieg. Kleinstaatenpolitik und ethnische Selbstbestimmung auf dem Balkan. Munich, 1996. Boeckh, Katrin and Sabin Rutar, eds. The Wars of Yesterday: The Balkan Wars and the Emergence of Modern Military Conflict, 1912–​1913. New York, 2018. Cornwall, Mark, ed. The Last Years of Austria-​Hungary. A Multi-​National Experiment in Early Twentieth Century Europe. Exeter, 2002. Gumz, Jonathan E. The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914–​1918. Cambridge, 2009. Guy, Nicola. The Birth of Albania. Ethnic Nationalism, the Great Powers, and the Emergence of Albanian Independence. London, 2012. Hall, Richard C. The Balkan Wars, 1912–​1913. London, 2000. Lyon, James. Serbia and the Balkan Front, 1914.The Outbreak of the Great War. London, 2015. Martel, Gordon. The Month that Changed the World, July 1914. Oxford, 2014. Mitrović, Andrej. Serbia’s Great War, 1914–​1918. London, 2007. Torrey, Glenn E. The Romanian Battlefront in World War I. Lawrence, Kans., 2011. Williamson, Samuel R. Austria-​Hungary and the Origins of the First World War. New York, 1991.

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15 BULGARIA’S WARS AND DEFEATS, 1912–​1 919 Richard Hall

Few modern states have undergone such extreme changes of military and political fortune as Bulgaria did in the near decade of wars beginning in 1912. The First Balkan War of 1912–​13 saw Bulgaria realize its national claims in Southeastern Europe with a surprising victory over the Ottoman Empire only to have these gains snatched away by its defeat at the hands of its erstwhile Balkan allies, abetted by Romania and the Ottomans in the Second Balkan War of 1913. Two years later, seeking to reverse their fortunes, Bulgaria joined Austria-​Hungary and Germany in a successful assault on Serbia. Together with subsequent offensives in northern Greece and in Romania, the Bulgarians again achieved their nationalist objectives only to undergo total defeat in 1918, once again deprived of these territories. The subsequent peace treaty in 1920 left Bulgaria with many refugees, a truncated state, and an unstable government owing massive reparations. The warfare from 1912 through 1918 was not the first time the young Bulgarian state had experienced great disappointment after having apparently achieved its national claims. Nineteenth-​century Bulgarian nationalists had advocated a restoration of the medieval Bulgarian state from Ottoman controlled territories that included Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Thrace. The Russo-​Ottoman War of 1877–​8 ejected Ottoman forces from much of Southeastern Europe. At the Treaty of San Stefano in March 1878, the Russians established an independent Bulgaria that encompassed most of Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Thrace. Objections from the other Great Powers, especially Austria-​ Hungary and Great Britain, forced a revision of this treaty to Bulgarian dismay. The Treaty of Berlin in July 1878 trisected San Stefano Bulgaria. It created an autonomous Bulgarian Principality from the Balkan mountain range to the Danube River with its capital in Sofia but left a semi-​autonomous Eastern Rumelia, with its capital at Plovdiv and only limited freedom from Ottoman control. The remaining territories, including Macedonia and Thrace, returned to direct Ottoman governance. After the disappointment in Berlin, the new government in Sofia worked toward the implementation of the San Stefano goals. It soon achieved a success in 1885 with the unification of Eastern Rumelia and the Bulgarian Principality. The Great Powers accepted this modification of the Berlin settlement but endeavored to ensure that the remainder remain intact. The Bulgarians, however, continued to seek the unification of Macedonia and Thrace with the Principality.To this end, the Sofia government pursued accommodation with Ottoman authorities in Constantinople to consolidate its Exarchate’s religious privileges and open Bulgarian 155

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schools for the population in Macedonia and Thrace. The Sofia government also attempted to gain Great Powers support for its policy. For all practical purposes this meant dealing with Austria-​ Hungary and Russia. Both powers increasingly vied for influence and power in Southeastern Europe. The annexation of Eastern Rumelia had complicated Bulgarian relations with Russia. The first Bulgarian Prince, Alexander of Battenberg, had acted against the wishes of his uncle Tsar Alexander II in unifying with Eastern Rumelia. The Russian Tsar insisted on the deposition of his nephew, who abdicated in 1886. Ferdinand of Saxe-​Coburg-​Gotha, an Austro-​German prince, succeeded Prince Alexander in 1887. A reconciliation with Russia took place only after the death of Tsar Alexander III in 1894 and the conversion of Ferdinand’s son and heir, Prince Boris, to Orthodoxy, with Russian Tsar Nicholas II as godfather, two years later. By the turn of the twentieth century, elements within the Bulgarian army increasingly sponsored guerilla bands in Macedonia and Thrace who endeavored to undermine Ottoman authority. While these bands did undertake actions against the Ottomans, they also fought against rival Greek and Serbian guerrillas who contested control of Macedonia with Bulgaria. From 1893, two rival groups had also come together in Macedonia, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (VMRO), seeking autonomy, and the Supreme Macedonian Committee working toward union with Bulgaria.VMRO was the larger group but with leaders trained in the Bulgarian schools. It organized a widespread but loosely coordinated attack on the Ottoman administration across Macedonia.The uprising began on August 15, 1903, St. Elias Day (Ilinden). Ottoman troops were sent in to suppress the uprising and burned a number of villages. Despite public pressure in Sofia to intervene, the government failed to send support to the rebels. Credit for its origins would continue to be disputed between Macedonian and Bulgarian historians. After the defeat of the uprising, official and unofficial activity in Bulgaria nonetheless continued to pursue its claim to Macedonia and to support the Supreme Committee. In 1904, the Bulgarian government reached an agreement with Serbia, but the Austrian-​Russian agreement at Mürzsteg for international oversight in Ottoman Macedonia pushed it aside. By the time it had failed, the Committee for Union and Progress, also known as the Young Turks, seized power in Constantinople in 1908. They announced a program of reform in the Ottoman Empire. Fearing that a Young Turk success would strengthen the Ottomans, the Austro-​Hungarians annexed Bosnia-​Herzegovina, an Ottoman province they had occupied since 1878. Seizing the moment Prince Ferdinand proclaimed Bulgaria’s formal independence from the Ottoman Empire and assumed the medieval Bulgarian title of Tsar.

The Balkan Alliance and the First Balkan War An uprising in the Albanian lands against Ottoman rule in 1910 and the Italian attack on Ottoman Libya in 1911 provided further incentive for the Bulgarians to seek a resolution of their national claims.The other Balkan states, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia also recognized an opportunity in the Ottoman distractions to realize their own territorial aspirations. Diplomatic activities toward a Balkan alliance began in 1910 and increased the next year.The nexus of these efforts was Sofia, which as the largest single Balkan power, was a key component of any effort. In 1911, Bulgarian Prime Minister Ivan E. Geshov, having determined that the time was right to resolve the national issues with the Ottoman Empire, initiated talks with Serbia. The greatest obstacle to a Balkan alliance remained Macedonia. The Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs claimed all or part of this region based on historical and linguistic arguments. The Bulgarians and the Serbs finally reached an alliance agreement on March 13, 1912. This agreement hinged upon the division of Macedonia into an “undisputed” region in the south including the towns of 156

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Ohrid, Prilep, and Veles going to Bulgaria and a “disputed” region in the northwest containing the city of Skopje, subject to Russian arbitration. Russian Tsar Nicholas II agreed to guarantee the agreement, and if necessary, to arbitrate any dispute over the partition of Macedonia. This was extremely important for Bulgaria, because the bulk of their forces would have to confront the Ottomans in Thrace, while the Serbs would send most of their army into Macedonia. Subsequently on May 29, 1912, Bulgaria concluded an alliance with Greece, which lacked any provision for the division of Macedonian territory. At the end of August, the Bulgarians entered into an arrangement with Montenegro. By the fall of 1912, this loose Balkan league was ready to act against the Ottomans. The Montenegrins agreed to initiate the conflict, in part to gauge the extent of any possible Great Power opposition to a conflict in Southeastern Europe. After the Montenegrin declaration of war on October 8, 1912, the other Balkan allies, perceiving no serious Great Power problem, began their own war. The Bulgarians mobilized their army beginning on September 25, to great popular enthusiasm. Only a few voices, notably Agrarian Union (Peasant) Party leader, Aleksandǔr Stamboliiski and some socialists, warned against the war.The mobilization proceeded quickly. Bulgarian troops crossed the Ottoman frontier in Thrace on October 18. They enjoyed immediate success. The Bulgarian armies seized the Ottoman fortress at Lozengrad (Kirk Kilasse) and then broke Ottoman lines between Buni Hisar and Lüle Burgas. The road to Constantinople was open.These astonishing victories presented the Bulgarians with a quandary. The Sofia government had not anticipated that the Bulgarian army would prevail against the Ottomans. Geshov and his colleagues had planned to request Russian intervention soon after the initiation of hostilities. They expected that the Russians would provide the diplomatic initiative through which Bulgarian national objectives would be realized. Tsar Ferdinand and the Bulgarian army commanders, however, had no intention of halting after their resounding victories over the Ottomans. Ferdinand himself dreamed of appearing in the Hagia Sofia in the regalia of a Byzantine emperor. The Bulgarian army continued to pursue the Ottomans up to their final defensive positions before Constantinople, known as the Chataldzha Lines. After a failed frontal assault, the exhausted Bulgarians settled into positions in front of Chataldzha. The Bulgarian attempt to take Constantinople (officially renamed Istanbul in 1930) annoyed the Russians, who had for a long time sought to gain the ancient imperial city for themselves. Meanwhile the Bulgarian army invested the Ottoman fortress city of Adrianople, the largest city in Thrace. Another Bulgarian division moved down the Struma River to seize Thessaloniki (Salonica, Solun), arriving less than a day after the entry of the Greek army into the city. Also, smaller Bulgarian units crossed the Rhodopi Mountains and moved into western Thrace. Elsewhere the Serbian army had overrun much of Macedonia and Kosovo and entered northern Albania. The Serbs also responded to a Bulgarian request to assist with the siege of Adrianople. The Greeks had occupied much of Thessaly and Epirus and brought the town of Janina under siege. Finally, the Montenegrins had surrounded the northern Albanian town of Shkodër. By December all belligerents were exhausted. With the exception of Greece, they agreed to an armistice negotiated at Chataldzha. Convening in London, the representatives of the Balkan alliance and the Ottoman Empire negotiated an end to the conflict. Joining them in London, the Great Power Ambassadors to Britain conferred in order to oversee the Balkan peace settlement. Despite their setback at Chataldzha, the Bulgarians were optimistic at the end of 1912.Their government was confident in the strength of the Bulgarian army and the power of Russian diplomacy. Prime Minister Geshov wrote in an editorial in the influential newspaper Mir that as a result of the war, Bulgaria would realize expanded frontiers greater than those of San Stefano. 157

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Over all the Bulgarian population had responded favorably to the demands of the war despite heavy casualties and the appearance of epidemic disease among the troops and then at home.

Failed peace and the Second Balkan War Troubles loomed, however, soon ahead. One problem was the failure of the London peace talks to produce a final settlement. This issue worsened when on January 21, 1913, the Young Turks returned to power in Constantinople after a brief hiatus. They announced their intention of pursing a military solution. Their war with Bulgaria resumed on February 3. Another problem that emerged was the instance of Bulgaria’s northern neighbor Romania on territorial compensation to offset Bulgaria’s gains at the expense of the Ottomans. The Romanians, as the largest and most populous Christian Balkan state, aspired to exert their own influence over the region. The Romanian claim for compensation received some attention at the London ambassadors conference, but provoked outrage in Bulgaria. Geshov hoped that Russia would protect Bulgaria from Romanian demands. By far the most important problem that beset Bulgaria was the demand by its Serbian ally for a renegotiation of the alliance agreement. Its aspirations for an Adriatic outlet in northern Albania having been thwarted by Austro-​Hungarian and Italian opposition, Serbia sought to obtain a greater share of Macedonia than was envisioned by the agreement with Bulgaria. The presence of Serbian troops in most of Macedonia, while the Bulgarian army remained in Thrace, reinforced their claims. The Greeks also began to raise their claims to parts of Macedonia that their army had occupied, especially to Salonica and eastern Macedonia around Drama and Kavala. The absence of any prewar agreement strengthened their claims. During February 1913, Bulgarian forces rebuffed Ottoman attacks at Chataldzha, the Gallipoli peninsula, and on the shore of the Sea of Marmara. On March 26, 1913, Bulgarian and Serbian troops seized Adrianople, which had been besieged since November 1912. The Ottomans returned to negotiations in London. On May 30, 1913, the Balkan allies signed a preliminary peace treaty by which Bulgaria gained Thrace up to a line from Enez on the Black Sea to Midiya on the Sea of Marmara. By this time however, Bulgarian and Greek soldiers were already fighting in disputed areas of eastern Macedonia. Serbian forces were consolidating their occupation of Macedonia. Also, a conference of Great Power ambassadors in St. Petersburg had sanctioned the ceding of the town of Silistra in northeastern Bulgaria to Romania. Russia had done little to support Bulgaria in its reluctance to part with any territory after a successful war. The rising tensions among the Balkan allies caused Geshov to resign on May 30, 1913. The more aggressive Stoian Danev replaced him as Bulgarian prime minister.The Bulgarian attitude now hardened. After the London agreement, the army had transferred most of its forces to the west to support Bulgarian claims to Macedonia. By the late spring of 1913, signs of unrest emerged in the Bulgarian army among the mainly conscripted peasant soldiers, who had been at arms away from home for nine months. The army command feared that if the army was not soon engaged, many soldiers would demand to go home. Danev was depending on Russia to support the Bulgarian position in Macedonia. An indication from St. Petersburg that Russia would not support the Bulgarian position in the dispute with its allies, however, brought the situation to a critical point. On the night of June 30, 1913, Bulgarian units attacked Serbian forces in Macedonia. The attacks were local; not all Bulgarian forces were engaged. Provocations on both sides had occurred since the spring, and the Bulgarians were already skirmishing with the Greeks. Both sides then used the June 30 attacks to begin a general war, known as the Second Balkan War 158

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or Inter-​Allied War. Initially the Greeks and Serbs pushed the Bulgarians back. The Bulgarians suffered especially heavy loses north of Thessaloniki. After two weeks of fighting, however, the Bulgarian lines stabilized and the army began to push back against the Greeks and Serbs. Just then Romanian troops crossed the Danube and moved unopposed into Bulgaria. The Romanians wanted to enforce their claims to northeastern Bulgaria. At about the same time the Ottoman regime perceived an opportunity to retake Adrianople, which they had reluctantly conceded in London. Because the bulk of Bulgarian forces were fighting in the west, the Ottomans did not encounter significant opposition either. With Bulgaria beset on all frontiers and no help forthcoming from Russia, Danev resigned. The new government in Sofia, led by Vasil Radoslavov, immediately sought peace terms.The Treaty of Bucharest with Greece, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia on August 10, 1913, and the Treaty of Constantinople on September 30, confirmed Bulgaria’s complete defeat in the Second Balkan War (see Map 14.2). Although Bulgaria lost most of Macedonia to Greece and Serbia and most of Thrace, including Adrianople, to the Ottomans, as well as southern Dobrudja to Romania, it still retained significant territories south of the Rhodopi Mountains taken from the Ottomans in the First Balkan War and thus, had access to the Aegean Sea. With the defeat, however, came thousands of wounded soldiers, masses of refugees, and widespread epidemic disease. Cholera, diphtheria, and typhus had broken out among the troops in Thrace in the fall of 1912 and persisted on into the next year. Radoslavov was much less inclined than his previous two predecessors to rely on Russia after its failure to prevent Bulgaria’s catastrophic defeat. The estrangement of Bulgaria from Russia left Serbia as Russia’s only important ally in Southeastern Europe. This forced Russia to rely increasingly on Serbia in order to maintain influence in the region. Because of this shift the Russians had to support Serbia in the summer crisis of 1914. Had the Bulgarian-​Russian relationship survived the Balkan Wars, the First World War, if it had broken out at all, might well have taken quite a different course.

The First World War With the support of Tsar Ferdinand, Radoslavov steered Bulgarian policy toward the Austro-​ German alliance. As a result, a major loan from Germany was soon provided in July 1914. Radoslavov also attempted to engage the Ottomans. He did this in part to pacify the large Turkish populations still living in the newly acquired territories. In addition, some arrangement with the Ottomans was necessary for Bulgaria to attempt to reverse the 1913 Bucharest settlement. The Bulgarians regarded Serbia as having betrayed the March 1912 agreement and wanted to obtain the parts of Macedonia promised them by that treaty. While over the next several months, Sofia and Istanbul engaged in negotiations for a alliance treaty, they were unable to reach a final draft by the time the First World War erupted in August 1914. When war broke out, the Radoslavov government declared strict neutrality. Although aware that it offered an opportunity to undo the Bucharest settlement, Radoslavov understood that Bulgaria still had to recover from the losses in manpower and material resulting from the Balkan Wars. Even so many Bulgarians indicated their preference for Bulgaria’s traditional ally Russia. Some volunteered to fight in the Russian army, including the Balkan War hero and Bulgarian minister in St. Petersburg General Radko Dimitriev. Despite its proclamation of strict neutrality, the Radoslavov government, however, tilted toward the Central Powers. The Bulgarian government and military aided armed groups of Macedonians who continued to vie with the Serbs for the control of that region. After the Ottomans joined the Central Powers in November 1914, Bulgaria facilitated the movement of material and men there from Austria-​Hungary and Germany. 159

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From the beginning of the war the strategic importance of Bulgaria was obvious to both sides. Efforts to lure Bulgaria into the war increased into 1915 as the Central Powers sought greater access to their Ottoman ally. Bulgaria’s price for entry into the war was Macedonia. The first side to agree to grant Macedonia to Bulgaria would obtain Bulgarian support. This imposed difficulties for the Anglo-​French and Russian Entente, because the defense of Serbia was a primary cause of the war.The Serbian government naturally had no interest in ceding the territory they recently gained at a heavy cost in material and men. The best the Entente could do was to promise the undisputed region of Macedonia and most of Thrace after the war. The Central Powers offered both the disputed and undisputed zones of Macedonia. Bulgaria had only to participate in a joint attack and occupy the regions. This presented the Radoslavov government with a dilemma. By maintaining favorable neutrality of participation on the side of the Entente, Bulgaria could receive part of Macedonia and Thrace at the end of the war, providing the Entente prevailed. As the British attack on Gallipoli commenced and the Russians contemplated a Black Sea attack on the Bosporus, Radoslavov indicated that Bulgaria would not oppose the landing of Russian troops on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. The Ottoman capital thus would have come under attack from two sides, possibly with the participation of the Bulgarian army, and very likely would have fallen. The Russians, however, never managed to mount a Black Sea assault, and the British and Australian landing at Gallipoli faltered. At the same time, the Central Powers undertook a massive campaign in Galicia that forced the Russians to retreat. The difficulties of the Entente made the Central Powers appear more appealing to the Sofia government. During the summer of 1915, Radoslavov and his cohorts, with the support of the Bulgarian tsar, decided to join the Central Powers in an attack on Serbia, and thus obtain Macedonia immediately. The Bulgarians signed several agreements with Austria-​Hungary and Germany as well as a separate arrangement with the Ottomans to become the last and smallest member of the Central Alliance. On October 16, 1915, two Bulgarian armies joined an ongoing Austro-​Hungarian and German operation against Serbia.The Bulgarian public wearily accepted the situation. The government soon imprisoned the peasant leader Stamboliiski and other war opponents. By the beginning of November, the combined forces soon overran Serbia. The Bulgarian First Army pursued the retreating Serbs into northern Albania while the Bulgarian Second Army turned south to confront a joint British and French force moving up the Vardar valley from Thessaloniki to help the beleaguered Serbs. Large elements of the Serbian army reached safety on the Adriatic coast, but the Bulgarians stopped the Anglo-​French force and forced it back toward Salonica. The Bulgarians then pursued the British and French to the Greek frontier. The Bulgarian command wanted to continue on to Salonica, but the Germans imposed a halt in order to maintain Greek neutrality and to prevent Entente soldiers there from being deployed elsewhere. What became known as the Salonica Front stabilized for the next three years. During the summer of 1916 the Bulgarians did advance further into Greece in Eastern Macedonia when they seized the towns of Drama, Kavala, and Serres, but an attack by French forces and a revived Serbian army forced the Bulgarians from Bitola (Monastir) in southern Macedonia in November. That same summer, in August, Romania joined the Entente. In response the Bulgarian army together with German and Ottoman forces successfully invaded the Dobrudja region of Southeastern Romania.The Bulgarians also fended off a counter attack by the Romanian army across the Danube. By 1917, the Bulgarian population was becoming increasingly weary of the war. Even though the country had occupied Macedonia and Southeastern Romania, the army remained in the field and continued to take casualties. Food and fodder were becoming scarce at the fronts 160

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and at home due to inflated prices and the demands of the Central allies. As in the militaries of the other combatants, disciplinary issues emerged in the Bulgarian ranks. Territorial disputes undermined the Bulgaria war effort. So did an Ottoman demand for a revision of the Bulgarian border in Thrace and German requisition of Bulgarian grain.The revolutionary events in Russia also engaged the traditionally Russophile Bulgarian population. The heavy hand of the Sofia-​ based military administration of Macedonia did not encourage support among the local population for the war effort or for postwar union with Bulgaria. In southern Serbia, resistance groups confronted the occupying Bulgarian troops. The material and morale condition of the Bulgarian army further declined into 1918. The Germans withdrew most of their equipment and manpower to participate in their great spring offensive on the Western Front. Food became scare in the cities and at the front. Military material deteriorated. The Bulgarian army failed to counterattack against an Entente effort at Yerbichna on the Macedonian front in June in part because the troops lacked footgear to traverse the stony ground. The German conclusion of peace with Romania at the Treaty of Bucharest in May 1918 brought little advantage to Bulgaria. The realization that the war would be won or lost on the Western Front provided little assurance for the Bulgarian army and civilian population. On September 14, the Entente forces on the Macedonian Front began a massive offensive against the Bulgarians at Dobro Pole. After three days of hard fighting the Bulgarian line cracked. Elements of some units refused to obey orders and streamed north toward Sofia to reckon with the government that had brought about the war and their suffering. While other Bulgarian units held, notably at Lake Doiran, the breach in the lines soon forced a general retreat. In an effort to placate the troops, the Sofia government released Stamboliiski and other war opponents.With the army in disarray and in retreat, the government of Aleksandǔr Malinov, in power since Radoslavov’s resignation in June, sought an armistice. Negotiations with the Entente at Salonica resulted in Bulgaria leaving the war on September 29, 1918, so the last power to join the Central Powers was the first to leave the alliance. About the same time German and loyal Bulgarian units stopped the mutineers south of Sofia. With the war over, the dissident soldiers then dispersed and returned to their homes. In the midst of the turmoil, Tsar Ferdinand, who had presided over two catastrophes, abdicated on October 3. His son, the crown prince succeeded him as Tsar Boris III. While Entente troops occupied Bulgaria’s wartime acquisitions, they mainly remained out of prewar Bulgaria. The old nationalist agenda receded in politics. Aleksandǔr Stamboliski became the Prime Minister in 1919. The new Bulgarian government hoped that the Wilsonian principles of self-​determination might enable them to retain at least part of Macedonia. The peace settlement between the Entente and Bulgaria, however, was a tremendous disappointment. By the Treaty of Neuilly of November 27, 1920, the Bulgarians once again lost their conquests, including not only Macedonia and Dobrudja, but also their Aegean coastline. In addition, they had to pay huge reparations and accept severe limitations on their army. For the third time in 44 years, Bulgaria had failed to win the large territory promised at San Stefano. Stamboliski implemented a policy promoting Bulgaria’s agricultural economy and peace toward its neighbors, all of whom had recently been enemies. Unfortunately, his policies antagonized elements in the Bulgarian military and in the Macedonian movement.With acquiesce of Tsar Boris, they overthrew Stamboliiski’s government and brutally murdered him in June 1923. A communist uprising failed that fall. The decade 1912–​22 was dominated by what was essentially one long failed war for Bulgarian unity. It devastated Bulgaria. In the two Balkan Wars and the First World War, the Bulgarian army lost 167,224 dead and 254,026 wounded. Over 200,000 refugees from 161

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Dobrudja, Macedonia, and Thrace flooded into Bulgaria. Epidemic disease ravished the country. The economy, burdened by defeat and reparations, struggled to recover under the weight of reparations. The defeats in 1913 and 1918 would enter Bulgarian popular memory as the two “national catastrophes.” The alliance with Nazi Germany in World War II, again to regain Macedonia, and the defeat in 1944 became the third one.

Selected Readings Boeckh, Katrin. Von den Balkankriegen zum Ersten Weltkrieg: Kleinstaatenpolitik und ethnische Selbstbestimmung auf dem Balkan. Munich, 1996. Crampton, Richard J. Bulgaria 1878–​1918. Boulder, Colo., 1983. Danaillow, Georgi T. Les effects de la guerre en Bulgarie. Paris and New Haven, Conn., 1933. Friedrich, Wolfgang-​Uwe. Bulgarien und die Mächte 1913–​1915. Stuttgart, 1985. Hall, Richard C. The Balkan Wars 1912–​1913. Prelude to the First World War. London, New York, 2000. Hall, Richard C. Balkan breakthrough.The Battle of Dobro Pole 1918. Bloomington, Ind., 2010. Markov, Georgi. Goliamata voina i bǔlgarskiiat kliuch kǔm evropeiskiia pogreb 1914–​1916 g. Sofia, 1995. Markov, Georgi. Goliamata voina i bŭlgarskata strazha mezhdu Sredna Evropa i Orienta 1916–​ 1919 g. Sofia, 2006. Radoslawoff (Radoslavov),Vasil. Bulgarien und die Weltkrise. Berlin, 1923.

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16 AFTER EMPIRE The First World War and the question of Albanian independence Lejnar Mitrojorgji

This chapter explores the political behavior of independent Albanian associations during the First World War. Albanian activists, both domestic and émigré, used the occupation to advance national goals and reasserting the precarious independence of 1912. Their collaboration with the various occupying armies ironically served as a vehicle for reasserting independence when the war ended.

National associations in the late Ottoman Empire Modern Albanian political life began with the initiatives of several, primarily Muslim Albanian-​ born civil servants and members of the free professions after the loss of Ottoman territory under the Treaties of San Stefano and Berlin in 1878. Starting in Istanbul, it soon expanded to the Albanian Orthodox merchant diaspora in Romania, Egypt, Bulgaria, Austria-​Hungary and, after 1906, the United States. These emigrant activists took advantage of constitutionally protected liberties to establish independent voluntary associations, make contacts, circulate writings, and build institutional networks. In addition, they learned the use of representative democratic tools such as voting, elections, balloting, checks and balances, and petitions for redress of grievance. Then, the overthrow of the authoritarian regime of Sultan Abdülhamit II by the Young Turk revolution of 1908 brought them back to the Ottoman Empire, where that organizational experience proved valuable. Their aim was not to oppose the legitimacy of the imperial multinational state but to reform it from within. They sought the decentralization of political authority away from the capital to the provinces. There were considerable differences between this Albanian experience and similar processes in the Balkans. First, the larger Serbian, Bulgarian, Bosnian, and Greek diasporas never developed a comparably widespread set of separate associations. Second, the Albanians’ diverse cultural and religious makeup permitted neither notions for a separate national state nor the cultivating of international patronage for statehood, the kind of which Greece enjoyed with Britain or Serbia and Bulgaria with Russia. As a result, the Albanian idea of their political framework remained firmly fixed on the Ottoman state, which, however, they wanted to see reformed. The Albanians’ divisions initially proved to be a drawback in negotiating a national agenda with the imperial government. Despite frequent collaborations and basic agreement over shared political goals, the associations were divided about everything else. Personal rivalries, ambition 163

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for social and political prestige, and even the disparate intellectual influences encountered in the diaspora, could be overcome only during moments of crises.Yet, this disunity also proved to be an asset. By avoiding consolidation, each center acted independently from the other, thus, preserving intact its own unique resources, finances, forms of organization, networks of support, and venues for social activism. When one such center fell apart or was incapacitated, then another emerged with the resources, will, and the intellectual and moral impetus to fill the vacuum. This dynamic gave to the Albanian social activism a vitality and mobility that could respond to both domestic and foreign challenges as they arose. To escape Hamidian Ottoman repression after 1880, social activists moved their operations to Romania, gradually expanding elsewhere in Europe, North Africa, and the United States. Until 1908, Romania was the center of Albanian activism with networks linking Bucharest to Albanian communities in Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire, Austria, and Tsarist Russia.This was the first phase.The second phase was their return to Albanian territory after the Young Turk revolution of 1908 and the explosion there of domestic associations. Their flight following the occupation of a newly independent Albania by Serbia and Greece during the Balkan Wars and then the First World War was the third phase. As war and foreign occupation thwarted their attempts to reestablish normal operations in Albania, the torch of social activism passed on to the associations in America, especially New England. We focus here on this third phase: the associations’ efforts to preserve their transnational networks through the war and seek some advantage in the postwar settlement.

National associations in wartime For the Albanians, perhaps more than any other Balkan peoples, the experiences of the Balkan Wars 1912–​13 and First World War 1914–​18 blurred into a single period. What began with a declaration of independence in November of 1912, turned into brief European oversight under Prince Wilhelm of Wied. It was replaced in 1914 by a series of foreign occupations burdening the population and barring local political activity until 1919. Under these trying circumstances, national associations found it difficult to exist let alone operate as freely as in the recent Ottoman past. They ceased operations in Albania altogether and their members left for more secure locations in Europe, the remaining Ottoman territory, Egypt, and the United States. Even there they found themselves powerless to influence the political course of events. Increasingly, they became reliant on Austro-​Hungarian and Italian patronage, the only European powers with vested but competing interests in Albanian independence.With little European backing, the associational center of gravity quickly shifted to the United States. Already in April 1912, the pan-​Albanian Federation of America Vatra (Hearth) had been established in Boston thanks to the merger of four smaller, formerly independent associations. Led by Fan Noli and Kristo Dako, its ambition was to become the primary organization acting for Albanian interests in the wider world. The distance between the United States and the Balkans proved an immediate drawback. Vatra had neither anticipated Albanian independence nor was it fully in touch with the prevailing political currents in Ottoman regime. Indeed, following the declaration of independence in 1912, Fan Noli branded Ismail Qemali, the first president of independent Albania, a traitor for not decisively opposing the territorial expansion of Greece in southern Albania. Under intense Austrian and Italian pressure, the Great Powers rolled back some of the Greek gains in the Protocol of Florence in 1913. This decision, however, created resentment among the local Greek minority that wanted instead to join Greece.With the crisis averted, Noli’s hostility to Qemali also abated. Growing more familiar with the situation in Albania, he lent Vatra’s support to Qemali’s government and to the Austrian patronage of Albanian independence. In 164

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late November 1913, Noli embarked on a European tour seeking to expand Vatra’s network among Albanian émigré circles and to secure Great Power support for a foreign European prince. Supported by a Vatra stipend, he traveled first to England and then to Romania, Austria, Italy, and Albania. The onset of the First World War found him in Trieste. He then went to Vienna, where he declared Vatra’s support for the Central Powers, given the role that Austria-​ Hungary played in securing the existence of an Albanian state in 1912–​13. It was not until May 1915 that Noli was able to return to Boston. The hostilities between the Entente and the Central Powers in 1914 meant that the Albanians could neither count on either a relatively benign pan-​European mandate under Wilhelm of Wied as Prince Sovereign, nor rely on the Austrian and Italian support for Albanian independence as they had done in the last 17 months. Following the departure of Wilhelm and European experts in 1914, the country fractured into regions of influence. Ambitious warlords and clan leaders seeking to turn the clock back to local pre-independence regional autonomies, a peasant rebellion that sought Albania’s return into the Ottoman fold, and Greek nationalist bands brought the newly independent Albania to anarchy. Foremost among these new threats was Esat Toptani, a large landowner in central Albania and a controversial political figure who had cut many contradictory deals with Greece, Serbia, and Italy. By auctioning off portions of the country to them, he had secured for himself a rump principality in central Albania and the support the Entente powers. They, in turn, desired a power broker in the region in order to ensure an alliance with still neutral Greece and Italy as well as to reward Serbia and Montenegro. To Greece, Toptani had promised to recognize its annexation of southern Albania. To Serbia, he promised portions of northeastern Albania, a joint customs union, and joint defense and foreign policy. He also acquiesced in Montenegro’s annexation of Shkodër, a city that he had at first defended but then abandoned during the First Balkan War. To Italy, he promised to counter Austrian influence in Albania and not to intervene should Italy elect to annex the port city of Vlorë, directly across the Otranto Strait. The most immediate issue was the political anarchy in southern Albania. With some support from Greece, the local Greek minority had launched a local insurgency in February 1914 that culminated in a declaration of independence for the short-​lived Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus (ARNE). The insurgents quickly formed a government and negotiated with the Wied regime the Protocol of Corfu in May that awarded ARNE wide ranging autonomy. Benefiting from such anarchy and encouraged by the deal it had struck with Toptani, the Greek army simply moved ahead and occupied southern Albania in late October 1914. Having accomplished its goal of joining southern Albania to Greece, ARNE dissolved. Its territory was then split into two prefectures –​Korçë and Gjirokastër –​as part of Greece. In December 1914, Italy seized the Sazan Island and Vlorë itself. Faced with domestic turmoil and Europe aflame, Albanian activists now retreated to neutral countries like Switzerland and the United States. Back in Boston, Vatra had had fallen prey to competition for the leadership of the association. After his return, Noli was unanimously elected as the sole chairman. The decision permanently damaged his relationship with former leaders. Indeed, a month later, in August, the former co-​chairman Kristo Dako arrived from Sofia, Bulgaria, to suddenly find himself no longer a member of the leadership. In the event, he brought back a proposal, originally put forward by Themistokli Gërmenji, to consolidate and then coordinate all Albanian associations and activities in Europe, North Africa, and the United States. The aim was to forge sufficient Albanian unity necessary to offset the loss of European support and counter Greek aims in the occupied areas. Already in July 1914, Gërmenji had established his own informal association. This National League was intended as a “shadow government” in charge of providing basic functions and services, thus in effect, creating national institutions in all but name. 165

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Vatra’s leaders mounted fresh efforts to expand the association’s support among Albanian-​ Americans. Noli started an energetic campaign, traveling around New England and preaching the merits of and the dangers to the “motherland” from the pulpit. Dako and others expanded on existing links with Protestant missionaries, bible societies, and their institutions that were supported with donations from wealthy Americans like Charles Richard Crane. At the same time, Vatra also began to appeal directly to the US Department of State reporting on the ambitions of the Balkan states, their atrocities in Kosovo and elsewhere, and the failure of the European powers to consider Albania an independent and neutral country. But the State Department paid no recorded attention. In contrast to the American association, Albanian activists still in Europe appeared to suffer from an impending sense of doom and saw no alternative to supporting either the Entente or the Central Allies. They claimed that if the Entente won the war, then Albania would be fully partitioned to satisfy the demands of Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece, whereas if the Central Powers won than Greece would permanently retain the Albanian south that it now possessed. Some activists even advocated that Vatra, now the premier Albanian émigré organization, lend its support to the International Socialist Committee in Berne, Switzerland, and participate in the Zimmerwald Conference that was to be held that September 1916. They claimed that the socialist aim to ensure a “paix durable” was the only chance to save Albania for the Albanians. The traumatic events of the First World War proved the presumption of national solidarity false even in the United States. Throughout the war, Vatra’s leadership was in agreement on basic political objectives but divided over leadership disputes and social background. Soon two main factions developed within it. One was led by Noli. He had managed to raise his visibility as the indisputable leader of the immigrant masses. In the process, he became Vatra’s chief historian, polemicist, poet, and politician. He was arguably the most publicly visible Albanian in the United States, all by the age of 34. On the other hand, Kristo Dako, the former co-​chairman, drew to his camp virtually all other top, mostly middle-​class merchants and members of free professions, Albanian activists in the United States; the American Protestant networks, which included noted missionaries, industrialists, and philanthropists like Crane, and even British supporters such as Edith Durham and Aubrey Herbert. Yet despite this impressive array of opponents, none could match Noli’s mastery of the spoken and written language. Meanwhile in Albania, the wider range of social activists found it impossible to maintain wartime neutrality. Following the collapse of the Serbian Front in November 1915, the Serbian army began a long and arduous retreat south through the Albanian highlands. Bad roads, awful weather, and constant harassment from Albanian villagers taking revenge for atrocities committed earlier during the Balkan Wars decimated the Serbian columns. The survivors reached the Adriatic coast from where they were eventually transported by the French navy to Corfu. Some 150,000 were later kitted out in Greece with British and French aid to join the Entente effort on the Salonica Front. Following closely the Serbs’ heels, the Bulgarian army was the first of the Central Power allies to enter Albania in December 1915. Not supporting the Bulgarian territorial designs, Austria-​Hungary entered Albania from the north and attacked Italian and Greek-​held territories. Although they were able to take Korçë from Greece, they failed to dislodge Italy from Vlorë. Greece’s emerging National Schism over choosing sides in the First World War, made it nearly impossible for Greece to oversee its territories in Albania. Now declaring for the Entente, Italy simply took over Greek-​held territories. By 1916, a system of protectorates was established with Italy occupying southern Albania and the French taking Korçë for the Entente. Bulgaria stayed in Pogradec until 1917, and the rest of the country north of the Vjosë River remained under Austria-​Hungary. Constant reshuffling 166

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within these occupation regimes between military and civilian administration produced much confusion. Between December 1912 and June 1920, only Korçë experienced ten separate regimes from Greek military and civilian administrations and French-​backed Albanian national management to a French military protectorate. For their voices to be heard, Albanian activists were forced to collaborate with occupational authorities in each zone, while at the same time professing neutrality. Each occupying army drafted local auxiliary forces, and it was commonplace to see Albanian units fighting each other either for the Entente or for the Central Powers. But as long as Greece and Serbia were denied spheres of influence in Albania, this did not seem to matter to the Albanians. Links with occupying armies were understandably stronger in the Austrian-​held territory, given the prewar role of the Dual Monarchy in seeking an independent Albania. In Korçë, the French authorities established the Autonomous Albanian Republic [of Korçë] in December 1916, staffed by an Albanian administration composed of National League activists and led by Themistokli Gërmenji. This French decision appalled the governments of Greece and Italy as well as the Serb-​backed pretender for Albanian political leadership, Esat Toptani. Gërmenji nonetheless proved to be an energetic collaborator with the French local authorities. In 1917, he led an Albanian detachment in the French drive that ejected the Bulgarians from Pogradec, for which he received the Croix de Guerre. A native Albanian administration in Korçë, however, ran counter to Greek designs on the region and they accused Gërmenji of collaborating with the Austrians. Arrested by the French on trumped up Greek charges he was sent in Salonica where he was tried and summarily executed on November 9, 1917. Back in the United States, Vatra’s leadership continued to be divided. To counter Noli’s growing authority, the opposition led by Dako established the National [Albanian] Political Party (ANP). Even this initiative failed to sideline Noli. In 1917, he took advantage of two major political changes. First, immediately after the Russian revolution the new Bolshevik government denounced the Pact of London of 1915. This was a series of secret diplomatic discussions that had included Albania’s postwar dismemberment. The subsequent publication of these secret treaties by the Bolshevik government enhanced the prestige of Russian communism among some Albanian social activists, and Noli in particular, as an alternative social system. Second, with the entry of the United States into the war, Noli and his faction quickly disavowed any support for Austria and declared for the Entente. Following President Wilson’s decision to establish The Inquiry, the study group composed of historians, geographers, and political scientists charged with preparing for the United States’ postwar interventionism in European affairs, Vatra received an invitation to submit its own contribution. Noli even met with Wilson on two separate occasions, where the latter allegedly promised him to consider rectifying the injustices done to Albania by its neighbors. Now that the United States had committed itself to the Entente, Noli’s earlier sympathies for the Central Powers came under the official scrutiny of the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), the precursor of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In due course, the investigation determined that the case against him rested only on charges leveled by his opponents in the Albanian-​American community. Noli continued to plow ahead, conducting meetings and sponsoring conferences, raising funds, composing patriotic poems, and making pro-​Entente speeches to the few Albanian-​born US soldiers in training camps. Toward the end of war, he had reestablished himself as the leading Albanian personality in the United States. He had increased Vatra visibility, its membership, and reportedly raised more than $40,000. This was an enormous sum for an émigré association that relied primarily on small private donations. These funds were later used to support Albanian social activists seeking to influence the Great Powers at the Peace Conference in Paris. 167

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Postwar challenges at the Peace Conference The challenges the Albanians faced at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 were more daunting than those faced during the London Conference in 1913 that awarded Albania its initial independence. The defeat and dissolution of Austria-​Hungary deprived the Albanian of their staunchest supporter. This left Italy as the only remaining Great Power with vested interests in Albania. Without Austrian opposition, Italian policy geared up to counter the rising contest with the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Yugoslavia from 1929) over concessions made to Italy in the secret London Pact in 1915. These included territories along the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, including an overall Italian protectorate in Albania. In addition, with the loss of Austrian support, the Great Powers’ pre-​1914 commitment for an independent Albania state was downgraded to the status of a previously non-​existent state. The Albanian question was thus now seen as the equivalent of a colonial problem in an area not yet ready for independence. At Paris, Albanian interests were represented by at least three different domestic centers of advocacy. First, there was the Congress of Durrës, a hasty ad hoc governing body created by former Ottoman civil servants. It soon came under Italian control. This reliance on a foreign power with clear expansionist interests on Albanian territory cost the Congress most of its domestic support. Under public pressure, the Congress sought to mitigate Italian influence by petitioning for the return of ethnic borders in accordance with the principle of self-​determination, full independence for this Albanian state, and equal membership in the international state system. But this was much more than what Italy was willing to accept. For its part, the Congress of Durrës lacked official recognition at the Peace Conference and thus was not prepared to alienate Italian sponsorship. On the contrary, it worked diligently to ingratiate itself as much as it could with Italian diplomatic circles. Second, there were the older associations in Europe, North Africa, and the United States. Most of the émigré Albanian associations sought to send their own delegates to Paris.Yet with the exception of Vatra, and to a lesser extent the Albanian communities of Bucharest and Istanbul, few had the financial means to do so. As a result, most associations came to accept the moral, if not the political, leadership of Vatra as the only active organization that possessed both capable leaders and the financial wherewithal to represent the Albanian cause. Ironically, Noli, because he was still subject to the ongoing BOI investigation, could neither secure a passport nor a French visa. The large land-​holding magnate of central Albania, Esat Toptani, represented the third center of advocacy and the sole individual contender for a top position either as president or as prince. Arguably the most vilified political figure in Albania, Toptani’s political record elicited universal criticism in all national quarters. Few had forgotten his betrayal of Shkodër to the Montenegrins in 1913 and the early wartime promises made to Greece, Serbia, and Italy. Following the Austrian occupation, he left Albania and had joined the Allies in Salonica, where he had established a provisional Albanian Government. At the Peace Conference, he would lose all Allied support as well but continued to enjoy staunch Serbian and Greek backing. Because of this support, his candidacy mattered until he was assassinated in June 1920. At the Peace Conference, the Albanians, therefore, lacked the unity to formulate a single platform for a common political objective. Denied formal representation, their demands were articulated by the three separate groups just noted. Their myriad of demands undermined any trust from the Great Powers in the ability of Albanians to administer their country. As a result, overall Albanian influence in Paris was minimal. Wilson’s initial commitment to self-​ determination had raised expectations for rectifying the injustices inflicted of the Treaty of London in 1913. Yet, Wilson’s decision in April 1919 to give up Vlorë to Italy was widely 168

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regarded as a sign of the American abandonment of Albania. In response, the Albanian position returned to the more realistic hope of preserving the 1913 borders. In principle, most Albanians did not oppose an international mandate. The problem was the choice of a mandatory power. Previous experience under the Ottoman Empire suggested that as long as the requirements for self-​rule were satisfied, membership in an imperial framework was preferable, if for no other reason because it guaranteed territorial unity against potential future Greek, Serbian, and Montenegrin demands. In 1918, there were two options available. Vatra and its network preferred an American mandate because, as a distant power, the United States harbored no territorial demands on Albania.Wilson’s moral diplomacy had already struck a responsive chord in those who believed in political decentralization and an open democratic process. At a minimum, Albanians and their American support groups accepted a US “civilizing mission” to aid in state building, strengthen civil society, finance educational institutions, and safeguard the country’s borders until such time that the Albanians could manage their own affairs. The second option was an Italian mandate, supported by the pro-​Italian Congress of Durrës. During the war, Italy had courted Albanian goodwill by improving roads, opening schools, creating jobs and supporting local administration by Albanians, albeit only briefly. Wartime Italian-​Albanian relations had, indeed, grown so close that pro-​Greek centers alleged to the US State Department that Albanians, assisted by Italians, were effectively changing the demographic map of southern Albania. Yet, the Italian mandate attracted only mixed support since many remembered Italy as a signatory to the secret treaties of 1915. Still, given the geographic proximity, many Italophiles, including Mustafa Kruja, the future puppet Prime Minister of Albania during the Italian fascist occupation in the Second World War, were genuinely convinced that the Italian connection was to Albania’s benefit. They admired Italian culture, which in their view represented a pathway to Western modernity even if under colonial imposition.The Italian option also drew the support of many Kosovar immigrants who viewed Italy as the only hope to win back Kosovo from Serbia. For others, the Italian mandate was simply a matter of choosing between it and the threat of dismemberment by Albania’s neighbors. After the wartime occupation, however, many Albanians came to resent Italy’s continuing military administration of local life as well as the presence of occupation forces in peacetime. As 1919 came to a close, the defense of Kosovo and Çamëria as unredeemed national lands all but disappeared from the Albanian political discussion. Gone also was the option of American oversight as well as any attraction to an Italian mandate. The émigré associations and the Congress of Durrës understood only too well that they possessed very little bargaining power in the international state system and consequently distrusted every international proposal. The trauma of wartime was followed by postwar pessimism. Many viewed the Peace Conference as a market where Albania and its inhabitants were “traded like cattle” to Italy, Serbia, and Greece. In part, this was the result of the changing dynamics in the postwar international political system. After the collapse of the Central Powers it was expected that the Entente’s military victory should have increased the victors’ postwar political cohesion, In reality, the opposite took place. The emergence of a new political vocabulary in Paris (i.e., self-​determination, racial equality, minority rights, and so on), and, perhaps more importantly, the sheer number of competing nationalist claims and counterclaims, left major issues unresolved as the victors could agree only on reparations from the defeated Central Powers.The resulting delays did give the Albanians the necessary time to come together and even defeat the prospect of the Italian mandate. An occasion presented itself in October 1919 when news leaked to the Albanians of the Tittoni-​Venizelos agreement between Italy and Greece. Originally signed in July 1919, the agreement was an effort to settle their territorial claims. In return for Italian recognition of 169

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Greek claims over southern Albania, Greece undertook to recognize Italian sovereignty over Vlorë and an overall mandate. In addition, Greece promised to lease to Italy the city-​port of Sarandë for a period of 50 years, should that city become part of Greece in the future. Greece also promised to reimburse Italy for all public works constructed in southern Albania during the war. It pledged to provide competitive contracts to Italian railroad societies for the building of railroads linking Sarandë with the interior, should Greece find it financially prohibitive to do so itself. By November, massive anti-​Italian sentiment was mounting in Albania. So did public sentiment against the Congress of Durrës, which was accused of serving Italian interests. Attempts by the Congress to reach a compromise failed and in January 1920, an assembly of delegates elected to form a new government gathered in Lushnjë. As Fan Noli, now exonerated by the US investigation, defended Albanian interests at the League of Nations in Geneva, the Congress of Lushnjë displayed in Albania considerable political courage. First, it replaced the provisional government of the Congress of Durrës with a new government made up of former Ottoman civil servants, local notables and warlords, and émigré activists, thus conveying the composition of a pan-​national congress. Second, it denounced all plans to partition Albania and rejected any option for an international mandate, while pledging to defend the sovereignty of the 1913 borders. Third, the congress set up a foundation for state institutions. It established the National Council, a Regency to oversee executive functions. Since Prince Wilhelm of Wied had never formally abdicated the Albanian throne, the Congress attributed only limited executive powers to the Regency and subordinated its authority to the National Assembly. Italy attempted to intervene. On May 10, the Italian garrison in Durrës expelled the Albanian-​ staffed city council and appointed an army captain as prefect. However, Albanian forces loyal to the new government overcame the Italian garrison while the new regime began to expand its authority in other contested areas of the country. In May 1920, the government signed an agreement with Greece, whereby confirming the inclusion of Korçë in Albania, pending the expected French withdrawal. It also promised to respect ethnic, religious, and civic rights of the Greek minority. The most pressing problem remaining for the government was Vlorë, which had in the meantime been placed under Italian martial law. Bolstered by its recent successes and faced with Italian intransigence, the government broke off diplomatic negotiations with Italy and entrusted local strongmen to “voluntarily” gather forces and take the city. On June 2, nearly 4,000 volunteers, later increased to 10,000 from southern and central Albania began the battle for Vlorë. Half of the Italian forces in Albania, some 10,000 strong were invested in defending the city. The rest were thinly spread over the hinterland. The Albanians inflicted several defeats on the Italian outposts surrounding Vlorë, but they could not take the city. Facing growing public disorder at home, the Italian government entered into negotiations. On August 2, 1920, Italy agreed to transfer sovereignty of Vlorë to Albania. On September 2–​3, the last Italian troops left for Italy and Albanian civil administrators entered the city. Albania’s reaffirmation of its independence in 1920 came from the confluence of several domestic and international factors. Chief among these was the associational experience cultivated since the late Ottoman Empire.This experience taught the Albanians valuable lessons in how to organize, manage, finance, and it supplied a national political culture, an experience that did not exist prior to the in the 1880s. Their neighbors could look to their medieval kingdoms and religious sites to inform modern demands for their increased territories. Albanian political dynamics could not deploy these claims for expansion. Their focus remained by necessity inward, citing a national culture and building proto-​national institutions like the associations. The declaration of independence of 1912 was neither expected nor planned. When the Ottoman principle of imperial defense failed, the Albanians opted for European “membership” 170

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of Europe, which by virtue of representing “the civilized world” was held morally responsible for providing political protection to newly independent peoples. This was not provided, then or after the First World War. Then, the Entente’s failure at the Peace Conference to translate military victory in the First World War into a clear political victory undermined expectations for a new and equitable social and political order. This led the Albanians to reclaim in 1920 the same kind of internal momentum that had served them well during their recent Ottoman past.

Selected Readings Austin, Robert C. Founding a Balkan State: Albania’s Experiment with Democracy, 1920–​1925. Toronto, 2012. Fischer, Bernd. J. King Zog and the Struggle for Stability in Albania. Boulder, Colo., 1984. Guy, Nicola. The Birth of Albania: Ethnic Nationalism, the Great Powers of World War I and the Emergence of Albanian Independence. London, 2012. Heaton-​Armstrong, Duncan. The Six Months Kingdom: Albania 1914, eds., Gervase Belfield and Bejtullah Destani. London and New York, 2005. Pearson, Owen. Albania in the Twentieth Century, A History: Volume I: Albania and King Zog: Republic and Monarchy, 1908–​1939. London, 2004. Schmidt-​Neke, Michael. Entstehung und Ausbau der Königsdiktatur in Albanien 1912–​1939. Regierungsbildungen, Herrschaftsweise und Machteliten in einem jungen Balkanstaat. Munich, 1987. Vickers, Miranda. The Albanians: A Modern History. London and New York, 2004.

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17 GREECE FROM NATIONAL EXPANSION TO SCHISM AND CATASTROPHE, 1912–​1 922 Stefan Papaioannou

The First World War in Greece was but the middle of a wartime decade. The years 1912–​22 saw not only death and destruction but also fateful transformations in Greece’s borders, politics, and population. Greece roughly doubled its territory, acquiring western Thrace, scores of Aegean islands, and substantial parts of the regions of Epirus and Macedonia. The Balkan Wars of 1912–​13, the First World War, and the Greco-​Turkish War of 1919–​22 were not simply wars between soldiers; they entailed the killing and expulsion of non-​Greek populations from prewar and annexed Greek territories and an even larger influx into Greece of refugees from similar ethnic persecutions by opposing forces. These years also gave rise to a deep political divide, known as the National Schism, which would entrench a lasting pattern of popular polarization and violence in Greek political culture. Long years of political upheaval began in August 1909 when an officer-​led Military League, taking its cue from the Ottoman military’s role in the Young Turk revolution of a year earlier, aimed to upend perceived conservatism and clientelism in the political establishment through sweeping reforms. The movement soon placed at its head Eleftherios Venizelos, renowned for his bold leadership in Ottoman Crete for the island’s unification with the Greek state. Elected Prime Minister as head of his newly formed Liberal party in December 1910,Venizelos oversaw major revisions to the constitution and other reforms championed initially by the Military League. Yet he also asserted his independence from the League by granting amnesty and restoring to high positions key officials earlier ousted by the League. Greece’s longstanding national ambitions to incorporate Greeks across borders into a greater Greece, expressed in the phrase Megali Idea (Great Idea), served as an important point of consensus for the country’s major political factions. In Macedonia and Thrace especially, Greek irredentists had to contend not only with Ottoman sovereignty but also with rival nationalist claims from Bulgaria and Serbia over the allegiance of the Orthodox Christian population as well as with a movement for an autonomous or independent Macedonia. But simultaneous crises for the Ottoman regime  –​an Albanian insurrection beginning in 1910 and Italy’s invasion of Ottoman Tripolitania (Libya) in 1911 –​provided an incentive for the rival Balkan nation-​states to suppress their differences in order to take advantage of Ottoman vulnerability. A  Serbian-​Bulgarian alliance of March 1912 was followed by a Greek-​Bulgarian alliance agreement in May and then by less formal bilateral agreements involving Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro. Yet none of these treaties and 172

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agreements settled or even addressed overlapping claims on Ottoman territory between Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia in the event of victory over the Ottoman Empire.

The two Balkan Wars, 1912 and 1913 Rival ambitions for Ottoman territories were temporarily masked as Greece, along with its Bulgarian, Serbian, and Montenegrin allies, scored rapid and spectacular victories after their joint invasion of October 1912. Greece’s comparatively large navy played an important role in preventing the reinforcement of Ottoman troops in the European provinces by sea while conquering several Aegean islands for Greece. The Greek army, smaller than those of both Bulgaria and Serbia, pressed through northern Thessaly, southern Epirus, and much of southern Macedonia, entering the chief northern Aegean port city of Salonica on November 8, only hours before the arrival of the Bulgarian army. Prewar tensions between Balkan states soon resurfaced. On June 1, 1913, the very day after the Treaty of London ended the First Balkan War, Greece and Serbia signed the Treaty of Salonica to defend each other against a Bulgarian attack. Meanwhile both of their armies continued to infiltrate territory in Macedonia tenuously held by thinly spread Bulgarian troops. Reacting to continued provocations, Bulgaria launched a simultaneous offensive against Greece and Serbia on June 29, 1913, thus starting the Second Balkan War. The entry of both Romania and the Ottoman Empire into the war ensured the rapid collapse of the Bulgarian forces. The Treaty of Bucharest, signed on August 2, 1913, ended the Second Balkan War. Its terms added eastern Macedonian territory to Greece at the expense of Bulgaria. During the course of the two Balkan Wars between October 1912 and August 1913, Greece expanded both its territory and its population by over 60  percent. The Treaty of Bucharest awarded Greece the former Ottoman regions of southern Epirus to its northwest, southern Macedonia to its north, and the island of Crete. The Great Powers held back on the treaty’s promise of most other Aegean islands to Greece, as they insisted first on the withdrawal of Greek troops from northern Epirus –​a region the powers expected to constitute part of the emerging Albanian state. The roughly 1.7 million people Greece added to its population through its 1912–​3 conquests were much less homogeneous than its prewar population. By 1915, according to Ottoman government figures, over 120,000 Muslims –​whether Turkish, Albanian, or even Greek-​speaking  –​had been violently expelled or otherwise induced to flee the territories conquered by Greece. In Greek Macedonia, the prewar Muslim population had been reduced by as much as 25  percent through emigration and death. Greco-​Bulgarian hostilities in the Second Balkan War also induced tens of thousands of Orthodox Christians, presumed to have Bulgarian loyalties, to flee Greek Macedonia for Bulgaria; many others were killed deliberately if they did not flee. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Greek refugees were forced to flee analogous persecution in the Ottoman Empire and in Bulgaria’s newly conquered territories in Macedonia and Thrace. Mass expulsions of Greek Orthodox Christians from Ottoman western Anatolia began early in 1914. The Young Turk government ultimately sought a settlement involving an organized exchange of populations. Greek Orthodox Christians were to leave Anatolia for Greece, while Muslims still in Greece would leave for Ottoman resettlement, thereby making each of their populations more homogeneous. The mass expulsions proposed in 1914 were in part a tactic, successful as it turned out, to force the issue and bring Venizelos to the table. The two countries reached an accord on voluntary exchange of populations in July 1914, which stipulated that a mixed commission would determine the desires of members of the two populations regarding whether they wanted to emigrate or remain in their homes. This accord was never ratified, as 173

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the outbreak of the First World War soon intervened.Yet it set an important precedent for more comprehensive bilateral agreements to exchange populations at the close of the war decade.

The First World War from the National Schism to the Salonica Front Greece’s peculiarly gradual embroilment in the First World War, unlike its experience with the Balkan Wars, was the source of bitter domestic controversy. By 1915, it had spiraled into the so-​ called National Schism, a political cleavage that helped normalize violence and polarize Greek politics over the next generation. The Schism has often been misrepresented as driven by the fundamentally irreconcilable views and ambitions of Prime Minister Venizelos and Constantine I, Greece’s King since March 1913. Despite the “liberal” name of Venizelos’s party and the frequent reference to Venizelos’s opponents as “royalists,” the Schism did not reflect such a straightforward political division. Supporters of Venizelos were not consistently republicans, and Venizelos himself supported the monarchy as an institution in principle. Anti-​Venizelists often promoted policies comparably liberal to those of Venizelists. Constantine’s and Venizelos’s positions as the war began were not diametrically opposed as commonly depicted. Constantine’s marriage to the sister of Kaiser Wilhelm and earlier German military training notwithstanding, his general preference to keep Greece neutral was based on his estimation of Greece’s best interests rather than a presumed pro-​German orientation, he never considered allying with Germany. Constantine did entertain joining the Entente under certain scenarios, yet he worried both about the conditions imposed upon Greece in such an alliance and about what Greece stood to lose in the event of defeat. For his part, Venizelos sought Greece’s participation with the Entente but not unconditionally. He was more confident in the prospects for an Entente victory and in the possibility of realizing major goals of the Megali Idea through territorial gains in Greek-​populated areas of Ottoman Anatolia. Nevertheless, the enormous stakes for Greece involved in joining the Entente or staying neutral fed the existing divisions between followers and opponents of Venizelos. Repeated violations of Greece’s neutrality by both the Central and Allied Powers between 1915 and 1917 would also provide fuel for escalating accusations between Venizelists and anti-​Venizelists. Germany was the first power to try to enlist Greece after the opening of hostilities in 1914, as its Kaiser asked for Greece’s aid against Serbia on July 31 and again on August 4. Both times, King Constantine declined the German overtures, stating that neutrality was in Greece’s best interest and pointing out his country’s vulnerability to the powerful British navy. The Entente was by comparison slow to court Greece. When Venizelos approached Britain on August 18, offering to contribute all of Greece’s armed forces to the Entente effort, British Foreign Minister Edward Grey declined, concerned that this would lead to an Ottoman or Bulgarian alliance with the Central Powers. The Ottoman entry on the side of the Central Powers at the end of October 1914 increased Entente interest in Greece’s cooperation, though as-​ yet uncommitted Bulgaria remained a major concern. On January 23, 1915, Grey attempted to unite the Balkan states behind the Entente with a proposal that Greece support Serbian territorial concessions to Bulgaria; Greece would be compensated in the event of Allied victory with the acquisition of “northern Epirus” (southern Albania) and an undefined part of the Anatolian coast. With an eye toward the large concentrations of persecuted Greek Orthodox in the latter region,Venizelos was inclined to accept this offer. His memorandum to Constantine on the subject indicated Venizelos’s willingness to cede to Bulgaria the eastern part of Aegean Macedonia, freshly won

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in the Balkan Wars, in return for the prospect of gains in Anatolia and northern Epirus. As the Anglo-​French naval bombardment of the Dardanelles commenced in mid-​February,Venizelos again lobbied for Greek participation. Constantine rejected the idea on his generals’ advice that the Dardanelles campaign would fail while, without any explicit guarantees of protection from the Allies, Greece would be left vulnerable to Bulgarian invasion with her forces diverted. Venizelos persuaded Constantine only to mobilize the Greek army to guard against the possibility of a Bulgarian invasion.Yet the reluctance to bring Greece in also came from parts of the Entente; Russia herself rejected Venizelos’s March offer to send three divisions to approach the Gallipoli peninsula by land, wanting to preclude a rival claimant to Constantinople. Frustrated with Constantine’s apparent resistance to alliance with the Entente,Venizelos submitted his resignation on March 6, 1915. Yet Constantine did not in fact categorically oppose any scenario for cooperation with the Entente. He backed a March 22 proposal under his new Prime Minister to support the Entente on the condition Greece be guaranteed against any Bulgarian territorial ambitions, even sending Prince George to Paris to make the offer personally. The Entente again declined this proposal, insisting as a condition of alliance that Greece be willing to cede some of its territory to Bulgaria in the event that Bulgaria entered the war on the side of the Entente. In June 1915, Venizelos’s continued popularity propelled him again to victory in the elections prompted by his March resignation. His return set the stage for further clashes between followers of the King and the Prime Minister over the direction of foreign policy. Entente hopes to woo Bulgaria were finally dashed on September 22, 1915, when Bulgaria began a general mobilization against Serbia. Serbia now appealed to Greece for military assistance according to their June 1913 treaty, but Greece’s reply was muddled by its internal political rift.Venizelos invited France and Britain to land troops at Salonica to help counter the expected Bulgarian-​German-​Austrian invasion of Serbia. After Entente troops began to land on October 2, Venizelos called on parliament for Greek troops to be sent to aid the Anglo-​ French effort. As Constantine continued to reject the idea absent clear Entente guarantees of Greece’s territorial integrity,Venizelos tendered his resignation for the second time in the year. He and his party refused to participate in the new December elections, declaring the results invalid as 68 percent of the electorate abstained. Once the King’s allies had won the election and overwhelming control of parliament by default, they also proceeded to purge Venizelist officers and civil servants from their positions. For the embittered Venizelists as well, the purges set an ominous precedent for how new governments would deal with political opponents in future transfers of power. In the meantime, the 20,000 Entente troops at Salonica, which under French General Maurice Sarrail had pushed northward in October 1915 to counter the Central Power and Bulgarian invasion of Serbia, were forced to retreat behind Greek borders by the end of November. Over the strenuous protests of the pro-​Constantine government at the violation of neutral Greece’s territory, they encamped around Salonica. Their numbers swelled to 150,000 by the end of December when joined by British and Australian troops remaining from the failed amphibious landing at Gallipoli. In May 1916, Sarrail prepared for an offensive against German and Bulgarian troops on the Macedonian front moving troops up to selected points on the northwestern border of Greek Macedonia. Bulgarian and German units crossed the same 1913 post-​Balkan War border into Greece at other points to the east in response. Constantine and his Prime Minister directed the Greek army not to resist the Bulgarian-​German advances, ceding the strategic Fort Roupel on May 23 with only a formal protest to the Central Powers for their violation of Greece’s neutrality.

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Constantine justified his concessions as necessary to maintain Greece’s neutrality after it had allowed Entente forces to occupy much of Macedonia as well as several Greek islands.They were decried by Venizelists as a betrayal of the costly 1913 victories against Bulgaria. For their part, the Entente Powers retaliated with a blockade of Greece and demands that Constantine demobilize the Greek army and call new parliamentary elections. Constantine complied with these demands and named Alexandros Zaimis, acknowledged to be sympathetic to the Entente, to head a caretaker government.Tensions nevertheless escalated again in August 1916. Anticipating a planned Entente offensive, the Bulgarians and the Central Powers attacked Franco-​Serb forces in western Greek Macedonia and advanced further into the eastern Macedonian territory still under Greek military control. Bulgaria and Germany issued guarantees to Greece that these advances were directed against threats from the Entente and implied no claims on Greek territory. Constantine again ordered Greek troops not to resist, allowing the port of Kavalla and the market towns of Drama and Serres to come under mainly Bulgarian occupation by September 11. The Athens government, with approval from Constantine, again proposed alliance with the Entente. This time the proposal was rejected by Italy, which had its own postwar designs on areas such as Epirus, the Dodecanese islands, and Asia Minor. It did not want to contend with Greece’s competing claims. Nor would France guarantee Greece’s current borders. Constantine’s concessions to Bulgaria and Germany were seen as humiliating capitulations by Venizelists. They endorsed a revolt by Greek officers stationed in Salonica, demanding a declaration of war against the Central Powers and calling their movement National Defense. Venizelos himself soon took leadership of their movement. He landed in Salonica on October 9, 1916, and established a Provisional Government, opposed to the one in Athens, headed by a triumvirate also including General Panagiotis Dagklis and Admiral Pavlos Koundouriotis. By November, the Salonica government had raised three battalions to serve with Entente forces on the Macedonian front. Most Greek troops stationed in the area, excluding those already expelled by Sarrail for their support of the King, volunteered to fight. An effort to conscript local young men, many of whom did not consider themselves to be Greek, met with much more resistance. Distrusting the Athens government, the Entente continued to escalate its demands. By early November 1916, Constantine had agreed to surrender the entire Greek fleet and place railroads, telegraphs, and the mail system under Entente control.Yet when Constantine’s Prime Minister refused a demand to surrender all Greek war materiel in compensation for that which Greece had left to the Central Powers, French and British marines landed in the port of Piraeus on December 1. They began to march toward Athens, expecting no opposition. They were instead ambushed by Greek troops. The ensuing skirmishes killed or wounded around 200, mostly French troops, before the Entente forces withdrew to their naval vessels. Angry, at perceived Venezelist complicity, the paramilitary Panhellenic Reservists Union, comprised of recently demobilized supporters of the King, led several days of deadly rioting in Athens. In response, the Entente Powers tightened their blockade of Constantine’s Greece, depriving it of grain and fuel shipments. The ensuing hunger, sickness, and unemployment burdened a considerable part of the population in Athens and in the countryside.The Entente also issued a series of further demands, which were finally accepted by Constantine on January 13. Among the concessions, Constantine’s government withdrew all Greek troops into the Peloponnese, issued a formal apology, and undertook to compensate all Entente and Venizelist victims of the recent skirmishes and riots. It promised to prosecute those responsible and ordered the disarming of all civilians. A British decision in May 1917 to redeploy a large number of its troops from the Balkans to the Middle East risked leaving the remaining forces, mainly French and Serbian, exposed to the army 176

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of the still-​distrusted royalist government in Athens. The French and British command decided to ouster King Constantine by force, advancing south through Thessaly where they seized the crucial grain crop and threatening to bombard Athens unless he agreed to abdicate. Constantine fled Greece without formally abdicating. His second son Alexander, viewed as less hostile to the Entente than his older brother, was installed as King, an act never accepted as legitimate by the Greek royal family. Italy and Russia had not approved of the Anglo-​French action. They worried correctly that this would bring Venizelos to power and bring Greece into the war as an ally whose territorial aspirations in Asia Minor, the Straits, and Epirus would conflict with their own claims. Back in Athens, Venizelos was named Prime Minister of a reunited Greece on June 27. He recalled the parliament of June 1915 that had been the result of a landslide victory for Venizelos’s Liberals, voiding the December 1915 election and declaring its parliament the illegitimate result of an unconstitutional process. They began purging civil servants and officers perceived to have backed King Constantine. The purges extended to clerics of the Orthodox Church (whose leaders had excommunicated Venizelos in December 1916), to university professors, and to local mayors. At Venizelos’s behest, Parliament also exiled anti-​Venizelists believed to be prominent Germanophiles, including Ion Dragoumis, former Prime Minister Dimitrios Gounaris, and General Metaxas to Corsica to be kept under French supervision. Other prominent anti-​Venizelists were placed under effective house arrest. Following on the previous purges of Venizelists when anti-​Venizelists took power in the December 1915 elections, this pattern would continue through the interwar period, of thorough purges and counter-​purges as Venizelists and anti-​Venizelists alternately came to power.The National Schism thus took on an uncompromising character, relatively detached from domestic policy questions and emanating more from the dependence of many livelihoods upon who was in power, feelings of fierce party loyalty, and the tendency toward recriminations when national setbacks occurred. Venizelos could now bring Greece formally into the war on the Entente side. The announcement was not accompanied by any military initiatives, as France and Britain showed little initial interest in readying Greece’s army for participation.Venizelos saw what Greece’s lack of military participation would mean for its prospects of advancing postwar claims. He finally ordered a general mobilization of Greek forces in January 1918. France and Britain, still trying to negotiate a separate peace with Bulgaria, did not initially respond to Venizelos’s pleas for formal guarantees of Greece’s prewar boundaries. By April, the overtures to Bulgaria had failed, and the Entente and its Serbian allies prepared a major offensive in Macedonia.They now stated their intention to “devote their efforts to the liberation of Greek territory and to the defense of all Greeks against attempts of oppression, persecution, and servitude,” though including no specific statement regarding Greek territorial claims outside its prewar borders. The Bulgarian and Central Power armies on the Macedonian front began to disintegrate during the summer months due to desertion, undersupply, and sickness. Greek participation was crucial in the Allies’ decisive general offensive launched on September 15, 1918. Nine Greek divisions, along with another nine from France and Serbia broke through and forced Bulgaria to sign an armistice on September 29. The rest of the Central Powers capitulated shortly afterward. Between two thirds and three quarters of over 40,000 Greek civilians deported from eastern Macedonia by occupying Bulgarian forces to locations in Bulgaria’s interior now returned, most of the rest having perished in Bulgarian concentration camps.The Treaty of Neuilly with Bulgaria on November 27, 1919, provided for a voluntary exchange of minorities between Greece and Bulgaria. This agreement eventually led to the emigration of over 50,000 people from Greece to Bulgaria and 30,000 from Bulgaria to Greece, adding to the tens of thousands who had fled as refugees between the two countries in the preceding wars. 177

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The Anatolian campaign and catastrophe, 1919–​1922 Yet the war was far from over for Greece. In January 1919, Venizelos sent two divisions to Ukraine in the Entente’s doomed effort to defeat the Bolshevik forces.Venizelos hoped to gain recognition as a valued partner through this initiative. At the Paris Peace Conference, he marshaled Greece’s arguments for its territorial enlargement to include additional areas of Greek settlement on the Wilsonian principle of national self-​determination. His vision of an enlarged Greece included the western coastal region of Anatolia, (including its port city of Izmir), Aegean islands still under Ottoman suzerainty or occupied by Italy, all of Thrace (the western half to be annexed from Bulgaria, the eastern half from the Ottoman Empire), and “Northern Epirus” (to be detached from Albania). Drawing on the precedent of the aborted 1914 Greco-​Ottoman agreement, Venizelos assumed that the large Greek Orthodox population left under Ottoman rule would be exchanged with the equally large Muslim population residing within the new Greek borders. In fact, Christians outnumbered Muslims in the zone of Asia Minor claimed by Venizelos only if the adjacent, overwhelmingly Greek, eastern Aegean islands were included. Italy objected to Venizelos’s proposal from the outset, and in May 1919 preemptively landed troops in southwestern Anatolia, a region the Entente had promised to Italy upon its entry into the war in 1915. Italy’s move displeased the United States, France, and Britain, the latter two seeing it as a threat to their own postwar ambitions in the wider Middle East. To provide a counterweight to potential Italian hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean, the British, American, and French leaders explicitly encouraged Venizelos to land Greek troops in Smyrna (Izmir in Turkish), as French and British forces took control of southern and northern parts of Anatolia. The Greek landing on May 15, 1919, was accompanied almost immediately by killings of Ottoman soldiers taken prisoner and local Muslims by ill-​disciplined troops and revenge-​seeking local Greeks, leading to some 350 fatalities. The high commissioner for the Greek occupation appointed by Venizelos, Aristeidis Stergiadis, attempted energetically to stabilize the situation, court martialing perpetrators of atrocities and providing compensation to victims’ families. Yet he also directed the repatriation of 120,000 Greeks who had fled or been expelled from the region by Ottoman forces over the previous few years. These were promptly settled on land vacated by Muslims whenever they fled harassment by Greek troops or irregular armed bands. Where Greek troops were few, the more numerous Turks formed armed bands and raided Greek settlements. In the long run, Stergiadis was unable to rein in the resulting civil war. The ongoing disturbances and the presence of Greek troops in the Ottoman heartland fueled the spread of the nascent Turkish nationalist movement being organized by Ottoman General Mustafa Kemal in eastern Anatolia. As Kemal’s movement gathered strength, it inflicted a defeat on French forces in Cilicia in March 1920 and then threatened British positions in northwestern Anatolia and the international zone around Constantinople. Greek forces were spread even more thinly after being called upon to extend their lines northward in order to help shore up the British zone. The Treaty of Sèvres signed on August 10, 1920, ostensibly the final settlement between the Ottoman Empire and the Entente Powers, had given Greece almost all of Thrace and the Aegean islands, as well as effective rule over the region surrounding Smyrna in Anatolia. France and Italy contented themselves with zones of economic influence in Anatolia rather than annexation, signaling their decreased commitment to the effort to hold territory against a determined Turkish nationalist movement. The Sèvres treaty was soon a dead letter, as Kemal prevented the treaty’s ratification by the Ottoman Senate.

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By October 1920, 150,000 Greek troops were spread along a long front in Anatolia and facing the steadily strengthening Turkish nationalist forces. Meanwhile Britain, the most consistent backer of a Greek presence in Asia Minor, declined to furnish financial support for the continued occupation and a potential offensive to eliminate the threat from Kemal’s forces. War weariness in Greece contributed to Venizelos’ resounding defeat in the November 1920 elections. He was portrayed as the chief architect of Greece’s costly and inconclusive military ventures of the past three years. On December 5, a fraudulent plebiscite decided 99 percent in favor of restoring Constantine to the Greek throne, with a majority of the public probably supporting his return. Though Constantine and his supporters in the newly elected government declared their unswerving loyalty to Greece’s wartime allies, the Entente Powers issued a communiqué stating that they regarded Constantine’s restoration “as a ratification by Greece of his hostile acts” and that they “reserve[d]‌to themselves complete liberty in dealing with the situation thus created.” Though genuinely distrustful of Constantine, Italy and France also found the change of government useful as grounds to back away from commitments to support Greece’s presence in Anatolia. They disengaged from their own occupations there, even selling arms to Kemal’s forces. At a conference in London in February 1921, the Entente allies unsuccessfully pressed Greece to make concessions in Asia Minor to Kemal’s representatives. In April, they declared their neutrality in the brewing Greco-​Turkish conflict. Despite war weariness and vanishing foreign support, the anti-​Venizelist governments under the restored King Constantine retained Venizelos’s basic objective of securing the western coastal region of Anatolia for Greece.Voluntary withdrawal from Anatolia would not only expose the government to accusations of national surrender but would leave hundreds of thousands of Anatolian Greek Orthodox vulnerable to almost certain attack. In March 1921, French withdrawal from its zone of Anatolia seemed imminent and Greek forces stood to be further exposed. The Greek command responded by urging an offensive to defeat Kemal’s forces once and for all as a threat to Greece’s claims under the Sèvres treaty. But Turkish nationalist forces had in the meantime coalesced into a highly motivated, well-​organized regular army. A multi-​front Greek attack launched on March 23, 1921, was soon rebuffed at all points. A major offensive beginning on July 10 did force Kemal’s forces to retreat.Yet his orderly withdrawal to a line preserving his base in Ankara left the bulk of his army intact while he continued to recruit more soldiers and amass arms. Greece’s attempt in August to take Ankara and thus deal a crippling blow to Turkish forces stalled. Greek troops regrouped behind a shorter front that commanders hoped would be more defensible but were left further exposed in October. Under its separate agreement with Kemal, France withdraw all troops from Anatolia and left substantial arms and supplies to be claimed by the Turkish army. Kemal’s army now had an unmistakable advantage, and his confidence grew. He rejected a British proposal in March 1922 under which Greece would withdraw but Greek-​populated areas of Anatolia would instead by administered as a League of Nations protectorate. Kemal insisted that Greece begin withdrawing all its troops as a precondition for any negotiations as he prepared for his own offensive, launched on August 26. Within a month his army drove Greek forces, ten divisions stretched thinly along a vast front in the heartland of Anatolia with only two in reserve, back to the coast. Greek and Armenian civilians fled for their lives along with the army, complicating efforts at an orderly retreat. By September 8, Greek state forces had withdrawn from their administrative base in Smyrna where they left the large Christian population unprotected. Turkish forces began massacring the city’s Greek Orthodox inhabitants on September 11. Two days later, they systematically set fire to Smyrna’s Greek and Armenian quarters, killing over 25,000 inhabitants. Two hundred thousand more

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attempted to flee to the neighboring Greek islands on anything that would float. They were among the roughly 1 million Greek Orthodox refugees, not only from the Anatolian west coast region but also from the Pontus region to the northeast and from eastern Thrace, who arrived in the wake of the rout of Greek forces in 1922. Recriminations in Greece, further poisoning the political atmosphere initiated by the National Schism, now followed after the collapse of Greek forces and the effective end of most of the Greek presence in Anatolia in what Greeks have since called the Asia Minor Catastrophe. The anti-​Venizelists in power during the collapse were made the logical culprits. Pressured by high-​ranking Venizelist military leaders, the government ministers resigned and King Constantine abdicated on September 27, 1922. He fled into exile leaving the way open for his son George to assume the throne. On November 28, six leading figures associated with the recent anti-​Venizelist governments and military command, including two prime ministers, were executed after show trials on charges of high treason. Upon the Armistice of Mudania signed with Kemal’s forces on October 11, 1922, Greek forces withdrew completely from Anatolia and to the west of the Maritsa River in Thrace, establishing Greece’s present-​ day boundaries, excepting only the islands ceded by Italy after the Second World War. The Treaty of Lausanne of the following year would confirm this territorial settlement, in addition to legalizing and regulating the euphemistically termed “exchange” of Orthodox Christian populations in Turkey for Muslim populations in Greece. The challenges of integration posed by the large refugee population accumulated over ten years of war would, during the interwar period, further complicate a polarized political culture inherited from the years of Greece’s National Schism.

Selected Readings Dakin, Douglas. The Unification of Greece, 1770–​1923. London, 1972. Dragostinova, Theodora. Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900–​1949. Ithaca, NY, 2011. Kitromilides, Paschalis, ed. Eleftherios Venizelos: The Trials of Statesmanship. Edinburgh, 2006. Ladas, Stephen P. The Exchange of Minorities: Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. New York, 1932. Leon, George B. Greece and the First World War: From Neutrality to Intervention, 1917–​1918. New York, 1990. Mavrogordatos, George T. Stillborn Republic:  Social Coalitions and Party Strategies in Greece, 1922–​1936. Berkeley, Calif., 1983. Mitrakos, Alexander S. France in Greece during World War I: A Study in the Politics of Power. New York, 1982. Pentzopoulos, Dimitri. The Balkan Exchange of Minorities and its Impact on Greece. London, 2002. Smith, Michael Llewellyn. Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor, 1919–​1922. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1998.

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18 HABSBURG SOUTH SLAVS IN PEACE AND WAR, 1912–​1 918 Rok Stergar

South Slavs lived in both halves of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-​Hungary and in Bosnia-​ Herzegovina, administered jointly by Austria-​Hungary since occupation in 1878 and annexation in 1908. Their shares in the provincial population varied from an overwhelming majority in Bosnia-​Herzegovina, Croatia-​Slavonia, Dalmatia, and Carniola, to a slight majority in the Adriatic Littoral, a plurality in southern Hungary (roughly today’s Vojvodina and Banat), and a significant minority in Styria and Carinthia. Importantly, the South Slav linguistic continuum did not end at the Southeastern border of Austria-​Hungary but continued into neighboring Serbia, Montenegro, and further to Ottoman Macedonia and Bulgaria. A majority of the almost 7  million Habsburg South Slavs were Roman Catholic, also including some Uniate communities. Some 2  million were Orthodox, and about a third, that is more than 600,000, of South Slavs in Bosnia-​ Herzegovina were Muslim. There was also a small Jewish minority and smaller communities belonging to various Protestant denominations. After the turn of the twentieth century, nationalism was firmly established among the political elites of this heterogeneous population, and nation became an important mode of group building. Nationalists were increasingly able to mobilize the middle classes, and a rising number of workers and peasants. However, identification with a nation remained contingent and situational; while national identification and categorization were fairly common, they were far from universal. Often, provincial, regional, and local categories of identification were more relevant than national. While Serb and Croat nationalists competed for the South Slav speakers’ allegiance in southern Hungary, and the budding Yugoslav nationalists were convinced they were all Yugoslavs, many of them actually preferred to identify as Bunjevci or Šokci. Similarly, some South Slavs in Istria declined to identify either as Croats or Slovenes and certainly did not support the Yugoslav movement; they rather identified as Illyrians or (Slav) Istrians. And in south Styria, a good number refused to align themselves with the Slovene national movement –​even if they sometimes called themselves Slovenes –​and voted for a Slav Styrian regionalist party.

Yugoslav nationalism and its rivals before and during the Balkan Wars While Austria-​Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia-​Herzegovina in 1908 turned Serbia back to its own ethnic nationalism, a surge of enthusiasm for Yugoslav nationalism continued in the 181

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monarchy’s South Slav population. In Croatia-​Slavonia, the so-​called New Course from 1905 had helped establish enough collaboration between several Croat and Serb parties to found the so-​called Croat-​Serb Coalition. In that context, the notion that Croats and Serbs are just parts of the Yugoslav nation gained traction; the idea was not new but had lost a lot of currency when Croat and Serb parties engaged in political battles during preceding decades. Integral or unitary Yugoslav nationalism, which did not acknowledge any separate subcategories, now became more attractive to politically active young people.The so-​called nationalist youth comprised various groups, which rejected “tribal” identifications and identified with the unitary Yugoslav nation. Paradoxically, one of the most active groups within this heterogeneous movement was Young Croatia, which evolved from the youth of the Pure Party of Right, the most Serbophobe among several splinter groups that grew out of the original Party of Right. These high school and university students came to the conclusion that Croat and Serbian nationalists were essentially talking about the same people even if they were using two different names. Hence, conflicts could be easily avoided by abandoning competing “tribal” nationalisms and choosing unitary Yugoslavism. After 1909, Slovene national radicals, an informal organization of liberal youth, and Bosnian Serbo-​Croat Progressive Youth, founded in 1911, also came to share similar beliefs. These ideas did not remain limited to the youth movement. Speaking in the provincial diet in 1910, the leader of the Croat National Society in Bosnia-​Herzegovina, Nikola Mandić, stated that Croats and Serbs share common “blood” and a common language, and are only separated by names. This, Mandić added, should be rectified and “national unity” achieved. Some Slovene speakers, mostly coming from the liberal camp, also supported unitary Yugoslavism and were ready to give up Slovene and switch to Serbo-​Croat to further the goal of “national unity.” In April 1913, the executive board of the National Progressive Party, the Slovene liberal party from Carniola, announced that they would strive for a “political and cultural unification of all the Austro-​Hungarian Yugoslavs.” When the journal Veda (Science) asked 20 prominent Slovene writers and scholars about the fate of the Slovene language, seven of them answered that it should be abandoned, because Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs were culturally a single nation. One stimulus for this surge of Yugoslav nationalism came from developments in neighboring Serbia. There, the Karadjordjević dynasty, which had replaced the pro-​Austrian House of Obrenović after the bloody coup of 1903, charted a confrontational course against the Dual Monarchy. More attractive to the monarchy’s South Slavs under a new constitution and civil liberties, Belgrade’s own civil society reached out to them with hopes for an idealistic Yugoslavism of all the South Slavs. For irredentist Serbian politicians, though, Yugoslavism was mostly a useful tool to position Serbia as the “Yugoslav Piedmont,” tactically pushing the efforts to create a Greater Serbia to the background. They supported pro-​Yugoslav organizations, press, and individuals in the Habsburg Empire. After the Austro-Hungarian annexation of BosniaHerzegovina in 1908, however, Greater Serbia regained its precedence. Serbian irredentism also came back to the fore in Belgrade’s official activities among the Orthodox South Slavs, particularly in Bosnia. Serbia nonetheless remained an important center piece for Yugoslav nationalism and many nationalists from the Habsburg Empire started looking toward Serbia for support and inspiration even if they did not necessarily support the dismemberment of Austria-​Hungary and the creation of a Yugoslav nation-​state. Yugoslav nationalism still coexisted in the Dual Monarchy with imperial patriotism and dynastic loyalty; nationalists seeking full independence or incorporation with Serbia were a small minority. Unsurprisingly, Serbian and Montenegrin (and Bulgarian) victories in the First Balkan War caused a virtual euphoria among Habsburg South Slavs. For the writer Ivan Cankar this was the “Yugoslav Easter,” a moment the South Slavs rose from the grave and were reborn. Not only 182

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nationalist activists, but also many ordinary people were overjoyed  –​not least because anti-​ Muslim sentiment was widespread. Individuals, who previously did not identify as Yugoslavs, and even people, who rarely identified with any nation, were cheering Serbian and Montenegrin victories in the Balkans as if they were their own. Large donations were gathered for the Serbian Red Cross, mass demonstrations in support of Serbia and Montenegro held, and several hundred volunteers crossed the border to join the Serbian army.The Second Balkan War, when two South Slav states –​Serbia and Bulgaria –​fought each other, dampened this enthusiasm somewhat, yet some of it persisted. Not only had Yugoslav nationalism –​in all its variations –​become more relevant and was able to mobilize larger numbers, there were other changes too. Among the Orthodox South Slavs in the Habsburg Empire, Serb nationalism and irredentism gained strength, while the anti-​Serb strands of Croat nationalism found themselves on the defensive. In April 1913, the paper Hrvatska (Croatia) stated that a clear change from Serbophobia to Serbophilia could be observed among Croats. During the Balkan Wars, the monarchy responded harshly in its borderlands with arrests, censorship of newspapers, disbanding of societies, suspension of the Serbian Orthodox Church’s autonomy in Hungary, and the proclamation of a state of emergency in Bosnia-​Herzegovina in May 1913. However, disproportionate reactions of civilian and military authorities actually encouraged and often radicalized Yugoslav nationalism. Because of these oppressive measures, the feeling, not entirely unfounded, grew stronger that Austria-​Hungary did not treat all its citizens equally, that it was persecuting its South Slavs, and that their existence as a nation was under threat. Consequently, increasing numbers really did start looking across the border, toward Belgrade, for a solution. Still, such ideas were hardly accepted widely. Even among the politically active population, opponents of Yugoslavism and those who rejected its irredentist version were well represented. The Croat Pure Party of Right, led by the rabidly Serbophobe lawyer Josip Frank, rejected all versions of Yugoslavism and insisted that only autonomous and enlarged Croatia within a reformed Habsburg Empire is the way forward. Party newspapers and supporters kept up with the anti-​Serb propaganda into 1912.They continued to deny the existence of Serbs or any other nation within the borders of their imagined Croatia. As the public mood changed after the First Balkan War, the party was increasingly marginalized and forced to merge into the newly united Party of Right, which was more conciliatory. A police informant’s report from 1913 claimed, that all the political groups of any standing in Croatia-​Slavonia supported “Croat-​Serb,” i.e. Yugoslav, nationalism. Yet anti-​Serb views and rejection of any Yugoslavism still had support in Croatia-​Slavonia. In 1913, those opposing the collaboration with the Serbs and the Yugoslav course again seceded from the united Party of Right and reestablished the Pure Party of Right; a group in Dalmatia also shared their platform. Similar ideas were circulating in Bosnia-​Herzegovina, where the Catholic Archbishop of Sarajevo, Josip Stadler, and his political fellow travelers supported Greater Croat nationalism strongly tied to Catholicism.While their paper, Hrvatski dnevnik (The Croat Daily), initially showed enthusiasm for Serb victories in the First Balkan War, it quickly reversed course and started publishing anti-​Serb and pro-​Ottoman articles. The largest Slovene party, the Slovene People’s Party, was a close ally of the Party of Right, both parties even merged in 1912. Believing that Slovenes cannot survive as a separate nation and as Habsburg loyalists, its leaders were pinning their hopes on a Catholic-​ dominated Habsburg South Slav state “from Trieste to the Drina,” as one of them put it in 1909. Greater Croatia seemed like a good approximation, especially as rumors were constantly circulating that Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne, favored its establishment as the third part of Austria-​ Hungary. Consequently, the People’s Party went along with the equation of the South Slavs 183

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with Croats, its leaders announcing that the Slovenes were in fact a component of the Croat “political nation.” They were, however, less anti-​Serb than their Croat partners. There was a lot of enthusiasm for Serb victories in the First Balkan War among the party rank-​and-​file and even on the pages of Slovenec (The Slovene), the People’s Party daily. So much so that the leader of the party, Ivan Šusteršič, felt the need to publicly denounce such “childish” enthusiasm and stress the party’s loyalty to the Empire. He could not entirely banish sympathies for the Serbs from the party, but the overwhelming majority of its supporters certainly rejected irredentism and could only envision a future in a Habsburg South Slav state. This was true for several other political parties and their supporters. While some Slovene liberals started to flirt with irredentist Yugoslavism, one of their leaders, the mayor of Ljubljana Ivan Tavčar, clearly rejected any solutions that would involve the dismemberment of Austria-​ Hungary. The South Slav labor movement and its organizations also opposed irredentism and stressed the advantages that a reformed Central European polity would bring to all its inhabitants, especially workers. Stjepan Radić, the leader of the nascent peasant movement in Croatia-​Slavonia was also convinced that only a federalized Habsburg Empire made sense for his constituents. He was one of those who –​while they believed that Yugoslavs are one nation  –​rejected the total cultural and linguistic homogenization with an abandonment of “tribal” identifications. Indeed, even while enthusiasm for unitary Yugoslavism was rising in the middle class and especially among the educated elites, it was far from universally accepted. Of all the South Slavs, Muslims were perhaps the least likely to identify as Yugoslavs. In fact, among them, identification with religion and not nation was still dominant. There were some who identified as Serbs; a number of youths were active in Serb irredentist and Yugoslav nationalist groups. Others identified as Croats, but their numbers quickly diminished when Croat nationalists increasingly allied themselves with Catholicism. The project of a multi-​religious Bosniak nation, which the Habsburg authorities had been promoting for a time, also found some supporters among Muslim elites. During the Balkan Wars, Muslims, already mostly reconciled with Habsburg rule, had to give up any lingering hopes that the Ottoman Empire might regain sovereignty over Bosnia-​ Herzegovina. At the same time, they had to face the triumphs of the Orthodox states’ alliance and the rise of Yugoslav nationalism and Serbian irredentism. While many of their Orthodox and Catholic neighbors were triumphant, a significant part of Muslims sympathized with the Ottoman Empire, the preeminent Islamic power. A few hundred volunteers even joined the Ottoman army. The limits of ethnolinguistic nationalism were very apparent in the case of Bosnian Muslims; with a few exceptions they felt solidarity with coreligionists and not their supposed co-​nationals. Religious allegiance was important for others, too. Despite the surge of nationalism, many still saw the Balkan Wars primarily as a conflict between Muslims (“Turks”) and Christians. Mass politicization did increase as the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy introduced universal male suffrage in 1907, and the franchise was slowly expanded in Hungary. All the same, mass identification with any nation –​be it Slovene, Serb, Croat, or Yugoslav –​was not permanent or all encompassing before the First World War. Nationalism was still mostly limited to the educated middle classes and only occasionally resonated among the peasants, urban lower classes, or workers. For an illiterate peasant from the Dalmatian hinterland or a maid, earning her living in one of the towns, other concerns were often more pressing and other modes of group formation more pertinent. Even the middle classes did not always and unreservedly subscribe to nationalist agendas. Economic interests, scholarly ambitions, or non-​national identifications limited the reach and importance of nationalisms. The more radical, anti-​Habsburg, versions could only mobilize a few. Even people, who supported the creation of a South Slav state, 184

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mostly thought of a Habsburg South Slav state. After all, most people, nationalists included, were embedded in the existing state in myriad ways. This did not exclude those who identified as Serbs, even if for obvious reasons irredentist solutions had more support among them. As the summer of 1914 began, the South Slavs of Austria-​Hungary for the most part went about their daily lives without much regard for their supposed nation-​ness.The surge of enthusiasm, so apparent a year and half ago, had subsided, and there were other things to worry or care about; there were other issues that mattered. Most nationalists were still searching for solutions within the Habsburg framework. Even the Serbian government counseled caution and advised against radicalism. Yet, it was precisely the radicals, who were willing and able to change this dynamic, as the events of June 28, 1914, clearly demonstrated.

1914–​1915: the World War begins The assassination of the heir-​apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo came as a shock. Not unexpectedly, consternation was dominant in the public sphere. Even the Serb press in the Monarchy denounced it, also trying to calm tempers. In private, reactions were not so unanimous, yet bewilderment and anxiety still prevailed. A high school student from Celje, a previous supporter of the anti-​Habsburg Yugoslav youth movement, wrote in his diary that the assassin should be “swung by his heels over a fire.” Moreover, there was an almost complete consensus that Serbia was behind the assassination and that it needed to be punished. Not surprisingly, the outrage was most pronounced among Habsburg loyalists, and especially in those political circles that had hoped to accomplish their trialist plans with the Archduke’s help. Frustration gave way to anger, and the leaders and supporters of the Pure Party of Right and the Slovene People’s Party quickly moved from expressions of grief to anti-​Serb propaganda. Their statements did little to distinguish between Habsburg Serbs and Serbia, between Serb nationalists and Orthodox masses, between loyal citizens and irredentists. This intolerance helped spread and worsen what were initially spontaneous anti-​Serb demonstrations. Pogroms started in Bosnia-​Herzegovina, Dalmatia, and Croatia-​Slavonia immediately after the assassination. As the authorities stood by or even helped fuel the flames, the limits of the assumed South Slav unity and solidarity were clearly strained to the breaking point. Slovenes, Croats, and Muslims, many of whom quite possibly identified as Yugoslavs until recently, attacked Serb shops, banks, schools, and Orthodox churches. Calls for retribution were not limited to the streets and hyper-​patriotic papers. The military leadership of Austria-​Hungary was also eager to use the opportunity and eliminate the threat of Serb irredentism, the “Yugoslav Piedmont,” once and for all. At the same time, civilian and military authorities started persecuting presumed Pan-​Slavs and Serbophiles. Prominent intellectuals, priests, and politicians as well as humble workers and peasants were accused of espionage, treason, and lesser offenses and interned, imprisoned, or executed, often on spurious evidence. While the civilian courts retained at least a semblance of proper procedure, the Austrian army summarily executed several thousand Serb speaking civilians suspected of spying or assisting the enemy in the vicinity of the front after the war had started. Rival nationalists exploited this opportunity to settle accounts. Hungarian nationalists used the powers at their disposal to indiscriminately persecute Serb speakers in southern Hungary. Croats and Muslims were often eager to help in the harassment of Serbs. Croat nationalists, supporters of the Pure Party of Right, helped set up Schützkorps, the auxiliary police force established in Bosnia-​Herzegovina after the assassination and mostly recruiting Croats and Muslims. The Schützkorps, which was nominally tasked with the suppression of Serb irregular forces in the province, quickly became infamous for its persecution of all categorized as Serbs. 185

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Its units harangued civilians, looted, and executed several people, mostly forgoing any legal procedure. In the hysterical atmosphere, which was most pronounced in the regions that bordered Serbia and had a high share of Orthodox population, denunciations became a useful tool to settle scores with rivals –​political, national, or of any other kind –​and many South Slavs did not hesitate to use it. Several Croat papers denounced those compatriots they felt were not patriotic enough; real and supposed Serbophiles were attacked and eternal loyalty to the dynasty and the Empire proclaimed. Almost immediately after the assassination and before the war had started, Ivan Šusteršič sent a confidential circular to the ranking party members all over Carniola, asking them to start gathering information about Serb irredentism and “anti-​Austrian activities.” The real target of his scheming were his political rivals, Slovene liberals and social democrats. In fact, many were arrested, sentenced and sent to jail, interned or sent to the front, the publication of their newspapers stopped, and organizations disbanded. Yet accusing domestic rivals of irredentism and disloyalty was a double-​edged sword, because non-​Slav nationalists could wield such allegations much more effectively. After all, the authorities, especially the military, were not really able or interested in distinguishing patriotic Yugoslavism from its unpatriotic variety. Therefore, German nationalists in Styria and Carinthia were extremely effective in their campaign against any Slovene or Yugoslav nationalists, Catholic, liberal or social democratic, real or imagined. All of them, including a large number of Catholic priests who could hardly be accused of disloyalty, were targeted and many imprisoned, forcibly relocated, or interned in the first years of the war. This wave of arrests enveloped all the South Slav lands and provinces, caused human suffering, and made many loyal South Slavs question their allegiance to the Monarchy. The indiscriminate nature of this persecution and the lack of proper procedure ate away at the trust in the state many still considered to be their own. The assumptions that the South Slavs –​or Slavs in general –​could not be trusted and that the Slav reservists might refuse to join their units during mobilization proved largely unfounded. While there was no overwhelming enthusiasm for war, citizens from the entire Monarchy reacted to the events similarly and their national identifications were just one of the factors influencing their conduct. It is true that many Slav speakers were less than enthusiastic for a war with Serbia and Russia, against their “brothers,” but for the most part they did what was expected of them, occasionally showing patriotic zeal. This was especially the case for the Muslim soldiers, who remembered that Serbia had only recently waged war against the Ottoman Empire and knew what had happened to the Muslim population in the territories Serbia annexed after the Balkan Wars. Moreover, this was a time when particularism was on the rise. Illustrating the contingent and situational nature of national identifications, Yugoslav nationalism lost much of its attractiveness. Being only Slovene or only Croat or only Muslim became more common than identifying as a Slovene/​Croat/​Muslim Yugoslav let alone a “pure”Yugoslav. Boundaries dividing the South Slav groups were being strengthened or re-​established. Soldiers from the so-​called Croat regiments, recruited from Croatia-​Slavonia, were writing home about their exploits in the battles against “traitorous Serbs.” When Belgrade briefly fell in the hands of Austro-​Hungarian troops at the end of 1914, triumphant newspaper titles appeared in Slovene and Croat papers, and church bells were rung. Some of this was certainly intended to publicly demonstrate patriotism and avoid suspicion. After all, the authorities were quick to react to any signs of disloyalty. The mayor of Ljubljana, Ivan Tavčar, confided to one of his friends that he would “act with such hypocrisy, the world will be amazed.” He certainly was not the only one to do so. Still, not everybody abandoned their prewar convictions. Despite everything, Janez Kalan, a Catholic priest and an esteemed member 186

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of the Slovene People’s Party, refused to ring the bells in his parish when Belgrade was taken. He was also highly skeptical of the anti-​Serb course his party charted during the July crisis and at the beginning of the war. He was not alone in clinging to sympathies for all the South Slavs or even in supporting the Yugoslav movement. In his paper Zastava (The Flag), Oskar Tartaglia, one of the most outspoken members of the national radical youth from Dalmatia, published the news about the Sarajevo assassination without condemning it or expressing remorse, also defending Serbia in subsequent articles. Tartaglia was arrested soon after and spent the next few years in jail. Several prominent Yugoslav nationalists avoided his fate by emigrating. Some joined the Serb army as volunteers, others left for Western Europe and started organizing an anti-​Austrian movement that eventually evolved into the Yugoslav Committee. However, this was a tiny minority. Most South Slavs could not leave and continued serving at the front, caring for the wounded, burying the dead, working in the factories, and tilling the fields. In fact, most did not want to leave; their allegiance to the dynasty and the Dual Monarchy was still alive, despite all the misgivings and despite rising dissatisfaction.

1915–​1918: toward the end In the first half of 1915, Italy joined the Entente and entered the war. This made the military situation of Austria-​Hungary even more precarious, but it also improved the relationship between the Dual Monarchy and its South Slavs. If motivating them to fight the Serbs and the Russians had been a challenge, this was not the case against the Italians. Propaganda could now employ a set of stereotypes about the “ancestral enemy” that were effective, but most of all it could exploit the fact that Italy had been promised several provinces South Slavs considered their own. Bringing up the 1915 Treaty of London worked very well until almost the end, especially among frontline soldiers. Austria-​Hungary became the lesser evil compared to Italy. The changed dynamics was also a consequence of reduced domestic pressure by the authorities. Realizing that the need for motivated soldiers had been compromised by the repressive policies of the previous year, the civilian government in Vienna suggested going further, offering an amnesty in South Slav provinces of the Austrian half of the Empire. The army leadership opposed such a move and prevailed. Even among the generals, however, there were those who supported a change of course.The chief of general staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, showed some interest in a plan that leaders of the Slovene People’s Party suggested after Italy’s entry into the war: The creation of a separate Slovene province that would serve as a military border against Italy. The plan was quickly shelved, because most generals were still convinced that in the final instance all the South Slavs, Catholic Slovenes included, were traitors who could not be trusted. Still, the official attitude toward the South Slavs did change slightly. The fear of Italian territorial ambitions but also genuine belief that the Habsburg Monarchy was the best framework to solve the “Yugoslav question” kept domestic South Slav politicians focused on solutions that would reform and not destroy the Monarchy. While the émigrés were trying to establish a partnership with the Serbian government and convince the allies that the Habsburg Empire should be dismembered and a Yugoslav nation-​state established, those at home were searching for a way to achieve their aims without dissolution. Different plans were discussed: from minimalist pragmatic solutions that would only solve a part of the whole “equation” to the maximalist plans that would see the establishment of a Habsburg South Slav state, possibly including parts of occupied Serbia. This was also an idea a few generals entertained. 187

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As the new Emperor Karl, who ascended the throne in November 1916, turned away from military absolutism, discussions became even livelier.The Yugoslav question was one of the main challenges the governments in Vienna and Budapest had to face. It was also one of the hardest, because it could not be comprehensively solved if the dualist structure of the Monarchy were to be preserved as the Hungarians were insisting.Yet the crucial political initiative coming from the joint South Slav caucus in the Vienna parliament, the so-​called May Declaration of 1917, proposed exactly that. An autonomous state ruled by the Habsburgs and comprising all the southern provinces –​Austrian and Hungarian –​inhabited by the South Slavs.The driving force behind this were the Slovenes, who were desperate to prevent any restructuring which would leave the dualist border intact, separating them from other Habsburg South Slavs and having to deal with German nationalists on their own. At first, the May Declaration did not gain much support outside the Austrian half of the Empire. With a few exceptions, political parties and groups in Croatia-​Slavonia and Bosnia-​ Herzegovina were reluctant to support demands that seemed so unrealistic. The Croat-​Serb Coalition, the ruling party in Croatia-​Slavonia, was unwilling to risk the autonomy Croatia already had, and some prominent members were also convinced that only a Serb victory in the war would bring the desired changes. In their opinion, any autonomous action was counterproductive which was also the advice they got from the Serb government through secret channels. Bosnian Muslim elites also initially rejected the May Declaration, opting for the status quo or even the inclusion of this province in Hungary. Likewise, supporters of the Pure Party of Right in Bosnia-​Herzegovina, Croatia-​Slavonia, and Dalmatia rejected a Yugoslav solution and kept arguing for the establishment of a Greater Croatia in the Habsburg realm. All the while, the population was forced to face increasing hardships. Food shortages became very widespread from the beginning of 1917, coal and other sources of heating were in short supply. Death notices and wounded soldiers kept coming back from the front, and the repressions from the first war years has not been forgotten. News of the Russian Revolution also fueled unrest, and deserters started forming armed bands, the so-​called green cadres, which gained control over entire regions. In short, the situation was precarious, the people were ready to support a change, yet the politicians were hesitant. A rare exception were Slovene nationalists, who were desperately pushing for a Yugoslav solution and launched the so-​called Declaration Movement in late 1917. Supported by the People’s Party, liberals, social democrats, and the Catholic church, it quickly swelled and by the summer of 1918 more than 300,000 signatures were collected. While the supporters of the Declaration demanded the establishment of a South Slav state, most of them hoped it would be ruled by the Habsburgs, something that the original text explicitly declared. Slovene political leaders and their allies in other provinces, however, were increasingly abandoning the so-​called Habsburg clause. This change of course was largely a consequence of the realization that the Central Powers could not win the war and that the Entente policy toward Austria-​Hungary had changed. By the spring of 1918 its goal became dissolution. Now, Emperor Karl and his ministers, who were still working on reform plans, could hardly propose an attractive alternative to independence. If the Yugoslav nationalists had previously thought that the Monarchy would protect them from Italian expansion, it was now clear that it would not be able to do even that. An independent state, they believed, would stand a better chance at a peace conference, especially if it united with a winning power, Serbia. As many different ideas were still circulating and not even all the Yugoslav nationalists were ready to support independence, the alternatives were becoming increasingly unrealistic. Habsburg

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loyalists and those who were indifferent to nationalism or those more interested in a social than a national revolution failed to produce a convincing alternative and more importantly failed to mobilize enough support. Nationalist politicians controlled local and provincial organs of power and the papers, nobody else could mobilize the population, increasingly split into national camps during the war, the same way. Consequently, they were the ones shaping domestic political developments, especially as they managed to interweave hugely popular demands for an end of the war with nationalist propaganda. National self-​determination became a watchword, which subsumed many expectations. As 1918 went on, support for independence grew and additional political groups started advocating it. In the beginning of the year, the social democrats came on board. Simultaneously support for Yugoslav independence started to grow among Muslim political circles in Bosnia-​ Herzegovina. By late summer, the pro-​Yugoslav groups prevailed, and even most influential Muslim clerics backed independence. Although Croat nationalists around the Archbishop of Sarajevo, Josip Stadler, still vehemently rejected any South Slav state, let alone an independent Yugoslavia, they were becoming increasingly isolated. Support among political parties and the Catholic clergy from Croatia-​Slavonia also increased, even if the biggest party, the Croat-​Serb Coalition, remained reserved, and the Pure Party of Right continued to push for a Greater Croatia in the Habsburg Monarchy. Alternative solutions were still being discussed and even supporters of independence kept their options open throughout the summer. Yet the Emperor and the governments in Vienna and Budapest were unable or unwilling to come up with a plan that would satisfy most Yugoslav nationalists, while external developments made any reform of the Monarchy increasingly unlikely. Hence, preparations for independence went ahead. Regional national councils acting as parallel organs of power were established. By the fall, anything but independence looked improbable. The last reform proposal of Emperor Karl from mid-​October was immediately rejected. Outside the political establishment, many South Slavs, even nationalists, still thought and hoped that the Monarchy would survive, but most of the politicians focused on the establishment of Yugoslavia. On October 6, a joint National Council of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs was established in Zagreb and the Croat-​Serb Coalition came on board as its representatives joined a couple of days later. The clock was ticking, and when the front in Italy crumbled toward the end of October and the Entente recognized the independence of Czechoslovakia the time was ripe. On October 29, the provincial parliament of Croatia-​Slavonia, the Sabor, and a public gathering in Ljubljana simultaneously proclaimed the independence of the State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs. The new state was not however internationally recognized, its borders not defined; Italian troops were pouring across the old border of the Empire, occupying lands Yugoslav nationalists believed belonged to their state. At the same time, significant portions of the population did not recognize the new state. Some were in open rebellion, and it looked like the national revolution would be overtaken by a social one. Hence the parties gathered in the National Council in Zagreb hastily decided to send a delegation to Belgrade and ask for unification with Serbia, which had already absorbed Montenegro. On December 1, the Prince Regent Alexander proclaimed unification and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. An independent South Slav nation-​state came into being. For many South Slavs, this was the fulfillment of their dreams. Some were only happy that the war had ended, and some semblance of stability returned. Others had seen their dreams crushed or at least looked at the new state with apprehension. The vast majority acknowledged the change, adapted, and went on with their lives.

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Selected Readings Banac, Ivo. The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics. Ithaca, NY, 1984. Calic, Marie-​Janine. A History of Yugoslavia. West Lafayette, Ind., 2019. Cornwall, Mark. “The Great War and the Yugoslav Grassroots:  Popular Mobilization in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914–​18.” In New Perspectives on Yugoslavia: Key Issues and Controversies, eds. Dejan Djokić and James Ker-​Lindsay. New York, 2010, 27–​45. Krizman, Bogdan. Hrvatska u prvom svjetskom ratu: hrvatsko-​srpski politički odnosi. Zagreb, 1989. Lampe, John R. Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country. 2nd ed. Cambridge and New York, 2000. Lukan, Walter. Die Habsburgermonarchie und die Slowenen im Ersten Weltkrieg.Vienna,  2017. Mikavica, Dejan, Goran Vasin, and Nenad Ninković. Prečanski Srbi u Velikom ratu 1914–​1918. Novi Sad, 2018. Pleterski, Janko. “The Southern Slav Question.” In The Last Years of Austria-​Hungary, ed. Mark Cornwall. Exeter, 2nd ed., 2002, 119–​48. Rusinow, Dennison. “The Yugoslav Idea before Yugoslavia.” In Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918–​ 1992, ed. Dejan Djokić. London, 2002, 11–​26. Weaver, Eric Beckett.“Yugoslavism in Hungary During the Balkan Wars.” In War in the Balkans: Conflict and Diplomacy Before World War I, ed. James Pettifer and Tom Buchanan. London, New York, 2016, 47–​75.

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19 FROM SALONICA TO BELGRADE The emergence of Yugoslavia, 1917–​1921 Dejan Djokić

The Salonica Front The decisive turn in the First World War in the Balkans came in mid-​September 1918, when Allied troops under the command of French General Franchet d’Espèray broke through the Salonica Front, also known as the Macedonian Front. The Entente forces, consisting of British and French units, many of them from Africa and India, as well as the Serbian army and Greek and Italian divisions, proved too powerful for the defensive line of the Central Powers. The Bulgarian forces gave in first, surrendering in late September, while Austro-​Hungarian and German troops could not halt the further Allied advance. The 1st Serbian Army of General Bojović entered Vranje on October 5 and Niš several days later. Vojvoda (Field Marshal) Stepa Stepanović’s Second Army, helped by the French, took Priština/​Prishtina on October 10, and Peć/​Peja/​Ipek a week later. By November 1, 1918, Belgrade was liberated. French officers marveled at Serbian peasant-​soldiers who sometimes marched up to 17 hours a day, eventually covering 400 miles in a month and a half. In addition to a natural desire to liberate occupied Serbia and return home after nearly three years of exile, at least within the Serbian leadership there existed a sense of a mission to liberate and unite all Serbs and other South Slavs in a common state. A combination of Serb and Yugoslav nationalism, a goal to create, around Serbia, a large South Slav state informed the thinking of Serbia’s political and military leadership. Serbian soldiers did not stop at their country’s old borders but continued to push the enemy out of Vojvodina (in southern Hungary), Bosnia-​Herzegovina, and Montenegro.They also rushed to the eastern Adriatic in order to prevent Italian occupation of contested territory in Dalmatia, Istria, and Slovenia. This was a remarkable recovery for the Serbian army. After it had held for almost a year and a half, it was finally defeated in late 1915 when Bulgaria joined Austria-​Hungary and Germany in a concerted attack against Serbia on two fronts. Facing a total defeat during the winter of 1915–​16, the Serbian army, together with members of the government, the King’s family and some civilians, crossed the mountains of Montenegro and Albania to reach Greece, then still a neutral country. The government-​in-​exile and most of the army were transferred to the island of Corfu, occupied by the Entente. The Skupština (Serbian parliament) also convened at Corfu, 191

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as around 120 deputies retreated together with, or as members of, the army. Serbia may have been occupied, but the government in exile had at its disposal a parliament and an army. It was an exhausted force, reduced by one half to less than 150,000 surviving soldiers and officers, but nevertheless an army. This force, and absence of rival political or guerrilla movements in occupied Serbia was the main difference between the governments in exile in the First and Second World War. Recuperated and rearmed by the French and the British, Serbian troops had taken back a small part of Vardar Macedonia before the end of 1916, but this came at the heavy cost of 4,000–​5,000 killed and wounded. The Serbian and Bulgarian armies subsequently dug in behind the same sort of trenches found on the Western front. For about a year the Balkan front remained relatively quiet, so much so that Georges Clemenceau, the French Prime Minister, mockingly described the Allied troops in Macedonia, mainly French and Serbian, as “gardeners of Salonica.”

South Slav politics It was hardly quiet in the Serbian and South Slav political arena. A three-​way political struggle from before the war between Prime Minister Nikola Pašić, Prince Regent Aleksandar, and Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević-​Apis, an unofficial leader of a group of officers known as the Black Hand, came to a head in late 1916. The Prime Minister and the Regent had drifted apart following Serbia’s collapse the previous winter, the former increasingly focused on the restoration of Serbia and its unification with other Serbs, while the latter still committed to the liberation of South Slavs and their unification into an independent,Yugoslav state. The differences between Aleksandar and Pašić were put on hold in order to remove Colonel Apis, who may or may not had been conspiring against one or both of them. Accused of plotting to assassinate the Regent, the Black Hand leader and several other members of the organization were executed after a hasty trial in Salonica in June 1917. Serbia’s reputation among the Allies suffered as a result of what was obviously a show trial. The Independent Radical and Progressive ministers resigned from Pašić’s coalition government in protest. They would, however, take part in negotiations between the Radical government and Habsburg South Slav representatives at Corfu in June–​July 1917 and Geneva in November 1918. At the same time, South Slav deputies in the Austrian parliament called for autonomy but also for staying within the monarchy. Their May 1917 declaration provoked a strong reaction from the Yugoslav Committee, a group of exiled Habsburg South Slavs based in London. Their leader Ante Trumbić issued an appeal to the British parliament, dismissing the declaration as unrepresentative and the Reichsrat (Austrian parliament) as an undemocratic institution. The declaration also accelerated talks between the Serbian government and the committee, leading to their meeting at Corfu that summer. Formed in late 1914, theYugoslav Committee was led by two Dalmatian Croats, Ante Trumbić and Frano Supilo, who had resigned in 1916 before his untimely death in September 1917. Although it received financial support from the Serbian government, the committee’s relations with it were often strained, largely due to disagreement over the nature of a future union and also because the committee’s propaganda was directed not only against Austria-​Hungary but also against Italy, Serbia’s ally. Prime Minister Pašić believed that Yugoslav unification should be led by Serbia, the only independent South Slav state other than its close ally, the small Montenegro, which had capitulated in early 1916. Trumbić and Supilo, on the other hand, preferred an equal union, albeit of unequal partners. The committee included a number of distinguished South Slav political and intellectual personalities, including Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović 192

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and Serbian scientist and Columbia University professor Mihajlo Pupin. Both men, incidentally, had grown up among herders in the upland areas of the Habsburg borderlands where legends of Serb and South Slav past glories were part of a rich oral history, sometimes mixed with romantic nationalist ideas from central Europe and Italy. The Corfu meeting resulted in a declaration which stated that “this three-​named [Serb-​ Croat-​Slovene] people of ours is one according to blood, spoken and written language, the feelings of unity and continuity and compactness of territory in which it lives.” National claims went hand in hand with a democratic promise: the authorized representatives of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes […] demand on the basis of the principle of free national determination that the [Yugoslav nation] be wholly liberated […] and united in a free, national and independent state […] based on modern and democratic principles. The two sides could not agree on whether Yugoslavia should be centralized or federalized, but their declaration unquestionably laid the foundations for the future Yugoslav state. In some ways, the Corfu Declaration was for interwar Yugoslavia what the November 1943 session of the Anti-​Fascist Council AVNOJ was to Tito’s post-​Second World War socialist federation. In supporting Yugoslav unification in summer 1917, the Serbian government had gone back to its original wartime position. Barely a month after the war had begun in 1914, Pašić instructed Serbia’s diplomatic representatives in London, Paris, and Petrograd that his government’s aim was a large South Slav state united around Serbia. This evolution from prewar position, when focus was on unification with Montenegro and annexation of Bosnia-​Herzegovina (an Ottoman province occupied and then annexed by Austria-​Hungary, despite its overwhelmingly South Slav, and peasant, Orthodox Christian, Muslim and Roman Catholic population), was then proclaimed publicly by the parliament. Forced to retreat from Belgrade, it convened in Niš in December. When they found out about the 1915 London Treaty of the Entente and Italy, which promised Dalmatia and Istria to Italy in exchange for entering the war on the side of the Entente, the Serbian government and exiled Habsburg Yugoslavs opposed and campaigned against the deal. The Allies had not informed Serbia of their negotiations with Italy, but in summer the same year they offered, through Petrograd, Bosnia and Herzegovina in exchange for surrendering the Serbian share of Macedonia to Bulgaria, in return for Sofia joining the Entente. The Serbian government rejected this offer, despite a Serb plurality in the neighboring provinces and the prewar rivalry with Austria-​Hungary over Bosnia-​Herzegovina, which sparked the global conflict in summer 1914. (In 1916, the Allies promised Romania the Banat region, parts of which were claimed by Serbia and the South Slavs, so Bucharest entered the war on their side). Following Serbia’s defeat in late 1915, Pašić and Radical ministers in the wartime coalition government adopted a “narrower,” Serbian platform, especially in communications with Russia. But their fellow Independent Radical ministers, as well as Regent Aleksandar, maintained a pro-​ Yugoslav line. Despite competing visions of Yugoslavia, evolving views and reversals among the South Slav leaders, virtually everyone was in favor of a Yugoslav union by 1918. This included Serbia’s government, the Prince Regent, and opposition parties, the South Slav émigrés in London, Croatian, Slovene, and Serb political leaders in Austria-​Hungary, and Montenegro’s political emigration. To be sure, the idea of a Serb-​dominated centralized Yugoslavia was close to Pašić’s heart, and it was probably how many Serbs understood Yugoslavia, consciously or not. However, the pro-​Yugoslav Serbian opposition and Serbian intellectuals included also federalists and republicans. 193

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Serbian Orthodox dioceses and the Roman Catholic Church in Habsburg South Slav regions mostly supported a Yugoslav union, too. For example, the later controversial Serbian bishop Nikolaj Velimirović spent part of the war in Britain, advocating a Yugoslavia. Ante Bauer, Roman Catholic bishop of Zagreb had joined the prewar Croat-​Serb Coalition, while his eventual successor, the later even more controversial Alojzije Stepinac joined the Serbian army as a volunteer in the last days of the Salonica front. Ante Korošec, the first and only President of the State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs, also the only non-​Serb prime minister of interwar Yugoslavia, was a Slovenian Catholic priest. Muslims from Bosnia-​Herzegovina were on the margins of Yugoslav unification, but their intellectuals supported cooperation, and sometimes identified with Croats and/​or Serbs. Some Muslims from Kosovo, Macedonia, and Sandžak fought in the Serbian army, having been mobilized after Serbia took over these regions in 1912–​13. After the war, Bosnian Muslims increasingly accepted Yugoslavia as a protective screen from Serbian and Croatian nationalism. In addition to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, Bosnia’s Yugoslav Muslim Organization was the only major political party of the interwar period with a prefix “Yugoslav.” The Jewish community of future Yugoslavia also supported the creation of the new state, which brought Ashkenazim and Sephardim together as Yugoslavs.

The final weeks of the war As Serbian and other Allied troops advanced from Salonica toward Belgrade, Habsburg South Slav political representatives formed a National Council of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs in Zagreb on October 8, 1918. Three weeks later, and one day after Austria-​Hungary sued for peace, on October 29 the council proclaimed the State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs, a transitional polity independent from Austria-​Hungary and on its way to unification with Serbia and Montenegro. Statements of support came from Ljubljana, Sarajevo, and Novi Sad. It might be said that with this act, Zagreb rejected the May Declaration and began implementing the Declaration of Corfu. On the same day, the Croatian Sabor (Assembly) and Ban (Governor), two medieval institutions preserved under the terms of the 1102 Pacta conventa with Hungary, and a similar arrangement with Austria in 1527, severed all ties with Budapest and Vienna. The Sabor soon went on to recognize the supreme authority of the National Council, effectively dissolving itself and the office of the Ban. An independent Croatia had thus existed for a matter of minutes, between the proclamation of independence from Austria-​Hungary and the decision to enter the new, Slovene-​Croat-​Serb state, as a step toward a full Yugoslav union. Dušan Simović, a Serbian officer (and one of the leaders of the March 1941 coup and Prime Minister of the Yugoslav government in exile), reported from Zagreb in mid-​November 1918 that all Serbs and most Croats and Slovenes were in favor of a union with Serbia under the Karadjordjević dynasty, despite republican and federalist sentiments among some Croats. Local Croatian sources at the time recorded similar levels of support for some sort of a South Slav union, although many “ordinary people” were probably indifferent to what kind of state they would live in as long as it brought peace, stability, and relative prosperity. Meanwhile, disorder and hunger made for a highly volatile and uncertain situation in the South Slav territories of the rapidly dissolving Habsburg monarchy. As soon as it was formed, the State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs faced serious problems. Internally, it struggled to maintain law and order. It proclaimed martial law and threatened the death sentence for anyone caught looting, burning, and pillaging property. It ordered an unsuccessful mobilization. Returning soldiers, former prisoners of war and deserters (the so-​called Green Cadre) often clashed with the authorities who attempted to mobilize them. The new 194

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state did not fully control its yet unmarked borders. It was recognized only by recently restored Serbia, the newly created Czechoslovakia, and paradoxically, by the dying Austria-​Hungary. The greatest threat to Yugoslav territorial ambitions was posed by two of Serbia’s wartime allies, Romania and Italy. The dispute with Romania, and with Hungary as well, over the Banat region was eventually settled by its partition at the Paris Peace Conference, mainly between Yugoslavia and Romania, with only a small part going to Hungary. The disputed region saw disturbances and violence between various military units loyal to newly created states and Béla Kun’s communist republic in Hungary. In autumn 1918, Italian forces sought to occupy large parts of the eastern Adriatic, as promised in the secret Treaty of London in 1915. The same territory was claimed by the Yugoslav side on the nationality principle. Croatian “state rights” were also cited to strengthen the Yugoslav claims. As Italian troops advanced toward central Croatia and Slovenia, the army of the Slovene-​ Croat-​Serb state, hastily assembled from former members of the disbanded Habsburg army and police, was unable to stop them. On November 4, Zagreb issued a plea for help to the Allies.The Serbian High Command immediately responded by sending troops to Srem/​Srijem, Slavonia, and to Dalmatia, where they joined American, British, and French forces. The Allied presence helped to avoid an actual war between Italy and Serbia/​the South Slav state. The capture of Ljubljana by Italians was only prevented by a unit made up of former prisoners of war commanded by a Serbian officer named Stevan Švabić. Rijeka and the Bay of Kvarner/​Carnaro was defended by the 2nd Battalion of the 50th Serbian Infantry Regiment. Rijeka, or Fiume, would be later taken over by Gabriele D’Annunzio’s fascists, then proclaimed a free “city-​state,” before it was eventually annexed by Mussolini’s Italy in 1924.

Unification Serbia’s recognition of the State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs state came in early November 1918, during talks in Geneva between the Serbian government and representatives of the National Council and the Yugoslav Committee. The Serbian opposition also took part, siding with the Habsburg Yugoslavs and against Pašić over the question of the nature of the union. A joint declaration promised a union of equal partners, but it ultimately came to nothing due to its rejection by both the Serbian parliament and the National Council. It also had no support from Pašić and the Croatian Serb Svetozar Pribićević, respectively the key political personalities in Belgrade and Zagreb, so the new state would be formed largely on the Serbian government’s terms.Trumbić was in Paris but urged the National Council to press ahead with the unification, given the grave situation in his native Dalmatia. When in mid-​November Regent Aleksandar asked Pribićević to convey to the National Council Serbia’s desire to start talks about unification, the Zagreb deputies responded with enthusiasm. While opinions differed within the National Council on the form of the future state –​whether the government should be centralized or decentralized and whether the country should be a monarchy or a republic, or a mixture of the two –​the vast majority of its members supported the unification with Serbia. Feeding the sense of urgency was the continuing threat of Italian occupation. The only dissenting voice came from the Croatian People’s Peasant Party, whose leader Stjepan Radić famously warned the deputies not to rush into Yugoslavia like “geese in the fog.” But Radić’s voice was a minority view, and even he did not entirely reject some sort of a South Slav union.The Dalmatian delegates were especially keen to move fast.They threatened to unite their province with Serbia independently of Zagreb if the National Council hesitated. “If you gentlemen are not going to go to Belgrade,” Josip Smodlaka warned, “my [Dalmatian] comrades and I  will go without you and will bring state unity to life.” Predominantly Serb 195

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municipalities in Bosnia-​Herzegovina and Vojvodina also pushed for a unification with Serbia. A representation of Vojvodina Serbs proclaimed the unification with Serbia on November 25 –​ the only act of union issued in the final weeks of 1918 still in place a century later. Serbia gave up its sovereignty by entering the union with the Slovene-​Croat-​Serb state on December 1, as had Montenegro, whose pro-​Serb leaders proclaimed the unification with Serbia a week before. Like elsewhere in Europe, fighting in the South Slav areas did not end on November 11, Armistice Day. The Serbian army continued to fight against Hungarian troops, before taking Subotica/​Szabadka on November 15 and then occupying parts of Hungary until 1921. But the real challenge came in the south from Serbia’s wartime allies. In addition to sending its troops to Dalmatia and Istria, Italy supported the Albanian, Macedonian, and Montenegrin guerrillas who rebelled against unification or, in the case of some Montenegrins, against the way in which it was carried out. Supporters of exiled Montenegrin King Nikola rose in arms against the Podgorica Grand National Assembly of the Serb People in Montenegro, which on November 26, 1918, proclaimed Montenegro’s unification with Serbia. The proclamation cited Wilsonian principles of national self-​determination and historic and ethnic unity with Serbia and Serbs. The union with Serbia, therefore, was to be the last phase in a centuries-​long struggle to unite, or re-​unite, two Serb states. And just like the State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs, whose formation became a transition toward “full” unification, the Podgorica deputies saw Montenegro’s merger with Serbia as a step toward a broader South Slav union. In late November, National Council delegates traveled from Zagreb to Belgrade, to formally seek the unification with Serbia. They needed nearly two days to reach Serbia’s capital city, due to damage caused to railways and infrastructure during the war. They were received by Prince Regent Aleksandar at 8:00 pm on December 1, 1918 in his temporary residence, a house near the Terazije square in central Belgrade. Present also were three Serbian government ministers (but not Prime Minister Pašić, who was away), and Vojvoda Mišić, chief of staff of the supreme command of the Serbian army. The National Council’s address stated that Slovenes, Serbs, and Croats, who had temporarily created their own state, wished to unite with Serbia. This they believed was an act of national self-​determination, the principle enunciated by President Wilson of the United States. The Zagreb delegation proposed that Regent Aleksandar, in the name of his ailing father King Petar, should reign in the new state and that a modern, democratic government “in the territory of the whole Yugoslav state” would be formed, in consultation between the National Council, the Serbian government, and relevant political parties in Serbia and Montenegro. During an interim period, the form of government should be decided in a Constituent Assembly elected on the basis of “general, equal and proportional vote.” In the meanwhile, existing local governments should remain in place. The address ended with cheers for King Petar, Regent Aleksandar, the “whole, united Serbo-​Croat-​Slovene people,” and a “free, united Yugoslavia.” Aleksandar duly responded by announcing, in the name of his father King Petar, “the unification of Serbia with the lands of the independent State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs in a single Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.” Later that month the Serbian Skupština convened to endorse the act of union and in the process to dissolve itself.

Interim institutions An interim parliament and a government were set up. Seventeen ministers in the provisional cabinet were nominated by the main South Slav political parties. Most parties and coalitions were represented by one or two ministers, with the exception of Pašić’s Radicals, who had 196

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three ministers in the cabinet including Prime Minister Stojan Protić. The party leader, and until recently Prime Minister of Serbia, Pašić was not part of the new government and did not become the first Prime Minister of Yugoslavia because of Aleksandar’s opposition. Trumbić, not a member of any political party, was appointed Foreign Minister in the first Yugoslav government, but would spend much of the following year and a half in Paris, as Pašić’s deputy in the Yugoslav peace delegation. The Yugoslav delegation was the only one in Paris not headed by an active head of state or government. Pašić’s (and Serbia’s) prestige was such that in some ways this did not matter. But it also meant that the delegation needed to seek the government’s approval for all key decisions, at the time when lines of communication in Europe had not yet been fully restored following wartime damage. A 294-​member provisional parliament convened on March 1, 1919, on the basis of regional representation. Pre-​1912 Serbia had 84 deputies, Kosovo and Macedonia 24, Montenegro 12, Vojvodina 24, Bosnia-​Herzegovina 42, Croatia-​Slavonia 60, Dalmatia 12, Istria 4, and Slovenia 32. As the largest South Slav group it should not have come as a surprise that “ethnic” Serbs formed a majority in the interim representation, but complaints about Serb over-​representation were nevertheless heard, not without any merit. What tends to be overlooked, however, is that the very formula used to form the parliament acknowledged the existence of historic provinces, contrary to the popular perception of the unification as dismissing separate pre-​1918 territorial identities. To be sure, centralism eventually prevailed, but not before prolonged parliamentary debates and backroom deals. Political rivalry soon appeared between the newly formed Democrats (a merger of the Independent Radicals, members of the Croat-​Serb Coalition, and Slovene liberals) and Pašić’s Radicals –​two largest winners in the November 1920 elections for a Constituent Assembly. It was eventually set aside to push through a centralist constitutional proposal, which both sides accepted. The Radicals themselves were divided, as Protić put forward a revived proposal based on a compromise between centralism and federalism which envisaged autonomy for nine historic provinces. Croat and Slovene deputies presented somewhat overlapping constitutional proposals, which would have given the central government control over foreign policy, defense, and economic affairs. All other powers, including law enforcement, would rest with six provinces. According to one proposal these would be Slovenia; Croatia-​Slavonia and Dalmatia; Bosnia-​Herzegovina; Serbia; Montenegro; and Vojvodina; and according to another one, pre-​ 1912 Serbia and Macedonia, Croatia-​Slavonia and Dalmatia, Montenegro, Bosnia-​Herzegovina, and Vojvodina. The Croat and Slovene proposals envisaged a bicameral parliament, with an upper house of provinces and a lower house elected on a “general democratic basis.” Croats had more than one proposal. Smodlaka envisaged Yugoslavia as a federation of 12 provinces enjoying limited legislative powers under governors appointed by the King. Two small Serb parties, the Republicans and Socialists, presented their own constitutional proposals advocating a decentralized republic. The Serb Agrarians on the other hand proposed a hybrid republican-​monarchist model with decentralized power. If we consider that many Serbian intellectuals had spoken publicly in favor of a federation and/​or a republic, then it is difficult to sustain the popular argument that all Serbs were centralists and monarchists. Nor were all non-​Serbs federalists and republicans. The Democrat-​Radical alliance eventually succeeded in pushing through their centralist proposal, but only just barely. Their victory would not have been possible without the support of Muslim deputies from Bosnia-​Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Macedonia, who voted for the centralist constitution in exchange for political and economic concessions to their landowners and political leaders. The voting was boycotted by the third and fourth largest political parties, the Communists and the Croatian Peasant Party. In the end, the vote was 223 for and 35 against, 197

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with 161 abstentions. Without the boycott, the centralists would not have won a clear majority, and their proposal might well have been even rejected. The vote took place on June 28, 1921, the anniversary of the 1389 Kosovo Battle –​as well as the 1914 Sarajevo assassination, and exactly two years after the peace treaty with Germany was signed at Versailles. Thus, from the very beginning, the Yugoslav Kingdom was associated with the central Serbian nationalist myth around Kosovo (also embraced by Croat and other non-​ Serb Yugoslav advocates at the time) and the consequences of the 1914 assassination.

Paris Peace Conference Parallel to preparing for elections for the Constituent Assembly, the interim Yugoslav government needed to assemble a delegation for the peace conference which began in Paris in January 1919. Yugoslav delegates began to convene in Paris in early January, without any real preparation, but with many uncertainties surrounding them. Initially accepted by the conference as a delegation of the Kingdom of Serbia, mainly due to Italy’s opposition to the Yugoslav (and Serb-​Montenegrin) union, and the other Allies’ reluctance to accept recent Habsburg subjects (and in one case a recent Austrian minister, now the leading Slovene member of the Yugoslav team), the delegation also suffered from internal rivalries. Pašić and Trumbić nonetheless managed to put their differences aside, largely because they, and other delegates, shared a common goal, international recognition of the Serb-​Croat-​ Slovene Kingdom in borders as extended as possible. The delegation was not without some major advantages. Many of the territories it claimed had a South Slav majority, much of this territory was also under the control of the Serbian/​new Yugoslav army, and Serbia’s war effort counted for considerable international prestige. Among sympathetic allies, and citing the principle of national self-​determination, championed by President Wilson, the Yugoslavs had some powerful weapons with which to counter the rival claims of their neighbors, especially Italy. By the time the delegation left Paris in July 1920, it had secured international recognition of the country and most of the territories it had originally claimed. The one exception was the dispute with Italy over the eastern Adriatic, which was eventually mostly resolved in Rapallo in November 1920, to the full satisfaction of neither side. The new state appeared politically and economically viable and despite considerable challenges, including armed rebellion in parts of its territory, its future seemed relatively bright. As did that of the new international order created in Paris, of which Yugoslavia was to be a key member, at least in Southeastern Europe.Yugoslavia may have been “composed around the echo of a pistol-​shot” in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 (to borrow from Lawrence Durrell’s 1951 poem “Sarajevo”), but it was not created in Versailles, as has been often claimed. The fate of the interwar Yugoslav state, however, would increasingly depend on the fate of the Versailles settlement, the first major treaty which mentioned the Serb-​Croat-​Slovene state and thus effectively represented its full international recognition. Despite a complex make-​up, as suggested by the country’s original name, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes fitted the dominant ideology on which the new international order, led by the United States, was to be based:  the Wilsonian principles, which promoted national self-​determination and liberal-​democracy. The South Slav leaders’ championing of the Yugoslav nation (admittedly not always consistently and sincerely), and its ultimate international acceptance, suggest that a century ago the idea of a South Slav ethnic and linguistic unity may not have seemed as far-​fetched and unrealistic as it might appear today. The new state faced considerable obstacles, caused by difficult historical and different imperial legacies as well as by the enormous destruction, especially in Serbia, which lost up to 198

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a quarter of its population during the war. Some of the major problems which destabilized the young country during the crucial interim period (for example rival visions of a future state), had already begun to appear in the years before the unification. But these were not always based on apparently incompatible national ideologies. For example, difficulties and challenges surrounding the formation of a unified Serbian Orthodox Church in 1920 in many ways mirrored those experienced by the South Slav political leaders during the formative period. Integrating a largely South Slav-​populated area but often without a sustained history of previous political and economic unity, was going to be a major challenge under the best of circumstances. The volatile and brief interwar period hardly gave Yugoslavia a chance to recover fully from a difficult birth. Yet, the country eventually consolidated. Its economy showed signs of promise, a vibrant cultural space emerged (in some cases building on prewar ties), and international alliances were forged in foreign policy. Domestic politics was undermined by crises characteristic of interwar Europe, but Yugoslav politics also demonstrated an ability to seek and achieve compromise, a quality usually not associated with the interwar period, not only in the Balkans.

Selected Reading Banac, Ivo. The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics. Ithaca, NY, 1984. Calic, Marie-​Janine. A History of Yugoslavia. West Lafayette, Ind., 2019. Djilas, Aleksa. Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution, 1919–​1953. Cambridge, MA, 1991. Djokić, Dejan. Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar Yugoslavia. London, 2007. Djokić, Dejan. Pašić and Trumbić:The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. London, 2010. Djokić, Dejan, ed. Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea 1918–​1992. London, 2003. Djokić, Dejan and James Ker-Linsday, eds. New Perspectives on Yugoslavia: Key Issues and Controversies. London, 2011. Djordjević, Dimitrije, ed. The Creation of Yugoslavia, 1914–​1918. Santa Barbara, Cal., 1980. Lampe, John R. Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country, 2nd ed. Cambridge, 2000. Mitrović, Andrej. Serbia’s Great War, 1914–​1918. London, 2007.

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Southeastern European states and national politics, 1922–​1939

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OVERVIEW The interwar decades from parliamentary struggles and international pressures to authoritarian regimes John R. Lampe

Now five independent states, Southeastern Europe began the two interwar decades within borders fixed by the Paris Peace Settlements noted in the Overview to Part III and depicted here in Map 19.1. The states varied in size, population, and ethnic composition (see Table 19.1 on page 206). Albania’s population totaled slightly less than 1 million but its ethnic majority of 92 percent matched that of the larger Greece with 6.3 million.Yet Greece’s Orthodox religious majority of 94 percent contrasted with the Albanian division between Muslims, Orthodox, and Catholics, 70, 20, and 10 percent respectively. Bulgaria’s Orthodox majority was also large, at almost 84 percent but there was also a Muslim, largely Turkish minority of 14 percent. The two much larger states gained territory in the postwar settlements but had smaller ethnic majorities. Romania’s ethnic minorities of Hungarians 8 percent, Germans and Jews 4 percent each, Ukrainians 3.2 percent, and 1.5 percent Roma and others reduced its ethnic majority to 72 percent. In the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, the dominant Serbs had only a plurality at 38.8 percent. Croats and Slovenes, at 23.8 and 8.5 percent, could not match that plurality. Bosnian Muslims at 6.3  percent, Macedonian Slavs at 5.3  percent were joined by Germans, Hungarians, and Albanians all at about 4 percent of the total population. Despite these differences, all five states began the first postwar decade under new constitutions, elected multi-​party parliaments by universal if still male suffrage, launched land reforms for the huge peasant majorities, and looked forward to international support. The promise of female suffrage would remain unmet across the region until a Bulgarian election in 1938 gave the vote to married women. Liberal parties predominated in Romania and Greece, which became the region’s only republic in 1923. Elsewhere, the monarchs showed initial restraint. A Democratic Party in the Yugoslav Kingdom tried to reach across ethnic lines. A peasant party won a majority of Croatian seats in Yugoslav parliament; the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BZNS) was briefly in power (until 1923) and made lasting changes. A National Peasant Party formed in Romania and at the end of the decade won election to power. State ministries grew in size and authority in the 1920s, but so did elected municipal governments.

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This Overview moves from the postwar parliamentary struggles and international pressures of the 1920s that frustrated the early promise of the authoritarian regimes that took their place in the 1930s. Overseeing their domestic fates in the 1920s, but not providing the expected financial support, were relations with the victorious powers in the First World War and a new set of international organizations. The royal dictatorships of the 1930s faced new challenges not only from the Great Depression but from domestic radicals on the nationalist right and Communist left. Relations with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy now took precedence over reliance on France, Britain, and the League of Nations. The chapters below connect the two decades in Greece (Katerina Lagos), Bulgaria (Roumen Daskalov), Albania (Robert C. Austin), Romania (Constantin Iordachi), Croatia (Mark Biondich), and Serbia, Kosovo, and Macedonia (Vladan Jovanović). Christian Axboe Nielsen examines Yugoslavia’s contested national idea. Balasz Trenchenyi compares diverging ideas and images of nation, class, and gender across the region, while Marijana Kardum explores nationalist tensions in the regional women’s movement. Here we review the contrasting fortunes of the region’s states and foreign relations between the two decades.

1921–​1931: political parties, elections and postwar foreign relations The Albanian experience with parliamentary democracy was the briefest in the region. It began with elections in 1921 that gave neither the Popular Party, formed by the diaspora, nor the landowners’ Progressive Party a working majority. A constitutional assembly in 1923 called for a representative cabinet, a bicameral senate, and an independent judiciary, but failed to resolve the impasse.Ten prefectures also continued the French administrative framework from 1920 that placed internal administration under the Interior Ministry. The initial Interior Minister, Ahmed Zogulli (later Ahmed Zogu), had indeed expelled Italian troops. Soon his demands for arbitrary power and rising domestic grievances forced him to flee with Serbian support to Belgrade in June 1924. In a popular coup rather than an election, the Popular Party leader, the diaspora Orthodox Bishop Fan Noli, became Prime Minister. As described in Robert C. Austin’s chapter, he used his brief regime of six months to redistribute the large holdings of the southern beys and promise a loan from the League of Nations to support the land reform. The loan was not forthcoming, especially after Noli’s intemperate demands. Support from southern landowners and the northern Catholics joined by a mercenary force allowed Zogulli to return to power. By 1925, he obliged a senate led by his representatives to appoint him for President. He became King Zog in 1928, abolishing the senate and removing the last vestiges of the Constitution of 1923. Italian financial support from infrastructure loans and a secret military pact secured his position but made the county largely dependent on Italy. The two large successor states, Romania and the Yugoslav Kingdom, did not receive the new postwar loans that they expected from their informal but celebrated military ties to France. Nor did their membership with Czechoslovakia in the Little Entente, intended to deter Hungarian or Bulgarian irredentism, bring them closer together. Such tensions were also visible in the women’s movement formed to support the Entente, described by Marijana Kardum. Postwar Romanian and Yugoslav constitutions, passed in 1923 and 1921 respectively, nonetheless placed the central governments in Bucharest and Belgrade in a strong position. Their Kings appointed the Prime Minister, and the Interior Ministry appointed the Prefects for local administration. The large number of their districts, 33 and 36 respectively, prevented any wider regional representation. Supplementing the two large armies were armed police units (French-​style gendarmerie). The Yugoslav units were free to repress any opposition in Kosovo and Vardar Macedonia, as described in Vladan Jovanović’s chapter. Their annexation to Serbia 204

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Map 19.1  Southeastern Europe after World War I, 1918–​1923.

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John R. Lampe Table 19.1  Ethnic and religious composition after the First World War (in % of total population)

By ethnicity Albania (1930) Total pop.: 1 mil

Bulgaria (1920) 4.85 mil

Greece (1928) 6.2 mil

Romania (1930) 15.6 mil

Yugoslavia (1921) 12 mil

By religion

Albanians Greeks Slavs (Macedonians, Montenegrins) Vlachs Roma Bulgarians Turks Roma Greeks Jews Armenians Russians Others Greeks Turks Macedonians Jews Armenians Albanians Bulgarians Roma Others Romanians Magyars Germans Jews Ukrainians Russians Bulgarians Roma Turks, Tatars Gagauz Serbs, Croats Czechs, Slovaks Poles Others Serbs (including Montenegrins) Croats Slovenes Bosnian Muslims Macedonians Germans Albanians Magyars

206

92.4 4.7 1.4 0.9 0.9 83.4 11.2 1.3 1.0 0.8 0.2 0.2 1.9 92.8 3.1 1.3 1.0 0.5 0.3 0.3 0.1 0.5 71.9 7.9 4.1 4.0 3.2 2.3 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.6 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.9 38.8 23.9 8.5 6.3 5.3 4.3 4.0 3.9

Muslim Orthodox Roman-​Catholic

70 20 10

Orthodox Muslim Jewish Roman-​Catholic Armenian-​Gregorian Protestant

83.8 14.3 0.9 0.7 0.2 0.1

Orthodox Muslim Jewish Roman-​Catholic Protestant

94.1 4.0 1.2 0.6 0.1

Orthodox Uniate Roman-​Catholic Jewish Calvinist Lutheran Muslim Unitarian Baptist Others

72.6 7.9 6.8 4.2 3.9 2.2 1.0 0.4 0.4 0.6

Orthodox Roman-​Catholic Muslim Protestant Jewish Uniate Others

46.7 39.3 11.2 1.9 0.5 0.3 0.03

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By ethnicity

By religion

Romanians Turks Italians Other Slavs Others

1.6 1.2 0.1 1.6 0.3

Sources: Enciklopedija Jugoslavije, vol. 6. Zagreb, 1990, p. 263; Richard Crampton, Ben Crampton. An Atlas of Eastern Europe in the 20th Century. London, 1996, pp. 52, 117, 124; Paul Robert Magocsi. Historical Atlas of Central Europe. Seattle, 2002, pp. 166, 173; Magarditsch Hatschikjan, Stefan Troebst, eds. Südosteuropa. Gesellschaft, Politik,Wirtschaft, Kultur. Ein Handbuch. Munich, 1999, pp. 496–​9; John R. Lampe. Balkans into Southeastern Europe: A Century of War and Transition. Basingstoke, 2006, p. 72. Note:  The names for ethnic groups in this table follow largely the contemporaneous use in censuses. Yet, where for political reasons of that time, nationalities were officially ignored or merged with others (such as the Macedonians in interwar Yugoslavia), or where different group names were used next to each other (such as Ruthenians and Ukrainians in Romania), we have opted for simplification and today’s terminology. Roma were usually called “Gypsies” in the statistics of the time. The reader is advised to take these numbers as estimates and to take into account that governments often manipulated census figures, and that certain populations self-​identified in different ways (e.g. there used to be, and still is a significant undercount of Roma).

in 1912 remained in place and exempted them from the minority protection provisions of the League of Nations. The Hungarian and other minorities in Transylvania were not exempt, although their many complaints had little effect. The Romanian political spectrum provided much to complain about, despite universal male suffrage, until turning in a democratic direction later in the end of the 1920s. The initial wartime alliance of the anti-​Russian Conservative Party with the Central Powers had eliminated their chance to survive into the postwar era. The National Liberals and their wartime leader Ionel Bratianu ruled unopposed with only a brief interruption until 1927. Their education minister and the Bucharest banks took over the previously Hungarian cultural and financial institutions in Transylvania. The regime promoted domestically owned industry as part of a policy called Prin noi inşine (“Through ourselves alone”), the region’s most explicit nationalist ideology (see the chapter by Balázs Trencsényi). Former estate owners frustrated the Liberals’ promised land reform and encouraged a peasant-​based challenge to their regime. The merger of the old kingdom’s (Regat) Peasant Party and the National Party of Transylvania into the National Peasant Party won them 22 percent of the vote but fewer seats in the hasty second election of 1926. The Liberals took 62 percent of the vote and more seats. First Bratianu and then King Ferdinand died in 1927, leaving the Liberals in disarray. In the 1928 elections, the National Peasant Party and its leader Iuliu Maniu swept to an overwhelming victory with over three quarters of the vote. Maniu’s government promoted decentralization and local self-​ government. It relaxed restrictions on minority rights, Jews included, and foreign investment. This promise continued until the Great Depression coincided with the accession of a new King, Carol II. The democratic prospects for the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes at first looked to be more promising. Despite the Serbian domination of the ministries, the courts in Croatia and Slovenia remained under the same set of laws and many of the same judges as before the 207

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war. Zagreb and the Ljubljana elected Municipal Councils with local authority. Prewar school textbooks also remained the rule. The Croatian Peasant Party (HSS), the Slovenian Peoples’ Part (SLS), and the Bosnian Muslim Yugoslav Muslim Organization (JMO) received all of the seats in their districts with ethnic majorities in the elections of 1923, 1925, and 1927. The Albanian party was however excluded from the 1925 elections and the German party after 1927. Serbs or their choices represented Kosovo and Macedonia, while the multi-​ethnic if Serb-​led Democratic Party did not come close to the repeated Serbia-​centered pluralities of the Radical Party. Absent a majority, however, the Radicals’ leader Nikola Pašić was forced to form a series of coalitions, once even with the leader of the HSS, Stjepan Radić, to stay in power. After Pašić died in 1926, a reduced Radical plurality in 1927 and Croatian complaints about a land reform favoring Serbs promised only more short-​term coalitions. Any prospect of including the HSS ended when Radić was assassinated by a Montenegrin Serb delegate in the Belgrade parliament building in 1928. The HSS delegates refused to return. In January 1929. King Aleksandar suspended the constitution, abolished all political parties, and forbade their publications. Royal edicts replaced parliamentary government. Bulgaria and Greece had already experienced the same sort of turmoil at the beginning of the 1920s. Both faced the burden of refugees fleeing from lost territories, 220,000 for Bulgaria and 1.4 million for Greece.Their prewar and wartime European debts, plus reparations owed by Bulgaria, helped to delay loans from the League of Nations into the mid-​1920s. By then, both postwar political regimes had been overturned. The Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BZNS) had won the immediate postwar elections in 1919 and 1920, trailed most closely by the new Bulgarian Communist Party, as noted in the Overview to Part III. Club-​wielding Orange Guards had helped the BZNS to win a narrower victory in the 1922 elections. Its peasantist program succeeded in expanding the cooperative network, strengthening the Agrarian Bank, and introducing agricultural education at Sofia University. But the BZNS regime was cut short before another election could be held. In June 1923, the irredentist leadership of the Macedonian refugees concentrated in Sofia and southwest Bulgaria joined with army officers and the so-​called Constitutional Bloc from the prewar political parties to seize power. The Agrarian Prime Minister Aleksandŭr Stamboliiski was assassinated and dismembered, and many party members were arrested. The repression of a hasty Communist coup in September that year allowed the new regime led by the wartime economics minister Aleksandŭr Tsankov to consolidate power. The young Tsar Boris, succeeding Ferdinand after his abdication in 1918, stood by as indicated in Roumen Daskalov’s chapter.The White Terror against Communist party members and sympathizers presaged an authoritarian regime under Tsankov. Its growing unpopularity threatened British support for a loan from the League of Nations, badly needed for debt and reparations relief. Tsankov then stepped down in favor of Andrei Liapchev, the originally Macedonian leader of the new Democratic Alliance. It prevailed in the 1927 election with 39 percent of the vote. But one of the two Agrarian factions won 23 percent and the Workers Party shadowing for the Communists won 2 percent. By 1928, Liapchev had relaxed restrictions on the press and on trade unions. His agricultural ministry kept the educational reforms and rights granted to the cooperative framework and its financing under Stamboliiski. Only in the southwest Petrich region did the authority of irredentist leadership keep the right to ignore the Sofia ministries and to appoint their own delegates to the parliament.They stayed in place even after the 1931 elections in which a reformist Peoples Bloc defeated the Liapchev Alliance. It had agreed to proportional representation, and 85 percent of the franchise voted. The huge number of Greek refugees had instead been the base of support for the predominant Liberal Party and its leader Eleutherios Venizelos. The defeat and retreat from Anatolia in 208

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1922 had forced King Constantine to flee the country. Half a dozen of his ministers were left to be tried and executed for the “national catastrophe.” The Liberals won a sweeping victory in the parliamentary elections of 1923, as the royalist supporters abstained. Their delegates soon voted to abolish the monarchy in favor of a republic, the only one in the region.Venizelos himself returned in 1924 and as Prime Minister negotiated the first refugee loan from the League of Nations. He left again in 1925, unable to mend divisions with the Liberal ranks. The prosecutor in the 1922 trials, General Theoderos Pangalos, led a coup that seized power in June. His ill-​conceived invasion of Bulgaria later that year prompted a British-​backed demand for withdrawal from the League of Nations, its only interwar intervention. Pangalos was forced to step down, and Venizelos returned in April 1926. By 1928, his regime had won a second refugee loan and accepted the creation of a central bank to reassure its debtors. He suppressed divisions in his Liberal Party and used police powers to win an overwhelming Liberal majority in the 1928 elections, also increased by ending the previous practice of proportional representation. Refugee support in his four-​year term faltered after 1930 when the Ankara Agreement with Turkey did not provide enough financial compensation.

1931–​1939: royal regimes, radical alternatives and prewar foreign relations Following the divergent struggles with elections and parliamentary regimes across the region through the 1920s, the five states of Southeastern Europe faced a more comparable experience in the 1930s. Royal regimes under authoritarian monarchs or their ministers prevailed sooner or later. They faced down radical alternatives as well as the established political parties. They also confronted the Great Depression and the rise of Nazi Germany as an economic alternative to the failing financial resources of France and Britain. Let us examine these three common experiences in turn. Albania’s royal regime was already in place by 1928, when Zog proclaimed himself King. He was followed by the Yugoslav King Aleksandar, who dissolved parliament, political parties, and their newspapers in January 1929. The transition went more slowly elsewhere. Romania’s King Carol II took the throne in 1930 under an agreement for restraint with the National Peasant Prime Minster, Iuliu Maniu. He soon violated it by working with and then splitting the opposition National Liberals. Governing informally through his camarilla of advisors, Carol did not abolish the constitution and abolish all political parties until 1938. In Bulgaria, Tsar Boris was reluctant to intervene in the coalition governments elected in 1931 and returned in 1932.Then the Zveno group of army officers staged a coup and seized power in 1934. Seeing their inexperience, Boris displaced them in 1935 and ruled through his ministers before allowing non-​ party elections in 1938. The new franchise did allow married women over 30 to vote. Greece’s Republic struggled after 1932, as detailed in the chapter by Katerina Lagos. The anti-​Venizelist People’s Party resisted extralegal efforts by Venizelos to return to power after losing the 1933 elections. After his second failed coup in 1935, the People’s Party was able to stage a rigged plebiscite and bring King George back from exile. The 1936 elections did not relieve the stalemate between Venezelist supporters and opponents, between republicans and royalists, or between the Schism’s rival sets of army officers. The King’s new Prime Minister, General Ioannis Metaxas, finally staged his own military coup on August 4, 1936. Metaxas removed rival army officers and suspended the parliamentary provisions in the constitution. Political power passed from the parties to Metaxas, Prime Minister for life by 1938, under the passive authority of George II. The monarchs across the rest of the region took a more active role in their authoritarian regimes. Supported by the police powers of unchecked interior ministries, they also pursued 209

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or permitted some domestic reform. King Aleksandar standardized the various pre-​1914 legal codes and advocated a Yugoslav identity for his renamed Kingdom of Yugoslavia, a daunting prospect whose limitations from the 1920s forward are detailed by Christian Nielson’s chapter. A  royal edict reduced the 33 districts into nine banovine and concentrated an expanded set of police powers in each one, all under the authority of the powerful Interior Minister Petar Živković.The large Croatian unit was separated from the Dalmatian coast, Bosnia was divided so that no entity had a Muslim majority, as were Macedonia, Kosovo, and the Vojvodina so that all had a Serb majority. A new constitution in 1931 allowed only nonparty elections and some press to reappear. There was also some debt relief for the peasantry, as in Romania. In Albania, King Zog’s educational reforms confronted the region’s largest share of illiteracy but faced opposition from the established Greek schools that could not be overcome. Rural schooling made more progress in Romania under the sociologist Dimitrie Gusti as Education Minister. The continuing framework of cooperatives in Bulgaria took advantage of a voting age reform, intended to strengthen the royal regime, to reestablish its representation. In Sofia and in Bucharest, state universities grew in size and standards rose, while their independent municipal governments funded housing reform and food supplies. In Greece, the Metaxas regime at least strengthened the official place of the demotic Greek popularly spoken, thereby challenging the dominance of the Byzantine katharevousa. But it also banned the speaking of any language other than Greek in public. By the late 1930s, his Interior Minister Theodoros Mitsotakis has supplemented his police powers with the same set of informants and detention centers as King Carol’s Siguranţa in Romania. A reduced set of seven regions in 1938 added to Metaxas’ authority as did the Yugoslav banovine to King Akeksandar’s. Helping to justify arbitrary authority across the region were the radical challenges faced by the royal regimes. In Albania, King Zog employed his detachment of British mercenaries to protect him from Kosovo irredentists and Italian collaborators in the small Albanian army. In Bulgaria, after the military seizure of power by the Zveno officers in 1934 had eliminated the IMRO enclave, Tsar Boris abolished the Military League despite its wider membership since the 1920s. In Bulgaria and Greece, the two Communist parties, respectively the surrogate Workers Party and the KKE, had staged violent strikes and supported the Comintern promise of territorial concessions to an independent Macedonia. When the Soviet Union’s Popular Front dropped that prospect in 1935, the KKE won enough seats in the 1936 election to be needed as a partner for a majority in parliament. General Metaxas used the threat of Communist participation to seize power and intern many KKE members. The illegal Yugoslav and Romanian Communist parties also gained members under the anti-​fascist banner of the Popular Front. The Yugoslav party overcame divisions under the Front’s endorsement of a united Yugoslavia, Macedonia included. Ethnic Romanian leadership after a railway yard strike in 1933 helped the Romanian party. None of these Communist threats to any of the royal regimes compared with the right-​ wing nationalist challenges posed in Yugoslavia and Romania. In 1934, the Macedonian IMRO provided the gunman to assassinate King Aleksandar on his visit to Marseilles. The plot came from the Croatian Ustaša, organized in 1929 by a Zagreb lawyer, Ante Pavelić. It was based by this time in a series of training camps for their émigré members in Hungary and Italy. Chapter 38 by Rory Yeomans explores its wider background and limited activity inside Yugoslavia until the war years from 1941. Until then, however, its threat and IMRO’s justified the continued restrictions under the Regent Prince Paul’s successor regime of Milan Stojadinović and a new Interior Minister, replacing Živković. Its new single government party, the Yugoslav Radical

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Union (JRZ) lacked only Croatian support from the reviving of the HSS under its new leader Vladko Maček (see the chapter by Mark Biondich). In Romania, nationalist political violence came earlier and pushed the royal regime to respond in kind. By 1931, the Legion of the Archangel Michael, founded in 1927 by Zeliu Cordreanu, had created its own paramilitary force, the Iron Guard. The chapter by Constantin Iordachi describes the rise of the region’s one major fascist movement through the 1930s. In 1933, they were banned by King Carol’s new Liberal Prime Minister Ion Duca and promptly assassinated him. Carol relaxed the ban and soon created his own paramilitary youth organization. Inconclusive elections in 1937 failed to give the Liberals a ruling majority while the Legion’s candidates won 16 percent of the vote. King Carol abolished the Legion and all political parties in 1938, and his Interior Minister Armand Calinescu arrested many Guardists. Codreanu was killed and a dozen more were shot in prison. The mass movement withered, but the Legion’s core remained. The rise of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany strengthened the region’s authoritarian regimes, while the retreat of France and Britain weakened their countervailing leverage. The political attraction to a single, all powerful party or leader did not however lead to any military alliances with Germany. Nor were trade ties at the expense of France and Britain as widespread as assumed at the time. Italy’s leverage in Albania was the one case of full economic dependence. King Zog signed a new economic accord with Italy in 1936, restarting the flow of SVEA investment and returning Italian teachers and advisors. Elsewhere, the German trade offensive was attractive for the favorable exchange rates under bilateral clearing agreements rather than for political alliance. Only in Bulgaria did the Austro-​German share of its exports and imports rise past 50 percent by 1938. German offers of arms imports and military advisors were refused. Yugoslavia’s trade with Germany did not reach 50  percent of its total foreign trade, despite Prime Minister Stojadinović’s proclamation of its advantages. A celebrated German investment in a new Bosnian steel mill in 1938 still did not raise the German share of foreign investment past 8 percent. The strong Western market for Romanian oil exports kept down its German trade share even after the departure of its pro-​French Foreign Minister in 1936. Despite support among some Nazi officials for the Iron Guard, Hitler accepted its brutal suppression in 1938. Greece’s diplomatic ties to Britain remained in place.They discouraged German attempts to use a limited increase in their trade by 1938 to diplomatic advantage. The region’s own efforts to form a Balkan League had however faltered by this time. After a founding meeting in Athens in 1930, efforts failed to bring Bulgaria into what began as anti-​ Bulgarian links between Yugoslavia and Romania in Czechoslovakia’s Little Entente of the 1920s. King Aleksandar of Yugoslavia was pursuing rapprochement with Tsar Boris of Bulgaria when Aleksandar was assassinated in 1934. Absent any joint security or reassurance from France and Britain, the region’s resistance to political or military agreements with Nazi Germany deserves respect as late as 1938, if not afterwards.

Selected Readings Austin, Robert C. Founding a Balkan State.Albania’s Experiment with Democracy, 1920–​1925. New York, 2012. Bell, John D. Peasants in Power. Aleksandar Stamboliiski and the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union, 1899–​1923. Princeton, NJ, 1977. Biondich, Mark. Stjepan Radić. The Croat Peasant Party and the Politics of Mass Mobilization, 1904–​1928. Toronto, 2000. Fischer, Bernd J. King Zog and the Struggle for Stability in Albania. New York, 1984. Grueff, Stefane. Crown of Thorns.The Reign of King Boris III of Bulgaria, 1918–​1943. Lanham, Md., 1987. Lungu, Don B. Romania and the Great Powers, 1933–​1940. Durham, NC, 1989.

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John R. Lampe Mavrokordatos, George. The Stillborn Republic. Social Conditions and Political Struggles in Greece, 1922–​1936. Berkeley, Calif., 1983. Nielsen, Christian Axboe. Making Yugoslavs: Identity in King Aleksandar’s Yugoslavia. Toronto,  2014. Oberländer, Erwin, ed. Autoritäre Regime in Ostmittel-​und Südosteuropa, 1919–​1944. Paderborn, 2001. Roberts, Henry L. Rumania, Political Problems of an Agrarian State. New Haven, Conn., 1951. Veremis, Thanos. The Greek Military in Politics from Independence to Democracy. Montreal, 1997.

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20 INTERWAR IDEAS AND IMAGES OF NATION, CLASS, AND GENDER Balázs Trencsényi

Shaping and reshaping stereotypes including self-​ stereotypes played a crucial role in the construction of modern nations all over the world. These stereotypes created symbolic frameworks which helped to integrate the different social, ethnocultural, and territorial units that came to form the modern national communities, distinguishing them from neighboring and competing national projects. In Southeastern Europe nation-​ building ventures that were considered “late-​comers” felt a pressing need to legitimize themselves with historical, ethnographical, geographical, anthropological, or even aesthetic and philosophical arguments against the supra-​ethnic imperial claims and the partially overlapping claims of their neighbors. Southeastern European nation-​builders also sought to prove the European credentials of their national project. They were confronted with a number of developmental models often lumped together as “Western,” despite evident differences and tensions between them, as shown by recurring conflicts among Anglophile, Francophile, and Germanophile models. Consequently, the process of national identity-​building in Southeastern Europe was conflictual not only on geopolitical grounds but also on symbolic ones. This dynamic took on a new dimension after the turn of the century. The phenomena of mass society and mass politics had a powerful impact on the ideological framework of national identity-​ building.The traditional cleavages in society, dividing it by different legal, social, and cultural markers, were superseded by the more comprehensive image of a single national community.At the same time, empirical social sciences produced a newly divided vision of society, stressing the growing gap between the “Europeanized” urban elites and the rural masses left out of the processes of modernization. The Balkan Wars and the ensuing World War contributed to the radicalization of national images. Wartime propaganda represented the collective self in conflict with its enemies. It also facilitated the wider circulation of Southeastern European national imagery.The Central Powers sought to put Bulgaria and Turkey on their symbolic side as worthy allies, while the Entente readjusted their otherwise rather ambiguous image of Serbia, Romania, and Greece to support their struggle against the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. This process necessitated a dialogue of local and external actors and also created a need for experts and mediators, such as the Dalmatian exiles (such as Ante Trumbić and Frano Supilo) who were able to reframe their collective identity as Yugoslavs in the emerging paradigm of national self-​determination.To a lesser extent, similar processes also took place on the other side, as some of the local intellectuals tried to situate their national claims within the war aims of the Central Powers. Thus, for instance, 213

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Ivo Pilar used historical and anthropological arguments to reinforce Croatian identity within the Habsburg imperial framework, positioning it against both Italian expansionist pretensions and Serbian irredentism. On the whole, radical wartime language led to retrospective projections of historical conflicts and alliances and the formation of radically new geopolitical visions. These shifts affected the ideological framework of the interwar debates, as it became clear there was no return back to the prewar status quo. At the same time, it would be a mistake to call the interwar years a homogeneous period as they witnessed radically transformed expectations and concomitant ideological shifts. Thus, the early 1920s saw a liberal nationalist revival, at least in the countries that could be qualified as “winners” of the First World War. There the image of the nation was framed in a modernist paradigm, but with a strong focus on national unity that created an increasing conflict with the liberal precepts dictated by the victorious Entente powers. By the late 1920s, however, a widespread consensus about the collapse of this liberal dominance triggered the rise of anti-​modernist constructions of identity. National consciousness was no longer conceived of as evolving, but as an atemporal essence that was corrupted by the flow of history and had to be potentially restored by heroic projects of national rebirth. While these ideas were usually linked to the right, there were also radical left-​wing alternative options. Adherents on the radical left envisioned a similar rupture of continuity but with a different ideological aim, namely a socialist revolution to overcome the asymmetric economic and symbolic relationship between “the West” and its peripheries like Southeastern Europe. Apart from the national and class layers of identity, gender was also highly politicized in the interwar years. On the whole, there was a complex relationship among these layers, as in many contexts gender closely interlocked with nation  –​as the recurrent stress on Balkan masculinity but also on the contribution of women to the war efforts shows. The social and political transformations in the 1920s and 1930s prompted new modalities of femininity, one modernist (stressing emancipation) and another anti-​modernist (focusing on the biopolitical role of women in reproducing the nation). This chapter will analyze these transformations, following the tripartite division among nation, class, and gender.The reader should bear in mind that these layers were closely interlinked, and thus one needs to be aware of their complex entanglements.

Defining the nation: integrating and othering Nation in space and time The immediate postwar years were marked by the persistence of Western civilizational models even though the geopolitical landscape had changed.The traditional clash of German vs. French modernity was seemingly settled with the defeat of the Reich, even though ethnocultural/​völkisch nationalism remained a central framework of thinking about the national community all across the region. In contrast, France emerged victorious but hardly an uncontested model to follow due to its continuing internal cleavages. Its republican nationalism had rather limited impact. At the same time, the anti-​republican and radical conservative current in French political culture continued to exert a certain regional influence, especially in the Romanian context where the ideas of Maurras and Barrès had already had powerful resonance at the turn of the century. In turn, Britain remained a powerful model but also one that became increasingly impossible to hold up as a realistic example for Southeastern European political cultures to follow. Finally, as a result of the decisive US intervention during the First World War and the general expansion of American popular culture in the “roaring twenties,” Americanism became a new cultural-​ideological inspiration on many levels. Yet, the idea of a multi-​ethnic 214

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“melting pot” failed to register against the strong ethno-​nationalist ideological commitment of the Southeastern European cultural and political elites. With these divergent sources of inspiration, mainstream Southeastern European discussions of national identity in the 1920s tended toward a more institutional-​political definition of the nation. Yet they never completely abandoned the ethnocultural components which had shaped the preceding period of “national revivals.” This was even more complicated in the case of Yugoslavia, where there were multiple levels of self-​identification and multiple imperial heritages (see Nielson’s chapter). The ethnogenetic narratives used to buttress the internal and external symbolic hierarchies could be ambiguous. The Dinaric discourse of the anthropogeographer Jovan Cvijić, extolling heroic patriarchal mountaineers, was originally meant to support the Serbian irredenta seeking to unify the South Slavs around a common geographical and anthropologically Serb core, populating the Dinaric uplands from southwest Serbia across parts of Bosnia, Croatia, and Montenegro. After the First World War, it was reshuffled to fit the integral Yugoslavist narrative and could be turned to various political directions (from radical modernism to fascism). This narrative could also be subverted from inside, as in the work of the Croat Dinko Tomašić. Tomašić argued that in contrast to the patriarchal Dinaric highlanders, it was the peaceful lowlanders, cooperating in their extended family (zadruga) system, who were the ideal South Slavs. This interpretation secured a favorable place for Croats in the symbolic Yugoslav project, turning them from peripheral into central players. The interplay of geography and national characterology had many faces. Going beyond Cvijić’s geomorphological vision in philosophical complexity was the Romanian poet, writer, and philosopher Lucian Blaga. He opted for an ontological interpretation of the national space. Drawing on the ideas of the German Leo Frobenius about geographically determined cognitive frameworks, Blaga developed his own idiosyncratic vision about the “Romanian mind,” shaped by the “undulation” of their geographical habitat, namely the alternation of hills and valleys in Transylvania. This vision emphasized cognitive structures, diverging from the anthropogeographical model developed by Cvijić. Nevertheless, there were obvious points in common: both extolled the mountaineer population as the normative core of their unitary nation-​building project. Space was not the only category to be nationalized, as both time and historicity obviously played a central role. What was common for the various historical narratives emerging in the interwar period was the collapse of the linear modernist vision that had been central to the nation-​building narratives of the turn of the century. The postwar loss of belief in cumulative progress and the concomitant agenda of gradual catching up with the normative Western social and institutional practices opened the way to various Sonderweg and cyclical theories. They turned the model of gradual Westernization upside down. Southeastern European intellectuals started to look for moments of tragic divergence, like the Bulgarian medievalist Petŭr Mutafchiev. He interpreted the medieval heterodox sect of Bogomilism as a key factor of the Bulgarian Sonderweg. Prehistories were reevaluated and sometimes morphed into constructions for returning to an authentic mode of existence by reviving the most archaic substrate of national culture. A case in point is the cult of Dacian antiquity in Romania, ranging from the archaeological opus magnum of Vasile Pârvan, to the more speculative philosophical constructions of Mircea Eliade and Dan Botta. Interwar radical nationalists often returned to the national revival of the nineteenth century, but they became increasingly suspicious of the possibility of the convergence of their national tradition with Western liberal modernity. They argued either for a regenerative potential inherent to the non-​Western cultures not yet enfeebled by over-​civilization or pointed 215

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instead to the paradigm shift of Western political culture away from liberal democracy. The new normative Western model was actually totalitarian. This often triggered an anti-​modernist vision of nationhood as in the works of young radical intellectuals such as the Romanian Emil Cioran or the Albanian Ismet Toto. They rejected the return to archaism but sought to overcome bourgeois modernity with a program of “total mobilization.” While these ideologies of mobilization were often associated with the radical right (Cioran himself got close to the fascist Iron Guard), they also entered the discourse of the radical left. While nation in general was not one of their core concepts, Southeastern European interwar communists often linked their class agenda to national liberation.This was particularly common with those activists whose national community had, like Macedonians in Yugoslavia, become a target of centralist nation building.

Nation and state The First World War and its aftermath escalated the debate about what qualifies a nation for successful state building. The key factors were historical legitimization, the continuity of statehood, as well as the structural-​institutional competence for administering a modern state. These preconditions were rooted in the nineteenth century liberal nationalist formula for state building, but it was obvious that the erstwhile optimism for the harmonious co-​existence of national projects was gone. Instead, a strong feeling of competition emerged between different national projects claiming the same territories, further radicalized by the rift between losers and winners in the postwar settlement. At the same time, maximalist unification projects were somewhat frustrated. The most obvious examples were the catastrophic loss of Asia Minor in the Greek case and the Bulgarian loss of Vardar Macedonia. In addition,Yugoslavia lost Istria and part of Dalmatia to Italy while Albania lost Kosovo to Yugoslavia.

Nations and nationalism Given the ambiguous relationship of the interwar national discourse to the prewar revival period, the study of the national movements became a key issue for historians, literary scholars, and some social scientists as well. This implied both canonization and historicization of key figures and trends, as in the intellectual histories of the Serbian Slobodan Jovanović, Bulgarian Boyan Penev, and a generation later the Albanian Eqrem Çabej and the Greek Konstantinos Dimaras. There was a powerful trope of an unquestioned “re-​awakening,” i.e. a conscious return to previous models of national identity. Inspired by French social history and German Volksgeschichte, the Slovenian historian Fran Zwitter developed a different analysis of nationalization in the broader Slovenian ethnic space, tracing patterns of assimilation, population movement, and ideological mobilization. There were more critical positions coming usually from the left, problematizing the idea of reviving the past as a basis for creating a modern nation-​state: Greek intellectuals such as George Seferis stressed the demotic element of language and culture as against the cult of classical antiquity, while the Bulgarian leftist sociologist Ivan Hadzhiiski depicted the democratic radicalism of an upward-​mobile rural stratum in the early nineteenth century, who gradually lost their progressive drive while becoming the bureaucratic elite of the new Bulgarian state. Further to the left, authors such as the Romanian Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu and the Slovenian Edvard Kardelj sought to create a Marxist-​Leninist theory of the nation, pointing to the interplay of class and national antagonism. In both cases the pressure to develop such a theory was obvious due to the presence of strong nationalist contenders: in Yugoslavia, the centralist integral 216

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nationalism of the Serbs and the competing and gradually radicalizing anti-​centralist national movements among Croats, Slovenians, Macedonians, and Bosnians. There was also an anti-​ federalist variant of the Communist national program, mostly supported by Serbian members of the party. In the Romanian case, Pătrășcanu responded to the challenge posed by the radical ethnonationalism of the Iron Guard. He fused social and national analytical categories into a particularly intricate mixture. On the other end of the ideological spectrum, Communist leaders in Romania from the Hungarian or German minorities, who tended to focus on social conflicts, invested little in rethinking the longue durée history of the Romanian national movement.

Nation and religion The interwar period saw the further politicization of religion. This process coincided with a backlash against modernist theology, often taken up by the neo-​traditionalist groups. They started from resistance to the break with traditional societies and religious practices, and the need to reconfigure the relationship of religion, politics, and society. Rather than accepting the process of secularization and seeking to find the place of religious attitudes in this new context, they sought to “re-​enchant” their society. The period saw the nationalization of religion and the sacralization of the nation all over Southeastern Europe. States and various political movements made strong symbolic investments into the national religious symbolism, often manifested in the cult of national saints, such as Saint Sava for the Serbians. These cults were sustained by historical narratives pointing to particular links between national spirituality and Christianity. There emerged popular theories of Christianization, such as the growing veneration of Saint Andrew as the Apostle of the Romanian lands. What is more, the search for archaic religious traditions rekindled also the interest in pre-​ Christian cults (Thracians in the Bulgarian case, and Dacians in the Romanian one). The nationalization of religion sharpened denominational conflicts between what was considered the “national religion” and the others. Transylvanian Greek Catholics and neo-​ Protestants were increasingly targeted in Romania, and there was a generalized fear of neo-​ Protestant proselytism in Serbia and Bulgaria. In some national contexts there were aborted attempts to create a unified national denomination, but it was only after the Second World War that it became possible, somewhat paradoxically with Soviet assistance, to eliminate the Greek Catholic denomination in Romania. Their much smaller numbers survived in Bulgaria. The processes of nationalization and sacralization were especially complex in the multi-​ethnic and multi-​denominational Yugoslav state.The options ranged from pressing Orthodoxy as a sort of state-​religion (manifested in the symbolic importance of building Orthodox cathedrals in the newly acquired lands), to coopting the Catholic and to some extent even the Bosnian Muslim clergy. After 15 years of negotiations, a Concordat was finally concluded between Yugoslavia and the Vatican in 1935. In Albania, the numerically dominant Sunni Muslim community was in a way the least “nationalized,” whereas the minority Catholic, Orthodox, and Bektashi communities had stronger narratives stressing the national importance of their religious tradition.

Class identities: parallel realities and the search for coherence Peasantry Given the fact that Southeastern European societies remained prevalently agrarian through the interwar period, the peasantry remained central to the social imaginary across the region. Until late in the nineteenth century, the idealized peasant was seen with very little political 217

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involvement. Then the Serbian Radical Party took advantage of universal male suffrage to win peasant seats in parliament, and Bulgaria’s Agrarian National Union emerged from populist mobilization. The war and its aftermath made the peasantry both more visible as the army rank and file and the source of increasingly scarce foodstuffs. The wider introduction of universal male suffrage made them also more important politically. The period saw the flourishing of specific genres of literature focusing on the rural world, ranging from neo-​Romantic or naturalist novels (such as the Bulgarian Elin Pelin, Yordan Yovkov, or the Romanian Mihail Sadoveanu) to sociography (such as the Croatian economic sociologist Rudolf Bićanić or the Romanian sociologist Dimitrie Gusti). The trials and future of the peasantry became a principal preoccupation of some sections of the urban society as well. At the same time, the urban elites’ fear of a jacquerie remained a key element shaping especially those political cultures where the rural-​urban conflict also had a national component. For instance, the postwar clashes between the Serbian army and the Croatian peasants remained a formative social experience which fed the political mobilization of the Croatian Peasant Party against the Belgrade-​controlled army and bureaucracy. Agrarian populism became a key political movement across the region, with the exception of Greece. Stressing their numerical majority, peasant leaders rejected the liberal modernizing agenda of industrialization and urbanization at the expense of the rural population. At the same time, agrarians repudiated the mainstream Marxist vision of a retrograde peasantry and its belief in industrialization as the only way toward social progress. Agrarians instead believed in the possibility of preserving the peasantry as the dominant social group rather than eliminating it, defending it from impoverishment or re-​feudalization in the face of falling farm prices and growing indebtedness. In their two-​sided ideological struggle, they put their hope on peasant cooperatives for offering a more efficient and more human existence than liberal capitalism or Soviet-​style communism.They linked their agenda to a global division of labor where not every nation could and should become predominantly industrial.They argued that the preservation of peasantry also contributed to the maintenance of national essence. Critical of the urban elite’s representative democracy, agrarian populists preferred a specific “peasant democracy” based on their common class interest and rooted in their (alleged) pre-​ modern traditions of collective ownership. These ideological constructions were devised by Bulgaria’s Aleksandŭr Stamboliiski and Ivan Hadzhiiski,Yugoslavia’s Dinko Tomašić, or the left-​ wing of the Bucharest sociological school, such as Henri Stahl. Later in the 1930s, they could fit into the Popular Front combination of socialist and populist elements, thus creating a certain basis for mobilizing the peasantry in the anti-​fascist struggle during the Second World War, especially in the case of Yugoslavia and to a certain extent also in Greece, Bulgaria, and Albania. In most of these cases the bulk of the resistance was indeed provided by the rural population.

Urban elites While the new political and social elites in Southeastern Europe at the turn of the century were predominantly urban, there emerged also a powerful anti-​urban rhetoric, castigating decadence and “forms without substances,” i.e. the adoption of Western ideas and institutions without any link to the local social and cultural structures. This discourse had a conservative orientation, but also appeared in the leftist criticism of the bourgeoisie and, in some cases, it was present in a mixed version which was hard to position on the left or right of the political spectrum, as in the writing of the Croatian modernist poet and essayist Antun Gustav Matoš. At the same time, the modernist urban culture emerging in the booming big cities aimed at a new commercial elite, now outnumbering the public officials that had predominated before 218

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1914.There emerged local variants of the European trends, from bourgeois liberalism to different shades of avant-​gardism. Importantly, even if the avant-​gardists were critical of bourgeois culture as such, they still resonated with the milieu in which they worked. This created an ambiguous image of the modern urban space –​as both an object of fascination and a center of corruption. In the interwar period, these trends continued and to a certain extent even sharpened, with the flourishing of radically anti-​bourgeois ideologies (especially communism, fascism, and agrarian populism), and modernist aesthetic streams which continued to have a love-​hate relationship with the city and its dwellers. Similar to the genre of national characterizations, a number of literary and sociological works sought to characterize the urban population. An example is Pogled s Kalemegdana (View from the Kalemegdan, 1938) by Vladimir Velmar Janković, offering a collective portrait of the Belgrade population. This urban self-​identification could serve as a symbolic framework to accommodate ethnic otherness, such as the emotional identification with Brăila, a Danubian port town in Southeastern Romania and home of various minorities, among them a sizable Jewish community, in Mihail Sebastian’s De două mii de anii (From Two Thousand Years,  1934). While the interwar period in general is usually characterized by the collapse of the liberal (or liberal nationalist) project in Southeastern Europe, there were also some attempts to defend the liberal Weltanschauung. A case in point is the work of the Romanian social theorist Ştefan Zeletin, whose 1925 book on the Romanian bourgeoisie was an emphatic argument for the historical contribution of private capitalism in the emergence of the modern Romanian nation-​state. This “neoliberal” position slipped off the mainstream, but some nationalist elements of Zeletin’s doctrine found their way to the radical right: corporatist state capitalism was to replace the multi-​ethnic urban stratum of Jewish-​owned enterprises with a nationally and ideologically homogenized new Romanian middle class.

Intelligentsia Similar to the anti-​bourgeois sentiments they typically shared, the image and self-​image of the intelligentsia was marked by a profound ambiguity. On the one hand there was a very strong feeling of mission of the intellectuals as the destined spiritual leaders of their societies.There was also a persistent criticism of inorganic elites often focused on the detachment of the intellectuals from the “common people.” In a way, it was precisely the huge and unrealistic expectation of the transformative capacity of the intellectuals (shared across East Central Europe) that contributed to the growing disenchantment with them and among themselves, In contrast to the Polish case, the social position of the intelligentsia in the region was much less hereditary and drew instead on a variety of social connections. In Romania, boyar and merchant families morphed into the intelligentsia, in Croatia a small but existing urban and gentry component was a background. To a certain extent in Greece, with the transformation of merchant elites, as well with the Muslim urban elites in Bosnia and Albania reconfiguring themselves as cultural leaders, there was a certain social rootedness of the new intellectual groups. Serbia and Bulgaria displayed much less continuity and instead a stronger convergence between the new state bureaucracy (including teachers) and the intelligentsia. One can perhaps deduce from this the considerably stronger symbolic position of Romanian, Greek, or Croat intellectuals in their society than that of their Serbian and Bulgarian peers. The interwar period also saw the emergence of generational movements of young intellectuals such as the Romanian “young generation” (or “generation of ’27”) or the Albanian “young men” (të rinjtë).While their political ideas and destinies diverged, they developed similar patterns and rituals of sociability. They revolved around café culture, debating societies, and 219

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ephemeral journal projects. Their essayistic style favored the cult of “experience,” and a search for defining their group identity by negating what they considered the hopelessly anachronistic and paralyzing culture, politics, and institutional structures of their fathers. It was a bitter irony of history that this energy of emancipation often pushed these young intellectuals toward totalitarian political models which proved highly destructive, in some cases even self-​destructive.

Workers In contrast to the peasants, urban labor was hardly at the center of interwar attention, not least because in most of the region workers hardly exceeded 10  percent of the total population. Nevertheless, there were some pockets of industrialization, mainly the capital cities but also some of the peripheries such as the Banat in Romania, some parts of Vojvodina and Slavonia in Yugoslavia, or Shkodër in Albania. Working-​class identity and political movements developed there. It is noteworthy that the emerging working class was often multi-​ethnic, as in Vojvodina, Transylvania, and in major cities from Thessaloniki and Plovdiv to Bucharest and Iași. This contradicted the unitarist image of nation building and added another layer to the debate on the relationship of the city and the countryside. An emerging literature focusing on the working class was rooted partly in avant-​gardist tendencies often linked to various shades of the socialist movement. It is characteristic, however, that in many radical representations of the oppressed, such as the revolutionary poem “September” by the Bulgarian Geo Milev, the envisioned popular uprising merges the urban and rural worlds: “Peasants, Workers, Common folk, Landless, Illiterate, Boors…” There were also more conservative streams seeking to alleviate the situation of the urban proletariat. Christian socialism had an impact especially in Slovenia, where once again it interfered with agrarian populism (e.g. in the writings of Andrej Gosar). And especially from the late 1920s, different corporatist approaches sought to integrate the workers into an organic unity with the managers and the producers, rejecting the idea of class conflicts. These ideas often started with an apolitical technocratic rhetoric, stressing the need to go beyond the traditional political divisions, but often ended up with the radical right, as in the case of the most interesting corporatist ideologue of the interwar years, the Romanian Mihail Manoilescu.

Images of gender between tradition and modernism Gendering has been a well-​established rhetorical trope of describing national and civilizational difference.Traditional representations of the Balkans, in contrast to Orientalism, tended to focus not on the “effeminate East” but more on patriarchal masculinity. Nevertheless, there was also a space for a specific Balkan female type, going back to the image of Teresa Makri adored by Lord Byron and also contrasted, as it were, to the Ottoman world: “Though I fly to Istambol, /​ Athens holds my heart and soul.” Modernist visions of society in Southeastern Europe had started toward the end of the nineteenth century to allocate a more active social, cultural, and political role to women, more than the targets of the masculine gaze or the symbols of pre-​political domesticity and motherhood. The opening of educational opportunities and new occupations, such as that of teachers in the expanding school system and some wartime administrative and industrial jobs, created new institutional practices and behavioral patterns, triggering social expectations of further emancipation. Across the region, feminism started to have a visible impact from the 1910s onward, mediated both by the international networks and by local political movements, both leftist and nationalist, or a mixture of the two. 220

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In most cases, this led to pluralization in the women’s movement already before the interwar period. In Bulgaria, the radical left was led by Vela Blagoeva, the wife of the orthodox Marxist theoretician –​in the Bulgarian context, “narrow” socialist –​Dimitŭr Blagoev, while the more moderate socialist wing, ready to cooperate with bourgeois activists, was led by Anna Karima, the wife of the “broad” socialist Yanko Sakazov.The bourgeois liberal feminists were led by Yulia Malinova, the wife of the liberal nationalist politician Aleksandŭr Malinov. Despite the obvious political differences, many key points of their agendas were held common and prompted some cooperation. They all focused on social and educational improvements, hygiene, child-​care, the fight against prostitution, and even a certain eugenic preoccupation. What was obviously different was the vision of society that could finally achieve this emancipatory program. Blagoeva relegated these goals to a future socialist society after the revolution. Karima’s reformist perspective envisioned gradual social reforms making the situation of women increasingly more bearable until eventually a socialist society could be created, while Malinova’s humanitarian liberal vision focused more on the transformation of institutional and social practices within the existing framework. These ideological divisions became even more tangible in the 1920s, when a common framework for the women’s movement became increasingly untenable due to the clash of the radical left and right (see Kardum’s chapter). Along these divided lines, different political forces developed their own women’s sections and created different ideological combinations of nation, class, and gender. It is telling that Malinova, who came from a Russian Jewish background, had to resign in 1926 from the Presidency of the Bulgarian Women’s Association due to nationalist attacks. The two extremes were the radical right, which constructed the role of the women in biopolitical terms as birth-​givers and educators of the nation, linked to the socio-​economic, hygienic, and educational agenda of national self-​reproduction. On the other side stood the radical left, which tended to subordinate the women’s question to the class struggle. More typical were moderate conceptions emanating from the merger of feminism and mainstream nationalism and sometimes a religiously driven moral discourse. These stances ranged from the Romanian Princess Alexandrina Cantacuzino to the Serbian writer Isidora Sekulić, or the Croatian writer Marija Jurić Zagorka, the latter being more anti-​clerical, to liberal nationalism focusing on the modernization of the living conditions of the most oppressed and exploited rural women, as with the key figure of the Yugoslav Women’s Association, Leposava Petković. Various shades of leftist women’s activism focused on social conflict and social hygiene but also showed a special interest in the liberation of the female body from conservative authoritarian practices and mind-​sets (see the works of the Croatian Jewish writer Vera Stein Erlich or the Slovenian Angela Vode). Compared to the plurality of voices and images about femininity, the representations of masculinity were more traditional. Wartime propaganda led to a paroxysm of heroic masculine imagery of soldiers in the respective armies, soon to be capitalized upon by many interwar ideologists of nation-building such as Jovan Cvijić. Throughout the interwar period this remained the dominant popular image reproduced by locals and sympathetic external observers as well. A paradigmatic work was Heroische Lebensform (Heroic Life Form) by the German Slavist Gerhard Gesemann on the Montenegrins. This vision obviously resonated with the political culture in these societies, with a growing presence of paramilitary violence. At the same time, there was also a widespread debate in literature and literary criticism on the “non-​heroic” type of masculinity. A number of paradigmatic satirical oeuvres, created at the turn of the century, such as that of the Bulgarian Aleko Konstantinov, the Serbian Branislav Nušić, or the Romanian Ion Luca Caragiale, remained central to the debate in the interwar years. They depicted the flamboyant and bragging but in reality fainthearted representatives 221

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of the lower middle class, echoing the bombastic patriotic rhetoric of the nation-​building elites but pursuing instead their own petty material interests.These portraits and the discussions around them, amplified by the interwar avant-​gardist streams, represented the total subversion of the mainstream narratives of collective identity in Southeastern Europe. They rejected the normative link between the valiant ancestors and the heroic builders of the modern nation-​state, turning the self-​descriptive tropes of the national revivals into a carnivalesque parody where images and identities ceased to have any coherence. As Tristan Tzara put it into the mouth of Mouth, one of the protagonists of his Dadaist play Le Coeur à gaz: “Everyone does not know me. I am alone here in my wardrobe and the mirror is blank when I look at myself.”

Selected Readings Banac, Ivo and Katherine Verdery, eds. National Character and National Ideology in Interwar Eastern Europe. New Haven, 1995. Bucur, Maria. Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania. Pittsburgh, 2002. Daskalov, Roumen, Tchavdar Marinov, Alexander Vezenkov, and Diana Mishkova, eds. Entangled Histories of the Balkans, 4 vols. Leiden, 2013–​2017. de Haan, Francisca, Krasimira Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi, eds. Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms in Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe: 19th and 20th Centuries. New York, 2006. Drace-​Francis, Alex. The Making of Modern Romanian Culture:  Literacy and the Development of National Identity. London, 2006. Lampe, John R. and Mark Mazower, eds. Ideologies and National Identities: The Case of Twentieth-​Century Southeastern Europe. Budapest and New York, 2004. Livezeanu, Irina. Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–​ 1930. Ithaca, NY, 1995. Mishkova, Diana, ed. We, the People: Politics of National Peculiarity in Southeastern Europe. Budapest, 2008. Trencsényi, Balázs. The Politics of National Character: A Study in Interwar East European Thought. London, 2011. Trencsényi, Balázs, Maciej Janowski, Mónika Baár, Maria Falina, Luka Lisjak-Gabrijelčič, and Michal Kopeček. History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe, vols. I–​II. Oxford, 2016 and 2018.

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21 INTERWAR WOMEN’S MOVEMENTS FROM THE LITTLE ENTENTE TO NATIONALISM Marijana Kardum

Prior to the First World War, women activists in Southeastern Europe did not regard themselves as the British-​style suffragettes of the region. At the international women’s congress in 1913, the Serbian representative from Austria-​Hungary disregarded the so-​called “militant suffragettes” in favor of the home and family which were said to be central to “feminism” in non-​Western societies in Europe. Women needed to fight for their rights “slowly, spontaneously, in line with the time and culture,” and not focusing exclusively on the right to vote. In the nineteenth century, access to (higher) education and the professions were crucial demands by women in the region. Women were expected to act as national edifiers in the process of nation building. Women’s associations appeared at the same time. They merged in wider national unions and umbrella organizations after the establishment of the national states and during the first decades of the twentieth century. Still, Marija Jurić Zagorka, a Croat writer and journalist, seriously criticized the “social, cultural, and political” conditions in Croatia (then part of Austria-​Hungary), where there was still no women’s movement and where feminism was dismissed as “the fight for trousers.”The First World War saw many women, as did the Balkan Wars, actively supporting the war efforts of their respective nations. The nationalization and politicization of women intensified during wartime and continued to be (re)conceptualized in the 1920s and 1930s. The interwar period signaled more radical demands for full social, political, and civil equality with men.There was still a huge gender gap that continued across the region in voting rights. It was not until the 1940s and 1950s that the women of these countries achieved full suffrage. Women’s movements in Southeastern Europe included women of diverse ideological standpoints, from the radical left to the radical right. One common characteristic of the Bulgarian, Greek, Romanian, and South Slavic (i.e. Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian) women who promoted women’s rights was their social class.They were predominately members of the urban upper strata. Feminist activities came from well-​educated, middle-​class (or even noble) women, who often had some family ties with male political leaders and members of the intelligentsia. In the interwar period, women focused on intellectual networking to participate in international politics. Their organizations continued prewar projects of national emancipation and 223

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consolidation. Between the two wars, however, the ideology of nationalism played a crucial role in limiting women’s transnational activities and challenged the proclaimed international “sisterhood.” During the 1920s, representatives of the major international women’s organizations, such as the International Council of Women (ICW), the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) toured Southeastern Europe with the intent to spread their agenda.They typically reported that the animosity among neighbors in the Balkans stood in the way of internationalism.The lack of “international spirit” in the region was especially striking in the antagonism between Hungarians and Serbs, Serbs and Bulgarians, and Bulgarians and Greeks. There were serious tensions among the dominant nations and other national or ethnic groups in Yugoslavia and Romania. There were still women internationalists in the region, but they were at the same time actively pursuing their own national, economic, and cultural interests. Women rarely acted in the international arena completely free of ideological and political baggage. They were taking part in on-​going nation-​building, even if they were not always ready to acknowledge it. The Little Entente of Women (LEW) seems an appropriate case study for understanding how the interwar women’s transnational network proceeded within the geopolitics of the region.

Regional cooperation and the international community Contacts between the Slavic women of the “nations without states” of Austria-​Hungary existed from as early as the second half of the nineteenth century. Women’s networking in the region prior to 1918 incorporated personal ties, usually between well-​informed women that engaged in transmitting practical strategies of knowledge production for women in their mother tongues, with legitimation rooted in the fight for national causes. By clothing their political actions in linguistic and cultural terms, most of these women reacted against the perceived national privileging of the imperial centralist elites who were allegedly supranational and transnational. While nineteenth century attempts at internationalist cooperation among women from the imperial peripheries did not challenge the more “advanced” nations, the next century brought more ambitious projects of cooperation that seemed to put women in the region on an equal footing. After 1918, however, the new political elites discarded the intra-​state divisions and federalist agendas of their constituent nations. The new centralist elites in their integrationist zeal for nation-​building maintained the existing hierarchies and seemed insensitive to national, class, religious, and other differences among their own people. In the years following the First World War, the division between the women’s movements in the countries that had already implemented women’s suffrage and those where protracted debates on the issue gained momentum at the end of the war was more visible than ever. For example, the IWSA renewed its activities in the first postwar conference in Geneva in 1920.The new decade brought new challenges, and the IWSA faced them through the issue of women’s suffrage which divided Western and Eastern, rich and poor nations. The need for “growing inter-​internationality” was again apparent at the Rome Congress in 1923. It was opened in a ceremony led by Benito Mussolini. Il Duce greeted the international feminist community, but his support for women’s activities was met with suspicion by the Yugoslav delegation. The delegations of Bulgarian, Czechoslovak, Greek,Yugoslav, Polish, and Romanian women formed the LEW during IWSA’s mid-​May meeting. LEW sought to unify women beyond national borders in East-​Central Europe in their demand for women’s political rights. The organization took its name and its purpose from the Little Entente, a defensive alliance between Czechoslovakia,Yugoslavia, and Romania formed in 1920–​1.The leaders of the countries of the 224

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Little Entente intended to present a common front against potential threats from Hungary and Bulgaria to revise the Paris peace treaties and reverse the territorial losses forced on Hungary and Bulgaria. While the alliance made only a limited attempt to involve the Poles, the LEW engaged in feminist and pacifist networking throughout the region, from Poland to Greece. The creation of LEW at the 1923 IWSA Congress in Rome was an attempt to set up an organizational structure that would mitigate the discrepancies between the nations with and without suffrage. The LEW thus included women who had the same legal status as that of “children, feebleminded and insane.” The first conferences of LEW were held in Bucharest, Belgrade, and Athens, in the capitals of countries that still had not granted suffrage to women, and after that in Prague and Warsaw, where women had achieved suffrage in 1918. Positioning itself between the “East” and “West,” LEW leaders believed that this strategy would eventually improve women’s positions in the national and international framework. When LEW came into existence, efforts were already being made for Slavic women’s cooperation. Much of the Pan-​Slavic enthusiasm in the last decades of the nineteenth century prior to the First World War came from Prague. Many protagonists of regional women’s movements praised the Czechs as the natural leaders of a desired Slavic women’s federation in the Austrian part of the Habsburg Monarchy. It was therefore no surprise that Czechoslovaks sought the leadership of a Slavic women’s regional organization after the dissolution of Austria-​ Hungary. Romanians, on the other hand, hoped for a Balkan federation which would gather and “represent” Balkan women and their interests. Finally, the two separate women’s regional cooperation initiatives, the Balkan and the Slavic one, laid the foundation for the Little Entente of Women. Greece and Poland were never so enthusiastic about the project, probably because their respective ruling elites were not supportive of the Little Entente. While Yugoslavia certainly hoped to profit the most from its position as both a Slavic and a Balkan country, it did not go beyond pledging large-​scale support for the establishment of the organization when that question arose in 1923. Yet, in 1938 the Yugoslav delegate of LEW, Milena Atanacković, would reflect on this eagerly created cooperation between Balkan and Slavic women as a sign of “postwar delight.” In the democratic euphoria of the moment, the Polish delegate, Justyna Budzińska-​Tylicka, commented that men in Poland did more than they had hoped for after the war when they gave women full voting rights. The LEW serves here as a way of assessing women’s movements in the Balkans. As the first regional and transnational women’s organization formed in the interwar period, the LEW gathered various organizations that brought to the forefront their efforts to make “the duties and rights” of women equal to those of men. LEW members were from organizations representing Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Romania at the IWSA Congress in 1923. Therefore, monitoring the progress of women’s issues in each country was the first task of the organization, primarily aiming to build bridges between countries with and without suffrage.The other task was less the result of “postwar delight,” but more in praise of women and their engagement in the war. A frequent argument of Yugoslav intellectual women demanding suffrage during Yugoslav unification in 1918 was that gender equality was “bought by suffering.” It came as a warning signal that another world war would inevitably come if pacifist solutions for regional disputes were not formulated precisely and put into practice accordingly.

Entangled nationalisms: Romania and Yugoslavia The LEW decided on a rotating presidency, so that the Romanian representative Alexandrina Cantacuzino took over the presidency in 1923, followed by the Yugoslav representative Leposava Petković in 1924, and the Greek delegate Avra Theodoropoulou in 1925. All three 225

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were members of the upper-​or middle-​class elite, and, like most educated feminists in the region, they maintained close relations with the ruling elites. The royal courts of Yugoslavia and Romania (related through a daughter of the Romanian King Ferdinand I, now Queen of Yugoslavia Marija Karadjordjević), accepted patronage of LEW’s events. The LEW frequently expressed its gratitude to these political elites for their support. Postwar Romania and Yugoslavia would proceed as diplomatic allies in the Little Entente, and in the Little Entente of Women. Women’s politics would correspond to, if not follow, the Entente’s geopolitical strategies and its pattern of bilateral and multilateral cooperation. The Romanian delegation to the LEW was led by Princess Alexandrina Cantacuzino, one of the most prominent Romanian feminists. Challenging her was Calypso Botez, her intellectual rival in the Romanian women’s movement. Cantacuzino’s dominant position and her insistence on international projects frequently resulted in harsh criticism at home. The two leaders of the women’s movement in Romania had a history of conflict that would eventually lead to Botez’s resignation in 1930. Unlike Cantacuzino, who advocated keeping the demand for women’s political rights within separate, exclusively women’s organizations, Botez pursued its incorporation into the agenda of the major political parties. Political and ideological conflicts, joined by nationalist quarrels, hindered cooperation among the women of Yugoslavia. Clashing federal and centralist solutions in state matters, stemming from the country’s fragmented politics, troubled the women’s movements in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Yugoslavia after 1929). The Belgrade-​based Ženski pokret (Women’s Movement) was for most of the interwar years perceived as a synonym for an all-​Yugoslav women’s organization. Leposava Petković turned out to be Cantacuzino’s Yugoslav counterpart in the LEW, and one of the leaders of “bourgeois” feminism there throughout the interwar period. As the major representative of Serbian nationalism, the governing Radical Party insisted that the new country was the legal successor to the Kingdom of Serbia, so the Yugoslav women’s umbrella organization was founded in Belgrade in 1919 as an “enlargement” of the pre-​war Srpski narodni ženski savez (Serbian Women’s Union). For many Serbian women active in the women’s movement, “Yugoslavia was only a term of geography.” That would eventually change in the 1920s, turning Yugoslavia’s leading feminists into active propagators of narodno jedinstvo (national oneness), both nationally and internationally. The leadership of the Yugoslav women’s movements would discredit anti-​centralist and federalist conceptions as either “traces of a decomposed [Austro-​Hungarian] empire,” or as “separatist” proponents of the “Croatian question.” On the other hand, the creation of a single Yugoslav national identity –​“to represent ourselves as one in front of foreigners” –​would require international support, sought first within the geopolitical constellation of the Little Entente. The first conference of the Little Entente of Women was convened in Bucharest in 1923. It agreed on a common platform, directing LEW activities in the fight for women’s political rights, equality before the law, women’s right to work, and protection against exploitation at work. Continuing efforts were made to “try to disperse disagreement between the people of the Little Entente of Women” and develop “cordial relationships” that would lead to world peace. While affirming the predominance of the higher classes of society in and around the LEW, the great majority of other women were left out, as they belonged to the still predominately agrarian and illiterate rural majority in interwar Yugoslavia and Romania. In spite of the warm welcome in Bucharest and numerous events where women could share their “propaganda” with Romanian authorities, there were voices from the highest political levels that opposed the subordination of the national interests of Romanian women to the demands of feminism and internationalism. 226

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The subsequent conference in Belgrade in 1924 expanded its activities, but failed to bring Poland and Greece into the Little Entente itself. Never fully acknowledging its “auxiliary” status, the LEW focused primarily on the rapprochement of peoples in the region. As a “private and voluntary” organization, it still worked on ensuring and supplementing the major goals of the alliance. As a Greek delegate, Alexandru Ioanides, stated in Belgrade, the LEW should understand its position as primarily oriented toward pacifism, without recognition of “enemies” among neighbors. However, the LEW also consisted of exclusionist organizations that consequently failed to include women from those countries expected to have territorial demands on Entente members. These countries were primarily Hungary and Bulgaria, even though attempts were made to include them, with a possible enlargement to Albania and Turkey. LEW’s first president Cantacuzino systematically opposed any enlargement with the explicit statement that the maintenance of the Versailles order should remain the LEW’s political goal. Yet, the organization proceeded to act against her position, and the majority voted (in vain) for the implementation of more inclusive policies, to resemble a truly internationalist organization. In addition, the major disagreement between the LEW and the Little Entente itself came from its governments’ failure to recognize women’s political rights as legitimate means in fighting for its geopolitical goals. The criticism was expressed most eloquently in Belgrade: men could not defend the honor of their country if they disregarded the largest part of their own nation. Yugoslav and Romanian nationalism both drew on past military victories to bring the “sacred cause” of the nation-​state to life. The similarities derived from their “common” history under multiple empires should have united the women of the LEW around the common cause. Setting aside Czechoslovak democratic ambitions, even the Czech delegation in Bucharest easily found a common denominator between their country and the host country, simply the same enemy –​the Magyars. Grounding the LEW’s project in some kind of unifying narrative did try to bring together past national accomplishments into an imagined unity of the Balkan peoples. Maintaining the territorial status quo within the LEW was for Leposava Petković grounded in the notion that it was the Serbian soldiers “upon [whose] bones Yugoslavia was created.” The LEW’s acting president, Cantacuzino, shared similar convictions in 1924, citing the “noble crusade [World War I], which, thanks to the indisputable heroism of the Serb people, liberated the world.” To her mind, the “new society” established after the war dramatically changed the outlook of the region, providing the Balkans with a geostrategic position that encompassed the narrative of continuities of nation-​ building and building international standing. “The Revolution of 1789 ended here,” said Cantacuzino, concluding that “it was once again given to the Orient of Europe, this old disturbed Balkans, to remain the guardian of civilization.” Because geopolitical settings easily dictated the LEW’s strategy, reliance on them also made the organization weak in responding along the proclaimed principles of feminism and pacifism. Pursuing instead the national interests of each member ultimately created a fluid sense of unity that would subordinate feminist demands to geopolitics. Struggles with the Bulgarian membership in the LEW revealed the flaws in this strategy.

Nationalism and the limits of women’s transnationalism: Bulgaria The claim that the Little Entente of Women was a truly internationalist organization would have been confirmed by Bulgarian membership. Bulgaria had evidently been part of the founding meeting in Rome in 1923. Represented by the Bulgarian branch of the WILPF, it did not take part in the LEW’s subsequent activities. Not long after the agreement in Rome, WILPF’s Summer School in Podĕbrady, Czechoslovakia, witnessed the Bulgarian delegates’ alleged attack “in an indelicate manner” on the Yugoslav and Greek representatives. After the 227

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“incident,” the Yugoslav delegation demanded the exclusion of Bulgarian women from the organization. Serbia’s Leposava Petković, president of the Yugoslav delegation, reported that “Bulgarian women’s organizations” should not join the LEW until they had shown that they had accepted membership “right mindedly.” Why Bulgarian women had not ratified the LEW agreement and what actually happened at the “incident” in Czechoslovakia remains an open question. Just weeks after the Rome meeting, Bulgaria experienced a dramatic regime change with a military coup d’état against the Agrarian leader and prime minister, Aleksandŭr Stamboliiski.The democratically oriented Stamboliiski was responsible for rapprochement with Yugoslavia, opposing Tsar Boris III and the military, and his removal from power and assassination opened political space for a right-​wing government. It cannot be ascertained whether or not the Bulgarian women were directly responding to these events in their domestic politics, by taking a more hardline approach to the Yugoslavs (primarily the Serbs), or whether these events were additionally fueled by the already existing antagonism. The tensions between the two delegations arose over the Macedonian question, a dispute involving Greece as well. The Yugoslav Minister of Foreign Affairs made the exclusion of Bulgarian women a condition for the financial support of the Yugoslav delegation’s trip to the Bucharest conference. Zheni Bozhilova-​Pateva, a co-​founder of the first Bulgarian women’s umbrella organization, the Bulgarian Women’s Union, and a signatory of the LEW’s founding agreement, was prompted to declare her stand on the issue. Pateva reassured the LEW of her personal commitment to feminism and pacifism but warned that the current, post-​coup situation in Bulgaria made her involvement in propagating peaceful ideas impossible. Various attempts were made to establish cooperation in the following years with another co-​founder of the Bulgarian Women’s Union and its chairperson, Julia Malinova. She refused because of “lack of time and for other reasons.” She nonetheless welcomed a certain “unification of Slavic women.” Dimitrana Ivanova, who succeeded Malinova in the post, opposed Bulgarian participation, calling it the female version of the Little Entente, from which Bulgaria was barred in any case. She would nonetheless engage in negotiations with the Serbian-​led Ženski pokret over reconciliation between the two national women’s movements. This would prove utterly unsuccessful, because both perspectives were shared with those of their governments. Only a change in the political climate in the 1930s, led by King Aleksandar and Tsar Boris, would finally bring cooperation between Bulgarian and Yugoslav women within the framework of the several Balkan Conferences and into common participation in a similar women’s international organization, the Slavic Women’s Committee.

Greek reluctance and dissolution The Greek activists in the LEW represented the most radical of Greece’s women’s organizations, and for them, feminist goals were coming too “slowly.” The Greek movement as a whole was better structured and internationally active in seeking political, social, and civil equality with men. As elsewhere, it was rarely unified. Some agitated for women’s rights on almost universalist grounds, and others requested only greater protection for their advocacy. The Greek delegate Negropontes made an important contribution to the debate on feminism in the Balkans. She identified the three different social classes that might be mobilized for the liberation of Greek women. The first enlisted were women of a good economic background, generally not interested in “social questions,” such as feminism, but rather engaged in various kinds of charitable work. Second, there were “intellectual workers,” mainly consisting of “clerks, professors, students,” i.e. feminists. Manual workers were however deemed unreachable. Their illiteracy and poor living conditions made them “suitable only for Communist recruitment.” This was 228

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the sort of prescriptive prejudice that prevented women’s cross-​class cooperation. The feminist intellectuals thereby faced serious limitations in approaching working or peasant women. Despite this limitation, the LEW was able to obtain a place on the executive committees of the major women’s organizations and to raise the visibility of the women of the region internationally. A modest, but highly desired, victory, both for LEW and the Greek women’s movement came early when Avra Theodoropoulou gained a place on the IWSA’s Executive Board. Greece then hosted the third LEW conference in 1925, unfortunately just after a border incursion brought Greece and Bulgaria close to war. The Greek delegation unsurprisingly took the Yugoslav side in the Macedonian dispute with the Bulgarian women. In the late 1920s LEW divided into two blocks. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania as the core countries of the political Little Entente who insisted on expanding their political activity versus Greece and Poland. Their delegates remained more interested in feminism and pacifism, eventually raising the need for a different name for the organization. In spite of the common platform and the support they claimed to have in their countries, the LEW’s activity after 1929 largely withered. While there is also evidence that LEW’s framework became ideologically fragmented, the Great Depression reduced the members’ ability to travel and participate in the LEW conferences. The turn of the new decade brought changes in the political regimes of some of the members’ countries. Royal dictatorships replaced parliaments, first in Yugoslavia and then in Bulgaria and Romania. New women’s organizations had been established by the late 1920s, channeling international activity in the region away from LEW. One such organization was the Slavic Women’s Committee, launched in 1929 by Czech women. It assembled women from Poland, Yugoslavia, and Russian émigrés, and by 1933, from Bulgaria. Their Slavo-​ centric orientation focused on social issues and humanitarian work, criticizing the “predominance of the Anglo-​Saxon element” within women’s international conferences. Their organization was however “neither feminist, nor political.” Its main aim was the cultural revitalization of the “Slav question.” In addition, internal tensions among LEW members and conflicts within their own leaderships complicated the relationship between them and the new organizations. There had of course been requests for women’s cooperation at the Balkan Conferences in the early 1930s. Invited by the Balkan government representatives, women participated in the discussions regarding “women-​and-​children.” But their demands, ranging from banning prostitution to equality between men and women in state legislation, were once again bypassed. When, in 1934, the Balkan Entente, including Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Turkey, tried to come to terms with Bulgaria, Cantacuzino led the Romanian delegation in meeting with the Bulgarian women. The Little Entente of Women, consisting now of only Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania, reorganized in the mid-​1930s “to strengthen peace within the countries of the Little Entente and outside it.” But its efforts to reach even as far as Bulgaria had no effect.

Conclusion Efforts for women and men to have the same “duties and rights” toward their countries gained momentum in Southeastern Europe after the First World War. Elite women still without suffrage understood their positions in the on-​going negotiations of citizenship as active participants who could influence political decisions or at least, public opinion. “Strengthening women socially, economically, and politically” was not however inseparable from advocating the political and territorial status quo of the region. 229

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The aim to unite the “Balkan” and “Slavic” women from the “small [European] nations” deserves recognition not only as a supranational body that represented Eastern Europe in the “West.” As testimony to the potential interwar transnationalism, it should also be noted that the national and international components of this regionally organized movement were neither coordinated nor initiated in the “West.” The model of the LEW nonetheless endorsed the existing hierarchies. Internationalism in the region looked more like the sum of “nationals” working from opposing and mutually exclusive narratives rather than a truly international framework of cooperation. Interwar transnationalism did not aim to transcend national boundaries. On the contrary, despite its proclamations of universal values, it promoted strategies and mechanisms of international lobbying to further the national cause. The LEW’s origins in a postwar political alliance of winners against losers meant that its member organizations were unlikely to go much beyond their national interests. Rather than creating a sustainable single identity to connect women in and around LEW, the organization paid more attention to maintaining the territorial decisions of the peace treaties. As the political landscape shifted with the authoritarian regimes of the 1930s, growing instability and frequent violations of civil liberties left resolving “the woman question” to the side. In such an atmosphere, the leading figures in and around had little chance of stepping from social work into the political arena. In the 1930s, transnational cooperation among women in the region was still largely limited to cultural diplomacy. In Southeastern Europe, the debate over which place women should have in society stayed within a national framework, even within the initially transnational LEW.

Selected Readings Bosch, Mineke and Annemarie Kloosterman. Politics and Friendship:  Letters from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 1902–​1942. Columbus, Ohio, 1990. Daskalova, Krassimira. “Bulgarian Women in Movements, Laws, Discourses 1840s–​ 1940s,” Bulgarian Historical Review, XXVII (1999): 184–​200. Daskalova, Krassimira and Susan Zimmermann. “Women’s and Gender History.” In The Routledge History of East Central Europe since 1700, eds. Irina Livezeanu and Arpad von Klimo. New York, 2017, 278–​322. De Haan, Francisca, Krassimira Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi, eds. A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms in Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe: 19th and 20th Centuries. Budapest and New York, 2006; reprinted 2008. Ramet, Sabrina P., ed. Gender Politics in the Western Balkans: Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States. University Park, Penn., 1999. Rupp, Leila J. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement. Princeton, NJ, 1997. Trencsényi, Balázs, Michal Kopeček, Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič, Maria Falina, and Mónika Baár. A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe. Volume II: Negotiating Modernity in the “Short Twentieth Century” and Beyond, Part I: 1918–​1968. Oxford, 2018. Tzanaki, Demetra. Women and Nationalism in the Making of Modern Greece.The Founding of the Kingdom to the Greco-​Turkish War. Basingstoke and New York, 2009.

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The Great Fire of Smyrna in September 1922 marked a turning point for Greece. The Greek community in the city was decimated; those able to escape came to Greece and were later joined by other Greeks from Bulgaria and Russia, along with those who were part of the exchange of populations stipulated in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. The “Asia Minor Catastrophe” brought a fiery end to the territorial expansionism of the Megali Idea (Great Idea) and nineteenth-​century irredentist politics. Greek politicians now turned to domestic concerns of refugee settlement, economic reforms, and attempts to secure political stability. With the end of the Megali Idea, a period of introspection came to dominate the political and cultural discourse. Greek intellectuals and elites struggled with issues associated with Greekness, language, and religion, while writers of the interwar period focused on Greek identity and sought to present traumatic events from a unique perspective. In the realm of politics, Eleftherios Venizelos’s second lengthy tenure in power witnessed the implementation of his domestic reforms. However, the Great Depression undermined his proposed infrastructural reforms and prompted a second bankruptcy in the country’s history. The turbulence stemming from the National Schism would continue to destabilize the political order during the interwar period. The military was fractured between monarchists and anti-​monarchists and followed the pattern of other Mediterranean countries with direct intervention in political affairs. Thus, a new development during the postwar period centered on the military’s direct involvement in political governance. Their divisions over the monarchy led to multiple coups, counter-​coups, and assassination attempts. In addition, with the demise of the Megali Idea in foreign policy, political attention shifted to refugee resettlement cultural assimilation, internal threats of communism, and external territorial threats.The Greek interwar period of 1924–​40 began with a republic and ended with an authoritarian royal dictatorship led by General Ioannis Metaxas.

The Second Hellenic Republic and the continuing National Schism The exchange of populations and formalized territorial boundaries shaped political affairs throughout the interwar period. The polarization between Venizelists and anti-​Venizelists was compounded by new divisions that pitted “Old Greece” versus “New Greece” and indigenous versus foreign/​refugee Greeks. The establishment of what was the Second Hellenic Republic 231

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achieved little political stability. During its 11  years of existence, the Republic witnessed 23 changes in government, one dictatorship, and 13 attempted coups. Shortly after the massacre and flight of Greek refugees from Smyrna in August 1922, a Revolutionary Committee formed by Colonel Nikolaos Plastiras and other military leaders demanded that King Constantine and his government resign. King Constantine abdicated in favor of his son George, and leading members of the Gonatas government were arrested. Plastiras and his Revolutionary Committee assumed power, but were faced with negotiating a new treaty with Turkey and managing the exchange of populations. However, these responsibilities were overshadowed by the trial and execution of “The Six,” government officials made responsible for the “national catastrophe.” Both the international protest and domestic ramifications of the execution destabilized the Plastiras government. In October 1923, an attempted military counter-​coup against Plastiras reflected the fractures within the military and hastened the movement toward national elections. Plastiras quashed the rebellion and cashiered over 1,000 anti-​Venizelist officers. As popular sentiment had grown in favor of a republic, the elections of December 16, 1923 resulted in an overwhelming victory for the Venizelists (anti-​Venizelists had abstained from the election). George II immediately left the country while Plastiras himself resigned. Venizelos assumed power but could not maintain unity within his Liberal Party nor reach an understanding with the anti-​Venizelists. By February 6, 1924, Venizelos had resigned office and left Greece. His successor, George Kafandares, also was unable to form a government and he too soon resigned. As a new leader was sought, the National Assembly quickly organized a plebiscite on the fate of the monarchy. With a generous margin, the monarchy was abolished and the Second Hellenic Republic was announced on the anniversary of the Greek War of Independence, which had briefly led to the founding of a republic in 1829. The republic faced the continuing contention generated by the National Schism and disagreement on a new constitution. With the splintering of the Liberal Party into three factions, Alexandros Papanastasiou lost critical parliamentary support for his government and was faced with growing extremism from the right. However, during his short term in office, Papanastasiou was able to push for nation-​building projects that included the establishment of the University of Thessaloniki, the adoption of spoken demotic Greek as the language of education, privileging the Orthodox Christian religion in state and administrative functions, and enacting progressive legislation for creating adult education centers. With the Liberal Party fractured, Papanastasiou could no longer carry a majority in parliament and was overthrown by the Venizelist Assembly in July 1924. He was replaced by a member of the center-​left wing of the Liberal Party,Themistocles Sofoulis, as an interim leader. In October, a government was formed under Andreas Michalakopoulos.The continued political turmoil prompted an ardent Venizelist, Lieutenant General Theodoros Pangalos, to seize power in a bloodless coup in June 1925. Despite a vote of confidence from the parliament, Pangalos decided to dissolve it and on January 5, 1926, declared himself dictator. Pangalos claimed that Greece’s political instability made his dictatorship necessary. He announced new regulations to prevent protests, abolish press freedom, and arrest anyone seeking to undermine his regime. Pangalos’s reactionary social policy sought to eliminate demotic from the educational curriculum because of an alleged link to communism. He approved of a constitutional amendment to allow literate women over the age of 30 to vote in local elections, but he also established a “Morality Police” charged with seeing women were modestly dressed in public.The initial consensus that Pangalos generated with members of the military and political circles would soon be undermined by his foreign policy missteps and economic mismanagement. Pangalos nearly started a war with Bulgaria by sending the Greek army across the border, 232

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ceding a “Free Zone” in Thessaloniki to Yugoslavia, and threating war against Turkey by not recognizing the Treaty of Lausanne and scheming with Fascist Italy. This was too much for his own military command. On August 21, 1926, General George Kondylis launched a counter-​ coup and overthrew Pangalos. The following two years witnessed a succession of short-​lived administrations, but in the election of July 1928,Venizelos was returned to power after his Liberal Party won a decisive victory. Replacing the proportional with a winner-​takes-​all system for each seat, he called another election for the following month. The new electoral rules gave him 61 percent of the electoral vote and 226 of the 250 parliamentary seats.Venizelos would fulfill the entire four-​year electoral term, until May 1932. He quickly moved to reestablish positive relations with the major European powers. Within months of assuming power, Venizelos met with both French Prime Minister Aristide Briand and British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to reassure them of Greek political intentions and ensure positive foreign relations between their respective countries and Greece. Concurrently, Venizelos sought to smooth relations with Greece’s neighbors. He was successful in negotiating a treaty of friendship with Italy in September 1928, with Yugoslavia in March 1929 and later with Turkey in October 1930. The treaty with Turkey was internationally hailed and Venizelos himself would later nominate Kemal Atatürk in 1934 for the Nobel Peace Prize. Positive relations with Turkey would continue throughout the interwar period, and during World War II, this friendship would result in Turkey providing the first emergency relief shipments during the famine of 1941–​2. Venizelos sought to continue the domestic reforms and economic development that he had begun during his first term in power before and during the two Balkan Wars. Policies of nationalization that were begun at the end of his wartime premiership (public use of the Greek language by all citizens, urban development projects that erased Ottoman or Slavic influences, as well as others) were continued. From its founding in 1918, the new Communist Party, the KKE, posed a threat especially in the northern stronghold of Venezelist support because of its attraction to the refugees.Venizelos passed the Idionymon Law in 1929 that targeted unions and communists, while also curtailing civil liberties.To enforce the Idionymon,Venizelos relied only on the Greek City Police Force that had been established in 1920. Meanwhile, the KKE had suffered for supporting the Comintern resolution for a separate Slav Macedonia in a Balkan federation. Hoping to provide more employment opportunities,Venizelos focused on economic reforms and domestic projects. He succeeded in getting the drachma back on the gold standard in 1928 and embarked on a series of public works (housing, roads, and harbor works) all financed through international loans. Venizelos envisioned that these projects would modernize and “Europeanize” the country. Throughout the 1920s, Greece attempted to increase its industrial sector and modernize agricultural production. From the former Ottoman properties in northern Greece, roughly 1.6 million hectares were divided and distributed to over 250,000 families. Two thirds of the Greek population still worked and lived in the countryside, producing 60  percent of national income and 90  percent of exports. There was however little agricultural modernization. Total exports were not enough to cover the needed imports of food and raw materials. Finally in the summer of 1929, the Supreme Grape Organization and Central Protection Committee for Domestic Grain Production were founded to oversee grape and grain production, while an Agricultural Bank of Greece was to provide agricultural credits and loans. The Greek economy was instead sustained by the invisible income generated from its merchant marine and the remittances of its emigrants. Remittances by immigrants to the United 233

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States increased throughout the beginning of the twentieth century and peaked at $120 million dollars in 1920 but then dropped to $32 million in 1922. In addition, immigration restrictions to the United States beginning with the Immigration Act of 1924 precluded emigration as an escape valve for Greek overpopulation and an opportunity to escape poverty (see Brunnbauer’s chapter on emigration). By the end of the 1920s, Greece had secured loans of nearly 1 billion gold francs to finance public works and refugee resettlement plans. Despite the precarious nature of the economy, optimism for the Greek economy prevailed. When the US stock market crashed in October of 1929, many economists and bankers questioned the degree to which Greece would be affected. Nevertheless, the financial strains resulting from the crash began to be felt a year later. With the French blocking of Greek wine exports, slowly the climate of free and open trade came to an end. Declining sales of currants and tobacco reflected the growing strains on the economy. Between 1929 and 1932, drachma earnings for Greece’s two biggest exports, two thirds of the total value, fell by 50 percent. The Bank of Greece tried to adopt deflationary policies to stave off the general crisis but failed. Once Great Britain abandoned the gold standard in September 1931, the Greek economy was in a free-​fall, with Venizelos and his economic ministers powerless to stop it. Remittances from abroad declined sharply and the value of the drachma plummeted. As a result, Greece could no longer service its foreign debts and imposed a moratorium on all payments in 1932. In addition, after a protracted debate, Greece left the gold standard in April of the same year. For Venizelos and the Liberal Party, the economic collapse foreshadowed their political collapse. The municipal elections of February 1932 reflected losses for the Liberals, and the plummeting of the drachma in April meant that Venizelos could no longer hold onto power. He resigned in May in vain hopes that a coalition government would be formed. The rival People’s Party leader Parayis Tsaldaris refused to cooperate and, with a brief interlude of a Papanastasiou cabinet, new elections were scheduled for September 25, 1932.Venizelos framed his campaign around the issue of the Republic and rallied his supporters with the threat posed to it by Tsaldaris and the People’s Party. The results did not provide either Venizelos or Tsaldaris with a clear electoral majority.Venizelos resigned and Tsaldaris formed a coalition government in November from all the anti-​Venizelist parties. However, by the end of the year, Tsaldaris was also forced to resign following a no-​confidence vote in the parliament. In January 1933, Venizelos formed his last government with the expectation that he would prevail in the upcoming March elections based on majority rather than proportional representation. The outcome was instead nearly a deadlock. The anti-​Venizelist People’s Party secured 136 seats in parliament and the Venizelists 110; Venizelos accepted the results, but some of his supporters did not. On March 6, the same General Plastiras who had forced the King to abdicate in 1922 orchestrated the seizure of the Ministry of War to protect the Republic from its presumed enemies. Other military leaders did not support the coup and order was re-​established. While Prime Minister Tsaldaris ordered the arrest of his supporters, Plastiras managed to avoid arrest and flee the country. The Plastiras coup triggered renewed violence and political instability that brought down the Republic. Soon after the coup, there was an assassination attempt on Venizelos. On June 6, 1933, Venizelos and his wife were shot at by a pursuing vehicle while driving a car. While Venizelos was not injured, the preemptory investigation prompted him to leave temporarily for the south of France. For the conservatives and royalists, Venizelos’s departure offered them the chance to orchestrate the return of King George II and the monarchy. In January and again in February 1935, the King’s supporters organized demonstrations in support of George’s return.These two demonstrations, together with the cashiering of Venizelist officers from the military the previous October, prompted Plastiras to attempt yet another 234

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coup in March. This time Venizelos himself came to Crete to participate in the coup. Tsaldaris quickly responded and the revolt was crushed in ten days. Those involved were put on trial; two generals and a major were executed. Venizelos and Plastiras were able to escape to Italy but both were condemned to death in absentia. The attempted coup in March 1935 represented Venizelos’s last direct participation in Greek politics. He would spend the remainder of his life in Paris until his death in March 1936. The aftermath of the 1935 coup gave Tsaldaris carte blanche to dismantle the institutions of Venizelos’s rule.After he had abolished the Senate, he dissolved parliament and scheduled national elections for a new Constituent Assembly on June 9, 1935. With the Venizelists abstaining, the People’s Party won a resounding victory at the polls. Winning 287 out of 300 seats, Tsaldaris could move forward to schedule a plebiscite on restoring the monarchy. In September, tensions emerged between Tsaldaris and George Kondylis over the plebiscite, and in October General Kondylis with other military officers forced the civilian Prime Minister to resign. Kondylis assumed the premiership and abolished the Republic on October, 1935, reinstating the 1911 constitution. A  rigged plebiscite on the monarchy took place on November 3, 1935, and resulted in a nearly unanimous decision (98 percent of the vote) to bring back King George II. From Paris, Venizelos sent Kondylis a message whereby he would recognize the decision on the condition that the condemned from the March 1935 coup would be amnestied. Kondylis accepted but the officers were precluded from ever re-​entering the military. More turmoil lay ahead, not only because of economic depression of the 1930s, but also because of the challenge from the 1920s onward of incorporating the massive influx of 1.4 million Greek refugees.They were primarily settled in the northern territory taken in 1912, where they created a large Greek majority that replaced Slav Macedonians and Turks in the countryside and outnumbered Jews in Thessaloniki.

Hellenization and the new lands Throughout the interwar period, successive Greek governments pushed for the complete assimilation of the territories and the multi-​ethnic population incorporated into the Greek state during the Balkan Wars and World War I. In contrast to “Old Greece” in the south, “New Greece” in the north, reflected not only territorial divisions but also ethnic divisions.The ethnic composition of the “New Lands” included not just Greek-​speaking Orthodox Christians but still some Turks, Slav Macedonians, Jews,Vlachs, and Roma. During the exchange of populations, the Turks of Western Thrace were excluded from this process (as were the Greeks of Constantinople, Imbros, and Tenedos).The Slav Macedonians remaining after the exchanges with Bulgaria faced the greatest pressure, aggravated by raids from the Bulgarian-​based International Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO). Successive Greek administrations would enact legislation to Hellenize both the new citizens and the new territory. Hellenization continued through the 1920s and escalated from language to place names only in the late 1930s. Education was a central component for Hellenization and was fraught with controversy. For the system of public education, the battle over Greek identity was tied to the Greek language to be taught, either the katharevousa or the spoken demotic. Although demotic was gaining acceptance amongst intellectuals and the general populace, the 1923 selection of noted demoticists Alexandros Delmouzos as director of the newly founded Marasleion Didaskaleion, which oversaw the instruction of future educators for primary schools, and Dimitris Glinos to the newly established Pedagogical Academy, which developed instructional material as well as the instructors for secondary schools and for the Marasleion, led to renewed controversy. During the 1920s, support of demotic was linked by its adversaries to communism. Both 235

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Delmouzos and Glinos’s modernization of the teaching materials added fuel to the fire. The debate spilled over into the press where the Marasleion faculty were accused of undermining Greek identity and history, threatening the state-​ constructed  –​and church supported  –​ understanding of Greek history, culture, and identity.Theodoros Pangalos, who became dictator in 1926, as noted above, opposed the Marasleion faculty and asserted that the demoticists and Communists were conspiring against the interests of the Greek state, and Hellenism. Demotic was removed from the primary schools and the Pedagogical Academy was closed down indefinitely. Later Delmouzos and Glinos would be rehabilitated by Venizelos in 1928. Demotic also emerged victorious and its use in Greek education grew steadily during the interwar period. Underlying the controversy between katharevousa and demotic was the belief that a specific form of the Greek language could serve as a vehicle for national unity. Linguistic unity and societal Hellenization of the newly incorporated population were to serve as protection against these “communist” or irredentist threats. For the 1920s, the threat came not only from the Bulgarian sponsored IMRO but from the attraction of the small Slav Macedonian minority to a Greek Communist Party endorsing a separate Macedonian entity in a Balkan federation. A further aspect of the Hellenization process targeted towns in the newly acquired territories. Since the late nineteenth century, urban planning in the existing Greek territory had been a priority. European visions for urban development and European architects and planners were mobilized to “modernize” Greek cities. This urban agenda soon connected with political agendas for cities and towns throughout the New Lands, especially Thessaloniki. Along with postwar reconstruction, Asia Minor refugees were strategically resettled both in Thessaloniki and in all of the northern territories to replace the departed Turks and the exchanged Slav Macedonians. By the end of the 1920s, their shares of population in the New Lands had both fallen to less than 5 percent. In Thessaloniki, the pre-​1912 Jewish plurality had been replaced by a Greek majority. A political goal of the reconstruction and resettlement was to eliminate any Bulgarian, Yugoslav, or Turkish claims to Greek territory. This agenda was pursued by administrators throughout the New Lands.To promote the assimilation of the existing minority population, educational regulations required all foreign and minority schools to ensure that this population was conversant in modern Greek. Other regulations required that only Greek be spoken in public places and offices.

Metaxas and 4th of August regime By 1936, the rise of fascist regimes in other European countries seemed to some Greek intellectuals and politicians to present a viable alternative to the political instability that continued after the King’s return. Between August 1935 and April 1936, the death of six prominent politicians, including Eleftherios Venizelos, George Kondylis, and Konstantine Demertzis, left a vacuum in political leadership. The parliamentary elections of January 1936 had only made matters worse. The People’s Party and the Liberals won virtually the same number of seats. Neither could form a coalition government without the 15 seats won by the KKE, now attracting some Greek support as the new Comintern endorsement of the Popular Front had disavowed any separate Slav Macedonia. Then Demertzis died in April 1936, leaving Greece without a Prime Minister. King George II now acted swiftly to find a replacement. He did not discuss his choice with any of the remaining political party leaders before selecting Deputy Prime Minister General Ioannis Metaxas to be sworn in as Prime Minister. Metaxas may have received a vote of confidence by parliament on the same day as Demertzis’ death, but other politicians quickly conspired to undermine his leadership. Reacting to an alternate proposal in the parliament for an interim coalition government, Metaxas met with 236

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the King on July 22 and probably raised the idea of a coup d’état. The following day, Metaxas informed three close confidants that the King had given him permission to establish a dictatorship and left it up to him to choose the exact date and justification. The planned national strike scheduled for August 5, and supported by the KKE, provided both the date and the justification for the coup. A bloody conflict had already followed a strike in Thessaloniki in May, when as many as 25,000 workers were demanding better working conditions. Metaxas decided to use the planned strike as the pretext for his dissolution of parliament and the establishment of a dictatorship. Metaxas held a meeting on the night of August 4 at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with members of the existing government. Instead of discussing the impending strike, he informed them that he intended to dissolve parliament and suspend portions of the constitution. He had no plans to schedule another national election at least for the time being. Only three members refused to sign the order. Months prior to the planned strike, other politicians had discussed the possibility and desirability of a dictatorship. Just before his death,Venizelos had written a letter objecting to another coalition government which “overlooked the only possible solution, the formation not of a caretaker government […] but an extra-​parliamentary one.” Ironically, it would be Metaxas, who would take up Venizelos’ solution. Athens was caught unaware by the dictatorship. Only the Communists knew of the planned coup d’état. The choice of Metaxas may have come as a surprise to many politicians, but it was actually a very logical one for King George. Metaxas was a royalist who despised parliamentary politics and would never turn the King into a royal puppet like Victor Emmanuel of Italy. Metaxas proclaimed that he had acquired the minimal amount of power required to face any communist threat and had “saved Greece from threatened catastrophe.” To Metaxas, the 4th of August regime represented a “colossal change for Greece, opening a historic turn for this ethnos, of which perhaps not everyone has understood entirely the greatness this will have […] for Greece.” He sought to mend the polarization of the interwar period and establish stability and order throughout Greece. Political parties ceased to exist and leading Venizelist and Communist Party members were arrested and exiled to isolated islands in the Aegean to ensure that this “historic turn” occurred without internal opposition. The Metaxas dictatorship seemed to resemble other European fascist dictatorships, but it was Metaxas’ rejection of avid militarism, military aggrandizement, and strident anti-​Semitism that differentiated his from other regimes, such as fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The 4th of August regime can be more appropriately called a monarchical dictatorship. Metaxas repeatedly stated how his regime would not engage in military campaigns; he stressed that “[this new Greek civilization] is a grand ideal, because it gives to the people […] the feeling of conquest, conquest not of territory, but of culture, dominating others through this culture.” This ideological position also differentiated Metaxas from Greece’s fascist-​leaning politicians and intellectuals, such as General George Kondylis. Diplomatically, Metaxas maintained a position of neutrality and expanded the Balkan Pact to include Bulgaria. No formal ideology or ministry of ideology existed under the Metaxas dictatorship, but rather a “set of guiding norms” that formed the basis of Metaxas’ vision for Greece.Yet, it seems that Metaxas never transcended the level of generalities to articulate how, and in what form, his political vision would be realized. Nevertheless, within one of Metaxas’ key political visions he delineated a definition of “Greekness,” and who could be considered part of the Greek ethnos (nation). Metaxas embarked on his own adaptation of the Megali Idea –​the creation of a “Third Hellenic Civilization” whose cultural brilliance would dominate the Western world. In Metaxas’ series of articles entitled, “The History of the National Schism,” he expressed his reconceptualization of the Megali Idea from the territorial irredentism pursued by previous 237

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Greek politicians, especially by Venizelos, to a movement for intellectual and cultural regeneration of the Greek nation. Metaxas claimed that “the domination or prevalence of Hellenism […] has no boundaries […] the task of the modern Greek state is to reconstruct Hellenic culture.” Like Venizelos, Metaxas considered language and religion to be the primary determinants of Greek identity. He tried to take a conciliatory position on the use of demotic, introducing its teaching in elementary schools and commissioning a grammar book in demotic. Metaxas also thought that the language question would retreat over time as the two versions fused together. Metaxas did not espouse biological or racial views of ethnic identity, but rather based his conceptualization on Greek cultural distinctions. His Hellenism emphasized a sociocultural regeneration founded on religion, family, and homeland. Metaxas frequently repeated these three foundation stones, also using them to counter European cosmopolitism Because Metaxas did not have a large political party that came into power with him, he sought to create a basis of popular support through a new youth organization, the National Organization of Youth (EON, Ethniki Organosis Neoleas). EON was to foster a strong sense of patriotism, loyalty to the regime, and support of the Greek Orthodox Church. Politically, EON also furnished informers to the political police of the newly expanded Interior Ministry. Using the powers of the 1929 law, its feared minister oversaw the arrest and island exile of Communists and strike leaders. Strikes were banned, and trade unions could function only in the economy’s new corporatist framework. Internationally, Metaxas found himself in a more difficult economic situation. Germany had increased its share of Greek foreign trade, doubling the formerly large share for Britain and Western Europe. This dependence left Greece vulnerable to Germany’s further economic penetration. Metaxas’ foremost concern was to strengthen the Greek military so that it could successfully withstand a foreign invasion, primarily from Italy. Beyond his posturing as Greece’s First Soldier, he increased army salaries and improved training. Although he continued to emphasize Greece’s neutrality and determination to avoid participating in another European war, the aggressive intentions of Italy were a growing worry. Mussolini had proclaimed his desire to reestablish an Italian empire like ancient Rome’s and considered Greece a target for expansion. In 1923, he used a border dispute between Albania and Greece as a pretext for the Italian bombardment and occupation of Corfu. After diplomatic negotiations, the Italian troops left the island but Mussolini continued to harbor territorial ambitions in Greece. Italy still held the Dodecanese Islands (occupied by Italy in 1912 and formally acquired in 1923) and Mussolini quickly pursued Italianization there. In 1940, Italian provocations against Greece had increased significantly. The Italians sank the Greek cruiser Elli off the coast of the island of Tinos on August 15, a major Orthodox holiday and thus a deliberate effort to prompt a Greek declaration of war. Metaxas diffused the situation, but peace would not last. On the evening of October 17, Italian Ambassador Emanuele Grazzi was ordered to deliver an ultimatum to Metaxas at his home in Athens. At 3 am on October 28, Metaxas himself answered the door. Grazzi did not relish having to deliver the ultimatum, and when Metaxas read the ultimatum he stated “Alors, c’est la guerre.” Mussolini demanded that Metaxas allow Italian troops to occupy strategic areas of Greece or face invasion by 6 am. No sooner had Metaxas given his famous single word answer “no,” OXI in Greek, Italian troops were crossing the Albanian border into Greece. As the Greek troops rallied to defend their country, support for Metaxas also increased as his OXI became a popular rallying cry written on walls and stones. The Greek troops, under the leadership of General Alexandros Papagos, were not only able to repel the Italian forces, they pushed them even back into Albania. By mid-​November, the Greek troops were able to turn the tables on the Italians and launched their own offensive, culminating in the capture of Korçë. 238

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By December, the Greek offense had come to a halt and neither side was making significant gains. For the Greek people, however, the Greco-​Italian war united them, reportedly including the Greek Communist Party (KKE) in support of Metaxas and against fascism. By this time, Metaxas was in declining health. Limited offers of British support were rejected by Metaxas fearing that they would only hasten Germany’s involvement.Yet an anti-​Axis coup in Belgrade in March and the need to support a failing Italian campaign in North Africa sealed Greece’s fate as well. Postponing the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler decided to invade both Yugoslavia and Greece in April 1941. Metaxas would not live to see the outcome of Hitler’s decision and the wartime German occupation of Greece. He died on January 29, 1941.

Conclusion The Italian ultimatum of October 28, 1940, brought an end to Greece’s interwar period, but many of the conflicts that existed during this time continued long after World War II and the ensuing civil war. The political divisions that dominated the interwar period continued, as well as the emphasis on Hellenization. Fears of communism within Greece and irredentist aspirations in the Balkan Communist neighbors fed a defensive nationalism that political leaders sought to contain. Both Venizelists and anti-​Venizelists had previously adopted policies to protect Greece from these internal and external threats. From the aftermath of the Asia Minor Catastrophe to the death of Metaxas, the interwar period represented an unusually turbulent chapter in Greek history.

Selected Readings Χατζηιωσήφ, Χρήστος [Chadzipsif, Christos]. Όψεις Πολιτικής και Οικονομικής Ιστορίας, 1900–​1940.

Athens, 2009. Clogg, Richard. Minorities in Greece. London, 2002. Δαφνή, Γρηγορίου [Dafne, Grigorios]. Η Ελλάς Μεταξύ Δύο Πολέμων, 1923–​1940. Athens, 1997. Karakasidou, Anastasia N. Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870–​ 1990. Chicago, 1997. Kitromilides, Paschalis. Eleftherios Venizelos: The Trials of Statesmanship. Edinburgh, 2006. Κωστόπουλος, Τάσος [Kostopoulos, Tasos]. Η Απαγορευμένη Γλώσσα:  Κρατική Καταστολή των Σλαβικών Διαλεκτών στην Ελληνική Μακεδονία. Athens, 2008. Mackridge, Peter. Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–​1976. London, 2009. Mavrogordatos, George T. Stillborn Republic:  Social Coalitions and Party Strategies in Greece, 1922–​1936. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983. Mazower, Mark. Greece and the Inter-​War Economic Crisis. Oxford, 1991. Veremis, Thanos and Robin Higham, eds. Aspects of Greece: 1936–​1940, Metaxas Dictatorship. Athens, 1993.

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23 BULGARIA FROM STAMBOLIISKI AND IMRO TO TSAR BORIS, 1919–​1 943 Roumen Daskalov

Bulgaria was among the losers in World War I. The Bulgarian front at Dobro Pole was broken in September 1918 by the superior forces of the Entente.The retreating Bulgarian soldiers started a revolt. Headed by the Agrarian leaders Rayko Daskalov and a reluctant Aleksandŭr Stamboliiski, the soldiers were stopped by a Bulgarian detachment and a German unit before entering Sofia. A civil war was thus avoided.The monarch Ferdinand of Saxe Coburg-​Gotha abdicated in favor of his son Boris, so the monarchy was preserved. Bulgaria lost its territorial wartime gains in Aegean Macedonia to Greece and in central Macedonia to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes; the latter gained also small territories along the western borderlands of Bulgaria (so-​ called zapadni pokrainini). Southern Dobrudja, that was regained during the war, was returned to Romania.Western Thrace, which Bulgaria had gained after the Balkan Wars, remained under Allied occupation and was subsequently given to Greece.Thus the promised access for Bulgaria to the Aegean never materialized. By 1920, the country was flooded with over 200,000 refugees, mostly from Macedonia but also from Thrace. British and French Military Missions stayed in Sofia through 1920 to ensure demilitarization, and an Allied Control Commission oversaw the transfer of the enormous reparations levied on Bulgaria by the Treaty of Neuilly in 1919: more than 2 billion gold francs were due over 37 years; the burden was reduced in 1923.

Stamboliiski rules The traditional parties that had led Bulgaria during the Balkan War and World War I were now discredited. The desperate social and political situation radicalized public opinion and favored the two most radical parties, the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU, in Bulgarian BZNS) and the Communists. Both parties had taken a stand against the wars. The leader of the Agrarians, Stamboliiski, had openly confronted the King and was imprisoned in 1915. Now released, he led the Agrarians to the largest share of the vote in the 1919 elections and to a near majority in parliament in 1920. From 1919 to 1923, Stamboliiski headed a BANU government. The Narrow Socialists, transformed into the Bulgarian Communist Party (BKP) in 1918, also increased their share in the 1920 elections and stayed in second place with less than half of BANU’s seats. The rule of the BANU became increasingly more radical. There was almost no area in which the Agrarians did not undertake legal and administrative change. They passed some 100 new 240

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laws. The most important were land reform, its redistribution benefiting mainly the refugees, and educational reform. It introduced obligatory classes after primary education, the so-​called pro-​gymnasium. Other measures introduced compulsory labor service (12 months for boys, six for girls) and gave state support to the cooperatives and the rational use of water resources.While many of the revolutionary sounding measures were modified or canceled after the overthrow of Stamboliiski in 1923, the support for cooperatives and education would remain. Compulsory labor service, much praised as an expression of the labor principle, was reduced in duration because the Allied Control Commission feared that it would become a substitute for an army reduced to 20,000 under the peace treaty. Meanwhile, Stamboliiski demanded from the Allies the reduction of reparation payments, only to be achieved after his overthrow. During their rule, the Agrarians came into conflict, among others, with the leaders of the prewar parties, who were not only removed from power but some of them tried by an extraordinary “people’s court.” Stamboliiski set it up to punish those politicians who had led Bulgaria into the two “national catastrophes” in 1913 and 1918 (see the chapter by Richard Hall). The urban elite in general was antagonized by his rude anti-​urban rhetoric and policy. He specifically targeted lawyers, prohibiting them as defense attorneys at lower courts or to challenge Agrarian measures in higher courts. Academic circles resisted the new departments encroaching on the autonomy of Sofia University. The regime was also in conflict with the Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church for confiscating some of its land property and buildings. Another opponent of the government were the trade unions which faced state repression after confronting the regime in a general strike led by communist railway workers. Most importantly, army officers organized in a secret anti-​ government Military League following the demobilization and the drastic reduction in the size of the army. Equally serious was the conflict with activists of the revisionist Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, many of them refugees from Macedonia. They congregated in Pirin Macedonia in southwestern Bulgaria, where they established a virtual state within the state. After they assassinated the Agrarian war minister in 1922, the conflict came to a head in 1923. Desiring reconciliation with the Yugoslav Kingdom, Stamboliiski signed the Niš agreement in March 1923. It barred the IMRO cheti (armed bands) from entering Yugoslavia from Bulgaria. Stamboliiski often spoke of “the rule of the people,” by which he meant the overwhelmingly peasant population of Bulgaria. His “estatist” theory postulated the replacement of the prewar parties with representatives of professional or occupational “estates,” with the Agrarians standing for the peasant majority, and the socialists and trade unions for workers and professionals. In the event, the Agrarians did not reform the political system on this corporatist basis. But the Agrarian leaders often went beyond the framework of existing laws, dismissing opposition deputies and civil servants. A paramilitary Orange Guard disrupted opposition meetings, even beating opposition leaders at the Tŭrnovo railway station in September 1922. BANU bypassed the state apparatus by using party committees to implement some measures. The behavior of many of those in office was hardly less clientelist in their appointments than that of their predecessors and not less prone to corruption. Such abuses began to estrange some supporters in the villages. All in all, the rule of the Agrarians was not a high point of “bourgeois democracy” as depicted by the previous Communist historiography to justify the forced coalition of the Communist and the Agrarian parties from the late 1940s, after genuine Agrarian opposition had been crashed and their leader executed. Stamboliiski himself was indeed a charismatic peasant leader, whose powerful but demagogic speeches lasted for hours. The danger to democracy in an Agrarian regime facing growing opposition emerged from its new Committee for Peasant Dictatorship, perhaps imitating the Russian “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Created in late 1921 with Stamboliiski’s approval, it organized the aforementioned paramilitary units, called the 241

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Orange Guard after the color of the Agrarian party banner.They could not protect Stamboliiski in the end. A  project for changing the constitution to a republic seems to have been under way in 1923. In fact, Stamboliiski created a precedent in Bulgarian history of a one-​party dictatorship with a multi-​party party-​parliament still in place. Precisely because he did not reject parliamentary democracy per se, Stamboliiski allowed the opposition a forum to begin his ouster before he could conduct and control another election in 1923.

The overthrow of Stamboliiski and authoritarian rule after 1923 The Agrarians were toppled from power by force on June 9, 1923, by the secret Military League (and not by IMRO) and by the National Alliance (Naroden sgovor). The latter was an elitist association of academics and politicians who assumed the public responsibility for the coup d’état. Tsar Boris was probably informed. Stamboliiski himself was sadistically murdered by members of IMRO; and many Agrarian leaders were killed as well, while some managed to emigrate.The prewar order was restored by harsh repression against the Agrarians and then the Communists, whose belated uprising at Moscow’s insistence in September 1923 was severely crushed by the new regime. There followed the harshly authoritarian regime of Aleksandŭr Tsankov, professor of economics, until 1926. Its ruthless repression of Agrarians, Communists, and anarchists gave it an unsavory international reputation. The regime was initially under the domination of the Military League, in particulary an informal group of officers (the so-​called Convent) around General Ivan Vŭlkov, but it was also assisted by the so-​called “irresponsible factors,” such as IMRO and special army units. The terror provoked counterterror from the Communists, who created a military branch for the armed struggle. An extraordinary “Law for Defense of the State” was enacted specifically against them. The final Communist plan was to eliminate the Bulgarian political elite, including the Tsar, by blowing up the St. Sophia cathedral in Sofia on April 16, 1925, at the funeral service for an army general, murdered to create the occasion. Hundreds were killed but not the Tsar or key government ministers. The government responded by killing many leftist intellectuals and innocent people. The key Communist leaders escaped to the Soviet Union. The atrocities discredited the “bloody” Tsankov government before the wider world. Because of the reprisals, the regime was labeled “fascist” in the Bulgarian Communist historiography, and Tsankov would indeed later turn to National Socialism in the 1930s Soon after the 1923 coup d’état, the National Alliance broadened into a coalition of politicians and parties called the Democratic Alliance (Demokraticheski sgovor). Its ideology sought to stand above any single party in order to overcome past divisions to establish “strong rule.” The idea of a strong state included economic intervention and social reform, aiming to defuse social conflict and protect workers tempted by communism. The prospect of more competence in the state administration and in parliament was also advanced, going beyond prewar liberalism without leaving parliamentary democracy. The regime initiated an array of interventionist policies justified with protection of the broader public social interest. Among them were a state monopoly over currency exchange and control over some of the imports, especially luxury goods, a law against high prices, enhanced control over the cooperatives through state credit and loans. Strong resistance from large enterprises forced some measures to be softened or discontinued. Social policy included higher salaries for state officials, agrarian policies to increase the purchase prices of farm products, support for the cooperatives, and creation of a Labor Inspectorate to improve working conditions. Laws providing insurance against unemployment and measures to secure jobs were also passed. All this

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was intended to broaden the social basis of the regime among peasants and workers and divert them from the Agrarians and the Communists. Under a second government of the Democratic Alliance, led by Andrei Lyapchev (1926–​31), the center of gravity moved away from the military and its arbitrary interventions. Civil peace was restored, and the constitution was taken more seriously. The activities of the Communists, but not their party were legalized with the acceptance of a shadow workers party. State economic intervention was restricted even in the face of a developing international economic crisis (1929–​33).Yet, the law for the “encouragement” of industry was extended in 1928 and the state organization Hraniznos for grain export was set up in 1930 in order to provide the producers with higher purchase prices. The elections in 1931, perhaps the freest yet in Bulgaria, brought another coalition to power. The People’s Block was led by the Democratic Party and a moderate Agrarian faction. Its government was hardly “a breach in the fascist dictatorship” of Liapchev as described by the exiled Bulgarian Communist Party leader Georgi Dimitrov. It demonstrated instead considerable continuity with the Democratic Alliance. Civil peace and further democratization continued. In dealing with the Depression, the Democratic Party enhanced the regulative role of the state without retreating from private enterprise, political liberalism, and parliamentary democracy. Specific measures included laws for protection of an unalienable minimum of peasant landholdings and for peasant debt, extending repayment over time. There was also tax relief for peasants and the expansion of Hraniznos into a state export monopoly to cover more goods and ensure their receiving higher prices. However, these economic measures had a price, budget deficits forcing an increase in indirect taxes and reducing or delaying the salaries paid to civil servants. The People’s Block also discredited itself in petty bargaining within the coalition for ministerial appointments, through the spread of partizanstvo (patronage appointments) and corruption. This difficult and disintegrating coalition lost confidence in itself and did not resist the military coup that displaced it in 1934. Dissatisfaction with democracy grew with the economic revival of Italy and Germany, now under dictatorial regimes. The People’s Block was the last coalition of parties to hold power in interwar Bulgaria. The “United (anti-​fascist) Front” of the Communist shadow party in the later 1930s failed to attract centrist allies and did not find a place in what were royal governments after 1935. After their violent overthrow and persecution, the Agrarians had split into several wings, leaving one centrist group as noted above to join the People’s Block. The moderate Social Democrats had already faded and left the workers’ attraction to the Communist Party. On the extreme right, there were many small organizations of various “generations” and different persuasion (some of them more distinctively fascist than others). Yet only Tsankov’s National Social Movement attained greater popularity in the 1930s and had a more disciplined structure based on the Führer principle. However, it attracted little electoral support. Only during World War II did the Union of the Bulgarian National Legions and the Warriors for the Advancement of the Bulgarian National Spirit (the so-​called Ratnitsi) appear as fascist paramilitary organizations, again with little popular support. In the interwar period, the Bulgarian national liberation movements in Macedonia and Thrace did not turn to fascism although finding themselves in a very difficult situation. The Exarchate in Istanbul was closed down and moved to Sofia, while the Bulgarian eparchies outside Bulgaria were lost. The territories of the Ottoman Empire claimed by Bulgaria were included in the neighboring nation states of Greece and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, where they were subjected to policies of coercive assimilation, resettlement, colonization, and expulsion (such as the population exchange between Greece and Bulgaria). Many people with a Bulgarian national consciousness also emigrated to Bulgaria. Conducting an armed struggle 243

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through IMRO bands became almost impossible in Vardar Macedonia and even more so in Greece, where Bulgarian settlement was drastically reduced. By 1919, as noted above, IMRO had established the base of its operations in Pirin Macedonia in Bulgaria. As a “state within the state” it collected its own taxes and sent its own representatives to the parliament. People of Macedonian descent were widespread among Bulgarian politicians, army officers, and scholars, and they actively supported the “Macedonian cause.” But with decreasing chances to change the situation in Macedonia, IMRO engaged in internecine struggles between various factions. Rival killings and gun fights on the streets of Sofia and elsewhere became familiar and unsettling also for the urban population. They were not missed after the destruction of the Internal Macedonia Revolutionary Organization’s (IMRO) bases in the Pirin area after the military coup of 1934. Although treaty revision was understandably the main direction of Bulgaria’s foreign policies between the wars, the actual possibilities were limited. The defense of minority rights of Bulgarians in Greece and Yugoslavia through appeals under League of Nations provisions for postwar protection of minorities was not an option because these territories had been incorporated in the two countries before the First World War. Besides, the vigorous “integral nationalism” of the neighboring states rendered international agreements ineffective and Bulgarian protests futile. Bulgaria’s isolation in the Balkans could not be overcome for a long time. In 1934 the so-​called Balkan Pact was concluded between Greece, Romania, Turkey, and Yugoslavia, which was intended to reinforce the French system of pacts between countries supporting the territorial status quo. Bulgaria did not join because that would mean recognition of the post-​1918 borders and renouncement of its territorial claims.

From the 1934 coup d’état to royal dictatorship and World War II The May 19, 1934, coup d’état was carried out by the restored Military League and the political circle Zveno (meaning link). The new government was headed by the leader of Zveno, colonel Kimon Georgiev, with ministers selected from the organizers. Many ministers were freemasons, including the Grand Master of the Bulgarian lodge.The organizers’ proclamation spoke of overcoming narrow party and class interests in the interest of the whole nation. The government should be authoritarian but staffed by the most competent people. Their qualifications should enhance the authority of the government and its administration, while the population should be organized in support of the state. The economy should be directed by the state to develop industry and trade but with policies also assisting agriculture and the poor. So-​called parasitic and speculative capital should be curbed. To ensure social peace, the trade unions should be reorganized and membership made obligatory. They could then join in the sort of corporatist representation already introduced in fascist Italy. The self-​proclaimed “rescuers of the fatherland” dissolved the National Assembly and banned all political parties (to be consistent, Zveno was also disbanded). Censorship was introduced. A number of other constitutional rights and freedoms were set aside but the constitution itself was not formally suspended.The government ruled through decrees and referred, with doubtful justification, to a constitutional provision allowing special measures in the face of extraordinary external or internal dangers. A  Directorate of Social Renewal was set up as ideological and propaganda body with the ambitious task of organizing and guiding the public in the spirit of “above-​party state,” “unity of the people,” “harmony,” and “peace between the classes.” It was also entrusted with organizing new social support for the regime through a kind of state party or movement. There followed a number of measures for centralization under a new territorial division into bigger administrative districts and consolidated rural communes. Village mayors were to be appointed, and local self-​government was thus eliminated. Some thousand civil 244

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servants were dismissed and replaced by experts and specialists in their field, in practice often reserve army officers. The coup did initiate a process of appointing more qualified civil servants and giving them tenure, which continued until the end of World War II.The regime put an end to independent trade unions and unified them with no rights to strike or to hold unauthorized meetings. Only mandatory arbitration was permitted. Authors of the coup also tightened police discipline and gave police more functions and authority. Most importantly, they suppressed the IMRO. IMRO leader Ivan Mihailov fled from the country. IMRO’s disbanding reduced tensions with Yugoslavia, and diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union were also established. Thus described, the ideas and actions of the organizers of the May 19 coup were not only authoritarian but went in the direction of Italian corporatism. However, much remained in the state of intentions or did not materialize as intended. The Directorate for Social Renewal, a forerunner of the wartime Directorate of Propaganda and of the Communist ideological “organs,” in reality had a minimal impact on public opinion. Its propaganda sounded hollow to a society skeptical of the authorities.The idea of a social force in support of the regime was soon buried in discord between competing voices. The effort to create a unified youth organization remained stillborn. The envisaged official trade unions reached only the initial stages of organization. The idea of a corporate parliament with representation of professional bodies was soon dropped. Despite new regulations and restrictions, a certain political pluralism was tolerated. All in all, the organizers of the coup proved to be better in dismantling the parliamentary-​party system than in constructing a new social-​political order. The regime is thus best described as rightist authoritarian and a military dictatorship. In the spectrum of right-​wing and fascist movements, it stands with those on the radical right experimenting with authoritarianism and trying to form new governing elites but falling short of the paramilitary and revolutionary momentum of fascism. Nor did it commit the atrocities associated with the Military League and IMRO in the previous coup of June 1923 and the White Terror against the Communists in 1923 and 1924. In any case, its regime was short-​lived. The Military League and Zveno were removed from government in 1935, a little more than a year after they had come to power.Tsar Boris did this by skillfully making use of the monarchist sentiments of a substantial number of army officers. After several transitional governments that progressively shifted power away from the Military League, the monarch concentrated power in his own hands and established something between a royal dictatorship and an authoritarian government. The Zveno conspirators had cleared the way for another authoritarian regime. Boris kept the ban on political parties, the removal of the parliament, and the rule by decrees. He did not rule directly, as he was not personally inclined to do so, but rather through non-​party cabinets composed of officials, appointed by him and directly responsible to him. The government thus became primarily an administration by often capable experts and bureaucrats and not a government by political leaders seeking public approval and accepting political responsibility. Boris made use of his own prerogatives by cautiously taking account of public opinion. While the political rights of the citizens were curtailed, the legal order and personal rights were preserved. In addition, restricted party activities were also tolerated and even the formation of oppositional coalitions among several parties took place, albeit under police surveillance. The Tsar’s own doubts about the non-​party bureaucratic model of rule emerged by the late 1930s. He restored elections but only allowing non-​party candidates representing themselves, not parties. Opposition candidates still faced significant hurdles, and the government candidates had the full use of the state machinery working in their favor. After local elections in 1937, there followed the next year general parliamentary elections in which many oppositional deputies from the former parties could at least enter the contest. But there was no further democratic opening in the face of the coming war in 1939. 245

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Under cabinets appointed by the Tsar consisting of non-​party personalities, an ascending line of state intervention and regulation continued under a bureaucratic and technocratic project for economic development. More effective regulation of industry and also the relations between labor and capital were achieved. In 1936, a new law for industry formally canceled the benefits for the “encouraged” industries and increased their regulation.The state also tightly controlled currency exchange and foreign trade. New road and railroad construction went ahead.The standards and stability of the civil service were further improved. Restrictions on the army were lifted with the Thessaloniki agreement of 1938; the army’s size was increased and new armaments purchased, although not the ones offered by Nazi Germany. The upsurge of the economy since 1935 was partly the result of a bilateral clearing agreement with Germany, as Germany paid higher prices for Bulgarian agricultural exports. As a result, Germany became Bulgaria’s main trading partner by 1938. Tsar Boris’s rule has been described by some as comparable to Bonapartism or at least the Prussian monarchy of the nineteenth century, enhanced with modern etatist approaches. By the standards of the interwar period, his conservative and authoritarian government can be compared to the royal regimes in Yugoslavia, Romania, and eventually Greece. This moderate right-​wing authoritarianism broke with political parties and initially with elections and parliaments but not with legal tradition, individual rights, and the prominence of the Orthodox religion. Strong leadership was tempered by these traditional legitimacies and prevented the formation of new elites. Only the aspiration to rapid economic development and modernization was shared with the radical right and fascism. The Bulgarian decision to ally with Nazi Germany in World War II was not a voluntary choice nor the result of economic dependence. Boris was not a Germanophile and fascism was deeply alien to him. He feared Hitler and Stalin equally and was not confident in the victory of the Axis. It was with great reluctance and after all possible delay that he agreed to appoint a pro-​German Minister President, Bogdan Filov, in 1940. This being said, it is clear that as in World War I, an alliance with a revisionist power better suited the national objectives than a Western alliance with governments that had made no concessions to Bulgaria’s territorial interests. In 1940, before any formal German alliance, southern Dobrudja was returned peacefully to Bulgaria from Romania under pressure from Berlin but with Moscow’s agreement.This was the only territorial acquisition to be retained after the war. Joining the German attack on Yugoslavia in April 1941, Bulgarian troops and its administration occupied Vardar Macedonia and Western Thrace from Greece. Here was a new and also last illusion of attaining the national “ideal” promised at San Stefano in 1878. The regime underwent an unavoidable transformation after joining Germany’s Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan on March 1, 1941. An anti-​Jewish law was passed, but resistance from Bulgarian officials, the parliament, the Orthodox Patriarch and eventually the Tsar prevented the transfer of Bulgaria’s Jews to the German death camps from within the old, if not the wartime borders (so-called “new territories”). An ideological Directorate of National Propaganda was set up, and there was an attempt to create an obligatory organization of the youth; both with limited effect. Opponents and especially the Communists, who on Moscow’s orders were slow to take up armed resistance, were severely persecuted.Yet many things were different from a proper fascist regime. Most of society was not won over to the obligatory professional, youth, and other organizations. Some ideological and organizational pluralism remained in spite of censorship and surveillance. Nor did the regime have mass support of a party or movement.Tsar Boris himself held back from overt support with his established reticence. Boris died suddenly on August 28, 1943. The largest crowd in Sofia’s history assembled for his funeral. As Communist partisans now launched armed resistance, Bulgaria was ruled by 246

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a Regency Council headed by his brother Kiril. A  few successive governments made futile attempts to conclude a separate peace with the Allies. There were no substantial changes of the political system until September 9, 1944, when power was passed to the Bulgarian Communist Party by the invading Soviet forces.

Selected Readings Bell, John. Peasants in Power, Aleksandar Stamboliiski and the Bulgarian Agrarian Agricultural Union, 1899–​1923. Stanford, Calif., 1977. Brunnbauer, Ulf and Klaus Buchenau. Geschichte Südosteuropas. Ditzingen, 2018. Crampton, Richard. J. Bulgaria. Oxford, 2007. Daskalov, Roumen. Debating the Past. From Stambolov to Zhivkov. Budapest and New York, 2011. Daskalov, Roumen. “Agrarian Ideologies and Peasant Movements in the Balkans.” In Entangled Histories of the Balkans, vol. 2, eds. Roumen Daskalov and Diana Mishkova. Leiden and Boston, 2014, 281–​354. Daskalova, Krassimira. “Women’s Suffrage in Bulgaria.” In The Struggle for Female Suffrage in Europe.Voting to Become Citizen, eds. Blanca Rodrigues Ruiz and Ruth Rubio. Leiden, 2012, 321–​37. Lampe, John R. The Bulgarian Economy in the Twentieth Century. London and Sydney, 1986. Payne, Stanley. Fascism. Comparison and Definition. Madison, Wisc., 1980. Poppetrov, Nikolaj. “Faschismus in Bulgarien. Geschichte und Geschichtsschreibung,” Südost-​Forschungen 41 (1982): 199–​218. Sundhaussen, Holm and Roumen Daskalov. “Modernisierungsansätze.” In Südosteuropa. Gesellschaft, Politik, Wissenschaft, Kultur. Ein Handbuch, eds. Magarditsch Hatchikjan and Stefan Troebst. Munich, 1999, 105–​35.

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24 THE LEGION “ARCHANGEL MICHAEL” IN ROMANIA, 1927–​1 941 Constantin Iordachi

The Legion “Archangel Michael” in Romania (Legiunea “Arhanghelul Mihail”) emerged in late the 1920s and the 1930s as one of the strongest and most original fascist movements in interwar Europe. As in the case of other contemporary fascist movements, the origins of this organization can be understood only against the fate of prewar and postwar processes of nation-​and state-​building. The Kingdom of Romania entered the First World War in August 1916 in order to fulfill its ideal of national unification. After an initially successful offensive in Transylvania, its army suffered heavy casualties, and large parts of its territory fell under long periods of military occupation by the Central Powers. Following the victory of the Entente, Romania then managed to fulfill its maximum national desiderata, doubling its size and population. Yet the incorporation of Transylvania, Banat, Bukovina, and Bessarabia proved difficult. The new provinces were shaped by distinct imperial legacies and, in addition to a numerically dominant Romanian population, were inhabited by large ethnic minorities, as well, amounting to almost 30 percent of the country’s population. Although there was a large political consensus among Romanians over the need to consolidate the Romanian nation-​state, there were nevertheless major societal debates over the means to this end. In line with the Minority Convention signed by Romania as part of the Treaty of St. Germain with Austria, the two major mass parties of Romania, the National-​Liberal Party (NLP) and the National Peasant Party (NPP), opposed the adoption of overtly discriminatory policies against ethnic minorities. They opted for a gradual and lawful process of national consolidation. In contrast, a new radical grassroots political movement pressed to speed up the process of national unification through the rapid transfer of power and resources to ethnic Romanians by strict, arbitrary measures. The new ultra-​ nationalist movement was not animated by war veterans, who were in fact successfully demobilized through the adoption of universal male suffrage and a comprehensive agrarian reform. Its origins lay instead with the postwar nationalist student revolt that emerged mostly in the universities in the newly joined multi-​ethnic provinces of Greater Romania. Nationalist students argued that, although Greater Romania was in theory the national state of ethnic Romanians, in practice the postwar political order still worked in favor of the so-​called “high status” or “imperial” minorities (mostly the Hungarians and Jews), who had managed to preserve their allegedly privileged status to the detriment of ethnic Romanians. These grievances generated opposition to the ruling NLP and NPP. Their leaders were denounced 248

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as “accomplices” of the minorities’ “plans of political and economic domination” and as “traitors” to the national cause. The process of consolidating the nation-​state in Greater Romania thus generated a confrontation between the official, democratic political culture promoted by the NLP and the NPP and a radicalized student counterculture. In 1923, at a time when the students’ political mobilization was experiencing a decline, a small but fanatical group of nationalist students from the universities of Iași and Cluj, led by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and Ion I. Moţa, respectively, managed to reformulate student discontent into ideological grievances, creating the base for a violent youth movement, militant for “national salvation” through terrorist revenge. Sociologically, the psycho-​social dynamics of the process of student radicalization that gave birth to this counterculture could be defined as a protest ideology of under-​privileged social groups. The first violent act of the new radical group was an anti-​Jewish plot initiated in 1923. The plot was discovered by the authorities, but the students were soon released on the grounds that the plot was an intention but not a fully-​fledged plan. This acquittal against the government’s wishes empowered the nationalist students. On October 25, 1924, Codreanu assassinated the police prefect of Iași County; his subsequent acquittal by another jury assured Codreanu of instant notoriety, turning him from a regional into a national leader. During the trial, much laudatory literature presented Codreanu as a predestined popular hero, establishing the foundations of his charismatic cult. Codreanu’s prestige was further amplified by a skillful “marketing” strategy. On June 13, 1925, his wedding turned into a popular nationalist celebration. A month later, Codreanu became the godfather to more than 100 children born on the day of his marriage. These mass religious ceremonies paved the way for Codreanu’s charismatic appeal and the religious grounding specific to Romanian fascism. After university graduation, radical student groups became active in the newly formed League of National-​Christian Defense (Liga Apărării Național-​Creștine, LANC), a new radical right organization established in 1923 by the anti-​Semitic leader A. C. Cuza, Professor at the University of Iași. For the next few years, LANC served as a laboratory for the crystallization of a new radical political ethos, distinguished by rabid anti-​Semitism, the violent activity of its blue-​uniformed paramilitary groups (lăncieri, or spearmen), and its anti-​establishment orientation. Soon however, the new radical orientation of the student activists and their resort to violence generated tensions with LANC’s more conservative leadership, prompting them to defect and create a new organization.

The Legion’s ideology The Legion “Archangel Michael” was established on Friday, June 24, 1927, on the religious feast of St. John the Baptist, as an “alternative” organization of radical nationalists. Its nucleus was formed by the members of the 1923 anti-​Jewish plot, led by Codreanu and Moţa. The new organization claimed to be of a different stock than conventional parties, as the Legion had no political program. The backbone of the Legionary doctrine consisted of the “teachings” of Codreanu, the leader of the Legion boasting the unofficial title of “Captain,” and of Moţa, his closest collaborator. During the 1920s and 1930s, other contributions, authored by the intellectuals of the so-​called Axa group (Vasile Marin, Mihail Polihroniade, Vasile Christescu, Puiu Gârniceanu, and Alexandru Cantacuzino) and by other prominent leaders such as Ion Banea, Ilie Imbrescu, and Constantin Papanace developed the Legionary ethos into a comprehensive ideology. The foundations of this doctrine drew on the tradition of messianic nationalism and sacralization of politics existing in pre-​1914 Romania, from the anti-​Semitic campaign of the 249

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National-​Democratic Party led by Nicolae Iorga and A.  C. Cuza, further developed in the postwar LANC, and prewar traditions of nationalist struggle in the multi-​ethnic provinces of Transylvania, Banat, and Bukovina. These core values were enriched with the new ethos of postwar student activism. The main vehicle of ideological expression was Pământul Strămoșesc. Established in 1927, this journal served as a mirror of the movement’s early organization and political evolution. The main features of the Legionary ideology, as it evolved throughout the late 1920s and the 1930s, were revolutionary, paramilitary ultra-​nationalism and populism; taken together, they place the Legion in the fascist political camp. The Legion was first and foremost an ultra-​ nationalist organization. Its ultimate aim was to consolidate the Romanian nation-​state by cleansing the “unwanted others.” Its discourse glorified the virtues of the Romanians as God’s “chosen people” and the titular ethnic nation of Greater Romania, proclaiming them as the ultimate source of political legitimacy, sanctity, and justice. The Legionaries condemned the alleged “decadent state” of the nation and projected its lost glory into an ideal of future salvation. The message of salvation was embedded in a populist discourse based on the confrontation between the homogeneous and virtuous people and a corrupt transnational elite. To express this Manichean vision of the world as a perpetual confrontation between the forces of redemption, identified with the good, and the forces of degeneration, identified with the evil, the Legionaries adopted a militant language, having at its core religious-​nationalist notions such as divine providence, damnation, and salvation through purification. They argued that in order to overcome the forces of decadence, a national revolution was urgently needed, conducted by violent means. The ultimate goal of the Legionaries was the redemption of the Romanian people through forging the new Legionary man and woman under a totalitarian state and as part of a new fascist international order. An integral part of the Legionary project of regeneration was the idea of cleansing the nation by removing the unwanted elements who allegedly polluted the ethnic/​cultural/​racial purity of the nation. The Legionary ideology targeted first and foremost the Jews, who were blamed for “invading” the Romanians’ national territory and of corrupting their national elite. Codreanu was influenced by the doctrine of anti-​Semitism forged by his godfather and early mentor, A. C. Cuza, but he invested anti-​Semitism with new implications and a renewed sense of urgency. He argued that this minority instigated a Judeo-​Bolshevik conspiracy meant to take over the entire world. He also claimed that the Jewish anti-​national attempt “to destroy the Romanian people” had concentrated on two main targets, overrunning the Romanians’ ancestral lands and weakening the Romanians’ religious faith as their means of communication with God. To counter the “anti-​Romanian activities” of the Jews, the Legion proposed a several-​sided plan of elimination. In education, the Legion fought for a policy of numerus nullus, or the total exclusion of the Jewish population from universities. Moreover, in January 1933, Ion Zelea Codreanu, the father of Codreanu and a Legionary deputy, argued that the Jewish question in Romania could only be solved through “elimination.” He also demanded the adoption of a Nazi-​inspired program of racial hygiene and a ban on intermarriage that would lead to the “purification of the race from the infiltration of the Judaic blood.” This position was reiterated in the same year by Mihai Polihroniade, who openly demanded “de-​Semiticization” of cities through “forceful” deportation. During the 1930s, the Legion continued its ideological evolution, stimulated by its own internal dynamics and by the example of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Most important events were the incorporation into the movement of leading intellectual circles such as the Axa group in 1932; part of the Criterion intellectual debating circle in 1932–​3; the nationalist magazines Iconar and Însemnări sociologice in 1935, and Lumea Nouă in 1935–​7. Under their influence, the 250

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Legion’s ideology was enriched with new transnational ideological arguments for the establishment of a fascist totalitarian-​corporatist state in Romania, in close alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

The Legion’s political trajectory The political history of the Legion can be divided in six main periods: 1927–​9, years of ideological clarification and organizational consolidation; 1930–​4, harsh political-​ideological battles, marked by violent confrontations with the authorities; 1935–​7, when the Legion turned into a major mass political party; 1938–​40, a new period of harsh state repression under the royal dictatorship of King Carol II; September 1940 to January 1941, its short time in power; and afterwards, its activity in exile. The beginnings of the new movement were modest. Although in its first political proclamations the Legion demanded the abolition of the “corrupt” and divisive parliamentary system, Codreanu nevertheless decided in July 1927 to run in national elections. Lacking financial means, political experience, and local networks of power, the Legion obtained only 10,761 votes, clustered in northern Moldova, the Banat, central Transylvania, and southern Bessarabia. In the next two years, the Legion consolidated its membership and organization but experienced a period of political inactivity at the national level. At the end of 1929, Codreanu set as the Legion’s new strategic goal its “going to the masses.” Its first political rally was organized on December 15, 1929, at Berești, Galați county, in Moldova. Its success encouraged Codreanu to organize a new propaganda march in Bessarabia, a newly acquired province that was not yet fully integrated in Romania’s postwar political system. The Legion hoped to fill the local political vacuum through new methods of recruitment and activism. In addition, since Bessarabia bordered the Soviet Union and had a large Jewish population, the march enabled the Legion to claim it directly confronted the “Judeo-​Bolshevik” danger. On February 2, 1930, a column of 300 Legionaries crossed the Prut river into Bessarabia and organized a popular gathering at Cahul, reportedly attended by circa 20,000 peasants. The Legion’s strategy of entering active politics opened a period of violent confrontation with the authorities, who were alarmed by the organization’s potential growth. To escape repression and to forge new allies, Codreanu established the paramilitary Iron Guard as a new political section of the movement in April 1930. In July 1930, the Legion announced plans for the organization of a second, larger march in Bessarabia. Invoking recurrent clashes between the authorities and Iron Guard activists, the government of the NPP outlawed the Legion “Archangel Michael” –​Iron Guard on January 3, 1931. Codreanu and six other leaders were arrested and tried. At the end of February, the Legionary leaders were acquitted by the court against the government’s wishes and released from prison.The movement was quick to regroup, reorganizing its political activity under a new name, “The Corneliu Zelea Codreanu Grouping.” Drawing on intense media attention, even though largely negative, “The Corneliu Zelea Codreanu Grouping” managed to win 34,000 votes in the general elections held in June 1931, but this success failed to secure seats in the parliament. On August 31, 1931, Codreanu was nonetheless elected deputy in the by-​elections organized in Neamţ county, against a Liberal candidate. This first political success increased the movement’s visibility. Further capitalizing on this success, the Legion experienced a major electoral breakthrough in June 1932, collecting 70,674 votes in the national elections (over 2 percent of the electorate) and winning five parliamentary mandates. The Legion’s access to parliament changed the nature of the organization. Although the Legionary deputies professed a kind of anti-​politics, they nevertheless entered mainstream political life. The political accession of the Legion coincided with the gradual erosion of the 251

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multiparty system instituted under the 1923 Constitution. On the one hand, the economic crisis of the Great Depression that was felt in Romania after 1929 led to the decline of the major democratic parties, the NLP and the NPP. Distressed with the burdens of the economic crisis, the electorate was increasingly attracted by radical alternatives. On the other hand, since his enthronement on June 8, 1930, King Carol II consciously undermined the multiparty system with the intention of establishing a regime of personal authority. The Legion benefited from the growing political instability. Its membership grew exponentially, its centers of power shifting from rural to urban areas. As a result, the Legion transferred its political center to Bucharest, where it built a new seat called The Green House (Casa Verde). Alerted by this expansion, on December 9, 1933, a few weeks ahead of national elections, the ruling NLP (1933–​7) issued a decree banning the Legion “Archangel Michael”  –​The Iron Guard. In retaliation on December 29, 1933, a Legionary terrorist squad made up of three Macedo-​Romanians assassinated the Liberal Prime Minister I. G. Duca at Sinaia. The repression that followed marked a turning point in the evolution of the movement. The main Legionary leaders were arrested and tried, and the activity of the Legion paralyzed. The trial ended on April 6, 1934, with the life sentences for Duca’s assassins but with the full acquittal of the Legion’s leadership. The acquittal of the “moral authors” of the assassination exposed the vulnerability of the political elite, which had neither full legal means nor a direct interest to completely suppress the Legion. On the contrary, having understood that martyrdom was in fact serving the Legion’s rise, members of the establishment tried to channel the Legion into a clientelist relationship and use it for their own political purposes. This strategy seemed to pay off in the short term, but in the long run it would prove ineffective in taming the Legion’s radicalism. After serving a political ban of one year, Codreanu set up a new party in December 1934 called “All for the Country” (Totul pentru Țară) and placed it under the leadership of the controversial General in Reserve Gheorghe (Zizi) Cantacuzino (1869–​1937). Relaunched under a new label, the Legion benefited from three consecutive years of legality (1935–​7) and managed to reinsert itself into political life. The Legion’s growth posed a major challenge to Romania’s political establishment. To weaken the Legion from within, the government encouraged internal factionalism and defections. In 1934, the Legionary leader Mihai Stelescu defected with secret governmental support and encouragement, and formed a rival organization called “The Crusade of Romanianism” (Cruciada Românismului). Accused of treason, Stelescu was brutally assassinated by a Legionary terrorist squad in April 1936. In December 1936, in an attempt to strengthen ties to other fascist parties in Europe, the Legion sent a small but high-​level combat mission to Spain, in support of General Franco’s forces. Two members of this mission, Ion I. Moţa and Vasile Marin, died in action; they were subsequently proclaimed “martyrs of Christianity” by the Legionary propaganda and buried in Bucharest after large and impressive funeral processions. In February 1937, confronted with the strong support generated by the burial of Moţa and Marin, Carol II made a final attempt to subordinate the Legion. Secret negotiations for political collaboration conducted with Codreanu were nevertheless fruitless. Codreanu rejected the King’s request to be proclaimed “the Captain” of the Legion, on the grounds that charismatic loyalty cannot be the subject of a political transaction. Instead of an alliance with the King, “All For the Country” signed an electoral pact of non-​aggression in November with the NPP, on an anti-​Carol platform. This alliance allowed the Legionary movement to present itself as a respectable opposition party. Consequently, in the parliamentary elections in December 1937, the Legion received 437,378 votes, representing a share of 15.6 percent of the total electorate and winning 66 parliamentary mandates (out of a total of 390). They were now the third largest political party in the country. Yet, despite its 252

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impressive electoral result, the Legion’s political position was in fact very weak. The party had risen to political prominence, but its incomplete “victory” made it vulnerable to state repression.

Social structure and membership Socially, the Legion was a catch-​all party, incorporating diverse elements of society, the most important of which were peasants, students, blue and white collar workers, members of the rural and urban intelligentsia (mostly teachers and priests), rural and urban shop owners, and members of the aristocracy. While greatly affected by the postwar upheaval, these social strata were united by the feeling of being excluded from the full benefits of the ongoing social and political transformation. The Legion’s ideology, capitalizing on Codreanu’s charismatic claims and based on a compensatory ideology of salvation, offered the unifying cement for these heterogeneous social strata. It managed to mobilize socially disenfranchised and economically impoverished groups who perceived themselves as the losers of the parliamentary political regime, but also dynamic urban strata of the population who, while advancing on the social ladder, still fell hampered in their social mobility. Upon its establishment, the Legion functioned as a small fraternity of nationalist male activists, in 1929 boasting an estimated 400 to 1,000 members, selected according to strict criteria. The Legion was primarily a youth movement: the majority of its members were students, socially deracinated through their transplantation from the rural environment to the “hostile” urban environment. Its membership thrived, especially after the economic crisis, and the number of its basic units, called “nests” and encompassing at least seven members each, grew from 3,495 in December 1934 to 4,200 in May 1935, 12,000 in January 1937, and 34,000 by December 1937. The most informed analysts estimated the Legion membership at its political peak in 1937 at some 270,000 enrolled members. In the same year, the party “All for the Country” received 478,000 votes, dispersed among all 72 counties of Romania as well as in the capital city, Bucharest. This complete national presence was a remarkable performance for a party created only in 1934. The Legion overcame its initial regional concentration on Bukovina, northern Moldavia, and southern Bessarabia, moving its center from East to West, with a strong concentration in the newly-​annexed provinces of Bukovina, Banat, and Crișana-​Maramureș, all situated along the multi-​ethnic border with Hungary in the northwest and inhabited by a multi-​ethnic population. Mid-​range results were scored in the Wallachian provinces of Muntenia and Oltenia, mostly due to their higher scores in industrialization.

The Legion in power The national elections that took place in December 1937 confirmed the gradual erosion of popular support for the two main democratic parties and the rising tide of new nationalist parties, among which the most important were the Legion “Archangel Michael” and the conservative-​r ight National-​Christian Party (NCP). Party politics in Romania was thus recast as a confrontation between bourgeois-​democratic and radical parties. In the next seven years, a series of cumulative succession of departures from democracy followed, leading to multiple totalitarian experiments. In February 1938, encouraged by the political crisis caused by the 1937 election results, Carol II decided to pursue his own, long-​harbored plans to install a regime of personal authority, called dictatura regală (royal dictatorship). Although Carol II first conceived of his authoritarian rule as a barrier to the Legion’s bid for power, his regime borrowed numerous political features from the Legion itself, such as the cult of the predestined leader, the single 253

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party, corporatism, paramilitarism, the socialization of the youth through political mobilization “from above,” and toward the end of the regime, anti-​Semitism. Soon after the consolidation of his personal regime, Carol II unleashed a campaign of systematic repression meant to eliminate the Legion as a socialpolitical movement. Aware of the danger and confident that his time was yet to come, on February 21, 1938, Codreanu tactically disbanded “All for the Country.” The adoption of this strategy of political passivism did not however appease the King. On April 16–​17, 1938, Codreanu and other leading Legionaries and sympathizers were arrested and interned in camps throughout the country. In May 1938, Codreanu was tried and sentenced to ten-​years of hard labor. Finally, on the night of November 29–​30, Carol II ordered Codreanu’s execution, along with 13 other imprisoned Legionaries, on the pretext that they had tried to escape with external help. Codreanu’s execution shocked the Legionaries. In response, on September 21, 1939, a death squad made up of eight Legionaries led by the lawyer Dumitru (Miti) Dumitrescu assassinated Prime Minister Armand Călinescu, holding him directly responsible for Codreanu’s assassination. As retaliation, the authorities unleashed an unprecedented wave of lawless repression. On September 21–​2, over 252 Legionaries were executed without trial. In addition, the authorities initiated a new propaganda campaign to discredit the Legion as an anti-​national, terrorist organization. Throughout its 30-​month existence, Carol II’s personal regime changed from a soft dictatorship with limited political pluralism to an increasingly repressive authoritarian regime with pronounced fascist characteristics. In the summer of 1940, this new authoritarian direction also informed Carol II’s amnesty and renewed attempts at cooperation with the Legion. This dramatic and highly controversial policy change was prompted by the German defeat of France. In view of the growing Nazi hegemony in Europe, Carol II attempted to rehabilitate the Legion and bring it back to power as a gesture of goodwill to establish a political alliance with Hitler. To this end, on July 4, 1940, the King managed to coopt four renowned Legionaries into the new government led by Ion Gigurtu. The movement’s new leader, Horia Sima, was appointed Minister of Religious Cults and Arts. In addition, two decrees passed in early August 1940 elevated anti-​Semitic measures to the level of official state policy. Carol’s attempt to cooperate with the Legion did not work out, however, in view of the terror he had unleashed in 1938–​9, decapitating the Legion’s leadership. On the international scene, the capitulation of France left Romania isolated (see Vladimi Solonari’s chapter on Romania in World War II). Carol was soon forced to cede Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union (June 28, 1940), Northern Transylvania to Hungary (August 30), and Southern Dobrudja to Bulgaria (September 8). These major territorial losses shattered Carol II’s legitimacy. His attempt to survive by appointing General Ion Antonescu, an uncompromising and strong-​handed nationalist leader, backfired. General Antonescu assumed full powers and forced the King to abdicate. In need of a mass political movement to legitimize his authoritarian rule, the General co-​opted the Legion to power and on September 14, 1940, proclaimed the “National-​Legionary State.” The new state was founded on the three main principles of integral nationalism: it was “national, Christian and totalitarian.” The practical implementation of this doctrine focused on two main campaigns: the denaturalization and removal of the Jews from economy and society; and the redistribution of their property to the Romanian upper and middle classes. The Legion’s rise to power opened a new phase in its evolution. The Legion acquired the means to legally rehabilitate itself, to indoctrinate the masses, to implement its agenda of revolutionary transformation, to provide its followers with rewards, and to punish its enemies. The Legion’s rule was however marred by internal weaknesses and external political constraints. 254

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First, the two years of bloody repression during the royal dictatorship had left it disorganized and leaderless. Second, the Legion did not have a comprehensive program of socio-​economic transformation and lacked both the cohesion and discipline necessary to implement a long-​ term agenda. Its ad hoc activities were meant to provide immediate material and political satisfaction to its supporters.Third, although the Legion became the ruling party in the new regime, it had to share legislative and executive power with the army.While the political position of the Legion was apparently strong, it lacked any control over the army, the justice system, and the economy. In addition to controlling the key ministries, General Antonescu had the upper hand in decision-​making as the head of government. The Legion’s rule was meteoric, lasting only 120  days, until January 23, 1941. Its rapid demise was accelerated by anarchic behavior, its internal weaknesses, its vulnerable political position in the new regime, and its troubled relationship with General Antonescu. The Legion and the General represented two related yet distinct streams of nationalism. Antonescu was in favor of a large nationalist coalition based on the principles of integral nationalism and focusing on a guided, top-​down process of sociopolitical transformation.The Legion, on the other hand, rejected any cooperation with the NCP or other conservative-​nationalist forces. It instead called for a revolutionary, grassroots transformation of society through the complete elimination of the old political class and its replacement with a new Legionary elite, the nationalization of the economy and of trade through the elimination of ethno-​religious minorities, and the transfer of their property to ethnic Romanians. Another major disagreement concerned the political methods employed to implement a nationalist agenda of transformation. The Legion’s clandestine mode of action shaped its approach to violence:  even when they were in power, its members continued to promote underground terrorist methods, based on the unruly violence. This orientation put the Legion in conflict with General Antonescu, who wanted to nationalize the state in an “orderly” fashion, through a gradual process, coordinated from above. His actions were not designed to bring about a social revolution from below, but to shelter and consolidate the interests of the Romanian elite, to the detriment of ethno-​religious minorities. These irreconcilable differences between the Legion and General Antonescu generated recurrent top-​level confrontations, leading to a political crisis that paralyzed the new regime. In addition, the Legionaries’ violent and uncoordinated actions brought chaos and disorganization into the state administration. Their terroristic acts culminated in the assassination of 65 former state dignitaries in November 1940, considered guilty for acts of repression against the Legion. In response, General Antonescu restricted the Legion’s authority and capacity of action, maintaining that its lawless and chaotic actions compromised the image of the National-​ Legionary Regime. The growing tension between the two sides culminated in an open military confrontation between the Legion and the army that took place January 21–​3, 1941. After heavy fighting had inflicted significant casualties among soldiers, Legionaries, and also civilians (mostly Jews), the army managed to isolate and surround the Legionary centers of resistance. The Legionaries who took part in the “rebellion” were arrested, given public trials, and swiftly sentenced to death or forced labor. The main leaders of the Legion, including Horia Sima, managed to find shelter abroad, mostly in Germany.There they served Nazi authorities more as an instrument for pressure on the Antonescu regime as a potential political alternative. Following its defeat, the Legion was eliminated from political life in Romania. Its members suffered from harsh repression under the subsequent dictatorships of General Antonescu (1940–​4) and of the Romanian Communist Party (1945–​9). Despite the eradication of the Legion as a political force, the Legionary ideology of national salvation through violence continued to survive during the Communist regime in underground nationalist circles and resurfaced in the post-​Communist period. 255

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Selected Readings Bejan, Christian M. Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania.The Criterion Association. London, 2019. Clark, Roland. Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania. Ithaca, NY, 2015. Heinen, Armin. Die Legion „Erzengel Michael“ in Rumänien: soziale Bewegung und politische Organisation. Ein Beitrag zum Problem des internationalen Faschismus. Munich, 1986. Ioanid, Radu. The Sword of the Archangel. Fascist Ideology in Romania. Boulder, Colo., 1990. Iordachi, Constantin. Charisma, Politics and Violence:  The Legion of the “Archangel Michael” in Inter-​war Romania. Trondheim,  2004. Iordachi, Constantin. “God’s Chosen Warriors: Romantic Palingenesis, Militarism and Fascias in Modern Romania.” In Comparative Fascist Studies:  New Perspectives, ed. Constantin Iordachi. London, 2010, 316–​57. Iordachi, Constantin. “A Continuum of Dictatorships:  Hybrid Totalitarian Experiments in Romania, 1937–​1944.” In Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Interwar Europe, eds. António Costa Pinto and Aristotle Kallis. London, 2014, 233–​71. Livezeanu, Irina. Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–​ 1930. Ithaca, NY, and London, 1995. Mann, Michael. Fascists. Cambridge, 2004. Viega, Francisco. La mística del ultranacionalismo. Historia de la Guardia de Hierro, Rumania, 1991–​1941. Barcelona, 1989.

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25 ALBANIA BETWEEN FAN NOLI, KING ZOG, AND ITALIAN HEGEMONY Robert C. Austin

Albania’s predicament between the two world wars was hardly enviable and in some ways it faced even more challenges than the rest of the Balkans. After all, Albanian independence came late, in 1912 and was confirmed by the great powers only in 1913. The Albanians, like the Bulgarians, Greeks, and Romanians, got a new German king of sorts, Prince Wilhelm of Wied, who stayed only briefly before Albanian political intrigue and the onset of the First World War sent him back to Germany, never to return although he was not without a few supporters in Albania. In the aftermath of the war, Albania regained its independence, although its borders were still in flux and its very existence was consistently challenged by Greece and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Yugoslavia after 1929). Greece was particularly keen to use the Greek minority living in the south (Northern Epirus) to foment both instability and potential border revision in their favor. Yugoslavia was particularly interested to get as much control of Albania’s north as possible while limiting Italian influence. The Kingdom of Italy was more or less given paramount influence in Albania in so far as they were ultimately the guarantors of Albanian independence –​very ironic in so far as it would be Mussolini’s Italy that would invade and then annex Albania in April 1939. Only a few of Albania’s emerging elite were prescient enough to foresee the dangers Italy’s role played.

Setting the scene in the early 1920s In the 1920s, outside of external challenges, Albania’s internal political climate was equally fraught. The very nature of the state was still undecided –​was it still a monarchy or set to be a republic? Would it lean east or west? There were no organized political parties, a largely illiterate and agrarian population, feudal relations in the countryside, and lacking even the most basic infrastructure. There were hardly any roads or railways. The national idea was only in its early stages and very few inroads had been taken in the creation of a truly national consciousness. When compared with the other Balkan states, Albania was years behind which helps explain many of the challenges Albania faced throughout the twentieth century. Many of these obstacles were specific to Albania. Of course they needed a standardized language, which would actually not come until the 1950s, but there were immense regional differences between north and south. The presence of three religions  –​Islam (Majority Sunni and minority Bektashi), Catholicism in and around the northern city of Skhöder, and Orthodoxy primarily in the 257

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country’s south –​posed additional challenges.While the interwar period saw some modest gains in the process of making Albanians into Albanians, the serious nation (and state) building only really happened during the communist period between 1944 and 1990. The Congress of Lushnje, where Albanian political leaders met in January 1920, set up a very rudimentary state structure with a Regency Council comprised of four representatives from the four religious communities. In the aftermath of the congress, Albania experienced an exciting and lively debate on fundamental political, economic, and social issues. In fact, the period between January 1920 and December 1924 was the most democratic period in Albania’s entire twentieth-​century history. A political culture was taking shape, albeit still at a very early, rudimentary stage; Albania had had its first parliamentary elections. However, the main goals of the congress, which were to decide on a permanent form of government and draft a new constitution through an elected constituent assembly, had not been fulfilled. Political parties were formed, but they possessed no mass base of support, offered nearly identical programs, and made little effort to broaden their appeal to the wider population. Politics remained the domain of the landowning aristocracy –​essentially seven large families that owned most of what was worth owning. Moreover, if Albania was to escape its poverty, money would have to come from somewhere. Some hoped the newly founded League of Nations would be the savior, others understood that given strained relations with neighboring Greece and Yugoslavia, only Italy was actually in a realistic position to help. In this highly complicated milieu two principal politicians emerged that shaped the debate until December 1924 –​Fan S. Noli and Ahmed Bey Zogu. Similar in age, Noli born in 1882 and Zogu in 1895, the two represented the competing visions for Albania. Born outside what would become Albania, Noli had spent most of his life external, especially in the United States, where he embraced progressive ideas. He was a key player in defending Albania to the outside world. Zogu was ultimately a northern Albanian tribesman from Mati with big dreams who had hardly ever left what would become Albania in 1912. In terms of skills, as a bey and therefore hereditary elite, Zogu had the upper hand when compared to Noli’s poor grasp of the local reality and even poorer connections to political life inside Albania. Moreover, ever since the Young Turk Revolution, Zogu had earned a reputation as a very capable soldier and this was confirmed time and time again in the First World War and after. Although originally in the same party, Noli would ultimately break with Zogu and push for radical reforms in Albania. Like so many other peasant leaders in the Balkans who would go down to defeat, Noli sought to break the power of the landowners. Zogu was less ambitious in terms of reform –​he sought power and the spoils that came with it, not highfalutin ideas about social justice. While he later likened himself to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, his time in power was hardly revolutionary. In some ways, Zogu was a harbinger of the very type of leaders that would come to shape the region throughout the twentieth and twenty-​ first centuries –​often shallow opportunists with a taste for cash and luxury that always prevailed over reform. The ever austere Noli, whose main contribution to Albania and the Albanians was the creation of the independent (autocephalous) Albanian Orthodox Church, was always honest. In 1920s Albania, and everywhere else in the Balkans, that meant nothing. Within the confines of two political parties, the Popular Party and the Progressive Party, Albania experienced a very real political debate. The Popular Party was the larger party and tended to represent both conservative and liberal opinion as evidenced by the membership of both Fan Noli, who was the party’s first leader, and Ahmed Bey Zogu. The party was generally more reform minded; it sought a state developed along modern lines, was hostile to the continued dominance of the beys (big landowners), included many intellectual and democratic

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elements and was correspondingly well represented in southern Albania. The Roman Catholic minority, who tended to play a moderating role in Albanian politics, also preferred the enlightened program of the Popular Party but largely remained outside the party due to the presence of Zogu, whose increasing influence they had come to fear. The Progressive Party was more or less the party of the beys and represented the interests of central Albania where large landowners held sway. Essentially in favor of the status quo, its platform had no use for the masses. Outside the political parties, numerous other groups, oriented toward progress or status quo appeared. Of special significance for Albania and the Albanians was the influence of the Albanian-​Americans who really played an outsized role in Albania in the 1920s. The main player in this was the party Vatra (The Hearth) where Noli had strong roots. Vatra’s leadership very much became the leader of progressive change in Albania and gradually assumed deeply anti-​Zog policies. Its newspaper, Dielli, and a sister paper established in the southern town of Korça, were emblematic of what the Albanian-​Americans thought Albania could become. They did, however, represent primarily the Orthodox south of the country. Other progressives groups gathered around the politically active youth and the Catholic community in the north. Joining these disparate forces were the Albanians from Kosovo. The fact that Albania’s borders were the product of geo-​political concerns rather than following ethnic lines, ensured that Albanians eager for border revision would play an important role in the political struggle. Serbia essentially conquered Kosovo in 1912–​13 and Albania’s then borders had left over 500,000 Albanians living in western Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. In the war’s aftermath it was simply assumed that Kosovo was an integral part of Serbia.The Kosovo question has been an on-​again-​ off-​again dilemma for successive Albanian governments since 1913. What is most important is that it was only between 1920 and 1924 that Albania actually had a Kosovo policy. After Zogu achieved total dominance in 1925, the issue was shelved. For many Albanians, especially those in the northeast, who had had their trade and other links with the towns of Prishtina and Prizren in Kosovo severed when borders were drawn, there was a strong desire for national unification. Also, Belgrade’s policy, which was aimed at Serbianization after five centuries of Ottoman rule, manifested itself in multiple injustices and abuses.The period between 1920 and 1925 stands out as by far the worst period for Albanians in Serbia prior to the policies of the regime of Slobodan Milosević between 1989 and 1999.

The Noli-​Zogu confrontation Noli and Zogu fought a battle over Albania’s future. Both were in and out of government –​ Noli a foreign minister, Zogu often minister of interior or prime minister. Noli’s niche was always foreign affairs and he hardly ever seemed comfortable in Albania’s narrow corridors of power. He made his mark defending Albania in the League of Nations on several occasions. In the fall of 1923, as Albania headed for long-​awaited elections for the constituent assembly, Noli established a new political force, the Liberal Party, to challenge Zogu’s march to dictatorship. With a bizarre system of indirect voting in two rounds, Zogu and his allies prevailed. In what would become the hallmark of Albania’s post-​communist rulers where almost every election was contested by the loser, Noli and his followers rejected the results. A new assembly did begin sitting in January 1924 but a later assassination attempt on Zogu in February 1924 threw the country into crisis. Zogu resigned and one of the country’s largest landowners took over. Plus, Albania’s financial situation was dire:  no foreign concessions had been granted and no loan ever came either. After the murder of two Americans who had been ambushed on one of the

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country’s few roads, Noli and his group departed for Vlora. The April assassination of the youth leader Avni Rustemi pushed Zogu’s opponents ever further. The opposition blamed Zogu for his death and later decided to overthrow the government by force. Joined by some other progressives, especially those who like Noli had left Albania, Noli took advantage of the chaos and strife and started what some called for a revolution and others a simple coup in June 1924.Whatever it was, Noli found himself in power with a very complex set of allies. Zogu fled to Belgrade to re-​group. Noli’s revolution, which he considered to be a major blow against Albanian feudalism, was actually doomed to fail for a number of reasons. His coalition included die-​hard reformers like him who wanted to end feudalism, a larger collection of opportunists, army members who merely wanted to get paid and Kosovars who wanted Kosovo to be part of Albania. For the post-​World War II communist leaders, Noli’s seizure of power was the bourgeois-​democratic revolution that was nipped in the bud by rapacious neighbors and imperialists. The June Revolution, as it was later called, confirmed also the communist position that Albania was surrounded by enemies.While unsuccessful at the time, it became an important historical milestone for the communist myth making and later isolationist tendencies. Noli would subsequently go down in defeat and with it, went Albania’s chaotic experiment with a form of democracy which was no better or worse than the sham democracies on offer throughout the Balkans between the wars. Noli did face hostile neighbors, indifferent great powers that did not think Albania could be democratic anyway, and the well-​organized opposition of Zogu in exile. For Noli, however, his far biggest error was his assessment of Albania’s international leverage. As noted, Noli thought that the outside world was on his side. He therefore prioritized the external problem believing that he had the moral high ground. He did but if there is one lesson from the period between the wars, it is that morality did not matter at all.The fate of Central Europe and the Balkans made this all too clear. Noli decided that his best route was to head to Geneva to plead a case for cash and recognition of his government. While Noli had praised the League when Albania was admitted as member, this time around he attacked it. His speech was famous back home for those who could read but his berating of the League and the great powers did little to help his cause. He left empty-​handed and went back home only to find that his coalition had more or less disintegrated. Most of the Great Powers decided he was too dangerous and de-​stabilizing to support. The consensus was that Zogu was the better bet as he would never raise border issues. The British representative in Albania took a particularly dim view of Noli and called for his ouster. Making matters worse, Noli went ahead with a plan to recognize the USSR and Soviet diplomats showed up at the main port of Durres which only confirmed what many suspected: Noli was a dangerous Bolshevik. Even though the United Kingdom had done the same in February 1924, small powers like Albania did not have the same leeway. The Italians did not help either as they hoped for better deals with Zogu in power and were indeed promised lavish concessions.The Yugoslavs were to be rewarded with some territorial changes in their favor and no more mention of the fate of the Albanians in Kosovo. Territorial changes, or even the miserable fate of the Albanians in Yugoslavia disappeared as a policy in Tirana. Noli, who hoped to legitimize his revolution with elections in December to gain international recognition, had to postpone them given the impending threat from Zogu. But if one thread prevailed in great power assessments of Albania and the Balkans more generally it was that stability was far more important than democracy.

Zogu in the ascendant In Belgrade, where he had been making friends since 1915 particularly with Serb leader Nikola Pašić, Zogu lined up his allies: Serb army regulars, exiled white Russians from General 260

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Wrangel’s army who were looking for a fight along with his tribesman in the north. He invaded his homeland and toppled Noli’s government after very limited fighting. Noli fled Tirana on December 23, 1924, some say with the by then meager contents of the treasury. After a brief last stand in Vlore, Noli subsequently headed to a life in exile in Europe and then Boston where he led the Albanian Orthodox Church. He later retired and died in Florida in 1965. Back, in charge, Zogu was to govern Albania for nearly 15 years. He thus became the most important figure in the country’s interwar political life. By the very low standards of Balkan leaders in the interwar period, where mediocrity and avarice prevailed, Zogu was not the worst. His imprint on Albania was marginal and he always avoided the big questions like land reform. He governed with the threat of land reform but he still relied on the conservative forces to retain power. One could argue that he left Albania more or less as he found it: feudal, unintegrated, and weak. But, on the plus side, he did preserve Albanian independence, built a modest government quarter in what was then sleepy Tirana, and tried to make Albania look as ridiculous as possible. His lack of imagination was truly astounding despite the hagiography of some of his admirers, he was incapable of thinking of anything outside his own survival. With so many assassinations committed on his orders, he had so many blood feud debts that he grew increasingly fearful and isolated. In terms of the internal situation. Zogu made some extremely important changes. The period of democracy and chaos, which was the hallmark of the 1920–​4 period, gave way to permanent authoritarianism and ultimately conquest by a foreign power but also to the first significant efforts at state building. As noted, the question of just what type of state Albania was to become was still up in the air. The constituent assembly foreseen by the Lushnje Congress never happened. In any case, back in power, Zogu got rid of his enemies in various ways (exile and assassination) and he consolidated a conservative government that always depended on the support of the landowners. Noli’s peasant dreams were shelved leaving the peasantry largely ruined for the duration of the interwar period. Only the communists would put their issues back on the table but only in the form of brutal Stalinist-​style collectivization campaigns after World War II which amounted to a second slavery. While first re-​constituting the pre-​revolutionary government, Zogu waited until the end of January 1925 before seeking the Assembly’s approval for the creation of a presidential republic, establishing himself as the country’s first president and doing away with the Regency Council established in Lushnje in 1920. The new constitutional framework looked, at least on paper, something like the one found in the United States. Zogu’s key change, however, was to concentrate power in his hands –​ he controlled the army, the cabinet, the judiciary, and even the constitution. The presidential “stage” was another temporary step on the road toward a monarchy, since he used the intervening years until 1928 to lay the foundations for his own personality cult. He subsequently bowed to the “wishes” of his people and assumed the title of King of the Albanians. It was not clear then how Albanians made their “wishes” known but Zog always maintained that Albanians were, in their hearts, monarchists. Proclaiming himself Zog I, King of the Albanians, as opposed to King of Albania, that was about all he was willing to do for the Albanians who found themselves living outside the state. While some historians have credited King Zog with finally unifying the Albanian nation, or at least laying the foundations for unity, he chose to concentrate on creating stability while always holding out the potential for reform. The need for a benefactor, which Noli could not find, was solved as Zogu turned his back on his Yugoslav supporters and allowed Italy to gradually assume the very control Noli was so unwilling to permit. Unlike Noli, Zogu’s interest was not in eliminating the disintegrative trends that plagued Albania and creating a unified and reformed country, but using disunity to his advantage. 261

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Until 1925, Zogu’s best supporters in Belgrade and for a while, even Belgrade and Rome could more or less agree to share influence. Both benefited from an independent Albania and even acquiesced to its existence but neither ever wanted a strong Albania. Both agreed that if the place went off the rails, it would just be partitioned. However, things changed and Italy became the paramount power for a simple reason: they had more cash to support Zogu, who wanted to build an administration, almost from scratch, and create an army that could protect Albania (and himself too). Mussolini financed his grand lifestyle and some modest infrastructure projects like turning tiny Tirana into a European capital with fascist style government buildings on the main square and a grand boulevard for parades. The Italians did not lose time in making Albania a colony. The Societá per lo Sviluppo Economico de l’Albania (SVEA) was supposed to develop the Albanian economy to Italy’s benefit, and later the Italians provided the capital to establish an Albanian National Bank. The Yugoslavs were totally shut out by Italian largesse. Economic assistance was supplemented by military agreements too when in 1926, the two governments signed the first Tirana Pact whereby Italy guaranteed Albania’s territorial integrity and Zogu’s regime. The Tirana Pact also came with substantial cash for Albania. Even bigger loans, on very favorable terms, followed. The struggle for Albania continued unabated until April 1939. Until then, the Yugoslavs and Italians continued to pursue their aims. The changing international situation, which became especially apparent with the Anschluss in March 1938, the Munich agreement in September 1938, the First Vienna Award for Hungary in November 1938, and the end of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 clarified things for the Italians. They tried to force Zog to accept even greater Italian control, especially of its ports and other infrastructure but Zog resisted. On April 7, Italian troops landed at the Albanian coastal city of Durres, the very port they had paid to modernize. King Zog promised to remain for the fight but fled two days later with his wife Queen Geraldine, his infant son Leka, and a large entourage. The Italian monarchy replaced the Zog one, thus ending the 11-​year-​old Albanian monarchy. As an indication of the depravity of the era, Zog married in 1938. No better example of isolation and poor judgment was his choice of best man, Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano. After he left, likely with as much of the state treasury they could take, Zogu joined Fan Noli in exile. Try as he might, Zog never returned to Albania and, after drifting around the world, died in Paris in 1961.

Selected Readings Austin, Robert C. Founding a Balkan State. Albania’s Experiment with Democracy, 1920–​1925. Toronto, 2012. Austin, Robert C. Making and Remaking the Balkans: Nations and States since 1878. Toronto,  2019. Fischer, Bernd J. King Zog and the Struggle for Stability in Albania. Boulder, Colo., 1984. Fischer, Bernd J., ed. Balkan Strongmen. London, 2007. Schmidt-​Neke, Michael. Entstehung und Ausbau der Königsdiktatur in Albanien 1912–​1939. Regierungsbildungen, Herrschaftsweise und Machteliten in einem jungen Balkanstaat. Munich, 1987. Swire, Joseph. King Zog’s Albania. New York, 1937. Tomes, Jason. King Zog: Self-​Made Monarch of Albania. Stroud, 2003.

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26 THE CROAT PEASANT PARTY From Stjepan Radić to Vladko Maček Mark Biondich

The Croat Peasant Party (HSS, Hrvatska seljačka stranka) was arguably the most important Croatian political party in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Emerging as a relatively minor party in the late Habsburg era in 1904, largely as a result of the restrictive electoral law in prewar Croatia-​Slavonia, it was transformed after 1918 into the only major political party, in actual fact a mass movement, in the Croat lands and the second largest party in the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (“Yugoslavia”). Most of its political gains were made under the leadership of the charismatic Stjepan Radić (1871–​1928), who died in August 1928 following an assassination attempt, and sustained by his successor Vladko Maček (1879–​1964), one of Radić’s closest aides and confidants.

The Radić brothers and the origins of the HSS Stjepan Radić and his older brother Antun (1868–​1919) co-​founded the HSS in 1904, but it was Stjepan who emerged early in the party’s history as its driving force and leader. Over the course of two decades, Radić transformed the HSS from a relatively minor party into a mass movement. By the interwar period the HSS had penetrated virtually every village in Croatia and had extended its political activism into other Croat-​populated regions of the new Yugoslav kingdom, in particular Bosnia-​Herzegovina and Dalmatia, where it had not had a presence before 1918. In many respects, Radić’s political activism and death led to a brief period of Croat national unity. His successor,Valdko Maček, would lead the HSS through the equally turbulent period of King Aleksandar Karadjordjević’s royal dictatorship after January 1929 to the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941. The Croat Peasant Party played an integral role in the completion of Croatian national integration by articulating Croatia’s first agrarian program with an equally important emphasis on national rights. The HSS was both a peasant social movement and Croat national party. The party’s agrarian ideology addressed the growing social, political, and economic problems of Croat villages at the turn of the twentieth century, while its national ideology aimed to secure the political sovereignty of the Croat nation in the Dual Monarchy.These two components, articulated before the First World War, positioned the HSS to capitalize on the upheavals associated with the increased mobilization of the countryside during the war and its resultant radicalization. The HSS’s promotion of the concept of “the peasant right” legitimized the peasantry’s right 263

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to a leading role in society and was simultaneously the HSS’s economic, social, and political program. The HSS asserted the peasantry’s right to greater political participation at every level of state organization, and the reform of the existing economic system. This necessitated providing the peasantry with greater access to education, land, technology, and credit, as well as cooperative action to improve its collective position in the marketplace. The party’s agrarian ideology was both anti-​capitalist in that it saw unfettered economic competition as a threat to social justice, and anti-​socialist in that the party always opposed the collectivization of agriculture and revolutionary class struggle. In broader historical terms, the HSS played a central role in the democratization process in Croatia by asserting the political rights of the socially dominant countryside and facilitating the peasantry’s emergence as a political actor and the nucleus of the Croat national movement. In this respect, the peasant movement played a modernizing role in Croatian society. A key component of the HSS’s agrarian program, comparable in significance to the notion of “the peasant right,” was “the peasant state.” This model was of importance to the process of national integration, especially after Yugoslav unification in 1918. The peasantry had experienced the autonomous Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia that began to emerge after 1868, as a sub-​unit of the Kingdom of Hungary within the Dual Monarchy, as a new and oppressive institution.This state imposed new burdens on the peasantry and collected a range of taxes from them. Peasants invariably identified the nascent state bureaucracy and officialdom with the city and Croatia’s political elite.This social divide between the village and the city posed an impediment to national integration. To mobilize the peasants to the national cause, and in order to facilitate their identification with the Croatian state, the Radić brothers articulated the idea of “the peasant state,” essentially a state that would guard the peasantry’s socio-​economic interests and reflect its political preferences. The national ideology of Stjepan Radić, and hence the HSS’s national program, represented a synthesis of nineteenth-​century intellectual currents in Croatian society. Like many other Croat national ideologues, Radić acknowledged the importance of Slavic reciprocity and struck a delicate balance between Croat political rights and cultural Yugoslavism. Before 1918, the HSS party program promoted unity with the Dual Monarchy’s South Slavs as a means to an end, namely, the unification of those lands deemed to be historically Croatian within the Dual Monarchy. Confronted by the threat of Magyar domination, Radić urged unity and cooperation between Croats and Serbs. But Radić’s variant of cultural Yugoslavism never contained unitarist, Belgrade-​based implications and remained confined to the borders of the Dual Monarchy. His jettisoning of the principle of narodno jedinstvo (national oneness or national unity) was therefore relatively painless after Yugoslav unification on December 1, 1918.

Radić and the HSS, 1918–​1928 Radić and the HSS believed that the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was unconstitutional and undemocratic, as Yugoslav unification had neither been ratified by the Croatian Diet nor subsequently sanctioned by Croats in a referendum. In the months following unification in December 1918, as the Serbian state and military apparatus were extended to Croatia, the HSS’s position only hardened. Only in 1919–​20, when Radić realized that the Paris Peace Conference would not act on behalf of Croat popular wishes, did the party abandon independence in favor of a federalist platform. However, the HSS adopted a policy of abstention from the Constituent Assembly (1920–​1) and National Parliament (1921–​4) in Belgrade. It believed that participation would be tantamount to legitimizing the unification act. Abandoned only in 1924, the policy of abstention was again used repeatedly throughout the interwar era. 264

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The other mainstream Croat parties, the Croat Union and Croat Party of Right, were seriously debilitated by the introduction of universal male suffrage. In 1921 they deferred to the HSS and formed the “Croat Bloc,” a united political front against Belgrade that supported Croatian sovereignty. From that point, the HSS remained the only significant political party in Croatia at least until the Second World War. Radić was certainly a Croat nationalist, but his profoundly rooted commitment to Christian ethics and democratic principles meant that his nationalism never degenerated into chauvinism. Even after 1918 he remained committed to his Slavophile ideas and recognized that Croats and Serbs were culturally part of a larger Slavic community. During the height of his party’s struggle against Belgrade for a Croatian republic in the early 1920s, Radić often resorted to bitter invectives against the Serbian political elite. Yet, he was always careful to distinguish between Serbs as a people (i.e. the peasantry, upon whom he often heaped praise) and the Serbian establishment, which he repeatedly denigrated as corrupt. These Slavophile sentiments notwithstanding, Radić never believed that the South Slavs’ political distinctions and historical identities should be sacrificed for the sake of a wider Yugoslav community. The nationalist antagonism between Croats and Serbs over the issue of state organization, which was at the core of the national question in Yugoslavia, could only be resolved, at least in Radić’s mind, if each national group respected the political individuality and rights of the others. This was the underlying theme in Radić’s policies in the 1920s. In practice and particularly after the adoption of the centralist Vidovdan Constitution (1921), the Yugoslav state came to be dominated by Great Serbian elements, namely, Nikola Pašić’s National Radical Party (NRS). The NRS sought to construct a centralized state order to preserve Serbia’s preeminent role and to safeguard all Serbs in the single state proclaimed in December 1918. Radić’s opposition emerged in this context. In the waning days of the Great War, in the late summer and fall of 1918, the Croatian countryside was in open revolt as economic privations mounted and military desertion increased. This unrest, represented by the so-​called “Green Cadre,” demonstrated the existence of a wide chasm between the village and the city. At this critical juncture, in 1918–​19, Radić and his inner circle opted for a republican platform, undoubtedly in part to resist the imposition of a Serbian monarchy but also because the nascent Czechoslovak and Polish states were republics. Armed with a republican platform and the concepts of peasant right and peasant state, Radić offered the Croat peasantry a program that affirmed not only its socio-​economic and political rights but also its national identity. In 1918 he was one of the few political figures in Croatia to contest the hastily arranged process of Yugoslav unification. Burdened throughout the 1920s by pressures from the new monarchical Yugoslav state, the Croat peasantry coalesced around “the party of Radić.” In spite of the on-​going process of economic differentiation in the countryside after 1918, the peasantry demonstrated the strength of traditional rural ties and acted in unison under Radić’s leadership. By 1921, and even more by 1925, Radić’s political juggernaut had emasculated the other Croat political parties, who were reluctantly forced to recognize his leadership. This was based on their realization that Radić’s party was the only political force of significance in Croatia, and also in no small measure on their growing disenchantment with Yugoslav unitarism. Even his Croat critics recognized that Radić had come to represent the Croat people’s resistance to Yugoslav state centralism. By the early 1920s, Radić’s name had become essentially synonymous with Croatdom and the preservation of Croat national individuality. By the mid-​1920s, Croat national integration had been completed under the aegis of the HSS. In early 1925, the HSS leadership claimed that “the Croat Republican Peasant Party has become the Croat people.” This claim was essentially correct. 265

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Despite its firm hold over the Croatian countryside, Radić’s party was never able to enact its national or socio-​economic program. Although the peasant movement undermined the legitimacy of the Yugoslav state between 1919 and 1925 –​by abstaining first from the Constituent Assembly and then the National Parliament –​in reality it never posed the serious danger that Yugoslav authorities believed it did. Committed to a pacifist platform, Radić never earnestly countenanced the use of violence. He was a committed parliamentarian and evinced a great deal of tactical flexibility. Radić repeatedly spoke of “compromise,” “just” solutions, and “honorable” agreements. But his parliamentary activism, which only truly began in the second half of 1925, was thwarted by the same forces that had brought him to heel in the first place. Following his clandestine departure from the country in 1923 and travels to the United Kingdom and then Soviet Russia, where he enrolled the HSS in the Soviet-​sponsored Peasant International, Radić was arrested in early January 1925 upon his return to Yugoslavia. The HSS was also declared illegal, on the basis of the 1920 decree on state security (obznana) that had been used to suppress the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. With Radić and much of his senior party leadership in custody for alleged collusion with the Soviets, the HSS agreed in July 1925 to abandon its republicanism and recognize the Yugoslav state system. The HSS joined government in 1925 and formed an awkward partnership with its former nemesis, Pašić’s National Radicals. It lasted only until January 1927. Neither the National Radical Party nor the HSS was particularly enthusiastic about their uncomfortable coalition government. The political arrangement proved unworkable from its inception and little was accomplished during the HSS’s only time in government. Pašić, who did not want Radić in government in the first place, was not prepared to move on any major reforms, and the Radicals became increasingly immobilized because of their own internal problems. Radić’s experience between 1925 and 1928 is instructive. The consistent criticism directed at Radić and his movement by contemporaries –​whether Yugoslav or Western –​and many historians since then is that he committed a major tactical error by abstaining from Belgrade in the first years of the new Yugoslav state. Had he gone to Belgrade, the political system might not have had such a pronounced Serbian bent. This argument tends to ignore or at least minimize the significant pressures exerted on Radić by the more radical HSS elements, many of whom wanted a more aggressive and even violent resistance to Yugoslav authorities. It also overrates the commitment to meaningful state reform among the two leading Serbian parties. This argument fails to take into account the structural flaws of the Yugoslav parliamentary system and the powerful role of King Aleksandar. In the event, after Radić went to Belgrade in 1925, whether as a member of the governing coalition or in opposition together with the Croatian Serb politician Svetozar Pribićević, a bitter former rival, reform proved to be no simple matter. Some elements within the National Radicals, like Stojan Protić, had realized by the early 1920s that strict centralism was unworkable but were unable to find sufficient support for constitutional reform within their party. Among the Democrats, on the other hand, Ljubomir “Ljuba” Davidović was amenable to reform, but was thwarted first by Pribićević’s faction (1919–​24) and then by another faction for 1926–​8. Effecting meaningful constitutional reform in Yugoslavia in the 1920s proved difficult and was ultimately elusive. The growing influence of the royal court and its factions within the Radicals and Democratic Party proved instrumental in this stalemate. In 1924, King Aleksandar opted to oust Davidović’s government, a move that was not unconstitutional but which demonstrated that the King was prepared to topple a government with a comfortable relative majority if only because he disagreed with its policies.The King’s actions in 1924 set an ominous precedent for the future. Even the arch-​centralist Nikola Pašić was forced by 1926 to fight an ultimately futile rearguard action against the King’s growing involvement in party politics and party factionalism. 266

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In 1927–​8, competing National Radical factions formed governments with the backing of Democratic factions and the Slovene and Bosnian Muslim political parties. In opposition stood a new political alliance, the “Peasant Democratic Coalition,” formed in November 1927 by Radić and the Croatian Serb politician and leader of the Independent Democrats, Svetozar Pribićević.This Coalition represented –​and was portrayed as –​a united political front of Croats and Croatian Serbs, which in early 1928 launched a reformist campaign emphasizing the inequalities in the state system.

Radić’s murder The political debates in 1928 became so bitter that parliamentary sessions often degenerated into chaos. At the session on June 20, 1928, the Montenegrin Serb Radical deputy, Puniša Račić, shot five HSS deputies, killing two instantly. Radić was seriously wounded and died in Zagreb on August 8. At that point, the country reached a crossroads.The Peasant Democratic Coalition withdrew to Zagreb, refusing to participate further in the National Parliament or to negotiate with the government. It demanded sweeping changes to the Vidovdan state system. At this stage there was no common ground between the government parties and the court in Belgrade and the Peasant Democratic Coalition in Zagreb. On January 6, 1929, King Aleksandar proclaimed the imposition of a royal dictatorship. The Vidovdan Constitution was suspended; the National Parliament and all political parties were dissolved. A  new administration was formed under the leadership of General Petar Živković, the commander of the Royal Guard. The shots fired in the Belgrade parliament in June 1928 eventually killed not only Radić but the democratic experiment in Yugoslavia. That the Yugoslav state stood at a crossroads in 1928 was a fact not lost on most contemporaries. With the imposition of the royal dictatorship in January 1929,Yugoslavia’s first and only ostensibly democratic decade ended in political failure, and Croat-​Serb relations now reached their nadir. The murder of Radić undermined Croat-​Serb relations and soured political relations in the country. The writer Miroslav Krleža, otherwise one of Radić’s most prominent and prescient critics, suggested at the time that Radić was perhaps the only political figure in the country who could, with his blend of naive romanticism and Slavophilism, still bridge the gap that divided Zagreb and Belgrade. He saw no other figure on the political landscape that could fill that role. In spite of his dislike for Radić and his ideology, even Krleža had to admit after Radić’s death that “the people returned his sincere love with love.” His fellow writer August Cesarec wrote of the “tragic death of the uncrowned king of Croatia,” who died in the struggle “for humanity and the equality of all citizens.” In death, Radić’s stature grew immeasurably. Radić’s martyrdom meant that his name would continue to command a great deal of political capital. But what was Radić’s legacy? His party certainly played the central role in Croat national integration and mobilization, but assessing his legacy is problematic. Even his followers drew rather different conclusions after his death as to the course that he would have followed. This assuredly stems from Radić’s numerous and seemingly contradictory statements and policy positions. One could easily mine his published works and speeches and extract remarks to support one of any number of positions. Radić frequently denounced “Balkanism” and questioned the Yugoslav state’s viability and yet at times called for unification with the Bulgarians. He traveled to the Soviet Union to win international recognition of the Croat national cause but recurrently denounced communism. He was always a practicing Christian, but consistently denounced the clergy. He was a committed pacifist but his rhetoric was often inflammatory. In late 1927 he said in the Belgrade parliament that the Yugoslav idea was already dead, but in February 1928 reportedly told two American visitors that “the unity of the Yugoslavs is 267

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permanently established.” It was often difficult to distinguish between rhetoric and conviction. One should therefore not be surprised that during the Second World War, both the Croat wing of the Partisan resistance and the fascist Ustaša movement used his name in an attempt to win the hearts and minds of the Croat peasantry, while at the same time subverting the ideals for which he stood. As a result, Radić’s legacy has been highly politicized. Even in post-​socialist Croatia a number of political parties have laid claim to Radić’s legacy. Under his leadership, the HSS acted as a vehicle through which peasants could attempt to achieve their political objectives. But even as the HSS claimed to assert the rights of the peasant people in society, it provided only a limited role to peasants in the most senior leadership positions within the party. Peasants constituted a majority of the party’s central leadership and elected deputies; the internal make-​up of the party reflected the existing social composition of Croatian society. However, the HSS never developed an internal democratic machinery. Although this was likely not Radić’s original intention, by the late 1920s the party had become an unofficial autocracy. The local peasant leadership was slighted and lost much of its pre-​ 1918 significance. Sessions of the HSS’s party assemblies and committees, frequent before 1914, ceased almost completely after 1918. In part this assuredly stemmed from the general political circumstances of the early 1920s, but it was never remedied in Radić’s lifetime nor was any major initiative undertaken to reverse the trend. The process only intensified under Maček’s leadership between 1928 and 1941, although this undemocratic tendency also reflected the times and the country’s political circumstances. Radić also often confronted the party with faits accomplis: in 1923 when he left for London, in 1924 when he went to Soviet Russia, in 1925 when he came to terms with Pašić’s party, and again in 1927 when he came to terms with Pribićević, hitherto a bitter political rival. Moreover, toward the end of his life a virtual cult of personality had developed around “the Leader” Radić. While this was a testament to Radić’s towering presence within the party-​movement –​in many respects, he was the party –​it also attests to the fact that the HSS had become internally undemocratic. Despite this undemocratic trend within “the party of Radić,” it carried out a veritable national revolution among the Croats and in this regard played a modernizing role in Croatian society. It achieved complete mastery over the Croat national movement and became synonymous with that movement until 1941. And given his stature as the leader of the first Croat national mass movement, Radić is still regarded in Croatia today as an important progenitor of Croatia’s independence. His statue stands alone in front of the Croatian parliament. And yet the experiences of the 1920s disproved the accuracy of many of Radić’s earlier assertions and hopes. In that decade the Croat peasantry was finally organized and became a political force, but this did not translate into a real share of political power or the realization of the party’s socio-​economic program. Radić always seemed to believe that the Croat peasant movement would prevail, if for no other reason than because its “mission,” to use his words, was “just” and “honorable.” In the end, however, Radić the idealist and romantic was delivered a fatal blow. His fate had ominous implications for Croatia and Yugoslavia and in some respects foreshadowed an equally violent end for the movement that he had founded.

Maček and the late Yugoslav period, 1929–​1941 Under the leadership of Vladko Maček, the HSS entered the most difficult period of its history. It was forced to contend with King Aleksandar’s royal dictatorship (1929–​34); the Great Depression; growing nationality tensions; an increasingly volatile political climate in which the extremes of the Right and Left, represented in Croatia by the Ustaša and Communist parties, respectively, vied to subvert the existing political order and established parties; and, 268

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finally, the painful experiences of war and occupation which overlapped with and culminated in Communist revolution. After January 1929, the dictatorship of King Aleksandar Karadjordjević worked systematically to indoctrinate the populace into an abandonment of their old “tribal” identities in favor of a new Yugoslav national identity. The ideology of integral Yugoslavism was promoted with new vigor. A reorganization of the local administration abolished the old system of 33 departments in favor of nine large provinces (banovine), which took the names of geographical features rather than historic and cultural entities. The borders of the new banovine cut across historic pre-​war frontiers of provinces like Bosnia-​Herzegovina, Croatia, and Montenegro. The governors of these provinces were appointed by royal decree and were directly responsible to the King. In October 1929, the state’s name was officially changed to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. On September 3, 1931, acting under French pressure, the King imposed a new constitution. Although it guaranteed personal liberties, it still forbade most forms of political activity. The executive was given extensive powers, as was the King; elections to the National Parliament were no longer by secret ballot, and half the members of the Senate were to be nominated by the King. The state apparatus, army, and judiciary remained firmly in Serbian hands and a new government party, the Yugoslav National Party (JNS, Jugoslovenska narodna stranka), was a predominantly Serb affair. In the same period (1931–​4), many of the moderate non-​Serb leaders spent time in prison and were otherwise harassed by the authorities; Maček would spend nearly six months in detention in 1931 and the better part of 1933–​4 in prison for his alleged anti-​state activities until acquitted. King Aleksandar’s Yugoslavist project began to unravel even before his October 1934 assassination in Marseilles by a Macedonian terrorist working for the Ustaša movement. His political experiment in dictatorship had resulted in the construction of an elaborate police state and undermined the project of establishing a widely shared unitary Yugoslav identity. While a shared identity was one of his stated objectives, its imposition resulted in further alienation, as detailed in the chapter by Christian Axboe Nielsen. There was a nearly universal shift to the nationalist right among the various ethnic groups in Yugoslavia, although this shift also reflected the spirit of the times in Europe. The royal dictatorship undoubtedly contributed to an increase in interethnic tensions. After October 1934, a Regency Council was established, headed by Prince Pavle Karadjordjević, the late King’s cousin. Much of Aleksandar’s system, like the 1931 Constitution, was retained, although the reins of dictatorship were loosened. Prince Pavle combined a reactionary attitude toward parliamentary pluralism and socio-​economic reform with a desire to reach a political compromise with the HSS. Despite elections in 1935 and 1938, attempts under Prime Minister Bogoljub Jevtić (1934–​5) and then Milan Stojadinović (1935–​9) to overcome the political divisions in the country failed. During this period, Maček headed the country’s United Opposition, which brought together the HSS, the Croatian Serb Independent Democrats, and the Serbian Democrats and Agrarians. Significant change came only in early 1939, when Dragiša Cvetković replaced Stojadinović as Prime Minister. In August, Cvetković and Maček negotiated the Sporazum (Agreement), which created a semi-​ autonomous Croatian banovina (province). This semi-​ autonomous Croatian unit included prewar Croatia-​Slavonia (minus most of Syrmia), Dalmatia, and those parts of Bosnia-​Herzegovina with a Croat plurality, i.e. western Herzegovina, parts of central Bosnia and the Posavina region. Croatia received its own elected Diet, the Sabor, and autonomy in most internal administrative matters. Foreign policy, defense, and taxation remained in the hands of the Yugoslav state in Belgrade. In August 1939 the HSS joined a coalition government, 269

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its only time in government since 1925–​7, with Maček assuming the position of Deputy Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Given the long shadow cast by Radić, and largely marginalized by Western historiography, it is not surprising that Maček remains one of the most ignored figures of twentieth-​century Croatian political history. Maček never possessed Radić’s charisma nor did he suffer a martyr’s death like his mentor. These facts, combined with the painful reality that he ended his life in obscurity as an exile alongside so many other East Central European political émigrés, contributed to his marginalization as a historical figure. Maček and the HSS were simply overtaken by history. With the so-​called ‘rebirth of history’ in 1989, Maček (unlike Radić) simply never figured prominently as a figure in the national memory. This should not blind us to his or the HSS’s political significance in the late interwar period. They culminated in 1938 with a warm public welcome in Belgrade after his success in patiently negotiating an HSS coalition with the Serb opposition parties. Soon after his release from prison in 1934, he had begun working systematically with local HSS leadership, as Radić had not, to expand the cooperative network to villages hit hard by the Great Depression. Their numbers mushroomed, and by 1935, he was able to speak of “the boom of the party.” Another important result of his organizational efforts were the many party-​affiliated associations created or revived in 1935–​6.These included Economic Concord (Gospodarska sloga) and Peasant Concord (Seljačka sloga), designed to address the respective socio-​economic and cultural problems confronting the Croat peasantry at the time. In 1936, the HSS formed the Croat Peasant Defense (Hrvatska seljačka zaštita), a paramilitary formation created to protect party supporters against several existing paramilitary formations, which had either a Yugoslavist or Serb nationalist orientation and enjoyed varying degrees of state sponsorship. The royal dictatorship lacked broad popular support and, like other conservative authoritarian regimes in the region, availed itself of paramilitary formations to suppress popular discontent and intimidate political opponents. The proliferation of such organizations highlights the failure of the regime to establish order and to build a legitimate state based on the rule of law. The Croatian Peasant Defense enabled the HSS to counter, albeit in a limited way, state-​sponsored paramilitaries. In the end, however, the HSS and its many affiliated associations were overtaken by events. In April 1941 the party was marginalized by the Ustaša regime of Ante Pavelić and the Croatian Peasant Defense was dragooned into service as the nucleus of the wartime Croatian Home Guard. After refusing a German invitation to collaborate, the puppet Ustaša regime arrested Maček in October 1941 and interned him in the Jasenovac concentration camp. From March 1942, he was confined to house arrest in his native village in Kupinec. He would flee Croatia in May 1945, in fear of Communist reprisal, never to return. Maček and the HSS would never recover from the deluge of the Second World War.

Selected Readings Biondich, Mark. Stjepan Radić, the Croat Peasant Party and the Politics of Mass Mobilization, 1904–​1928. Toronto, 2000. Biondich, Mark. “Vladko Maček and the Croat Political Right, 1928–​1941,” Contemporary European History 16, no. 2 (2007): 203–​13. Boban, Branka. Demokratski nacionalizam Stjepana Radića. Zagreb, 1998. Boban, Ljubo. Maček i politika HSS, 1928–​1941, 2 vols. Zagreb, 1974. Maček,Vladko. In the Struggle for Freedom, eds. Elizabeth and Stjepan Gaži. University Park, Penn., 1957. Mužić, Ivan. Maček u Luburićevu zatočeništvu. Split, 1999.

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The Croat Peasant Party Mužić, Ivan. Stjepan Radić u Kraljevini Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca. Zagreb, 1988. Pavlaković, Vjeran. “Vladko Maček, the Croatian Peasant Party and the Spanish Civil War,” Contemporary European History 16, no. 2 (2007): 233–​46. Perić, Ivo. Vladko Maček: politički portret. Zagreb, 2003. Ramet, Sabrina P. “Vladko Maček and the Croatian Peasant Defence in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia,” Contemporary European History 16, no. 2 (2007): 215–​31.

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27 SERBIA, KOSOVO, AND MACEDONIA FROM REVOLT AND RESETTLEMENT TO REPRESSION Vladan Jovanović

The struggle to integrate “South Serbia” (1918–​1929) Victory in the Balkan Wars and the peace treaties after World War I allowed the political elite of Serbia to realize one of its deep-​seating wishes, the reclamation of Kosovo and Macedonia from the Ottomans. In Serbian mental maps, this was so-​called Old Serbia, since this region had been part of the medieval Serbian state and played an outstanding role as place of memory in the national historical consciousness. Following the proclamation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in 1918, the “new regions” were incorporated as an “historical province of South Serbia” encompassing Macedonia, Kosovo, Metohija, Sanjak, and eastern Montenegro. However, despite its huge symbolic meaning, “South Serbia” had no special legal standing. This territory was populated by a variety of ethnic groups whose past coexistence had been replaced by opposition to Ottoman rule and mutual antagonisms by the early twentieth century. The influential Serbian anthropologist Jovan Cvijić described the Turkish emigration from the Balkans to Anatolia as a “natural evolution” that should remove or help to alleviate the “ethno-​psychological friction” created by Ottoman rule. Its “exhausted civilization” had left the Macedonian Slavs, who constituted after 1918 nearly 60 percent in the total population in “South Serbia,” as an “amorphous floating mass” that were only now free to assimilate to a distinct Serbian identity. That still left the rest of the province’s population, the Albanians with 28 percent, and the remaining Turks with 10 percent. In Macedonia, there were also smaller numbers of Vlachs, Jews, Greeks, Roma, and other ethnic groups. The Serbian political leadership were concerned that almost half of “South Serbia’s” population were Muslim. They saw the principal threat from the nearly half a million Muslim and presumably “disloyal” Albanians who lived in Kosovo and western Macedonia, now on the border with an independent state of Albania. They greatly outnumbered the small Serb minority that remained there after a series of pre-​1914 migrations to Serbia. The initial legal provisory introduced in 1921 after the military occupation of the region in the First Balkan War in 1912 resulted in a series of confused attempts to integrate these formerly Ottoman regions. The so-​called Vidovdan Constitution was adopted in 1921 by a Serb 272

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majority with the main Croatian party abstaining. Several minority parties survived, including the Kosovo Albanians’ Çemiyet. With no party of their own, some Macedonian MPs were pressed on threat of death to vote for the constitution. Representation in the administrative structure of the new province was also restricted. District assemblies and committees were formally elected bodies, but the powerful town mayors could suspend or ignore their decisions. Despite the strict provisions for previous experience in the Law on Civil Servants, government officials in Kosovo and Macedonia were poorly qualified and poorly paid. They survived on favoritism and soon became notorious for their corruption, attracting the attention of leading officials in Belgrade. In 1924, Ljuba Davidović, the leader of Democratic Party and now the Yugoslav Prime Minister proposed the establishment of a “strict but just regime” in the south. More precisely, he advocated the abolition of the “National Militia,” better appointments to the state apparatus, and the promotion of a “national moment” that all sides could freely accept. Referring to Bismarck’s policies in a newly united Germany, Davidović proposed better communication with Belgrade and also closer ties between the authorities and the local population. Little came out of these lofty aims. During the first decade of the Yugoslav Kingdom, the police service was divided into three levels (district, county, municipal) with multi-​million dinar budgets. The gendarmerie was unified in 1919 under the dual management of the Military Department and the Ministry of Interior. The members of the Second Gendarmerie Brigade based in Skopje were free to “adjust” the way they did their duties. In addition to inconsistency, their abuses primarily of non-​Serbs created a bad reputation throughout Macedonia and Kosovo. Admittedly facing continuing disorder, almost two thirds of the Yugoslav Kingdom’s entire gendarmerie was permanently stationed in “South Serbia” until 1929. One of the crucial factors for protecting state authority in the province was the Yugoslav Army. Skopje was the seat of the unattractive “punitive command,” as the Third Army was perceived among the officers themselves. There were 12 infantry and several artillery regiments deployed in Kosovo and Macedonia, while the Skopje air regiment carried out missions on the Albanian border. By bombing Albanian rebel (so-​called kaçaks) settlements and their inaccessible hideouts, they had a significant psychological impact. In 1922, 20 flying squads were formed, armed and supplied by all five army commands. They suppressed armed gangs in border areas, as did the “national militia” and municipal police. Apart from being seen as a patron of paramilitaries, the Yugoslav army was accused of excessive expenses such as the handsome officers’ houses, barracks, hospitals, and barutans that they built across Macedonia and Kosovo. The contrast to their miserable environment was striking for the local population. In contrast to the military presence, the judicial system of “South Serbia” was slow to function primarily because the Appellate Court in Skopje was obliged to serve the entire province. In addition, the lack of qualified clerks led to the recruitment of a large number of unskilled staff and unqualified lawyers. The Skopje penitentiary was supervised by corrupt managers whose only qualifications were family and political ties. In the collection of tax and customs revenues, the provincial and state budgets of “South Serbia” were far behind the other Yugoslav provinces. The revenues were primarily spent on building roads, public buildings, administrative staff, and agriculture. Tens of municipal fruit plantations were renovated by 1927. At the same time, dozens of experimental agro-​botanical stations and agricultural schools were established, while the idea of cooperatives was popularized through courses in Belgrade, attended by young men from Kosovo and Macedonia. The health service developed slowly until the mid-​1920s when efforts were made to combat the spread of malaria. District hospitals still struggled with unqualified staff. 273

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The number of national primary schools, established according to Serbian laws, was constantly increasing.The official statistics, intended for the international public, say that there were almost 500 new schools in “South Serbia,” built from 1919 to 1929. However, the reports of school supervisors indicate that in Skopje, the largest school district, only 17 schools were built, while 20 were temporarily repaired. Since the funding through municipal courts appeared ineffective, as obligations were redirected to poor rural municipalities, the gap between allocated and paid funds became more evident. The situation was worsened by the church authorities who used to expel pupils from classrooms that allegedly belonged to “usurped property.” By converting the so-​called incomplete gymnasiums (type of secondary school) into high schools, without adequate teaching staff or facilities, the state created an illusion of regularity. The teachers’ schools in Skopje and Prilep were mainly a source of concern for educational authorities because of frequent strikes and Communist propaganda among the students.

Political and economic instability in the 1920s Neither the Macedonians nor the Albanians had the opportunity to be adequately represented in the first Yugoslav Parliament. The delegates from “South Serbia” in the parliament of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (SCS) were recommended by district chiefs and court presidents, who were members of the Radical Party, the Democratic Party, or the Çemiyet, a Muslim political organization which was banned in 1925. Owing to electoral manipulation and pressure on voters, the number of Radical mandates grew until the Democrats, more favored by the Macedonians, managed to win some seats in the 1927 election. Ahead of the 1925 elections, the Democrats had conducted a campaign for people in the region to be able to write appeals in their own “Macedonian Dialect.” Meanwhile in the largely Albanian Tetovo district, the Radicals assembled sufficient votes by fake ballots from migrant workers (pečalbari) who lived abroad. In the village of Topolčani, where 95 percent of inhabitants were Turks, the controller of the opposition ballot box was removed, so there was not a single vote for the two Muslim electoral lists. The tobacco producers in Macedonia were blackmailed ahead of the elections, while the forestry authorities threatened those who would not vote for Radicals with deprivation of pastures and wood.The district chief in Donji Polog threatened to bomb villages and kill peasants seen voting for the opposition at the polling stations. Particularly worrying for the authorities was the fact that the Communists had won 20 parliamentary seats in Macedonia in the 1920 elections.Their propaganda had found a foothold in an environment of widespread unemployment, general misery, and legal anarchy. The state responded with a ban on the party, then with raids, arrests, and murders. In 1928, there were only 37 active members of the now illegal Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) in Macedonia. The government was even more worried, though, about autonomist tendencies in Macedonia, where many Slavs did not accept the official notion that they were Serbs. Since December 1920, the autonomist group Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), and the Communists developed cooperation based on traditional connections between the original IMRO and socialists from the period of the Ilinden uprising against Ottoman rule (1903). On the eve of the municipal elections in the Bregalnica district, Bulgarian armed bands were agitating for Communists “for the sake of gaining Macedonian autonomy.” Such cooperation was a result of general political crisis in Macedonia, where many people displayed a form of national identity that did not fit the official version. After the coup in Bulgaria in 1923, IMRO became a tool of the Bulgarian government, which opposed Yugoslav control over this part of Macedonia. In the same year, the Comintern intensified its propaganda for the Sovietization of the Balkans, by helping IMRO financially.The 274

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leaders of the Macedonian organization reluctantly agreed to cooperate with the Communists and signed the Balkan Federation Pact in Vienna, under the patronage of the USSR. The Bulgarian government was surprised and displeased, forcing the military faction to renounce both the Soviet sponsorship and the leftist supporters of cooperation with the Communist in 1924. Followers of the Balkan Federation were removed. Some of them went into exile to Austria where they founded the “United IMRO (federalists).” Another group opposing Serbian domination was the Macedonian Youth Secret Revolutionary Organization (MOTRO), founded in 1922 in Zagreb by five students from Macedonia. The young Macedonians presented themselves as “fighters for the liberation of Macedonia,” and were, therefore, persecuted by the state. In 1927, persecution culminated at the Skopje Student Process in 1927, when 20 Macedonian students were tortured and given lengthy prison sentences. As revenge, IMRO leader Vančo Mihailov organized an attempted assassination of the chief of public security, Živojin Lazić, in July 1928. Lazić survived and was appointed head of the Vardar Banovina, which encompassed Macedonia, the very next year. In general, the southern province was ruled as though it was occupied territory. The main preoccupation of police officers was the search for “enemies of the state.” The frequent murders of gendarmes and soldiers posed a real danger of collective punishment of “concealer villages” and the suffering of innocent people, as these murders were frequent in the early 1920s. Regardless of the symbolic importance given to control over Kosovo and Macedonia, the Yugoslav government showed little respect for any form of institutional order, particularly in regard to the Albanians. Apart from organizing brutal military and gendarmerie actions, the government tried to disarm Albanians and tightened the legal procedure for gun permits. Serbian and Montenegrin colonists, were in contrast systematically armed, so they could defend themselves against attacks by Albanian and Bulgarian rebels. The Albanian kaçak movement, which had begun as a resistance movement against the Ottoman regime, denied any legal Yugoslav authority. Belgrade’s response was to try to eliminate it in Kosovo and western Macedonia. Between 1918 and 1924, hundreds of kaçaks passed through the police hands, while official efforts to put the “organized Albanians” into Yugoslav service quickly failed. Neither tactic gave the expected results. Only in 1924, the government managed to partially suppress the kaçaks, thanks to the restoration of King Zog in Albania, who was more accommodating to Yugoslavia. Although the movement lost power and its leaders emigrated, the problem was only postponed. Albanian irredentism would erupt even before the outbreak of the Second World War and the destruction of Yugoslavia. Despite the fortifying of villages bordering Bulgaria, there were also frequent attacks by Bulgarian komitadji who entered from their bases in Bulgaria. They killed border guards and colonists. Their intelligence was collected at their headquarters in Štip and then transferred to Bulgaria via IMRO couriers. As a response, the government formed an anti-​Bulgarian bandit association in Štip in 1923. The district prison in Štip was constantly overcrowded, and life in the surrounding villages was paralyzed prompting a mass exodus to Bulgaria. IMRO was especially interested in recruiting young Macedonian refugees. The state authorities kept records of all “suspicious Bulgarians,” especially Macedonian university students abroad, who were considered dangerous exponents of IMRO. Combating komitadjis in Macedonia cost the lives of many lesser rebels than Yugoslav soldiers and gendarmes. But their pursuit of armed gangs led to uncontrolled local repression, from mass arrests to the displacement of entire villages, spreading resentment of the Belgrade government.The armed conflicts between the komitadjis and largely Serbian gendarmerie usually peaked in the days before a parliamentary election. Then military pressure on Macedonia was suspiciously relaxed immediately after the polling stations closed. 275

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The corrupt structure of Yugoslav administration in Kosovo and Macedonia was also reflected in ethnic-​based promotion, nepotism, embezzlement of state funds, smuggling, and political scandals. In 1923, obligatory labor (kuluk) for men was introduced by the government, forcing people to serve as guards or work on state building projects. The authorities were free to “borrow” cars and tractors from peasant households. In the borderlands, the kuluk obligations not only included cutting wood, but also pursuing komitadji and kachak gangs. In such circumstances, there was increasing emigration to Bulgaria and America, while further displacement of Muslims to Turkey and Albania followed from the land reform and colonization. The government’s plan to colonize the south was supposed to represent a symbolic break with the Ottoman administration. Yet only a half of the land projected for colonization was distributed by 1928, and barely a fifth was designated “non-​ownership property,” permanently abandoned by Muslims. Bank loans for irrigation and cultivation were too few or too small, although the Alliance of Agricultural Communities received millions for founding new colonies. The settlements were built primarily in critical borderlands or crossroads in the south, along the routes for kachak and komitadji gangs. Consequently, most of the armed conflicts occurred around the new colonies. A lot of landholdings were allocated to both former and active Chetniks and the leaders of the “National Militia,” who were armed by the Supreme Agrarian Trust warehouses. Komitadji activity was a constant danger for settlers who slept with their rifles and carried them in the fields. Despite such precautions, many colonist settlements were destroyed by Bulgarian gangs. In the initial settlements surrounding urban areas, the colonists received only a quarter of the land intended for the colonization project. Most of this land went to the state (44 percent) or the municipalities (27 percent). One fifth of such properties came from Muslims who had been forced out. In Macedonia, 52 percent of the total land area was given to colonists, while 39 percent was left to local peasants. The Strumica region was unsuitable for colonization because it was mainly marshland, while the Dojran was full of unexploded grenades from the First World War. Another problem in the areas that were colonized was that new settlers, many of whom came from mountainous Montenegro or Herzegovina, lacked experience in lowland farming. But similar to the Albanians in the region, they had experience of armed resistance to government authority which only added to local conflicts. Only a fifth of the total area of the province was under cultivation. The growing of industrial plants, primarily tobacco and poppy seed (for opium), had fallen with bureaucratic interference costing many jobs. Strict legal provisions on tobacco cultivation indirectly stimulated smuggling, while the state monopoly over this culture along with continuous experimentation led to a reduction in production of 70 percent in 1924. Macedonian opium, as a pharmaceutical raw material, had the highest quality in the world due to its high morphine content, but the Geneva Convention of 1925 put rigorous restrictions on the opium trade and production worldwide. Many prominent Yugoslav politicians nonetheless took part in continued trading. In 1932, the opium trade became a state monopoly, and Macedonian peasants were obliged to sell their poppy seeds at a discount. US pharmaceutical companies were for some time the main consumers of Yugoslav raw opium. In the late 1930s, the opium zone in Macedonia and the transnational smuggling network covering Yugoslavia were closely monitored by the League of Nations and the US Treasury Department`s office in Paris. Other branches of the economy stagnated as well. The disappearance of 40 registered crafts under the influence of industrial competition was further stimulated by the protective attitude of the state toward importers. The illegal routes to Albania persisted despite the strong military checkpoints on both sides of the border. Prices rose given the insecurity of traders and commercial caravans on the roads, high transportation fees, and municipal taxes. Industrial investment 276

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was still considered a high-​r isk activity. Although the number of industrial enterprises had risen five times by 1929, they were all of modest capacity.

Culture and education One of the biggest challenges to the Kingdom of SCS was culture and education in Kosovo and Macedonia. Only a fifth of the population was functionally literate. A poor knowledge of the official Serbo-​Croat language was a particular problem. Neither the nominal strengthening of educational infrastructure nor the allocation of one third of the educational budget to “South Serbia” achieved the expected results. Teaching was still being done in rented private homes and abandoned Turkish buildings. Ambitious programs in primary schools, emphasizing the correction of “non-​literary speech,” did not find fertile ground. Despite the law for mandatory education, nearly 40 percent of children in the province were not enrolled in the school system because their families were afraid of “losing their workforce.” Albanian pupils were virtually nonexistent in elementary schools.Temporary teaching staff from the war years entered the new system without any professional training. Political motives and especially family ties determined many appointments, despite an official attempt to examine and improve the quality of education in the south. As secondary schools were perceived as an imposed obligation, most parents were not willing to send their children on to further education. A large number left school at the end of each year, while Muslims avoided state schools even in the areas where they made up the majority. Trapped in political and criminal scandals, high school teachers struggled to survive in Kosovo and Macedonia. Owing to a lack of school facilities, half-​day classes were organized in large classes with over 40 pupils. Barely 11 percent of the teachers had higher education themselves. In the late 1920s, five full grammar schools were turned into lower ones, while four were shut down, leaving the eastern part of Macedonia without a single high school. The stand-​alone Faculty of Philosophy was founded to start a university in Skopje in 1920 but was attended mainly by the children of state officials who came from other parts of Yugoslavia.The construction of a dormitory, the formation of the Obilić singing society, as well as the launching of the Skopje Scientific Society and the Museum of South Serbia were its main achievements. A costly replica of the Belgrade National Theater was built on the Vardar Quay in Skopje explicitly to provide a new southern portal for the unifying mission of “national cultivation.” State authorities did establish health resorts and school clinics in an effort to confront the malaria epidemic that affected hundreds of thousands of people throughout Macedonia and Kosovo.The lack of hygienic habits (unclean housing, sleeping with livestock in the same room, not bathing with soap) helped to spread tuberculosis. The high mortality high rates from influenza triggered a nationwide vaccination campaign, but with limited success. The reliance on traditional ways of healing, the fear of “innovations” and the cost of treatment obstructed the efforts of the Ministry of Health. Religious division significantly added to the political divisions. The legalization of religious communities as “public institutions with a special position” was not equally applied. The privileged position of Orthodox Christians were based on the benevolent attitude of the state toward the priesthood and the property of Serbian Orthodox Church. Serbian-​Bulgarian divisions in the same Orthodox community led to disputes usually resolved in the Serbs’ favor. As for the Muslims and their five muftis of the Skopje ulema-​medžlis, half of the costs were borne by the state itself, while the Islamic Religious Community secured the second half from revenues of its estates (vakuf) and from religious taxes. There were around 90 Turkish-​language elementary schools, dozens of madrasas (schools of higher Islamic learning), several private 277

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faculties, and Sharia courts. On the other hand, the state often used to seize Muslim properties illegally and them into parks, agricultural stations, warehouses, and powder magazines.

The Banovina period (1929–​1941) After abolishing the elected parliament on January 6, 1929, King Aleksandar and his ruling elite established a new administrative set-​up, and renamed the country as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Nine banovine (provinces) replaced the historical regions as the main territorial units. The government believed that the abolition of national historical units would remove sources of separatism. Each banovina was put under the direct control of the central government in order to forestall any aspiration for greater autonomy. In addition, the disintegration of former historical provinces would pave the way for the forced unification and national leveling that the King and his associates advocated. The public was told that the introduction of such a “principle of de-​ concentration” should enable the state administration to become closer to the people. In comparison with other parts of Yugoslavia, the Vardar Banovina had a rather predictable territorial composition because it included the entire Vardar Macedonia. In a striking departure from the administrative-​territorial concept of the previous decade, the rest of South Serbia was split up between three banovinas. Each of them had an ethnic Serbian plurality. It was hoped that their position as a minority in all three would dilute any separatist Albanian ideas and impede the consolidation of “anti-​state elements,” especially around the critical border zone. A whole quarter of the population of the former “province of South Serbia” remained outside the boundaries of the newly formed Vardar Banovina. However, the attempts at social emancipation and political integration of Macedonian and Kosovo villages remained incomplete.The only coordinated effort came after the earthquake of March 1931, when theYugoslav state built new houses for affected families in central Macedonia. A quarter of the population of the Vardar Banovina lived in urban areas, although the many towns were small: one quarter of their population was still engaged in agriculture, while a high percentage of “industrial population” was engaged in traditional crafts. The small number of pensioners suggested that only a negligible part of the urban population was employed in the civil service.There were far more people with no permanent occupation who were a burden to the poorly funded municipalities. The most systematic policy of the government to change the social fabric of “South Serbia” was the resettlement of ethnic Serbs in the former Ottoman territories. This was intended to achieve two goals, to transfer the poor from the “passive” parts of newly established Yugoslav state, and to change the national composition in areas left by departing Turks and Albanians. The more specific intention was for the Yugoslav Kingdom to “free itself ” from the presumably disloyal Albanian population and take over their land for colonization. The Serbian share of Kosovo’s population indeed rose to nearly 40  percent by the late 1930s, but an Albanian majority remained in place. The only prospect for their resettlement was Turkey, with deserted areas available from which Kurds, Armenians, and Greeks had previously been expelled. In the wake of several Serbian proposals to deport Albanians to Turkey, the Stojadinović government signed the Yugoslav-​Turkish Convention in 1938. Intended to facilitate the emigration of Albanians to Turkey, it still awaited final ratification and enforcement at the outbreak of the Second World War. The idea of legal expulsion of Kosovo Albanians to Asia Minor as a “people of Turkish culture and language” further aggravated inter-​ethnic relations. The colonization of Serbs in Macedonia and Kosovo that began in the previous decade continued into the 1930s.Yet, instead of the desired ethnic balance, the state got a new category of vulnerable, dissatisfied, thus disadvantaged citizens. The colonists were still poor farmers 278

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whose 8 hectares of land per family could not meet their existential needs. There were barely 20,000 settled families remaining in Macedonia and Kosovo in 1940, scattered in 1,000 colonial settlements. If we include the families of natives who received land, some 48,000 families were directly involved in the process of colonization and land reform. Their morale suffered from poor security, and a weak and corrupt state administration, all in the absence of continuity and the “mission spirit.” There was little wonder that a large number of settlers returned to their original homes. Governing Macedonia and Kosovo before and after the proclamation of the dictatorship in 1929 was comparable in several respects. The south was ruled by the same people from the same background who faced the same or very similar problems offering the same or almost identical solutions. The local results remained quite similar. The general sociopolitical context was however different. After a temporary suppression of the Albanian rebellion and the IMRO, the political situation in Macedonia and Kosovo was relaxed to a considerable extent. Thanks to improved diplomatic relations between the Balkan states in the mid-​1930s, the Macedonian issue was treated with far more attention and tact, even after King Aleksandar was assassinated by Croatian-​sponsored Macedonian nationalists in Marseille in 1934 in the wake of his conciliatory meeting with Tsar Boris of Bulgaria. Moreover, despite a rigid state apparatus at all levels, some aspects of the Macedonian issue became legitimate elements of the debate, such as the use of the “local dialect,” forbidden only a few years before. The evolution was also evident among moderate Macedonian separatists who replaced the aggressive tactics of the IMRO with more subtle ones, modeled on Communist propaganda. Yet, two decades of political violence were a significant obstacle to stabilizing the situation and creating confidence in the Yugoslav state. Little wonder that in 1939, new Prime Minister Dragiša Cvetković failed to persuade Macedonian Muslims to take a more active role in political life. The tangible erosion of state authority in Macedonia and Kosovo was felt during the last years of the 1930s when it became dangerous to speak Serbian in public places.The assassination of one of the last governors of the Vardar banovina and the limited mobility of his successors in the streets of Skopje was a clear signal that Yugoslavia was definitely losing control over its own territory. The interwar failure to integrate this strategically important territory was however the responsibility of the authorities themselves. Despite some seeds of modernization that the Yugoslav Kingdom left in Macedonia and Kosovo, it was not able to adjust its priorities to the time and to its own abilities. After the collapse of the Yugoslav Kingdom in April 1941, the perception of many people in the Vardar Banovina was that their territory was “liberated” when it was merged with Bulgaria and Albania respectively, reflecting the fragility of Yugoslav order in the region.

Selected Readings Boškovska, Nada. Yugoslavia and Macedonia before Tito: Between Repression and Integration. London, 2017. Dimić, Ljubodrag. Kulturna politika u Kraljevini Jugoslaviji 1918–​1941, vols. 1–​3. Belgrade, 1996 and 1997. Janjetović, Zoran. Deca careva, pastorčad kraljeva. Nacionalne manjine u Jugoslaviji 1918–​1941. Belgrade, 2005. Jovanović,Vladan. Slike jedne neuspele integracije. Kosovo, Makedonija, Srbija, Jugoslavija. Belgrade, 2014. Katardžiev, Ivan. Makedonsko nacionalno pitanje 1919–​1930. Zagreb, 1983. Lampe, John R. Balkans into Southeastern Europe, 1914–​2014. A Century ofWar andTransition. New York,  2006. Nielsen, Christian Axboe. One State, One Nation, One King:  The Dictatorship of King Alexander and His Yugoslav Project, 1929–​1935. New York, 2002. Petranović, Branko. Istorija Jugoslavije 1918–​1988, vol. 1. Belgrade, 1988. Pezo, Edvin. Zwangsmigration in Friedenszeiten? Jugoslawische Migrationspolitik und die Auswanderung von Muslimen in die Türkei (1918 bis 1966). Munich, 2013.

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28 YUGOSLAV IDENTITY IN THE INTERWAR PERIOD Christian Axboe Nielsen

On December 1, 1918, only weeks after the end of World War I, as Austria-​Hungary disintegrated and an exhausted Entente celebrated victory, Prince-​ Regent Aleksandar Karadjordjević proclaimed the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Although the new state quickly became commonly known as Yugoslavia, its official name revealed both the complexity and the conflicts which the kingdom and its leaders would struggle to cope with during its turbulent interwar existence. Only in October 1929, during the royal dictatorship of King Aleksandar, did the state officially become the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. During Aleksandar’s regime, the state implemented a massive but flawed campaign to expunge “tribal” identities in favor of a unitary Yugoslav identity. By the end of the interwar period, King Aleksandar was dead, and the Yugoslav idea was on life support, wounded and increasingly discarded by dueling Croat and Serb nationalists.

Antecedents The Yugoslav idea did not appear suddenly at the end of World War I but rather emerged gradually starting in the nineteenth century. Prompted by pan-​German and pan-​Slavic as well as national ideologies, a small but growing number of South Slavic intellectuals independently contemplated the linguistic, cultural, and other traits commonly shared by the South Slavs. In the broadest conception, this encompassed the area from Trieste/​Trst and Villach/​Beljak in the northwest to Varna and Thessaloniki/​Solun in the east and southeast. An early precursor to Yugoslav identity was the short-​lived Illyrian movement of the 1830s and 1840s, pioneered by Ljudevit Gaj (see Iskra Iveljić’s chapter). The Roman Catholic bishop of Đakovo, Josip Juraj Strossmayer, coined the term “Yugoslavism” and in 1866 established the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb. In Serbia, meanwhile, the linguist Vuk Stefanović Karadžić and others performed ethnographic research that at a minimum highlighted the linguistic commonalities of the South Slavs. From the outset, the search for a common Yugoslav identity encountered difficulties. Among other things, diverse opinions also existed as to which criteria should be used to determine Yugoslav identity. In an area as ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse as the Balkans, this lack of agreement was perhaps understandable, and various proponents of Yugoslavism sometimes facilely identified as Yugoslavs those who might rather identify otherwise, while its 280

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opponents rejected this new identity out of hand. And it should be kept in mind that during this period the vast majority of the South Slav population of the Balkans were illiterate peasants for whom national identity held very little importance. At the same time, the Yugoslav idea from the outset faced robust competition from urban elites who propagated and proselytized nascent Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian nationalisms. As with all questions of identity, both push and pull factors played a role in the formation of Yugoslav identity. While the common traits of South Slavs acted as an attractive pull factor, particularly for the small but growing number of intellectuals, the potential or perceived threat to South Slavs from in particular German, Hungarian, and Italian nationalism also functioned to push South Slavs closer together. Hence it should not surprise us that many of the most fervent adherents of South Slavic unity resided in Dalmatia and other areas in which Italian nationalism or irredentism posed the greatest threat to Slovenes, Serbs, and Croats. A good example of this is the Croato-​Serb coalition (Hrvatsko-​srpska koalicija) founded by Frano Supilo and others. This coalition insisted on the notion of “national oneness” (narodno jedinstvo), which vaguely asserted that Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes together constituted one nation. Some artists and intellectuals, most notably the famous sculptor Ivan Meštrović, used culture to propagate a sense of shared identity among South Slavs. Yet during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, very little was done in an organized manner to nourish Yugoslav ideology, and very few South Slavs in Austria-​Hungary desired or actively worked for the establishment of a Yugoslav state. The historian Charles Jelavich has shown that South Slavs in both Austria-​Hungary and in Serbia learned very little from their school textbooks about their presumed brothers and sisters. For obvious reasons, the imperial rulers of Austria-​Hungary had no vested interest in fostering Yugoslavism, and in Serbia the state elites consistently focused on the expansion of the Serbian nation-​state. Aleksandar Karadjordjević, the future Yugoslav king, rarely expressed his views on the Yugoslav question, but all indications are that he was mostly preoccupied with Serbian interests. It would take the calamity of World War I and the collapse of Austria-​Hungary to clear the way for a Yugoslav state, but even then the path toward a unitary or popular Yugoslav identity would prove difficult and precarious.

The turbulent first decade Perhaps the best indication of how difficult it was to translate vague and contradictory views of national ideology and the state into practice is the amount of time that passed between the proclamation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes on December 1, 1918, and the promulgation of the constitution on June 28, 1921. The fate of the individual historical identities of those territories entering into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes figured centrally in the debates of this period, and facile formulations about the “thrice-​named nation” (troimeni narod) of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes resolved little. Disagreements about the common state and its structure were many and extended all the way up to the King and the most influential politicians in the country. Even the name proved controversial; the powerful leader of the Serbian Radical Party, Nikola Pašić, opposed the name “Yugoslavia,” fearing that the Kingdom of Serbia and the Serbs as a nation would “drown” in this new construction. The fact that Serbia had proportionally speaking lost more lives in World War I than any other nation, and that most Croat and Slovene soldiers had fought on the defeated Habsburg side, made the state-​building negotiations even more difficult. Throughout the interwar period, the agents and defenders of the Yugoslav state availed themselves of a primitive rhetoric of krv (blood), žrtve (victims), and žrtvovanje (sacrifice). Successive governments and journalists loyal to them resorted to these powerful symbols in their efforts to quash opposition, criticism, and 281

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even the existence of independent individuals in society. Through this sort of rhetoric, state officials attempted to valorize the state’s claims to superiority and to defend the first Serbian preeminence and later the heavily Serbian-​based definition of integral Yugoslavism. Roughly speaking, Serb politicians believed that the institutions of the prewar Kingdom of Serbia could be transposed onto the new state as a whole, and that all important state matters should be centrally steered from Belgrade. By contrast, Croat and Slovene politicians, together with many Bosnian Muslims, preferred a much looser federal or even confederal state structure. The Croats were led by the charismatic Stjepan Radić and his Croat Republican Peasant Party, which succeeded in maintaining a hegemonic hold on the Croat electorate throughout the 1920s (see Mark Biondich’s chapter). Although Radić had some idealistic thoughts about the inherent solidarity of Croat and Serb peasants, his desire for broad autonomy for Croats and his party’s republicanism made him anathema to King Aleksandar and the Radicals. Slovene political leaders, with no obsession with statehood to parallel the Croatian notion of Croatian state right (hrvatsko pravo) took a more pragmatic approach to the formation of the Yugoslav state. The Slovenes were also more conscious of the dangers of Austrian and Italian irredentism and therefore tended to view Belgrade as less a threat and more as a guarantor of security. In June 1921, the Yugoslav parliament adopted the constitution on Vidovdan (June 28), the most significant date on the Serbian calendar, precisely seven years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. However, the adoption of the constitution did not resolve any of the underlying problems in the state, least of all the question of national identity. Indeed, it has been said that any analysis of the Vidovdan constitution must be primarily informed not by those who voted for it, but rather those who voted against it or boycotted its adoption (46 percent of members of parliament voted no or abstained). Scholars often use the term “Serbian hegemony” in order to describe the dominating and preeminent role played by Serbs and Serbian national ideology during the interwar period in Yugoslavia. The extent of this domination is perhaps revealed most clearly in the Serbs’ control of ministerial posts. In the interwar years, a Serb served as prime minister for 264 out of 268 months, minister of internal affairs for 240 months, foreign minister and justice minister for 237 months, and minister of defense throughout the entire period. Chronic political strife between the centralist views of the king and the Radicals on the one hand and the federalist –​and, until 1925, republican –​tendencies of Radić and his Peasant Party shaped the first decade of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. After the death of Nikola Pašić in 1926, the situation became even less stable, with governments frequently falling. Even more worryingly, the political rhetoric turned increasingly poisonous. This deterioration culminated in June 1928 with the shooting on the floor of the parliament of Radić and several other members of the Croat Peasant Party. Radić succumbed to his wounds several weeks later, plunging the country into an autumn of even greater political crisis.

The royal dictatorship On Orthodox Christmas Eve, January 6, 1929, King Aleksandar issued a solemn declaration to his subjects in which he stated that “the hour has come when there can and may no longer be any intermediary between the People and the King.” Aleksandar viewed the suspension of parliament as the only possible solution to the fractious and divisive political climate in the country. Therefore, the king suspended both the parliament and the activities of all political parties. Simultaneously, King Aleksandar decreed a series of new laws intended to restructure the state and increase national and state unity.These laws strengthened rather than discarded the rigid centralism of the 1920s, but Aleksandar claimed that he as king would rule justly in the 282

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name of all Yugoslavs. However, Aleksandar’s appointment of many well-​known politicians as ministers in the dictatorship’s government severely undermined the royal pronouncement of a clean break with the past. Moreover, the preponderance of posts given to Serbs, who held ten of 16 ministerial posts, strengthened suspicions that the king was first and foremost ruling in the name of the Serbs. Nevertheless, in many corners of the country, the initial reaction to the dictatorship was a sigh of relief and hope for a fresh start. Even Vladko Maček, the successor to Radić as the leader of the Croat Peasant Party, famously pronounced that the restrictive “vest” of the 1920s had been unbuttoned and could now, perhaps, be properly buttoned. The ideology of King Aleksandar’s dictatorship juxtaposed Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian plemenstvo (tribalism) against Yugoslav nacionalizam (nationalism). The state believed that the differences among Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes stemmed from the long period they had spent under various foreign rulers. Subject to foreign cultural, political, and social influences, the South Slavic, or Yugoslav, nation had fragmented into distinct “tribes.” These identities would now be superseded by a superior, stronger, and more viable Yugoslav nation. King Aleksandar believed passionately that his country could modernize itself only if “tribalism” was abolished. The 1920s had taught him that as long as Yugoslavia wallowed in the quagmire of bickering identities, it would remain internally divided, as well as vulnerable to the irredentist appetites of neighbors such as Italy and Hungary. In addition to suspending all parliamentary and parties’ political activity, King Aleksandar therefore quickly began to act against parties, associations, and organizations bearing “tribal” labels identifying these as Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian. In practice, however, the ban on parties and organizations proved less than consistent. From the outset, a large gap was visible between the king’s ambitions and the reality. To cite one striking example, the dictatorship never succeeded in replacing the existing history textbooks with new “Yugoslav” ones which could potentially have helped to create a sense of a common national identity. Instead, Slovenes continued to learn primarily about Slovenes, Serbs about Serbs, and Croats about Croats. Armed with an arsenal of draconian royal decrees, the state’s security apparatus positioned itself as the primary arbiter of the crucial line between the acceptable, or “national,” and the unacceptable, or “tribal.” The state injected itself into every aspect of Yugoslav identity during this period; it alone determined which of its citizens would be praised as “national workers” or condemned as “traitorous tribalists.” Throughout the country the police were tasked with imposing surveillance and monitoring the loyalty of the population not just to the state but also to its Yugoslav identity project. The regime of King Aleksandar vowed to eliminate interethnic and interfaith distrust and antipathy throughout the country. Numerous laws and regulations banned organizations with “tribal” or religious labels. But the Yugoslav project did not fully take shape until the autumn of 1929. On October 3, King Aleksandar unveiled the single most important change since the beginning of his regime. Renaming the country “Kingdom of Yugoslavia,” Aleksandar hoped to symbolically and practically signal the shift from a state of three nations to a unitary state informed by Yugoslav identity. An ambitious redrawing of Yugoslavia’s internal administrative boundaries accompanied the name change. In place of the previous 33 oblasti (regions), the country would henceforth be divided into nine provinces, to be known as banovine (singular, banovina). Although the name change was perhaps symbolic, no one could accuse King Aleksandar of lacking ambition with the creation of the banovine. The very name stemmed from Croatian history, and the regime viewed it as a courteous bow to Croatian sensibilities. The new provinces forsook the historical boundaries and names and were largely named after rivers. With the exception of Slovenia, which was left more or less intact as Drava banovina, all the others 283

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radically recast the country’s administrative geography. The official line was that the banovina system would rationalize Yugoslavia’s administration and economy and erase outdated tribal labels.They would serve to decentralize the state in that more responsibility would be delegated to the newly created regions. Yet the actual boundaries of the new provinces and the reactions to them proved to be symptomatic of the problems which Aleksandar’s Yugoslav project consistently encountered. Six out of the nine banovine contained Serb majorities, which indicated to many non-​Serbs that ethnic gerrymandering had been a primary consideration in the drafting process. Bosnian Muslims were particularly incensed by the disappearance of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the map. For all its failings, even the Vidovdan Constitution had preserved Bosnia and Herzegovina. The fact that the Bosnian Serb justice minister Milan Srškić had earlier professed the goal of making Bosnia and Herzegovina disappear did not help. Conversely, many more conservative Serbs were distraught that Serbia was also divided into several banovine. Moreover, it was unclear that the administrative reform would result in any practical devolution of decision-​making away from the center. In sum, the redistricting left no one happy. The political turmoil of the 1920s notwithstanding, work continued throughout the decade on the development and formulation of Yugoslav identity. Many of these drew upon the pioneering work of the Serb geographer –​and advisor to then Crown Prince Aleksandar –​ Jovan Cvijić. The pseudoscientific racial concepts of identity which were gaining popularity in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also heavily influenced Cvijić’s approach to South Slavic identity and unity. However, the regime struggled to define precisely what Yugoslav identity was and how it should function in practice. At a major meeting of the Ministerial Council a year and a half after the proclamation of the dictatorship, ministers led by Prime Minister Petar Živković trumpeted the accomplishments such as the banovine and the banning of “tribal” organizations and called for the establishment of a pro-​regime Yugoslav political party. Such a party would be able to further propagate “Yugoslav thought.” Prominent pro-​regime intellectuals such as the writer Jovan Dučić pitched in to foster a positive atmosphere of Yugoslavism. Authors of poetry and songs as well as sycophantic newspaper and magazine articles worked tirelessly to proselytize the Yugoslav mission of the dictatorship. Officials in the new banovine organized special fealty delegations, where handpicked groups of individuals from all corners of the country visited Belgrade in order to pay their respects to King Aleksandar. Journalists wrote glowing reports about how these visits allegedly fostered even greater adoration for the Yugoslav idea. But what was this fabled “Yugoslav thought?” Simply put, despite literally thousands of laws, regulations, and circulars calling for the abandonment of “tribalism,” and despite the trumpeting of a new and modern Yugoslav identity, a core question would remain unanswered: Did the shift to Yugoslavism entail the complete elimination and denial of the “tribal” past, or did it mean building an ecumenical Yugoslav identity on “tribal” foundations? Or, in the plain language of the peasantry, could a “good Croat,” “a good Slovene,” or a “good Serb” also be a “good Yugoslav?” Or could one only become a “good Yugoslav” by utterly renouncing one’s previous identity? No clear answer was forthcoming, and the few explications that emerged sounded naively utopian, bureaucratically obtuse, or suspiciously biased. Indeed, not a few pronouncements on Yugoslavism shared all of these dubious traits. Many of the utterances on the topic by the regime’s own officials on the meaning of Yugoslavism had a fatal flaw: their prima facie ecumenical arguments, even when crafted with care, foundered on their heavy reliance on Serbian symbols and traditions. Throughout the dictatorship, unitarism would remain de facto Serb nationalism.

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Advocates of Yugoslavism hailed it as the national ideology of the future, arguing that in order to survive threats from neighboring nations, the South Slavs should abandon the “tribal” identities that were holding back their political and economic development. Thinkers such as the Croat unitarist Mijo Radošević maintained that a new and modern Yugoslav nationalism would completely replace the “untruthful” and “degenerative” nationalisms and “historical traditionalism” of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Bulgarians. From the regime’s perspective, however, the Serb national identity was not to be discarded, for only that identity (according to the Serbs) had been powerful enough to break free from foreign bondage. Indeed, that identity was to serve as the model of the new Yugoslav identity. In this sense, the shift from Serb “tribal” identity to Yugoslav identity was smaller than what was required of other South Slavic identities. And non-​Serbs perceived the country’s new administrative boundaries as reinforcing this pro-​Serb  bias. In addition to pro-​regime propaganda, a number of associations took the lead in inculcating the population, and in particular the youth, with Yugoslav ideology. In December 1929, the government launched a strong effort to consolidate Yugoslav culture with physical training.The Sokol (Falcon) movement, a pan-​Slavic youth physical fitness organization with regional-​cum-​ national branches, was the principal agent of this drive for cultural synthesis. In particular, the regime acted against the Croat Sokol and the Croat and Slovene Orao (Eagle, plural Orlovi), the latter a Catholic youth organization based in Ljubljana. As part of its campaign against “tribal” organizations, the state announced on December 5, 1929, that all “tribal” chapters and branches of the Sokol were to merge into a new Savez Sokola Kraljevine Jugoslavije (Union of Sokols of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia). From the state’s perspective, the Sokol movement was crucial to transmitting Yugoslav ideology from the center to the population. The Sokol movement was to play a leading role in efforts to create healthy young Yugoslavs who would be loyal to the fatherland and the king. All students in state schools were encouraged to join the Sokol movement, and teachers were monitored with respect to their own loyalty and active interest in the movement. When assessing teachers, school inspectors were required to evaluate their “success in instruction of national subjects,” “work on national enlightenment,” and “work in the Sokol of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.” Besides providing financial and material assistance, the state ensured that the Sokol movement maintained a high profile in society. The tightly controlled press gave steady and favorable coverage to Sokol meetings and conventions. Every self-​respecting town erected a Sokolski dom (Sokol House) to serve as the focal point for all Sokol activities. King Aleksandar himself on Vidovdan in 1930 stated that Sokol members were bound “from cradle to grave” to serve Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav idea. The Sokol movement increasingly moved in a somewhat paramilitary direction. Throughout Yugoslavia, the authorities closely monitored the population’s attitude toward the Sokol movement. In particular, the regime struggled with the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to it. The Adriatic Sentinel (Jadranska straža), founded in 1922, was another organization designed to disseminate the ideology of King Aleksandar’s regime, and the only one based outside Belgrade. Patterned on the naval leagues which had emerged in several European states in the nineteenth century, the Adriatic Sentinel functioned as the mirror image of Italian irredentist organizations. It devoted itself largely to thwarting Italian ambitions to turn the Adriatic into an Italian lake. In order to emphasize Yugoslav Unity, the Adriatic Sentinel’s journal, like those of other unitarist associations, alternated from article to article or even from page to page between the Latin and the Serbian Cyrillic alphabets. In addition, in an effort to emphasize its synthetic brand of Yugoslavism, articles in Ekavian tended to be in the Latin alphabet, while articles in Ijekavian tended to be in the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet. In November 1929, one of

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the association’s most prominent intellectuals, Niko Bartulović wrote an article entitled “The Victory of Race” in which he praised the “genius” of the Yugoslav race. Yet even the Adriatic Sentinel was not immune to the rivalry between Serbs and Croats. The same challenges were visible as regarded state holidays. For example, with the advent of the dictatorship, the regime attempted to rebrand St. Sava’s Day, January 27, as an ecumenical holiday celebrating learning and enlightenment.The authorities had hoped to create a sense of balance and synthesis by adding a special day for Bishop Strossmayer, the nineteenth-​century Roman Catholic Croat philanthropist, on the calendar only a few days later, in early February. “Tribal” figures such as Saint Sava and Strossmayer would now, thanks to selective interpretations of their lives, take on a unitary Yugoslav flavor. Regime ideologues, including a number of ultra-​unitarist Croats such as Viktor Novak and Mijo Radošević, specialized in providing facile and teleological arguments for such readings of South Slav intellectual history. However, the amount of media and official attention devoted to events such as Strossmayer’s holiday paled in comparison to what was lavished on Saint Sava. And although no one challenged the centrality and salience of Saint Sava to Serbian history and identity, Roman Catholic and Islamic clergy resented the imposition of a Serbian Orthodox holiday on their followers. Important figures such as the Archbishop of Zagreb, Ante Bauer, and the leader of the Islamic community in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Džemaludin Čaušević, strongly opposed the imposition of a fundamentally Serbian Orthodox holiday on Catholics and Muslims. Both Bauer and Čaušević called on their followers to boycott the holiday. The state attempted to come up with compromise solutions, but these were frequently thwarted by zealous local and provincial officials. Overall, therefore, St. Sava’s Day had a generally negative impact on interfaith and interethnic relations. This observation points to a much more pervasive problem in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Serb civil servants had a troubling tendency to refer systematically to Serbia, Serbs, and things Serbian expansively in the first person.Thus, “we” and “us” meant “Serbs,” and all things Serbian were “ours.” Although such a disposition was, of course, understandable, it made it difficult for these civil servants to deal fairly with the concerns of non-​Serbs. In light of the state’s campaign against non-​Serb “tribal identities,” it also courted hypocrisy. In spite of the official rhetoric of Yugoslavism, little effort was made to conceal or curb such obvious bias. The unitarists themselves never succeeded in developing a consistent ideology. Nor did the unitarist rhetoric and policies ever succeed in adopting more than a veneer of assimilationist vocabulary. Even the most zealous unitarist ideologues revealed this in their rhetorical shifts. Their opponents observed that, far from attracting a broad and genuine following, Yugoslav thought remained an essentially “bureaucratic term,” with each nationality tenaciously retaining its own national consciousness. Non-​Serbs overwhelmingly refused to subscribe to unitarist ideology. All the while, the regime usually tolerated and sometimes even encouraged expressions of nationalist sentiment by Serbs while branding similar expressions by non-​Serbs as separatist. In his rare public pronouncements, King Aleksandar did try to project a genuinely new Yugoslavism. In a ceremony on September 6, 1930, Crown Prince Petar’s birthday, the king “buried” the Serbian military colors and presented the army with new Yugoslav colors. No one who possessed even casual knowledge of the king can doubt that this act was an enormous sacrifice on his part. For Aleksandar, always first and foremost a Serb soldier, and one who had witnessed first-​hand Serbia’s massive losses in the First World War, the Serbian military colors were the font of his most cherished values. And therein lay the problem: however strong the symbolism of his act, the king could not break free of his value system. And even if he had been able to do so, it would not have been enough to counter the thousands of officials who discriminated against non-​Serbs on a daily basis. 286

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From the outset of the dictatorship, it was apparent that even the modest degree of accommodation offered to other nationalities under the unitarist program was anathema to Serb nationalists. The regime proved pathetically inept at selling Yugoslav ideology not only to non-​ Serbs but also to Serbs themselves. At the University of Belgrade, most of the professors, whatever their political persuasion, resented being forced to teach fantastic theories about integral Yugoslavism, which they now were required to do. Yet hindsight tells us that the most serious problem was that the dictatorship had initiated a bifurcation between Serb nationalism on the one hand and unitarism as de facto Serb nationalism on the other. Many Serb nationalist intellectuals simply could not accept the regime’s suggestion, however mildly broached, that Serb nationalism had been complicit in the dysfunction of the 1920s. The dictatorship thus exacerbated relations between Serb nationalists and King Aleksandar even while strengthening the impression that he had not risen above his dynasty’s purely Serbian relations. In this way, it failed both with Serbs and with non-​Serbs.

From dictatorship to war In October 1934, King Aleksandar was assassinated when he began a state visit to France. King Aleksandar’s advisors immediately claimed that his dying words had been “Čuvajte mi Jugoslaviju!” (Preserve my Yugoslavia!), and in the months that followed his death, the government tried to continue to steer a Yugoslav course. Yet in practice the Yugoslav project of King Aleksandar had long since run out of steam. A tenuous and partial democratization since 1931 had not fundamentally improved anything. The government’s tactic of asking people to “vote for Yugoslavia” had the unfortunate side effect of turning the elections into much more than political contests. In effect, every election became a plebiscite on Yugoslavia. And by crudely manipulating those elections, the state further devalued the concept of Yugoslavism. With the exception of a few zealous advisors, the idea of imposing Yugoslav identity from the top down had lost traction and faced opposition not just from Slovenes, Croats, and Muslims but also from Serbs. In practice, therefore, the project was quietly shelved in subsequent years. State-​sponsored efforts after January 6, 1929, to impose a unitary identity on the diverse Yugoslav population had two malignant effects on the population. First, it drove them into a struggle against the new identity; second, it radicalized them within their own previously held identities. Both processes reinforced the hegemony of competing nationalist narratives and thereby further impeded any methodical attempt to solve the country’s grave socio-​economic and political problems. Whereas Yugoslavism’s proponents saw a hegemonic Yugoslav identity as a solution, others –​for example, nationalist Croats and Slovenes –​began to see the realization of their “national” goals in the same manner. In this sense, state Yugoslavism made a civil dialogue among the nations of Yugoslavia almost impossible to achieve. Moreover, it left the significant non-​Slavic populations of Yugoslavia (above all ethnic Albanians but also Turks, Hungarians, and Germans) permanently branded as an “a-​national element” that the Yugoslav state neither intended nor desired to convert to the Yugoslav cause. The tragedy of the regime was that in forcing Yugoslavism on the public and the political culture, it failed to dispel and ultimately encouraged the misperceptions that had for long divided the population. Thus, Croats and other non-​Serbs continued to believe they lived under “Serb hegemony” and found plenty of anecdotal evidence to support such assertions. Many Serbs saw themselves as sacrificing much without receiving anything in return and were disenchanted enough with this and with the dictatorship’s style of governance to drift away from Aleksandar and closer to a stronger and more exclusivist Serb nationalism. This became evident in the rhetoric of the Serb Cultural Club, founded in the late 1930s, where 287

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Slobodan Jovanović and other Serb intellectuals coalesced around the banner “Jako srpstvo –​jaka Jugoslavija” (Strong Serbdom –​Strong Yugoslavia). In addition, both Croats and Serbs during the final years of interwar Yugoslavia turned increasingly strident in their rhetoric, a development that was worryingly accompanied on both sides by the formation of paramilitary party organizations. Hence, even those who had embraced integral Yugoslavism left the way open to alternative and increasingly aggressive and exclusivist ideologies after the death of Aleksandar. The Second World War would unleash these ideologies on a disastrous rampage.

Selected Readings Calic, Marie-​Janine. A History of Yugoslavia. Transl. Dona Geyer. West Lafayette, Ind., 2019. Djokić, Dejan. Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar Yugoslavia. London, 2007. Janićijević, Miloslav. Stvaralačka inteligencija međuratne Yugoslavije. Belgrade, 1984. Jelavich, Charles. “Textbooks and South Slav Nationalism in the Interwar Era.” In Allgemeinbildung als Modernisierungsfaktor, eds. Norbert Reiter and Holm Sundhaussen. Wiesbaden, 1994, 127–​42. Lampe, John R., ed. “Belgrade, Serbia and the First Yugoslavia, Connections and Contradictions,” East Central Europe 42, no. 1 (2015). Nielsen, Christian Axboe. Making Yugoslavs: Identity in King Aleksander’s Yugoslavia. Toronto,  2014. Stojkov, Todor. Opozicija u vreme šestojanuarske diktature, 1929–​1935. Belgrade, 1969. Wachtel, Andrew Baruch. Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation. Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia. Stanford, Calif., 1998.

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Economies and societies, 1878–​1939

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OVERVIEW Challenges of change. Economic and population growth, social and cultural transformations up to World War II Ulf Brunnbauer

In the 1930s, life during winter in a Bulgarian village appeared to have remained unchanged since time immemorial. This is how the American ethnologist Irwin Sanders described it: One ordinary day followed another. Every morning the water buffalo had to be groomed until they shone; the oxen had to be cleaned after the night in the dirty stall; these, as well as the sheep, had to be fed. […] At noon they [the men] plodded home to a lunch of beans, looked after the cattle once more, and gave commands to their womenfolk. The rest of the day was spent at thinking and talking, interspersed with long, easy silences. […] Slow motion was characteristic of Dragalevtsy life in general, but especially of the bodily movements of the people. Yet, the notion that nothing had changed during half a century of existence of the Bulgarian modern state would be misleading. Sanders’ book includes also a chapter on “The National State as Intruder and Reformer” indicating a crucial force of social change also in the countryside: the state and its government. In Bulgaria but also elsewhere, many villages were provided with a school, with some rudimentary public infrastructure and peasant cooperatives; the number of village folk who could read and write grew; men were recruited into the army; in the village tavern, men did not only drank some form of liquor but also could read –​or have read to them –​the newspaper. Even if the technology of farming seemed frozen in time, the circuits of information and exchange expanded, and fundamental structures of social life underwent change. Since the late nineteenth century, the region had become increasingly incorporated into the global economy. These transformations were neither uniform nor unidirectional; framing them as “modernization” would impose too much teleology on what were complex and ambivalent, and also politically contested processes. But social and cultural life did change, not only in the cities –​as described in the chapter by Mary Neuburger, who compares two Bulgarian cities and their changing cultural and social outlook. Also the countryside was transformed, though with large differences between the different areas of the region. Change was evident, for example, in 291

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the rapid decline of the traditional multi-​family households that were typical in the western parts of Southeastern Europe (central Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and the Albanian lands). Contemporaneous sociologists, such asVera Erlich inYugoslavia, described how large households (so-​called zadgrua) split up and gave way to nuclear families. Sons began to leave their parental home upon marriage, whereas previously they would stay in their father’s household. Women continued to occupy a subordinate position in the family but their situation began to improve with the decline of these large, extremely patriarchal households (in Kosovo, remnants of them survived until recently). Some family related things, though, did not change:  marriage, for example, remained universal, that is, most people married at some point in life, and people often married at a young age.

Rural transformations Another continuity was the fact that making a living from farming remained the overwhelming experience for most Southeast Europeans until after World War II. The proportion of the rural population in the total population did not decline significantly from the late nineteenth century until 1941. On the eve of World War II, more than three fourths of the population of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Romania still lived in villages, in Albania even more than 90 percent; only Greece had reached a higher level of urbanization (more than a third of the population lived in towns). Yet, the conditions of farming life had changed substantially in that period. A major change was the decline of market-​oriented animal husbandry, which had been the dominant form of commercial land-​use during Ottoman times. Very often, it was organized in mobile forms –​ transhumance, (semi-​) nomadism –​in which large flocks of cattle (mainly sheep) were moved over substantial distances. Sheep provided milk and meat, and wool for the burgeoning late Ottoman cloth industry. The drawing of new borders after the Congress of Berlin as well as the conversion of pasture land into farmland and the privatization of the commons undermined the economic and ecological basis of large-​scale animal husbandry. From the mid-​nineteenth century until the interwar period the Balkans were turned from a land of pastoralists into one of smallholders. Agriculture, especially grain production, became the predominant mode of land-​use. Only in Serbia, animals (pigs) remained the main product of commercial farming, exported to Austria-​ Hungary until the tariff war (1906–​11). While much of agriculture was extensive and subsistence oriented, there was production for regional and international markets as well. Romania became a major grain exporter thanks to the ruthless exploitation of share-​croppers (in 1910, it was the world’s fourth largest exporter of grain in value terms); Bulgaria exported wheat as well, here based on a smallholder economy. Greece had relied on exporting raisins until overproduction forced the price down in the face of new French and Russian tariffs in the 1890s. In the interwar period, tobacco became the single most important export for Bulgaria and Greece. Macedonia was a major producer of cotton and rice until the disruption of the Balkan Wars; in the interwar period, it became well known for poppy seeds. A major beneficiary of increased trade in gains and oil between the Black Sea, the Mediterranean and America was Greece, which had built a successful merchant fleet, based on the islands. Stemming from eighteenth-​ century privateers, pirates, and intermediaries, Greek ship-​owners grew into a potent and internationally recognized force. In the 1930s, they employed about 19,000 seamen, and the Greek shipping fleet ranked ninth among all merchant fleets worldwide The rural transformation was greatly strengthened by wide-​ranging agrarian reforms immediately after World War I, which the governments also conceived as an antidote to revolutionary stirrings in the countryside. In Romania the government expropriated more than 292

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12 percent of usable land mainly large landholdings, in Yugoslavia more than 8 percent. The land was redistributed among medium and small-​scale farmers and the landless, thus upending entrenched patterns of unequal landholding. In Romania this was particularly urgent:  as recently as 1907, the country had experienced a huge peasant uprising, in which exploited share-​croppers rebelled against landlords and their hated intermediaries. At that time almost half of the land belonged to large landowners (boyars). After the war, Romania’s landholding pattern became more similar to the one in Bulgaria, “old” Greece, and the “old” Kingdom of Serbia, that is, a predominance of small and dwarf holdings. In 1941, almost 60 percent of farms had a maximum of 10 hectares of land. In Yugoslavia, 68 percent of farmers owned only up to 5 hectares of land in 1931, a similar share to Bulgaria (63 percent in 1934). In Bulgaria, the land reform was also less dramatic because there had not been many big landholdings to speak of. In Albania, the government refrained from touching the inherited pattern of dominant estates because its existence depended on the precarious goodwill of their owners. The land reforms constituted a huge intervention of the state in the social fabric; new laws on property and its transfer would permanently embolden the power of the state over the countryside. The reforms were also an exercise in nation building: much land was taken from landholders who belonged to newly constituted minorities, such as Germans and Hungarians in newly acquired Transylvania in Romania and the Yugoslav Vojvodina, or Muslim owners in Bosnia and so-​called “South Serbia” in Yugoslavia and in the territories acquired by Greece after 1881 (Thessaly, Macedonia). The Serb dominated Yugoslav government resettled thousands of South Slavic families from depressed areas of the country in these more fertile regions. However, the redistribution of land was not matched by a large-​scale investment in the modernization of agriculture. Interwar efforts to make farming more efficient, such as by providing farmers with credit, introducing new varieties and using artificial fertilizers, remained limited. Farm productivity did not significantly increase after the end of Ottoman rule; in some cases it even declined. Two exceptions were Slovenia and Bulgaria, where credit and other agricultural cooperatives had been well established before World War I and continued afterwards. In Bulgaria, as described in John Lampe’s chapter, the region’s first and largest Agricultural Bank (BZB) provided credit to the cooperative network in the last prewar decade and again through the interwar decades even after Stamboliiski’s Agrarian government had been overthrown in 1923. Another exception to this rule –​dictated not by a government strategy but by e­ xpedience –​ was the major investment in farming in Greece after World War I, when new land was claimed for many of the almost 1.5  million refugees that came from Turkey as result of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). Many of them were settled in Macedonia, Thessaly, and Western Thrace, regions where previously large estates had dominated and where much land could not be farmed because of the spread of malaria. Then, the land was drained and reclaimed into farmland, with much financial and technical support from the League of Nations. Most of the time, though, national governments neglected agriculture as a result of peasant exclusion from political life (only twice did the demographic peasant majority translate into rule by a peasant party, in Bulgaria as noted above until 1923 and in Romania from 1928 to 1930). One reason for an emerging agrarian crisis in the interwar period, despite a more equitable landownership pattern, was the shrinking amounts of arable land per capita. By around 1900 –​with significant regional differences –​Southeastern Europe faced a sharp demographic transition from declining mortality while birth rates stayed high, as noted in the chapter by Siegfried Gruber. For the last prewar decades, population growth was exceptionally high. By 1900, the Balkan countries displayed the highest birth rates in all of Europe at around 40 live births per 1,000 population (England:  27). Population growth was between 1  percent and 1.5 percent per year well into the 1930s. The rapid growth of the population led to increasing 293

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pressure on land: scarcity of land became a major issue. Neither could usable land be much expanded (such as until the late nineteenth century), nor did the intensity of labor increase by much, and not enough new economic opportunities outside of farming were created. In the mid-​1930s, average farm size in Bulgaria and Romania was below 6 hectares –​in Denmark, as an example of intensive, commercialized farming based on medium sized and small farms, it was more like 15.5. In 1930s Yugoslavia, more than 110 persons subsisted on 100 hectares of land –​in Germany it was 52. Yugoslavia was said to have the highest population density as a ratio of people to arable land in all of Europe.The practice of equitable heritage among all sons, common in most of the region, aggravated the problem of land division, so that many farms became too small to sustain a family. In the contemporary literature, “overpopulation” became an important theme in the 1920s and 1930s. More people lived in the countryside and depended on farming than could be productively employed in agriculture. The easy availability of labor in the countryside acted as another brake on technological modernization because it eased the pressure to mechanize. A major difference from earlier times was that overseas emigration, the traditional solution to excess rural labor was no longer a possibility. In the 1880s and 1890s, large areas of Southeastern Europe began to experience massive emigration to the Americas, which lasted until the outbreak of World War I, as detailed in Ulf Brunnbauer’s chapter. One trigger was the phylloxera epidemic that had an impact on wine production since many vineyards were destroyed. Vines were among the few cash crops peasant families had at their disposal (in Greece mainly for the production of raisins). Emigrants came especially from areas where land had become increasingly scarce, also because it was so unevenly distributed. First affected were the coastal areas down from the hinterland of Trieste to the Greek islands and Macedonia, and later increasingly also the inland parts of the region; many hundreds of thousands of people left for America in order to work there, some also going to South Africa or Australia. Only where grain-​g rowing on peasant smallholdings prevailed, and the state curtailed the freedom to leave, as in Bulgaria and Serbia, emigration was very limited. They were attracted by higher wages in the North and South America or the hope of obtaining land. Most of these emigrants went into factories or mines in the United States, where major cities such as Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and New York gained substantial South Slavic and Greek communities. In the United States, the immigrants from Southeastern Europe formed part of what was called the “new immigration.” Balkan migrants stood out in comparison to other Europeans by their high frequency of return. Depending on their origins, half or even more of them eventually returned from the United States. After the war, this pattern was disrupted. Strict US restrictions on immigration from Eastern and Southeastern Europe in the early 1920s ultimately closed down this route (other overseas destinations followed with similar restrictions). Some emigration was redirected to European destinations, especially France and Belgium but many were forced to return in the Great Depression of the 1930s. In the most underdeveloped regions, emigration became crucial for the local economy. Emigrants sent savings back home that helped their families to improve their living standards in a money economy. Emily Greene Balch, who studied the migration conditions among the South Slavs, attentively noted in 1910: This influx of money naturally makes itself felt. Tile replaces thatch, taxes and debts are paid, field is added to field, better tools and more cattle are bought, phylloxera-​ smitten vineyards are replaced with immune vine stocks, churches are built and adorned. 294

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Reports from Macedonia, another region of heavy emigration, spoke of land prices rising thanks to the inflow of migrant remittances. For interwar Yugoslavia and Greece, migrant remittances were a major source of foreign income, helping to balance negative trade accounts. Not all emigrants went so far. Until the early twentieth century, and in some places beyond that, there was extensive seasonal migration. From many a mountain village, a substantial part of the male population left during the winter in order to work as artisans or seasonal construction workers in the adjacent lowlands or even far-​away places, such as Greek islands. Whole villages specialized in certain trades, such as stonemasonry, carpentry, cloth making, or pottery. In the summer, these seasonal migrants came back to their mountain villages and helped to bring the modest harvest in. Another important pattern was seasonal migration of land-​poor men and women from Bulgaria, Serbia, and eastern Croatia to the estates in Romania or Hungary, where they toiled as farmhands during harvest season. Sometimes seasonal migrants offered highly specialized skills and ultimately became settled:  Bulgarian gardeners from the Balkan Mountains first went to places like Constantinople temporarily before discovering a market for their skills in Budapest and Vienna. In the Ottoman capital, Montenegrins were eagerly employed as watchmen because of their stature and their prowess to use arms.

Urbanization Once options for seasonal migration declined, some with skilled trades moved to towns and cities. Still, the region’s population would remain predominantly rural until World War II as noted in Siegfried Gruber’s chapter. By 1900, more than 80 percent of Serbia’s, Bulgaria’s, and Romania’s population lived in villages and these proportions would hardly change by 1938. A number of cities, especially the political capitals, nonetheless experienced substantial growth. Athens had a population of 65,000 in 1879, 50 years –​and a refugee wave –​later it approached half a million. Bucharest reached almost 1 million inhabitants by the late 1930s. Cities in the former Ottoman territories also radically altered their outlook as most of their Ottoman architectural heritage was destroyed and replaced by “modern” buildings. The city scape had to symbolize the achievements of the new nation state and its ethnic and religious identity. Two mosques did survive in Sofia and one in Belgrade, where the remaining Turkish population had been expelled in 1862. Capital city centers acquired representative public and apartment buildings and paved streets, plus private mansions in Bucharest. No public funds were invested in the outskirts, as noted below. Mary Neuburger, in her chapter on the parallel social lives of Sofia and Plovdiv, highlights the specific attention paid by governments and urban planners to capital cities. In the Habsburg areas as well, provincial capitals such as Ljubljana and Zagreb (then Laibach and Agram) grew along the same lines. Fortifications and city walls were demolished and new urban centers on the lines of Habsburg urban planning were built (central train stations were invariably painted in the representative Schönbrunn yellow). Cities started to acquire modern transportation, such as tramways (Timişoara claims to have been one of the first towns in Europe with a horse-​drawn tramway, introduced as early as 1869). Trieste and Rijeka were transformed into the major ports of Austria and Hungary, respectively, with regular services to America. Trieste and Rijeka (Fiume) were lost to Italy for interwar Yugoslavia and could not replace their Habsburg connections. Elsewhere, Salonica, now Thessaloniki in Greece developed in parallel to Athens, and Cluj, now in Romania expanded in the same fashion as Bucharest.The same parallels could now be drawn in the Yugoslav Kingdom between Belgrade and Zagreb. For Bulgaria, Mary Neuburger compares the old Ottoman commercial center of Plovdiv with the new, less ethnically mixed capital of Sofia. 295

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Urban centers were the place where new life styles developed first, thanks to quickly intensifying travel and information flows made possible by new infrastructure (the telegraph and the railway). The change was most visible in former Ottoman territory, where Oriental dress was replaced by European dress. The capital cities acquired national theaters (which sometimes struggled to find enough “national” dramas to fill their programs), symphony orchestras, opera houses, and similar features of European high culture –​while at the same time, folk cultural forms rooted in Ottoman and traditional patterns continued to be popular. In Greece, for example, the music brought by the Anatolian refugees (rembetiko), while initially being confined to marginal places, ultimately became a national symbol. In the interwar period, cinemas became increasingly widespread as well. Romania had 400 in 1931, Yugoslavia 360, Bulgaria 138, and Greece 123. The governments also invested heavily in national institutions of higher learning and research: by 1920, all capital cities bar Tirana, but also Zagreb in Croatia hosted a university, an academy of sciences, and a national library. The local professional and political elite was increasingly home-​trained, whereas the first generation of them had often studied abroad. In the urban centers secondary education became more widespread, while rural schooling continued to suffer from neglect: illiteracy rates remained high, concentrated in the countryside and among women. Muslims also had much higher rates of illiteracy as a result of official neglect and of the devaluation of their traditional Ottoman script. In the early twentieth century, between 70 and 80 percent of the population could not read and write. Only in Greece was the proportion lower (60 percent). In interwar Yugoslavia, illiteracy rates ranged between under 10 percent in Slovenia and more than 80 percent in Macedonia. In general, the divergence between life styles in larger cities and in the countryside was stark and growing. Urban based and self-​serving as it was, the political elite channeled most public investment into the cities and the army and did little to ameliorate the lives of the peasant majority. The new urban middle classes scorned peasant dress and ways. Although lauding peasants as the embodiment of their national virtue, they did not want to live side by side with them. Only where a legacy of strong peasant activism and an extended network of rural cooperatives existed –​especially in Bulgaria –​did governments pay more attention. Yet, as the opening vignette showed, even in a place close to the capital city, rural life lacked many of the amenities of modernity, such as sanitation, modern health care, and good education. This was even truer in the many isolated mountain areas of the Balkans. Descriptions of villages in the Albanian and Montenegrin highlands from the 1930s tell of a life of utter hardship where people died early, often of curable disease or malnutrition. Yet, life was also hard for those inhabiting the outskirts of cities, where urban and village life blended into each other. Incoming settlers from the villages often lived in primitive and crammed housing on unpaved streets. Many workers actually did not even relocate but maintained a family in the village. Similar to Russia and the early Soviet Union, the peasant worker was a standard feature of social organization in Southeastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century: they worked in factories with little machinery in the agricultural off-​ season, but also engaged in small-​scale farming. Peasant-​workers are said to have constituted more than 50 percent of the workforce of larger industrial enterprises in Croatia in the mid-​ 1930s. These workers received low wages, enjoyed little work protection, and were housed in crowded and unhygienic conditions. In larger plants with longer term employment, such as the tobacco factories around Plovdiv in Bulgaria and Salonica in Ottoman Macedonia and then in Greece, exploitation stimulated workers to organize and strike for higher wages. Elsewhere, workers toiled in small establishments and were hard to organize, also because of their ongoing connection with the countryside. 296

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Industrialization Peasant-​workers represented one of the peculiarities of industrialization in the region, which started late. In the post-​Ottoman lands, there was not much industry which could be developed, because proto-​industrial stirrings –​such as cloth production in the Bulgarian lands, cotton in the hinterland of Salonica, silk in Epirus and Thessaly  –​had largely disappeared once these producers lost access to Ottoman consumers and faced increasing competition from much cheaper industrial imports from Europe. The national governments, therefore, took various measures to support industrialization which was seen as crucial for the intended modernization. Jelena Rafajlović and John Lampe, in their chapter on the textile industries as one of the most important manufacturing branches, analyse such measures and their effects from a comparative perspective. Tariff barriers and tax breaks, rebates on transportation costs, government subsidies, and provision with state land were thought to nourish domestic industry. Romania developed the most comprehensive system of such support before World War I, enacting a regime of high tariffs and passing an industry-​friendly commercial code as early as 1886. Industry’s share in the economy stayed much lower than in Western and Central Europe, despite a couple of mini-​spurts and high aggregate growth rates. Southeastern Europe did not experience an industrial revolution before World War II. The economies faced typical problems of “latecomers:”  insufficient domestic markets, competition by foreign incumbents, lack of investment capital, underdeveloped banking, high interest rates, shortage of skilled labor and poor infrastructure. These problems were aggravated by misfortune, such as the coincidence of native development efforts and international recession. In view of the dearth of private capital and the scope of the challenge, the state played a crucial role in mobilizing investments.Yet, even state support could not bring about full-​scale import substitution. The redrawing of borders, the dissolution of empire, the Balkans Wars and World War I, and their dramatic consequences acted as further exogenous impediments to industrial growth. The shipyard and arsenal in the Austrian town of Pula on the Adriatic is a case in point: while it employed up to 8,000 people until 1918 producing large ships, it was reduced to modest repair works with a few hundred workers under Italian rule after 1918. In the early 1930s, manufacturing employed between 9 and 16 percent of the working age population, and much less in Albania where industry contributed less than a quarter to economic output. Pre-​industrial and industrial patterns of employment existed side by side; the shift from the former to the latter was slow and regionally diverse. One reason for that was the limited adoption capacity of industrial enterprises, which often were small and did not offer long-​term, stable employment opportunities.The average Bulgarian firm employed less than 40 people at around 1910. In Yugoslavia, almost half of all industrial enterprises in the 1920s were in the food industry employing around 40 people on average. Many of these establishments throughout the region concentrated on the processing of farming products. In general, consumer goods industries were predominant, mainly in foodstuff and in some regions also in textiles. In Greece, textiles constituted the largest industrial sector in the 1920s. In the Yugoslav Kingdom, according to the chapter by Rafajlović and Lampe, commercial clothing factories in Croatia and Slovenia grew with investments from Vienna and Budapest before World War I and continued in the interwar years to compete with state-​supported-​firms from Belgrade. Another rapidly expanding sector, more closely tied to the availability of local raw material and demand, was a series of breweries. They were among the oldest industrial enterprises in region. Even the Ottoman pasha attended the opening of the Sarajevo Brewery in 1864. Breweries, a fast-​growing fish processing industry along the eastern Adriatic coast, and other food processing industries were often established with capital from Vienna, Prague, or Budapest. 297

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A similar story is represented by the timber industry in Bosnia, which developed quickly under Austro-​Hungarian rule and continued with its concession from Belgrade to Bosnian Muslim management in the interwar period. In some areas, where good infrastructure came together with the availability of raw materials, and with enough capital, pockets of heavy, capital goods industries developed. Often, the state gave the initial impulse, for example in connection with military demands, or even owned these enterprises, especially mining.The Romanian town of Reşiţa, for example, became a major producer of steel and locomotives in the interwar period building on an earlier Austrian state firm and the local mining of iron ore going back to the eighteenth century. Since the late nineteenth century, Romania hosted a large oil sector thanks to massive investment by German banks. It developed rapidly in the interwar period, overtaking grain as the major export (and attracting strong interest from Nazi Germany). Apart from the availability of raw materials, the industrial promotion and protective tariffs of the ruling Liberal Party in the 1920s played an important role in promoting domestic rather than foreign investment. During the 1930s, governments in the region intensified their protectionist policies resulting in an industrial boom in the second half of the decade. They had learned from the Great Depression that the terms of trade changed in favor of industrial goods from to the disadvantage of agriculture. By the late 1930s, for Bulgaria in particular farm prices also rose thanks to increasing exports to Germany. German imports came under favorable exchange rates from the sort of bilateral clearing agreements that would characterize their experience with Soviet trade after World War II. As Nazi Germany became the largest trade partner for the region, only Greece with its British connections and Romania with oil in high demand in world markets could avoid German clearing agreements until 1939. A major factor in long-​term social and economic change was the expansion of modern infrastructure. Its uneven development across the region helps to explain the striking regional disparities. The railway as the most visible and very consequential facet of modern infrastructure is a case in point: while travel from Vienna to Constantinople became much easier, and major ports such as Trieste, Salonica, Galaţi, and Varna were well connected to the European railway network, there were also many areas untouched such as all of Albania. In the Habsburg territories, important railway links were established already in the 1850s and 1860s and grew into a dense local network by the early twentieth century. In the Ottoman territories, the network remained much thinner, yet its successor states, except Albania, made great efforts to expand it. Bulgaria expanded its network from some 600 kilometers at the time of gaining autonomy in 1878 to more than 3,000 kilometers by 1930. Railways marked a revolution in mobility: traffic on the Salonica-​Constantinople Line in Macedonia, for example, increased fourfold from 190,000 passengers in 1900 to more than 400,000 in 1910. Railways, the telegraph, expanded postal services, and improved roads reduced the costs of transportation and greatly facilitated the inclusion of the region in global circuits of goods, people, and information. The Greek merchant fleet and improved port facilities also need to be mentioned here. By the 1930s, Southeastern Europe was still an economic periphery, but an increasingly well connected one.

The balance sheet On the eve of World War II, Southeastern Europe’s societies had therefore changed considerably since 1878. For many observers, it was the classic question, “Is the glass half full, or half empty?” The income gap compared with Western Europe had not narrowed and many

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people lived in poverty, enjoying little support from the state. The nascent welfare state was limited to state employees and those few workers in “normal” employment who began to enjoy basic forms of social insurance in the interwar period. The countryside remained especially neglected, a result of its deliberate political marginalization. Peasant debt remained a huge problem, despite the beginning of provision of cheap credit through state banks or cooperatives. There were also huge regional discrepancies in industrial development within each country. In the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, for example, industries remained concentrated in the north (Slovenia, Croatia, Vojvodina), where farm practice was more advanced, and around Belgrade. Modernization made little progress in the poorer south and into the interior of Croatia and Bosnia-​Herzegovina. Living conditions of workers in the cities had hardly improved. In the early 1930s, the average worker’s family in Belgrade lived in 1.3 rooms. Still, many things had improved. Agricultural productivity advanced with greater diversification of crops.Textile and food industries became more competitive, and mining more profitable. With respect to social relations, traditional restrictions were increasingly questioned, especially in urban milieus. Urban but increasingly also rural women outside of the centers of patriarchy –​ the tribal areas in the western Balkans –​enjoyed more choice, evident in their increasing wage employment. In Bulgaria, more than 30  percent of workers were female in the early 1940s. General education progressed, if slowly in the countryside, and important measures to improve hygiene were carried out. People lived longer than before: a person born in Greece in the 1880s had an average life expectancy of 36 years. In the 1930s it was 53 years. Health-​care provision, as patchy as it was, marked another area where actual livelihoods improved, although with striking differences across the region. People populating the north Albanian mountains, for example, were still unlikely to encounter a teacher or doctor during their lifetime. A major obstacle to advancement elsewhere was the forced migrations starting with the Albanians pushed out of Serbia in 1878, and Bosnian Muslims and Turks leaving Bosnia-​ Herzegovina after the Austro-​Hungarian occupation in 1878. Greek departures from Bulgaria started with the anti-​Greek riots in 1906 and culminated in the population exchange of 1919. As detailed in the chapter by Theodora Dragostinova, the border changes of the Balkan Wars and World War I added to the disruption of long-​standing Greek settlement. By the 1920s, the commercial populations of Plovdiv and Serres had lost their multi-​ethnic character. Meanwhile, over 200,000 Slav Macedonians or Bulgarians had fled Vardar and Aegean Macedonia for Sofia or Bulgaria’s Pirin Macedonia. In addition, an estimated 400,000 Turks and Albanians were pushed to move from Bulgaria, Romania, and the Yugoslav Kingdom to the newly established Republic of Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s. Overall, we need to take into account the impact of such hugely disruptive historical events. The Ottoman crises, the Balkan Wars, and World War I left social despair and violence behind them. The massive population displacement interrupted many of the hopeful developments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Governments and societies had to start all over again. Repeated state-​reconstruction also meant that most political energy, and a good part of state expenditure, went into nation building. Governments regularly considered financing irredentist efforts and building strong armies as a better way to gain popular support –​and to keep powerful interest groups happy  –​than putting money into the more mundane task of supporting rural agriculture and its peasant majority. And just when a new impetus to modernization arose from the challenge of the Great Depression in the 1930s, Germany and Italy brought the next devastating war into the region. But as Marius Turda shows in his chapter, fascist social-​engineering was not only enforced from outside: it also built on local eugenic ideas that racialized questions of demography and social relations.

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Selected Readings Byrnes, Robert F., ed. Communal Families in the Balkans: The Zadruga. Essays by Philip E. Mosely and Essays in his Honor. Notre Dame, Ind., 1976. Demeter, Gábor. Agrarian Transformations in Southeastern Europe from the late 18th Century to World War II. Sofia, 2017. Erlich,Vera. Family in Transition. A Study of 300 Yugoslav Villages. Princeton, NJ, 1966. Kaser, Karl, ed. Household and family in the Balkans. Münster, 2012. Koliopoulos, John S. and Thanos M. Vernemis. Greece. The Modern Sequel. From 1821 to the Present. New York, 2002. Lampe, John and Marvin Jackson. Balkan Economic History, 1550–​1950. Bloomington, Ind., 1982. Palairet, Michael. The Balkan Economies, c. 1800–​1914. Evolution Without Development. Cambridge, 1997. Rothenbacher, Franz. The Central and East European Population since 1850. London, 2013. Sanders, Irvin T. Balkan Village. Lexington, Ky., 1949.

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29 DEMOGRAPHIC GROWTH Patterns and problems, 1878–​1939 Siegfried Gruber

Introduction The demographic history of Southeastern Europe remains not as well known as that of other parts of Europe. One reason is that sources for population history and historical demography in this region are unfortunately available in smaller number and often in lower quality. The registration of births, marriages, and deaths was done by religious authorities before the states took over this task. The Catholic Church and Protestant churches introduced this kind of record for their followers in the sixteenth century, while the Orthodox Churches introduced it later, and Islam did not have this practice at all. The registration of current population was done with the help of census taking. Regularly counting the population became a common feature for European states in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Ottoman Empire introduced counting the complete population quite late, because its administration had been interested only in tax-​payers and possible military recruits. The new independent successor states in Southeastern Europe lagged behind Western and Central Europe in establishing an efficient bureaucracy, and census taking was therefore harder to conduct. Serbia was an exception, having an impressive series of censuses already carried out in the nineteenth century. Another obstacle for administrating population counts and procedures was the high rate of illiteracy in the region until the end of the nineteenth century, reducing the reliability of responses from the population to printed questionnaires.

Population figures and structure Population figures for Southeastern Europe still have some uncertainties for the nineteenth century, but by 1900 we can be quite sure about a combined population of about 32  million people for the territory comprising nowadays Albania (AL), Bosnia-​Herzegovina (BH), Bulgaria (BU), Croatia (CR), Greece (GR), Kosovo (KO), Moldova (MO), Montenegro (MN), North Macedonia (NM), Romania (RO), Serbia (SE), and the European part of Turkey (TR) (Table  29.1). After the dissolution of the multinational and multireligious Habsburg and Ottoman Empires two larger countries (Romania and Yugoslavia) and three smaller ones covered the region, containing about one tenth of the total European population.

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Siegfried Gruber Table 29.1  Population figures of Southeastern Europe, 1880–​1930 (in millions)

AL

1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930

0.8 0.8 1.0

BH

BU

CR

GR

KO

1.2 1.5 1.7 1.9 1.9 2.3

2.9 3.2 3.7 4.3 4.8 5.7

2.5 2.9 3.2 3.5 3.4 3.8

1.7 2.2 2.5 2.7 5.0 6.4

0.5 0.4 0.4 0.5

MO

MN

NM

RO

SE

TR

0.8 0.9

8.6 10.0 11.2 12.9 15.5 14.1

1.8 2.2 2.5 2.9 4.3 5.0

4.8 6.3 5.6 5.2 1.5 1.2

0.2 2.0 2.4 2.9

0.3 0.3 0.4

Total SEE

32.0 37.6 38.9 44.2

During the nineteenth century Southeastern Europe was among the most sparsely populated regions within Europe; only northern Scandinavia and parts of Eastern Europe had a lower population density. Nevertheless, there were concerns about rural over-​population, because grain cultivation was generally based on small family farms in the lowlands and large parts of the region were mountainous and therefore suitable only for grazing sheep and goats. In 1900, less than 20 percent of the population lived in urban areas. Greece was an exception where the proportion of the urban population had already reached one third of the population. Only in Scandinavia and Russia was the share of the urban population at a similarly low level in Europe. The urban share increased steadily until World War II, but massive urbanization started only after 1945. The largest city in the region was and still is Istanbul (although it lost its position as capital city of the Turkish republic) and all capital cities grew much faster than any other city in the region. As a rule, there is generally a proportion of about 105 males to 100 females at birth. With increasing age, the proportion of women increases because they have a higher life expectancy in most societies. Until World War I, all countries in Southeastern Europe had a male majority with as much as a 10 percent surplus of men over women. Such a male surplus can be partly explained by worse living conditions for the female population in societies dominated by patriarchal values but also by an under-​enumeration of women (especially young girls) in censuses. After World War I, war deaths lowered the proportion of men in most countries to below 50 percent. Only in Albania, Bosnia-​Herzegovina, Kosovo, and today’s North Macedonia did a male majority persist into the interwar period. The age structure of a population is generally divided into three groups:  children (0–​14 years), the working-​age population (15–​64 years) and the elderly (65+ years). This distribution is of special interest, because the working-​age population is doing most of the productive labor, while the younger and older generations are consuming more than producing. In historical times, this separation was less sharp due to widespread child labor and the elderly staying productive as long as possible. Until 1900, the share of the children within the population was in most countries 40 percent and more, while the elderly generation had a share of less than 5 percent, but in Croatia it was a bit larger. Until World War II, the children’s share dropped to 30–​40 percent, while the elderly population had almost no increase, reflecting an increase in the proportion of the working-​age population. The distribution of the population by religious and ethnic affiliation was of major political interest during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because nation states claimed territories based on such data. Therefore, different figures existed for disputed territories, depending on the source of the data. Within the European part of the Ottoman Empire the proportion of 302

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Muslims increased toward the end of the nineteenth century, because predominantly Christian areas became parts of newly created states emphasizing their Christian character and their Muslim populations emigrated, fled, or were expelled to the remaining territory of the Ottoman Empire. After the Greek-​Turkish war of 1919–​22, a major population exchange was carried out between Greece and Turkey, involving almost 2 million people. Such an exchange caused not only personal tragedies but also a major change in the populations of the areas involved. In Greece, the proportion of Muslims was much reduced and Greeks from Asia Minor were settled in large numbers in northern Greece.The warfare in Southeastern Europe leading to the creation and enlargement of the newly created states were sometimes accompanied by atrocities against the civilian population with Balkan Muslims being the major target. They became minorities in all new states except Albania. The newly established states considered themselves as nation-​states, although most of them had considerable minorities within their borders after World War I. Romania had Hungarians and Germans,Yugoslavia Hungarians, Germans, and Albanians, and Bulgaria Turks. Albania had only small minorities, because the borders of the new state were drawn at its expense, leaving many Albanians outside of the state. After the population exchange with Turkey, Greece still had a Slav Macedonian minority which was pressed to assimilate. Istanbul was until 1900 inhabited by Muslims, Christians, and Jews, with Muslims being about half of the population. This situation changed with the expulsion of the majority of the Christians and a steady immigration of Muslims from Anatolia. Yugoslavia was a special case with its aim of uniting Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes into one South Slav nation. It was renamed the Kingdom Yugoslavia in 1929 to replace the original Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Bosnians, Macedonians, and Montenegrins were not considered separate “tribes” of the imagined tri-​unite nation). Besides these populations living outside the borders of their perceived mother state, two notable minorities existed in Southeastern Europe:  Jews and Roma. Roma were generally of a low social status and not well captured by censuses and other registrations.

Population movements The demographic transition describes the fundamental changes in fertility and mortality during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This was a transition from high and fluctuating to low and relatively stable fertility and mortality rates. In most countries mortality rates declined first, while fertility rates stayed for some time at high levels. During this period population increases were therefore the highest. After fertility rates declined, an equilibrium of fertility and mortality would be reached at relatively low levels. A large research project about the demographic transition, the European Fertility Project, included limited data about Southeastern Europe. There were major differences within European regions in the level of fertility before the demographic transition and in the dates when it began. Its mainsprings were economic and social modernization (industrialization, urbanization, better education, a higher standard of living, public pension systems), better food and hygiene (including water and sewage systems), improved medical systems, increasing costs of child care (costs of education instead of income from child labor), changing perceptions about gender roles and new family values, and better methods of contraception. Different studies proposed either socio-​economic or cultural changes as more important for the onset of the demographic transition. Raw fertility rates (live births per 1,000 inhabitants) are available for the territories of the Habsburg Monarchy from 1828 onward and show major variations within them and with the independent Balkan states. Around 1900, raw fertility rates converged at a level of about 40 per 1,000 for the territories with available data (Bosnia-​Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Moldova, 303

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Romania, and Serbia), which was already a decrease from peak levels of about 45 per 1,000 in previous decades. Fertility levels continued to decrease for most countries until World War I.  which caused a major drop in fertility in all affected countries. Afterwards, fertility levels bounced back to prewar levels, followed by rapid declines until World War II. In Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, and Serbia fertility levels reached 25 per 1,000, which was almost half of their previous peak levels. In Albania, Bosnia-​Herzegovina, Kosovo, and North Macedonia fertility levels were still 35 per 1,000 and in Moldova, Montenegro, and Romania at 30 per 1,000. In Albania and Kosovo, the fertility decline started only after 1945, the latest in this respect in Europe. Christians generally started to reduce their fertility earlier than Muslims, which led to an increase in the Muslim population and triggered anti-​Muslim polemics among the majority population and political elites; in the late 1960s the communist leadership of Bulgaria, for instance, justified its measures to stimulate birth-​rates among the Bulgarians by its uneasiness about the growing share of the Turkish minority in the country. The proportion of births out of wedlock in Southeastern Europe was historically very low. Women married very early and illegitimate children were strongly discriminated against. In most countries the proportions were at 1 percent or below until World War II. The only exceptions were Croatia and Romania with rates between 5 and 10 percent. The marriage patterns within Europe until World War II were divided by an imaginary line between St. Petersburg and Trieste into a Western and an Eastern variant. West of this line, called the “Hajnal Line” after the historical demographer John Hajnal who published his thesis about marriage patterns in 1965, the “European pattern” was characterized by an older age at marriage and a high proportion of people who never married. East of this line an “Eastern European pattern” existed with lower ages at marriage and almost no-​one remaining unmarried. Hajnal proposed a maximum 26 years for men and 21 years for women as the average age for marriage in this Eastern European pattern. He also argued that non-​European civilizations were more like Eastern Europe and used the term “European pattern” for reasons of brevity instead of Western European pattern. This dividing line was similar to the political dividing line during the Cold War and therefore coincided with non-​demographic distinctions. His terminology was criticized for suggesting a pejorative correlation, designating the population east of this line as not really European. His analysis of ages at marriage was sometimes lost in political controversy over his imaginary line, what it meant beyond demography, and whether a territory was actually to the west or east of it. There are no data covering all Southeastern Europe in the nineteenth century, but available data from its last decades yield average ages of first marriage for women in the range of 18 to 21 years. In 1900 women married on average at 19 years (Serbia) or 20 to 21 years (Croatia, Romania, Bosnia-​Herzegovina, and Bulgaria). There is unfortunately no statistical data available for the Ottoman Empire. Until World War II, these ages at marriage increased slightly by about one year; only in Greece did women marry two years later. The data from the Albanian census of 1918 allows us to get a more nuanced picture of ages at marriage:  women living in cities married later than women in the countryside (19 instead of 18 years), which is also confirmed by other studies. Literacy had an even stronger effect with a delay in marriage of about three years.Wives of men in agriculture married very young and wives of men employed in the white-​collar sector married comparatively late. The effect of religion on marriage ages in Albania was also evident: Muslims married younger than Catholics and especially Orthodox Christians; in Bulgaria Muslims also married earlier than Orthodox Christians. Ages at marriage for men were slightly higher at 21 to 23 years in Serbia and Wallachia, while in Transylvania men married even later. We know more details about Albania from the census of 1918, where the overall mean age at marriage was almost 27 years. Urban men married on 304

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average four years later than rural men and literate men even five years later than illiterate men. Men in the agricultural sector married youngest (up to 26 years), while men in the sales and services sector at 30 years. Muslim men and Catholic men married at about the same age, while Orthodox men married later.The highest mean ages at marriage for men by far (34 years) could be found in Shkodër, the largest city covered by this census. The differences between regions and cities were more pronounced for men than for women. Husbands were generally older than their wives. In most regions of Southeastern Europe the proportion of couples where the wife was older than her husband was historically lower than 10 percent, very often lower than 5 percent. These shares were among the lowest in Europe. In Albania the age differences between spouses were highest within Southeastern Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. The average age difference was almost ten years and due to the later marriage ages of literate and urban men, even higher for these men. The greatest average age difference (14 years) was in Shkodër, the city with the highest male age at marriage. Larger age differences for urban couples were also reported for cities outside Albania, based on the same difference in marriage ages in cities as compared to the countryside. A second factor distinguishing the western from the eastern half of Europe in terms of marriage patterns was the proportion of never married people at an age of 50 years. Available data for women in Southeastern Europe until 1930 showed proportions below 3 percent. The proportion of never married men was a bit higher, but still much lower than in the western half of Europe. We can therefore conclude that Hajnal’s theory about lower ages at marriage and lower proportions of never married people does hold not only for Bulgaria and Serbia, where he cited their data, but for the overall populations across Southeastern Europe except for men in Albania. Urban men were often an exception to his rule. They married later than he postulated and there was also a high proportion of men who had never married. In Southeastern Europe divorce was quite rare until World War II, also due to high legal constraints. Fewer than 5  percent of all marriages ended in divorce. A  major exception was Turkey with rates at around 10  percent, thanks to a more liberal view on divorce in Islam, especially for men. Most marriages therefore ended with the death of one spouse. Widows and widowers could contract a second marriage. This option was much more common for widowers than for widows, and therefore among the elderly few widowers could be found in relation to many widows. Raw mortality rates measure the proportion of deaths per 1,000 people. Early mortality rates in the twentieth century were sometimes quite low, possibly the result of under-​registration of deaths. Around 1890 mortality rates in Southeastern Europe began their secular decrease from rates fluctuating between 25 and 35 per 1,000. Rates declined to 25 to 30 per 1,000 until the Balkan Wars and World War I, in Bulgaria even to 22 per 1,000. The wars caused temporarily increases in mortality, but the downward trend continued throughout the interwar period, declining to 13 to 19 per 1,000. These were the lowest mortality rates achieved in this region, about half of the rates experienced before the secular decline in mortality some decades ago. The age structure of the population played a role in this reduction too, because the largest reductions happened among the younger age groups who made up a large proportion of the population. A large proportion of elderly people in the population tends to increase raw mortality rates, which could indeed be observed toward the end of the twentieth century. A major contribution to the decline in mortality at the end of the nineteenth century was the decline in infant and child mortality. We have data on infant mortality rates for 1880 to 1914 only for some countries in this region. In Bulgaria and Serbia infant mortality rates were at a level of about 150 per 1,000 live births and in Bosnia-​Herzegovina a bit higher, while in Croatia and Romania rates were much higher between 200 and 250 per 1,000 live births. This 305

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meant that in Croatia still about every fifth to fourth child died before its first birthday.This was among the highest rates within Europe, while Bulgaria and Serbia had medium levels of infant mortality. In 1930 the figures in most countries of Southeastern Europe resembled levels in the Iberian Peninsula or East Central Europe, between 100 and 180 deaths per 1,000 live births. The highest infant mortality was still found in Croatia and Romania and the reduction in infant mortality was slower in Southeastern Europe than Western Europe. Infant mortality rates for children born out of wedlock were generally higher than for those born to married parents. Life expectancy at birth is another good indicator of living conditions in a country, but there are only a few published surveys about life expectancy in Southeastern Europe before World War II. In Greece, life expectancy at birth in 1879 was 36 years for men and 37.5 years for women, while in Serbia around 1900 it was 39 years for men and 37.3 years for women. There are two calculations of life expectancy at birth for Bulgaria, first 40 years for 1899 to 1902 and 42  years 1900 to 1905 (men and women combined). In the interwar period life expectancy at birth rose in Bulgaria to 51 years for men and to 52.5 years for women. There is a life table for Greece in the years 1926 to 1930 reflecting life expectancy at birth of 45 years for men and 47.5 years for women. Life expectancy at birth rose in Greece to 53 years for men and 55.8 years for women by 1940. In Romania, life expectancy at birth in 1932 was lower, at 42 years for men and women combined. In Yugoslavia, life expectancy at birth was 50.1 years for men and 54.2 years for women for the years 1931 to 1933. We can assume that the life expectancy at birth in Greece and Bulgaria was the upper limit for Southeastern Europe during the interwar period. The population increase in Southeastern Europe cannot be fully reconstructed because of the many border changes, including the partitioning of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, and also missing data. We can nevertheless be certain that the population increased significantly, except during the Balkan Wars and World War I. Toward the end of the nineteenth century the fluctuations in the death rates were reduced and they started to decline. The natural population increase went up to rates of 15 to 20 per 1,000. In the interwar period the yearly increase in population was between 5 and 20 per 1,000.The trend was towards lower increases for Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia, and higher increases for Albania. In the remaining countries rates of natural increase were somewhat stable. The demographic development of Southeastern Europe during this period of time can be divided into two phases toward the end of the nineteenth century which cannot be clearly separated. In the first phase, high birth and death rates dominated and still fluctuated yearly. Population increase also fluctuated. Age at marriage, life expectancy, population density, and urbanization were all low. Illegitimate births were almost non-​existent. Toward the end of the century, fluctuations in birth and death rates diminished as they started to decline. The modern demographic transition started as population increased and life expectancy went up, while the marriage patterns remained somewhat stable. The Balkan Wars and World War I caused death, flight, expulsion, and population exchanges for millions of people.Yet the prewar demographic patterns continued through the interwar period. Birth and death rates continued to decline and the population increased. Infant and child mortality declined too, although slower than in other European countries.

Selected Readings Coale, Ansley J. and Susan Cotts Watkins. The Decline of Fertility in Europe. The Revised Proceedings of a Conference on the Princeton European Fertility Project. Princeton, NJ, 1986.

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Demographic patterns, 1878–1939 Faron, Olivier, Jacques Dupâquier, and Georges Siampos. “Les pays balkaniques:  la Grèce, l’Albanie, la Bulgarie, la Roumanie et les états issus de l’ex-​Yougoslavie.” In Histoire des populations de l’Europe, vol. 3: Les temps incertains, 1914‒1998, eds. Jean-​Pierre Bardet and Jacques Dupâquier. Paris, 1999, 591–​631. Hajnal, John. “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective.” In Population in History. Essays in Historical Demography, eds. David Victor Glass and David E. C. Eversley. London, 1965, 101–​43. Rothenbacher, Franz. The Central and East European Population since 1850. London, 2013. Todorova, Maria. “Les Balkans:” In Histoire des populations de l’Europe, vol. 2: La révolution démographique, 1750‒1914, eds. Jean-​Pierre Bardet and Jacques Dupâquier. Paris, 1998, 463–​86.

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30 FINANCING ECONOMIC GROWTH AND FACING FOREIGN DEBT, 1878–​1 939 John R. Lampe

This chapter begins with the region newly divided in 1878 by the Congress of Berlin between five Balkan states and the remaining Ottoman and Habsburg borderlands. In the decades that followed, the economies of both the states and borderlands grew with expanding foreign trade and surpluses primarily from agricultural exports. The destruction and disruptions of the First World War left five independent states covering Southeastern Europe, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.Their economies struggled to recover in the face of reduced export markets and less of the foreign lending that had supported the independent Balkan states before 1914. Although domestic financial institutions helped to fund both the prewar and interwar economies, foreign capital was needed first for railway building and then for state-​building, armies included. The larger share before 1914 came from bond sales by European banks or consortiums for state governments. European lenders typically assured debt service with a claim on the borrowing state’s tax revenues. Under the existing gold standard, repayment was required in currencies whose gold reserves supported an exchange rate equivalent to the French franc. After borrowing during the First World War added to these debts, a new European framework for guaranteeing the convertible repayment forced austerity on the region’s economies until their currencies could meet a new gold exchange standard that included hard currency reserves. As a result, new state loans other than for refugee resettlement became scarce. Instead domestic bank credit and investment supported economic growth in the late 1920s, and a combination of foreign joint-​stock and state investment in the late 1930s.

Founding financial systems and state loans, 1878–​1914 European intervention in Ottoman financial affairs followed from the state’s failure to repay war debts, first from the Crimean War (1853–​6) and then the Russo-​Ottoman War (1877–​8). In 1881, the Porte was obliged to accept a foreign Public Debt Administration. Its largely European members received access to state revenues in order service the foreign debt. This international regime set the controversial precedent repeatedly applied to the Balkan states and their interwar successors. The Habsburg financial system reached further and deeper into its imperial borderlands than its Ottoman counterpart. Yet the Great Banks of Vienna, led by the Creditanstalt, rarely 308

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ventured into investment beyond the Czech lands and the Budapest banks beyond the Vojvodina. In Slovene Carniola, the resident Italian banks had lost their initial advantage in multiple currency exchanges with the Austrian conversion to the gold crown in 1892. The Czech Živnostenska Banka did support the founding of the first Slovene bank in Ljubljana (then Laibach) in 1900. For the rural hinterland, the principal financial institution was instead the set of agricultural societies that soon spread more widely there than anywhere in the future Yugoslav territory. Starting from the Schulze-​Delitsch model of share-​ownership in a profit-​making enterprise, the rival Raiffeisen model soon attracted more members. It offered more loans and a lower interest rate. By 1905, their 224 Slovene cooperatives outnumbered the 137 on the Schulze-​ Delitsch model. In Croatia-​Slavonia, a domestic savings bank had already been founded in 1846. Domestic commercial banking then made a significant advance following a slow start. An initial leader, the Hrvatska Komercijalna Banka, incorporated in Zagreb (then Agram) in 1872 survived the 1873 Vienna crash that took down its few competing institutions. By 1900, new banks began to appear and by 1913, there were 61 joint-​stock banks in operation in Croatia, mostly in Zagreb or Slavonia. In Bosnia-​Herzegovina, occupied in 1878 and annexed in 1908, the Wiener Bankverein assisted in founding an official Landesbank in Sarajevo in 1883. However, powerful opposition to further Austrian bank penetration came from Benjamin Kallay, ruling the joint Austro-​ Hungarian administration as Ban until 1903. He preferred direct state investment, which launched some industrial enterprises and funded urban infrastructure, especially in Sarajevo. Rival claims for a railway line to Vienna or Budapest prevented funding for railway construction. Thirty-​seven small local and Hungarian banks joined the Landesbank by 1911, but together they had barely 10 percent of the bank capital in Croatia-​Slavonia. Among the independent Balkan states, Greece was first to create its own bank of note issue. Founded in 1841 by a returning émigré from the large Greek commercial diaspora, the National Bank of Greece was also a universal bank that would remain the predominant financial institution even after a central bank for note issue opened in 1928. Its own note issue swelled through the 1880s with proceeds from a series of new Anglo-​French railway loans in the 1880s. In 1892, the export earnings needed to sustain the resulting debt service dropped sharply in the face of a new French tariff and revived French wine cultivation. The Greek government defaulted on debt service in 1893. It recovered only with forced loans and hence note issue from the National Bank. After the failed effort to take Crete from the Ottoman Empire in 1897, the government was obliged to convene a European Financial Commission from the six creditor countries. The Commission banned new note issue from the National Bank and received drawing rights on the state monopolies and tobacco taxes to service what was the largest Balkan debt. By 1910, Greece’s government used a recent record of fiscal and monetary stability to win the Commission’s approval for a new issue of gold-​backed currency from the National Bank under the prevailing European standards for reserves and convertibility. Access to the new state loans that its Balkan neighbors had been receiving since 1900 was not resumed. While Greece had a smaller population (2.7 million in 1910) and less arable land (20 percent) than the other Balkan states, Romania had the most people (7  million by 1910)  on land nearly 50  percent arable and well suited to grain cultivation. Grain shipped to Central and increasingly Western Europe led the way in doubling real export value and state budget revenues between 1899 and 1910. Budget surpluses also climbed after 1900. Meanwhile, the exploitation of petroleum from the 1890s brought the region’s one large flow of investment funds from the European Great Banks. The National Bank of Romania had been established in 1880 as a central bank with the sole right of note issue. Opting in 1890 under a government 309

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decision for the gold standard, the National Bank secured its commitment to the lei’s convertibility with no European oversight. Railway projects that led to large European loans began as soon as the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldova united as Romania in 1859. State loans totaling 400 million lei had put 900 kilometers in service by 1879. The lead in trackage over its Balkan neighbors continued to grow, half again Bulgaria’s next largest total by 1910. In the process, the state had borrowed another 1.5 billion lei. Debt service as a burden on state budget revenues took 36  percent through the 1890s but by 1911 declined to 17 percent, well below the 33 percent still being paid by Greece or Serbia’s 27 percent.The bulk of the foreign borrowing, 55 percent, had continued to come from Germany but 30 percent from France, leaving Austria-​Hungary with a small share and little political leverage. Also supporting Romania’s growing monetary base were large deposits in the region’s largest sector of private domestic and foreign banks. Their deposits stayed well ahead of the totals available for Greece and Bulgaria. By 1911, total bank assets amounted to 512 million lei for 144 domestic banks and 295  million for four foreign banks. The lading domestic bank was founded in 1864 by Jacob Marmarosch, who in 1874 was joined by Mariciu Blanc in a limited liability partnership, both young Jewish Romanians with European training and contacts. By 1879, the Banca Marmarosh-​Blanc had assembled the funding for the first of the Romanian railway lines built by a Romanian-​trained engineer. The bank went on to support virtually every industry in Romania with current account credit and shares purchased in the Bucharest stock market, which opened in 1882. As a counterweight to Marmarosch Blanc and four large foreign banks, first the Conservative Party and then the Liberal Party used alternate terms in office to set up their own state banks, rather than relying on the less partisan National Bank. By 1911, their combined assets also included industrial shares and nearly matched the total for the four foreign banks. Joining an urban financial system centered on the capital city was a belated set of cooperative banks to serve the peasant majority.To favor the larger number of peasant smallholders especially from its base of support in Oltenia, the Liberals introduced legislation in 1903 to create local Popular Banks. Favoring middle smallholders, these were Schulze-​Delitsch credit cooperatives requiring members’ investment in return for secured loans, still at high interest rates of 10 percent. Supported by a new Central Cooperative Bank, the number of these Popular Banks swelled to 2,900 by 1912. The Bulgarian and the Serbian central banks began operation in the shadow of a large neighboring economy and its existing currency, respectively the Russian ruble and the Austrian crown. Under authority of the Russian Provisional Government, the new Bulgarian government rather than the new Bulgarian National Bank received monopoly rights for gold and silver coinage in 1880. Banning the overvalued Russian silver ruble in 1887 to establish monetary order, the debt incurred for occupation costs by the Russian army in 1879 would remain through the 1890s. The National Bank finally received the right to issue silver-​backed notes in 1899 and for the gold-​backed notes convertible for foreign debt service in 1906. The Serbian government had started minting its own dinar coinage earlier, but it was not until 1884 that the Privileged National Bank of the Kingdom of Serbia opened. While the government kept veto rights on its decisions, the bank was a private joint-​stock company. The absence of a concerted Austrian effort to become a major shareholder helped the Belgrade merchant opposition to any foreign ownership to prevail. Like the other Balkan states, Serbia’s debt burdens had their origins in railway loans. Starting with an ill-​fated French project in 1881, the Serbian government contracted some 14 foreign loans for railway construction and then public administration that amounted to 355 million 310

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dinars by 1893. Debt service reached one third of state revenues by 1896, when a threatened tariff war with Austria-​Hungary reduced export earnings from its leading trade partner. Already receiving a lower bond rate in 1895 from negotiation with Vienna and Berlin banks, foreign creditors agreed to an extension only in return for the creation of an Independent Monopoly Commission to service debt payments directly from the state monopolies’ income. Unlike the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, the Commission consisted of four members from the Serbian government and only two for its foreign creditors. Only after a new government under the new King Petar Karadjordjević brought in a team of French budgetary advisors in 1903 did Serbia’s access to foreign capital markets reopen. Then French diplomatic support in the 1906–​11 tariff war with Austria-​Hungary generated two large new loans at a high effective rate of 85 percent but with service still tied to tax revenues. For Bulgaria, the cost of its railway construction created less foreign debt but more controversy. Disputes into the 1890s over the Bulgarian share of the Ottoman debt became entangled with rivalry over the route of railway construction across Bulgaria toward Constantinople.The state’s capacity to service the railway debt was hit hard by the prolonged drought of 1897–​1901. Annual budget and trade deficits exceeded 20  percent. The three European loans contracted between 1888 and 1893 had amounted to only 210  million leva, leaving Bulgaria with the lowest foreign debt and highest effective rate received from the loans in the region, 83 percent. The proceeds were largely spent in vain to construct a rail line parallel to the route of the Austrian-​owned Oriental Railway Company (ORC). A final Bulgarian effort to raise a new loan to finish the project or buy the ORC line failed by 1897. As the subsequent drought until 1901 halved grain exports, Bulgarian trade and budget deficits grew. The crisis deepened until a new French loan could be obtained in 1902. Defying the objections of the previous parliament, royal intervention forced its securing by direct French rights to the revenues of the state’s lucrative tobacco monopoly. From this point forward, buoyed by several good harvests and trade surpluses, Bulgaria regained access to the international capital market. There were two more Paris-​backed loans in 1904 and 1907, both requiring rights to stamp and tobacco revenues but doubling the 106 million leva of the 1902 loan. The two loans in 1909 made no such demands, reflecting their political motivations. Russia’s Independence Loan too supported Bulgaria’s 1908 full political separation from Ottoman oversight. Another slightly larger loan followed from the Wiener Bankverein, prompted by the Austrian diplomatic desire to keep Bulgaria free from the French financial connection already established, as we have seen, in Serbia. The largest part of the three French loans went to consolidate the state’s floating debt and to redeem at par the 1888–​9 loans. Military equipment now divided the rest with railway construction. As the National Bank expanded its gold note issue from 1906, its assets continued to dwarf those of 53 small domestic banks. The five foreign banks that appeared from 1905 forward promised to support a number of industrial enterprises but little came of these promises. The French backed but Austrian administered Generalna Banka did support several enterprises, from wood processing to glue and match manufacture. Deepening Bulgaria’s financial structure instead was the region’s pioneer Agricultural Bank. The Bŭlgarska Zemedelska Banka (BZB) opened in 1904; its assets grew rapidly to account for 32 percent of the Bulgarian total by 1911. It supported a comparable rise in the number of cooperative banks, from 24 to 721. Sponsored by the new opposition political party, the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU), almost all were set up on the more accessible Raiffeisen model favored in the Slovene lands, if not in Romania. The BZB provided both secured loans and mortgage loans to the cooperatives at 3 percent. By 1911, the Agricultural and the National Bank combined to form a Central 311

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Cooperative Bank that extended credit to struggling individual cooperatives as well as crop insurance to members. The distinctive feature of the pre-​1914 Serbian financial structure were the operations of domestic joint-​stock commercial banks that flourished in Belgrade after 1900. With some 150 mainly provincial savings banks, their combined assets by 1911 exceeded the per capita totals for Croatia/​Slavonia and Bulgaria, nearly matching Romania. These Belgrade banks played an essential part in the Serbian economy’s surviving and essentially winning the 1906–​11 tariff war with Austria-​Hungary.The sale of Serbian hogs and cattle to the Dual Monarchy had accounted for three quarters of its total exports. Now banned for five years, the successful Serbian resistance first made use of rival Mediterranean markets for their livestock. As the aforementioned French loans funded the purchase of French rather than Austrian arms and artillery, the National Bank and the other domestic Belgrade banks provided credit and direct investment in meatpacking for export to Greece and Germany and in timber and cement for the domestic economy. A dozen Belgrade banks were largely responsible for doubling the fixed investment in Serbian industry from 1906 to 1910. As short-​term credit to industry also rose fourfold, the total paid-​in capital and savings deposits in Serbian banks doubled. The tax revenues designated to service the new French loans also increased enough to cover the debt payments in dinars convertible to francs. The broad commercial capacity and investment initiatives of Serbian domestic banks completes a patchwork of financial structures across the independent Balkan states. Each of them, like the late Ottoman Empire, had met one or another of contemporary standards for a modern European financial system. None could match the banking nexus of the Dual Monarchy centered on Vienna, Prague, and Budapest.Yet taken together, the Croatian and Slovenian financial institutions and those of the independent Balkan states had met them all. By 1910, Greece and the other Balkan states had joined in borrowing a larger amount. Although their service was also tied to domestic tax revenues, they avoided default and kept their currencies convertible to French gold francs. These overvalued rates encouraged foreign investment and imports, while large trade surpluses survived thanks to growing agricultural exports.

The costs of war and interwar financial debt, 1914–​1929 Over the next decade, from the Balkan Wars of 1912–​13 to the First World War and then to postwar conflicts over the borders of the successor states, the region’s financial systems faced unprecedented disruptions. They extended from its own banks and state budgets to the set of 19 European currencies whose exchange could not resume under the prewar framework of the gold standard. Following this disruptive decade, with its inflationary note issue and swollen state budgets, the governments and central banks of the five independent states that replaced the old empires accepted the financial restraints of the new standard, based on central bank reserves in British, French and Italian currencies and US dollars as well as gold. After the victorious Allies had failed to extend any significant postwar aid, they did then prod Southeastern Europe into the stable exchange rates that qualified their currencies for the new gold exchange standard.Yet the promise of renewed access to foreign loans, in return for balanced state budgets and independent central banks to guard against renewed inflation, was not kept. The Bulgarian experience as the only loser opened the way for the earliest Western pressure, led by France, to bring these imbalances under control and reestablish a uniform framework for financial stability. Already in March 1919, the lev had fallen to less than one quarter of its prewar par with the franc. The terms imposed from September under the Neuilly peace treaty accelerated its decline.The treaty demanded 2.25 billion francs worth of reparations from 312

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Bulgaria. It was twice the value of Bulgaria’s national income for 1921. The refusal of the new Agrarian government under Aleksandar Stamboliiski to make the first semi-​annual payment due in January 1921 brought threats of trade sanctions and then of military intervention. In 1923, the League of Nation’s Reparations Commission cut the Bulgarian obligation by three quarters, encouraged by the international monetary conference of European and American representatives at Genoa in 1922. The Governor of the Bank of England, Montague Norman formulated its framework for restoring European financial stability. Independent central banks were to take the lead in supporting the new gold exchange standard, secured by reserves in pounds and francs as well as gold. Convertible national currencies could service existing debts only after austere budgetary policy had reduced postwar inflation. Although Norman could not convene a subsequent conference of central banks, his emphasis on their political independence would inform the Anglo-​French initiatives toward the four economies facing the financial burdens of prewar and wartime debt. The new state of Albania faced other burdens.The various foreign occupations from 1914 to 1918 and the circulation of their currencies also continued into the immediate postwar period until independence was re-​established in 1920. Thereafter, despite the absence of prior foreign debt and the debilitating postwar inflation prevailing elsewhere in the region, the new state could obtain only two small short-​term foreign loans, one from the Albanian diaspora in the United States. Meanwhile, the state budget of 1921 recorded a 14 percent deficit while exports were only 12 percent of imports. This was the uncertain financial situation in 1922 when the League of Nations commissioned a proposal for creating a single national currency for Albania. It gave equal one quarter shares in the new bank’s founding capital to British, French, and Italian interests but left the last quarter to Albania and its offices in Tirana. But the new government of Ahmed Zogu shelved the proposal in 1924. He accepted instead a special relationship with Italy. As a planned prelude to their founding of the National Bank of Albania, a group of Italian banks and Mussolini’s Investment Institute joined to create the SVEA, the Society for the Economic Development of Albania. SVEA provided a loan equivalent to 40  percent of state budget revenues. Shortly thereafter, the National Bank of Albania was founded in Rome with an Italian Chair. Italian capital held 75 percent of the capital, with small shares allotted to Yugoslav, Swiss, and Belgian interests. Its capital account grew along with income from services to Italian enterprises during the rest of the decade to cover deficits from foreign trade that was twice its 1921 value by 1929. The price for this new financial system and its stability was the sacrifice of more economic sovereignty than in any other Southeast European state. Bulgaria sacrificed sovereignty, if less directly in its conditions to meet the new gold exchange standard dictated by the reduction in war reparations.The National Bank of Bulgaria was barred from lending to the state budget as a condition for the reduction in reparations in 1923. The restriction did raise the exchange rate for the lev enough by 1924 to qualify for convertibility under the gold exchange standard. Debt service for the only two foreign loans that might have rewarded this restraint was tied to customs duties, as in the pre-​1914 period. These were the two League loans sponsored by its International Financial Committee, one yielding 2.9 million pounds in 1926 and the second 5 million pounds in 1928. The first offered little of the refugee relief promised when repayment for Treasury bills drawn during the First Balkan War were deducted. In addition, its terms required the National Bank to cease all commercial lending in order to maintain its high reserves. The second loan paid off past state borrowing from the National Bank and the Disconto Gesellschaft loan of 1914. The Bulgarian debt burden by 1928, still including reparations, was not much increased from 21 to 24 percent of the state budget. In the austerity demanded by the new standard, however, 313

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the Bulgarian National Bank had been obliged to keep discount rates and reserve ratios high. Its share of bank loans shrank from 30 percent in 1911 to 10 percent by 1928. Some 13 foreign bank affiliates, most of them newly arrived from Western Europe, took the lead in doubling the share of private bank loans in the Bulgarian total to account for almost one half. Seven of them joined three private Bulgarian banks in providing credit on current account to industrial enterprises. There was however no direct investment or stock purchases. Absent reparations, the burden of prewar and wartime debts nonetheless limited the access to foreign loans also for the three Allied supporters. Like Bulgaria at 3.8 percent, they all established exchange rates at par with the postwar French franc, the Yugoslav Kingdom at 8.9 percent in 1925, and Romania at 3.1 percent and Greece at 6.7 percent in 1927. The National Bank of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes cut its note issue by one third from 1924 to 1926 and settled its war debts with the United States to achieve the highest new rate. Romania was left with the lowest rate. Its postwar inflation was the highest and the decline in exports from lost grain markets and budget revenues the most severe. The Liberal government forced the National Bank to suspend all note issue from 1925 until a good 1927 harvest allowed a settlement of French and US war debts. In achieving convertibility under the gold exchange standard, interest rates stayed high as in the Yugoslav case and the domestic economy contracted. No new Western loans arrived to ease the burden, Budget revenues were boosted by protective tariffs and the domestic indirect taxes on which they continued to rely. At least for the Yugoslav and Romanian economies, a few domestic banks did take advantage of this stability and provided some of the investment capital for industry, if not agriculture. Zagreb’s universal banks moved into stock purchases and long-​term support, as exemplified by their investment in 51 industrial enterprises. Trading in industrial shares predominated in the Zagreb stock exchange, its traffic half again Belgrade’s. In the 1920s, they had no need of the high interest rates taken for discounting from Belgrade’s National Bank of Yugoslavia as the main source of bank credit in Serbia. Romania provided the other success story for entrepreneurial universal banking in the 1920s. Against the cautious lending in the majority of the nine large Bucharest banks dominated by French and Belgian capital, the two major domestic banks, the Liberal-​backed Banca Românesca and the Jewish-​owned Banca Marmarosch Blanc, concentrated on long-​term lending and stock purchases. Their networks of 15–​20 branches across the enlarged interwar state and their direct investment through their industrial institutes made a significant contribution to founding or expanding the manufacturing sector during the first half of the decade.The Banca Româneasca favored timber, petroleum, and metallurgy to build up a domestically owned industrial sector launched by the nationalization of the German-​Austro-​Hungarian Steua Româna, the largest oil producer before 1914, and further promoted by the restriction of foreign ownership in the Mining Law of 1924. The Banca Marmarosch Blanc favored stock purchases and ranged more widely, from cement, sugar refining, flour milling and timber processing to petroleum as well. Both banks and several other investment banks in Bucharest provided 16 percent of the capital for joint-​stock enterprises in 1925. When their share fell to 8 percent by 1929, the state’s own corporation for industrial credit doubled its contribution to 12 percent. With over 1 million refugees pouring in from Anatolia after the 1922 defeat, Greece also received two League of Nations loans for resettlement. The first came quickly in 1924. For the larger second loan, some 9 million pounds, an international Committee of Experts joined the League in pressing the National Bank of Greece to stabilize the drachma at 6.7 percent of prewar par and to agree to the founding of a central bank, As the new Bank of Greece opened with the sole right of note issue in 1928, Greece formally joined the gold exchange standard. The League-​sponsored Stabilization Loan settled British and US war debts and did 314

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nearly complete refugee resettlement. The drachma’s stabilization rate was however 13 percent above its free market rate in 1926, an overvaluation compounded by its link to the famously overvalued British pound. Only a high discount rate from the new Bank of Greece in 1929 could maintain the needed reserves in the face of currency trading against the drachma. It was in these constrained monetary conditions, after pursuing stability under the gold exchange standard for the larger part of the decade, that Greece and the rest of the region confronted the shock of the Great Depression.

Financial retreat and industrial recovery in the 1930s For a set of financial systems facing what had become manageable foreign debt by 1929, the Depression’s sudden drop in agricultural export prices and state revenues threatened their capacity to continue servicing their obligations. Only Albania, with no past debts, was still in no position to resist the growing Italian influence. Its SVEA lending with repayment deferred, the earnings from its local management covered the continuing deficits on current account and in primarily Italian trade.With SVEA loans suspended in 1933, banknotes in circulation fell by one third by 1934. Only with the resumption of SVEA lending in 1936 did the National Bank relax its deflationary policy, soon aided by a new Italian-​financed Agricultural Bank. Elsewhere in the region, the budget and trade deficits from 1930 pushed the other governments off the gold exchange standard by 1932. They were left to service their debts in now devalued currencies. Greece bargained with Britain and the other three with France. For Romania and Yugoslavia, initial French support did not help until state investment in rearmament played comparable roles in their belated recoveries. Compensation for the halving of agricultural export prices also came later from Nazi Germany’s bilateral clearing agreements signed first with Bulgaria and Yugoslavia and then by 1939 with Romania. Thanks to their favorable exchange rates, the German share of their exports rose past one half. Greece still imported enough grain to benefit from the fall in its international price. The Greek departure from the gold exchange standard followed the British departure from gold in 1931. After capital controls failed to halt capital flight, the League of Nations refused a request for a new loan.The Liberal government of EleftheriosVenizelos was forced to abandon the standard in April 1932 and the drachma’s exchange value plummeted by 60 percent. Obligations for foreign debt service more than doubled from the 30 percent of budget revenues demanded in 1931. The European doubts from the initial Greek default in 1898 had returned about ability of the Greek economy to generate enough export and budget revenue to service access to the international capital market.The foreign joint-​stock investment in mining plus domestic rearmament led the late 1930s recovery of the economy to a pre-​crisis annual growth rate of 5 percent. The resulting reduction in trade and budget deficits quieted international concern. Bulgaria’s economic recovery also pushed annual growth rates back to 5 percent for 1937–​8. Its financial system deepened as well with the same doubling of joint-​stock incorporations. Professional qualifications replaced patronage in staffing of both the National Bank and the Finance Ministry. Small industrial sectors grew as substitutes for higher priced imports. Defaulting on full debt service in April 1932, Bulgaria had gained initial relief at the Lausanne conference later that year from reparation payments to Greece and interest on the two League loans.That left the pre-​1914 debts, half of them owed to French bondholders and a government insisting on full payment in convertible currency. Further devaluation would of course have increased the debt burden, but the existing strain threatened outright default in 1934. In the face of the German campaign for bilateral trade with Bulgaria under new clearing agreements, the French bondholders accepted first a 25 percent payment and then 15 percent by 1935. 315

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Romania had received first a Stabilization Loan in 1929 from France, Britain, and the United States to help the new National Peasant government accommodate to the gold exchange standard and encourage foreign direct investment. The larger French Development Loan of 1.3 billion francs in 1931 was intended to reduce the budget deficit and keep the servicing of foreign debt. Compounding the burden of state budget revenues falling with agricultural income were the losses from non-​preforming bank loans or investment in industry and infrastructure from Banca Marmarosch Blanc.With the failure of its main foreign creditor the Creditanstalt in May 1931, the survival of the great Romanian universal bank would have required state intervention. Whatever role its Jewish ownership played, the rival and Liberal-​encouraged Banca Româneasca refused to join in providing support for more than the shadow existence that also allowed for the Creditanstalt to continue. Commercial bank assets dropped by one third by 1933, the region’s sharpest decline. The drop in West European bank and industrial capital also seen in Bulgaria did not open a larger share for new investment from Nazi Germany. Berlin’s credit to the state’s iron mining enterprise Rumuna Ferrostaal served only to liquidate the German clearing debt for grain and oil imports. German investment in Romanian industry was still less than 2 percent in 1938 despite annual economic growth of 6 percent since 1936. Meanwhile, the National Bank increased its note issue by one half between 1935 and 1938 reflecting a surge in state subsidies to a metallurgical sector expanding for rearmament and Anglo-​French stock purchases for a recovering oil market. The same may be said for Yugoslavia, where the belated boom in industrial production, growing 10  percent annually, came only in 1936–​8. Metallurgy primarily in Serbia and Bosnia led the way boosted by state subsidies for rearmament. Again, despite the Krupp steel works in Zenica, German investment rose only to 11 percent in 1939 form of a foreign total dominated by British and French non-​ferrous mining after the German absorption of and Czech and Austrian interests in cement, sugar, and electricity. The former grew more rapidly in these last prewar years than the latter, which in any case passed into German hands by 1939. The larger manufacturers and banks in Croatia and Slovenia suffered from the collapse of the Austrian Creditanstalt. The large universal banks of Zagreb that were the center of private finance in Yugoslavia lost 10 percent of their deposits. Their assets fell even further as the Depression made industrial loans non-​performing and investments unprofitable. The largest Zagreb banks avoided bankruptcy only by drawing on their “iron reserves,” with the number of banks in Croatia plummeting from 121 in 1930 to 21 by 1936. The survivors benefited from the further devaluation of the dinar by 20 percent in 1935 and the reestablishment of a stable exchange rate. The greater stimulus, however, came from the decision of the Agricultural Bank to write off half of existing peasant debts and significantly delay the repayment of the rest. Now the state financial sector, with university-​educated, professional staffing in the Finance Ministry and the National Bank, became the major source for new credit along with the Agricultural Bank. The Belgrade stock market also revived with trade in French and English mining shares and the state grain trading monopoly PRIZAD that reversed Zagreb’s previously noted predominance from the 1920s. The National Bank continued to favor Serbia and the Vojvodina as it had in the 1920s when the private Zagreb and Ljubljana banks had no need of it. Croatian resentment of this Serbian advantage was a precedent for postwar Yugoslavia. The same rise in the state’s share in industrial capital as in Bulgaria and Romania, each to 15 percent, was a broader precedent for the post-​1945 Communist regimes.

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Conclusion With the Great Depression, private bank funding retreated and some of them failed.The advance of belatedly founded agricultural banks and the survival of active stock markets provided some financial deepening to aid the limited recovery of the later 1930s. As European monetary stability disintegrated into competitive devaluations away from the gold exchange standard, Southeastern Europe combined its devaluations with a turn to the Central European clearing agreements for trade outside a standard exchange rate. Long infamous as instruments of Nazi economic penetration, significant German investment did not in fact follow. Domestic military or European mining investment instead provided support for limited industrial recovery. State leverage or direct control of central banks and the agricultural or new savings banks also grew as private commercial or universal banks retreated. The region stood little chance of returning to an international monetary standard and a leading role for private, bank-​led investment before the Second World War swept away its financial systems. Yet, their considerable efforts to meet European standards from 1878 forward had created a modern set of financial institutions, despite what became a difficult experience with foreign debt.

Selected Readings Cameron, Rondo, ed. Financing Industrialization, vol. II. Aldershot, 1992. Cotrell, Philip. L, ed. Rebuilding the Financial System in Central and Eastern Europe, 1918–​1994. Aldershot,  1997. Grenzbach, William S. Germany’s Informal Empire in East Central Europe. German Economic Policy toward Yugoslavia and Romania, 1933–​1939. Stuttgart, 1988. Kostis, Kostas P., ed. Modern Banking in the Balkans and West-​European Capital in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Aldershot, 2000. Mazower, Mark. Greece and the Interwar Economic Crisis. Oxford, 1992. Morys, Matthias. “Financial Supervision to Fight Fiscal Dominance? The Gold Standard in Greece and South-​ East Europe between Economic and Political Objectives and Fiscal Reality, 1841–​ 1939,” Discussion Papers in Economics. York, 2016www.ehs.org.uk/​dotAsset/​20aaa529-​7bc4-​4332-​a20b-​ fe1ff0d1e739.pdf. Nadyalkov, Oleg and Lyudmila Dimova. The Bulgarian National Bank and its Role in Bulgarian Economic Development, 1879–​2009. Sofia, 2009. Pamuk, Şevket. A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire. Cambridge, 2000. Roselli, Alexandro. Italy and Albania. Financial relations in the Fascist Period. London, 2006. Wynne, William H. State Insolvency and Foreign Bondholders, vol II. New Haven, Conn., 1951.

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31 MODERN MANUFACTURE, STATE SUPPORT, AND FOREIGN INVESTMENT Comparing Balkan textile industries, 1878–​1939 Jelena Rafajlović and John R. Lampe

By 1914, the spread of modern manufacturing across the independent Balkan states and the Austro-​Hungarian borderlands was too limited to speak of “sustainable” development. Small industrial sectors had nonetheless appeared across the region. During the interwar period, machine-​powered manufacturing advanced more quickly than foreign trade. Starting from a low base, its level fell short of transferring the majority of labor and capital into an urban industrial economy on the British or Central Europe pattern. The industrial startups and spread by 1939 in some sectors did however create a small modern base whose experience would help full-​scale industrial development to proceed after the Second World War. A case in point is the textile industry, already a leading branch of manufacturing in the pre-​1914 Balkans. It had not only received state support and state purchases, also a precedent for the post-​1945 communist regimes. Domestic and foreign investment in joint-​stock incorporation by the late 1930s was also precedent for privatization after 1989. The textile industry is also a good case study in another respect. It offers perhaps the best chance for comparison across the region because as an industry, it was not limited by the access to mineral deposits that favored some areas and not others. While including some reference to Greece and Romania, this chapter concentrates on the interwar territories of Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. Before the First World War, they were divided between the independent Balkan states of Bulgaria and Serbia, the Ottoman Empire and Austria-​Hungary. Autonomous from 1878, Bulgaria gained its southern half and its main textile trading center Plovdiv only in 1885. All of Ottoman Macedonia, including the Vardar region that is the center of modern Macedonia remained under the Sultan’s Empire until 1912 (see Map 14.1).Within the Habsburg Monarchy, Carniola (the heartland of present-​day Slovenia) and Dalmatia were under Austrian administration, Croatia-​Slavonia and the Vojvodina and Transylvania under Hungarian administration, and from 1878, Bosnia-​Herzegovina under joint control. The growth of textile manufacture that continued into interwar Bulgaria and Yugoslavia began in Ottoman Bulgaria, independent Serbia, and in Slovenian and Croatian territory in Austria-​Hungary.

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1878–​1914: from proto-​industrial to modern manufacture The textile industry in Bulgaria evolved from the proto-​industrial wool spinning and weaving in upland households, then collected for sale in the towns of Gabrovo, Sliven, Samokov, Tŭrnovo, Karlovo, and Kazanlŭk. Their Bulgarian merchants and manufacturers found ready markets for their braid and cloth from the Ottoman army and in Constantinople by the 1830s. Sales from this putting-​out system peaked in the 1870s and declined in the face of machine-​made production, domestic and imported. A  few small domestic textile mills had already appeared but they spread only after autonomous Bulgaria expanded to the south in 1885. Along with cheap machinery and easily available labor, the first Bulgarian law encouraging industry (1894), allowed the initial mechanized mills to expand their positions in the domestic market and to continue exporting to the Ottoman market despite now facing tariffs. These enterprises were established by local manufacturers with domestic capital. Foreign capital was rare in the woolen textile industry but predominated in the cotton manufacture that needed imports. A British firm was the first and largest after opening in 1897. Overall, by the start of the First World War, textile manufacture in Bulgaria was the second largest industry after food processing, some 37 percent of industrial production. Textiles were also the second largest employer in still Ottoman Salonica, trailing only tobacco, and the largest in the Athens-​ Piraeus nexus in Greece. Cotton in both was locally grown or easily imported from Egypt, so its manufacture predominated from the start. British and diaspora investment launched modern manufacture in several enterprises, but most of the production in Salonica came from small Jewish shops and plants in the center of the city. In the Kingdom of Serbia, textile manufacture received some encouragement from the industrial laws of 1873 and 1898. More important was the acquisition of the Niš triangle from the Ottoman Empire in the Berlin Treaty of 1878. It was a proto-​industrial center among the number that had appeared in what is today Bulgaria and Macedonia. Leskovac became known as the Serbian Manchester. But its wool manufacture, and also in several other Serbian sites, was largely tied to state orders for army uniforms, despite tariffs to restrict competition from Bulgarian imports. By 1908, there were 18 privileged factories with tax rebates as well as tariff protection, now including one established with Czech investment. By 1911, its combined output like Bulgaria’s had risen fivefold in 20 years but was still only half its size. In the Austro-​Hungarian borderlands, significant textile manufacture appeared early in the nineteenth century in Braşov on Transylvania’s border with Romania, which had links to the many small weaving and clothing shops in Bucharest. Set up by the large Jewish immigration, their exports reached as far as Leipzig. In Carniola and Croatia, textile manufacture started after the completion of the Vienna-​Trieste railway in 1857 allowed connection from upland locations with ample water power. By the mid-​1880s two mechanized wool mills had opened in Slovenian territory and one in Croatia at Duga Resa near Karlovac. Viennese capital led the way, later encouraged by the rise of metallurgy and machine production in Slovenia. Despite this greater access to capital investment than in the independent Balkan states, these enterprises also faced tariff-​free competition from the fully modern mills in the Czech lands. The Viennese investors had nonetheless introduced a cotton spinning plant at Duga Resa and continued to expand its capacity while others had financed a series of cotton manufacturers in Zagreb. Cheap cotton imports from Egypt through Trieste provided the essential raw material.

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1918–​1939: state support and joint-​stock incorporation After the First World War, both Bulgaria and the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes confronted a daunting list of economic problems. Some were new. Bulgaria faced reparations and an influx of refugees. The Yugoslav Kingdom faced substantial war damage to rail lines and rolling stock plus the destruction of Serbia’s factories, mines, and infrastructure. Some were old problems, primarily the dependence on a largely rural population and peasant agriculture.Their predominance in both countries kept the supply of industrial labor and the level of urban consumption low. In 1921, agriculture accounted for 75 percent of national income in Bulgaria and 63 percent in the Yugoslav Kingdom. The rural share of the population approached 80 percent and hardly changed across the interwar period. Crop diversification and the reduction in peasant debt obligations helped advance peasant incomes in the late 1930s. Industry remained a relatively small part of the economy in both countries but nonetheless increased its share significantly after a slow postwar start. Manufacturing and mining accounted for 8  percent of Bulgarian national income in 1921 but 18  percent by 1938. Led by much expanded mining in the 1930s, the Yugoslav share rose from 12 percent to 31 percent.The share of the labor force in manufacturing already rose by the late 1920s, to 9 percent in Bulgaria and 10 percent in the Yugoslav case but not much after that except in textiles. Textiles remained the second largest industrial sector in both countries, rising several fold to 29 percent of total industrial output in Bulgaria and 21 percent in the Yugoslav Kingdom while the shares for the leading sector of food processing declined in both economies. Textiles were the largest sector in Greece and one of the largest in Romania.The flood of refugees from Anatolia to Athens and especially Salonica, now Thessaloniki, provided a new source of low wage labor. After the disastrous fire of 1917 destroyed the Jewish textile shops and plants in the center of Salonica, entrepreneurs among the refugees joined in reopening some enterprises and founding new ones. In Romania, textiles’ share lagged behind metallurgy and chemicals, the main state-​encouraged industries, as well as food processing. The largest part of textile production came from the concentration of shops and plants in Bucharest, with no access to state support because they were Jewish owned and operated. In 1919 in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, there were only 25 surviving textile factories with barely 5,000 workers, almost all of them in Croatia or Slovenia. By 1929, the number of enterprises had grown to almost 300 with 33,000 employees. Half of them were in Slovenia. In Bulgaria, there were 66 state-​privileged textile enterprises with over 3,000 workers in 1921 and 198 with 19,000 in 1929. In the much larger Yugoslavia, there were half as many factories per capita as in Bulgaria but with half again the workers per factory, a smaller presence in larger enterprises. The increasing number of textile factories and workers did not however reflect a high standard of mechanization. In Yugoslavia, a workshop needed only 20 mechanical horsepower to officially qualify as a factory, and only 10 horsepower in Bulgaria. The few large textile mills in Bulgaria were now in Sofia rather than Gabrovo, the large Serbian woolen mills in Belgrade, and the large Croatian ones in Zagreb, except for Duga Resa. Producing finished clothing in cotton and wool, its 2,000 workers and modern machinery made it the most advanced textile enterprise in Yugoslavia. Cotton imports continued to supply the Slovenian weaving mills that far outnumbered the spinning mills and grew with access to the large interwar Yugoslav market. The largest Slovenian mill was backed by Austrian capital and the rest of the Yugoslav textile center by domestic banks in Ljubljana and Zagreb. Laws fixing domestic and import prices in 1935 in Yugoslavia and in 1936 in Bulgaria favored domestic yarn and especially spinning plants

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over higher priced imports. Legislation to restrict the higher prices from domestic cartels in most branches of industry was not as successful. The cartels themselves were however less successful in textile production. Assembling only a small group in Romania and absent in Greece, textile cartels failed to connect the diverse Yugoslav locations and survived only briefly in Bulgaria.The minimal definition of an industrial enterprise noted above allowed many small, owner-​operated enterprises to stay in business, especially in textiles. By the 1930s, however, the incorporation of the major firms separated ownership from management and spread the accounting standards required by new commercial codes. On the territory of interwar Serbia, the textile industry had shifted to Belgrade from its pre-​1914 centers in Leskovac, Užice, and Niš.The number of factories grew from 13 to 52.The textile industry in Leskovac stagnated after its factories were completely or partially destroyed during the war and little was done to rebuild them in the face of new competition from Croatian and Slovenian enterprises. Serbia’s two leading textile magnates, Ilić and Teokarević, had moved their facilities from Leskovac to Belgrade, as a major center, or to Paraćin, being closer to Belgrade. Beyond the tax and tariff rebates offered but rarely taken outside of textile firms under Serbia’s 1898 law, the Belgrade government in interwar Yugoslavia concentrated on foreign trade and tariffs. For textiles, there were duty-​free imports of machinery or a minimum tariff for cotton yarn and other key inputs. In Bulgaria, politicians, intellectuals and industrial owners saw the protection of national industry (and agriculture) as part of the modernization process. They were convinced that the state and society should be protected from foreign competition. Bulgaria’s protectionist policy toward industry was embodied in the Law on Industry Promotion of 1894. It was revised and enlarged several times with tax exemptions and tariff rebates. Under the new coalition government in 1931, provisions for state supervision were soon placed on the encouraged textile enterprises. This turn to étatism continued with the adoption of the Industrial Law of 1936. In return for abolishing the complex of privileges, it provided even more protection for domestic production by fixing yarn and thread prices at low levels and raising tariffs on their import.This import substitution allowed domestic textile firms to increase their sales to a growing urban market, especially in Sofia. Such protective tariffs also limited the import of finished goods that would compete with domestic production. But protecting textiles as an infant industry kept prices high enough to create a “scissors effect,” cutting down rural demand from its major consumer when agricultural prices sharply declined during the worldwide economic depression after 1930. Before then, the overall tariff rate for imports into Bulgaria in 1928 was 16 percent but the rate even for wool yarn was 88 percent. For Yugoslavia, the overall rate was 20 percent but only 12 percent for yarn. Its unified customs tariff introduced in 1925 with the aim of “protecting domestic production” from foreign competition did not regard the textile industry as needing high rates. In Bulgaria, on the other hand, there was a continuing commitment to tariff protection for textiles that only increased with the Great Depression. Combined with the aforementioned pre-​1914 law for industrial encouragement, this created an atmosphere for state-​sponsored industrial development rather than relying on the market. Privileges given to the emerging industrial enterprises somehow had the effect of a “greenhouse gas” in the domestic market, creating a secure climate for business, but blocking private entrepreneurship and competition. The level of technology and training in the pre-​1914 Balkan countries had been too low to allow them Alexander Gerschenkron’s “advantages of backwardness” and skip the gap in knowledge and practice between them and advanced economies by importing new machinery. Its import alone did not insure wider adoption or the training of skilled workers and management.

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The labor force in textiles was poorly paid, especially the two thirds who were female and the further fraction of child labor. Still, there was some technological progress in the industry compared to others like wood or food processing. Company histories testify to improvements that began in the first decades of the twentieth century and continued after the First World War. The majority of large mills developed from small weaving manufacturers sheds or warehouses adapted to start with, then growing into proper factories. There was nonetheless a significantly lower number of looms than spindles, reflecting the fact that a majority of the thread produced went to household enterprises or families for hand weaving. Instead of the latest technology, used machines were imported at low tariff rates. The distribution of spindles confirms that the more developed textile industry operated in the former Austro-​Hungarian territories. In factories of Croatia and Slovenia, in 1925, 98,582 spindles were operating, 60  percent of the total in the Kingdom. In Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Vojvodina there were about 64,000 spindles, more than the Bulgarian total. The interwar Bulgarian textile industry, largely “privileged” enterprises with state support unlike for example Romania’s, had about 53,000 spindles in the cotton and wool industry in 1923. Considerable capital was invested in the movable and immovable property in the Bulgarian and Yugoslav textile industries in the interwar period. For both, it represented some 20–​24 percent of the total invested in industry. More came from reinvested profits than from the limited number of long-​term bank loans available only a high rate of interest. Incorporation and joint-​ stock sales began to spread in the 1930s, as Bulgarian numbers caught up with the corporations in Croatia and Slovenia. Joint stock incorporation also rose in Greece, where textiles accounted for 27 percent of manufactured industrial production by 1938, versus 29 percent in Bulgaria and 20 percent in Yugoslavia and Romania. But for the many new small textile enterprises founded in the 1930s, doubling the number and but Bulgaria lacking state privileges, incorporation was not possible. Their larger numbers pushed down the number of workers per enterprise and horsepower per worker by 1938. Investment capital for them could come only from bank loans. The most popular loans in Yugoslavia were those of the National Bank of Yugoslavia (at the rate of 6, and 7 to 8 percent annually for Lombard credits). These loans were however often criticized for favoring Serbian traders, industrialists and bankers. In the period from 1920 to 1929, borrowers from Serbia got 44  percent of the amount lent, from Croatia 33 percent, from Slovenia 17 percent. The policy was justified in Belgrade by the enormous material damage that Serbia had suffered in the First World War. The large private banks, concentrated in Zagreb, also charged industrial companies but with much higher interest rates. Among private banks, the Croatian Savings Bank nonetheless lent 1.4 billion dinars to industry in 1925, while the National Bank of the Kingdom of SCS, seated in Belgrade, distributed 1.3 billion dinars. In Croatia and Slavonia, the banks also had large amounts of foreign savings, while in Serbia there were small independent banks, based on domestic capital and discounted loans with National Bank. The onset of the Great Depression and the collapse of the Austrian Creditanstalt in 1931 cost the Zagreb banks most of these foreign deposits. This left only the National Bank of Yugoslavia in Belgrade as a recourse. Unlike the disparate financial system of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria had a centralized system dominated by banks in Sofia, the state’s National and Agricultural Banks and a dozen foreign banks. Mainly French and Belgian, these foreign banks offered some support in the 1920s to the larger cotton mills but largely as short-​term credits for raw cotton imports. The one major investment allowed the large Berov enterpris e to reestablish itself after a fire as a Belgian joint-​stock company in 1923. Overall, foreign investment accounted for less than 322

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5 percent of fixed capital in the sector. During the economic crisis of the 1930s, foreign banks retreated from the textile industry entirely. At least the Bulgarian Agricultural Bank provided loans to encourage the cultivation of domestic cotton when the tariff law of 1932 was applied to imported yarn. Foreign capital continued to flow into the Yugoslav textile industry despite the 1930s depression and the retreat of the Zagreb banks. By 1937, there were 46 joint-​stock textile companies, over half with foreign capital. Most of them were in Croatia. One third of the investment came for Czechoslovakia, 11 percent from Austria, three percent from France, and smaller amounts from other European countries. None came from Germany. In the first years after the First World War, a fictional nationalization of “undisputed” foreign capital (neither Austrian nor German) was carried out, but the Austrian owners of the largest textile factories were not changed (Mautner d. d., Glansman and Duga Resa d. d.). Thus, foreign capital retained its position in Croatia and to a lesser extent in Slovenia. It was estimated that 30 percent of foreign capital invested in Croatia from 1923 to 1925 was from Austria, and 10 percent from Hungary. The rise in Czech investment came later, encouraged by the 1925 tariff law that raised the rates on finished goods but not thread and yarns. Common characteristics of the domestic markets of both countries were weak supply chains and weak rural-​urban links. Domestic thread and yarn for finished clothing could indeed be produced and purchased from domestic producers. However, their quality often did not meet factory standards, and textile manufacturers rarely purchased larger quantities of wool grown on the domestic market. The industry did not use more than 5 to 10 percent due to its poor quality.With higher tariffs in the 1930s, imports of yarn and thread fell but stayed above one half of the industry’s consumption across the region. As Bulgaria and Yugoslavia were still agrarian economies, its peasant consumers rarely bought factory manufactured textiles. The first signs of factory goods entering village shops and markets nonetheless appeared during the period between the two wars, first in the hard years of initial recovery and then in the good harvests and rising peasant income of the late 1930s. Yugoslav and Bulgarian exports rose past prewar levels by the late 1920s and then slipped back only slightly in the 1930s. Yet, textile exports did not advance. Croatian and Slovenian goods faced Czech competition in the Central European market. Bulgaria lost what had been the large pre-​1914 Ottoman market. As a result, their textiles barely accounted for 3 percent of total export value. Both countries had all the same been able to change the structure of their cotton imports. By the end of the inter-​war period, imports of finished cotton fabrics were reduced several fold, while the import of raw cotton increased. It significantly decreased the cost of cotton imports. In addition to improving trade balances, this shift testified to the increasing capacity and improved level of their own ready-​made products. For wool, however, most of the yarn still had to be imported until the mid-​1930s laws fixing import prices noted above favored domestic production. The shift from finished textile imports to inputs points to a wider issue raised by Marie-​ Janine Calic. To what extent did the interwar industrialization of Yugoslavia replace the imports with its own manufactures? A limited case can be made for textiles only in the special circumstances of the 1930s. In Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and also Romania, the imported share of textile consumption did drop sharply from over one half to 20 percent, while Greece stayed at 30 percent. Facing small urban markets and then reduced overall demand during the Great Depression, the majority of Bulgarian and Yugoslav textile mills did not expand beyond family ownership and the minimal mechanization needed to qualify as an industrial enterprise. A significant minority nonetheless modernized and grew, with some stimulus from direct foreign investment in the 1920s. Then domestic stimulus from state contracts and private joint-​stock 323

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enterprise allowed this minority to advance further in the 1930s.Yet the major advantage over imports for domestic producers, large and the growing number of small ones, came from the added tariff protection common across Europe in the depression decade of the 1930s. This was hardly the expanding economy needed to take advantage of import substitution, justifying protective tariffs for infant industries so they could soon grow without them.

Conclusion Bulgaria’s postwar industrialization under public ownership and central government planning could however draw on the 1930s transition from industrial encouragement to state regulation and price controls as well as the bilateral clearing agreements for trade with Germany, now replaced by the Soviet Union. At the same time, the rise of joint-​stock enterprises in the textile industry by the 1930s and their experience with separate ownership and management and the accounting standards needed to sell company bonds in a public stock market was a useful experience for the privatization process of the 1990s. The Yugoslav commercial code of 1937 was even reprinted to assist in meeting international standards and attracting direct foreign investment. In sum, textiles had moved from a household proto-​industry to mechanized manufacture by 1914, and to modern factory production and practice in enough enterprises by 1939 to provide precedents for the public and now private industrial development that followed.

Selected Readings Berov, Liuben and Dimitŭr Dimitrov. Razvitiye na industriiata v Bŭlgariia, 1934–​1947–​1989. Sofia, 1990. Calic, Marie-​Janine. Sozialgeschichte Serbiens, 1815–​ 1941. Der aufhaltsame Fortschritt während der Industrialisierung. Munich, 1994. Daskalov, Rumen. Bŭlgarskoto obshtestvo, 1878–​1939. Sofia, 2005. Djurović, Smiljana. Državna intervencija u industriji Jugoslavije 1918–​1941. Belgrade, 1986. Kresal, France. Tekstilna industrija v Sloveniji, 1918‒1941. Ljubljana 1976. Kukoleča, Stevan. Industrija Jugoslavije 1918‒1938. Belgrade, 1941. Lampe, John R. and Marvin Jackson. Balkan Economic History 1550‒1950. From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations. Bloomington, Ind., 1982. Palairet, Michael R. The Balkan Economies c. 1800–​1914. Evolution Without Development. Cambridge, 1997. Šimončić Bobetko, Zdenka. Razvoj teкstilne industrije u Hrvatskoj u razdoblju između dva svjetsкa rata, 1918‒1941. Zagreb, 1979. Vučo, Nikola. Razvoj industrije u Srbiji u XIX veku. Belgrade, 1981.

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32 NEIGHBORS INTO FOREIGNERS: THE GREEKS IN BULGARIA, 1878–​1 941 Theodora Dragostinova

The contested place of the Greek population in the Bulgarian national imagination can be traced back to the beginnings of the formation of a modern national ideology in the second half of the eighteenth century. At that time, the two main tenets of the Bulgarian national idea focused on carving out a place for the Bulgarian nation both in opposition to the “political oppression” of the Ottoman Empire and the “spiritual yoke” of the Greek-​dominated church and school. They both stifled the formation of a Bulgarian nation. These tenets proved powerful unifiers of Bulgarian national aspirations and frustrations from the 1878 institution of the modern Bulgarian state through the interwar period. Only the 1940s witnessed the end of sizeable Greek presence in Bulgaria. Greek presence faced a series of changes, from the 1885 unification of the Bulgarian principality and the autonomous province of Eastern Rumelia, to the unrest in Ottoman Macedonia and its repercussions in Bulgaria in the 1900s, to the wartime decade, to population exchange during the tumultuous 1920s, to pressures for assimilation and integration in the 1930s. The challenges to the Greek populations in Bulgaria track important trends in the evolution of national homogenization policies in the Balkans but also the rest of Europe. In the course of sixty years, the Greeks in the Bulgarian lands were transformed from a population with a largely cultural and linguistic identification to a “national minority” with firmly enshrined “minority rights.” Its continued existence became tied to the conflicting national agendas of Greece and Bulgaria. In the process, the Greeks of Bulgaria had to continuously adapt to growing pressures of assimilation, emigration, and integration, whether in their “national homeland” Greece or their “host country” Bulgaria. These pressures mirrored the situation of other newly minted “minorities,” as defined by the post-​1918 peace settlements, in the Balkans and beyond.

The evolution of Bulgarian national ideology Written in 1762 by Father Paisii of Hilendar, The Slavic-​Bulgarian History of the Bulgarian People, Kings, and Saints defined the main tenets of Bulgarian national ideology. Recalling the glorious pre-​Ottoman past, Father Paisii introduced the term “yoke (igo)” to describe Ottoman rule in the Bulgarian lands, an enduring metaphor in the national imagination. Importantly, however, he also called out the “cunning” Greek Byzantines, whose disloyalty and scheming had pitted the Turkish invaders against the Bulgarians. As a result, the “double-​yoke theory” was 325

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born, shaping the scope of Bulgarian nationalism until today. In this interpretation, the “spiritual yoke” of Greek priests and teachers over the Bulgarians in the Ottoman Empire was as oppressive as the “political yoke” of the Ottomans, because the Greeks suffocated the “national awakening” of the Bulgarians.The image of the calculating, “byzantine” Greek would remain in the Bulgarian national imagination. These ideas permeated the rationale of Bulgarian national leaders when they intensified their efforts in the nineteenth century, targeting Greek schools and churches during the period of “National Revival.” In the mid-​nineteenth century, Bulgarian activists mounted challenges to the authority of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, representing all orthodox Christians and based in Constantinople/Istanbul. For activists the Patriarchate served as a proxy for Greek interests. Bulgarian religious leaders criticized the corruption of Greek bishops and their oppression of their Bulgarian parishioners, and considered the Patriarchate thereafter “the Greek Church.” In their view, only the establishment of a separate Bulgarian church, with a Bulgarian-​speaking clergy loyal to its parishioners, could put an end to the spiritual oppression of the cunning, disloyal Greeks. In 1870, the Ottoman government allowed the establishment of a Bulgarian church, the Exarchate. Disagreeing, the Patriarchate declared a schism in 1872, trying to evict the new Bulgarian national church from the ecumenical Orthodox Christian community.The Exarchate not only challenged Patriarchist influence among the Orthodox Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire. It also asserted Bulgarian rights in territories that the Greek Kingdom, established in 1830, included in its visions for territorial expansion. Greek nationalists rightfully saw the dioceses claimed by the Exarchate as the basis for future Bulgarian political claims. This conflict between the Exarchate and the Patriarchate, closely followed by secular Bulgarian and Greek leaders as well, became one of the main aspects of confrontations between Bulgarians and Greeks. Religion featured prominently in the national programs of each state. Political issues, tied to territorials claims and national sovereignty, came to the forefront of the Bulgarian-​Greek conflict in the 1870s. The Ottoman-​Russian War of 1877–​8 led to the creation of a large Bulgarian state under the San Stefano Treaty of March 1878. Because the European powers feared that this Russian ally would dominate the Balkans, the Berlin Treaty from July 1878 returned many territories (notably Macedonia) to the Ottoman Empire. It split the rest of San Stefano Bulgaria into two halves, the vassal Principality of Bulgaria roughly north of the Balkan Mountains and the autonomous Ottoman province Eastern Rumelia to the south. The precedent of the San Stefano dimensions created lasting political tensions between Bulgarian and Greek national leaders. Bulgarians saw the treaty as a recognition of their rights over these lands, while Greeks claimed the same territory. San Stefano became a Bulgarian dream and a Greek nightmare through the Second World War.

Who is a Greek? National ambiguities and conflicting identities These religious and political disputes between national elites obscured the complexity of national identification at the level of the individual or community. Ultimately, the question “Who is a Greek,” did not have a straightforward answer because until the interwar period, if not beyond, the identities of the people affected by these geopolitical shifts underwent complex transformations. Their experience was consistent with the situation of other linguistic, religious, or ethnic “groups” in the region, where fluid and pragmatic identities would gradually be erased by mainstream national(ist) interpretations of history. Well into the 1930s, people who could be prescribed as normative Greeks often avoided being placed in one neat identity category.

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From the late-​nineteenth century until the late-​1930s, religious, cultural, political, and national factors fluctuated in the definition of who was considered to be a “Greek” in Bulgaria. Religious and linguistic distinctions remained particularly blurred, as both Bulgarians and Greeks were Eastern Orthodox Christians while many were also bilingual.Within the Bulgarian state, what separated a “Greek” community from a “Bulgarian” one was whether its members recognized the authority of the Patriarchate rather than that of the Exarchate. While often that meant that members of Patriarchist communities were predominantly “Greek” as defined by language, some Bulgarian speakers remained under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate. Bulgarian nationalists used the term grŭkomani, or literally “Greek-​maniacs,” to describe these “traitors” of the Bulgarian cause, conveniently forgetting that for individuals, such decisions were based on family or community connections, rather than national allegiances. After 1878, Bulgarian censuses counted inhabitants according to nationality and mother tongue. Between 1878 and 1900, the Greeks according to “nationality” consistently represented two percent of Bulgaria’s inhabitants. If counting by “mother tongue,” the figure was slightly higher, showing that some Greek speakers hesitated to record a Greek nationality. In 1900, Greeks by nationality amounted to 70,887 persons, or 1.8 percent of the population, and 73 percent of them inhabited urban communities.Their largest numbers were in Kavakli (96 percent of population), Sozopol/​Sozoupolis (90 percent), Nesebŭr/Mesemvria (89 percent), Anhialo/​Anchialos (82 percent), Stanimaka/​Stenimachos (52 percent, today’s Asenovgrad), Burgas/​Pirgos (31 percent),Varna (16 percent), and Plovdiv/​Philippoupolis (9 percent). However, the censuses did not record the number of Patriarchists, which likely included some Bulgarian-​speakers and would have increased the number of potential “Greeks.” For Bulgarian officials, the goal was to adopt a narrow definition of “nationality” and reduce the number of Greeks in Bulgaria. In contrast, Greek politicians sought to increase the numbers and considered as Greeks two other groups, the Gagauz and the Karakachani/​Sarakatsani. According to the 1900 Bulgarian census, some 8,251 Gagauz –​Turkish-​speaking Christians who recognized the Patriarchate –​ inhabited compact villages north of Varna. Some 3,309 Karakachani –​a nomadic stockbreeding population who spoke a Greek-​based dialect  –​lived in the Sliven area and the Rhodopi Mountains. Accordingly, Greek diplomats estimated the total number of Greeks, including the Karakachani and Gagauz, to be approximately 82,447. During the same period, the Patriarchate counted some 100,000  Greeks in Bulgaria, including in its estimate the Bulgarian-​speaking members of Patriarchist communities. Greek nationalists sought to combine national, linguistic, and religious criteria and inflate the number of Greeks in Bulgaria. From a socio-​economic viewpoint, the split between urban and rural populations created its own cleavage among the Greeks. Plovdiv/​Philippoupolis, Varna and Burgas/​Pirgos were important commercial, industrial, and naval centers, and smaller towns and villages like Voden/​ Vodena, Kuklen/​Kouklaina,Anhialo/​Anchialos, Mesemvria, and Sozopol/​Sozoupolis developed as viniculture, salt-​mining, fishing, and merchant colonies; all these communities accumulated significant wealth and had thriving communal life. In contrast, the areas around Kavakli (today Topolovgrad) were predominantly agricultural and poverty-​stricken due to bad soil and an inhospitable climate. In addition, the Gagauz were rural and secluded while the Karakachani, as transient stockbreeders, were mobile and unaccountable. The diversity of geographical locations, socio-​ economic backgrounds, and communal connections makes it difficult to map the collective identifications of the Greeks in Bulgaria. While many saw themselves as Greeks from the perspective of language, history, and tradition, they did not fully embrace the political project of the Greek nation-​state. Many called themselves “Thracians,” “(East) Romelians,” or simply “Christians (Romios, belonging to the Rum millet),” and started using the appellation “Greeks (Ellines)” only in the twentieth century. 327

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The conflicting ways of counting and classifying the population demonstrates the tension between linguistic, religious, and national factors in deciding who in the Bulgarian lands was a Greek. This murkiness would contribute to the intensification of the controversy between Bulgarian and Greek leaders over the belonging of these populations, as each side ultimately saw these people as potential converts to its own national idea.

Growing pressures from an emerging nation state, 1878–​1900 With these unstable collective identifications in mind, it is understandable that Bulgarian and Greek officials had constantly to adjust their policies vis-​à-​vis the “Greek” populations in the Bulgarian state as constituted in 1878. When the Berlin Treaty split San Stefano Bulgaria in two, the vast majority of Greeks became inhabitants of Eastern Rumelia. There, they enjoyed extensive religious, cultural, educational, and self-​governing rights, protected by the minority provisions of the Berlin Treaty. After the Bulgarian unification of 1885 incorporated Eastern Rumelia, the logic of a “nationalizing state” led Bulgarian officials to start placing limits on these extensive rights.The limits did not appear overnight, as the de facto “vassalage” of Bulgaria vis-​à-​vis the Ottoman Empire until 1908 placed critical limitations on the extent of Bulgarian nationalization policies. The period between 1885 and the early 1900s saw fluctuating yet increasingly expanding policies to enforce Bulgarian jurisdictions over “foreigners (inorodtsi)” in the Principality. The 1878 Berlin Treaty guaranteed the religious freedoms and civil and political rights of all ethnic, religious, and national communities in Eastern Rumelia, now an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire. For Greek communities, this meant, first and foremost, extensive religious autonomy. The Patriarchate had jurisdiction over multiple communities, maintaining five bishoprics in Plovdiv/​ Philippoupolis, Anhialo/​ Anchialos, Sozopol/​ Sozoupolis, Mesemvria/ Nesebŭr, and Varna. The Patriarchate owned a significant number of churches and monasteries, staffed them with Greek-​speaking priests, and used manuals printed in Istanbul. Further, the Greek communities had extensive cultural and associational autonomy. They maintained schools that followed the curricula of the Greek Kingdom, established associations, libraries, reading clubs, orchestras, theaters, women’s organizations, and leisure clubs, and sponsored philanthropic institutions like orphanages and soup kitchens that provided services to destitute members. Finally, the Greek communities enjoyed political representation. The population elected representatives in the regional assembly that shaped the legislative agenda of the province while it also chose mayors and members of city councils to represent it in the local administration. In general, within Eastern Rumelia, the Greek population maintained active relations with the Patriarchate, the Greek state, and the regional authorities. Many of these rights were then curbed after the unification of Eastern Rumelia and the Bulgarian Principality in 1885. From that point, the Bulgarian administration pursued more restrictive policies against its Turkish and Greek populations, trying to limit the autonomy that they had enjoyed previously. In an attempt to create national citizens, officials instituted obligatory Bulgarian-​language education for the children of all Bulgarian citizens in 1892. The main point of conflict between Bulgarians and Greeks remained religion. The Greek population in unified Bulgaria continued to recognize the authority of the Patriarchate. The fact that “Greek” (i.e. Patriarchist) churches, schools, communal buildings, and other economic assets were often more impressive than those of the Bulgarian ones caused particular agitation among Bulgarian nationalists. This disparity led to various campaigns to expropriate Greek communal buildings, especially churches and monasteries, in the late nineteenth century. Still, the sporadic nature of these campaigns demonstrates that, in the first twenty-​five years of its existence, the 328

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leaders of the Principality of Bulgaria did not have a clearly defined policy toward their Greek populations. In the early 1900s, the Greeks in Bulgaria still had wide political and cultural autonomy and extensive local community rights, but the Bulgarian state was increasingly encroaching on that autonomy. Yet, because of the “vassal” legal status of the Bulgarian principality and the still developing nature of its national bureaucracy, these ad hoc nationalization measures were unevenly implemented. Greek communities were still able to maintain their economic wealth, vibrant cultural and religious life, and political autonomy at the local level.

Hardening national lines through insurgency and war, 1900–​1918 The ad hoc nature of nationalization practices was bound to harden at the beginning of the twentieth century given the growth of national tensions and military conflicts in the Balkans. Beginning with the exacerbation of the Macedonian question in the 1900s and growing during the wartime decade from 1912, both Bulgarian activists and Bulgarian officials became more assertive in imposing restrictions on “foreign” residents. In the case of the Greeks, economic motives further exacerbated the tensions. Bulgarian expropriations of Greek communal properties became a key battleground in these debates. At the end of the First World War, Greek communities emerged with reduced economic power and less political and cultural autonomy. The vast majority of the Greeks nonetheless chose to remain in Bulgaria rather than emigrate to Greece. This development parallels the cautious reactions of other minorities, notably the Turks, who similarly chose to keep a low profile and adapt to the pressure, rather than emigrate. A first indication of this hardening followed the explosion of the conflict between Bulgaria and Greece in Ottoman Macedonia. As Bulgarian and Greek activists collided and violence spread in the early 1900s, some 30,000 refugees fled Macedonia to Bulgaria. In 1905 and 1906, the Bulgarian media widely reported massacres of Bulgarian civilians by Greek bands in Macedonia, inflaming public opinion. In summer 1906, Bulgarian refugees from Macedonia orchestrated a series of events, which were referred to as the “anti-​Greek movement” in contemporary sources, but in fact constituted mob violence that the government first considered innocuous but then failed to curb. In July 1906, the appointment of a controversial bishop as the head of the Greek community in Varna led to protests, attacks on Greek community members, and the expropriation of Greek religious and communal properties, led by Bulgarian refugees from Macedonia. Anti-​Greek rallies then spread to other Greek communities on the Black Sea coast and eventually Plovdiv/​Phillipoupolis. A  crowd there plundered Greek businesses, expropriated all five Greek churches, and looted the buildings of the Greek Club, the famous Marazli Lyceum, and the Greek female school. Similar pogroms spread to other Greeks communities.Violence escalated on July 30, when clashes between Bulgarian refugees and local Greeks led to the burning down of Anchialos/​Anhialo, a Greek majority city of 6,000 whose Greek neighborhood was completely destroyed. At this point, facing heavy criticism by European diplomats, the government finally took steps to curb the refugee actions. As an immediate consequence of the anti-​Greek movement, an estimated 20,000, or a quarter of all Greeks, left Bulgaria. Some went to Romania, the Ottoman Empire, and the United States, but the vast majority fled to Greece. This influx presented a major challenge to the Greek government, which launched programs to accommodate the new arrivals, granted citizenship to all refugees, and promised to secure land in Thessaly for their settlement. This included the establishment of a new community, Nea Anchialos, for those who had fled the burnt-​out city. Yet land was scarce, home construction poor, financial conditions dire, and malarial outbreaks frequent in Thessaly, so many refugees refused to move there.The desperate situation in Thessaly 329

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convinced many Greeks to return to Bulgaria, and eventually some 5,000 refugees, or a quarter of the initial immigrants, went back. This episode clearly revealed the limitations in front of the Greek state to serve as a “national center” for its compatriots. In 1908, the Bulgarian state bureaucracy took advantage of the newly assert independence of Bulgaria and formulated its first systematic program for Greek integration into Bulgarian society. Though not planning or endorsing the anti-​Greek events, the government used the unrest to pursue the national assimilation of the Greeks. In many ways, this was the first methodical attempt of the administration to implement comprehensive policies targeting a “minority” in Bulgarian territory. These nationalization campaigns targeted the legal status of Patriarchist churches, the enforcement of Bulgarian-​language instruction, and oversight in local administration. Notably, the new Education Law of 1909 made the instruction of Bulgarian history, geography, and language compulsory for all citizens, and superintendents began imposing fines on Greek parents who did not send their children to Bulgarian schools. This trend of increasing pressures on Greeks perceived as being collective “traitors” became more pronounced during the wartime decade. Bulgaria and Greece fought each other in the Second Balkan War and the Great War. There were two sorts of punitive measures that increased against the Greeks. One came from military contingencies. Greeks serving in the Bulgarian army were now removed from certain positions, while Greek civilians were displaced from sensitive border regions and interned in the interior of the country. Greeks also faced the requisition of their properties, forced conscription into the Bulgarian army, the settlement of Bulgarian refugees in their homes, and restrictions on their travel. Another escalation followed the Bulgarian defeat in the Second Balkan War in 1913. In 1914, a “second anti-​Greek movement” led to seizures of Greek communal properties that had remained unaffected in the first wave of violence. Although lasting only a few days, its assaults permanently ended autonomous Greek religious life in Bulgaria, completing the expropriation of Greek religious properties and deporting the last representative of the Patriarchate in Bulgaria.

From “voluntary emigration” to an “actual exchange,” 1919–​1925 No other development better illustrates the abuse of exclusive national categories in the treatment of “national minorities” than the implementation of population exchange in the Balkans. While the obligatory population exchange between Greece and the Turkish Republic from 1923 has served as an extreme example, the effects of the 1919 Convention for Emigration between Bulgaria and Greece demonstrate the diminishing ability of “foreign” individuals to exercise their choice of residence and allegiance. At the end of the First World War, the defeated Bulgarian government was obliged to sign two documents on November 27, 1919:  the Treaty of Neuilly, which included a series of harsh provisions, and the Convention for Voluntary and Reciprocal Emigration of Minorities between Bulgaria and Greece. The exchange was to be carried out under the supervision of the newly established League of Nations. This would be the first experiment of controlled “ethnic unmixing” of national minorities in the Balkans and Europe in general. The agreement targeted approximately 350,000 individuals in both countries. Half of the minority populations were expected to emigrate; including some 80,000 Bulgarian Greeks. The League of Nations insisted that the Convention did not sanction a forced population exchange but instead guaranteed “voluntary emigration” based on the individual choice of each potential immigrant who would freely decide where they wished to reside.To protect this individual right, the document specified a range of specific measures related to citizenship, free movement, property compensation, and pension provisions. As a result, the Greek government expected that the majority 330

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of Bulgarian Greeks would resettle to Greece, also serving the Greek priority of boosting the national composition of its diversely populated “new lands” in Macedonia and Thrace. Yet, in response to postwar instability and the disappointing refugee experience many Greeks had in 1906, the vast majority of Greeks decided to remain in Bulgaria. By April 1922, only 141 had confirmed their desire to emigrate in writing. The dynamics of emigration changed drastically for Greece by 1923 as a result of its catastrophic defeat in its war with reconstituted Turkish forces in Anatolia the previous year. The Lausanne Convention for the Exchange of Populations between Turkey and Greece in January 1923 sanctioned an obligatory population exchange of the Greek Orthodox citizens of the Ottoman Empire for the Muslim residents of Greece. Fleeing local violence as well, more than a million of Greek Orthodox refugees arrived in 1923 alone. The vast majority were settled in northern Greece, where they put pressures on local minorities that included the Bulgarian communities in Greece. Under pressure from 1923 on, Bulgarians in Greece started leaving for Bulgaria, clearly pressured by a Greek government that needed land and housing for the Anatolian and Pontic refugees.These migrations also complicated the situation of the Greeks in Bulgaria. Bulgarian refugees arriving from Greece abused local Greek inhabitants of Bulgaria, often seizing their land and forcing them out of their houses. Initially, the Bulgarian government urged restraint and tried to protect the Greeks, because it wished to avoid a mass emigration of minorities between the two countries. This would have stripped Greece of its Bulgarian minority, an undesirable option for revisionist sentiment in Sofia. Then the position of the Bulgarian government shifted in 1924–​5, following several bloody assaults against the Bulgarian minority in Greece, a continuing wave of Bulgarian refugees from Greek Thrace and Macedonia, and the refusal of the Greek Parliament to endorse a minority protocol guaranteeing the rights of the Bulgarian minority in Greece. At that point, the Bulgarian side adopted reciprocal measures against the Greeks in Bulgaria. Now many Bulgarian Greeks, often under pressure, filed declarations for emigration. In late-​1924 and throughout 1925, the Greeks in Bulgaria hastily abandoned their birthplaces for good. Some tried to sell their properties or collect their harvest before departure, but the vast majority relied on compensation through the Convention for Emigration. All in all, some 25,000 Greeks submitted declarations for emigration in 1925 alone, and the Greek government sent ships and paid for train transportation throughout the year. By May 1929, the number of Greeks who had availed themselves of the emigration option approached 46,000. The large majority of Greeks had now left Bulgaria. In the end, what was supposed to be “voluntary emigration” became an “actual exchange” because of nationalists who desired national homogeneity and international actors who wished to deliver an unambiguous result in an ambiguous situation. As the chain reaction of violence and displacement grew between Bulgaria and Greece during 1924–​5, the violence pressed categorical, clear-​cut choices on individuals with still fluctuating identities. While a small number of Greeks remained in Bulgaria, the vast majority left for Greece, and those remaining in Bulgaria were ready for compromise over their national identity. National homogeneity had become the order of the day.

Erasing ambiguities in the 1920s and 1930s The interwar period was the classic period of state-​led nationalization and activist-​led attempts at national homogenization in Southeastern and Eastern Europe. The Bulgarian Greeks, squeezed between the priorities of the Bulgarian and Greek states, provide a good example of the complex choices individuals and communities had to make to adapt themselves. The 331

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Bulgarian administration wished to treat its Greek population as a bounded minority group that would be subjected to clear-​cut policies for integration with the ethnic Bulgarian majority.This trend was also evident in the treatment of the Muslims populations in Bulgaria. Throughout the interwar period, Bulgarian officials similarly targeted the Turks and the Bulgarian-​speaking Muslims, or Pomaks, actively shaping or curbing their economic, cultural, and political rights. In Bulgaria, the census of 1926 recorded only 10,861 Bulgarian residents who declared Greek nationality. Despite the clear decrease in numbers, compact and visible Greek communities remained, mainly on the Black Sea and around Plovdiv/​Philippoupolis. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Bulgarian officials, refugees, and nationalist organizations exercised political and economic pressures against this population. Refugees continued to press claims over Greek properties and jobs, especially in trade, real estate, and fishing. The government assigned zealous Bulgarian officials at the local administrative level. Greeks nonetheless continued to thrive economically and played an important role in their communities, largely because of the support of local Bulgarians who preferred their well-integrated Greek neighbors to the newly arriving destitute Bulgarian refugees. In the interwar years, Greeks continued to own and manage successful businesses in Varna, Burgas/​Pirgos, and Plovdiv/​Philippoupolis, and their economic assets and connections remained influential in Sozopol/​Sozoupolis, Anhialo/​Anchialos, and Mesemvria; fishing, wine production, and salt-​mining, in particular, continued being associated with the Greeks, despite official measures to “Bulgarianize” those trades. The Greek language also continued being used in these communities, despite the agitation of refugees and nationalists. Informal networks and community dynamics in effect sheltered the Greek populations from the pressures of nationalists and allowed their successful adaptation to the new circumstances. In Greece, by contrast, the recent settlers from Bulgaria had a difficult time adjusting to their new homes. The immigrants acquired full political rights as Greek citizens but suffered from severe economic conditions after arrival, which undercut their sense of being full members of Greek society. In Greece, both the native Greeks and the newly arrived refugees from Pontos and Anatolia saw the immigrants from Bulgaria as competitors for the limited economic resources available in the country following the 1923 “catastrophe.” As Greece was trying to settle more than 1.4 million refugees from the Ottoman Empire, available land and real estate were scarce and the state’s financial assistance limited. Often, the Greeks from Bulgaria were settled in localities unsuitable for their traditional agricultural activities, while the promised compensation for their abandoned properties were delayed well into the 1930s. Many Bulgarian Greeks admitted having made “a big mistake” with their emigration and were disillusioned with their treatment in Greece, frequently complaining about the “injustices” done to them by the Greek state. Throughout the 1930s, the Bulgarian state enforced increasingly restrictive policies targeting the inhabitants of minority communities. In response to the economic depression after 1931, and especially after the establishment of the authoritarian personal regime of King Boris III in 1935, radical political groups increasingly pushed for the exclusionary “regeneration” of the Bulgarian nation. The main focus of official policies remained on the Turks and Pomaks. The nationalists wished to marginalize and expel the former and integrate and “re-​Bulgarianize” the latter. As a result, close to 100,000 Turks emigrated from Bulgaria to Turkey between 1934 and 1939. While not explicitly targeting Greek communities, some side-​effects of these more radical policies affected the Greeks remaining in Bulgaria, as well. Schools indoctrinated Bulgarian values in more assertive ways, while nationalist organizations targeted Greek youth with social activities and prohibited speaking the Greek language at the local level. In 1934, the Ministry of the Interior renamed the remaining Greek localities, using Bulgarian toponyms. Anhialo now became Pomorie while Stanimaka emerged as Asenovgrad, name changes that even local Bulgarians criticized. Critically, the 1934 census did not include the option “Greek” 332

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when recording one’s nationality. The state was clearly on the offensive, removing all visible signs of any Greek presence in the country. The climax of this crackdown came in 1939 and 1940 when the government summarily rounded up Greeks who had not settled their Bulgarian citizenship and expelled them for paperwork irregularities. While these measures affected only several hundred people, the authorities used the occasion to expel prominent personalities who had served as informal leaders of their communities, literally decimating the leadership of the remaining Greeks. On the eve of the Second World War, the Bulgarian state had finally managed to obliterate Greek communal life and to affirm the primacy of Bulgarian rights over its minorities. By then, the uneasy accommodation achieved between minority or immigrant communities in either Bulgaria or Greece, on the one hand, and the national administrations in each country, on the other, had come to an end.

Selected Readings Avramov, Roumen. “Anhialo 1906:  The Political Economy of an Ethnic Clash,” Études Balkaniques 4 (2009): 31–​115. Dragostinova, Theodora. “Navigating Nationality in the Emigration of Minorities between Bulgaria and Greece, 1919–​1941,” East European Politics and Societies 23, no. 2 (2009): 185–​212. Dragostinova, Theodora. Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900–​1949. Ithaca, NY, 2011. Dragostinova, Theodora. “In Search of the Bulgarians:  Mapping the Nation through National Classifications.” In Beyond Mosque, Church, and State: Alternative Narratives of the Nation in the Balkans, edited by Theodora Dragostinova and Yana Hashamova. New York and Budapest, 2016, 105–​28. Kotzageorgi, Xanthippi, ed. Oi Ellines tis Voulgarias. Ena istoriko tmima tou periphereiakou ellinismou. Thessaloniki, 1999. Mirkova, Anna. Muslim Land, Christian Labor: Transforming Ottoman Imperial Subjects into Bulgarian National Citizens, 1878–​1939. Budapest and New York, 2017. Nazŭrska, Zhorzheta. Bŭlgarskata dŭrzhava i neinite maltsinstva, 1879–​1885. Sofia, 1999. Ploumidis, Spiridon. Ethnotiki simviosi sta Balkania. Ellines kai Voulgaroi sti Philippoupoli, 1878–​ 1914. Athens, 2005. Shterionov, Shtelian. Gŭrtsite po bŭlgarskite zemi prez XVIII-​XIX vek (do 1878 godina). Istoriko-​demografska harakteristika. Sofia, 2008.

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33 SOUTHEASTERN EUROPEAN OVERSEAS MIGRATION AND RETURN FROM THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY UNTIL THE 1930s Ulf Brunnbauer

The talk is all of America. Our newspapers often write what bad thing it is whole families to go there as they do. But it is no use. People must eat. The stones are hard. There is too little land. The government does nothing for the good of the people. There are no factories, there is no building, no mining. So how can people live and pay taxes? And if the taxes are not paid the cow is taken from the stall, the pillows from under the head. This is how the teacher of a village school in Croatia summarized the reasons behind the massive emigration from his country to America in the years before World War I. It was published in Emily Greene Balch’s 1910 book Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, which in itself is a testament to the importance of immigration from Southeastern and Eastern Europe to the United States. Balch was not the only prominent American noting the increasing presence of Southeast Europeans. The author and immigrant activist Peter Roberts highlighted the important role of immigrants from Southeastern Europe for the expansion of US mining and industry in his 1914 book The New Immigration. The famous African American civil rights activist and educator, Booker T.  Washington, described the conditions provoking people from Southeastern (and Eastern) Europe to take their chance in the United States in his seminal study The Man Farthest Down (1912). These authors not only described emigration and immigration conditions, they also entered the public debate in favor of the so-​called “new immigrants,” who were denounced by nativist nationalists for not becoming Americans quickly enough. At the same time, debates about these migrants were also raging on the other side of the Atlantic, in the countries of Southeastern Europe which experienced a massive outflow of people to the United States and other overseas destinations. Parliaments discussed this issue and set up commissions to study it; newspapers were full of reports about the often unhappy fate of emigrants, while at the same time earning money by publishing advertisements by emigration agencies and steamship companies selling trips to America. A variety of authors feared that 334

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emigration might bring harm to their nation. In 1912 a Serb political operator in Croatia and Slavonia implored his people: “Remember what I tell you: America is the grave of our people, it’s the new Kosovo, its abyss, and not its salvation” (italics in the original).

The rise in pre-​1914 emigration These public interventions indicate the fact the emigration from Southeastern Europe to America had become too significant to ignore. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Austria-​Hungary accounted for almost a quarter of all immigrants to the United States, more than from any other country. Her Southeast European provinces contributed massively to this outflow. The main purpose of this chapter is to account for the extent of overseas emigration from Southeastern Europe and for its causes and consequences. Accounting for the exact number of migrants remains notoriously difficult. Some states like Serbia and Montenegro did not even bother keeping systematic migration statistics. In others, such as Croatia and Greece, official records seemed to undercount the true amount of emigration. The United States, as the by far most important destination for Balkan migrants (at least 85  percent), kept fairly good statistics. Yet its immigration officers often struggled to pin down accurate citizenship or confused it with “race.” Among many of the Greek immigrants to the United States, for example, there was a substantial cohort of Ottoman citizens, whereas many Italians from the Austrian provinces ended up in the same column as citizens of Italy. But these official records taken together with ship registers give us a fairly good picture of the dynamics of emigration. During the interwar period numbers became more precise –​as a function of increased state efforts to control international migration. Immigrants from Southeastern Europe were late-​comers to America, disregarding the few who already arrived during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Emigrant numbers from Southeastern Europe began to grow quickly only in the 1890s, first mainly from coastal regions but soon spreading inland as well. Greece, as one of the primary emigration countries, can illustrate the pattern. Annual US immigration reports recorded only a handful of immigrants from Greece until 1870. In the decade 1881–​90, only a total of 2,308 immigrants came from Greece. But in the 1890s, almost 16,000 immigrants from Greece were recorded, and in the first decade of the twentieth century 167,519, and in the second 184,201. Other country data corroborate this trend. In one emigration-​prone district in Croatia-​Slavonia, only 2 percent of all emigration passports had been issued for “America” in 1886, but it was 86 percent by 1902. Within few years the space of migration had radically changed. Where people once moved seasonally to neighboring areas, all within Habsburg or Ottoman territory, they now went across the Atlantic. The geography and timing of the emergence of large-​ scale overseas emigration are instructive. In Croatia, Istria, Dalmatia, and Greece, where emigration started, all of them had been severely affected by phylloxera in the second half of the 1880s. An insect originally from America destroyed much of the grape-​growing for wine, one of the few cash-​crops for many a small peasant farm in these areas. It was not the only external shock. Greek farmers suffered a major blow when France and Russia imposed protective tariffs on currants, Greece’s major export good in the 1890s. In Dalmatia, the building of sailing ships, which had employed many locals, was in its final stage of collapse from the change to steamships. Farmers in Austria-​ Hungary also faced increased competition from Italy, after Austria-​Hungary had concluded a trade agreement with it in 1891. These events made the already difficult situation of peasant farming even worse. As outlined in the overview of these chapters, more than 80 percent of the region’s population made their 335

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living from farming. The overwhelming majority of emigrants came from farming as well. In the detailed emigration statistics for Croatia-​Slavonia, 50 percent of all emigrants between 1901 to 1910 were classified as “farmers,” 24 percent as “farmhands and farm workers,” and 26 percent as “unspecified day-​workers,” who were hired seasonally mainly on farms. Only 3 percent of all emigrants from Croatia between 1900 and 1905 came from towns. Emigration, thus, reflected the deep crisis in agriculture at that time, when an increasing number of peasants could not produce enough to secure subsistence for their families and pay their taxes. It was in particular the shrinking size of land holdings, caused by rapid population growth and the pattern of equitable inheritance, as well as by the division of large households, that pushed many peasant families to the brink of destitution. There is a clear correlation between the prevalence of small holdings and emigration. In Croatia, for example, almost half of the farms were less than 3 hectares of land. Not by chance, the stony Karst uplands of western Croatia were most affected by emigration. In Montenegro, another emigration locus, three quarters of the peasant farms comprised only 2 or even fewer hectares of cultivatable land in 1900. Such minuscule farms were not viable.Their owners could not produce enough and faced tax or loan debts, another major cause of emigration to America. Emigration was often a family-​based decision, when one young male member would leave with the expectation that he would send money back. Wayne Vucinich’s memoirs provide a vivid description in the story of his family, where the first male member going to America would soon be followed by others. Ultimately, women would leave as well, either as accompanying family members or in search of work, although their numbers remained comparatively low. While about 30 percent of all immigrants to the United States between 1899 and 1910 were women, their proportion among the different Southeast European nationalities ranged between just 4 and 15 percent. This gender difference points to another important feature of overseas emigration from Southeastern Europe: it was not thought of as permanent settlement. The departing young men were supposed to come back after a couple of years working in the United States. This explains why few of them sold their property: Only 145 out of 6,144 property-​owning immigrants to the United States from Austrian Carniola, now Slovenia, had sold out before leaving. What were the circumstances that lay behind such family strategies? First there was the massive appeal by America, especially the United States, then undergoing an unprecedented industrial expansion. US wages were much higher than those in Central and Southeastern Europe. The Congressional Immigration Commission concluded in its 1911 report that “wages [in Austria] are extremely low in comparison with those which are prevalent in the United States.” A Hungarian historian found that industrial wages in the United States were five to six times higher than farming wages in Hungary, and prices for staple goods much cheaper. The lack of industrial development in much of Southeastern Europe kept wages down and offered few employment alternatives outside of farming. Southeast European peasant emigrants instead experienced industrialization and urbanization in the United States, most of them working in metallurgy or mining. The US census of 1920 counted 90 percent of the immigrants from Albania, Greece, Romania, and “Turkey in Europe,” and 80 percent of those from Hungary as urban residents. How crucial employment opportunities were for the decision to go to the United States, and how well informed the would-​be emigrants were, is also seen in the sharp drop in emigration in 1908, following the massive, but short-​lived American recession in 1907. Word of unemployment and declining wages spread immediately to the Balkans, as more people returned than usual. As soon as the crisis was over, the surge in emigration immediately resumed. 336

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Also making overseas emigration and return a viable strategy was the lowering of transportation costs. The rapid rise of steamship travel fed off the linking of Southeastern Europe to the European railway network. One could reach America from a village somewhere in Croatia or Macedonia in two weeks or less. Most emigrants from the northern parts of Southeastern Europe left from North Sea Ports, such as Hamburg, Bremerhaven, or Rotterdam because travel from there on the best-​known German, French, or English lines was fastest and cheapest. As soon as these companies recognized that there was a market for emigration in Southeastern Europe, they established an extensive network of agencies and sub-​agencies that facilitated the journey.These agencies often crossed legal borders, for example by helping emigrants to acquire fake passports. In the early twentieth century, the Austrian and the Hungarian governments also tried to develop the emigration business from Trieste and Fiume but with limited success. Migrants from the southern parts of the Balkans would either first go to one of the major Italian ports, or leave from Piraeus or Salonica, which had a direct connection to New York. The overwhelming majority of emigrants went to the United States, until the introduction of the quota restrictions in the early 1920s as noted below. Given the fact that the emigrants were mainly attracted by unskilled industrial jobs, clusters of Southeast Europeans appeared where US heavy industry was concentrated, from Pennsylvania to the Midwest. According to a 1921 statistic, half of all Yugoslav immigrants in the United States lived in just three states, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois. Cleveland was said to be the second largest Slovenian city in the world. Mining towns such as Butte and Anaconda in Montana and Hibbing and Virginia in Minnesota also acquired substantial South Slav populations. A similar pattern was evident in Chile, were many Croats went to the mining town of Antofagasta.While South Slav immigrants usually worked in heavy industry and mining, where they formed an easily disposable, badly paid segment of the working class, many Greek emigrants sold fruit and vegetables, candy or tobacco, first as peddlers, later opening their own shops. Greeks were also well known in the restaurant business and dominated boot-​blacking and shoe-​parlors. Some small Greek small businesses also took regrettable advantage of the so-​called padrone system, by which intermediaries brought boys from Greece to the United States to work for their “padrone” in a form of indentured labor. Once communities of emigrants from Southeastern Europe established themselves in America, the pioneering emigrants spread the word about the opportunities there through letters home. They also sent back pre-​paid tickets. Chain migration soon followed as the cost of migration for new arrivals declined because relatives and friends already arrived helped them to find employment and housing. Thus emigration from the above-​mentioned regions continued even after the initial triggers, such as the collapse of wine-​making, had disappeared. Once a stable migration route is established, it tends to reproduce itself. Until 1914, when the outbreak of World War I interrupted migration, a substantial number of people moved to America. From 1899 to 1910, the official statistics of Croatia recorded 170,000 emigrants to America, almost certainly an underestimate, out of a population of 2.5 million people. The multi-​ethnic Kingdom of Hungary counted 1.4 million emigrants between 1899 and 1913.The US census of 1910 registered 123,631 foreign-​born residents with Slovenian as their mother tongue. Almost 100,000 “Bulgarians, Serbs, and Montenegrins” entered the United States between 1899 and 1910. Greece recorded more than 320,000 emigrants, 95 percent of whom went to the United States, from 1876 to 1915, and another 105,000 until 1924. Only three countries of Southeastern Europe sent relatively few emigrants to America, interestingly the independent nation-​states of Romania, Serbia, and Bulgaria. Especially the absence of massive peasant emigration from Romania merits attention. The overwhelming majority of the 85,000 emigrants from Romania going to the United States between 1880 and 1920 337

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were Jews. Few ethnic Romanians left although rural living standards were particularly poor in Romania. In 1907, Romania experienced the last large peasant uprising in Europe, put down by the army at the cost of thousands of lives. Romanian share-​croppers may have been too poor to go to America. But the government also took measures to prevent them from leaving, on the urging of the dominant class of large landowners who depended on their cheap labor. Bulgaria as well did not experience a massive outflow, although it also suffered from an increasing shortage of land. Yet, land distribution was far more equitable than in emigration-​ prone Hungary or Croatia. The departure of many Turkish landowners, who left after Bulgaria had gained autonomy in 1878, meant that Bulgarian peasants could acquire new land.When the trickle of overseas emigration from Bulgaria threatened to become a stream –​in the first ten months of 1907, more than 17,000 Bulgarian citizens left for America –​the parliament quickly passed a very restrictive emigration law. Serbia’s distribution of land and also political rights were more equitable as well, and its government acted in a similar way to discourage immigration by imposing prohibitive fees on emigration passports. These last examples show that emigration became an important issue of political debate as policy-​makers and public opinion, more often than not, considered it a danger to the nation’s vitality. This was, after all, also a time of intense nation building and people, especially young men who could be drafted into the army, were seen as a vital resource for the nation, particularly in the independent states. Even in Habsburg Croatia, members of its Sabor frequently called upon the government to take measures to stem the tide of Croats and Serbs leaving the country. The actual government responses, though, differed widely among the countries of the region. Hungary passed a detailed Law on Emigration in 1903, which regulated the transportation of emigrants and demanded that emigrants leave from Fiume. But the Hungarian Kingdom did not restrict emigration as the government saw it as an important safety valve for rural discontent. It was content that a disproportionally high share of emigrants from Hungary were members of the non-​Magyar nationalities, especially Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, and Romanians. Montenegro’s state administration was too limited to impose any restrictions. The Ottoman government did nothing to stop its Christian subjects from leaving, although emigration was formally illegal. While there was also an intense public debate about emigration, the Greek and Austrian governments took essentially laissez-​faire approaches. In Austria, emigration was even a constitutional right of its citizens, of which Slovenes, for example, made heavy use. Only in the case of Brazil did Austria and Hungary try to ban emigration in the 1890s. Many of their citizens who had been lured by the Brazilian government ended up as destitute day laborers on coffee plantations.These were then often repatriated at the expense of their native governments, who wished to avoid these costs.

Return migration and decline of emigration in the interwar period It seems fair to assume that had World War I  not intervened, overseas emigration from the Balkans would not only have continued but even increased. After all, population growth was outpacing the number of new industrial jobs, and farm size continued to shrink. Yet when the war was over, the prewar pattern could not be re-​established because the United States quickly imposed stringent immigration restrictions.The strong nativist current in America, that opposed the so-​called “new immigration,” finally had its way. The so-​called Quota Acts of 1921 and 1924 deliberately set very low immigration quota for the countries of Southeastern and Eastern Europe (the number of entries granted to a nationality was calculated as a percentage of its percentage of residents from the 1890 census, when few Southeast Europeans had yet arrived in the United States). After the 1924 law, Yugoslavia, for instance, had an annual quota of only 671 new 338

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immigrants. Meanwhile, other overseas destinations temporarily gained in importance, until they imposed their own restrictions during the Great Depression. In the 1920s, about 40,000 citizens of Yugoslavia migrated to Argentina, for example. In the 1930s European destinations became more significant than those overseas. Even though the number of fresh emigrants to the Americas was greatly reduced after World War I, the prewar emigration continued to be consequential for Southeastern Europe. There were several ways in which emigration still affected their native communities. First, a substantial proportion of emigrants returned. Southeast Europeans recorded some of the highest return rates of all US emigrants. According to the Department of Labor, over 50 percent of all “Croatian and Slovenian” immigrants who arrived between 1908 and 1923 returned during this period. For Bulgarians, Serbs, and Montenegrins, the percentage of returnees was even higher, 89 percent, for Turks 86 percent, and for Greeks 46 percent. Most of the returnees had planned to come back anyway, but some returned out of patriotic duty. Thousands of Serb and Greek emigrants were said to have returned to fight in the Balkan Wars, and many South Slavs came back once a Yugoslav state was created in 1918. Returnees brought with them an appealing idea of America which, when emigration to the United States was still possible, motivated others to follow. The Slovenian emigrant Louis Adamič, who left his native village in Carniola in 1913 and became a well-​known writer in America, wrote that in my boyhood the idea that the United States was a sort of paradise on earth –​the Golden Country –​the Land of Promise –​was kept vigorously alive by the Amerikanci in our village […]. Thus the ambition to go to the United States was kindled in boys by men who had been there. Basil Gounaris writes that in Macedonia, “soon the 20 dollar piece carried by the smartly dressed ‘Americans’ became extremely popular; in the eyes of the peasants it stood as an unmistakable token of prosperity that only emigration to America was able to produce.” Reports from that time highlight that returnees often opened new businesses, such as grocery stores and coffee-​shops. On Adriatic islands, hotels and restaurants for nascent tourism were established by returned emigrants who had brought back not only money but also ideas, know-​how, and new customs. In the memoir of his childhood, Wayne Vucinich wrote that returned emigrants “retained certain Americanisms in their diet, dress, and work.Their hats, watches, and gold teeth set them apart.” A second important channel was financial. Money transfers from America and repatriated savings became an important source of income for the local economy. Booker T. Washington reported that the average immigrant from Hungary in the United States sent back approximately 120 dollars per year and, on average, returnees took 200 dollars back home. Obviously, only rough estimates as for the aggregate sums exist. Croatian statistician Josip Lakatoš estimated the total amount of money sent to Croatia through banks and the post office at 64  million US dollars in the period 1900 to 1912. Better estimates exist for the interwar period. Greece and Yugoslavia recorded annual inflows of migrant remittances of between 20 and 30 million dollars in the 1920s. In Greece, these receipts amounted to about half of her trade deficit in the mid-​1920s. The continuous flow of remittances shows that emigrants felt attachment to their homelands, especially by links to their families, long after they had actually departed. However, their ability to send money was dependent on the economic conditions in America. During the Great Depression, the amount of money flowing from Yugoslav emigrants in the United States back home quickly declined from 13 million dollars in 1930 to only 3 million in 1933. 339

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The economic consequences of the remittances were clearly visible. The Immigration Commission of the US Congress, which studied emigration conditions in Europe, concluded about Greece that “the benefits of American-​ earned money were everywhere apparent.” Contemporary observers reported about new houses that were being built with money from America, and new land and cattle plus consumer goods were acquired. In the regions most affected by emigration, such as parts of Croatia, Greece, or Macedonia, rural wages began to rise because of a shortage of rural labor. In Macedonia, Gyorge Petrov, a revolutionary, noted that emigrant capital “created a complete reversal in land ownership and changed the relationships between different categories of people in the towns and villages, especially in the latter.” He meant that Christian emigrants bought up land from Muslim landowners. The inflow of money led states to reach out to emigrants and try to maintain their loyalty to their homeland. Hungary, for example, launched a program to encourage emigrants to come back, although the nationalistic agenda of the Hungarian government addressed only Magyar emigrants. The South Slav minorities were not invited to return. Interwar Yugoslavia developed an elaborate legislative and institutional system to care for its emigrants. It encouraged South Slavic emigrants to lobby for the new state, while the government tried to ban the return of emigrants belonging to one of the country’s ethnic minorities. The government of Yugoslavia projected its nation-​building project, creating a single Yugoslav nation of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, across the sea for emigrants who had left before the new state was established. Behind these initiatives were expectations by the government that emigrants who felt an emotional attachment to their “homeland” would more likely send back money –​an expectation borne out by experience. At the same time, emigrants in America organized on their own. As soon as sizeable communities were established, emigrant associations emerged, very often with the main purpose of providing material support to migrants and their families in case of illness or death. Such associations and church communities provided a vital center for socializing at a time when many migrants lived in crammed housing and lacked the money to go out. Emigrant organizations often pursued homeland-​oriented activities as well, for example by sending money or providing support for new arrivals. During both world wars, emigrants rallied for liberation and, in the Yugoslav case, the unification of their homeland, evident for example in the organization of two South Slavic congresses in the United States during World War I. Some emigrant organizations became closely aligned with the polices of their “mother state” or were even established by them, such as the Panhellenic Union in the United States before World War I or the Yugoslav Central Organization in the US created by the government in Belgrade in 1932. The pro-​ Bulgarian Macedonian Political (later Patriotic) Organization, established in 1922, supported the Bulgarian attempt to “liberate” and ultimately incorporate the Serbian and Greek held parts of Macedonia. Such diaspora organizations constituted one of the important long-​term consequences of overseas emigration, as they supported diverse, more often than not nationalistic causes in Southeastern Europe. During World War II, there were separate Serb, Croat, and Partisan groups in the US. Their differences persisted after the war and into the post-​1989 period and the wars of Yugoslav secession. Such were the ambiguous consequences of overseas emigration, greatly strengthening the integration of Southeastern Europe into the wider world but also supporting nationalist divisions.

Selected Readings Adamic, Louis. The Native’s Return: An American Immigrant visits Yugoslavia and Discovers His Old Country. New York, 1934.

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Overseas migration and return Balch, Emily G. Our Slavic Fellow Citizens. New York, 1910. Brunnbauer, Ulf. Globalizing Southeastern Europe. Emigrants, America, and the State since the Late 19th Century. Lanham, Md., 2016. Gounaris, Basil C. “Emigration from Macedonia in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 7, no. 1 (1989): 133–​53. Immigration Commission. Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. 4: Emigration conditions in Europe. Washington, DC, 1911. Puskás, Julianna. From Hungary to the United States (1880–​1914). Budapest, 1982. Puskás, Julianna, ed. Overseas Migration from East-​Central and Southeastern Europe 1880–​1940. Budapest, 1990. Roberts, Peter. The New Immigration: A Study of the Industrial and Social Life of Southeastern Europeans in America. New York, 1914. Vucinich, Wayne S. (and Larry Wolff). Memoirs of My Childhood in Yugoslavia. Palo Alto, Calif., 2007. Washington, Booker T. (and Robert E. Park). The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe. Garden City, NY, 1912.

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34 EUGENICS AND RACE IN SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE Marius Turda

Eugenics was the most popular theory of human improvement to emerge from the scientific world of the late nineteenth century, bringing together Darwinian biology, sociology, statistics, and various explanations of human heredity. Moral philosophers, theologians, health reformers, and politicians, they all embraced it, and often for the same reasons. By the time the First Eugenics International Congress convened in London in July 1912, eugenics was a global phenomenon. Eugenics societies were established not only in Berlin, London, and New York but also in Budapest. Transylvanian Saxon and Hungarian eugenicists such as Heinrich Siegmund and Géza von Hoffmann were not only fully acquainted with the latest eugenic debates in Germany, Britain, and the United States but also were themselves promoters of new eugenic ideas. They also spoke in the name of a new racial ideology that was beginning to prevail, particularly in pre-​1918 Hungary, even though eugenics continued to arouse skepticism from scientists and the general public alike. As the countries of Southeastern Europe recovered from World War I and embarked on their nation-​building project, eugenics provided a persuasive strategy of how to guide the nation into the future. The Serbian hygienist Vladimir S. Stanojević underlined this argument in his book on Eugenics published in 1920. In addition to providing solutions to improve the health of the population, eugenics also provided protective measures for both majority and minority ethnic groups. As demonstrated by the wide circulation of eugenic ideas among the Hungarians and the Germans in Romania and Yugoslavia, ethnic minorities too engaged directly with strategies of race protection and improvement, encouraging their eugenicists to produce effective guidelines, codes, and procedures relating to reproduction, family, and children. Representatives of the German Saxons in Transylvania, for instance, adopted eugenics as a way of preserving their ethnic identity. Tellingly, the German eugenic project paralleled the Hungarian and the Romanian ones but it rarely interacted with them. Couched in a eugenic language, the identity of the ethnic minority was determined by biological, social, and cultural boundaries, separating those who belonged to it from foreigners and outsiders, who were viewed as aliens or potential enemies. In much in the same way as in Western and Northern Europe, eugenics was accepted in Southeastern Europe as a cluster of theories about the social and biological regeneration of the nation. It traveled easily across the political spectrum, as both the right and the left sought to exorcise the “unfit” for the salvation of the nation, the race or the society. During the 1920s and 342

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1930s, eugenics societies were established in most Southeastern European countries and international congresses were organized in the region, providing opportunities for local eugenicists to meet and share their ideas. For instance, the first eugenic societies were founded in Romania, in Cluj and Bucharest, in 1927, while the Bulgarian Society for Racial Hygiene was established in Sofia in 1928. As eugenics began to permeate national politics, various interpretations of eugenics were put forward, influenced by the three major models: the Anglo-​American, the German-​Scandinavian, and the French-​Italian.The application of these models to Southeastern Europe raised important questions about the very nature of eugenics, its proper boundaries, and the achievability of its programs. In each country, however, the specific national context determined which variant of eugenics and racial hygiene became popular with the local political elites. For instance, the Southeastern European countries were largely rural societies. Not surprisingly, then, the peasantry was the most valued segment of the population, considered to be an embodiment of racial fertility and national strength. Most eugenicists praised rural communities while criticizing the city as damaging to the racial health of the nation.These sanitized versions of rural life, the ideal national village as a repository of specific national values and traditions, were not only an essential component of nation-​building projects developed after 1918 in Southeastern Europe but were similarly incorporated into the emerging eugenic discourses. Whether inclined more toward the control of reproduction, the improvement of the race, or the protection of mothers and children, all eugenicists in Southeastern Europe favored both “qualitative” and “quantitative” eugenics. They called for the introduction of a host of measures conceived to strengthen the racial qualities of the population and demanded that the state cleanse society of its “impure” social and ethnic elements. The population was consistently portrayed in eugenic discourses as a biological entity whose natality, mortality, longevity, and morbidity needed both regulation and supervision. The eugenic policies advocated by Uroš Krulj and Andrija Štampar in the newly founded Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, as much as Iuliu Moldovan in Romania, Toshko Petrov in Bulgaria, and Emmanuel Lampadarios in Greece, were integrated within a modern vision of welfare, sanitation, hygiene, and social medicine. Their concepts of national eugenics and nationalized health care became dominant during the interwar period, when these individuals held important ministerial positions. By the late 1930s, the choice was no longer simply between eugenic ideas to stem the biological degeneration of the nation and the nationalist conviction that the protection of the race was required. Eugenicists demanded that that state be authorized to monitor closely the biological capital of the nation, based on hygienic and medical principles as the accepted basis of the modern approach to health, marriage, and family. To this effect, the introduction of eugenic marriage certificates was advocated in all Southeastern European countries, as a method to prevent the transmission of hereditary and venereal diseases. Eugenicists in Southeastern Europe identified the social, biological, and medical problems afflicting their societies, and hoped to solve them through the development of a specifically local form of eugenics. In doing so, they embraced the existing nationalist culture, increasingly alienating eugenics from the scientific realms within which it had originated. In a largely nationalist culture, it helped that eugenics supplied evidence supporting the biologization of national belonging. Subscribing to this axiom, eugenics re-​defined the body politic according to the scientific standards of the age, whereby the nation’s physical and spiritual qualities were placed under close inspection by both state agencies and individuals entrusted with the role of protecting them.This is what the Romanian eugenicist Ioan I. Manliu outlined in his Fragments of Eugenics and Social Hygiene, published in 1921. 343

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Within this extensive eugenics program, the nation became the object not only of a rational pedagogy, expressed in countless debates on the “national character,” but of a biological transformation, one that reflected the broader realities of postwar Europe. During the late 1920s, with the increasing popularity of Italian fascism, it became apparent that a more dynamic eugenic strategy was needed to meet current provocations, both demographic and ideological. The eugenic conceptual framework continued to be based on universal scientific principles, but its aims were now increasingly directed toward transforming the bio-​geography of the national space. The organization of eugenics societies and institutes, in addition to popularizing ideas of health and hygiene, was an integral part of the development of what can be called the nationalization of eugenics, namely the transformation of eugenics into a “national science” devoted to the protection of the specific nation’s health. In his 1925 The Hygiene of the Nation, the Romanian eugenicist Iuliu Moldovan conceptualized eugenics in exclusively national terms by connecting it to bio-​political interventionism and radical measures to regulate health. Moldovan placed the family at the center of his theory of national eugenics, envisioning bio-​political measures to protect “acceptable” families from both social and biological threats. This view was also shared by the Hungarian economist Károly Balás, who declared that racial protection was one of the state’s highest priorities. The Greek eugenicist Stavros Zurukzoglu pointed out in his 1925 Biological Problems of Racial Hygiene that modern eugenics should have the two central aims of instilling racial responsibility toward the nation as well as ensuring the harmonious growth of each individual’s physical, moral, and intellectual capacities. This two-​pronged approach was fully consistent with the modern temporality of eugenics, which Zurukzoglu visualized as an efficient antidote to the social and economic difficulties of postwar daily life. Likewise, the president of the Hungarian Association of Bio-​politics, Lajos Antal, supported the idea of social welfare with a eugenic philosophy and called this “biologism.”The only way to achieve the full potential of both the individual and the national community was through biologism, Antal claimed. By setting out the various eugenic tasks vital to rebuilding postwar societies, eugenicists like Moldovan, Zurukzoglu, and Antal demonstrated that the quest for social and biological improvement as tailored to state prerogatives had to include both extensive eugenic propaganda and programs of racial nurturing. Practical eugenics demanded that all social spheres be tied to the medical scrutiny of the health technocrats supported by official laws. Applied to national education, eugenics’ most important role was to promise social improvement and inspire public confidence in the country’s future. During the 1930s, the growing acceptance of negative eugenic methods such as sterilization in various Western and Northern European countries opened a new round of debates in Southeastern Europe over the boundaries of the eugenic capacity for biological change and improvement. The neurologist László Benedek indicated the reluctance with which eugenic sterilization was discussed in Hungary, as he drafted a sterilization bill in 1932. A  similar support for voluntary sterilization came from the Slovenian legal expert August Munda and the Slovenian-​Croatian biologist Boris Zarnik. Declaring that eugenic sterilization was necessary to ensure the race’s qualitative improvement did little to change Catholic morality concerning marriage and the individual’s private life, two characteristics of the national character which were particularly strong in Hungary, Croatia, and Slovenia, for example. Many Catholic and Greek-​ Catholic religious leaders in Hungary and Romania, including Tihamér Tóth and Augustin Popa openly addressed this Catholic morality and its relationship to eugenics, in their writings, particularly after Pope Pius XI’s issued the Encyclical on Christian Marriage, Casti Connubii in 1930. Tellingly, opposition to eugenic sterilization came not only from Catholic eugenicists but also from socialist physicians such as the Hungarians Ferenc Jahn and Béla Totis, although 344

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anarchist eugenicists such as the Romanian Eugen Relgis endorsed it. Jewish eugenicists also challenged the growing importance of Nazi theories of eugenics as illustrated by the writings of Iosif Glicsman (Dr. Ygrec) in Bucharest. In Southeastern Europe, ethnicity was an equally important factor determining public perceptions of eugenics and race. The Roma (Gypsies) were constantly targeted, as were the Jews, fueling the growing appeal of anti-​Roma racism and anti-​Semitism in this region. This process echoes developments elsewhere at the time, particularly in Nazi Germany. By the late 1930s, eugenicists in Southeastern Europe too became convinced of the general connections between eugenics, race, and nationalism. As actively politicized eugenic discourses developed in the region, ideas of national health became part of a radical political language, which in turn described and justified new models of national belonging based on “race” and “blood.” In this context, eugenics was invested to protect and improve not only the life of the individual but to also safeguard the social fabric, the family, and the body of the nation. This “racial turn” was also reinforced by a series of eugenic and racial laws introduced across Southeastern Europe between 1938 and 1942, in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Independent State of Croatia. These laws promoted the social, economic, and political power of the dominant racial group to the exclusion of ethnic minorities, especially Jews.Yet they also, as in the Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Romanian cases, introduced new ideas of public health and hygiene, protection for mothers and children as well as in some cases medical screening and mandatory premarital examinations. These laws further testify to the changes in eugenic thinking and practice, which occurred during the war-​torn Southeastern Europe during the early 1940s.

Selected Readings Bartulin, Nevenko. The Racial Idea in the Independent State of Croatia: Origins and Theory. Leiden, 2014. Bucur, Maria. Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania. Pittsburgh, 2002. Cergol Paradiž, Ana. Evgenika na Slovenskem. Ljubljana, 2015. Georgescu, Tudor. The Eugenic Fortress: The Transylvanian Saxon Experiment in Interwar Romania. Budapest, 2016. Kuhar, Martin. “‘From an Impure Source, All Is Impure’: The Rise and Fall of Andrija Štampar’s Public Health Eugenics in Yugoslavia,” Social History of Medicine 30, no. 1 (2017): 92–​113. Promitzer, Christian, Sevasti Trubeta, and Marius Turda, eds. Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945. Budapest, 2011. Theodorou, Vassiliki and Despina Karakatsani, Strengthening Young Bodies, Building the Nation. A  Social History of Children’s Health and Welfare in Greece (1890–​1940). Budapest, 2019. Turda, Marius. Eugenics and Nation in Early 20th Century Hungary. Basingstoke, 2014. Turda, Marius., ed. The History of Eugenics in East-Central Europe, 1900–1944: Texts and Commentaries. London, 2015. Turda, Marius and Paul Weindling, eds. Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Southeast Europe, 1900–​1940. Budapest, 2007.

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35 SOFIA AND PLOVDIV BETWEEN THE WORLD WARS Mary Neuburger

The city offers a unique window into historical rupture and change: a place where history’s cast of characters demolish, ignore, or radically reconfigure the past. At the same time a metropolis serves as a kind of layered exhibition, where historical periods and forms are embraced and preserved, where they linger in the back alleys or grace the main streets and squares –​in the form of buildings, monuments, street signs, or local markets and establishments. In the Balkans, as in East Central Europe, urban change has long reflected the complex process of untangling national from imperial forms; in complex and contested ways the city has been marked as the domain of the nation. This was arguably a far more painful process in large swaths of the Balkans than for other parts of Eastern Europe, where Austro-​German, Italian, or Russian imperial buildings and urban establishments were sufficiently, and even generically, “European” enough to be appropriated and integrated into nationalizing cityscapes. In the Balkans, in contrast, the post-​Ottoman process of “Europeanization” of the cityscape required the razing of a plethora of cultural and architectural forms in the quest to define nations in opposition to the “Oriental” past. Interwar Sofia and Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s first and second cities by size and importance, provide contrasting snapshots of this larger phenomena, which was slow and uneven. For history took markedly different turns in each of these cities, with their distinct panoramas and amalgams of buildings and streets, inhabitants and visitors, everyday experiences and momentous events. Since the late nineteenth century, Sofia had pivoted decidedly westward, as an avalanche of Western influences quickly buried many features of the Ottoman past. Plovdiv, in contrast, held on to its Ottoman complexion for much longer. Urban change was more glacial for Bulgaria’s second city nestled deep in the Thracian Plain, some 80 miles southeast of Sofia. Each city presented contrasting faces of the emergent Bulgarian nation –​embedded in its ongoing dialogue between past and present, East and West.

Re-​building a capital city When Bulgaria gained autonomy from the Ottoman Empire in 1878, Sofia was not the obvious choice as capital. With approximately 11,000 people, it was by all accounts a neglected backwater in relation to Plovdiv, which with over 20,000 people dwarfed Sofia in terms of economic and cultural significance. Indeed, according to the Treaty of San Stefano, which ended 346

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the Russo-​Ottoman War and created a large Bulgarian principality, Plovdiv was slated to become the new capital. But Bulgaria’s borders were cinched down in the subsequent Treaty of Berlin the same year, and as a result, Plovdiv became the capital of a separate, less autonomous entity, the more multi-​ethnic Eastern Rumelia, later united with Bulgaria (1885). By then Sofia had tripled in size to over 30,000 people and established itself as a capital city. Thenceforward, Plovdiv would remain in Sofia’s shadow, for better and for worse. It was bypassed in many respects in favor of the flagship capital, but also offered a kind of shelter from its storm of change. The transformation of post-​Ottoman Sofia into Bulgaria’s capital city was enmeshed in a process of rapid Europeanization, in tandem with political and cultural nation-​building. The articulation and codification of Bulgarianness was connected to the newly built forms, institutions, and changing demographics of the new capital. In 1878, Sofia was little more than a connected set of Ottoman villages, whose inhabitants shared their dusty streets and meadows with barnyard animals, wild dogs, and snakes. Its relative lack of an urban footprint allowed the city to start afresh. In a sense a wholly new city arose on the expansive plain adjacent to the foothills of the imposing Mount Vitosha. Close to Bulgaria’s western edge –​it was poised to be the potential capital of “Greater Bulgaria,” including the adjacent, coveted territories of Macedonia. Migrants from Macedonia became an important part of the new social fabric of post-​Ottoman Sofia, part of its gradual Bulgarianization. Sofia became a mecca and breeding ground for Bulgaria’s new cultural and political elite, Bulgarian-​speaking migrants from across the Ottoman and post-​Ottoman Balkans and beyond –​Istanbul, Bucharest, Odessa, Belgrade, Ruse, and of course Plovdiv. The opportunity to be at the cultural and political center of a new nation-​state was a considerable draw to Bulgarian-​speakers who were able to move from being members of foreign diaspora colonies, or an Ottoman minority population to the ruling majority. But Sofia also became host to numerous colonies of Russian and Central European migrants (Czechs, Austro-​Germans and Hungarians, and Serbs) seeking opportunity in the Bulgarian El Dorado, as well as foreign legations, missionaries, and traders. At the same time, many of the diverse peoples of the Ottoman past departed in waves –​first Turks, then Greeks, though others largely remained in this period, like Armenians and Jews. Furthermore, in Sofia the process of Europeanization of the cityscape meant the thorough razing of vestiges of the “Oriental” past. Ottoman urban forms were dramatically disrupted through a destructive Haussmannization –​that is a mimicking of the famous 1853 urban plan of Paris designed by Georges-​Eugène Haussmann. The Paris plan famously plowed over crooked city streets to create wide boulevards and radial ring roads that brought air, light, and utilities to the city and promoted rapid movement of people, along with opulent displays of imperial power. Sofia’s version of Europeanization was far more modest than that of Paris, but was nevertheless dramatic. Beginning in the 1880s, an enormous number of mosques, old houses, and other Ottoman structures were knocked down and winding casbah-​like streets were straightened in a quest to cast the Bulgarian capital as modern and European. City planners did spare Sofia’s sixteenth-​century Banya Bashi mosque in the city center, designed by the famous Ottoman architect Mimar Sinar, and a few other Ottoman structures. Still, Sofia became emblematic of the new Bulgaria –​buildings, clothing, streets, and habits “Europeanized” –​although Turkish-​ style coffee houses and baths still peppered the back alleys of the sprawling city as reminders of the not so distant past.

Plovdiv: the limits of de-​Ottomanization While Sofia continued to surge in size and importance at the turn of the century, Plovdiv’s fate was quite different. As of 1878, Plovdiv had a more developed Ottoman and cosmopolitan 347

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urban culture, which was relatively enduring in the post-​1885 period. Plovdiv served as a center of trade, but also as a center of intellectual and cultural ferment in the nineteenth century. With the largest urban density in the inland Eastern Balkans, its estimated mid-​century population of 30,000 to 50,000 inhabitants were of mixed ethnic origin –​Turks, Jews, Gypsies, Armenians, Greeks, and increasingly Slavs. During the Bulgarian National Revival (1762–​78), Plovdiv had been a considerably greater draw than Sofia for new Bulgarian elites. Bulgarian migrants from the prosperous Balkan mountain towns that surrounded it, came in ever greater droves as Western trade –​which had quickened since the Crimean War of 1853–​6 – ​continued to wipe out local handicrafts. After 1878, Plovdiv’s vibrant, cosmopolitan culture became swathed in inertia in the shadow of Sofia’s modern attractions. Like other Bulgarian cities, it was instead inching toward Europeanization, slowly electrifying, industrializing, and urbanizing. In the 1890s, Plovdiv’s new urban plan did level numerous mosques and straightened streets and its sea of minarets largely disappeared to make it more visually European. Still, if Bulgaria’s path toward Europe meant a far-​reaching recasting of urban space in Sofia, in Plovdiv it was tempered by the need to find, define, and preserve something uniquely Bulgarian in the urban landscape –​even if that something was clearly connected to the Ottoman past. Unlike Sofia, Plovdiv had a more elegant and developed urban profile to begin with, some of which survived the zealous wave of demolition. What later was labeled as Plovdiv’s old city continued to perch on its historic three hills, above the fray of change. In the Ottoman period the so-​called three hills had been home to rich Turks. Later this area became a Christian quarter populated by Greeks and finally Bulgarians. Its Ottoman architectural traces remain to this day, houses with stone bases, cantilevered wooden upper stories that created rooms hanging over the street –​for watching and gossiping about passersby. Built right up to the narrow and winding streets, Old Plovdiv’s houses had graceful gardened courtyards surrounded by high walls with large heavy gates. This turned the streets of the mahalle (quarter) into corridors, lined with colorfully painted facades. In the post-​Ottoman period this mahalle of the three hills was left intact, in part because it was not suited for the wide boulevards that would carve through the lowlands of the city below.The preserved quarter of “Old Plovdiv” became a kind of repository, housing memories of Bulgaria’s founding fathers and important cultural ­figures –​like Liuben Karavelov, Ivan Vazov, and Naiden Gerov. In contrast to Sofia, which began to feel more generically European, Old Plovdiv’s grand houses could be designated and experienced as uniquely “Bulgarian.” As a result, Plovdiv retained the character of a relatively sleepy provincial capital in comparison to Sofia’s bustling urban character, even as it maintained its status as a center of industry and trade. Nevertheless, Plovdiv was shaped by its secondary status in relation to Sofia, its slower population growth, and its distance from the political fray. It remained a kind of alter ego to Sofia, a symbolic alternative to its brazen Westward advance.

Postwar politics and urban transformations By the interwar period, Sofia had become an altogether new city, with only scattered remnants of its Ottoman past. If in 1878, Plovdiv had been more than twice the size of Sofia, by 1920 Sofia was three times larger with 154,000 people, and by 1934 four times larger with 401,000. Sofia continued to draw migrants –​Bulgarians from across the principality and diaspora, as well as Europeans looking for opportunities in the emerging economy. Sofia continued to build and transform as the political, intellectual, economic, and cultural capital of Bulgaria, center stage for its history to unfold. Indeed, Sofia was always at the heart of Bulgarian historical change, but it was also somehow foreign, often viewed through a critical lens –​along with the Westernization that marked it –​by its inhabitants and rejected by the hinterland it ruled. This was part of the 348

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larger cultural phenomenon of disillusionment with post-​Ottoman change, which was accompanied (and eventually replaced) by an ever-​deepening ambivalence toward the West –​even as the allure of modernization continued to hold sway. This was particularly true as World War I came to a close. Bulgaria was in military and political turmoil amidst mass starvation and bitter resentment toward Bulgaria’s leadership and the defeated Central Powers. In the shadow of the Russian Revolution, 10,000 Bulgarian workers converged on Sofia, swarming the streets and calling for peace and revolution in December 1917. By late September 1918, some 15,000 peasant soldiers were caught up in a mutinous wave of desertions from the collapsing Salonica Front that brought them in a menacing wave toward Sofia. As the so-​called Radomir Rebellion gained momentum, Tsar Ferdinand abdicated, and Bulgaria’s Agrarian Party came to power under Aleksandŭr Stamboliiski, who was released from prison where he had been held for his anti-​war views. Stamboliiski’s place in Bulgarian politics was confirmed in the first postwar elections, and agrarian politics and the notion of a “third way” reigned supreme in the Bulgarian capital. Significantly Stamboliiski hated the “Sodom and Gomorrah” of Sofia –​its “foreign” people and ways, that seemed to thrive at the expense of the peasantry. There was perhaps no other leader in Bulgarian history that was so popular and held the genuine faith of the population. His followers were largely from the peasantry, still four fifths of the population, not the more powerful vested interests of Sofia. These royal officials and army officers had opposed Stamboliiski from the start and stood by while irredentist refugees from the lost territories brutally murdered him in 1923. A swing to the political right would mark Bulgaria’s official politics for the rest of the interwar period, if not Sofia’s municipal government. The interwar period was a time of deep national mourning for the “national catastrophe” that was World War I, epitomized by the loss of territory and lives, as well as the wounding of Bulgarian national pride. This spawned ever more radical ideologies and movements in Bulgaria, which were most palpable in the daily life of Bulgaria’s capital city. The Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) had a strong showing in early postwar elections, garnering the second highest number of votes in the national assembly and taking power in a number of municipalities. In Sofia, as other cities, Stamboliiski’s repression of worker’s strikes pushed the BCP into an oppositionist stance. Still, the Communists staged a rebellion in 1923 after Stamboliiski’s murder, by order of the Comintern in Moscow. This uprising was largely carried out –​and crushed –​outside of Sofia, but after 1923 increasingly polarized politics prevailed in the capital. On April 16, 1925, members of the BCP bombed the Sveta Nedelia church in Sofia, where numerous political and military elite were in attendance for the funeral of a recently assassinated general. The explosion caused the collapse of the dome of the original medieval church, which (reconstructed numerous times) still graces a central boulevard of Sofia. In the chaos of collapse, many people were buried inside, and 150 people were killed, with some 500 others wounded.The evening after the attack, martial law was declared and a reign of terror against the Bulgarian left ensued –​with hundreds executed without trial.The political shift drove the remaining Communist leaders underground or abroad. In the period that followed, Sofia was marked by intensified culture wars, political assassinations, and struggles along a generally right vs. left fault line. Still the left in its many incarnations continued to live peacefully in Sofia, frequenting its cafés and taverns albeit under the close watch of government spies. Indeed, the period witnessed an explosion of new modes of leisure and consumption, cafés, bars, restaurants, beer halls, and cabarets proliferated. In the past public eating and drinking establishments were frequented only by men, of all ethno-​national persuasions. In this period, however, women could be seen –​ albeit generally accompanied by husbands and fathers –​at many of the new establishments, or European style cafés. 349

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Ambiguous urbanities By the interwar period. visitors to Sofia were struck by these new establishments, but also the grand gestures of its sweeping boulevards  –​such as Tsar Osvoboditel, Maria Luisa, and Dondukov and its imposing new (and restored) buildings –​museums, the parliament, the university, and the royal palace. It gave the impression of progress, with the presence of ever more cars replacing donkey-​, horse-​, and ox-​drawn carts –​though the latter still were the vehicle of choice for the colorfully dressed peasants who brought their wares to market day as the famous –​and still existing –​“women’s market.” If travelers came to interwar Sofia looking for the “Orient,” they were likely to be disappointed by its remarkable transformation. At the same time, one did not have to stray far from the center of Sofia, to be in a bewildering sea of livestock and Roma shanties, or find the boulders and potholes of unfinished, dusty roads. Sofia also had a more edgy western quarter, centered in the Jewish luchbunar district into which new industrial workers poured in the 1920s. This was also a gritty underbelly where bohemian, artistic types gathered in the mekhani (from the Turkish mey hane or wine house) on Pozitano street.The luchbunar was the well-​feathered nest of leftist intellectuals and revolutionaries, where one might find literary figures, like the poet Khristo Smirnenski or, until his flight to the Soviet Union in 1925, Georgi Dimitrov, a Communist intellectual and the first leader of postwar Bulgaria. Swelling this crowded western quarter of Sofia were also the refugees from the territories lost to Yugoslavia and Greece. Housed in their hastily erected shantytown, they were bitterly irredentist but also divided among themselves. Their disputes often ended in violence. Other parts of Sofia’s center had more of an upscale atmosphere. There, in nice weather, the evening promenade would have been impressive, with elegantly-​dressed Sofiantsi (Sofia dwellers), strolling in their finery and congregating at street cafés and restaurants. The “Lege” (Legation) street was a central destination to see and be seen, with the elegant Café Kontinental as center of elite urban dandies. Sofia cafés were not just the center for a new kind of leisure and entertainment. With the beerhalls, cabarets, and traditional taverns, they also served as incubators for Bulgarian cultural and political life, which percolated through them and a dozen newspapers. Their distinct, but also interwoven, clientele held court or visited rounds in urban hot spots by day and by night. Among the most famous of the literary figures in the pantheon of Sofia’s interwar café set were literary legends like Ivan Vazov, who was a regular at the fashionable café Bŭlgariia (on Tsar Osvoboditel boulevard) until his death in 1921. The Viennese-​style Bŭlgariia also attracted a new generation of literary figures including Elin Pelin and Iordon Iovkov. Modernist colleagues were also found at the nearby café Tsar Osvoboditel, where political and cultural elite mingled. The most important literary circle of the period, Zlatorog –​ named after the journal in which its members published –​met regularly at the Tsar Osvoboditel. This included Iordan Iovkov, and also the famous female poets, Elizaveta Bagriana and Dora Gabe. Interwar Sofia was the time and place of the most prolific flowering of literary culture in Bulgarian history, rooted in this café culture for women as well as men. But it was also a time for cultural and political soul searching –​in which the city would play an important role. Amidst the Europeanized cosmopolitan chaos of Sofia, Iovkov and Pelin became key figures, for example, in the development of Bulgarian “village prose” that looked to rural life for color and inspiration. They and other intellectuals looked to the village for Bulgarian origins and authenticity –​though few left the smoky comforts of their café tables to experience some kind of rural idyll. Others not only envisioned but became participants in the ruralist paths to national renewal which were evident in and around Sofia. Bagriana, for example, was one of a number of prominent Bulgarian Tolstoyans who spread the popular philosophy of non-​violence, abstinence, and 350

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vegetarianism in the capital and beyond. The Bulgarian Tolstoyan movement, was the largest outside of Russia, with followers and rural colonies across the country. In Sofia, they frequented associated urban hotels and restaurants. More visible in Sofia was the home-​g rown theosophist movement, the White Brotherhood or Dŭnovtsi. Founded by Petŭr Dŭnov –​the product of an American Protestant education (in Bulgaria and the United States) –​who was the Uchitel (teacher or leader) of the movement that had followers at the highest levels of Bulgarian government as well as scattered across the country. The Dŭnovtsi inhabited a communal compound of huts and gardens on the city’s edge; they could be seen passing through interwar Sofia with their distinctive all-​white clothing. If Sofia gave the impression of the most Europeanized footprint on interwar Bulgarian soil, it was also a city of contrasts, of right and left, rich and poor, local and foreign, anti-​Western and pro-​Western, as well as a “third way.” Above all it was rife with intellectual and social ferment in one of the most tumultuous peace-​time periods in Bulgarian history.

Trade, industry, proletarianization If interwar Sofia became an incubator for a new kind of cosmopolitanism, Plovdiv held on longer to its Ottoman texture –​even as its cast of characters slowly changed. Many interwar travelers who made their way through Plovdiv found more of what they were looking for, that is, a taste of the “Orient” that seemed to have largely disappeared from Sofia. Plovdiv maintained more of an Ottoman, or traditional Balkan flair, with its labyrinth of cobble stone streets lined with shops and street peddlers, coppersmiths, tinkers, and tobacco sorters. One could witness an occasional stampede of sheep down a side street, or a merchant caravan of camels, or ox-​drawn carts arriving with their wares. True, the city was slowly Bulgarianizing –​ with Greek and Turkish out-​migrations –​but somehow it still felt robustly Ottoman in the interwar era. Old Turkish men with scarlet sashes smoked their water pipes, while rubbing their worry beads on tables parked outside the still ubiquitous old-​fashioned coffee houses. Albanians sold boza (a fermented millet drink) from large urns strapped to their backs. There were still ample Turks and Greeks, but also Armenians, Sephardic Jews, Romanies, Pomaks, Kizilbashi, and Aromunians. Plovdiv was still a labyrinth of dialects and costumes, providing visitors with the expected Balkan flair, a renowned mix of faiths and tongues. The city offered the medley of peoples, smells, and flavors that had characterized the “traditional” Ottoman Balkans –​as depicted in so many Western (and local) travelogues, that oh-​so-​popular genre of the age. It was common place for foreign visitors to seek out the dizzying array of market stalls and shops that wound through the rambling alleys, wrapped around the feet of the elegant, but decaying, three hills. Or they would stroll the extensive tree-​lined, cobbled-​stoned streets of the quiet old city. Still, like Sofia, Plovdiv’s Ottoman hue had slowly paled. Down below the old city, Plovdiv’s new central boulevards were lined with shops and modern cafés, adding a small splash of modern European life.The catastrophic earthquake of 1928, also damaging Sofia, hastened the process of modern construction, destroying Ottoman-​period architectural remnants along with one third of Plovdiv’s buildings. The demographic Bulgarianization of the city also gained momentum, with urbanization and the influx of Bulgarian refugees from Thrace and Macedonia, especially after the Balkans Wars (1912–​13) and World War I. This process was advanced by the massive emigration of first Turks (since Plovdiv became part of Bulgaria in 1885) and Greeks (after the anti-​Greek riots of 1906). As in Sofia, colonies of foreigners from Central Europe, Italy, and elsewhere also appeared, many looking for economic opportunity in this capital of Bulgarian trade. The Italian Vakaro family, for example, were key figures not only in the rise of a modern tobacco 351

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industry, but in the building of breweries, food processing plants, movie theaters, schools, and restaurants. True, Plovdiv fell behind as a center of culture –​many of its best and brightest moving on to neighboring Sofia. But the city remained, and even grew in importance, as a hub of commerce. Situated on the vast Thracian Plain, with the Maritsa River winding through, it was located on a historic thoroughfare from Europe to Asia –​closer than Sofia to the largest regional centers of trade, Istanbul, Salonica, Edirne, and Izmir. Nestled on a fertile plain between the Balkan Mountains to the north and the Rhodope mountains to the south, Plovdiv had been an historic hub of overland trade –​tobacco, wool, rice, and other products bound for the trading hubs of the region. In 1892, Prime Minister Stefan Stambolov chose Plovdiv as host city for the country’s first international trade exhibition, an event designed to draw attention to Bulgaria’s potential as an international trade partner. It was not until 1934 that the trade fair would be resurrected and become an annual event, as it did again after World War II. The annual trade fair, a showcase of Bulgarian economic potential and international cooperation, brought large numbers of foreign exhibitors and visitors to the city each year bestowing upon Plovdiv the enduring role as capital of trade. Being a crossroads for trade, the city also became a center of industry, most notably tobacco. The industry brought wealth to some but also poverty to others in Plovdiv and its environs. As early as 1908. Plovdiv had a large concentration of tobacco workers, mostly former peasants who had flocked to the city from the impoverished countryside. In a sense, the city on the Maritsa River had been transformed into a workers’ city, which meant intermittent mass unemployment, hungry crowds of workers who became part of labor unions and radical leftist politics. In May 1918, with men still at the front, hundreds of women took to the streets in Plovdiv demanding bread and peace, one of the hundreds of the so-​called “women’s revolts” that exploded across Bulgaria. After the war ended, the global market for tobacco grew, and by the 1920s a tobacco city had emerged in the heart of Plovdiv, where a large segment of Bulgaria’s new working class was employed. A whole district of the city was lined with tobacco warehouses, where a diverse set of workers –​Bulgarians, Turks, Greeks, Jews, men, women, and children –​were involved in the sorting, drying, and fermenting of tobacco, required before export or local sale. Their miserable living and working conditions represented the dark side of Plovdiv’s economic growth. Not surprisingly, the city became a critical center for Bulgarian Communist organization in this period. The most famous Bulgarian Communists spent significant time in Plovdiv, for example Dimitŭr Blagoev,Vasil Kolarov, and Georgi Dimitrov, albeit before World War I. Other important figures in the movement, like Nikola Stoilov, Anton Yugov, and Nikola Gospodinov maintained the Party’s presence in the city in the interwar years, when the left became targets of official and unofficial surveillance, imprisonment, and assassination. Tobacco workers played a major role in the Communist uprising that took place in 1923, which ended in mass arrests, beatings, and outright assassinations. Plovdiv was actually blockaded, as the police descended into the tobacco warehouse district with rifles and batons, filling the prisons with Communist Party members and sympathizers. Police surveillance and brutality toward the left was a continuous feature of city life in workers districts, and Plovdiv was also the scene of Macedonian refugee turf wars, between left and right-​leaning organizations. The tobacco quarter of Plovdiv became notorious for drive-​by shootings. Plovdiv was not unscathed by the political divisions and violence that characterized the interwar era –​indeed it became a critical center for such conflicts to unfold. Still Plovdiv, like Sofia, offered its own kind of refuge for the left. Some were able to hide within the morass of the tobacco warehouses and workers’ district. Others looked not to politics but to alternative lifestyles amidst the tumultuous cultural and economic tidal waves of 352

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the postwar period. Yordan Kovachev, for example, established a Tolstoyan commune in 1926 on over 200 hectares of land in the village of Mechkiur (renamed Proslav), on what was then the outskirts of Plovdiv. Its achievements in modern agronomy, but also cooperative agricultural organization, attracted visitors and participants from across Bulgaria, and even foreign delegations. The farm also had a kind of “vegetarian quarter” with a cooperative vegetarian hotel and restaurant called “Zdrave,” a mere four kilometers west of Plovdiv. Plovdiv, like Sofia, was a city of contrasts –​somehow both a shelter from the storm of modernity and square in its path. In a sense Plovdiv and Sofia became rivals, if not alter egos, in this period. Sofia bent to the chaotic force of Westernization in a way that Plovdiv did not, or at least not so quickly. If Sofia became the political and cultural heart of Bulgaria, Plovdiv was (and arguably still is) its soul, a more peaceful and measured place where the layered past remains more palpable, even as changes continue to take hold.

Selected Readings Alvadzhiev, Nikola. Plovdivska khronika. Plovdiv, 1971. Balchev,Vladimir. Plovdiv: Drugiat briag na Evropa. Plovdiv, 2014. Brŭzitsov, Khristo. Niakoga v Sofiia. Sofia, 1970. Donia, Robert J. Sarajevo: A Biography. Ann Arbor, Mich., 2006. Gavrilova, Raina. Bulgarian Urban Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Cranbury, NJ, 1999. Hawkesworth, Celia. Zagreb: A Cultural and Literary History. Oxford, 2007. Mazower, Mark. Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430–​1950. New York, 2005. Norris, David A. Belgrade: A Cultural and Literary History. Oxford, 2008. Tashev, Petŭr. Sofiia. Arkhitekturno gradoustroistveno razvitie: etapi, postizheniia i problemi. Sofia, 1972. Todorov, Nikolaĭ. The Balkan City, 1400–​1900. Seattle, Wash., 1983.

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From the Second World War to the establishment of the postwar regimes, 1939–​1949

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OVERVIEW Collaboration and occupation, resistance and civil war, regime change John R. Lampe

The first year of the Second World War found four of the Southeast European governments with close trade ties with Germany but still resisting the military missions that would tie them to the German war effort. Albania was already absorbed into the German-​led Axis war effort after the Italian invasion and annexation in April 1939. King Zog had fled to Greece, and the occupying regime proclaimed a personal union with Albania under the Italian royal family. The other royal regimes were still in power but faced domestic challenges to their authoritarian rule along with growing German pressure. Romania and Bulgaria had at least agreed to add military equipment to their imports from Germany. The Romanian agreement in March 1939 had also redirected Romanian oil exports to Germany. King Carol’s dictatorship, proclaimed in 1938, survived the Iron Guard’s assassination of its Prime Minister in March 1939 for his role in banning them and in the arrest and killing of their leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. The Legion, their political party, remained in place to challenge Carol and his feared security service, the Siguranţa. Less turmoil confronted the regime of Tsar Boris in Bulgaria in the absence of a pro-​fascist movement. The growth of the Communist-​surrogate Workers Party posed a greater challenge, but the Hitler-​Stalin Pact of August 1939 ended its anti-​German resistance. Yugoslavia faced the greatest domestic challenge. Rising public pressure, primarily from Croatia persuaded Yugoslavia’s royal regency under Prince Pavle to replace the Stojadinović government and its Serbian-​led coalition that included Slovenian and Bosnian Muslim leaders. Facing Serbian opposition but fearing the example of Czechoslovakia’s subdivision, a new Prime Minister soon came to terms instead with the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS) and its leader, Vladko Maček. Their Agreement, or Sporazum, in August 1939 created a large, autonomous Croatian banovina, Including western Herzegovina and much of Dalmatia. Its HSS government allowed several hundred members of the Ustaša, the Croatian fascist movement, to return from Italy. Opposing the Agreement as did the Communist party, they both enrolled several thousand members by 1940.The Ustaša leaders remained in Italy, long their sponsor rather than Germany. In Greece, the Metaxas regime resisted German leverage. Both the dictator and King George II decided to stand by their connection to British support.

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1940–​1941: royal retreat and German advance Of the four royal regimes in early 1940, only Tsar Boris of Bulgaria would remain in power by the end of 1941. Determined to remain neutral, he nonetheless agreed to appoint a pro-​German Prime Minister in February 1940. By February 1941, the government of Bogdan Filov signed the Tripartite Pact of Germany, Italy, and Japan. It also accepted the passage of German troops from Romania into Bulgaria, pending their attack on Yugoslavia and Greece in April 1941. Romania was by this time committed to the German war effort under the military regime of General Ion Antonescu. He had assumed power in September 1940. King Carol II had been forced to flee the country in the wake of two losses of territory. The Soviet ultimatum of July 1940 had transferred Bessarabia to the USSR and then the German-​orchestrated Vienna Award on August 30 gave a sizeable part of Transylvania to Hungary. Carol’s young successor, King Michael, was powerless to resist the new military dictatorship, favored by German support for Antonescu. Antonescu declared himself Conducator (leader) after briefly sharing power with the Legion and suppressing a coup by its Iron Guard in January 1941. By June, he readily accepted Hitler’s invitation to join the invasion of the Soviet Union. Romanian forces advanced quickly to reclaim Bessarabia and with heavy losses as far as Odessa into what they called Transnistria. Their killing of Jews and Roma in Bessarabia and their deportation to Transnistria and then Nazi death camps is detailed below in Vladimir Solinari’s chapter on ethnic cleansing. Already in April 1941, a German offensive had with Italian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian participation entirely swept away the royal regimes in Yugoslavia and Greece. In March, the Yugoslav Regent Prince Pavle had reluctantly acceded to German demands to join the Tripartite Pact. Serbian military officers in Belgrade, encouraged by Serbian opposition to the 1939 compromise with Croatia and by British intelligence, deposed him in favor of the young heir Petar. Hitler immediately decreed the invasion of Yugoslavia and the destruction of its central government. As its leaders fled to the coast and the army offered little resistance to German armored divisions and air attacks,Yugoslavia’s dismemberment proceeded apace. Bulgarian troops entered Vardar Macedonia with hopes of annexation. The German occupation of Serbia also gave the Bulgarians control of southern Serbia. The Italian regime in Albania occupied Kosovo and put Kosovar Albanians in charge of the unified Albanian occupation zone. Serb settlers from the 1920s were killed or expelled. The German and Italian occupiers divided Slovenia, while Hungary received two border regions and the western half of the Vojvodina, where some Serbs were killed. Many more were killed in the new Independent State of Croatia (NDH), as detailed in Rory Yeoman’s chapter below. Failing to find another collaborator, the German authorities ceded power to the fascist Ustaša and their Poglavnik (leader) Ante Pavelić. Their regime was given authority over Bosnia-​Herzegovina as well as Croatia, but not the Dalmatian coast, which was claimed by Italy. As Yugoslavia disintegrated, the German divisions continued south into Greece. Its continuing connections to Britain now included a detachment of British troops and some RAF planes that could threaten supply lines to German forces in North Africa. They had arrived in Libya in February to reverse an embarrassing Italian retreat from Egypt. Poorly led and trained Italian troops had already been pushed back from their invasion of Greece in October 1940.The Greek counteroffensive and the resounding No (Oxi) from Metaxas to the Italian attack rallied public support to his harsh regime. And then he died suddenly in January 1941, leaving King George II and a still restrictive royal regime to survive until the German invasion. Nazi occupation kept control of Athens, Aegean Macedonia, and eventually Crete, while ceding Thrace to Bulgaria, minus a strip on the border with Turkey, and mainland Greece and the Peloponnese

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to Italian occupation. As for Yugoslavia and its London government-​in-​exile, the Greek royal regime was now exiled for the rest of the war. Based in Cairo, they were at least accompanied by some troops from the Greek army. But for the larger part of Southeastern Europe, the next years of the Second World War would revolve instead around a set of occupations and collaborations and the resistance movements that confronted them.

1942–​1944: alliance and collaboration, occupation and resistance Only Romania and Bulgaria served as German allies, and only the Antonescu government committed its forces to the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Already losing 70,000 men in the advance to Odessa, the Romanian army continued ahead to support the German campaign through the Caucasus. Left guarding one flank of the Wehrmacht’s assault on Stalingrad in late 1942, the poorly equipped Romanian forces were decimated in the Red Army’s initial success in surrounding the city.Two thirds of their 18 divisions were destroyed and the toll killed or taken prisoner doubled the losses in Transnistria. Except for a half dozen divisions left in the Crimea until 1944, the Romanians retreated to rebuild inside their wartime border. While only one third of its Jewish population survived, the large Jewish population in Bucharest and Wallachia faced restrictions and labor camps but no transfers to the Nazi death camps. While German representatives worked to preserve the alliance and vital access to Ploeşti’s oil refineries, Antonescu began bargaining with the Western allies for a way out of the war as early as 1943. He did not follow through, even refusing a Soviet offer in 1944 to keep Bessarabia in return. By August, the Red Army had swept through Bessarabia, into Moldavia and on to Bucharest. The Romanian army offered little resistance, and King Michael had Antonescu arrested, ending his regime. Bulgaria’s Tsar Boris had refused the German invitation to join in attacking the Soviet Union on the grounds of pro-​Russian sympathies among his troops. The Soviet side valued its continuing diplomatic relations and representation in Sofia as a source of intelligence –​hence its instructions to the Bulgarian Communist underground to restrain from launching the resistance which Bulgaria troops in neighboring Macedonia were trying to suppress. Internally, a deputy Minister of the Interior supported by the Orthodox Metropolitan, then the Parliament and Tsar Boris rejected two German demands that Bulgarian Jews, some in domestic labor camps, be rounded up and sent to the Nazi death camps. In August 1943, after a trip to see Hitler, Tsar Boris died suddenly. The regency for the very young King Simeon saw a set of governments begin shifting toward accommodation with the Soviet Union. The last one survived only until the Red Army arrived on September 9, 1944. Meanwhile, the sizeable Bulgarian Communist underground had belatedly organized partisan detachments and harassed the retreating Germans. Across the rest of the region, Communist-​led Partisans had appeared earlier but faced rival resistance movements in Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece respectively. The approaching Soviet Army was less important here, reaching only Serbia in October and then moving quickly north into Hungary. British and eventually American support was more important to the armed resistance, favoring first the royal and then the Communist side in Yugoslavia and Albania while trying to mediate between the Communists and their rivals in Greece. Their experiences from occupation and collaboration to resistance have attracted continuing scholarly attention and political controversy. The first four chapters below draw on the most recent research on this controversial period. Rory Yeomans addresses the origins, brutal beginning, and end of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), the major collaborationist regime. Heather Williams tracks the rival Yugoslav resistances, the Serbian Chetniks and the Communist Partisans, from their origins in occupied 359

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Serbia into Bosnia and Croatia.Vladimir Solonari reviews Romania’s wartime regime under Ion Antonescu from its wartime alliance with Nazi Germany and its persecution of Jews and Roma to disastrous defeat on the Soviet Front. Lejnar Mitrojorgji traces the surprisingly large network of Albanian Communist resistance that brought it to power by December 1944. Its advance owed more to German support for several rivals than to a belated British military mission. German occupation had begun after Italy left the war in September 1943 and abandoned its presence in Albania. Two final chapters extend into the postwar period. Ioannis Stefanidis follows the three rounds of the Greek civil war, and Zoran Janjetović details the harsh consolidation of power in Yugoslavia under Tito’s Communist regime. In Yugoslavia and Greece, the Italian exit combined with the British missions to constitute the major foreign challenge to German control. In the patchwork dividing up Yugoslavia, direct German occupation descended only on Serbia and northern Slovenia. Its harsh terms in Serbia, arresting opponents and first confining, then killing all Jews they could catch, had triggered the rise of two resistance movements by July 1941. A Serbian movement gathered around the former Yugoslav army Colonel Draža Mihailović. Once the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union, a Communist movement mobilized under the party leader, Josip Broz Tito. The two movements remained divided but defiant. The German occupation responded with a collaborationist regime, hastily convened under the Serbian General Milan Nedić, and also with mass reprisals for any German soldiers killed. By December, a renewed German offensive had driven both Mihailović’s Chetniks and Tito’s Partisans into Bosnia. There and in Croatia, the Independent State of Croatia’s early ethnic cleansing of Serbs and Jews added to the ranks of the Partisans in particular. Their survival benefited from the looser Italian presence south of the demarcation between German and Italian military responsibility for the security of the NDH and the still looser Italian occupation of Dalmatia and southern Slovenia. The British Special Operations Executive (SOE) had sent missions to both sides in 1942. Their reports contrasted the Chetnik lack of activity with Partisan survival after two German offensives in early 1943. The divided Yugoslav government in London could not prevent the British turn to the Partisans by the end of 1943. Once Italy left the war, it was the Partisans who took the larger part of their arms and equipment as well as access to the Dalmatian coast and its islands. From there, British shipments of increasingly American supplies flowed to a Partisan force that swelled to double the Chetnik numbers by 1944. Direct British access to Greece ended with the hasty retreat of its troops in April 1941 and the loss of Crete and several Aegean islands a month later. By September, however, the Communist-​led EAM/​ELAS in the south and the anti-​Communist EDES in the northwest were organizing armed bands from mountain bases. A deadly famine in the German-​controlled Athens region in the winter of 1941–​2 left several hundred thousand dead and pushed survivors into the mountainous uplands. British SOE missions to both sides supported them with gold sovereigns and worked to bring them together. The further effort to connect them with the Greek government in exile and the royal troops in Egypt was unsuccessful. The National Bands agreement between the two groups in Greece brought them briefly together in July 1943 until EAM/​ELAS attacked the smaller EDES forces in October. Failing to destroy them and losing British support in this first civil war, the ELAS forces survived with seizures of Italian arms and equipment. Their numbers grew from villages ravaged by a series of German attacks and reprisals. Meanwhile, in Thessaloniki and Aegean Macedonia, Nazi transport to the death camps went ahead, taking Jews already detained under their or Bulgarian occupation. In Albania, the German troops arriving in 1943 first made more food supplies available than the corrupt and undersupplied Italian regime that they replaced. By 1944, however, the German offer to supply arms to any group willing to attack the rising Communist forces left those 360

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groups to their hard fate when the Germans evacuated both Greece and Albania in the fall. By December, the Albanian Communist Front was in power in Tirana and EAM/​ELAS expected to be in Athens. British troops had however arrived first and brought royal Greek troops in Egypt with them. They were enough to win this second round of the Greek Civil War, fought in Athens in December 1944.

1945–​1949: postwar Communist advantages and the Western response Only in Greece did the advantage of a large resistance movement, as in Yugoslavia and Albania, or the advance for the Soviet Army, as in Romania and Bulgaria, fail to place a Communist regime in power. British intervention secured an agreement from ELAS to disarm in return for amnesty in February, and economic recovery began under largely American aid from UNRAA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Then the London Agreement of January 1946 proposed to stabilize the economy under a joint Currency Committee and British oversight. The Currency Committee would eventually play a constructive role in restraining inflation and government debt into the 1960s. The initial decision from the British Treasury to sell gold to fund the government, adding to the private stocks and the German sales in 1944, did not however restore confidence in the domestic drachma. Nor did the sale of the last UNRAA deliveries cut into the mounting budget deficit. The royalist government elected in March responded to renewed inflation and a run on the drachma in August by asking the British for more gold that their own war-​strained economy could not afford. As economic uncertainty mounted, the royalist regime’s controversial September plebiscite voted two thirds for the return of King George II, who came back to Athens in October. That same month ELAS combined its reconstituted detachments in the countryside and a larger northern base to announce the formation of its Democratic Army. The third round of the Greek civil war soon began in the contested political space persisting as from the first two. Stalin was content to allow Albanian, Bulgarian, and especially Yugoslav support for the Democratic Army without direct Soviet intervention. Instead, as detailed below by Ioannis Stefanidis, it was direct American intervention after the British had withdrawn and Communist division that turned the tide. US military and economic aid began in March 1947 and facilitated the reconstitution of the Greek army by 1948. Controversial oversight from the American Ambassador maintained a stable if hardly representative civilian government in Athens, while the unified Communist command fractured. The party leader’s faction forced the Democratic Army to abandon its guerilla tactics for an ill-​fated offensive and then chose Moscow’s side in the Tito-​Stalin split. Losing Yugoslav support and much of its large Macedonian Slav contingent, the Democratic Army was doomed to defeat by 1949. In contrast to Greece, the postwar political space in Yugoslavia was not seriously contested. The Partisan army of half a million had suffered more losses against the retreating Germans in the Vojvodina than from the scattered Chetnik survivors.Their leader Mihailović was later captured, tried, and executed. Tito’s coalition regime with Ivan Šubašić, the last governor of the prewar Croatian banovina, already excluded the exiled royal government in London. The leaders of the discredited NDH and its army members were treated like war criminals; some 50,000 returned from British capture were executed out of hand.The remaining German minority, after half had fled, were imprisoned and then forced out of the country. Enough Bosnian Muslims had joined the Partisans to spare their limited numbers in a belated SS Division. The leaders of several Serbian democratic parties and the Croatian Peasant Party were excluded from contesting the elections for a constituent assembly in November 1945.The Communist-​led Popular Front won an overwhelming majority of seats. They quickly approved a new Constitution in January 1946 361

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that created a national assembly in two chambers and a Federal Executive Council drawn from six constituent republics and two provinces in the new Federal Peoples Republic of Yugoslavia, FRNJ. Political power was in fact concentrated in the Communist Politburo and its wartime leader Tito. As described by Zoran Janjetović, merciless treatment of all potential adversaries, led by the UDBA security service and a Communist judiciary, served to consolidate power. Yugoslavia faced serious economic problems like Greece but with more war damage to repair.The Yugoslav regime made better initial use of a larger amount of URRA aid, mobilizing youth brigades to join in rural (re-​)construction, especially in the food-​deficit areas. By 1948, however, the effort to pursue rapid industrialization on the Soviet model had already foundered because of overcentralized central planning. Soviet control of key transport facilities under joint companies was drawing criticism within the party leadership, as were Soviet efforts to penetrate the UDBA. It was however Stalin’s displeasure with the independent example of the Tito regime that prompted the Soviet expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform in June 1948. In Romania and Bulgaria, it was the advance of the Soviet Army in August and September of 1944 that allowed their Communist parties to prevail by 1945 and to consolidate themselves in power by 1948. Absent significant resistance movements, the two parties began 1945 with their Bulgarian leader Georgi Dimitrov still in exile in the Soviet Union and the Romanian leaders newly released from prison. A common advantage was the forced deployment of the two national armies into the Soviet Army, carrying them on into the costly campaign for Transylvania and Hungary and leaving their officer crops exposed to later purges.The Bulgarian army lost more men fighting Germany than it had as its ally. Since both countries were treated as losers in 1945 and put under allied control, pending a final peace settlement with the Allies, the Soviets initially promoted united fronts.The new “democratic” governments included non-​ communist representation, although it was clear from the very beginning that they had little influence. In Romania, the small Communist Party formed a National Democratic Front in October 1944, its participation winning a Soviet pledge to restore all of Transylvania. The established Liberal and National Peasant Party leaders refused to join the Front. The Soviet military command accepted the resulting coalition government until it had failed to deliver promised supplies and transport to the Red Army. The Soviet Foreign Minister obliged King Michael to appoint the Front’s pro-​Communist agrarian Petru Groza as Prime Minster in March 1945. Quickly establishing a Ministry of Propaganda that restricted any rival press, his Communist Interior Minister pressed political rivals with wartime charges.Antonescu was tried and executed in 1946. By then Communist Party membership had grown to 700,000, from only 2,000 in 1944. The lesser opposition parties were drawn into its new Democratic Bloc for elections in November 1946. A new election law and massive ballot fraud, changing what was probably a majority for its main rival, the National Peasant Party, gave its Bloc 70 percent of the vote.With Groza still as Prime Minister, leading Communists now occupied most of the key ministries. The peace treaty of February 1947 ended the Allied Control Commission and left Soviet oversight to impose heavy demands in plant and equipment for reparations. A spiraling inflation soon wiped out private wealth. Maniu’s trial and conviction to imprisonment in the notorious Sighet prison later in 1947 ended any space for opposition parties.The Liberal Foreign Minister Gheorghe Tătărescu survived for appearances until November, and King Michael was forced to abdicate by the end of December. In the new People’s Republic of Romania, Groza remained in place as a figurehead for the new Romanian Workers Party. Now absorbing the Social Democrats, it won 93 percent of the votes in March elections for a constituent assembly. Its Communist leadership still included Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca from the retuning Moscow

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exiles, but Gheorghe Gheorgiu-​Dej, the ethnic Romanian Communist leader, used his position as Economics Minister to win Soviet favor over the Jewish Pauker and the Hungarian Luca. In Bulgaria, the much larger Communist party had initially numbered nearly 15,000. Bulgaria had the further advantage of owing the USSR no reparations. The strained economy received grain shipments to relieve a food shortage and limit inflation in the hard winter in 1946–​7. The postwar consolidation of Communist political power nonetheless proceeded no more quickly than in Romania. The stronger position of the Bulgarian Workers Party, BRP(k), now adding “k” for Communist, in the Fatherland Front of four opposition parties had encouraged elections for a constitutional assembly in November 1945, just as Communist Party leader Georgi Dimitrov was returning from the Soviet Union.The validity of the Front’s overwhelming victory was however challenged by the Communist refusal to allow a separate candidacy for the large faction of the Agrarian Party (BZNS-​NP) to stand under its leader Nikola Petkov. Some of its members abstained, and the Anglo-​American representatives on the Allied Control Commission refused to recognize the election. With Dimitrov as Minister President, his Interior Minister proceeded with arresting political opponents, significantly more than the 12,000 officials and army officers tried as collaborators by Communist-​led People’s Courts from late 1944 into early 1945. Well into 1946, however, the government still included a War Minister, Damien Velchev from the opposition Zveno. Once he was forced out in July, a second purge of the army’s officer corps removed another 2,000. Even then, the regime could not avoid holding a parliamentary election with BZNS participation. By October, an opposing Defense Minister had been removed and a referendum had conducted to end the monarchy. The large one third of the vote won by Petkov’s opposition Agrarians in the November elections persuaded the new largely Communist government that only a fully compliant Agrarian faction could be retained. A peace treaty ending the Allied Control Commission had been signed in February 1947. Petkov’s arrest was then delayed until US diplomatic recognition in June. With his execution in September, political opposition ended only months before it did in Romania. The final consolidation of leadership within the four Communist parties followed from the formal announcement of the Soviet split with Tito’s Yugoslavia in June 1948. Stalin had bridled at independent Yugoslav initiatives in the Balkans, first with Bulgaria and then in Albania. The Tito regime executed the few Yugoslav party leaders siding with Stalin and imprisoned his sympathizers.The Albanian party under Enver Hoxha executed its leader closest to the Yugoslav regime, Koçe Xoxe, and turned to the Soviet Union for economic aid. The Romanian leader Georghiu-​Dej used past relations with Belgrade by Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca to gain the upper hand over them, imprison the other leading party rivals, and purge other non-​Romanian members. After the death of Bulgaria’s Georgi Dimitrov later in 1948, his successor Vŭlko Chervenkov used the previous Yugoslav contacts of the leading Communist with interwar credentials, Traicho Kostov, to try and execute him in 1949. The three regimes now confronted Tito’s Yugoslavia as members of the Soviet Bloc. In all four states, single-​party Communist regimes ruled unopposed. In Greece, it was not the King but the victorious National Army and its commander, Field Marshal Aleksander Papagos, that occupied the predominant political position. Martial law lasted until parliamentary elections in March 1950. The surviving prewar political parties, including the KKE, were divided among themselves and opened the way for the 1951 victory of the new Greek Rally party, led by the retired Papagos. Other multi-​party elections would later follow under a parliamentary government absent elsewhere in the region.

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Selected Readings Boll, Michael M. Cold War in the Balkans, American Foreign Policy and the Emergence of Communist Bulgaria, 1943–​1947. Lexington, Kent., 1984. Chary, Frederick B. The Bulgarian Jews and the Final Solution, 1940–​1944. Pittsburgh, Penn., 1972. Deletant, Dennis. Hitler’s Forgotten Ally. Ion Antonescu and his Regime, Romania, 1940–​1944. Basingstoke, 2006. Fischer, Bernd J. Albania at War, 1939–​1945. London, 1999. Lykogiannis, Athanasios. Britain and the Greek Economic Crisis, 1944–​1949. From Liberation to the Truman Doctrine. Columbia, Mont., 2002. Mazower, Mark. Inside Hitler’s Greece.The Experience of Occupation, 1941–​1944. New Haven, Conn., 1993. Pavlowitch, Stevan K. Hitler’s New Disorder.The Second World War in Yugoslavia. New York, 2008. Solinari,Vladimir. Purifying the Nation, Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-​Occupied Romania. Washington, DC, 2011. Tomasevich, Jozo. War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–​1945. Occupation and Collaboration. Stanford, Calif., 2001 Woodhouse, Christopher M. The Struggle for Greece, 1941–​1949. Chicago, Ill., 1999. Yeomans, Rory. Visions of Annihilation. The Ustaša regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941–​1945. Pittsburgh, Penn., 2013.

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36 THE ALBANIAN COMMUNIST PARTY FROM PREWAR ORIGINS TO WARTIME RESISTANCE AND POWER Lejnar Mitrojorgji

Following the reestablishment of independence in 1920, most of the many Albanian émigré activists had returned to Albania, free to pursue their own state-​and institution-​building agendas. Fledgling national political parties, established soon thereafter, did not survive local rivalries and regional divisions (see Robert C. Austin’s chapter above). Then the imposition of Ahmet Zogu’s authoritarian regime pushed many back into exile.They spread out into the Albanian diaspora in Europe looking for new ways to challenge and replace his regime, soon dependent on Italian fascist assistance. By the late 1920s, Soviet communism had become the most ideologically attractive new stimulus for these new exiles. But common purpose and coordination among this cadre of radical left would prove elusive until the Italian occupation of 1939. This chapter addresses this interwar evolution before turning to its consolidation and rise to power by the end of the Second World War. Overcoming internal division by forging a popular front in the early days of the war had more to do with the growth and final success of the Albanian Communist Party in the Second World War than the often-​cited Yugoslav Communist intervention in 1941.

The new diaspora Led by Fan Noli, the exiles formed in Vienna on March 25, 1925, the National Revolutionary Committee, known by its Albanian acronym KONARE (Komiteti Nacional Revolucionar). This umbrella association intended to function as a broad popular coalition that included virtually all opponents of Zogu’s regime, regardless of their political persuasion. Radical left-​wing progressives with sympathies ranging from socialist to communist formed the Committee of National Liberation (CNL). In late 1925, the CNL sent about a dozen of its younger members to pursue higher education in Soviet universities. Objecting to growing links between KONARE and the Soviet Union, center-​and right-​wing nationalists, landowners, and clerics formed the National Union (NU), many of whose members would merge into the Second World War Bulli Kombëtar political organization. In light of KONARE’s growing rapprochement with Soviet Union and wary of its ability to retain political cohesion as an anti-​Zogu coalition, other factions emerged. 365

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Further diluted, KONARE became an essentially left-​wing association whose political spectrum oscillated between German social democracy and Soviet Bolshevism. Within it, there were three largely separate but closely associated factions. First was the CNL. Second was the Albanian Communist Group (ACG), a CNL offshoot of radical communist activists. Established in Vienna in 1927, it was for a time the main link to the Comintern’s Balkan Bureau. Linked to but separate from KONARE, was the Albanian Communist Organization (ACO) formed by the students sent by the CNL to the Soviet Union. The differences between these groups were both tactical and ideological. The ACO and the ACG adopted the argument that Albania was a sovereign state, albeit an undeveloped capitalist country. Accordingly, they argued, it followed that the country must have a working class that was ripe for a revolution. They held that liberation from Zogu’s regime would best be served by a Bolshevik-​style revolution headed by a vanguard to seize power while also solving the social problem large land holders left in place after Noli’s failed revolution in June 1924. Its program sought the Comintern’s help to create an Albanian Communist Party, fusing together all the émigré organizations of the left to lead workers, intellectuals, and students in a national revolution. On the insistence of the Comintern in the late 1920s, the ACO agreed to disperse and return to Albania to disseminate Bolshevik principles. Their dissolution now left the CNL as the strongest Albanian émigré informal network of the left. Still, members of the two were embroiled in intense competition for resources –​human and material –​in France, where an increasing number of Albanian émigré workers and students had settled in the second half of the 1920s. ACO’s efforts were, however, all for naught. This was largely CNL territory, and it had succeeded, at least marginally, to attract workers and students to their own societies. It was in this milieu that a young Enver Hoxha –​future leader of Communist Albania –​ made a appearance in France in 1930 as a student pursuing a degree in natural sciences at the University of Montpellier. Hoxha displayed little interest in the natural sciences. Instead, he devoted his time to reading widely about politics, history, and sociology. He audited classes in these subjects and spent time socializing with Albanian, French, and international students in the city’s cafés. After his scholarship was cut off in 1934, Hoxha left Montpellier without having completed his formal education. He then settled briefly in Paris, where he met with Paul Vaillant-​Couturier, the editor in chief of the French Communist publication l’Humanité. Seeking a job, his attempt went no further than the initial interview, and he soon moved to Brussels and would remain there until he returned to Albania in 1936. The future communist leader of Albania, therefore, took no part in any of the Albanian political émigré associations despite his later assertions to the contrary. Hoxha knew and cultivated contacts within both the CNL and NU, but only for small loans and favors. Although already known for his communist sympathies, he would remain unaffiliated until the late 1930s. Rejected in France, former ACO members followed Comintern advice and sought to establish contacts in Albania. The first major figure to arrive was Ali Kelmendi, a Kosovar-​born activist. In 1930, Kelmendi entered Albania as a member of a Kosovar faction benefiting from a Zogu amnesty, rather than as a Comintern envoy. Soon other Moscow trainees trickled back into Albania as well. Encouraged by the attention they received by these émigré activists and under their leadership, local communists and sympathizers gathered in a small village near Korçë on August 14, 1934, where they decided to form a communist party (CPA). Unable to resolve their ideological differences, they put off the decision to formally establish the CPA until November 1935. But before then, a failed coup in August resulted in the arrest of 1,000 suspected supporters, half of them convicted and sent to prison.

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The Comintern compromise Following the August debacle, the Albanian left was disunited and in disarray. The movement itself had stalled and the communist networks were isolated, with no representation in the Comintern, no funding, and few followers.Then, Stalin’s “popular front” policy of 1934 gave them a new lease on life. In the fall of 1936, leading CNL and Communist activists were summoned to Moscow for consultations. It soon became clear that Kelmendi and the other Albanian Communists had their doubts about the value of the popular front. They proposed instead to begin penetrating domestic societies and associations, which, according to him, already possessed sufficient organizational experience. But after two months of haggling, they accepted a compromise whereby all parties agreed to form an anti-​fascist democratic organization with a central committee composed with members from all communist, liberal, progressive, and nationalist networks. In addition, the Comintern appointed its first official representative in Albania. This was Koço Tashko and not Ali Kelmendi. The Comintern’s compromise did not produce a broader coalition but rather resulted in dividing the CNL. By late 1936/​early 1937, its more radical members shifted their allegiance to Moscow and with former ACO and ACG members established an informal Communist Representational Agency (CRA) in France to act as a conduit for formal links with the Comintern. Now the official Comintern agent in Albania, Tashko was the scion of a family with a long record in Albanian associational activities. He was born in Faiyum, Egypt in 1899, the son of Athanas Tashko, Fan Noli’s original benefactor and main patriotic influence. As Noli’s protégé and with CNL financial backing, in October 1930, Tashko traveled to Soviet Union where he spent two years at the International Lenin School in Moscow. In 1933–​4, he worked as the secretary of the American section of the ISL. In 1935 he immigrated to France where he joined the communist faction within the CNL. Given this background, Tashko was the perfect candidate for a Comintern emissary. In Albania, he found several competing networks. First, there was the Korçë Group, which became a more consolidated organization. A second major organization was the Tiranë Group. Although dismembered after the 1935 uprising, a network of few cadres remained. When Zogu’s repression eased and the Spanish Civil War started in 1936, the network revived by recruiting military cadets and expanding among the high school students of the city.This, however, gave the Tiranë network a heterogeneous membership, which, in turn, divided in two groups; the older cadres and the Youth Group. The latter became the third major communist group in interwar Albania. Several of these teen activists however also joined other groups in Shkodër and Tiranë. The fourth group was the Athens Group (the predecessor of the wartime Zjarri Group), formed in 1935 in the Greek capital by Albanian students and immigrant workers and wholly relying on the eccentric personality of its leader Andrea Zisi. Then there was the Shkodër Group, formed in 1936 by four high school students studying at the Lyceum in Tiranë, two workers, and one newspaper editor, all born between 1913 and 1920 in Shkodër. As a latecomer, the Shkodër Group found willing recruits among former members of the Korçë and Tiranë groups who had been purged from their ranks. While on the rise before Tashko’s arrival, Albanian communism was a divided movement lacking coordination, ideological coherence, and stable group membership. This situation contributed directly to deepening resentments and the disunity that prevented the establishment of a party prior to the Second World War. Still, one success under Tashko’s leadership was penetrating the city government, schools, union, and guilds in Korçë. Another was bringing new recruits into the group’s network of activists, sometimes with foreign experience. One such case was Tashko’s recruitment of Enver Hoxha, who at the time was working

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as a part-​time lecturer of French at the Lyceum, also in Korçë. Their relationship can be best described as that of a mentor and student. Eventually, the two became quite close and Hoxha was a frequent visitor at the Tashko household. Following this upsurge in communist activities, Zogu’s authorities launched a massive crackdown in late 1938 and early 1939. They arrested 93 communist activists on various charges of subversive activities. Particularly hard hit were the Shkodër and Tiranë groups, but all others were affected as well. The majority of the accused were high school graduates followed by workers, teachers, clerks, and tradesmen.The majority of the defendants were under 23 years old with only a handful above 30.The average age for all the accused was 24 years old, making communism in interwar Albania mainly a youth movement. It is noteworthy that Enver Hoxha was not among the arrested communists, suggesting that he was then at best only a minor activist. In the event, the jury delivered guilty verdicts only on half of the accused. These received prison sentences ranging from a few months to ten years, with the majority receiving one year or less. It did not matter, for on April 9, 1939, Italy invaded and soon occupied Albania, ushering in the Second World War.

The Second World War and the Communist rise to power The Italian occupation of Albania in April 1939 disrupted and reframed Albanian associational life. In contrast to occupations in the First World War, fascist Italy combined military strength with an elaborate three-​fold strategy. First, it sought the ideological cooptation of the hitherto largely independent émigré elites into political fascism, second, the integration of the Albanian administration into the larger framework of Italian state institutions, and third, public support by providing economic advantages and higher wages. By portraying the occupation as liberation from Zogu’s regime, albeit by an Italian proxy, they oversaw the dissolution of a number of the centrist and right-​wing émigré and domestic associations. In their place, Italy established new forms of associations, namely the Fascist Party of Albania, Albanian Youth of the Lictor, the Albanian Superior Fascist Corporative Council, the integration of the Albanian military into the Italian armed forces, and the erection of an Albanian Fascist Militia. By the second half of 1939, the Italian-​Albanian honeymoon fueled initially by some economic progress and liberalization had come to an end. Growing popular resentment over Italian misadministration and corruption contributed to a general distrust of Italian intentions. With Zogu’s supporters in disarray and the Italian cooptation of many within the Albanian national elite, the Communist rank and file membership had increased. Two broad efforts, first, in summer 1939 and then in spring 1940, to overcome ideological differences and unite all Communist groups had nonetheless failed. It became painfully apparent that a mediating agency was needed to break the deadlock. The most obvious link would have been the former CNL members still in France, through which they could directly appeal to either the Comintern or the French Communist Party. After the occupation of France, however, the Germans rounded up these activists and handed them over to Italy. In 1940, members of Shkodër and Youth groups sought to establish links with the clandestine Italian Communist Party (CPI), but precisely because of its clandestine nature this project did not appeal to the other groups. Then in April 1941, Germany invaded Yugoslavia and Greece.The occupation divided Greece and surrounded Albania with their forces or surrogates in dismembering Yugoslavia. The Shkodër Group now took the initiative to link up with the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ), drawing on some limited connections since the mid-​1930s. In the spring of 1940, they held several meetings in Ulcinj, Montenegro, but could not reach an agreement. Back in Albania, the Yugoslav option encountered determined opposition from the Youth Group, 368

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which still preferred the Italian option, and from the Korçë Group, whose members knew nothing about the KPJ. Contacts with the KPJ nonetheless increased, facilitated by Kosovar Albanian Communists and the Shkodër Group’s exchanges with the KPJ’s Kosovo branch. To allay the reservations from the Korçë Group, both sides agreed to another meeting in Kosovo. The leader of the Korçë Group, the Comintern’s Koço Tashko, admitted to the Yugoslavs that the Albanian failures in founding the CPA could be overcome only if the current leaders of each individual group were prohibited from contesting for the leadership position. For him, these leaders had become irreparably tainted by their ambitions for power and enjoyed no cross-​g roup respect. Instead, Tashko proposed to identify and elevate new, younger and uncompromised members focusing the selection especially on those who possessed sufficient intellectual background and a strong ideological commitment. Tashko’s plan relied on presenting this strategy as a Yugoslav proposal, acting on behalf of the Comintern, lest the Albanian left suffered yet another failed effort to founding a party. Encouraged, the Albanian delegation welcomed KPJ representatives to Albania. With the apparent support of a senior Communist party that simultaneously enjoyed membership in the Comintern, the Albanian communist groups launched a new attempt in early November 1941 to reconcile their differences and form the Communist Party of Albania.The meeting in Tiranë was attended also by Enver Hoxha, who had been brought there by Koço Tashko, in accordance with his plan to elevate young communists untainted by the factionalism of the past.The heated discussion focused on establishing the party’s structure and a strategic blueprint for future activities. The KPJ presence in the meeting had never enjoyed wide approval from all Albanian groups, so the Yugoslav emissaries were careful not to dominate the proceedings. Instead, their role was confined to organizational advice and ideological instruction. Still distrusted by most of the delegates, a proposal to allow the Yugoslavs arbitrate the proceedings in order to avoid potential deadlock was unanimously rejected. Still, the meeting concluded with a joint agreement on November 14, 1941, to establish the Communist Party of Albania, the CPA. A Provisional Central Committee (PCC) was formed as a governing body of equals but without a leader. No permanent positions were assigned but several activists from the Shkodër and Korçë groups assumed necessary administrative functions. One of them was Enver Hoxha, who was put in charge of Finance. The new CPA set to work to establish “a united and monolithic” party by demolishing the original groups and folding their support networks into its own incipient structures. All who did not agree with the new line were purged, whereas those who had strong reservations but nonetheless supported it, were sidelined. Particularly sharp were the struggles with the Youth Group. In this contentious atmosphere, Enver Hoxha earned a reputation as a moderating presence and as an efficient administrator. Hoxha’s steady rise within the Party’s bureaucracy followed. In February 1941, he was made political secretary of the district committee of the CPA for Tiranë. It was not until July 1943, when the PCC transitioned into a formal Central Committee, that he became the General Secretary of the CPA. Despite the title, however, his position in the leadership was weak throughout the war and always subject to internal challenges. The Albanian Communists were well aware of their inexperience and readily accepted KPJ advice on strengthening party structure and training. The new CPA leaders would however reject Yugoslav proposals on how to mobilize popular support for the war ahead. In contrast to a total war vision, proposed by the Yugoslavs and supported by Enver Hoxha, the CPA leadership strove to find common ground with nationalist associations and the more traditionalist factions. In this light, the Conference of Pezë, held in the fall of 1942, can be seen as the first of many acts by the new party to negotiate its independence and future leadership within a broader national resistance movement. Attended by nationalists, monarchists, and communists, 369

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the conference decided that they would all enter into a loose association for a common resistance, formally named the National Liberation Front (NLF).To achieve a broad-​based consensus, the CPA made significant compromises and scaled back its revolutionary rhetoric. It selected a Provisional General Council to lead the NLF headed by a former military officer during Zogu’s regime. Lesser ranks of the leadership were filled by equal numbers of nationalists and communists. Furthermore, the CPA dropped the favored Yugoslav term “antifascist” as identification for branches and regional councils. It made other concessions on political symbols and delayed appointing political commissars to resistance units. Whereas CPA-​led units adopted the five-​pointed red star and called themselves Partisans like the Yugoslavs, nationalist units were free to retain a shield-​shaped badge representing the national flag. These resolutions frustrated the Yugoslav emissaries, who were opposed to any modus operandi with the nationalists. At least for a time, the CPA was still influenced by the principles of the prewar popular front and preferred to ensure the widest popular participation possible. The CPA’s decision was soon vindicated. By joining themselves to the nationalist fighting units they managed to coopt their fight as their own and to portray CPA efforts as a national struggle. In the process, they found more recruits and gradually expanded the party’s presence on a national scale. At the CPA’s founding, there were 22 cells consisting of some 200 communists in urban centers in all of Albania. By the second half of 1942, even after some purging, the party’s networks in the county of Korçë alone counted 21 cells in both urban and rural areas. Although popular loyalties shifted constantly, by the end of 1942, the CPA could count on no less than 16 fighting units consisting of some 2,000 fighters. Prior to the party’s founding, it possessed none. In September 1942, the CPA received new legitimacy when its recognition by the Comintern arrived, albeit delivered from Tito’s KPJ headquarters. These advances and the uncompromising struggle against Italy, supported by an incipient iron discipline, enabled the CPA to gradually establish a near monopoly in the leadership of the NLF. Fearing Communist domination, several leading nationalists defected from the NLF. In collaboration with those who had remained unaligned, they formed Balli Kombëtar or the National Front, led by Mithat Frashëri, a veteran social activist. It was a fateful decision that doomed the nationalist cause, pushing them toward their eventual collaboration with the Axis forces. Balli assumed that nationalism was a sufficiently potent ideology for mass mobilization, but it proved no substitute for a coherent political program. Indeed, in its published tracts, Balli defined nationalism as a moral principle and rejected any effort to label itself a political organization. Balli’s political leadership never issued orders or directives for an all-​out fight against the Axis. As a result, the CPA-​led NLF continued to work its way into the national fabric, slowly building momentum and organizing a country-​wide mass movement. By mid-​1943, the CPA’s reorganization of the NLF had proceeded sufficiently to earn the trust of the British Special Operations Executive, who began to deliver the bulk of their assistance to the Communist Partisan units. On July 5–​10, 1943, the General Antifascist Council (GAC), the ruling body of the NLF met to found the regular National Liberation Army (NLA) and establish a General Staff, some nine months after the Yugoslav emissaries had suggested the idea. In order to manage a growing party membership, the CPA was forced to seek out political cadres possessing some formal education, often high school graduates. The newly formed Union of the Antifascist Youth (UAY) and the Union of the Antifascist Woman (UAW), two segments of the CPA’s support base were good recruiting grounds. Political classes were organized, consisting of crash courses on Marxism and the history of revolutionary struggles, after which they were quickly dispatched to the fighting units.

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An unintended, but eventually favorable consequence of further centralization was the defection of the monarchist faction within the NLF, its last splinter group. Rallying behind Abaz Kupi, a former gendarmerie major under Zogu and a senior member of the GAC, this faction split off in November 1943 and formed the Legality Movement. Like Balli before them, the defection of the monarchist faction was both a strategic and tactical error. Had Balli and the Legality Movement joined or remained in the NLF and pushed for more political representation within the NLF’s growing numbers, as the CPA did, then the postwar political map might have pulled Albania into the sort of civil war that ravaged Greece between 1946 and 1949. Instead, left with little support, dwindling recruits, and virtually no logistical base, the Legality Movement, like Balli, gravitated toward open collaboration with the German occupation that succeeded the Italian regime after its collapse in August 1943. Now unchallenged by factions within the NLF, the CPA went ahead on its own, consolidating its territorial fighting units into a disciplined army. The first unit was the First Shock Brigade formed on August 15, 1943, and composed of four rifle battalions for a total of 556 Partisans. Nearly one fifth of its complement consisted of former Italian soldiers organized into the Antonio Gramsci battalion. Mehmet Shehu, an aggressive commander and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, where he had led a battalion of the Twelfth International Garibaldi Brigade, was appointed its first commander. Imprisoned in France and Italy since 1939, Shehu returned to Albania in 1942 and quickly rose through the ranks. However, at this stage he was still comparatively junior to other military commanders, the former military students and cadres, members of the interwar Tiranë and Youth groups. His star rose only after mid-​1944, thanks in large part to his steadfast loyalty to Enver Hoxha and consolidated after the postwar purges had eliminated all other wartime senior leaders. The winter offensive of 1943–​4, a series of joint German and Balli operations intended to root out NLF resistance dealt heavy blows but failed to arrest its growth. On the contrary, these punitive expeditions only served to increase the NLF numbers with displaced persons who abandoned their burned-​out villages and joined Partisan ranks. Indeed, between October 1943 and March 1944, the NLF had consolidated four more brigades and formed cadre units for three more, which also included some 2,000 former Italian soldiers.Their small size of 500 to 600 men was not necessarily a drawback since the NLF strategy emphasized guerrilla warfare. By summer 1944, the First Brigade had doubled in size to about 1,000 Partisans. Other units followed similar patterns of expansion. By November, on the eve of liberation, the NLF had created 30 brigades grouped into eight divisions and three corps, supported by an administrative division of the country into 59 regional councils and no less than 72 separate territorial commands, managing their own territorial rear-​line units.The distinction between front-​and rear-​line was never clear-​ cut since both emerged from the same concepts of mobile hit-​and-​run tactics. Nonetheless, with the creation of a national army in the summer of 1944 included a rear-​line of units not directly engaged with the enemy but with the function of safeguarding the authority of the NLF in the so-​called “liberated” areas. They were also to furnish new troops and material resources to the brigades directly engaged with the enemy. The numbers fueling such growth did fall short of any modern military standards. Most divisions, for instance, averaged only about 2,000 to 2,500 Partisans, growing to about 3,500 after the liberation on November 29, 1944. By the end of the war in November 1944, the CPA-​led NLF had successfully penetrated most, if not all, levels of Albanian society and established an administrative apparatus that governed the territories it controlled. It commanded an army of some 35,000, with thousands more in logistical and administrative support functions. The CPA’s own membership had now grown to about 2,500, nearly a twelvefold increase from the approximate 200 that existed prior

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to the party’s founding in November 1941. The CPA’s authority was more entrenched in the lowlands and rural uplands of southern and central Albania, and the urban areas in the west of the country. The mountainous north, inhabited by the autonomous clan families, resisted their encroachments until autumn 1944 and came under Communist control only after the Germans evacuated Albania at the end of November 1944. The CPA and the NLF, including its subordinate bodies like the National Liberation Council, a 121-​member legislative body modeled after the Yugoslav AVNOJ, had meanwhile become virtually indistinguishable from one another. This enabled the CPA to hold back initially from calling themselves a Communist regime. Indeed, well after the war the phrase “party directives” or the word “party” were rarely heard. Every piece of legislation or directive bore the stamp of the “Front,” itself signifying national unity above any political affiliation. This was, of course, to the CPA’s benefit. Having been formed as an underground organization during the war, the CPA found itself to be still an underground and thus an illegal political entity after the war. It could not, therefore, compete in national elections nor could it pass legislation. Although there was never any doubt where real power lay, this situation lasted until December 1945, 13 months after the liberation. Then the National Assembly approved Law No. 370 concerning the founding of political parties, associations, and organizations. It allowed the CPA to become a legal organization, whereupon the founding of the party was officially backdated to November 8, 1941, the start of a week-​long meeting with the Yugoslav Communist representatives. In a broader perspective, however, the Yugoslav presence and assistance in the founding of the CPA were less important in its coming to power in 1944 than the wider wartime mobilization including non-​communist nationalists under the NLF. And behind that mobilization, in larger numbers and more widely spread than previously acknowledged, was the prewar experience of the various left-​wing political associations and groups although they had not formed political parties. With its ideological binding and its Soviet-​style organization, the CPA could now proceed without opposition to consolidate political power and promise a better postwar economic and social order.

Selected Readings Fevziu, Blendi. Enver Hoxha:  The Iron Fist of Albania. Translated by Majlinda Nishku. London and New York, 2016. Fischer, Bernd J. Albania at War, 1939–​1945. West Lafayette, Ind., 1999. Neuwirth, Hubert. Widerstand und Kollaboration in Albanien 1939–​1944. Wiesbaden,  2008. Pearson, Owen. Albania in the Twentieth Century: Albania in Occupation and War. From Fascism to Communism, 1940–​1945. London, 2004. Roselli, Alessandro. Italy and Albania: Financial Relations in the Fascist Period. London, 2006. Smiley, David. Albanian Assignment. London, 1984.

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37 ROMANIA IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR Vladimir Solonari

Reorientation to Berlin, 1939–​1940 Romanian foreign policy in the first phase of the war (September 1, 1939 to May 10, 1940) was guided by the government’s determination to resist claims of the country’s revisionist neighbors  –​the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Bulgaria  –​and preserve its territorial integrity while avoiding being drawn into the war. King Carol II, wielding final authority in foreign policy, continued a strategy of balancing between Western powers, France and Britain, Romania’s traditional allies, on the one hand, and Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, on the other. After French and British effectively betrayed Czechoslovakia in Munich in late September 1938 by agreeing to transfer a part of that country’s national territory to Hitler’s Germany, the futility of relying on their support in case Romania would come under attack from without had become painfully clear. The King and his entourage reasoned that it was high time for a rapprochement with Germany, in the hope of earning Hitler’s benevolence and thus discourage Romania’s neighbors from attacking it. Besides, the Romanian economy could indeed benefit from closer ties with Germany, which was seeking to extend its “economic space” through a system of clearing agreements with the Central and East European countries. These arrangements could simultaneously open up the German market for Romanian agricultural goods and raw materials, including oil to which the Germans showed increasing interests in view of their heightened preparations for a new war, in exchange of deliveries of German industrial products. By signing such an agreement on March 23, 1939, the government of Armand Călinescu signaled Bucharest’s readiness to adjust his country’s policy to the post-​Munich world. Simultaneously, however, Romanians secretly requested, and received, on April 13, British and French guarantees of Romania’s borders. Romania’s strategic position deteriorated sharply with the signing of the German-​Soviet non-​aggression pact in late August 1939.The royal government tried unsuccessfully to persuade Berlin that their main priority would now be improving relations with Germany. However, on September 21, 1939, the Iron Guard of the pro-​fascist Legion of Archangel Michael assassinated Prime Minister Armand Călinescu. They held him responsible for the assassination of their leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu in November 1938. King Carol responded by ordering the massacre of hundreds of imprisoned Legionaries, displaying their bodies in public spaces all over the country. Intended to demonstrate the King’s resolve to put down the Iron Guard, it also sent 373

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an anti-​German message since the Guard was staunchly pro-​Nazi. Only after German military triumphs in Belgium and northern France in May 1940 did Carol decide to take further steps toward Berlin. On June 1, 1940, he replaced his moderately pro-​Western Foreign Minister Grigore Gafencu with a wealthy industrialist with pro-​Germany sympathies, Ion Gigurtu. He also agreed to sign an “oil treaty” with Germany thus committing Romania to oil deliveries at low, fixed prices in exchange for military equipment. From the German perspective, however, it was too little too late. When on June 26, 1940, the Soviets presented an ultimatum to Romania demanding immediate cession of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, the Germans “advised” Romanians to concede. Bessarabia’s cession had already been agreed in the secret protocol to the Nazi-​Soviet pact. As to Bukovina, which unlike Bessarabia had never been part of Tsarist Russia, it had not been a subject of the German-Soviet agreement yet, and the Germans demanded that the Soviets limit their claim to the northern part of the province with a predominantly ethnic Ukrainian population. On June 27, the Hungarian and Bulgarian governments signaled their intention to press their claims over Transylvania and Dobrogea (Dobrudja in Bulgarian). It was assumed in Bucharest that the Germans were supporting their demands as well.

Territorial losses of 1940 and the new regime On June 28, 1940, the Romanian government acceded to the Soviets’ ultimatum. In the chaotic and humiliating withdrawal from the eastern provinces, Soviet troops intent on disarming retreating Romanian soldiers, in spite of an agreement to the contrary, also incited local Russians to attack and plunder Romanian columns. With the disaster unfolding in the east, Carol abandoned his wait-​and-​see policy and proceeded radically reforming his regime in order to align more closely it with the Nazi model. On July 3, he created a new government headed again by Ion Gigurtu but now including known Nazi sympathizers, such as Mihail Manoilescu as foreign minister, Horia Sima as minister of culture, and Nichifor Crainic as minister of propaganda. The new government defined its foreign policy creed as “sincere integration in the system created by Berlin-​Rome axis.” Romania “renounced” the British guarantee of April 1939 and left the League of Nations. On August 8, the new government issued two antisemitic law-​decrees based on the Nazi Nuremberg Laws of 1935.They redefined the nature of the Romanian state as founded “on the biological concept of the Nation” as a “community of blood.” These efforts did not change Hitler’s resolve to “solve” the Transylvanian and Dobrogean “questions” at the expense of Romania and in favor of Germany’s allies in the First World War, Hungary and Bulgaria. On August 30, 1941, the German and Italian Foreign Ministers, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Count Galeazzo Ciano, met in Vienna and “awarded” northern Transylvania to Hungary. They forced the Romanians, under the threat of attack, to agree to this decision. On September 7, Romania agreed, under strong German pressure, to cede southern Dobrogea to Bulgaria under the Treaty of Craiova. Taken together, the territorial losses of the summer of 1940 amounted to one third of Greater Romania’s territory and 6 million people, or one third of its population. Both in Bessarabia and in northern Transylvania ethnic Romanians comprised a majority; in northern Bukovina and southern Dobrogea they were a substantial minority. Romanians felt wronged and humiliated. The unpopular king was an immediate target of public anger. Massive anti-​government demonstrations were organized by the Legionaries, now released from prison thanks to Carol’s approaches to the Germans. They faced limited restraint from the police. Encouraged by the Germanophiles in his own entourage, Carol 374

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turned to army Major General Ion Antonescu, who had openly protested against the violent repression of the Legionaries and had been interned in the Bistriţa monastery in July 1940 as punishment for his widely circulated memorandum protesting the territorial concessions. Held in high regard by the Iron Guard, he apparently offered a last chance for Carol to repair his relations with the Legion. Carol II released Antonescu on September 1, and immediately offered him the premiership in exchange for a commitment to his throne. The Legionaries only intensified their violent protests, secretly encouraged to do so by Antonescu. The next day he pressured the King to grant him full power in order, as he claimed, to save the King’s throne and life. Antonescu immediately put his own people in charge of the army and police and on September 3 demanded Carol’s abdication, in exchange for his safe passage from the country. Having no allies to turn to, Carol abdicated in favor of his son Prince Mihai and immediately left Romania in a special train, carrying numerous valuables that he had amassed during his reign. Antonescu owned his meteoric rise from disgraced outsider to a fully-​fledged dictator to German diplomatic pressure exercised on Carol in the fateful summer days of 1940. During the secret negotiations Antonescu conducted at the time with the German emissaries, he fully committed himself to implementing the Vienna accord and making Romania a loyal ally of Germany. These commitments reflected a reversal for Antonescu, who in the interwar period staunchly supported a pro-​Western position as the only way to preserve the territorial integrity of Greater Romania. Germany’s stunning triumph over France in the summer of 1940 persuaded him that it had effectively won the war and that from now on the only option for Romania would be closely allying itself with the master of the European continent. Another commitment made by the general during those secret negotiations was to share power with the Legionaries, whom the Germans still considered their most reliable allies in Romania. As proclaimed by royal decree on September 14, 1940, the new regime was to be called the National Legionary State. Ion Antonescu became head of state with the title of Conducător (or Leader, a Romanian translation of the German Führer) and with full legislative and executive powers. Horia Sima became his deputy without portfolio and five other ministries of nineteen were given to Legionaries, including foreign and internal affairs. Other ministries were to be led by military generals devoted to Antonescu and “technical specialists,” some of whom had served under Carol. From the beginning, the regime was fraught with tension between the Conducător and the Legionaries. Although Antonescu, a hard-​core nationalist, shared the Legion’s xenophobia, antisemitism, and extreme nationalism, he distrusted their leaders as inexperienced and ambitious dilettantes, whose heads were filled with dangerous and unworkable ideas.While committed to the same vision of complete ethnic “purification” and “homogenization” of Romania, Antonescu was horrified by the violent and disorderly methods by which the Legionaries were pursuing their goals without regard to economic and reputational costs to the country. Although determined to prosecute the former high officials responsible for extra-​legal persecution of Legionaries, Antonescu was still intended to conduct investigations and court hearings in compliance with the law. It was these disagreements that led to the major crisis in relations between the two allies. In the night of November 26–​27, 1940, Legionaries assassinated 64 of the arrested former officials held in Jilava prison, including a former prime minister, a minister of justice, and the head of the Special Service of Information. About half of the victims were shot in mistaken identity. Then a legionary death squad assassinated the leading historian and former Prime Minister Nicolae Iorga and renowned economist Virgil Madgearu, both public enemies of the Iron Guard. Outraged, Antonescu demanded and obtained from Sima an order dissolving the Legionary Police, the paramilitary force responsible for these murders. The tension between 375

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the general and the Legionaries continued to grow. On January 20, 1941, Antonescu accused the Legion’s minister of internal affairs of incompetence and dismissed him. In response, the Legionaries revolted, attempting to seize power and oust Antonescu by force of arms. Yet, the army remained loyal to the Conducător and crucially, by this time Hitler switched his sympathy from the Iron Guard and its dangerous “fanatics” to Antonescu as better equipped to commit Romania’s resources to the service of the Third Reich. The rebellion lasted only through the morning of January 23, when the army intervened. According to official figures, 21 soldiers and 374 civilians were killed. Many more were wounded, and the real numbers were reportedly higher.Victims included many Jews in Bucharest, assaulted and robbed by the Legionaries. By royal decree of February 14, 1941, the National Legionary State was abolished and all political activity was prohibited. From that moment on, Ion Antonescu was the sole ruler.While several leaders of the Iron Guard managed to escape to Germany, lower-​ranking participants in the rebellion were prosecuted, some of them executed. Legionaries would remain the most closely monitored by the police political movement, and their activities, unlike that of the traditional National Peasants’ and National Liberal parties’, were suppressed. Antonescu saw himself as a savior of the nation, first from Carol, then from Legionaries, but he had only a vague idea of what he wanted to accomplish. Nevertheless, one can discern two major aims of his. The first was restoration of the interwar borders of Greater Romania. The alliance with Nazi Germany was supposed to serve as the main means to that end. By fighting alongside Wehrmacht against the Soviet Army, Romanian troops were to recover Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. By demonstrating Romania’s complete loyalty to Hitler’s regime, Antonescu hoped to persuade him to return northern Transylvania after the war. Internally, Antonescu’s priority was ethnic homogenization, either by outright expulsion of the most vulnerable minorities, such as Jews and Roma, or by the exchange of Hungarians and Bulgarians for ethnic Romanians who resided there.

Romania’s parallel war against the Soviet Union On June 22, 1941, Romania joined Germany in her attack on the Soviet Union in its own “parallel” war. In reality, they were in a subordinate position to their powerful ally. Initially the war was popular, as public opinion was united in its indignation over the Soviets’ annexation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Following a strategic German breakthrough in northern Bessarabia on July 3, the flanking Romanian Third and Forth Armies joined in expelling Soviet forces from Bessarabia by the end of the month. The country went euphoric, and Antonescu used the occasion to promote himself to the rank of Marshal on August 22. However, once Romanian troops crossed the Dniester River, the de-​facto border with the Soviet Union in the interwar period, many Romanians began to doubt the war’s wisdom. Pro-​Western political leaders, in particular those grouped around Iuliu Maniu, expressed their opposition to sending Romanian troops further to the east. The Conducător was however determined to continue fighting alongside Germany through the final victory over the Soviets. From August to mid-​October 1941, the bulk of Romanian forces besieged and assaulted Odessa, a major fortified Soviet naval base at the Black Sea. Antonescu’s ambition was to capture the city without German participation but this proved impossible. To their chagrin, Romanians had to request German air support but it was of little help. Nor did sacking of the commander of the Fourth Army for “lacking combative spirit” lead to success. The Soviets finally evacuated the city on October 16, but only to redeploy troops to the Crimean Peninsula where the German offensive was unfolding. Over-​blown celebrations of the city’s capture could not conceal the mediocre performance of the Romanian troops, the Conducător’s poor judgment, and 376

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the enormous number of casualties, of whom 17,891 were dead, in an operation whose necessity was doubtful from the beginning. Romania’s continuous further involvement in the war on the side of Nazi Germany brought it into conflict with the Western powers. On December 7, Britain declared war on Romania, and five days later, under German pressure, Romania declared war on the United States. In an exchange of letters with Hitler, Antonescu committed himself to sending additional troops, in strength of at least 10 divisions, possibly more, to help Germans achieve final victory in the east in the coming year. This decision prompted the resignation of Antonescu’s own chief of General Staff, who, in fact, reflected the views of many, if not the majority of top brass of Romania. In the ensuing months, the strength of Romanian troops engaged in the battles in the east would steadily grow to reach more than 463,000 by November 1942. Approximately 380,000 of them were deployed at the front and the rest in occupied territories. They participated in the battles in the Crimea, the Cuban region, and the Caucasus, and in the advance toward Stalingrad. Although their record was uneven, some of them, in particular the Mountain Corps in Crimea earned respect of the German commanders. Nevertheless, relations between German and Romanian troops were often tense. Romanian rear services depended on the Germans for the supply of materiel and provisions, a low priority for the Germans. Nor could Germany deliver promised ammunition since her industry faced difficulty providing for the needs of the Wehrmacht. The reckoning came in November 1942 at Stalingrad, when the Soviets launched their pincer operation on the Romanian and Hungarian troops deployed on the flanks of the German Sixth Army. The Soviet counter-​offensive overwhelmed the Romanians, who had long before warned the German command about their deteriorating conditions and retreated in disarray. Lacking German assistance in transport, they were easy prey to the advancing Soviets. From mid-​November 1942 to mid-​March 1943, the Romanians lost 181,441 men, of whom 15,566 killed, 67,183 wounded, and 98,692 missing. Following this disaster, the Romanians withdrew most of their units back into the country, but seven Romanian divisions numbering 66,000 men were still deployed in the Crimea. (The Romanians had been fighting partisans there since its conquest in the summer of 1942.) Again ignoring Romanian advice, Hitler was determined to keep the Peninsula at any price. Its evacuation started only after another Soviet offensive began on April 8, 1944. By that time, Romania had itself fallen under Soviet attack. On March 5, 1944, the Soviet Second and Third Ukrainian fronts launched an offensive that pushed German and Romanians troops from Ukrainian territory, cleared northern Bukovina and Bessarabia and occupied part of southern Bukovina. When in mid-​April 1944 the front stabilized, Ion Antonescu was still determined to defend the country, in spite of the rapidly deteriorating situation. On August 20, 1944, the Soviet troops resumed their offensive and by the end of the next day they had overwhelmed the German-​Romanian defensive positions. Romanian morale plummeted and their troops offered considerably weaker resistance to the Soviets than the Germans. When on August 22, Ion Antonescu visited the front, he immediately realized that all hope was lost but still refused to surrender. On August 23, he was deposed in a palace coup and arrested on the orders of King Mihai. Romania switched sides in the war. Romanian losses on the eastern front were estimated as 71,585 dead, 243,622 wounded and sick, 309,330 missing –​a staggering total of 624,540 casualties. The civilian population suffered as well from American and British air raids starting in April 1944, first bombing Bucharest and then Ploeşti and other cities. These raids, carried out from the airfields in newly liberated south Italy, were much more damaging to the Romanian oil industry and cities than earlier raids on the oil fields in 1942 and 1943, causing severe deterioration of populations’ morale. 377

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From October 1941 through January 1944, Romania occupied and administered a part of southwestern Ukraine between the Dniester and the southern Southern Buh Rivers with the center in Odessa. A territory of about 40,000 square kilometers and 2.4 million inhabitants, it was called by Romanians “Transnistria,” meaning “Beyond the Dniester River.” Although the government planned to annex Transnistria, they refrained from declaring as much for fear of giving the impression that this might be taken as compensation for the loss of northern Transylvania, whose return remained the foreign policy priority of the government. Subject to the regime of military occupation, Transnistria was used as a source of cheap food supplies for the troops and as a dumping ground for ethnic undesirables from Romania, namely Jews and Roma. The relations with the local non-​Jewish population were initially amicable but steadily deteriorated as the population became aware of the Romanian plunder of the region’s productive assets. Although Romanians succeeded in suppressing guerrilla groups created by the retreating Soviets, pro-​Soviet armed resistance revived by the end of Romanian occupation and attacked its retreating administration and forces.

The persecution of Jews and Roma The Antonescu regime committed heinous crimes against humanity, making Romanian second only to Nazi Germany in the number of its Jewish victims, estimated from 280,000 to 380,000. At the same time, the great majority of Jews of southern Transylvania and Romania proper, some 375,000, survived the war. Even though harassed, discriminated against, and subject to confiscatory taxes and expropriations, the Romanian government refused to hand them over to the Germans for extermination in the summer and fall of 1942. The government’s contradictory impulses ranged from visceral hatred of Jews to what Radu Ioanid dabbed “pangs of patriarchal generosity.” The pace of the policy was also different from the German radicalization from the summer of 1941 onwards, which went from selective killing of Jewish elites to complete annihilations of all European Jews. In contrast to the rising German trajectory of persecution, Romanian atrocities reached their climax in the summer and fall of 1941 in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina and continued in occupied Transnistria from October 1941 through April 1942, after which their intensity declined. Several massacres also took place there in the summer of 1942 but after that, the killings stopped.The survival rate of Jews in Transnistria was several times higher than in the neighboring German-​occupied Ukraine. Romanian atrocities included mass executions of Jewish civilians. Others died from forced deportation accompanied by the killing of the sick and elderly who were unable to keep pace with the rest of the column, internment in overcrowded ghettoes and concentration camps where exposure to epidemics, cold, and famine took their toll, as did overwork. Ion Antonescu and his high command either ordered the abuses or looked the other way when they were committed by lower-​ranking officials. The Conducător went to great lengths to conceal his personal involvement, making sure that all incriminating orders were either issued orally only or any paper trail destroyed. Among the worst atrocities against Jews were the pogrom in Iaşi on June 29–​30, 1941, with subsequent “death trains” carrying local Jews from the city. Taken together, the slaughter in the city and violent death in the trains cost about 13,000 lives, possibly more. Questions remain as to whether the government planned and prepared the pogrom or was overtaken by the disorderly violence which it further exacerbated by its own provocative orders prompted by false reports of a Jewish “rebellion.” Just a few days later, Ion Antonescu, acting through his Deputy Minister of the Interior, organized a campaign of mass murder in Jews in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in July–​August 1941, internment of survivors in concentration camps 378

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and ghettoes, and their subsequent deportation in September–​November 1941 to Transnistria. These “operations” killed 45,000 to 60,000 more Jews. Following Soviet guerrillas’ terrorist bombing in Odessa in October, which killed dozens of Romanians and German military officers, Romanian army units carried out a series of barbaric reprisals that killed about 25,000 Jews. From late December 1941 and through the rest of the winter and early spring of 1942, Romanian forces murdered around 80,000 Jews in the gigantic concentration camps in Bogdanovca and Dumanevca on the Southern Bug River. Finally, during winter and spring 1942, militia of ethnic Germans from Transnistria murdered with Romanian approval up to 35,000 Jews deported from Odessa in January 1942. Still, there does not appear to have been a plan of murdering all Jews, either in Transnistria or even less in Romania. Having tentatively agreed to German deporting of Romanian Jews to the Bełzec death camp in July 1942, Romanian authorities procrastinated and eventually suspended their agreement in October. By 1943, as German war fortunes declined, all further deportations were terminated as bargaining began with the Western allies. Between June and September 1942, Romania deported into Transnistria from 20,000 to 25,000 Roma, on the grounds of either being nomadic or for having a criminal record or presumed as a criminal for having no identifiable means of support. Their deportation was intended to rid the country of the perceived “parasites” whose unhygienic way of life was believed of spreading contagious diseases and whose “inter-​ breeding” with lower-​ class Romanians was said to lower the “biological worth” of the Romanian nation. About half of the deportees, including families of frontline Romanian soldiers, perished in Transnistria due to the lack of food and indifference to their plight on the part of the occupying administration and the local population. Antonescu’s government considered the Hungarian and Bulgarian minorities as under the protection of these neighboring states. He nonetheless issued covert orders to discriminate against them and encourage their departure. He foresaw their postwar replacement with all ethnic Romanians from the prewar territory of the two countries.These plans were abandoned by 1943 as the war turned against Romania. There were no such plans for the large German minority, which received privileged status making them a state within the state.

From German economic “cooperation” to switching sides With Romania’s entry into the war with Nazi Germany, its dependence on the German economy increased since all other markets for Romanian goods and necessary imports had disappeared. Nevertheless, Ion Antonescu resisted German attempts to take over the Romanian oil industry and to dominate other strategic sectors of the economy. The fact that Germany needed Romanian oil and food deliveries no less than Romania needed German machinery and military material boosted Antonescu’s bargaining power although an implicit threat of German occupation circumscribed his room for maneuver. In January 1943, he obtained Hitler’s renewed commitment to re-​equip the Romanian army and to ship 30 tons of gold to the coffers of the Romanian National Bank as a security deposit.While almost all oil extracted in Romania was delivered to Germany, the food supply of Romanians was prioritized over deliveries to Germany. While the 1941 and 1942 harvests were poor, food requisitioned from occupied Transnistria helped preserve an adequate level of consumption in Romania until a bumper harvest in 1943 further improved the situation. However, as German industrial capacity declined under Allied bombing while the Wehrmacht demand for munitions grew, Germany flatly refused in early 1944 to promise the fulfillment of their delivery commitments. However, they demanded an increase in Romanian shipments of food and raw materials.Tense 379

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trade negotiations ended in the signing of a new convention which was never fulfilled by either side. Already in the late spring of 1942, Mihai Antonescu, a distant relative, erstwhile lawyer and a trusted lieutenant of the Conducător, acting as vice chairman of the council of ministers and minister of foreign affairs, concluded that the war was unlikely to end in complete victory for Germany. Romania needed therefore to rebuild its relations with Western powers in anticipation of a negotiated peace in which Bucharest would need their support in territorial disputes with its neighbors. After the debacle at Stalingrad, he concluded that Romania was likely to experience the full force of a Soviet attack and occupation unless it could exit the war. In the first seven months of 1943, Romanian diplomats sought an opportunity to exit the war together with Hungary and Italy. The ongoing dispute over Transylvania prevented them from reaching an agreement with Hungary, while Mussolini’s stubborn refusal to face the hopelessness of his position precluded an agreement with him. Starting from late 1942, Iuliu Maniu and Constantin Brătianu, leaders of the two main opposition parties, the National Peasants’ and the National Liberals, tried to establish contact with the Western powers. They hoped to impress on them Romania’s strong desire to exit the war provided the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity could be guaranteed. The hard answers they received made it clear that the Romanians would have to negotiate directly with the Soviets. This, however, Maniu and Brătianu, representing the common opinion of Romanian elites, were loath to do. Nor would they be able to persuade Antonescu to pull the country out of the war, although he counseled Hitler to sign a separate peace with Western powers. He was convinced, correctly, that any attempt by Romania to act on its own would result in German occupation. At the turn of 1943/​4, Mihai Antonescu initiated discussions with the Soviets through the Romanian Ambassador in Stockholm but then abruptly terminated them still hoping for a separate agreement with the Western powers. It was only in February 1944 that a representative of the pro-​Western opposition in Romania, Prince Barbu Ştirbei, was dispatched, with tacit approval of the government, to conduct negotiations with the Allies in Cairo. There, he conveyed the Romanian elites’ common desire to take the country out of the war provided the Western Allies would undertake to protect it from German and Soviet occupation. Neither the British nor the Americans were ready to commit themselves and directed the Romanians back to direct negotiations with the Soviets. On April 12, 1944, the Soviets handed their armistice conditions to the Romanian ambassador in Istanbul. They required Romania’s immediately joining the Allied war efforts against Germany, restoration of the June 22, 1941 border with the Soviet Union, and payment of reparations. The immediate demands were the unimpeded movement of Soviet troops through Romanian territory and the release of Allied prisoners of war. In return, Soviets promised their support for the return of northern Transylvania to Romania. Facing the Antonescus’ stubborn refusal to accept the inevitable, Maniu and Brătianu signed an agreement with the Social Democrats and the Communists, forming what became to be known as the National Democratic Bloc. It aimed at securing Romania’s break with Nazi Germany, the overthrow of Antonescu’s regime and the reestablishment of democracy. Swift developments on the battlefront in the summer of 1944 forced them and the King, who took their side, to act earlier than they anticipated. In the afternoon of August 23, 1944, the King summoned Ion and Mihai Antonescu to the palace and demanded immediate acceptance of the armistice. When they refused, he ordered their arrest along with their ministers and announced to the country Romania’s exit from the war. Proclaiming the restoration of democracy, he formed a new government under the general commanding his royal guard. The new government included leaders of parties that were members of the National Democratic Bloc as 380

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ministers without portfolio. The King addressed the nation announcing the formation of the new government and the end of resistance to the Soviet Army and the Allies in general. He requested that the Wehrmacht leave the country peacefully, but since Hitler, incensed by the Romanians’ “betrayal,” had ordered German troops deployed around Bucharest to occupy the capital, the government ordered the army to turn its weapons against their former ally. The troops followed the King’s order without hesitation and by September 7, 1944, Romanian territory was cleared of German troops. After Romania declared war on Germany on August 24, 1944, 12 to 14 Romanian divisions, about half a million men, went on to fight side by side with the Soviet Army against German troops. From September 7, they were subordinated to the command of the Soviet Second Ukrainian Front.These Romanian divisions fought for the liberation of northern Transylvania –​ accomplished by October 25 –​and later in Hungary, Slovakia, Bohemia, and Austria. They lost 21,035 dead, 90,344 wounded and sick, and 58,443 missing in action, which, given its shorter duration was a considerably higher casualty rate than on the eastern front. Crucial for the shortening of the war was termination of Romanian oil deliveries to Germany that deprived the Wehrmacht of much-​needed fuel. In addition, the Soviet troops were spared fighting for the control of Romanian territory and were able to move more quickly into the Balkans and Central Europe.

Soviet occupation and establishment of the Communist regime The fate of postwar Romania was decided when Churchill agreed to leave it in the future Soviet sphere of influence in the so-​called percentages agreement with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944. With Romanian territory occupied by the Soviet Army and the Allies still focused on winning the war as soon as possible, Romania was left at the disposition of the Soviets. On September 12, the new government signed an armistice with the USSR, essentially confirming all the conditions first laid down in the Soviet armistice offer of April 12, 1944. An Allied Controlled Commission for Romania was created shortly afterwards, but its Anglo-​American members had little influence over its Soviet leadership. Despite the losses that the Romanian army was taking in supporting the advance of the Soviet Army, Soviet representatives demanded and obtained a drastic reduction in the Romanian troops within the country and in the police and the gendarmerie forces. Simultaneously, the Romanian Communist leaders, who had spent the war years in prison or in exile in Moscow, launched an anti-​government campaign accusing the National Democratic Bloc government of a lack of determination in prosecuting war criminals and sympathy for “reactionaries.” A party with very limited social support numbering about 1,000 members at the end of the Antonescu era, the Communists profited from the massive influx of opportunists of all sorts, as they were the one trusted ally of the true masters of the country, the Soviet Union. Forming an alliance with other leftist parties including the Social Democrats, the Plowmen’s Front, and the Union of Hungarian Workers of Romania, they soon demanded the “reorganization” of the government under the leadership of Petru Groza, head of the Plowmen’s Front and a devoted Soviet sympathizer. The King, supported by National Peasants and National Liberals, who were by far the most popular political parties in the country, resisted Communist pressure. Though twice reorganized in order to give greater representation to the Communists and their allies, neither of the reshuffled governments satisfied the Communists or the Soviets. On March 6, 1945, the Soviet emissary to Romania, Andrei Vyshinskii, served the King with an ultimatum demanding immediate appointment of Groza as prime minister or see a full Soviet occupation

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of Romania. King Mihai reluctantly agreed.The next day Groza government was sworn in, and the Communist era began. In the new government, the Communists held the two most powerful positions, minister of the interior and minister of justice. These positions allowed them to control local administration through the appointment of prefects, and to intimidate, arrest, and imprison their opponents on unproven charges. They pressured the government to implement radical land reform that provided for expropriation of landholdings larger than 50 hectares and was intended to increase support for the Communists among peasants. The nationalization of banks and big industrial enterprises marked the beginning of the transformation of the national economy according to the Soviet model. However, through the fall of 1947, when Stalin would turn decisively toward confrontation with the Western Allies, the Kremlin still considered it advisable to make token concessions to the West. Since Great Britain and United States refused to recognize the Groza government, the Soviets agreed to include in it representatives of the National Peasants and National Liberals in December 1945. The new government was announced on February 4, 1946, but the newly appointed ministers proved powerless to change the reality of Communist domination. The elections of November 1946 were carried out in an atmosphere of violence and intimidation.The massive ballot-box stuffing ensured a crushing victory for the Communist-​controlled Bloc of Democratic Parties. On February 10, 1947, the Romanian delegation signed a peace treaty with Allied representatives in Paris that established Romania’s post-war borders. Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were ceded to the Soviet Union, southern Dobrogea remained with Bulgaria but northern Transylvania was returned to Romania.

Selected Readings Ancel, Jean. The History of the Holocaust in Romania, eds. Leon Volovici and Miriam Caloianu, transl.Yaffah Murciano. Lincoln, Neb., 2011. Axworthy, Mark. Third Axis, Fourth Ally:  Romanian Armed Forces in the European War, 1941–​ 1945. London, 1995. Balta, Sebastian. Rumänien und die Großmächte in der Ära Antonescu (1940–​1944). Stuttgart, 2005. Deletant, Dennis. Hitler’s Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and His Regime, Romania 1940–​1944. Basingstoke,  2006. Deletant, Dennis. Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration. New York, 2018. Giurescu, Dinu C. Romania in the Second World War (1939–​1945). Boulder, Colo., 2000. Glass, Hildrun, Deutschland und die Verfolgung der Juden im rumänischen Machtbereich. Munich, 2014. Heinen, Armin. Rumänien, der Holocaust und die Logik der Gewalt. Munich, 2007. Solonari,Vladimir. A Satellite Empire: Romanian Rule in Southwestern Ukraine, 1941–​1944. Ithaca, NY, 2019.

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38 THE USTAŠA REGIME AND THE POLITICS OF TERROR IN THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA, 1941–​1 945 Rory Yeomans

The Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH), established on April 10, 1941, by the fascist Ustaša Croatian liberation movement (Ustaša hrvatski oslobodilački pokret), popularly called the Ustaša movement (Ustaški pokret), is chiefly known for two things:  the brutal and sanguinary nature of its rule and the campaign of genocide it waged against minorities –​primarily the indigenous Serb population as well as the state’s Jews and Roma. Racial politics and the “resolution of the Serb and Jewish questions” were at the center of the life of the state and almost every aspect of national life, including cultural politics, the social system, and economics was either informed by or directed toward these goals. The Ustaša leadership, state planners, and the majority of party theoreticians believed that a viable Croatian state could only be realized with the eradication of the Serbs. Paradoxically, however, the campaigns of mass killing, deportation, forced assimilation and incarceration in concentration camps greatly contributed to the instability and ultimate destruction of the state. The spontaneous armed rebellion among Serbs as a reaction to the genocide would form the core of the Partisan uprising against the new state in which increasing numbers of Croats also participated, leading to the overthrow of the Ustaša movement and the collapse of its state.

The origins of the Ustaša movement The Ustaša movement was formed sometime in the early 1930s as the Ustaša–​Croatian revolutionary organization (Ustaša hrvatska revolucionarna organizacija, UHRO) by Ante Pavelić, a lawyer and member of the Yugoslav parliament for the radical nationalist Croatian Party of Right (Hrvatska stranka prava, HSP) and the HSP journalist Gustav Perčec. The organization. which established a series of terrorist training camps, mainly in Italy, was committed to the “liberation” of Croatia from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the founding of a greater Croatia comprising Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Srijem as a minimum. The name of the organization and its members –​Ustaša (plural Ustaše) –​derived from the Serbo-​Croatian word for a rebel. 383

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The Ustaša leadership and its base remained in Italy, enjoying the support of Mussolini’s regime. Only with the Cvetković-​Maček Agreement of August 1939 and its creation of an enlarged and internally autonomous Croatian banovina were some 200 members, not the leadership, allowed to return. By 1940, they had recruited some 2,000 new members and attracted further support in opposition to the Agreement and its Croatian Ban (Governor), Ivan Subašić, who had served with the Serbian army on the Salonica Front during World War I. The Croatian Peasant Party (HSS), with its leader Vladko Maček as Deputy Prime Minister in the new Yugoslav government, now controlled and staffed the internal administration of the banovina. The HSS regime soon struggled with economic problems and increasing Communist agitation as well as the growing challenge of activism by Ustaše sympathisers. In response, in 1940 the authorities arrested and interned large numbers of Ustasha sympathisers. Into 1941, wider popular support for the Ustaše continued to grow particularly at Zagreb University, where separatist students echoed Nazi ideology and anti-​Semitism, as well as in the new Banovina territories with a mixed Croat-​Serb population. In March and April 1941, there followed in quick succession the Serbian military officers’ coup in Belgrade, the subsequent Axis invasion, and the rapid defeat of Yugoslavia’s army. First Maček and then the Hungarian regime refused the Nazi offer to form a new government for Croatia.The Ustaša leadership in Italy readily accepted and returned to Zagreb.

The new state, racial laws and the “Revolution of Blood” The Independent State of Croatia was officially declared on April 10, 1941, by Slavko Kvaternik, soon to become Croatia’s Supreme Commander of Armed Forces. A  few days later, Pavelić returned and as the head of the Ustaša movement declared himself Poglavnik (supreme leader) of the new state, formally swearing in his government. One of the first acts of the Ustaša movement after coming to power was the introduction of a series of racial laws targeting the state’s Jews and Roma. Before 1941, the Roma had hardly featured in Ustaša racial propaganda, but after the foundation of the new state, party newspapers began to associate the Roma with unclean habits, a nomadic lifestyle, and the bringing of criminality into the cities. Along with Jews, they were defined as a non-​Aryan people under the state’s racial legislation. The two main racial laws introduced in Croatia at the end of April 1941, the Legal Decree on Racial Affiliation and the Legal Decree on the Protection and Honor of the Aryan Blood of the Croat People were largely a copy of the Nuremberg laws, defining as Jewish and non-​Aryan anyone with three or more such grandparents (and in some cases with two grandparents), while Croat citizens with only one Jewish grandparent could obtain full Croatian citizenship. For Roma and Sinti, the laws were stricter still, defining as a Roma anyone who had at least two Roma grandparents. Actions against Jews took place almost the moment the new state was declared. On April 10–​11, 1941, a group of prominent Jews were arrested in Zagreb and held for ransom; the same happened in the town of Osijek on April 13, where the Ashkenazi synagogue and Jewish cemetery were burned down by Croatian and Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) mobs. Synagogues throughout the state were destroyed between 1941 and 1942, including the Sephardic Il Kal Grande synagogue in Sarajevo (which was destroyed by German soldiers and their Ustaša supporters soon after the former arrived in the city on April 15, 1941) and the synagogue in Zagreb, which was torn down on the orders of the Ustaša mayor, Ivan Werner. One of the first mass arrests of Jews took place at the beginning of May 1941, when 165 Jewish youths, many of whom were members of the Maccabi sports club, were arrested by the Ustaša police in Zagreb and sent to the Danica concentration camp in Koprivnica and from there to the Jadovno concentration camp in Gospić where all but three perished. In May and June of that year, the Ustaša 384

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authorities established camps for Jews who had come to Croatia as refugees in the late 1930s and early 1940s as well as for Jews from Bihać, Karlovac, Sarajevo,Varaždin, Bjelovar, and other cities. Some of these Jews, especially the refugees, were killed immediately but most, including large numbers of children, were deported to Jadovno where they were liquidated. Paradoxically, while the Serbs were not subject to racial laws, they were arguably the victims of the most severe repression in the state’s formative period.The terror against the Serbs quickly became a system in itself. Just a week after the establishment of the state, a law was issued creating legal grounds for the arrest, incarceration, and execution of prominent Serbs. The Legal Decree for the Defense of the State stipulated that anyone who had offended the “honor or vital interests of the Croat people or in any way endangers the survival of the Independent State of Croatia, even by attempt,” was considered guilty of high treason and could be sentenced to death. Most cases were tried by the new Extraordinary and Emergency People’s Courts and, later, Extraordinary Mobile Courts, many of which were presided over by Ustaša judges or else fanatical party activists. Those found guilty were, in the majority of cases, sentenced to death with the sentence having to be carried out no more than three hours after the verdict was passed. The courts did not exclusively punish Serbs: Jews and Roma were also subject to the court while Croats could likewise be brought before the courts for offenses ranging from procuring abortions to hoarding essential necessities. However, it was the Serbs who were the overwhelming target and they formed the vast majority of the victims. In the first few months of the state’s existence, Ustaša ministers and party leaders held a series of rallies in which they made direct threats against the Serbs. For example, Milovan Žanić, head of the legislative council, declared at a rally on June 6, 1941, that the Serbs had come to Croatia as “immigrants” and “spread like hedgehogs” and would now have to leave: This is a Croatian land and nobody else’s and there are no methods that we would not use to make this land truly Croatian and cleanse it of all Serbs who have endangered us for centuries and who would do so again at the first opportunity. At the same time, the first legislative measures for the mass expulsion of Serb civilians to Serbia were enacted. A  law, for example, ordered the deportation of Serb volunteers in World War I who had settled in Croatia after 1918 and the confiscation of their assets and farmsteads. In some regions such as Bosanska Krajina, Ustaša officials ordered the immediate expulsion of Serbs and Montenegrins even before this law was published, suggesting that a general plan to expel the Serbs had been agreed within the Ustaša movement before it came to power in 1941.

Economic destruction, mass deportations and the second wave of “cleansing” The Ustaša strategy toward Serbs, Jews, and Roma followed the pattern of most genocides: first, the victims were isolated, then stripped of all means of an independent existence and finally “ethnically cleansed” or, more often, murdered. One of the first acts in this general policy was the series of orders published by the Directorate of the Ustaša police in Zagreb and by regional Ustaša police chiefs in other cities ordering Serbs and Jews to move into particular parts of the city. They were also subject to strict curfews and regulations about where and when they could shop or be outside. While ordinary Croats were similarly placed under restrictions on the hours they could be outside, the curfews and ghettoization of Serbs and Jews was aimed at separating them from the wider Croat population and were accompanied by various attempts to prevent Serbs, Jews, and Croats from interacting. 385

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In addition, the Ustaša authorities introduced economic measures to impoverish the Serb and Jewish communities. Following the establishment of the new state, almost all Jewish and Serb employees were dismissed from their positions in the police, bureaucracy, commerce, and education. Essential branches of state employment such as medicine and the judiciary were required to produce lists of all Serb and Jewish employees to the Ministry of the Interior for dismissal. Given the shortage in expertise that the medical profession, in particular, faced, this did not always happen in practice and some Serbs and Jews were able to keep their positions. Destitute and on the edge of starvation, some middle-​class and professional Serbs applied for permission to “emigrate” to occupied Serbia, as part of which they had to sign a release form renouncing in perpetuity their Croatian citizenship and any claim to their former assets. This was an option open to few Jews. Some who sensed the danger immediately managed to escape to the Italian-​occupied Adriatic Coast and from there to Italy, but most waited, trying to survive somehow and hoping declarations of loyalty might save them from persecution. The mass confiscations and dismissals were a predominantly urban process. In the countryside, local “wild” Ustaša militias along with student and police militias sent directly from Zagreb, carried out a program of “cleansing” against the Serb population and sometimes also Jews. In many cases, a pretext of rebellion was invented for the mass arrest of Serb men who would then be driven in trucks to the edge of open-​karst pits where they would be murdered with axes, hammers, and knives and thrown in. Often, this was accompanied by the destruction of Orthodox churches, Serb and Yugoslav monuments, and community buildings. While the first to be arrested and killed were the local intelligentsia or all adult Serb males in a particular area, increasingly women, children and old people were massacred, especially in cases where the adult males had fled to the woods. A particular feature of the killings was their sanguinary and ritualistic nature. The victims were usually brutally tortured before being murdered and their exhumed bodies were frequently found mutilated, with body parts missing, defaced, and castrated. This period of mass killing in the countryside coincided with the beginnings of a cult of martyrdom of fallen Ustaša members and was referred to by Ustaša ideologues as “the Revolution of Blood.” One of the immediate impacts of the massacres in the countryside was the emergence of an armed Serb insurgency. This began on a small scale but quickly spread and, under the leadership of Communist activists, soon took on the character of a mass uprising. By the late summer, large parts of the countryside were already outside the control of the Ustaša authorities. Commanders of the regular Croatian army, the Domobrans, as well as some Ustaša officials complained about the indiscriminate massacres of the militias. At the end of June 1941, Pavelić, called an urgent meeting of all regional Ustaša leaders in Zagreb. He chastised them for allowing militias to create chaos in the countryside, criticized them for going further than their orders and complained that while the aims of the militias were also those of the state, there had to be “an order” to the cleansings. Overnight, he called a halt to the massacres and ordered militias to cease their actions; there were even a few prosecutions of militia men who had committed particularly egregious atrocities through the Ustaša disciplinary and criminal court. They then became scapegoats for the crimes of the movement and the state. The talk with regional leaders also announced the beginning of a new policy which aimed at the expulsion of a large number of Serbs who were to be deported through a series of “resettlement camps” to Serbia. The decision to resettle tens of thousands of Serbs was the result of an agreement between the German occupation authorities and the Ustaša regime in the middle of June 1941. At the meeting, it was agreed that, in exchange for Croatia agreeing to accept 100,000 “disloyal” Slovenians from the Reich, Croatia would be allowed to expel a comparable number of Serbs. Secretly, the Ustaša authorities wanted to expel a far larger 386

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of Serbs than was stipulated in the agreement. The state was able to expel around 160,000 Serbs before the process was brought to a halt. In the meantime, a special ministry, the State Directorate for Reconstruction (DRP) with regional branches throughout the state had been established to facilitate the mass expulsions of the Serbs and confiscation of their property. From the moment, the Ustaša movement came to power, demographic and statistical institutes such as the Croatian State Statistical Institute and the Croatian Institute for Labor had been working on the collection of empirical information regarding the number of Serbs, Jews, and Roma. The DRP continued this work, sending out questionnaires to local branches asking for information about the number of Serbs, the size of their farmsteads and properties, and extent of their assets. In a short space of time, the violence of the deportations led to increased resistance on the part of the Serbs since many assumed that they were being taken away by the Ustaše to be murdered. In some areas, Serbs retreated to the mountains and hills surrounding their town and attacked the Ustaša militias or the army when they arrived to take away the local population. The general failure of the deportation campaign also witnessed attempts by Serbs to re-​cross the border and return to their homes in Croatia. The abrupt ending of the expulsions was superseded by a second wave of cleansings by militias which aimed to crush the uprisings permanently and eradicate large numbers of Serbs. This second wave of massacres, like the first, involved both “wild” Ustaše and elite militias from Zagreb.While many Serb civilians fell victim to mass killings by militias, the massacres also helped to stimulate and broaden the uprising. By late summer, the leadership, under pressure from senior officials in the German occupation authorities, ended the massacres of the Serbs since these were making large parts of the countryside ungovernable. Ustaša militias were abruptly recalled from their cleansing operations in the countryside to Zagreb and over the next couple of months, the militias were either disbanded or amalgamated into the units of the Ustaša Corps, the official party militia. It was during this period that a new solution to the Serb question began to emerge in the form of a program of mass forced conversion of the Serbs to Catholicism to “transform” them into Croats.There had been sporadic conversions in the early summer, but a policy of systematic conversion only began in the autumn. While most historians interpret the decision as a top-​ down one arising from policy debates from within the Ustaša movement as well as the German occupation authorities, it is possible that the genesis of the idea originated with the victims themselves since thousands of Serbs, in an atmosphere of terror, had written in the spring and summer to various state ministries requesting conversion to Catholicism so that they could remain in the state.

Forced assimilation, institutionalized mass killing and the “Revolution of the Soul” In the late summer of 1941, a Section for Religion was set up in the DRP, led by a young Franciscan friar called Dionizije Juričev. His office was in charge of recruiting priests and monks who were to travel into the countryside as “missionaries” and convert the local Serb populations to Catholicism. A memorandum concerning conversion were drawn up by Radoslav Glavaš, a radical young friar and official in the Ministry of Religion. The memorandum specifically stipulated that middle-​class and educated Serbs should be barred from converting on the basis that their Serb identity was too strong to be overcome. In the period between late summer and early 1942, a campaign of mass conversions took place; it is estimated that around 70,000 Serbs were converted to Catholicism during this period.

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The religious instructions and rituals were rudimentary: in most cases, Serbs were simply issued with certificates of honor and then underwent a ceremony of conversion. Despite the supposedly religious nature of the program, some of the younger priests recruited as missionaries were notorious for their violence and radical nationalist views. Most mass conversion ceremonies, in any case, took place in the presence of armed Ustaša units. By February 1942, the conversion process had largely come to an end and was ultimately deemed a failure. The Ustaša movement was sharply divided in its attitude toward the Serbs and many radical Ustaša members did not accept that Serbs could become Croats, insisting that they were racially inferior “nomads” who should be killed. When Serbs realized that converting to Catholicism would not save them from persecution, their attendance rate at conversion ceremonies declined dramatically. The racial politics of wartime Croatia can broadly be divided into two discrete periods: the period between April and late 1941 –​the so-​called “Revolution of Blood” when the sanguinary mass killing and deportation of the Serbs was at its height and regime hardliners and militia culture were in the ascendancy; and the period between the beginning of 1942 and the middle of 1944 –​the so-​called “Revolution of the Soul” when national policy was determined by more “moderate” forces and pragmatic young technocrats within the administration who advocated a less violent and genocidal policy toward the Serb minority.This does not mean that the terror against the Serbs ceased. However, by the end of autumn 1941, the policy of systematic extermination had ended and large massacres of Serbs now only took place in isolated cases. Terror was instead institutionalized through the concentration camp system. The first camp was established in the town of Koprivnica a mere five days after the establishment of the state. The first camp in which large numbers of civilians were murdered, Kruščica in Travnik, was opened a week after that. The first permanent camp was the Jadovno-​Pag-​Slana camp complex established in the Gospić region in late April 1941. The majority of its inmates were Serbs and Jews although a small number of Roma and “anti-​national” Croats were also interned there. There were separate camps for women and children and for Jews and Serbs. The camps were near the karst region with its plentiful pits. Difficult to reach by transport, it was the ideal location in which to carry out mass killing. While many of the inmates were taken out to the karst pits and liquidated, others were worked or starved to death. When the Ustaša leadership agreed to allow the Italian occupation authorities to take over the area in which the camp complex was located, they also ordered the camp personnel to close the camps and liquidate the remaining prisoners. After Ustaša forces left the area at the end of August 1941 and the Second Italian Army took over control, a special disinfection team of 50 soldiers exhumed the mass graves of camp victims on Slana and incinerated them on large funeral pyres to prevent contagion and the infection of the local water supply. This took ten days. Although it is difficult to ascertain the number of victims in the three camps, the broad estimates range between 10,000 and 48,000 prisoners murdered at the Jadovno camp and 4,000 and 12,000 inmates in the Metajna and Slano camps. By far the largest permanent concentration camp constructed on the territory of the state was the Jasenovac-​Stara Gradiška concentration camp. Unlike Jadovno which was intended exclusively as a site of extermination, the Jasenovac camp complex served a dual purpose as a death camp and forced labor camp. In Ustaša propaganda, it was presented as a labor and collection camp where inmates were sent to be re-​educated in the values of the “new order.” Vjekoslav “Maks” Luburić, head of the Ustaša Surveillance Service agency administering the camps, made at least one trip to the Third Reich during which he visited the Nazi concentration camps of Dachau and Oranienburg. Impressed with what he saw, he used them as a model for Jasenovac. Construction of the camp began in August 1941 in the Serb-​inhabited village of 388

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Jasenovac and the camp was fully operational by the autumn; the inhabitants of the village were deported to it immediately afterwards. The main Jasenovac camp housed male prisoners while Stara Gradiška accommodated women and children. The population of the camp comprised others including anti-​fascist and liberal Croats and Bosnian Muslims, but the vast majority of the prisoners were Serbs, Jews, and Roma. Nearly 60 percent of all victims were Serbs. It is not clear how many people died in the camp. Current figures put the number of confirmed fatalities at around 83,000 though the actual number might be significantly higher. Many of the prisoners were executed by the Ustaša guards, while others died as a result of overwork, starvation, and disease. While rhetoric about the Jews continued to be overtly anti-​Semitic and annihilationist, from the end of 1941 the discourse about the Serbs began to evolve, reflecting important Ustaša policy changes. Originally, Serbs were described in party journals and newspapers as racially inferior “Vlachs” and unstable admixtures of Balkan nomadic tribes. If these kinds of articles never completely vanished, their number and intensity generally declined. Increasingly, especially during the conversion campaign, op-eds and essays argued that the Serbs in Croatia were former Catholic Croats who had been forced to convert to Orthodoxy during the Ottoman occupation of Bosnia and adopted a Serbian identity as a result of the proselytizing by the Serbian Orthodox Church. Booklets and pamphlets were also produced by the state’s various propaganda ministries in which ordinary Serb workers and peasants expressed their joy at being able to “reconvert” to Catholicism. At the beginning of February 1942, during the opening of the Croatian State Sabor (parliament), Pavelić announced the founding of a Croatian Orthodox Church: the Serb minority would henceforth be designated as “Croats of the Orthodox faith.” Designated seats for “Orthodox Croat” representatives were created in the Sabor; Serbs were allowed to apply to join the labor units of the Croatian army; and a department for Orthodox studies in the faculty of religion at the University of Zagreb was established. The Serb community also received its own newspaper, Glas pravoslavlja (The Voice of Orthodoxy), which carried pro-​Ustaša propaganda and features on famous “Orthodox Croats” throughout history. Serbs nonetheless continued joining the Partisan resistance in large numbers since the terror had not ceased. They continued to be deported to Jasenovac and other concentration camps and to be killed in massacres by the party’s death squads such as the Black Legion or PTS as well as local “wild” militias long after they had officially received civic “equality.” In fact, the largest single massacre committed by the Ustaša movement took place in late summer 1942 in the town of Zemun when thousands of Serb civilians were massacred at the local Orthodox cemetery by an Ustaša party militia led by Viktor Tomić as part of the state’s anti-​insurgency activities. In all, in the period between 1941 and 1945 as many as 350,000 Serbs out of a total population of 1.8 million or around 20 percent of the entire population might have perished on the territory of wartime Croatia. Not all of them died at the hands of the Ustaša regime though it is clear that the vast majority did. In any case, the “integration” of Serbs back into the Ustaša state was extremely limited. Many of them continued to live in a state of constant fear on the margins of society. Furthermore, the attempted assimilation of the Serbs during this period also resulted in the establishment of a series of Ustaša camps for Serb children, especially in the aftermath of the anti-​insurgency Kozara operation.This involved young children and babies being taken away from their mothers and being kept in unhygienic and desperate conditions. Traumatized children were forced to wear Ustaša uniforms, use Ustaša greetings, and learn Ustaša songs with the intention that they would develop an Ustaša consciousness. While some staff at these camps did their best to help the children, many others mistreated them. Significant numbers of the children died of diseases such as typhus while others starved to death or were murdered. The more fortunate were 389

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rescued by Croat nurses and doctors from the Red Cross and placed with local Croat families, many of whom were strongly resistant to the policies of the Ustaša regime. Cynically, the Ustaša regime used these humanitarian actions in propaganda films to substantiate their claim that these camps had provided refuge for these innocent “Croat Orthodox” children from Partisan “terror.” The cessation of mass killing of Serbs was accompanied by the intensification of the Final Solution of the “Jewish problem.” One of the early Ustaša initiatives regarding the Jews involved a proposal to build a Jewish settlement at Tenje, near Osijek.The proposal, submitted by advisers to the Directorate for Economic Reconstruction, envisaged that this settlement, to be modeled on the Jewish “model town” of Theresienstadt, would be an agrarian colony where the Jews of Croatia would learn to be self-​sufficient artisans and agricultural workers. The governor of the city of Osijek believed that the building of the settlement, funded by the sale of confiscated Jewish assets, would provide a permanent solution to the “Jewish problem” in Osijek and the surrounding area. Yet, little progress was made in its construction and it soon turned into a concentration camp with thousands of Jews from Osijek and the surrounding area crowded together. Very soon, its inmates were being transported to permanent concentration camps, including 200 of them to Jasenovac and 2,800 to Auschwitz. Throughout 1942 and early 1943 Jews continued to be deported to Jasenovac and other concentration camps. In May 1943, Heinrich Himmler paid a visit to Zagreb after which a general round up of the city’s remaining Jews began,with around 1,500 Jews in Zagreb and 300 from the surrounding area being taken away. These Jews were deported to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, including among their number many who had previously been given “honorary Aryan” status. After the collapse of Fascist Italy in September 1943, the Reich took over control of the regions of Pula and Rijeka and on January 25, 1944, German soldiers demolished the synagogue in Rijeka. Meanwhile, in April 1944, Jews from the region of Međimurje, which had been annexed to Hungary in 1941, were rounded up and taken to a Hungarian transit camp before being transported to Jasenovac and Auschwitz. By the time the Croatian state collapsed in 1945, it is estimated that around 32,000 of its 40,000 Jewish citizens or 80 percent had been murdered. At the same time as the propaganda war against the Serbs as a fifth column was diminishing, anti-​Semitic propaganda reached its height with Jews presented as the greatest threat to the survival of the state. The propaganda campaign culminated in the summer of 1942 in an anti-​Semitic exhibition organized by the state propaganda ministry, held at the Art Pavilion in Zagreb before going on a countrywide tour. Although some Roma were affected by the campaigns of Aryanization and workforce purges, it was not until May 1942 that the mass extermination of the Roma and Sinti was implemented. In late spring and early summer 1942, an increase in anti-​Roma propaganda was accompanied by the rounding up and deportation of the entire Roma and Sinti population to Jasenovac where they were liquidated. In all, 25,000 or around 96 percent of all Roma in the NDH perished, the highest casualty rate of any population group in wartime Croatia.

Return to the “Revolution of Blood” The tensions within the Ustaša movement burst into the open in the autumn of 1944 with the arrest of Ante Vokić, commander of the Ustaša Corps, and Mladen Lorković, the foreign minister, as well as many of their allies, predominantly regime “moderates.” They were replaced by members of the hardline faction who were once again in ascendance. In a series of speeches in the autumn and winter of 1944, as the state crumbled from within, Pavelić and his officials railed against “fifth columnists” in the party. This was the backdrop to a wave of purges within 390

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the movement and regime of “defeatist” and soft-​line elements. Vjekoslav Luburić was placed in charge of the interrogation of those suspected of involvement in the “coup” against Pavelić. In February 1945, Luburić was sent to Sarajevo to shore up defenses in the city and repress dissent. Five days after his arrival, Hitler had declared the city to be a “fortress” which had to be held at all costs. Luburić appointed nine Ustaša officers to a special task force to carry out the executions of suspected and known communists and in the two months that the plan was in operation, his villa came to be known as “the house of terror” as the remaining Serbs in the city as well as Muslim and Croat Communists and anti-​fascists were liquidated. On March 1, 1945, the Partisans launched Operation Sarajevo which aimed to wrest control of the city away from the Germans and the Ustaše. By early March, the city had been encircled and cut off from the rest of the state. On March 21, an alleged plot was uncovered to assassinate Luburić and four Ustaše were subsequently killed in Partisan attacks in the city. Afterwards, on the night of March 27–​28, the Ustaše hanged 55 Sarajevo citizens from street lamps and trees with signs reading “Long live the Poglavnik!” hung around their necks. The Partisans entered the city two days later. By May 5, the Croatian leadership, including Pavelić, had fled. On the same day that the government left and ten days before Zagreb was liberated, a legal decree was introduced called “The equalization of the members of the NDH with regard to racial origin” formally repealing all the racial laws enacted over the course of the state’s existence. That a law repealing racial legislation under which hundreds of thousands of citizens were murdered was only enacted the day that the regime which had introduced the legislation and implemented the terror accompanying it had fled, speaks to the nature of the Ustaša state. The mass extermination of non-​ Croatian ethnic groups, legitimated on the myth of the Ustaša liberation struggle, gave the new state its territorial justification, but it was also the single biggest cause of its demise.

Selected Readings Bartulin, Nevenko. The Racial Idea in the Independent State of Croatia. Leiden, 2016. Dulić, Tomislav. Utopias of Nation: Local Mass Killing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1941–​1942. Uppsala, 2005. Goldstein, Ivo and Slavko Goldstein. The Holocaust in Croatia, trans. Nikolina Jovanović. Pittsburgh, 2016. Greble, Emily. Sarajevo, 1941–​1945: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Hitler’s Europe. Ithaca, NY, 2011. Korb, Alexander. Im Schatten des Weltkriegs: Massengewalt der Ustaša gegen Serben, Juden und Roma in Kroatien, 1941–​1945. Hamburg, 2013. Miljan, Goran. Croatia and the Rise of Fascism: TheYouth Movement and the Ustasha duringWWII. London,  2018. Pino, Adriano and Giorgio Cingolani. Nationalism and Terror: Ante Pavelić and Ustasha Terrorism from Fascism to the Cold War. Budapest, 2018. Ramet, Sabrina P., ed. The Independent State of Croatia, 1941–​1941. London and New York, 2007. Yeomans, Rory. Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941–​1945. Pittsburgh, 2013.

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Germany’s Yugoslav campaign, launched on April 6, 1941, was short and sharp. Yugoslavia’s forces, only partially mobilized, were no match for the mechanized might of the Third Reich. Delaying his invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler moved to counter British advances in North Africa by conquering both Yugoslavia and Greece. The Kingdom’s capitulation was signed in Belgrade on April 17 and Yugoslavia ceased to exist. The Independent State of Croatia (the NDH) had already adhered to the Tripartite Pact on April 10 and withdrawn from hostilities. Yugoslavia had never figured in Hitler’s plans, and since he was only interested in lines of communication and raw materials, the German occupation of Serbia centered on these vital assets. Axis satellites and the Italians were left to occupy the rest of the dismembered state. Once defeat was complete, German forces moved swiftly on, leaving only second or third-​rate troops to occupy the rump of Serbia. Although thin on the ground, the German occupiers lost no time in implementing what was to become the “final solution” for Serbia’s Jewish population. Along with Jewish refugees from Austria, they were systematically persecuted, reduced to wretchedness, and subsequently murdered:  by May 1942, the Wehrmacht claimed Serbia was judenfrei. The Roma and Sinti populations fared no better. Serbs themselves were hated by Hitler as disturbers of European peace in 1914, and many army officers of Austrian origin who had served in the Balkans during the First World War harbored a deep animosity for the Serbian people as a whole. Before long, repression and terror were used to make up for the shortage of manpower.

Origins of resistance Already in the summer of 1941, a series of revolts against the occupiers erupted. These were localized, independent risings against particular hardships and grievances; the only factor linking them was their predominantly Serb character since it was the Serbian population that was hardest hit by the annexations and occupation.The first revolt was in the NDH where the Serbs of eastern Herzegovina fought back against the persecution and murder waged against them by the fascist Ustaša (see Rory Yeoman’s chapter). In Slovenia, opposition was sparked by the policy of Germanization with mass deportations to Croatia or Serbia of Slovenes not deemed suitable citizens of the Third Reich. Montenegro, occupied by an initially less severe Italian regime, caught fire in protest against the Italian declaration of the “Independent State of Montenegro,” 392

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which was to serve as a puppet state. In Serbia, the German invasion of the USSR on June 11, combined with feelings of outrage at the suffering of fellow Orthodox Christians arriving as refugees from the NDH, produced a spontaneous rising, encouraged by the withdrawal of many German frontline divisions to the east. It was in Serbia that the revolts would develop into full-​blown resistance. This resistance was divided and would soon diverge so drastically that civil war was added to the tragedy that had befallen Yugoslavia. The two opposing forces became known as Chetniks and Partisans, led respectively by Colonel Dragoljub (Draža) Mihailović and Josip Broz (Tito). The Partisans took their name from Russian patriots who fought Napoleon’s invading army, while the term Chetnik derived from the armed bands who had opposed the Ottoman Empire and later referred to Serbian army forces who operated behind enemy lines in World War I.  During World War II, Chetniks referred not only to bands of military personnel who formed the basis of Mihailović’s resistance, but also traditional patriotic associations grouped around local leaders, openly collaborationist “official” Chetniks or even out-​and-​out bandits. In late August, the Germans appointed a Serbian puppet government headed by General Milan Nedić, former Minister of War, who was allowed to establish a Serbian State Guard to ensure internal order. Generally undermanned and unreliable, they were supported by “official” Chetniks and Dimitrije Ljotić’s fascist Volunteer Detachments. Mihailović, a career officer, had served with distinction on the Salonica Front in World War I, and in the interwar period in the Military Intelligence Sector of the General Staff and as military attaché in both Sofia and Prague; a great Francophile and pro-​British, during the 1930s he developed strongly anti-​Nazi convictions. Chief of Staff of the Yugoslav Second Army in northern Bosnia, he was one of the many officers who had eluded capture following the April invasion. Mihailović set up a base on the Ravna Gora plateau in Serbia and began establishing a network of other military personnel to form the basis of an underground army which would join the Allies once the time came to overthrow the Axis occupation. A few civilians joined him and took charge of propaganda. Some were members of the Serb Culture Club and inclined toward Serb nationalism rather than Yugoslavism. Mihailović himself was not very politically minded but saw himself as a representative of the Yugoslav state whose duty was to serve his king and country. Josip Broz (Tito) was born in the Croatia of the Habsburg Monarchy. In his youth, he trained as a mechanic and worked all over the empire, picking up various languages, before being called up for military service in 1913. Wounded in the world war, he was taken prisoner by the Russians and met Bolsheviks as well as learning Russian. Tito joined the illegal Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) in his twenties and at 35 became general secretary of the CPY Provincial Committee. Arrested for distributing illegal literature in 1928 and sentenced to five years, Tito used his time in prison to extend his political reading and later referred to it as his “university.” He worked his way to the top of the CPY following Stalin’s 1930s purges in which hundreds of Yugoslav Communists perished. Tito eliminated divisions and brought cohesion to the party. By early 1941, the CPY membership had increased from 1,500 to 8,000 and developed into a tight-​knit Bolshevik style organization. Yugoslav veterans of the Spanish civil war returned to add to the party’s strength (Tito himself had spent time between Paris and Yugoslavia in 1937 recruiting volunteers to fight with the Spanish Republican army). Long years of being outlawed by the Yugoslav state had allowed the party to hone its ability to organize clandestine cells. Totally loyal to Moscow, Tito and the CPY agitated against the war as an imperialist struggle until the German invasion of the USSR in June changed the whole situation. Warned of the impending invasion, Tito moved to Belgrade and began to prepare for resistance in early May 1941. 393

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Joining the spontaneous Serbian rising after Stalin’s appeal for all to take part in the anti-​ fascist struggle, Tito and the CPY initially interpreted that appeal as the signal to foment social revolution. They concentrated their activities on the organs of the Yugoslav state, especially the gendarmerie and local government apparatus, destroying land records and assassinating local notables as class enemies. When Stalin made it clear that he wanted action against the Axis, not social revolution, the Partisans attacked the Germans in early August. Mihailović had been reluctant to launch an attack on the Germans, but once the uprising started, he had no choice but to join with a number of royal army officers to protect Serbian civilians. The remnants of the Yugoslav army and the Partisans, supplemented by local peasants, cooperated in joint action against the Germans, and large areas of Serbia were “liberated” in a series of attacks by one or both.The Partisans established headquarters in the town of Užice, where Tito joined them from Belgrade, designating the area the “Užice Republic.” Tito and Mihailović met twice: on September 19 and again on October 26 in an attempt to agree a modus vivendi. The meetings were destined to fail, since their aims were essentially incompatible. Tito wanted Mihailović and his forces to join him in a major offensive, while Mihailović demanded the Partisans place themselves under his command as he was the legitimate representative of the Yugoslav armed forces. He also felt the risings were premature and too costly of Serbian lives, as the Germans responded with extreme brutality: Hitler had ordered 100 executions for every German killed and 50 for each one wounded, but the scale of reprisals far exceeded this “quota.” The alliance between the Chetnik and Partisan forces, always a fragile one, crumbled as minor clashes and disputes over liberated areas and chains of command gradually turned into open conflict. Some of the army officers ostensibly under Mihailović’s command had never been happy to co-​operate with the Communists and were probably responsible for striking the first blow in the civil war. Tito and Mihailović spoke for the last time by telephone on November 21 to arrange an armistice, but a major German offensive began only a few days later. With reinforcements supported by air power and quisling forces, towns, and villages in “liberated” areas were soon retaken, followed by appalling reprisals against the civilian population. Once the Užice Republic had been overrun, Tito and the Partisans escaped the Germans by departing for the remote Sandžak (Sanjak) in Italian controlled territory in eastern Bosnia, where they hoped to link up with the Montenegrin Partisans.The collapse of the revolt in Serbia had a detrimental effect on public morale and support for the Communists. As for Mihailović, after narrowly escaping, he went underground and into hiding in Serbia. He dispersed most of his forces, sending some home and some into the ranks of Nedić’s State Guard where they could obtain arms and gather information. The understanding was that they would rally to his banner and rejoin the fray once the time came for an uprising in concert with Allied troops. This potentially useful tactic would also leave him open to later Communist accusations of collaboration.

Partisan and civil war Interpreting the summer risings as a continuation of the April campaign, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) infiltrated a British-​Yugoslav mission in September 1941. SOE’s Bill Hudson met with both Tito and Mihailović. On hand to witness the start of the civil war, he attempted to mediate but simply antagonized both sides. In mid-​November 1941, SOE advised that a recognition of Mihailović and his Chetniks by the Yugoslav Government in Exile (YGE), backed by the British and Soviet governments, was the most likely route to a unified resistance. This advice seemed sound when Mihailović told his government that he had ended “this fratricidal 394

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war” after concluding the armistice with Tito on November 21. In January 1942, with the YGE in the throes of one of their many crises, the Foreign Office prevailed upon them to appoint Mihailović Minister of War and promote him to General. His appointment was more a political gesture than a practical move. At the time, he was receiving maximum exposure as the most important resistance leader in Europe, and it was hoped that some of his success would rub off on the exiles. In 1942, a shortage of aircraft meant that the British were unable to supply much military material to aid the Chetniks. Propaganda was the only commodity not in short supply, but the last thing a secret army needs is an advertising campaign. The loss of Serbian civilian lives in the 1941 uprisings made Mihailović resolve not to take premature action again. During 1942, he returned to organizing a secret army, gathering intelligence and carrying out untraceable acts of sabotage. Continued German attempts to liquidate him prompted Mihailović to move to Montenegro in May, but he retained intelligence links to Serbia. Having designated his movement as the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland, he set about incorporating all forces outside Serbia, but he never managed to stop his organization being referred to as Chetniks. He held only limited sway over the scattered forces he was supposed to command; groups of Chetniks had loyalties to local leaders who made their own policies and accommodations with the occupiers. Chetnik bands in Montenegro, having accepted Italian aid to counter the excesses of the Partisans there, continued to do so. Equally, Serb rebels in the NDH were glad to accept Italian protection from Ustaša persecution. Mihailović might not have approved their actions but could not afford to challenge or repudiate them as he needed their forces for his planned final uprising, and in addition the Italians were a useful source of weapons. Unable to supply weapons themselves, the British provided money for them to be purchased from the Italians. Tito’s goal remained a return to Serbia but in March 1942, he had to accept that for the time being he must develop his movement in Bosnia. In the event, the move to Bosnia was to prove the making of the Partisans as both a political and military power. Tito soon established a new base in Foča. Eastern Bosnia was a devastated area where Ustaša massacres of Serbs had been countered by Chetnik attacks on Croats and Muslims, not only those who had aided the Ustaša but innocent villagers too. Animosity had been fueled by Muslim militias’ participation in Ustaša atrocities on Serbs in the NDH and Italian use of Muslim auxiliaries in Montenegro in 1941. The pejorative “Turk” was widely used and in August 1941, when the Chetniks had massacred 1,000 Muslims plus the Croat garrison in Foča after Ustaša forces left. As the majority of Partisans were Serbs, they were greeted warmly by the Bosnian Serbs and many joined their ranks. Partisan contact with the Comintern was re-​established and a desperate appeal made for help, but the Soviets were in no better position to supply materiel aid to the Partisans than the British were to Mihailović. While praising the heroic struggle of the Partisans the Comintern advised them to disguise their revolutionary Communist aims, as the Soviets had no desire to jeopardize the Allied Coalition against Hitler. The CPY leadership established a new republic in Foča and attempted to form the base of a state there. They followed Comintern advice, promoting the idea of fighting for liberation from fascism rather than for establishing a Communist system, setting up people’s committees, even allowing churches and mosques to reopen to appease local sensibilities and to help recruit Muslims and Croats. The new policy did not percolate down to the Partisans of Eastern Herzegovina, who waged a class struggle against “kulaks” and better-​off peasants, perpetrating massive violence against Muslim and Croat civilians as alleged collaborators. Their villages were burned down and the inhabitants murdered or driven out. Within their own ranks, these Partisans executed “fifth columnists” and “saboteurs” until the terror alienated local people who turned to the Chetniks for protection. Local Chetniks were 395

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joined by forces from Serbia to challenge the Partisans, adding fuel to the civil war. In late April the Germans, backed by Italian and Croat forces, launched Operation Trio against the Partisans. It was only partially successful but prompted Tito and the Partisans to move on again. In mid-​June,Tito and 3,000 to 4,000 Partisans left for the remote uplands of Bosanska Krajina in northwestern Bosnia. The so-​called Long March, 200 miles along the watershed between the Italian and German demarcation line, was also a watershed for the Partisan movement and would result in a transformation into a disciplined and organized force. Their route took them through areas that had seen ethnic strife but the Communist leadership was careful to distinguish between Ustaša and ordinary Croats or Muslims. They defended them against Serb reprisals and gained new recruits along the way. In this remote area of the NDH, of no strategic value and with no Axis troops, the Partisans ousted the Ustaša administration in the town of Bihač and established the Republic of Bihač. Here Muslims were assured of protection against Chetniks, and Serbs felt safe from the Ustaša. Young Croats who opposed Pavelić’s regime and wanted to avoid conscription into NDH armed forces expanded their numbers further. The new Croat and Muslim recruits enabled the Partisans to infiltrate the NDH administration and military in order to gain useful support and intelligence. Tito, as Supreme Commander, set about creating a new broadly based movement with an emphasis on Yugoslav patriotism rather than communism. The first session of the Anti-​Fascist Council for the Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) was convened on November 26, 1942. The National Liberation Army (NLA) had a wider appeal than the overtly Communist Proletarian Brigades and by the end of 1942 was three times larger and growing. The rank-​and-​file of the NLA was still predominantly Serb but its command was multinational and included Croats and Muslims. In reality, both AVNOJ and the NLA were dominated by the Communist Party as the Politburo and the Supreme Staff of the NLA were one and the same. Political commissars were attached to all units at every level to ensure maximum control. The military leaders, many of them Spanish civil war veterans, now molded the NLA into a much more useful body than the irregular one that had left Serbia in 1941. Soviet propaganda supported Mihailović as leader of Yugoslav resistance as enthusiastically as the Western Allies until suddenly changing in mid-​1942. Radio Free Yugoslavia, purportedly operating within Yugoslavia but actually based in the southern USSR, began claiming that only the Partisans were resisting in Yugoslavia while Mihailović took no part. Consternation at the Foreign Office in London grew with allegations of Chetnik collaboration with the Nedić regime.The British pressed Mihailović to be more active against lines of communication running through Yugoslavia, ostensibly to deny fuel to Rommel in North Africa but actually to counter Soviet claims. Mihailović increased sabotage operations but with the proviso that operations had some strategic value and were untraceable in order to minimize civilian reprisals. Hitherto viewed as a sideshow,Yugoslavia moved center stage in March 1943 when elaborate deception plans were put in train to persuade the Axis that the Allies planned an invasion through the Balkans. Increased guerrilla activity was needed to strengthen this impression and to tie up Axis forces away from actual targets and, crucially, away from the Eastern Front. Decrypts of intercepted German wireless traffic had been revealing for a considerable time that the Partisans were much more active and causing more disturbance to the Axis than Chetniks. However, reports often contained the caveat that supporting a Communist resistance was inimical to Britain’s alliance with the Yugoslav Government in Exile and its Minister of War. The British decided that backing each side of resistance with new high-ranking SOE missions would make it possible to direct them and capitalize on the military value of both, as they were trying to do in Greece. Both resistance leaders expected an Allied landing, although each perceived it in a very different way. Mihailović looked forward to the arrival of the Allies as a trigger for the general 396

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rising against the occupiers, while Tito and the CPY regarded it as threatening their aim of establishing a Communist state. They saw the Western Allies as a reactionary force that would naturally unite with similar elements, namely Mihailović, to frustrate this aim. One idea common to both was that their organization had to defeat the other and secure the Adriatic coast before any such landing took place. In early 1943 Tito and the NLA were planning to leave Bihač and attempt a push back into Serbia, while Mihailović was preparing a march on Bosnia. His plan envisaged the Chetniks of Herzegovina, Dalmatia, and Montenegro plus Italian-​supported Chetniks joining a concerted action against the Partisan republic. Although he had assembled about 25,000 in eastern Bosnia-​Herzegovina, Mihailović was unable to recruit forces from the far west as they either were too far from his influence or already committed to the Partisans. Meanwhile, the Germans felt it essential to destroy all Yugoslav resistance in case of an Allied landing. They launched the massive and ruthless Operation Weiss in January 1943, to deal first with the Partisans and then the Chetniks. A concerted Axis attack pushed Tito and his Supreme Staff south where, along with civilian refugees, they found themselves facing Mihailović’s force with the Axis at their back. Tito and the Partisan leadership negotiated a ceasefire with the Germans while the two sides parleyed. This suited the Germans who had met stronger than anticipated opposition from the Partisans. The Germans also offered Mihailović a ceasefire but he refused.The Partisan negotiators made clear that their main enemies were the Chetniks who would welcome a British landing, whereas the NLA would fight the “English” were they to land. The arrangement came to an abrupt end when Hitler demanded an end to negotiating with “bandits” and ordered the Wehrmacht to destroy both movements, not play off one against the other. The pause benefited the Partisans and allowed them to penetrate Chetnik-​held territory.The Partisans survived, if by the skin of their teeth, at the battle on the Neretva River, which took a huge toll in both civilian and Partisan lives. Once over the river the NLA fought pitched battles with the Chetniks, forcing them from their stronghold in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina but unable to progress into Montenegro where the Chetniks had regrouped. In May a German assault on both forces ended the Partisan offensive. Mihailović narrowly escaped to Serbia while Tito and the Supreme Staff headed for Mount Durmitor on the borders of Bosnia, Montenegro, and the Sandžak. A  month of continuous fighting ensued with huge losses of about a third of the Partisans, including seven members of AVNOJ. They finally broke out of the encirclement after a battle at the Sutjeska River. The first official British Mission to Tito’s headquarters arrived in the middle of the Axis encirclement and was duly impressed by Partisan fortitude. SOE’s Bill Deakin confirmed the military value of the Partisans and also reported on Partisan accounts of Chetnik collaboration with the Axis forces. His reports helped to advance the idea that supporting the Partisans would allay any Soviet suspicion of Western intentions and also open Tito to British advice. The events of spring 1943 were decisive for the future of both resistance leaders.The inability of Mihailović to form as large a united force of Bosnian Chetniks as he had planned, proved that his allies and foes alike had overestimated both his strength and authority.The defeat by the Partisans opened his eyes to the limitations of allowing his Serb Culture Club political advisors to promote only Greater Serbia, instead of reaching out to a wider political spectrum. The battles on the Neretva and Sutjeska were a turning point for the Partisans as well. Despite heavy losses, they had survived and remained a cohesive force. Their survival enabled them to spread out into larger areas of Bosnia. Positioning their forces in the Italian zone, they were able to take advantage of the Italian collapse when it came in September 1943. As a result, they gained large quantities of arms and an influx of new recruits from members of the Croat army who were unhappy with the Ustaša regime and with German dominance.They also wanted to be on 397

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the winning side. Partisan territorial gains were, however, short-​lived, as the Germans arrived to replace the Italians and safeguard the Adriatic coast.

Allied support and Partisan victory Milhailović had been deeply disappointed at not seizing the long anticipated Italian weaponry. Still, the Italian withdrawal had a positive psychological effect in Serbia, increasing his support with the feeling that the Allied invasion was imminent. This idea was encouraged by the arrival of the new SOE mission. Immediately after the Italian armistice, Mihailović sent out a general order to his commanders throughout Yugoslavia to attack German lines of communication and German troops. Widespread sabotage was conducted and a number of towns and villages taken from the Germans. In early October, Mihailović assembled 4,000 guerrillas and after heavy fighting took the town of Višegrad. His relationship with the British mission turned sour when the Višegrad victory was attributed to the Partisans on the BBC, which also announced the following week that the Partisans had taken Berane, but did not say it was not taken from the Axis but from the Chetniks. While large-​scale military supplies promised to the Chetniks failed to appear, the Partisans were receiving public praise and materiel support. Having finally taken the overt action pressed upon him by the British, Mihailović received nothing in return. He remarked to one of the American officers at the mission that “the British had sold him down the river to Stalin” and seems to have concluded that he should return to his own policy regarding both the occupiers and Partisans. By the end of 1943, the British had decided to withdraw from Mihailović and in the British media Tito now replaced him as hero of Yugoslav resistance. The publicly stated reason for dropping Mihailović was “some of the General’s commanders had collaborated with the Axis.” The real reason was that he was less active than the Partisans and his writ ran only in Serbia. Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, head of the military mission to Tito, had assessed that the most likely rulers of postwar Yugoslavia were the Partisans and advised that unconditional support for them would ensure continued British influence in Yugoslavia. The Partisans now had the support of the Western Allies and a Soviet mission, led by General Korneyev, finally arrived in February 1944. However, differences were emerging between Britain and America on the future of the Balkans, fueled by American suspicions of Britain’s old imperialistic motivation. While Washington did not want to become too embroiled in Yugoslavia, there were growing doubts about the pro-​Partisan policy and discontent with the idea of Mihailović’s eclipse. American OSS missions with the Partisans had become increasingly aware of the fact that the bulk of Partisan activity was directed against their domestic enemies rather than German or Ustaša forces. In fact, once the Partisans had recognition and support, they concentrated only on the civil war. Although the idea had taken hold in some quarters that Tito and his followers could be wooed away from the influence of the USSR, this had never been the case. Tito had remained in constant communication and regarded the USSR as his main ally. Britain and America had simply filled in while the Soviets were unable to help. The Partisans had always viewed the “English” with extreme suspicion. Tito accepted aid from the West cautiously and was always on the lookout for any indication that Perfidious Albion was out to destroy the Partisans. In spring 1944, while British-​brokered negotiations were underway between Tito and the exiled Yugoslav government, Tito narrowly escaped a German airborne attack on his headquarters at Drvar on May 25, leading him to relocate to the island of Vis. He chose to fly out of Drvar with General Korneyev rather than the Royal Air Force, suspecting that the British had revealed his location to the Germans.

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Tito had extended links to Macedonia and Kosovo and Partisans were established in Slovenia but, try as he might, Serbia eluded him: it remained largely loyal to Mihailović and King Petar. The Communists had not managed to overcome the memory of the catastrophic end of the uprising in 1941. Serbia was the key to a reunited Yugoslavia, as all parties recognized. Having previously left politics to advisors advocating only a Greater Serbia, Mihailović now looked beyond a solely Serb constituency, promising a wider program of social and economic reforms with a more inclusive agenda. His Congress of Ba in Serbia in January 1944 included the Socialist Party of Yugoslavia and refugees speaking on behalf of Slovenian and Croatian political parties. They passed a resolution for reorganizing Yugoslavia as a federation of Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia. The ideas found favor with the exiled Yugoslav government but came too late. Tito and the CPY leadership had already defined plans for a postwar federation at the second meeting of AVNOJ, at Jajce in Bosnia in November 1943. By mid-​1944, the British were faced with a dilemma:  Tito had the military might they required but Mihailović still held sway in Serbia. The British had withdrawn their support from him in favor of Tito because they thought the NLA could hinder the German withdrawal from the Balkans while the Allies re-​entered northern Europe.There were however new concerns as it became clear that arms supplied by the Western Allies were being used for the civil war. British fears were raised about communism being imposed on Yugoslavia and particularly on Serbia. When Churchill met Tito in Naples on August 12, 1944, and challenged him on these issues, the Partisan leader was prepared to make reassuring statements but only in private. Churchill’s reservations made the question of the NLA entering Serbia, always uppermost in Tito’s mind, more pressing. In early September, the Western Allies organized “Ratweek,” a concerted bombing campaign against lines of communication throughout Serbia to hinder the withdrawal of German troops. The bombing also demonstrated to Serbia that the NLA had Allied backing. Ratweek coincided with an unexpectedly rapid advance by the Red Army through Romania and Bulgaria. All too aware of the need to get back into Serbia, Tito left Vis secretly to meet the Red Army in Romania before flying on to Moscow to meet Stalin for the first time.Tito would later claim that he had invited the Soviet forces to enter Yugoslavia. On its way to confront the main German forces in Hungary, the Red Army needed to move through Serbia and the Vojvodina. In doing so, they allowed the NLA to enter and begin establishing its authority. The Red Army obligingly made a swift detour into Serbia to help the NLA. After a week of heavy fighting, Belgrade was liberated on October 20 and the Red Army swept on to Hungary. The British SOE missions finally left Serbia in May 1944, but an American OSS mission joined Mihailović in late August and stayed until November. Officially, the McDowell mission was simply organizing the evacuation of downed American airmen, but the Americans were increasingly unhappy about the prospect of a Communist Yugoslavia and still hoped that Mihailović could prevent it. On August 31, he ordered a general uprising, despite having been dismissed as Minister of War by King Petar. The mobilization was not a success: the Partisans used the cover of Ratweek to enter Serbia, and the Germans launched a large-​scale attack on Mihailović’s forces. The arrival of the Red Army in northeastern Serbia in October, accompanied by its new Bulgarian allies, helped to overwhelm Mihailović’s forces and his organization collapsed. The General, his staff and a few hundred survivors left Serbia for Bosnia still hoping, in vain, to link up with the Western Allies. Before departing, MacDowell advised Mihailović to build on the Congress of Ba resolutions and form an alliance with anti-​fascist democratic politicians in Croatia and Slovenia to establish an organization that would be strong enough for the Americans to support in negotiations with Tito, first to end the civil war but then also

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possibly as a counter-​balance to AVNOJ. Representatives were dispatched to Zagreb in spring 1945 but attempts to form such links were thwarted by the Ustaša, the Germans and also suspicion of trickery by the intended recipients. The relationship between the Partisans and Western Allied forces had been deteriorating for some time. As the war drew to a close, Tito and the Partisans made a desperate bid to achieve their territorial ambitions to add to Yugoslavia the “Slav” regions of Italy and Austria, leading to a race for Trieste and Venezia Guilia. The Western Allies advanced up the western side of the Adriatic while the NLA raced along the eastern side: both were hampered by the retreating Germans. In Yugoslavia, the Germans had a shorter front to defend, and continued their withdrawal from the Balkans in an orderly manner, while also inflicting heavy casualties on the Partisan units that confronted them. Meanwhile, the civil war intensified in Bosnia and Croatia, now even bloodier as Partisans, Chetniks, and Ustaša clashed with each other. While fighting both Germans and fellow Yugoslavs, the NLA was also intent on securing the Adriatic coastline against any possible Allied landing from Italy. The NLA won the race for Venezia Giulia, and then made an attempt to add Austrian Carinthia, but the Allied forces won that leg of the race. Tito’s forces withdrew a few weeks later, probably due to lack of Soviet support. The Partisans came out on top in the civil war that ravaged the country and went on to establish a federal and Communist Yugoslavia. The Western Allies, who had helped the Partisans to power, were unhappy with the outcome but the onset of the Cold War, and general war weariness of both public and armed forces, led them to accept the situation. Mihailović, having apparently refused an American offer of evacuation and sanctuary, returned to Serbia and went underground. He was later captured, tried, and executed in 1946. During World War II, more of the estimated one million Yugoslav war dead lost their lives to their countrymen than to the occupying forces.

Selected Readings Hoare, Marko Attila. Genocide and Resistance in Hitler’s Bosnia:  The Partisans and Chetniks, 1941–​1943. Oxford, 2006. Pavlowitch, Stevan K. Tito: Yugoslavia’s Great Dictator. London, 1992. Pavlowitch, Stevan K. Hitlers’ New Disorder.The Second World War in Yugoslavia. New York, 2008. Pirjevec, Jože. Tito and His Comrades. Madison, Wisc., 2018. Shepherd, Ben. Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare. Cambridge, Mass., 2012. Trew, Simon. Britain, Mihailović and the Chetniks, 1941–​42. London, 1998. Williams, Heather. Parachutes, Patriots and Partisans. The Special Operations Executive and Yugoslavia, 1941–​ 1945. London, 2003.

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40 AN OPPRESSIVE LIBERATION Yugoslavia 1944–​1948 Zoran Janjetović

This chapter surveys the Yugoslav Communists’ accession to power at the end of World War II and the measures they undertook during the first postwar years in order to change Yugoslav society as their core ideology dictated.The short but turbulent period was marked by liberation from foreign occupation followed by harsh repression for large sections of the society. The first to bear the brunt were wartime ideological enemies, churches, and the propertied classes, but soon wartime allies such as the peasant majority also came under pressure. The Communist Party of Yugoslavia faced grave social and economic problems while going back on wartime promises to the Western Allies by imposing a Communist regime under Josip Broz Tito that permitted no political opposition. The initial coordination with the USSR did not however go as smoothly as expected by the Soviet side. Confident from a wartime resistance unsupported by the Soviet Union, the Yugoslavs resisted Stalin’s direction in economic and regional relations. His celebrated break with the Tito regime followed in 1948.

The Partisans’ take-​over of power Communist-​led Yugoslav Partisans survived three major German attempts to annihilate their forces in the first half of 1943. After Italian capitulation in September 1943, they were able to establish a liberated territory in Bosnia. On November 29/​30 1943, they held the second session of their quasi-​parliament, the Anti-​Fascist Council for the Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ), there in Jajce. They not only set up a provisional government but reached decisions that would determine the political framework of postwar Yugoslavia. It was to be reconstituted as a federation of six republics with equal rights for all nationalities. In order not to antagonize the Serbs and the British, the AVNOJ left the future of the monarchy open and subject to a referendum after the war. By this time, the royalist Chetniks, already militarily weakened and politically compromised, were losing their initial British support. The Communist leadership of the Partisan movement, whose ranks were swelling with volunteers and forcibly recruited numbers from the liberated territories, were bent on receiving official recognition from the Western Allies. Encouraged by the Teheran conference of the three Allied leaders in late 1943, the Partisans were also gaining British and American support for “killing the most Germans.” During the

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first half of 1944, the British put increasing pressure on the Yugoslav government in London and King Petar II to persuade the Chetniks to join forces with the stronger Partisans. At the same time, the Churchill government saw this as securing postwar leverage for the King and non-​communist political leaders. Dropping support for the Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović was a means to that end. At the same time, the Communist leader Josip Broz Tito, insisted on recognition of his interim government in the country. The British government accepted only a joint interim government of both Partisan and émigré politicians. The former ban of Croatia, Ivan Šubašić, was seen as an acceptable émigré candidate, as a pro-​Yugoslav Croat, a supporter of federalism and a member of the largest Croatian party, the Croatian Peasants’ Party. He also enjoyed American support. As such he was acceptable for Tito too. The Allies managed to break down King Petar’s opposition in May 1944 and Šubašić was nominated as prime minister. Tito reached an agreement with Šubašić on the isle of Vis in June 1944, recognizing the King and placing two Partisan representatives in the joint government. For his part, Šubašić recognized the actual power of the Partisans in Yugoslavia and their army. The United States was still not willing to give up on Mihailović and his Chetniks. They judged that supporting both resistance movements would produce better military results. It was however the British, who had the greater political interest in the region. They prevailed on King Petar II to ask the Chetniks to join Tito’s forces on September 12, 1944. By that time, the Germans were in full retreat from the Balkans and large Partisan units were beginning to enter Serbia. The Soviet Army was also approaching the Yugoslav border from the East. Belated Chetnik attempts at mobilization failed and by late October 1944, Serbia was liberated with Soviet help. The collaborationist Serbian government, their military forces and Chetnik remnants withdrew westward. The Germans and their Croatian allies, the Ustasha, organized a strong defensive line in Syrmia and Eastern Bosnia that would hold until April 1945. Most of Yugoslavia was already liberated by then and Tito’s government took power in Belgrade in November 1944. For many, liberation from German occupation was a mixed blessing. It meant eviction of foreign invaders, but also installation of a new oppressive regime. Already during the first days of Partisan rule, many real or alleged collaborators were shot out of hand. Others were given short trials and then executed. Many more were imprisoned. The total numbers are still disputed. They fell victims to the Communist wish to clear the way for establishing the absolute power that for reasons of foreign policy they did not openly assert. They did not want to alienate the non-​Communist population, especially among the many monarchists in Serbia, neither the Allies, including a Soviet leadership not wanting to quarrel with the Western allies before Germany was defeated. After months of negotiations between Tito and Šubašić and British pressure on King Petar, a joint interim government was finally formed on March 7, 1945. Its purpose was to liberate the rest of the country, organize elections, and start the reconstruction. The Communists intended to use it to achieve international recognition and fortify their power, while the anti-​Communist parties and their Western backers hoped to hold back on the Communists and to eventually overturn them. The final battles for liberation of Yugoslavia started in spring 1945. By April the Germans, the Ustasha, remnants of the Chetniks and other anti-​Communist forces were retreating toward Austria. At the same time, the Partisan forces were rushing to capture Istria and Trieste as part of the new state.Yugoslav units managed to capture Trieste before the British, but soon had to evacuate the city, whereas Istria was provisionally divided into two zones. These would be one of the bones of contention with the West for several years to come. Partisan aggressiveness and hard treatment of the local Italians lost Yugoslavia some Western sympathy. 402

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Postwar repressions The war in Yugoslavia was officially over a week later than in rest of Europe since German and collaborationist forces refused to acknowledge the German capitulation on May 8. They hoped to cross into Austria and surrender to the British, believing they would enjoy their protection. However, the British did not want POWs in their zone of occupation. Wanting the Partisan forces to leave parts of Carinthia they hoped to annex, the British extradited a large number of German and mostly Croatian collaborationist soldiers and civilians to the Partisans, who killed most of them. The total number is still disputed, as is the number of those who were killed off in karst pits in Slovenia and on “death marches” to POW camps. However, despite the large number of victims of the Communist take-​over, it is only fair to mention several amnesties for the collaborationist small fry that were proclaimed since late 1944. It should also be noted that at the end of the war half of the Partisan forces consisted of former collaborationist soldiers. In this, as in other things, the new regime combined hard oppression with the offer of cooperation. As a rule, the repression was at its worst during the first weeks and months of the new regime: at that time, one could lose one’s life for an anti-​Communist article or two in a collaborationist newspaper; while a couple of months later, even high collaborationist officials received only prison sentences that were usually commuted later. During the first days of liberation, shootings and arrests were wonton and unorganized, usually committed by Partisan units. Soon afterwards, it was the political police, UDBA, which conducted investigations and issued indictments. Military court marshals still dispensed summary justice until August 1945. Civilian courts that took over then were staffed with a large number of unprofessional personnel and dependent on the regime. Particularly hard hit were the ethnic Germans and some Hungarians in the northern province of Vojvodina. Having participated in the Hungarian and German occupation and some of them also in war-​crimes, they bore the brunt of Partisan revenge. Some 7,000 Germans and up to 5,000 Hungarians, alongside alleged or real collaborators of other ethnic groups were killed during the first weeks of the new regime. The death toll here is also still debated. The Volksdeutsche (members of the German minority) who had not fled or were not evacuated by the Nazis, or been shot out of hand, faced beatings, rape, and robbery. A military administration was quickly imposed on the province. In November 1944, a process began for internment, pending expulsion to Germany, of almost all Germans and several thousand Hungarians in concentration camps. By mid-​1945 they would contain most of the ethnic Germans remaining in Yugoslavia. In late 1944 and early 1945 some 10,000 were also deported to forced labor in the USSR. Fifty thousand more died of hunger, sickness, and hard labor before the camps were disbanded in spring 1948. These detentions also served to impound huge tracts of arable land and other real estate. As by decision of the AVNOJ presidium on November 21, 1944, property of the Volksdeutsche (except of those living in mixed marriages, supporters or members of the Partisans), German nationals, and other enemies was to be confiscated.The decision ushered in wide-​scale confiscation of private property under the guise of punishment for collaboration. These measures were aimed at laying foundations for a state-​run Communist economy. Courts and other government organs applied the decision extremely liberally: regardless of ethnic affiliation. Practically every owner of a private company active during the war was labeled collaborator and his property confiscated. Foreign companies were for the time being only sequestered, so as not to lose Allied support for the regime’s recognition. Some four fifths of industrial property came under government control by the end of 1945. Private banks were nationalized on October 26, 1945.The 403

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pattern for establishment of almost total Communist power in the whole country was set up in eastern parts of Yugoslavia that were liberated in fall 1944 and smoothly applied in the rest of the country in 1945.

Consolidating Communist rule An interim National Assembly convened on August 7, 1945, combining AVNOJ representatives with the uncompromised prewar MPs, in accordance with the decisions of the Yalta conference, in hope of winning domestic and Allied support.The Communists did however keep a majority of 365 to 122 in the new legislative body. At the same time their Popular Front was officially founded. It was intended to manage what was left of the prewar political parties in keeping with Communist needs. To be sure, not all parties were willing to take part on these terms, but those who did were subject to all sorts of official and unofficial pressure. For these reasons the United Opposition, whose few representatives had gradually dropped out of the interim government, renounced participation at the elections for the Constituent Assembly on November 11, 1945. For their part, the Communist authorities deprived some 200,000 citizens of voting rights, under the pretext of collaboration or economic malfeasance. To be sure, the Communist-​dominated interim authorities undertook also positive measures to win support from large sections of the populace. Apart from proclamation of ethnic equality, the cancelation of peasant debts, agrarian reform, and colonization were probably the most important. Because the agrarian question had been one of the most pressing social issues during the interwar period, the Law on Agrarian Reform and Colonization was already passed on August 23, 1945. Some 1.6 million acres were impounded for the Agrarian Fund. Forty percent came from confiscated Volksdeutsche property, whereas the rest was taken from collaborators, churches, large landowners, banks and wealthy farmers. The land was distributed among landless peasantry, and small farmers. Former Partisan combatants or their families were entitled to larger land grants. Agrarian reform was coupled with transfer of people from the land poor regions, which had been the hub of the Partisan movement, to more fertile lowlands, especially in the Vojvodina and Slavonia. Unlike the interwar agrarian reform, it was more far-​reaching and more quickly implemented. It was essentially completed by July 1947. It did away with large private landholdings and increased the average size of plots, while keeping them small by European standards. They also changed the ethnic make-​up particularly in the Vojvodina, creating a Serbian majority for the first time, and tied large sections of poorer peasants to the regime. The predominantly Albanian-​inhabited province of Kosovo was an exception in some ways. Having been badly treated by the interwar Yugoslav monarchy, the Albanians greeted German and Italian troops as liberators in April 1941 and collaborated massively with them until the end. They committed repeated war-​crimes against the local Serbian and Montenegrin population, targeting the interwar colonists in particular. Thousands were killed, their homes destroyed or taken away from them, and many more were expelled or had to flee. Albanian membership in the Communist Party and the Partisan movement was negligible. At the same time, the Yugoslav Communists helped to create the Communist Party of Albania, leading to cooperation between the two resistance movements by 1944 and several divisions from Albania participating in the liberation of Kosovo and western Macedonia in 1945. Although they could not exonerate the worst war criminals in Kosovo, the Partisan authorities were also very much interested in allowing most of the Albanians to change sides. They were offered the possibility of integration into the new state by joining the Partisan units that were to liberate the rest of the country. In order to recruit them, the Partisan leaders had to rely on a number of former collaborators, who 404

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eventually turned against them and launched a massive Albanian uprising at the end of 1944. Some 30.000 Partisan troops had to be brought into the province to put down the revolt. In February 1945, a military administration was imposed there, at the time when it was lifted in the Vojvodina. The Communists had hard time convincing Albanian masses that their government was something quite different from the prewar one. Unlike the ethnic-​Germans who were earmarked for expulsion (“resettlement” in Germany), the Albanians were meant to become part of the new nation and perhaps play a role in creating a Yugoslav-​dominated Balkan federation that would include Albania too. Repression was therefore individual and selective, and some former collaborators and even war criminals found places for themselves in the new government. The process of integrating Albanians would take years, but the Communist Party was more than willing to let them enter the Party, administration, and secure their minority rights. Indeed, that would be the policy toward all national minorities in Yugoslavia. As means of placating the Kosovo Albanians and the newly recognized ethnic identity of the Macedonians, interwar colonists were temporarily prohibited in March 1945 from returning to their homes from which they had been expelled by the occupiers and the locals during the war. To compensate for rising food prices as crop production declined because the new settlers lacked experience, the regime ordered the compulsory sale of agricultural produce at prices below market value. It served to feed the towns and the workers needed for the development of heavy industry, always a Communist priority. An industrial working class was intended to replace a peasantry that was deemed conservative, religious, and backward. Wide-​spread rural resistance to the forced sales resulted in hidden or destroyed crops, black market sales, and even armed attacks. This in turn led to more fines, confiscations, and even longer prison sentences. Since political parties (or what was left of them) were effectively pushed onto the defensive, the loudest opposing voice became that of the Roman Catholic Church. The once privileged Serbian Orthodox Church had suffered hard at the hands of the Ustaša, the Germans and eventually the Partisans. Having lost hundreds of priests and several bishops, it also enjoyed no foreign support. The Roman Catholic Church was, also with heavy losses, still strong enough to oppose the new authorities. Its position was somewhat weakened due to collaboration of a considerable number of priests with the occupation in Slovenia and with the Ustaša regime in Croatia and Bosnia-​Herzegovina. It had nonetheless kept the loyalty of a majority of Slovenes and Croats especially because of its support for Croatian independence, its most galling feature for the Communist regime. As late as March 1945, the Croatian bishops expressed support for the preservation of the Independent State of Croatia. Although some 250 Roman Catholic priests were killed by the Partisans, many imprisoned and up to 500 emigrated, the Church was still strong. The new authorities were hoping to win over the remaining clergy but were not willing to make substantial ideological or jurisdictional concessions. What they wanted was a more “national” Catholic Church that would be autonomous from the Vatican. But the Roman Catholic Church opposed communism for the same reasons. It could not reconcile itself with a regime aggressively promoting atheism and it did not want to give up its publications and property or cut its ties to the Vatican. As did the Serbian Orthodox Church, it opposed abolition of mandatory religious instruction in schools, restrictions on church publications, the confiscation of buildings, also and the agrarian reform. Its opposition was peaked at several meetings between the Archbishop of Zagreb, Alojzije Stepinac, and Tito. They failed to agree, and a meeting of the bishops’ conference in mid-​ September 1945 issued a missive to the faithful accompanied by circular letter for the clergy. They called on the faithful to abstain from voting in the forthcoming elections. Seeing that there was no accommodating the Catholic Church, the Communists stepped up repression. 405

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The hard relations between the government and the Church culminated in the show trial of Stepinac in September 1946. If the Communists had been willing to forgive his collaboration –​qualified by displays of dissatisfaction –​with the Ustaša regime, they could not accept his refusal to cooperate with their new regime. He was tried for crimes he connived at (or did not denounce loudly enough) and for alleged ties with Ustaša terrorists coming to Yugoslavia after the war. His sentence to 16 years in prison was consistent with the Communist reckoning with all opposition figures, including the trial of Draža Mihailović, the Chetnik leader, earlier that year. Their two trials also helped to establish some ethnic balance in crime and punishment and thus promote inter-​ethnic reconciliation. Other trials across the ethnic spectrum had the same purpose. Opposition by both the churches and by political parties, however, had little effect on the elections on November 11, 1945. With so many people deprived of voting rights or in exile, intimidation, and probably some vote tampering, the government ticket scored a resounding victory. The monarchy was abolished immediately, and the new constitution of January 31, 1946, legalized the already existing federal structure of the country. The new government was installed the next month and was soon recognized by the major powers. The constituent republics passed carbon-​copies of the federal constitution, all relying heavily on the Soviet Constitution of 1936 (so-​called “Stalin Constitution”). The Communist Party turned to stifling the remaining opposition within the Popular Front. The Law on Nationalization passed on December 5, 1946, transferred most of the larger companies to state ownership for little or no compensation. In April 1948 the law was amended to cover also small companies. Except for land, all the means of production were now in the government’s hands. This fact coupled with aid from the UNRRA, large use of voluntary and forced (POWs and Volksdeutsche) labor allowed reconstruction of infrastructure to be largely completed by 1946. During that year the first Soviet-​style plan for the development of industry was agreed upon. It went into effect in 1947. Soviet models were copied in culture as well, where Soviet films, books, artworks, and plays were extolled and presented at the expense of “decadent” Western products. Schools, especially those for members of national minorities, multiplied but faced a lack of qualified teachers and schoolbooks, plus some popular resistance. These and other plans were unrealistically optimistic but expressing disbelief or lack of enthusiasm especially for Soviet films was socially unacceptable. Overt opposition was instantly punished. In some three years, the Yugoslav Communists managed to bring virtually all spheres of life under their control, mostly without direct Soviet help and earlier than in the new Soviet satellites.

From cooperation with the Soviets to the Tito-​Stalin split Cooperation with the USSR was supposed to be the cornerstone of the new Yugoslav foreign policy too. An agreement on cooperation was already signed by the Interim Government on April 11, 1945. Yugoslavia’s representatives loyally supported Soviet moves in international bodies and became to be perceived as the major Soviet satellite in the West. This stood in the way of the desired territorial expansion at the expense of Italy or Austria. The Western powers increasingly opposed Yugoslav demands not only for territory but also for reparations, restitution of Yugoslav deposits in American banks, and the extradition of war criminals. On the other hand, good relations with the Soviets helped improve Yugoslav relations with other neighboring countries (except for Greece, where the Yugoslavs supported the Communists in the Civil War). Already in late 1944 and early 1945, Tito and his associates started proposing plans for a Balkan federation with Bulgaria and Albania. Its promise of Yugoslav domination in the Balkans was too much for Stalin, and he set it aside by 1947. 406

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Cooperation with the USSR was needed for the speedy reconstruction and economic development. Joint companies were set up, although they mostly operated to the Soviets’ advantage. In order to improve the relations with other Soviet satellites, Yugoslavia was willing to reduce her share of the reparations (from Hungary) or to renounce them altogether (from Bulgaria). Before 1948,Yugoslavia seemed to have a secure place in the Soviet sphere of influence. Despite the Yugoslavs’ complaints about the joint companies, the break with Stalin in 1948 was a major shock for them. The first signs of Soviet dissatisfaction with Tito were observable already in fall of 1947. In spring 1948, Soviet advisers and experts were recalled and criticism expressed behind the scenes. When the Yugoslavs failed to react contritely, Stalin decided to make a public condemnation. The Yugoslav Communist Party was condemned by the resolution of the Soviet-​led Cominform on June 28, 1948, coincidentally chosen to fall on the same day like the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, which triggered the First World War, and on the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, which was a major Serbian holiday. The Yugoslavs were accused of leniency toward rich peasants, ideological revisionism, serving Western interests, and other transgressions. The Cominform resolution called upon the Yugoslav people and Party members to overthrow Tito’s regime. The Yugoslav public, especially Communist faithful, were flabbergasted. Behind these accusations lay Stalin’s dissatisfaction with Tito’s excessive independence. Yugoslavia was not following the Soviet line in economic policy and was becoming too independent in regional relations. Tito and his associates hastily called a Party congress a month later that gave unqualified support to the policy of the leadership. Until the end of the year the Yugoslav government believed that Soviet displeasure was temporary. It tried to prove their commitment to Soviet orthodoxy by stepping up pressure on rich peasants and launching a campaign to collectivize agriculture. When it became clear that the break was final, the regime descended on any suspected Soviet sympathizers. These were fired, put under surveillance, imprisoned, or sent to brutal concentration camps, such as the infamous one on the Island of Goli Otok (Naked Island), where they performed forced labor under most inhumane conditions. Estimates about the number of inmates in these camps range between 15,000 to 60,000, with some 4,000 to 5,000 perishing there. These measures can only partly be explained by the danger represented by the Soviet Union and its satellites. Also playing its part was the inherently repressive nature of the Stalinist system in its Titoist variety. Repression was the harshest during the next few years as the regime floated in limbo, expelled from the East and still not accepted by the West. Tito feared a Soviet invasion was imminent. These were also difficult years for the economy and the society. Finding its own way to an independent foreign policy and a liberal socialist economy,Yugoslavia seemed to have left behind the repressive regime that had consolidated itself in power between 1944 and 1948. But the single ruling Communist Party on which it had been created proved to be too weak a foundation to survive after the death of its leader, Tito, in 1980 and it collapsed at almost the same time as the other Communist regimes in Europe.

Selected Readings Bokovoy, Melissa K. Peasants and Communists: Politics and Ideology in the Yugoslav Countryside, 1941–​1953. Pittsburgh, 1993. Cvetković, Serdjan. Između srpa i čekića. Represija u Srbiji 1944–​1953. Belgrade, 2006. Gaćeša, Nikola. Agrarna reforma i kolonizacija u Jugoslaviji 1945–​1948. Novi Sad, 1984. Grahek, Martina. Ravančić, Bleiburg i križni put 1945. Historiografija, publicistika i memoarska literatura, 2nd ed. Zagreb, 2015. Janjetović, Zoran. Between Hitler and Tito.The Disappearance of the Vojvodina Germans, 2nd ed. Belgrade, 2005.

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Zoran Janjetović Pavlović,Vojislav G. Od monarhije do republike. SAD i Jugoslavija (1941–​1945). Belgrade, 1998. Petranović, Branko. Jugoslavija na razmeđu (1945–​1950). Podgorica, 1998. Portmann, Michael. Die kommunistische Revolution in der Vojvodina 1944–​1952. Politik, Gesellschaft,Wirtschaft, Kultur.Vienna,  2008. Radić, Radmila. Država i verske zajednice 1945–​1970, vol. 1. Belgrade, 2002. Živojinović, Dragoljub R. Vatikan, Katolička crkva i jugoslovenska vlast 1941–​1958. Belgrade, 1994.

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41 GREECE FROM OCCUPATION AND RESISTANCE TO CIVIL WAR, 1941–​1 949 Ioannis D. Stefanidis

The origins of the civil war The disintegration of the 4th of August regime in the wake of the German invasion and the debilitating effects of Metaxas’ dictatorship upon the prewar parties, both republican and monarchist, created an apparent vacuum of indigenous authority in wartime Greece. As the country suffered under triple occupation (German, Italian, and Bulgarian), three contenders sought to fill this vacuum: King George II and his government-​in-​exile, the collaborationist administration in Athens, and forces within Greece which were prepared to resist occupation.Two of these contenders depended on foreign support for their survival: the émigré authorities on Britain and the collaborationists on the Axis, primarily Germany. Among those who chose to resist, the Communists soon gained a preponderance. If the Germans were satisfied to control at least part of the country through a regime of exploitation and terror, the British were keen to undermine Axis domination and, as the tides of war began to turn, to control Greece’s transition into the postwar era. The foreign factor was also of crucial importance in the humanitarian crisis, which erupted within a few months of Greece’s occupation. A  net importer of foodstuffs before the war, Greece stood to suffer from both the predatory practices of the occupying powers and the British blockade. During the severe winter of 1941–​2, the death rate, especially infant mortality, skyrocketed and public health plummeted in famine-​stricken areas, especially Athens. Prevailed upon by the government in exile and humanitarian organizations, London partially lifted the blockade in February 1942 and allowed the regular shipment of food and other necessities under the supervision of the International Red Cross and neutral powers. It took further lengthy negotiations with the occupying powers through the Swedish government before substantial relief, especially Canadian wheat, began to flow from September 1942 onwards. Although the majority of the population continued to live well below subsistence level, the worst had been averted. Greece’s humanitarian issue was compounded by the displacement of hundreds of thousands of persons, predominantly from eastern Macedonia and Thrace occupied by Bulgaria but also from rural communities targeted by Axis reprisals and mopping-​up operations. Worse was the fate of the 77,000 members of the Jewish community of Greece, two thirds of them in Thessaloniki. After imposing a regime of discrimination, privation, and terror for nearly two 409

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years, the German authorities completed the mass deportations of these Jews to death camps in the German Reich by August 1943. A similar fate awaited the Jewish communities of the Dodecanese islands, following the British failure to wrest them from Axis control in late 1943. In eastern Macedonia and Thrace, the Bulgarian authorities handed the Jews over to the Germans in March 1944. In the end, an estimated 87 percent of Greece’s Jewish population perished.The occupying forces also fostered unrest among ethnic minorities, the Albanian Chams of Epirus, the Romanian-​speaking Vlachs of the Pindus mountain range, and the South Slav population in western Greek Macedonia. Secessionist propaganda was given free rein and pro-​Axis militias were formed among them. Their record of intimidation and violence would gravely compromise the status of their respective communities in postwar Greece. Economic exploitation was no less harsh, even in the larger Italian-​occupied regions. The territorially truncated and financially debilitated Greek Politeia (Republic), as the collaborationist regime called itself, was forced to meet the expenses of the occupation forces well beyond its means and, at the same time, tolerate the appropriation of local produce in exchange for over-​valued occupation currency. The latter practice exacerbated the scarcity of foodstuffs and other essentials, encouraged hoarding, and devalued the drachma. Realizing the self-​defeating character of their tactics, the German and Italian authorities attempted to regularize the exploitation of Greece through a bilateral agreement, which was signed in Rome, in March 1942. The collaborationist administration was obliged to cover occupation costs up to a certain amount, and the excess would be considered an interest-​free Greek loan to the two Axis powers. As a result of hyperinflation, Greek payments of occupation costs were repeatedly revised upwards. Significantly, the Reich repaid a few installments of the compulsory loan before its withdrawal from Greece, thus providing a basis for postwar Greek claims. The greatest tragedy resulting from the Axis occupation was undoubtedly the inception of the conflict that plunged Greece into intermittent civil war. It is customary for many Greeks to blame this development to foreign interference. True, the Axis conquest created conditions of acute insecurity and general degradation for the great majority of the population. This experience severely tested past loyalties. Out of desperation, many Greeks became receptive to radical alternatives. Soon, the Axis-​backed regime lost whatever appeal it shortly enjoyed, leaving two main contenders, the prewar political personalities and the resistance. The former limited themselves to an occasional statement with a precious few choosing a more active course, mostly exiled in British-​controlled Egypt. Such a situation left the field open to the cadres of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). Seasoned in underground activity, and despite the deportation of their leader, Nikos Zachariadis, to Germany, these previously marginalized forces formed the National Liberation Front (EAM) in autumn 1941. For more than a year, the KKE leadership under Georgios Siantos sought to place EAM at the forefront of a movement of civil protest against the harsh conditions of occupation.The protest did at least slow the Nazi policy of economic mobilization and the forced migration of labor to the Reich. By late 1942, however, a more militant Communist line prevailed. Its chief advocate was Babis Klaras (aka Aris Velouchiotis). The determination of the Communist leadership to monopolize armed resistance led to the first instances of internecine conflict. During 1943, rival resistance organizations, paramilitary units, and even entire rural communities armed by the Germans entered the fray. Rather than furthering the Allied cause, and even less working for a German victory, all these elements chiefly fought against fellow Greeks for a variety of reasons. At some point, they all turned to the cardinal issue: How was Greece to be ruled and orientated after the war? This was also a vital question for Britain, the traditionally dominant sea power in Greece’s region. London deemed control of the country essential for the safeguarding of the imperial 410

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lines of communication with the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East.The restoration of a friendly government and, significantly, the preservation of the monarchy became the cornerstone of British policy during the rest of the war. It was a course that owed much to Winston Churchill’s keen, though intermittent, interest in Greek affairs. Unfortunately, the British prime minister chose to ignore increasing evidence of the king’s unpopularity among his subjugated subjects. His identification with the Metaxas dictatorship apparently had alienated even moderate monarchists. Not until February 1942 did the exiled government under Emmanouil Tsouderos, a former Venizelist, formally disassociate itself from its authoritarian predecessor. Both the émigré Greek authorities and the British were even slower in recognizing that because of the king’s unpopularity; he ought not to return before the fate of the monarchy could be decided by a free vote. From late 1942, the requirements of Allied strategy on the Mediterranean fronts upgraded the operational significance of the fledgling resistance movement. A  mission of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) under Brigadier Edward Myers was dispatched to both the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), the armed wing of EAM, and the non-​communist National Republican Greek League (EDES) under Napoleon Zervas. The task of the SOE mission in Greece was to some extent eased by the desire of EAM and KKE to gain respectability through British recognition of ELAS as an allied force. To this end, ELAS sent representatives to the joint general headquarters of “national bands” which Myers helped to set up in July 1943. The successful conduct of British deception activities, especially Operation Animals that tied down German forces in southern Greece on the eve of the Sicily landings, momentarily overshadowed London’s misgivings about EAM’s political origins and its suppression of independent resistance groups. At the same time, the SOE mission became aware of the changing political sentiments in occupied Greece. In an attempt to press these changes home to both the British and the Greek émigré authorities, Myers accompanied a Greek resistance delegation to Cairo in August 1943. Its members unsuccessfully pleaded for representation in the Tsouderos government and especially, for a commitment from the king not to return before a plebiscite had been held. Myers’ initiative was dismissed by his superiors. The delegation flew back empty-​handed and bitter. Meanwhile, Italy left the war. A  windfall of arms and ammunition from surrendering Italian units had given ELAS the upper hand over other resistance groups. This EAM leadership decided to use this advantage to eliminate EDES and other organizations. As fratricidal violence escalated, the British cut off supplies to ELAS but did not withdraw the SOE mission. Myers’ successor, Colonel Christopher (Chris) Woodhouse managed to broker a ceasefire in early February 1944 and then the Plaka agreement, which officially terminated the conflict. Friction revived when, in March, EAM formed an alternative administration, the Provisional Committee of National Liberation (PEEA) in the territory controlled by ELAS, its military arm. This was a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the Tsouderos government. Shortly afterwards mutinies broke out in the Greek armed forces in the Middle East. “Disturbances” on account of political differences among the rank and file had not been uncommon, but this time the scale was unprecedented. The mutineers demanded the broadening of the government-​in-​ exile with EAM representatives and a clear commitment by the king not to return in advance of a plebiscite. The mutinies were suppressed with decisive British intervention. What remained of the Greek armed forces in Egypt now consisted of loyalist, mostly monarchist, elements. Meanwhile, on April 12, the king publicly recognized the people’s right to decide the question of his return by a referendum. This opened the way for the appointment of George Papandreou, a liberal politician who had opposed the Metaxas regime, as prime minister. Although a republican, 411

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Papandreou believed that the “real issue” was no longer the constitutional question but averting a communist take-​over after liberation. With full British backing, he convened a conference of all major Greek factions at a Lebanese resort, in May 1944. Only the extreme monarchists abstained. EAM’s delegates, completely outmaneuvered by Papandreou, accepted a political program that envisaged the formation of a government of national unity and a road map to liberation consistent with British objectives. In dismay, the leaders of KKE/​EAM sought to repudiate their representatives’ signature and declined participation in the new government. It was only in late August that EAM agreed to give in, most likely prodded by the newly arrived Soviet mission to ELAS headquarters. Already in May, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had acknowledged the predominant British interest in Greece in return for a free hand in Romania. Toward the end of September, EAM adhered to the Caserta agreement, which placed both EDES and ELAS units under the orders of General Ronald Scobie, commander of the British force earmarked for Greece. Its size was too small for fighting the retreating Germans; rather, its mission was to prevent Athens and other key locations from falling into ELAS hands. The Germans were about to evacuate Athens when, in October 1944, Churchill and Stalin reached an informal but momentous understanding over Southeastern Europe. The so-​called “percentages agreement” divided the entire region into spheres of “responsibility.” Romania and Bulgaria, already occupied by the Soviet Army, were recognized as falling within the Soviet sphere. An even share was acknowledged in the cases of Yugoslavia and Hungary. By accepting British predominance in Greece, Stalin not only kept his army from crossing its northern border but also met Churchill’s demand for the timely withdrawal of the Bulgarian occupation force from Greek territory. Now, the British were quite free to pursue their objectives in Greece, even if that entailed a showdown with the pro-​Soviet leadership of EAM.

The battle of Athens and British intervention Liberation found the country in dismal condition. Human losses as result of war and occupation were variously estimated between 7 and 11 percent of its population.The national currency had collapsed amidst hyperinflation and was replaced by gold sovereigns and barter.The destruction of bridges, railways, ports, public utilities, and other infrastructure further reduced the productive potential of a depleted, mostly agrarian economy. Foodstuffs and other essentials were in short supply and a great part of the population, including thousands of victims of German reprisal, depended on relief for their survival. Moreover, the government’s authority hardly extended beyond Athens. With the exception of the EDES power base in Epirus, most of the country, including Thessaloniki, passed under the effective control of EAM/​ELAS. In addition, German garrisons would remain on Crete, the Dodecanese, and the island of Milos until the end of the war in Europe. Before long, the government of national unity was torn apart over two related issues, the disbandment of partisan units and the composition of the new national army. EAM felt that it had made concessions to its own political limits. Its domestic rivals and the British were still anxious to contain EAM’s military leverage. By the end of November, the KKE leadership had decided on a show of force. In protest to Papandreou’s alleged double dealing over the army issue, the EAM ministers resigned on December 1, 1944. Provocation abounded from both sides and culminated in bloodshed during an EAM demonstration held in Athens on December 3.  On the following day ELAS units began to attack government positions throughout the capital. Whatever hopes its leadership harbored regarding British non-​intervention or even a friendly Soviet move proved illusory.The loyalist pockets held out for a crucial 11 days, until the 412

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reinforced British troops intervened. Following an abortive peace-​making mission by Churchill himself, on Christmas day 1944, British intervention prevailed and ELAS sued for an armistice. Meanwhile, King George was finally persuaded to make his return conditional upon the will of the people. Archbishop Damaskinos was appointed Regent and a new government under Nikolaos Plastiras negotiated with EAM the so-​called Varkiza Agreement of February 12, 1945. Yet the prospect of national reconciliation was compromised from the outset. The December clash had cemented the deep division between EAM and its opponents.The Left lost ground as its opponents could point at its record of violence, especially from hostage taking and summary execution of civilians. The subsequent discovery of caches with arms concealed in defiance of the Varkiza Agreement rendered the Communists’ commitment to peace questionable. At the same time, their rivals, especially in the countryside, were bent on revenge. Tens of thousands of EAM/​ELAS members would subsequently suffer in what the Left has described as the “White Terror” of the post-​Varkiza period. The unsettled situation prolonged British involvement well beyond the intentions of the Churchill government. For more than a year, British troops were charged with security and even police duties in much of Greece. A British service, the Military Liaison, undertook the provision of urgently needed humanitarian aid until conditions permitted the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) to operate. According to Woodhouse, the former head of the SOE mission, “up to 1947 the British Government appointed and dismissed Greek Prime Ministers with the barest attention to constitutional formalities.” This situation little changed after the Labour victory in the British general elections of July 1945. There was, however, a new interest in political moderation. In April 1945, the Plastiras government resigned amid much criticism for political interference in the new army command and failure to handle the economic situation. Kyriakos Varvaressos, Minister of Supply in the new cabinet under Admiral Petros Voulgaris, made a courageous attempt to tackle the country’s economic ills but was soon forced to resign under attack from those who had profited from Greece’s woes since 1940. Black market profiteering and the lack of trust in the drachma persisted, despite the influx of commodity aid, which made Greece the fifth largest recipient of UNRRA aid by 1947. The appointment of a predominantly republican government under Themistoklis Sofoulis, the aging leader of the Liberal Party, aimed at striking a middle course between the monarchist Right and the communist Left. To that end, the plebiscite was postponed until after the elections, which were also delayed. In addition to the inherent shortcomings of the so-​called Center, the scheme foundered on the intransigence of the confident Right and the decision of the KKE leadership, following Zachariadis’ return from exile, to adopt a dual strategy of legal activity and secret preparation for armed confrontation. Despite alleged Soviet counsel to the contrary, the Left decided to abstain from the elections of March 31, 1946. An international supervision team, consisting of American, British, and French observers, reported the process as being “on the whole free and fair.” The Left, for its part, denounced the results as the product of extensive fraud and violence. In any case, the abstention of the Left, estimated at between 20–​25 percent of eligible voters, helped the monarchist Right and its allies to secure an absolute majority in the Fourth Greek Constituent Assembly. An entirely monarchist government was formed under Konstantinos Tsaldaris, leader of the prewar People’s Party. Intimidation against the Left and the republicans intensified. According to US Ambassador Lincoln MacVeagh, the authorities tended “to consider all persons Communists unless [they were] Royalists.” Armed communist activity led the monarchist majority to pass

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legislation empowering the authorities to arrest without warrant and to imprison persons suspected of “plotting against public order and the integrity of the country.” Twenty-​five courts martial were set up, eventually trying 50,000 cases. Almost 60  percent of the accused were acquitted, but 3,000 of those condemned to death were executed. Finally, the plebiscite, which was held on September 1, 1946, resulted in a resounding victory for the monarchy with 68 percent in favor. King George II returned to Greece but died a few months later. He was succeeded by his brother Paul. Meanwhile, the drift toward civil war continued. In July 1946, the KKE approved the formation of a military wing, the Democratic Army. Many of its cadres had fled Greece after Varkiza and received sanctuary and training in camps, mainly in Yugoslavia. Their infiltration back into Greek territory added to the international dimension of the Greek crisis. Athens turned to the United Nations Security Council accusing Albania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia of violating Greek sovereignty. The People’s Republics responded by denouncing the Tsaldaris government as a menace to peace in the Balkans, citing Greek claims to Albanian and Bulgarian territory. Yet, when Greece put these claims forward at the Paris Peace Conference in July 1946, the Allies rebuffed them. The award of the Dodecanese, an Italian possession until 1943, failed to satisfy the government and public opinion in Greece. A sense of abandonment threatened to creep in. Indeed, hard-​pressed on other fronts and in dire financial straits, the British Labour government was bent on winding up its Greek venture.

Civil war and American intervention The prospect of the United States assuming at least part of the burden of keeping Greece within the Western fold had steadily gained ground in Washington throughout 1946. Policy planners, particularly within the State Department, had come to appreciate the strategic importance of the Eastern Mediterranean and the oil-​rich Middle East to the security of the United States and its European allies. Recent friction between Moscow and Ankara over the regime of the Turkish Straits, Soviet reluctance to withdraw its army from Iranian territory, and the civil war in Greece fueled suspicion about Soviet intentions in the region. As its own ability to hold the line steadily declined, the Labour government sought to get a clear American commitment to both Greece and Turkey. In October 1946, the administration of President Harry Truman agreed in principle to provide economic assistance to Greece and Turkey, which the British would continue to support militarily. Two months later, Washington dispatched a mission to Greece under Paul Porter in order to ascertain the country’s economic needs. Apparently unsatisfied by such a gradual approach, London forced the US administration’s hand by openly announcing its decision to terminate all financial assistance to Greece and Turkey by March 31, 1947. After a week of feverish exchange between the State Department, the White House and Capitol Hill, the Greek Ambassador in Washington was handed a document that was to be presented as an official Greek request for US aid. The bill authorizing aid to Greece and Turkey was deemed worthy of a presidential address to a joint congressional session, on March 12, 1947. What is now recognized as a landmark in both the globalization of US foreign policy and the incipient Cold War, authorized the disbursement of $300  million to Greece and $100  million to Turkey in financial and military aid, plus administrative expenses. Its canonization as the Truman Doctrine was due to the broad framing of its objectives. Truman declared the determination “of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside

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pressures.” Such sweeping language justified the aid to Greece in a seemingly open-​ended commitment to contain Communism across the board. From the outset, US assistance came with strings attached. In an attempt to improve the image of their Greek protégées abroad, especially in the United States, the cabinet in Athens was reshuffled with the participation of centrist elements including Papandreou,Venizelos, and Panagiotis Kanellopoulos under the elderly conservative Dimitrios Maximos. Still in doubt was the capacity of any Greek government to effectively utilize foreign aid. Indeed, one crucial recommendation of the Porter mission was that the execution of any assistance program should remain under firm American control.This approach was reflected in the bilateral aid agreement signed by the Greek and the US governments on June 20, 1947. A mechanism was set up for the allocation of funds and a new agency, the American Mission for Aid to Greece (AMAG), undertook to exercise whatever functions were deemed necessary for “the most effective use” of aid. The aid could be terminated at any time, if the Greek government failed to implement measures advocated by the mission. Economic leverage facilitated the further extension of US influence into Greek affairs, raising the authority of the US Ambassador over that of the AMAG chief. He and the State Department could oversee changes in the Greek cabinet or in the high command and the size of the armed forces. The Ambassador’s powers over Greek foreign relations and domestic policy established a new and relatively independent pole of foreign influence in Greece. The situation inevitably confounded Greek public opinion. The Greek crisis continued to reverberate at the international level. Following the exchange of accusations between the Greek government and its communist neighbors, the UN Security Council unanimously decided to dispatch an international commission to investigate the situation in the Balkans. The commission arrived in February 1947 and produced two reports. The pro-​Western majority minus France condemned the support of the communist Balkan states,Yugoslavia in particular, for the Greek guerrilla movement. Still, they did not fail to criticize the repressive practices of the Greek government, which were driving many of its opponents to seek refuge in neighboring countries. In their minority report, the Soviet and Polish representatives squarely placed the blame on the Greek government. At the General Assembly, a pro-​Western majority voted for the establishment of a body to monitor the situation on either side of Greece’s northern border. The Soviet bloc states refused to co-​operate and the UN Special Committee on the Balkans (UNSCOB) confined its activity to northern Greece. In its subsequent reports, UNSCOB regularly confirmed Greek complaints and helped corroborate the claim that the country was victim of foreign-​inspired aggression. Stalin was content to use Greece as a diversion in his bras de fer with the Western powers elsewhere. He still had to consolidate his gains in Eastern Europe, and he was aware of the overwhelming postwar advantages of the undamaged United States. Avoiding direct intervention as promised to Churchill in 1944, Stalin did allow the Communist regimes in Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia to keep the Greek civil war simmering. With its own large army and captured stock of military supplies,Yugoslavia in particular was able to move arms and logistical support back and forth across the border. In addition, Marshal Tito’s regime had its own reasons for supporting the Greek Communists. Belgrade aspired to a hegemonic role in the Balkans, starting with Macedonian nation building within the new federal republic and ending in the incorporation of Albania, Bulgaria, and a greater Slav Macedonian state within a Belgrade-​ dominated Balkan federation. A communist take-​over in Greece was expected to facilitate this plan. Already distressed with the Yugoslav regime for its domestic resistance to Soviet hegemony, Stalin balked at any prospect of Tito’s regional hegemony. In early 1948, he reprimanded the

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Yugoslav leadership for its initial accord on a federation with Bulgaria at Bled and demanded the scaling down of Belgrade’s involvement in the Greek civil war. Moscow’s reluctance to commit itself in support of the Greek communist movement, exemplified by its non-​recognition of its Provisional Government set up in late 1947, was not fully appreciated by the KKE. Until then, the party had attempted to keep its options open. While the Democratic Army increased its strength and capacity to deny control of large rural areas to government forces, the party, still operating in legality, pressed for a new government and fresh elections. Its proposals were repeatedly rebuffed until, in July 1947, the security forces rounded up thousands of real or suspected KKE activists, many of whom were shipped to detention camps on barren Greek islands. The unscrupulous way in which the Minister of Public Order, Zervas, conducted the operation provoked an outcry at home and abroad and eventually led to the resignation of the Maximos government. Like the British two years earlier, the Americans chose Sofoulis to head a Liberal-​People’s Party coalition in which Tsaldaris agreed to serve as deputy prime minister and minister for Foreign Affairs. Real authority, however, remained in the hands of the Right, which controlled the majority of cabinet posts and, more importantly, had consolidated its grip over the armed forces and the administration. The new government immediately proclaimed an amnesty, the second since February 1947, for all armed civilians who laid down their arms. The KKE, however, had already opted for a definite rupture. When, on December 23, 1947, a communist Provisional Government was proclaimed, the Sofoulis government outlawed the KKE, EAM, and all affiliated organizations and banned communist activity on severe penalties. By that time, the flow of American supplies and military equipment had restored morale within the government camp and its army. American assistance also entailed operational advice through the Joint US Military Advisory and Planning Group in Greece (JUSMAPG), under the command of General James Van Fleet. The aid program, which from the summer of 1948 became part of the Marshall Plan, was streamlined to provide military transport and improve communications while also covering the massive budget deficit of the Greek government and procuring essential civilian supplies. Victory still eluded the government forces. Despite their advantage in men and firepower, the summer campaign ended inconclusively. Maneuvering through Albania, the Democratic Army was able to recapture its strongholds in northwestern Greece and even threaten the city of Kastoria. The government camp was thrown into confusion. However, the Truman administration resisted calls for deeper military involvement, persuading the British to retain their own token force in Greece until the fighting was over. Because of the reverses at the front, the palace played with the idea of a “strong man solution.” King Paul envisaged such a role for General Alexandros Papagos, commander-​in-​chief during the Greek-​Italian war. US Ambassador Henry Grady put these schemes of informal dictatorship to rest. It risked discrediting the US involvement in Greece in the eyes of American and world opinion. Sofoulis continued in office, while Papagos returned as commander-​in-​chief. The cabinet was reshuffled and survived almost unchanged for another 11 months. The government’s rivals faced far greater difficulties. Despite the considerable aid it received through Yugoslavia, the Democratic Army proved unable to supply its units beyond its strongholds in northern Greece and was constantly short of reserves. The government had deprived it of potential recruits, first by dispatching nearly 29,000 communist sympathizers of military age to the “national re-​education” camp on the island of Makronissos, and then by emptying contested territory from its civilian population. Still, as long as they pursued sound guerrilla tactics, the Communists could prolong the struggle. However, from summer 1948, Zachariadis turned instead to conventional warfare. His offensive to seize enough territory 416

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and a town to constitute the semblance of a state resulted in a series of costly defeats. Markos Vafiadis, the Democratic Army chief and the champion of guerrilla warfare, had already been relieved of his command and eventually purged from the KKE leadership. Vafiadis’s purge also reflected the agonizing dilemma confronting the Greek Communists after the rift between Moscow and Belgrade. Eventually, during its 5th Plenum in January 1949, the KKE came out openly in support of the Moscow line. Its declaration in favor of Macedonian self-​determination reflected the fact that, by then, nearly half its military forces consisted of Slav Macedonians. It did however antagonize Tito and, more importantly, alienate Greek public opinion for clearly implying the cession of national territory. Another KKE initiative had similarly provided the government with a valuable propaganda weapon. The Democratic Army removed some 25,000 children from areas under its control to refugee camps in Eastern Europe. Rejecting the humanitarian pretext, the Greek government lodged a protest at the UN General Assembly. In November 1948, the latter adopted a resolution calling for the return of those children who themselves or their relatives so desired. By 1949, massive American assistance and a determined new leadership had enabled the Greek army to redress the setbacks of the previous autumn. After clearing the southern and central parts of the country, the government forces assailed the bastions of the Democratic Army along the Yugoslav border. Their forces, now much reduced, were overwhelmed. The Communist leadership blamed the Yugoslavs for a “stab in the back.” In response,Tito sealed the Greek-​Yugoslav border in July. In late August, the Greek army launched its final attack. After a short but bitter struggle, the remnants of the Democratic Army were forced to withdraw into Albania in order to avoid complete annihilation. On October 16, 1949, the KKE radio transmitter belatedly announced the suspension of military activities until further notice. Estimates of losses in the various stages of the Greek civil war vary considerably. The last three years of internecine fighting added between 42,000 and 47,000 dead to the 15,000 victims of the battle of Athens in 1944. Before then, there were some 55,000 fatalities as a result of reprisals, mopping-​up operations as well as ELAS action. Somewhere between 50,000 and 130,000 Greek citizens, including nearly 30,000 of Slav Macedonian origin, sought refuge in Yugoslavia and Soviet bloc countries. Following the half million dead in World War II and the occupation, the final toll of this terrible decade in a population of less than 7.5 million was indeed heaviest in Southeastern Europe.

Selected Readings Alexander, George Martin. The Prelude to the Truman Doctrine: British Foreign Policy in Greece, 1944–​1947. Oxford, 1982. Baerentzen, Lars, John O. Iatrides, and Ole Smith, eds. Studies in the History of the Greek Civil War, 1945–​ 1949. Copenhagen, 1987. Close, David H., ed. The Greek Civil War 1943–​1950: Studies of Polarization. London, 1993. Fleischer, Hagen. Im Kreuzschatten der Mächte: Griechenland 1941–​1944. Frankfurt am Main, 1986. Iatrides, John O., ed. Greece in the 1940s: A Nation in Crisis. Hanover, N.H., and London, 1981. Iatrides, John O. “Revolution or Self-​Defense? Communist Goals, Strategy, and Tactics in the Greek Civil War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 3 (2005): 3–​33. Kalyvas, Stathis and Nikos Marantzidis. Emfylia pathi: 23 erotisis ke apantisis gia ton Emfylio. Athens, 2015. Mazower, Mark. Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–​1944. New Haven, Conn., 1993. Woodhouse, Christopher M. The Struggle for Greece, 1941–​1949. London, 2002 [1976]. Wittner, Lawrence S. American Intervention in Greece, 1943–​1949. New York, 1982.

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PART VII

 

Cold War division and European transition, 1949–​1989

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OVERVIEW Communist regimes and the Greek exception John R. Lampe and Ulf Brunnbauer

From the end of the Greek CivilWar in 1949 until 1989, Southeastern Europe would enjoy a period of domestic and international peace behind the borders as shown in Map 41.1, unprecedented for the region in modern times.The chapters in Part VII examine the transitions in regimes and societies that accompanied a shifting set of Cold War divisions. The divisions also helped to keep the peace.They had however become irrelevant in the last years before the collapse of the Communist regimes and the warfare and turmoil that followed from 1989 forward.An Epilogue introduces the reader to the start of a new era whose course is not yet clear.The chapters below therefore end before the upheavals from late 1989 to 1991 changed all the region’s governments and societies. Our Overview tracks the region across three distinct periods. During the 1950s, a common pattern of political consolidation and postwar recovery prevailed. Hard, arbitrary regimes ruled everywhere, including Greece on the other side of the ideological border drawn by the Cold War. They allowed little dissent, let alone opposition. There followed two periods of increasing diversity between the five states and their societies, within them as well. First came the reform promised by Greek elections, Yugoslav self-​management, and the Czechoslovak example of “socialism with a human face.” All were defeated by the early 1970s. From 1974, political détente between East and West promised international stability.Western credit allowed domestic standards of living to continue rising through the 1970s. By the mid-​1980s standards had frayed in the face of the debt crises and political instability that precipitated regime change, civil war, and economic collapse from 1989 into the 1990s. To address the variety of advance and reversal from the 1950s forward, a majority of the chapters below proceed country by country. The first exception is Arnd Bauerkämper’s comparison of the varied struggles with collectivized agriculture in Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and briefly Yugoslavia, Michael Gruev follows the Bulgarian connection to the Soviet Union as it closest and most consistent ally. Elidor Mehilli examines the Albanian shift from Yugoslav to Soviet, then Chinese support and eventually self-​reliance.Vladimir Tişmaneanu and Marius Stan address the Romanian version of National Communism, moving from independence to repression under Nicolae Ceauşescu.Vladimir Unkovski-​Korica reviews the travails of Yugoslav self-​ management. Despite its initial promise as an alternative to the Soviet system and a Third World model, its own failings fed the fatal antagonisms between the federal republics. Othon Anastasakis takes us from Greece’s electoral promise of 1963 to the Colonels’ dictatorship of 1967–​74 and back to free elections, European Community membership, and a socialist government in the 421

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Map 41.1  Southeastern Europe after World War II, 1945–​1947.

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1980s. Returning to Yugoslavia, Jasna Dragović-​Soso focuses on the decisive role in Yugoslavia’s political endgame of critical intellectuals in Serbia and Slovenia. Looking across the region, Ulf Brunnbauer surveys the transnational, essentially European transition in urban societies and gender relations. John Lampe follows the rise of Western lending from the 1970s to the crises that its servicing or repayment created in the 1980s.The incompatibility of their rival nationalist narratives grew from 1981 forward. Together with the debt crisis and the economic implosion described in John Lampe’s chapter, they doomed the federation’s survival by 1989. None of the political responses to the economic crises in the other Communist regimes prevented their own implosions from late 1989 forward.

1949–​1959: Cold War consolidation and postwar recovery The five single-​party regimes that governed Southeastern Europe in the 1950s had much in common. They ruled though powerful ministries, large security services, and a compliant judiciary. News came from state radio stations and a censored press. Opponents faced prison camps, or worse, and ethnic minorities forced deportation. Greece was an exception only in the survival of several political parties and religious freedom. Its army generals nonetheless exercised unchecked authority, if not as widely as the General Secretaries of the Communist parties ruling elsewhere. At the same time, urban population and housing grew while rural living standards did not receive much attention. Public transport, health, and education also advanced, and illiteracy was greatly reduced even in the countryside. Only Greece did not press ahead with rapid industrialization, relying instead on shipping, foreign trade, and tourism. These economic advances in postwar modernization gave their governments a source of political support from populations that they otherwise constrained. Cold War divisions between East and West reinforced these constraints. The Soviet Union kept troops in Romania until 1958. To resist a potential Soviet invasion, the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) had become the region’s largest military force at half a million conscripts. US military aid, if little equipment soon followed. By 1952, Greece had joined the US-​led NATO alliance to protect its northern border against any effort to revive the Greek Civil War with Bulgarian or Yugoslav Macedonian support. Greece’s army remained the region’s second largest at 250,000, still supported with advisors and arms from US aid. In 1955, the Soviet Union countered NATO with its own Warsaw Pact, formally connecting bloc allies that included Albania (which later withdrew), Bulgaria, and Romania. Citing the threat of renewed warfare, the region’s five security services exercised extra-​ judicial authority. In the early 1950s, Greece’s Ministry of Public Order had put nearly 20,000 people in political prison camps, a total exceeded by Yugoslavia’s SDB (the renamed UDBA) and Bulgaria’s DS. Romania’s Securitate topped them all with 100,000 detained, adding another 40,000 in 1956 to suppress any unrest in Transylvania during the Hungarian Revolution. Romania’s large Hungarian minority lost its Autonomous Hungarian Region in the process. Elsewhere, most of the prison camps had by then been emptied except in Albania. Its Sigurimi still held suspected sympathizers with the failed émigré invasion in 1950 that was supported by Anglo-​American intelligence. Forced migrations had also served the ruling regimes, starting with the flight in 1949 of 150,000 Greek or Slav Macedonians on the losing side in the Greek civil war to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, or Albania. In 1953, 160,000 Turks left under pressure from the Communist regime in Bulgaria and moved to Turkey, as did 150,000 Muslims –​Turks, and Albanians and Roma who

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claimed or were claimed to be Turks –​from Yugoslavia. Most of the remaining Jews left Bulgaria and Romania to Israel in the late 1940s, and few years later also Yugoslavia. Churches faced strong pressures from the postwar regimes as well. The one exception was the powerful Greek Orthodox Church, a centerpiece of Greek national identity. In Transylvania, the Romanian Orthodox Church could not take advantage of the dissolution of the rival Greek Catholic (Unite) Church in 1948. Only the “national commitment” of Transylvania’s Orthodox Metropolitan from prison in 1956 resulted in some relaxation.The Bulgarian Orthodox Church received similar restricted acceptance in 1953. Its Plovdiv Metropolitan Kiril was named patriarch in return for recognizing the breaks with Yugoslav Macedonia and with the old Patriarchate in Istanbul. The few Catholic and Protestant clergy in Bulgaria were ruthlessly suppressed. As with Albania’s Catholics,Yugoslavia’s Croatian Catholics had already been denied autonomy and leading clergy arrested after the war. Bosnia’s Young Muslims were disbanded in 1949. By the mid-​1950s, private but not public autonomy was permitted to Serbian Orthodox and Slovenian Catholic clergy. All of the four General Secretaries had consolidated their positions at the head of their ruling Communist parties by the early 1950s. Their swollen party memberships were purged of potential rivals or cadres deemed unreliable. Under Enver Hoxha, the Albanian Party of Labor (PPSh) had already reduced its membership to 30,000 following the break with Yugoslavia in 1948. In 1950, Bulgaria’s Vŭlko Chervenkov purged 140,000 from its half million members in 1948, when it formally changed its name to the Bulgarian Communist Party (BKP). Retitled the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ) in 1952, Josip Broz Tito’s party had cut a similar number from 800,000 members by 1956. Starting from the smallest base of less than 2,000 in 1945, Gheorgiu Dej’s Communist Party of Romania (PCR) reduced its million members in 1948 to 720,000 in 1952 and 600,000 in the wake of the Hungarian Revolution. To tighten local control, administrative districts in Romania were cut from 29 to 10, in Albania from 47 to 10, and in Yugoslavia its county committees by one half. In Bulgaria, the southwest corner had received special status as Pirin Macedonia. There was language instruction in Macedonian from Yugoslav teachers until eliminated after the Tito-​Stalin split. All four regimes also created mass organizations to support the party, socialist unity fronts requiring or promoting membership for most of its citizens. Their membership soon accounted for half of the adult population in Albania and Bulgaria. Only selected party members stood for election to legislative assemblies that approved all measures put in front of them. Women had however been granted the right to vote, in conservative-​run Greece as well. Among the surviving Greek parties, proportional voting in the 1950 elections failed to give the army-​backed Peoples Party more than 20 percent of the vote and allowed the Communist-​ surrogate EDA some seats. General Aleksandar Papagos led his new Greek Rally Party to a sweeping victory in the hasty 1951 elections, thanks in part to the majority voting encouraged by the US Embassy. Unchecked military rule ended with his death in 1955. His successor, Konstantinos Karamanlis, faced the start of the Cyprus crisis. Britain abandoned its long occupation of the island, close to the Turkish mainland but with a population 80 percent Greek. His initial compromise over Cyprus with Turkey allowed him to launch economic reform in a renamed, less authoritarian National Radical Union (ERE). Cold War economic aid from the United States advanced agricultural reform in Greece and allowed Yugoslavia to abandon collectivization in favor of the existing private smallholders. As Greece’s 1.7 billion dollars shifted to military aid, the same sum for Yugoslavia provided payments relief for deficit spending on Western imports. They were needed in the absence of trade with the Soviet bloc until 1955. Smaller Soviet bloc aid of US$300 million to Albania was directed to industrial construction from almost no base. A post-​Stalin shift to light industry 424

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and agriculture, as in the rest of the bloc, prompted Soviet leader Khrushchev to object. His criticisms during a contentious 1959 visit started Hoxha’s eventual turn to China. Bulgaria’s fast pace of collectivization pushed huge rural numbers, over 700,000, to factory jobs and urban housing. Romania, slower to collectivize but with a larger industrial base in metallurgy and petroleum was able to match Bulgaria’s rapid rate of industrial growth. By 1958, Vŭlko Chervenkov led Bulgaria’s campaign to speed up the pace by completing the next five-​year plan in three years on the model of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Across the region, urban shares of population rose past 30 percent, in Greece past 40 percent, by 1960. Capital cities led the way. The share of the labor force in industry reached 20 percent, except in Yugoslavia with 15  percent. Total populations rose past prewar levels as did living standards, led by improved health, education, and public transport. Rural illiteracy was greatly reduced and access to university education was massively expanded. But constraining this increasingly educated urban population within the political controls of the 1950s would challenge all the ruling regimes.

1960–​1973: reform and retreat The states and societies of Southeastern Europe now proceeded in less comparable directions. All of them had nonetheless begun the 1960s with one sort of promise or another. By the early 1970s, none of these promises had been kept. A popularly elected new government in Greece had been replaced by a military dictatorship. Economic reforms in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria had not survived the political pressures of 1968, marked by the Soviet bloc invasion of Czechoslovakia.The domestic popularity of the Romanian refusal to participate in the invasion had not reinforced the initial promise of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s regime for political relaxation, nor did the Chinese replacement of Soviet bloc aid loosen the restrictive regime of Enver Hoxha in Albania. Political promise was the greatest in Greece. By 1963, a series of multi-​party elections and new press freedom led to the defeat of the still ruling Radical Union. Led by Georgios Papandreou, Prime Minister of the first coalition government in 1945, the new Center Union party won the largest share of votes. The United Democratic Left (EDA) came in second thanks to dissatisfaction over the Cyprus stalemate. Unsettled after the death of King Paul in 1964, officers in the previously predominant army feared an EDA victory in the next elections scheduled for 1967. In April, a group of army colonels led by George Papadapolous seized power and forced the young King Constantine into exile. American support for the coup was widely but falsely assumed. There followed a harsh regime of political repression and economic corruption by the military dictatorship. Othon Anastasakis addresses its rise and fall plus the promises that preceded and followed the junta. In Yugoslavia, the promise of economic reform came first. American aid continued until 1965 and the US Embassy provided more diplomatic support than anywhere else in the region. It helped Yugoslavia join the World Trade Organization in 1961 and accepted Tito’s leading role in the new Non-​Aligned Movement. A currency reform in 1961 advanced foreign trade. As noted below by Vladimir Unkovski-​Korica, the regime decided to give Workers Councils in industrial enterprises some of the autonomy that self-​management had promised them a decade ago. Their new rights allowed them to decide the division of annual net income between labor bonuses or capital reinvestment. By 1962, their preference for bonuses had fed the first inflation in a Communist regime. So did their managers still appointed by the local party. They found their investment funds instead from hundreds of communal banks that provided short-​term loans rolled over and not repaid. Their elimination in favor of a limited set of regional banks, 425

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charged with lending to projects promising repayment across the country was the core proposal of the ekonomska reforma of 1965. The new banks soon became only republic banks. Still, the reformist party leaders in Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia supported further reform to limit the authority of the local party leadership and open the way for Western investment. Problems in all three republics soon opened the way instead for Tito to dismiss them as “rotten liberals.” Sparked by West European student demonstrations and the Czechoslovak turmoil in 1968, mostly student demonstrators in Belgrade railed against market reforms and growing income disparities. Their protests spread to other university cities in the country. Tito intervened to promise them multi-​ candidate elections. In Prishtina, Belgrade’s Interior Ministry forces fired on Kosovar Albanians rioting for upgrading Kosovo from an autonomous province to a republic. Tito agreed instead to concessions in local administration and Albanian-​language higher education. In Zagreb, the Croatian demand for recognition of its separate language and literature pulled party leaders into political demands to double its parliamentary delegates. They also objected to sharing the sizeable income from the Dalmatian tourist trade with the other republics. In 1969, the Slovenian party leadership demanded in vain to use their World Bank Loan to fund a road connecting the republic only with Austria. By 1971–​2, Tito had had dismissed the three republics’ party leaders, Marko Nikezić in Belgrade, Savka Dabčević Kučar in Zagreb, and Stane Kavčič in Ljubljana. His trusted Vice President Edvard Kardelj led the drafting of amendments to the 1963 Constitution. It had allowed the republic parties the right to convene separately, ending the commitment to “Yugoslavism” from the 1953 Constitution. The amendments created a new Presidency headed by Tito but with two representatives for each republic plus the Kosovo and Vojvodina provinces. They could approve measures only voted unanimously, but a new, smaller Federal Executive Council (SIV) and its Chair were empowered to balance this confederal framework with inter-​republic committees. The economic prospects of Albania and Bulgaria started the 1960s well, but for different reasons. The Soviet rapprochement with Yugoslavia and the prospect of Chinese aid hastened the Albanian transfer of allegiance from Moscow to Beijing. New financial support did pour in from China, tripling the Soviet bloc’s 300 million dollars. Agricultural assistance helped the Hoxha regime to overcome the long dependence on grain imports. But the technical training for industrial construction and operation provided by the Soviet bloc was missing. In any case, importing the ideological rigor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution only increased the vigilance of the Sigurmimi against any opposition, dubbed as class enemies. By the early 1970s, the Chinese were refusing to extend repayment, as the Soviet bloc had done, for loans that were the largest part of their aid. In 1968, the Soviet bloc invasion of Czechoslovakia obliged Bulgaria not only to participate but to tighten its ideological ties to the USSR, as described by Michail Gruev.The major economic casualty was the New System of Management. Launched in 1964, it followed the Soviet’s Lieberman plan for textile enterprises whose managers were made responsible for net profit or loss. The Bulgarian system still left heavy industry to state subsidies and central planning, but enterprise managers across light industry took increasing advantage. Bulgarian foreign trade surged ahead of their Soviet bloc partners as a share of national product. In line with the Soviet reaction to the Czechoslovak reforms, Bulgaria abandoned the New System in 1968 as dangerous decentralization. The Zhivkov regime returned to the investment in heavy industry that Zhivkov believed would give Bulgaria the “steel apex” that made East Germany and Czechoslovakia developed economies. To strengthen his own political position in 1971, he assumed the title Head of State, in addition to his function as General Secretary of the BKP.

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The Soviet decision to crush the Prague Spring and thereby to put an end to any genuine sort of reform Communism had quite a different effect in Romania. Already in 1963, the Dej regime had rejected Soviet pressure to switch its emphasis from heavy to light industry in line with Khrushchev’s effort to recalibrate the division of labor in the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA). Before he died in 1965, Dej had authorized the release of the last political prisoners. The first years of his young successor, Nicolae Ceauşescu, seemed to promise further relaxation. Trade agreements with France and West Germany opened alternative markets to the Soviet bloc, whose coal, iron ore, and petroleum imports Romania did not need; in 1972, Romania joined the IMF as the only CMEA country to do so (Yugoslavia was already a member). A cultural agreement with the United States started an exchange program, reflecting US interest in Romanian independence like Yugoslavia’s under National Communism. That interest peaked when Ceauşescu refused to join in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and mobilized the Romanian army in case of a comparable invasion. His domestic reputation also rose with ready civilian participation in a new home guard. Already disquieted by demands for free debate from a party membership swelling toward 2 million, he turned sharply away from any such debate in 1971. His visit to China and North Korea had impressed him with the military discipline of their party assemblies and mass parades.Vladimir Tismaneanu and Marius Stan follow the transition of Ceauşescu’s National Communism to the personality cult and family-​ centered dictatorship by which he is remembered.

1974–​1989: détente and decline East-​West tensions eased after both sides, minus only Albania, signed the Final Act of the Helsinki Agreement in 1975. Its first provision recognized all of the post-​1945 borders in Eastern Europe, long a Soviet goal. The Commission for Cooperation and Security in Europe (CSCE, today’s OSCE) was created after the Helsinki Final Act.While the Soviets were granted the confirmation of postwar territorial borders and political status-​quo, they also had to subscribe to provisions for the OSCE to monitor human rights in the member states and to increase cultural exchange and to facilitate travel across borders. In the long run, these provisions helped to undermine Communist regimes. Dissenters could argue that their governments had to observe what they had subscribed to, and the eased flow of information through the reputed Iron Curtain made it ever more porous. Strengthening the signatories and Greece as well through the 1970s were rising standards of urban living, particularly in the capital cities. Belgrade and Sofia had reached 1 million, Bucharest and Greater Athens 2 million by 1980. University enrollment reached West European levels, and women made great progress in employment and education (less so under the more traditional gender regime still in place in Greece until PASOK came to power). Ulf Brunnbauer’s chapter reviews these social developments and highlights the similarities across the region, but also with other European countries.Where rising living standards were not enough for buttressing regime legitimacy, or where political regimes feared for their power because of growing openness, they often resorted to ethnic nationalism. The Romanian, Albanian, and Bulgarian regimes transformed into varieties of National Communism (or Communist nationalism), in which the current rulers positioned themselves in a long line of strongmen, going back to medieval times or even antiquity. Ethnic nationalism became an instrument to promote unity and homogeneity, with a strong anti-​minority touch in Romania and Bulgaria, where the Hungarian and Turkish minorities respectively saw their rights increasingly curtailed. Albania became an atheist state in 1967, thus ignoring the religious divisions among the Albanians. However, in none of

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these countries radical nationalism could hide growing economic malaise and dampen popular discontent in the long run. Zhivkov’s turn to nationalism had started in the mid-1960s. Along with a focus on Bulgaria’s pre-medieval state, he clashed with the Yugoslavs over the question of the existence of a Macedonian nation and language, both of which the Bulgarians vigorously denied. There was popular support for the regime media’s claiming them as Bulgarian on the 100-​year anniversary of the separation of Bulgaria from Ottoman rule after a Russo-​Ottoman War and the Treaty of Berlin.The elaborate celebrations of “1,300 years of Bulgarian statehood” in 1981 turned into a bonanza of crude nationalism at home and abroad.The regime also eyed popular support when in 1984 it launched its ill-​fated campaign to force the large Turkish minority (10 percent of the country’s population) to adopt Bulgarian names and identities. Instead, domestic opposition from an educated urban elite as well as OSCE complaints confronted the campaign. It was based on the specious claim that the Turks were originally Bulgarians forced to convert to Islam and to acquire the Turkish language by the Ottoman conquest. Meanwhile, the New Economic System introduced in Bulgaria in 1979 had allowed new small enterprises to begin manufacturing consumer goods on the same commercial basis under which produce from leased family plots on the Agro-​Industrial Complexes had already improved urban food supplies. Aggregate economic growth nonetheless declined from 1983 despite the concentration of loss-​making heavy industry into a smaller number of enterprises in a smaller number of administrative districts. Only Western bank loans permitted new investment until the burden of their servicing, as noted in John Lampe’s chapter, closed them off by 1987. As urban shortages, electricity blackouts, and price inflation appeared, political protests over industrial pollution also grew. A new ecological association grew with encouragement from the example of open debates on late-​night Soviet television and the new openness of Soviet periodicals, which the Russophile Bulgarians eagerly watched and read. The reforming Gorbachev’s distance from Todor Zhivkov was clear. To defuse pressure from Bulgaria’s own new association for the defense of human rights, Zhivkov invited the dissatisfied Turkish minority to leave for Turkey in May 1989. Expecting only a few to go, almost 400,000 had soon crossed the border. He had played his last nationalist card and lost support in the party.The international reputation of the country laid in tatters as well.The party leadership not only forced him out in November but soon disbanded the notorious State Security and allowed other parties to organize. Romania’s National Communism also denied rights to the country’s minorities, as detailed by Tismaneanu and Stan below. The Autonomous Hungarian Region was finally disbanded in 1968.To facilitate ethnic homogeneity and at the same time fill state coffers, the regime allowed members of the German and Jewish minorities to emigrate as long as Germany and Israel, respectively, paid a substantial per-​capita fee on each emigrant. Ceauşescu’s strident insistence on Romanian ethnic origins presented the Romanians as the first occupants of their lands, notably also Transylvania. Sycophantic scholarship came up with the idea of proto-​chronism, declaring major civilizational achievements as Romanian inventions predating even the Romans. This and Ceauşescu’s growing personality cult combined to strangle independent scholarship. For him, further greatness would depend on a large labor force of Romanians, so a formal ban on abortion was tightly enforced. Romania’s main economic problem, given uncommercial collective farms and swollen state industrial enterprises, was however a shortage of capital. Growth in petroleum profits declined by 1980 as their expected export along with metallurgy to Third World buyers had not materialized. Western bank loans had filled the gap but when their service mounted and Romania faced the danger of default in 1980, Ceauşescu decided instead to pay off their full sum. The forced export surpluses took food and fuel supplies that left urban housing, hospitals, 428

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and schools to suffer in the hard the winter of 1984–​5.To address the farm problem and tighten control of the rural population, Hungarians included, the regime then launched a plan for their forced movement into a new concentration of state settlements. When sistematezarea was extended to demolition and reconstruction in Bucharest around a huge new presidential palace, some of the city’s educated elite, party members included, risked opposition despite the feared reputation of the Securitate. Ceauşescu and his small ruling council, in which his wife and other family members were a majority, paid no attention to the protests or the loss of international support, East and West. By November 1989, Ceauşescu’s bloody repression of a Hungarian cleric’s protest, at the very time when the Berlin Wall fell, prompted the massive demonstration he summoned in Bucharest to turn against him. Losing support from the army and some forces of the Securitate, he and his wife Elena were tried and summarily executed before the end of the year.The Romanian Communist Party was dissolved, and a hastily assembled National Salvation Front won the multi-​party elections of 1990. In addition to comparable economic problems, the Albanian, Greek, and Yugoslav regimes struggled with new political conditions by the 1980s. Albania’s economic isolation, after the break with China became final in 1978, prompted the Hoxha regime’s new pressure on the rural majority. It demanded even family livestock for the collective or state farms. Political tensions also rose around the aging Hoxha. In 1981, rivals pushed his Prime Minister and likely successor, Mehmet Shehu, into committing suicide. When Hoxha died in 1985, Ramiz Alia took his place. He won approval at the 1986 party congress for relaxing the livestock regime and opening trade relations with Austria and some selected Western countries. An agreement with Greece ended the state of war since 1940 and opened the border for trade and even an initial bank credit. But opposition from Hoxha’s widow, Nexhmije, prevented him from going further. National income continued to decline with loss-​making heavy industry sucking up scarce resources. After the collapse of other Communist regimes in 1989, some of the growing urban population scrambled to emigrate to Italy. Alia and his party would struggle but managed to stay in power until losing elections to a new Democratic Party in 1992. Greece’s political prospects had looked much better than its neighbors by 1980. In power since 1974, the Karamanlis government had supported the return of multi-​party elections and parliamentary democracy. Foreign trade and tourism led an expanding economy. In the election of 1981, however, resentment of the long-​standing Western alliance led by the United States helped the newly formed socialist party, PASOK, to win power. Its leader, Andreas Papandreou, George’s son, became Prime Minister. He railed against Greece’s membership in NATO but did not leave it.Yet, he did strengthen relations to the Soviet Bloc and Yugoslavia. More fatefully, he created a series of public companies paying high wages and investing lavishly as well. PASOK won a second term in 1985, while a scandalous divorce from his popular American wife and a soaring foreign debt cut into his own popular support. Like Bulgaria, greater economic concentration did not help. PASOK’s public enterprises were denied regional and local autonomy, while private membership of their business associations became compulsory. When political appointees replaced several hundred civil servants in the state bureaucracy in 1987, opposition to Papandreou began building even within PASOK. He returned from surgery abroad in 1988 to a set of financial scandals in state-​owned enterprises. His government survived two votes of confidence in 1989 but not another in 1990. In Yugoslavia, Tito’s death in 1980 did not lead to the immediate political crisis that his émigré opponents had predicted. But daunting economic problems would ultimately trigger rival nationalisms that brought Yugoslavia to an end in 1990–​1. Inflation and foreign debt were already mounting. Unemployment approached 15 percent after the return of one third of the one million “guest workers” in Western Europe after these countries had stopped 429

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recruitment in 1974. Edvard Kardelj’s subdivision of the self-​managed Workers Councils into Basic Organizations of Associated Labor (BOAL) in 1976 had not helped. The BOALs soon complicated management in profitable enterprises and discouraged reform in unprofitable ones. The lengthy new Constitution of 1974 had subdivided the electoral process as well, starting with 20,000 delegates, and it had left a weakened central government.The party (SKJ) had been federalized as well. But the freedom to travel, work, or study abroad remained. So did a higher standard of urban living than any member of the Soviet bloc. The relative numbers of privately owned cars, television sets, and telephones came closer to West European standards. The press and media sought to emulate those standards as well, within republic party guidelines. The Presidency continued without Tito but with one member for each republic and region plus the army (JNA) Chief of Staff. They were still bound to unanimous agreement as were decisions in the delegations in the Chamber of Republics and Provinces. A Federal Executive Council (SIV) and its Chair, holding four-​year terms voted by the larger Federal Chamber, could however take executive action. Its first female Chair, the Croatian former Partisan Milka Planinc used her authority to secure reluctant acceptance of the United States-​led rescheduling of rising foreign debt in 1983–​4, Yugoslavia’s last Cold War dividend dubbed “the Friends of Yugoslavia.” Her successor in 1986, the Bosnian Croat Branko Mikulić could not win approval of continuing the IMF conditions on fiscal restraint that went with continued rescheduling. Inflation soared past 100  percent and unemployment past 20  percent. By this time, voter turnout declined with the several layers of elections for delegates to the two chambers, and so did party (SKJ) membership. Two new republic party leaders who stepped forward by 1987 would make the federal framework politically unworkable by 1989. Jasna Dragović Soso traces the nationalist conflicts started by leading intellectuals in Serbia and Slovenia forward from Tito’s death into their adoption by the rival republic leaderships. Slovenia’s Milan Kučan demanded his republic’s autonomy and Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević recentralization on Serbian terms. Milošević’s rise to head of the Serbian party in 1987 relied on nationalist demands to recentralize control of Kosovo. The republics’ contradictory demands and the end of single-​party regimes across the Soviet bloc did not allow the belated but promising economic reforms of the last SIV Chair Ante Marković to survive. Nor did the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia survive the dissolution of the League of Yugoslav Communists and separate republic elections in 1990.

Selected Readings Baeva, Iskra and Evgenia Kalinova. Bulgarien von Ost nach West: Zeitgeschichte ab 1939.Vienna,  2009. Burg, Steven l. Conflict and Cohesion in Socialist Yugoslavia: Political Decision Making since 1966. Princeton, NJ, 1983. Clogg, Richard, ed. Greece, 1981–​1989.The Populist Decade. London, 1993. Close, David H. Greece since 1945. London, 2002. Crampton, Richard J. The Balkans since the Second World War. London, 2002. Deletant, Dennis. Romania under Communist Rule. Portland, Oreg., 1990. Dragovic-​Soso, Jasna. Saviors of the Nation. Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism. Montreal, 2002. Jović, Dejan. Yugoslavia, the State that Withered Away. Lafayette, Ind., 2009. Mehilli, Elidor. From Stalin to Mao. Albania in the Socialist World. Ithaca, NY, 2017. Rejak, Svetozar, Constansa Botsiou, Erini Karamouzi, and Evanthis Hatsivassiliou, eds. The Balkans in the Cold War. London, 2017. Tismaneanu, Vladimir. Stalinism for All Seasons. A  Political History of Romanian Communism. Berkeley, Cal., 2003.

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42 THE COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE IN SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE Arnd Bauerkämper

State of research The opposing ideological “camps” of the Cold War shaped scholarship on collectivization in Southeastern Europe before 1990. Owing to political restrictions imposed on academic research, the great majority of works published on the topic in the Southeast European countries praised collectivization as a major step toward the creation of the envisaged utopian communist society. By contrast, many Western scholars conceived the forced merger of farmers and peasants as one of the consequences of oppressive “Sovietization.” Interpretations of collectivization as a type of Soviet-​style “modernization” remained on the margins of scholarship, even in the late 1960s and early 1970s when this view had become more widely accepted by scholars. Altogether, research on collectivization generally suffered from ideological constraints, especially in the Communist regimes. In the West, the lack of access to primary archival sources or oral testimonies impeded studies of the process. In addition, scholarship concentrated rather on the political history of communism, in particular on the decision-​making process at the higher central level of the higher echelons of power, and on the issue of repression and peasant resistance to collectivization. As a result, scholars have largely neglected the social and cultural dimensions of collectivization, although it subverted existing property relations, challenged entrenched forms of production, and also undermined traditional rural values and lifestyles. Moreover, few investigations have dealt with the differentiated response to collectivization within various historical regions or among different social strata of the peasantry, ranging from hard resistance to accommodation and even collaboration. Not least, the historiography has underestimated conflicts and forms of communal solidarity among the peasants. After the collapse of the Communist regimes, scholars gradually gained access to archives which enabled them to pursue more in-​depth studies of collectivization at the local and national levels. Beyond the policies of the rulers, recent investigations have also dealt with aspects of everyday life in the countryside and resistance to the forced merger of farms in Southeastern Europe. These studies have demonstrated that many villagers were able to adapt to the new conditions created by collectivization and even to attain some immediate benefits according to their economic interests. Recent scholarship has also provided important insights into the destructive dynamics of collectivization in the countryside. In addition, historians, 431

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social scientists, and anthropologists have paid attention to the complex transfer of the Soviet model of collectivization to the Soviet bloc countries in the Balkans. The case of Yugoslavia, where Josip Broz Tito abandoned collectivization in 1953, has been of special interest. Melissa Bukovoy has argued that resistance from peasants who had supported the Communist partisans during the Second World War forced the Yugoslav Communists to retreat from collectivization. In the United States and Western Europe, pioneering investigations concentrated on the political repression accompanying the processes of the Communist makeover of rural society. At the end of the 1970s, a new generation of social anthropologists enriched the study of collectivization. Conducting fieldwork, they promoted an interdisciplinary research agenda focusing on the agrarian question and social relations in rural communities. The liberalization of academic studies in Romania after 1989 stimulated research also on the socio-​economic transformation enforced by the new communist rulers. However, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-​Dej’s Stalinist policies of the 1950s, and therefore also the period of collectivization, enjoyed much less scholarly attention than Nicolai Ceauşescu’s regime. This chapter addresses the varied experiences of Romania, Bulgaria,Yugoslavia, and Albania. Following an overview of the preconditions of collectivization, a second section reconstructs its stages, policies, and varieties of implementation. A third section deals with the impact and repercussions of collectivization. The conclusion places their common features in comparative perspective with the rest of Eastern Europe and the role of the Soviet model.

Preconditions In Romania, the Communist Party (Partidul Comunist Român, PCR) had a difficult start after the Second World War. Founded in 1921, but outlawed in 1924, it had reemerged as late as 1944. Even after it had seized power in the following year, the party remained weak in the countryside, where small agricultural holdings predominated. After the Social Democratic Party had been forced to merge with the Communists in 1948, the new Romanian Workers’ Party (RWP) called for a “bourgeois-​democratic revolution.” They promoted the land reform that Communist leaders had initiated in March 1945. However, perennial factionalism and repeated changes in its agrarian policy undermined the Party’s credibility. Even though Secretary General Gheorghiu-​Dej denied rumors about an impending collectivization, the RWP, which had seized power in March 1946, emulated the Soviet model. In the new People’s Republic, which had succeeded the monarchy in 1947, a decree of March 1949 authorized the government to seize private properties above 50 hectares. State authorities also confiscated the agricultural inventory, cattle, and financial means of large landowners and proprietors of medium-​size farms. In March 1949, the authorities transported at least 9,000 landowners and peasants with their families to isolated locations throughout the country. Beyond land confiscations, the forced requisition of agricultural products according to collection quotas fueled the “class struggle” that the party leadership had proclaimed. It paved the way to economic planning in the countryside. Collectivization was to enhance agricultural production and productivity, but deprived middle and large landowners of their economic resources by 1949. In Bulgaria, after its occupation by the Soviet army and the formation of a coalition government in September 1944, membership of the Communist Party grew rapidly. As early as September 1944, state support for cooperative farming began, resulting in a decree establishing “Working Cooperative Agricultural Farms” (WCAF) of April 13, 1945. These policies would seemingly build on the widespread cooperative framework that had emerged in the late nineteenth century. Land reform was implemented in 1946, even though two thirds of the agricultural holdings had already comprised less than 5 hectares in the interwar years. Moreover, 432

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peasants’ parties and leaders (especially Aleksandŭr Stamboliiski) had played a major political role in Bulgaria in the 1920s and 1930s. According to the Agrarian Reform Act of March 12, 1946, all plots of arable land and estates larger than 20 hectares (in southern Dobrudja larger than 30 hectares) were to be nationalized. Following the institutionalization of the WCAF in December 1947, the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP), adopted a “Program for the building up of socialism in Bulgaria” in December 1948. This resolution marks the end of land reform and an official endorsement of the collectivization that had already started in July 1948. In Yugoslavia, the provisional government that had been formed in March 1945 already established communal agricultural organizations in a country where about 75 percent of peasant families had holdings of less than 5 hectares. The new compounds set targets for agricultural production, allocated resources, and granted financial advantages to state farms. At the same time, the authorities confiscated all German property, paving the way to the formation of the first peasant work cooperatives (Seljačka Radna Zadruga, SRZ) in late 1945, as the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia succeeded the monarchy. The expropriation of land holdings of more than 3 to 5 hectares of arable land and of abandoned holdings from August 1945 as well as the introduction of compulsory deliveries (otkup) greatly reduced private farming in the Yugoslav countryside. In January 1946, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY), already pressuring the government to pass a law against peasant “speculation and economic sabotage” as early as April 1945, initiated a propaganda campaign against agricultural producers who were hoarding supplies, speculating with produce prices, or trading on the black-​market. Following the transition to central planning on May 22, 1946, the Communist-​dominated Federal Parliament adopted the “Basic Law on Cooperatives” in July. It designated four types of collective organizations in agriculture: buying-​ selling cooperatives, processing-​producing cooperatives, credit cooperatives, and (as the most advanced form) peasant work cooperatives. CPY leaders around Prime Minister Tito envisaged the merger of peasants into collectives, but only as a gradual process. Then, to contradict Stalin’s criticism in the conflict with the Soviet Union in 1948, the Yugoslav Communists decided to centralize agricultural land, machinery, tools, labor, and the other resources into peasant work cooperatives. By late 1949, they covered 18 percent of the arable land, almost 63 percent in Montenegro. In Albania, following the formation of a commission for the registration of agricultural land and other assets in the Ministry of Economy in December 1944, a land reform law was also enacted on August 29, 1945. In May 1946, the (Communist) Albanian Party of Labor (APL) led by Enver Hoxha had decided to confiscate all agricultural land and to nationalize forests and pastures. The decree on cooperatives of April 20, 1946, followed the Yugoslav model. After the Tito-​Stalin split in 1948, however, the Albanian leaders embraced the Soviet Model Charter for kolkhozes of 1935. As in the other southeast European states, the first steps toward collectivization went hand in hand with measures against big “capitalist” farmers who were officially denounced as kulaks, introducing a Soviet word that did not exist in the vernaculars.

The collectivization process from 1949 onward With the exception of Yugoslavia, the collectivization of agriculture proceeded in Southeastern Europe throughout the 1950s. In Romania, Party leaders decided to initiate the process at their plenary meeting of March 3–​5, 1949. The resolution of the Central Committee of the RWP for the “socialist transformation of agriculture” stopped and abolished the land reform of 1945. Apart from the overarching economic objective of forced industrialization, the turn to collectivization was motivated by the Party leaders’ aims to gain political control over so-​ called rich farmers (chiaburi) as well as peasants and increase Party influence in the countryside. 433

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Proclaiming a “class struggle” against the chiaburi, the RWP sought to divide peasant communities and win over the landless laborers and poor peasants to collectivization.Yet these groups opposed the displacement of the big estate owners, whereas measures against the chiaburi met stronger support. Moreover, a discriminatory agricultural tax progressively disempowered the rich agricultural producers. This measure however eluded Party control as local councils and mayors took the opportunity to confiscate the possessions of wealthy farmers as well as small peasants. Collectivization also served to exile certain ethnic and religious groups (such as Serbs and Germans as well as the Uniate Greek-​Catholics) to remote “special villages” or “special communes.” After the first wave of collectivization (1949–​53) had largely failed, the process stagnated from 1953 to 1957 because many peasants rejected joining collective farms “voluntarily.” Following the suppression of the 1956 Revolution in Hungary, RWP leaders finally decided to force all farmers and peasants to join collectives. Party functionaries started the process in the Dobrudja (Southeastern Romania) and forcefully promoted it in 1959. In March 1962, they officially declared it complete, barring some areas in the mountains. Violent repression of the resistance against collectivization in the countryside was accompanied by contradictory political directives that reflected power struggles between Party leaders. The forced merger of peasants in Bulgaria proceeded along similar lines. A  rigid quota system, which was implemented from 1947 onwards, obligatory state deliveries, “crop plans” that did not take account of soil and climatic conditions, and politically imposed categories of social stratification intensified “class struggle” in the villages. The goal was to deprive agriculture of valuable resources that were required for industrialization, including its workforce. After a slow start of collectivization in 1948–​9, dissent among Communist leaders and massive peasant resistance, especially in northwestern Bulgaria in 1950–​1, led to a reduction of the pressure on peasants until 1956.The death of Stalin on March 5, 1953, resulted in a relaxation of forced deliveries from peasant produce according to imposed quotas. Moreover, the cooperative model for collectives (Trudovo-​kooperativno zemedelsko stopanstvo, TKZS) had proved ineffective. Following Todor Zhivkov’s rise to First Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) and the resignation of his predecessor Vŭlko Chervenkov (1956), the Central Committee of the BCP decided to complete collectivization by 1959, at the latest. Party leaders exempted small plots (0.5 hectares per household) of land for private use from state deliveries, granted members of the TKZS pensions, and allowed wealthy farmers (officially called kulaks) to join the collectives. Mass depopulation in mountain regions and poor living conditions in lowland villages contributed to the completion of collectivization in 1959. In Yugoslavia the Communist Party had failed to secure the economic viability of the SRZs by 1950. In Croatia, where only 12.5 percent of the land had been collectivized by December 31, 1949, peasant resistance did not subside. Discontent also abounded in Vojvodina, where collectives held approximately 40 percent of the cultivated land, and in northwestern Bosnia (in the area of Cazin) a major rebellion against collectivization broke out in April 1950. Elsewhere as well, CPY, local officials, and those peasants who supported the regime and collectivization faced violence and intimidation. By crop destruction and slaughtering livestock, resisters in the countryside sought to defend their land, property, family, and independence. In addition, the weakness or lack of Party organizations in the collectives resulted in disorganization and problems in the administration of the SRZs. In 1953, the CPY’s Commission for the Village admitted that collectivization had failed. On March 30, the Federal Assembly passed the “Law on the Property Relations and Reorganization of Work Cooperatives.” It allowed members of SRZs to withdraw from the peasant work cooperatives.They could be liquidated or reorganized, provided the majority of the membership consented to this move. On May 27, 1953, another 434

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law restricted the individual ownership of land to a maximum of ten hectares in order to prevent the impoverishment of poor peasants who remained in the SRZs while the more prosperous members left them. Apart from peasant resistance and the economic drawbacks of the SRZs, internal Party disputes about agricultural policy as well as the split from the Soviet Union led the Yugoslav Communists to abandon their collectivization campaign. They also took into consideration their image in the United States, on which they became increasingly dependent for support. In Albania, the cooperatives suffered from low productivity, making collectivization a protracted process. Slow growth rates prevented the leadership of the APL from meeting the agricultural targets of the First Five-​Year Plan (1951–​5). As late as the end of the Second Five-​ Year Plan (1956–​60), individual peasant farms still accounted for 87 percent of farm land and provided 90 percent of the agricultural output in the non-​state sector. In October 1958, the APL subjected kulaks who still cultivated land to confiscatory tax rates. Owing to an oppressive quota-​ collection system, discriminatory contracts imposed on agricultural producers, and massive migration from the interior to the lowlands, the cooperative sector quickly took over. By 1960, it accounted for 84 percent of the arable land and 76 percent of agricultural production outside of state farms. Even though Party leaders claimed that collectivization had been completed, only about 70 percent of rural households had actually joined the cooperatives.

Impact and repercussions to 1989 In Romania, the Communist Party ultimately proved unable to subject the peasantry to its regime. It had taken 13 years from 1949 to 1962 to complete collectivization. In 1965, the new Secretary General of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP), Nicolai Ceauşescu, initiated a large-​scale campaign of industrialization and urbanization. Peasants were to become workers, and the differences between cities and the countryside were to be eliminated. Collectivization was an integral component of a long-​term scheme of forced Communist “modernization” that rested on repression and the attempt to erase traditional rural culture. Yet only few collective farms were economically viable. Some 1.3 million people left agriculture. Only massive financial support from the government secured some social and economic progress in several regions. The former peasants who had joined collectives did benefit from social security, regular vacations, and work time arrangements. Overall however, the collectivization of agriculture did not result in prosperity in the countryside. Production and productivity remained low, even when compared to the other countries ruled by Communist parties. The leaders of the RCP had were obliged to reintroduce collection quotas and food rations in the latter half of the 1980s. The success of the “private sector” reflected the failure of collectivization, as well. In 1984, peasants’ cooperatives and non-​collectivized households held only 15 percent of the agricultural land but provided 57 percent of the total number of egg-​laying hens and 49 percent of the sheep. Forced requisitions and strict surveillance of agricultural producers from 1986 onwards only aggravated the economic crisis in Romania. When the regime collapsed in December 1989, peasants dismantled the collectives and returned to private ownership. Nevertheless, the collectivization of agriculture had led to alienation from landed property and agricultural work. In Bulgaria, where collectivization had officially been completed in 1959, migration from villages to towns and cities continued from the 1960s to the 1980s. From 1950 to 1970, 1.4 million Bulgarians left agriculture. Whereas villagers accounted for 75 percent of the total population in the late 1950s, this share had dropped to 39 percent in the early 1980s and to 30 percent at the end of that decade. Massive migration led to the integration of rural culture 435

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into urban communities and vice versa. Collective farms began to suffer a severe shortage of labor. Students were sent from towns to help with the harvest. From 1971, the regime began combining the collectives into a smaller number of Agro-​Industrial Complexes (APK). Their efforts to promote rural industrial production had little success but the long-​term leasing of small plots did improve the domestic supply of fruits and vegetables. Family members already in towns could join in the ventures, providing transport to urban markets. As the countryside became depopulated, the villagers turned into members of collective farms and ultimately into laborers. The loss of traditional mores, values, and lifestyles in the countryside was accompanied by the infusion of rural culture into cities and towns. Altogether, a new type of citizen emerged. Even those villagers who remained in the countryside came closer to living conditions in towns, as they shed old views of life and abandoned their traditional means of livelihood. Altogether, the depopulation of villages and the “rustification” of towns brought peasants and workers closer together without effecting a merger of the two strata. Forced modernization had forged a new society in Bulgaria. After they had abandoned collectivization in Yugoslavia, Communist functionaries reduced state control over agricultural producers. They abolished the machine tractor stations, which had previously supported the collectives, lifted forced procurement, and rescinded mandatory quotas. Party leaders pinned their hopes on the general agricultural cooperatives that they preserved and funded. By 1957, optimistic expectations of a substantial increase in their productivity had been dashed. Edvard Kardelj, the leading Communist theoretician and Tito’s deputy, proposed to leave peasants freedom of action without entirely abandoning the hope to ultimately integrate them into the socialist economy.Yet the Yugoslav Communists needed aid from Western states after their rejection of Soviet-​style communism, and they had disapproved of collectivization.The share of rural population dropped from more than 80 percent in 1953 to 54 percent in 1981. Against the backdrop of this profound socio-​economic transformation and political reorientation, a state-​socialist economy never materialized in the agricultural sector. Financial support was not available to private farming, and agricultural policy was inconsistent and at times even contradictory until Yugoslavia disintegrated in 1991. In Albania, agriculture and rural society took a different direction. As the leaders of the APL rejected the de-​Stalinization that the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had initiated in 1956, they split from Moscow in 1961. Although the Albanian Communists pursued some reforms in the course of the 1960s, they relentlessly stuck to full collectivization. In fact, they resumed the campaign of forced farm mergers after their Fifth Party Congress. In order to achieve full-​ scale control of agriculture in the Albanian highlands, Party leaders strove to establish 500 new cooperatives in 12 districts within four to five months. Peasants received benefits for creating or joining the enterprise, but force and violence predominated. Resistance abounded in the countryside. Peasants kept boundary markers to preserve their claims on formerly private plots of land. Resistance was however weaker in the mountain regions than in the more fertile parts of north-​central Albania. Member households of cooperatives could keep small household plots (usually of one dynym or 0.1 hectare) and one cow or ten sheep or goats. Yet the regime gradually reduced and ultimately eliminated private ownership when it transformed the cooperatives into collectives (kooperativa bujqësore e tipit të lartë) in the early 1970s. State control and investments were intended to increase output and productivity. Following Albania’s break with China in 1978, the APL sought to extend state intervention in order to abolish any remnants of capitalism and raise agricultural production. Party leaders were ordered to seize privately owned animals and transfer them to collectives. In reaction, peasants slaughtered their livestock, creating in a severe shortage of meat and a food crisis. The leadership under Enver Hoxha was therefore forced to 436

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reintroduce rationing. After his death in 1985, his successor Ramiz Alia at least began calling collectivization into question. However, the Communist Party did not abandon it officially before the end of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania in 1991–​2.

Conclusion In Romania and Albania, the collectivization of agriculture proved long and protracted, because the agricultural sector was large and economically important. Moreover, the Communist Party was weak in rural areas, especially in terms of membership, political experience, and legitimacy. In Romania, in particular, political rivalry among Party factions impeded the forced merger of farmers and peasants. Collectivization also met resistance in Bulgaria. Moreover, it reduced production, productivity, and livestock, at least in the short and medium term. Ultimately, however, the Communist leaders of the three countries were willing to pay the political and economic price of transforming the peasantry in order to consolidate their power and to embark on an ambitious project of industrialization intended to achieve autarchy. In both Romania and Albania –​the latter arguably the least industrialized country in the Eastern Block –​the Stalinist leadership survived attempts at political reforms. In Bulgaria, the main stages of the collectivization campaign roughly mirrored the Stalinist campaign of the 1920s and 1930s (without the mass starvation). Following an initial “massovization” from 1948 to 1951, which resulted in large-​scale peasant resistance, especially in northwestern Bulgaria, a relative stalemate between 1951 and 1956 forced Communist leaders to concentrate on the stabilization of the existing cooperative farms. The second collectivization drive from 1956 to 1959, characterized by political and social oppression, completed collectivization in mountain and peripheral regions, as well. The Bulgarian agrarian model did not undergo substantial changes after the 1950s until 1970. The aforementioned consolidation of collective farms into 161 so-​called Agro-​Industrial Complexes launched the long-​term leasing of small private plots, which increased the urban food supply. The clashes, but also interactions between the central Party leadership and peasant culture led to distinguishable “learning curves.” Peasants remained powerful social actors (as distinct from mere objects of political rule), and monitoring commissions and agricultural specialists influenced top-​level policy. In all these economies (with the partial exception of Albania), the collectivization of agriculture was accompanied by migration from the countryside to cities and industrialization. Moreover, minorities who had supported the Axis powers in the Second World War or had merely been associated with them fell victim to expropriation and expulsion. In a wider comparative perspective, the collectivization of agriculture followed the Soviet model in most Southeast and East European countries. Following land reform (which dispossessed large estate-​owners), campaigns against affluent and (supposedly) wealthy farmers and forced procurement disempowered these “kulaks” and deprived them of their influence in the countryside. The onset of collectivization marked the next stage in the transformation of agriculture. In the German Democratic Republic, for instance, where the leading functionaries of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) proclaimed the forced merger of farmers and peasants at their Second Party Conference in July 1952, the process resembled the one in the USSR and Bulgaria. Collectivization took a similar path in Czechoslovakia. By contrast, the Polish Communists abandoned collectivization in 1956, analogous to their Yugoslav “comrades” three years earlier. Following the decision taken at their Ninth Plenum on October 29, 1956, the Polish reformist leaders allowed members to leave the collectives. Arguably, it was less the resistance of the peasantry against collectivization that had caused this fundamental change in agricultural policy in Poland. In fact, the attitude of the Polish Party elites toward collectivization 437

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had been ambivalent even before 1956, giving rise to serious doubts among the reformist group around Władysław Gomułka. Moreover, their relationship to Moscow against the backdrop of the upheavals of October 1956, the important role of the Catholic Church, and the requirements of national consolidation in the newly acquired provinces of Silesia and Pomerania have to be taken into account. In all the other states where Communist leaders clung to collectivization, the process was followed by new political pressures that aimed to industrialize agriculture through the formation of huge cooperatives, the creation of wage laborers in the countryside, and the separation of particular branches of agricultural production. Apart from geographical conditions, the relationship of Communist Party leaders to the Soviet Union (and, in the case of Albania, China) played a crucial role in the enforced collectivization of agriculture. Moreover, the degree of unity or factionalism in the Communist parties influenced policies and their implementation in the countryside. Not least, the general context of the Cold War was important. Even though research on the attitudes and actions of peasants and Party functionaries in the country has provided valuable insights into the everyday history of collectivization, analysis of this important dimension has remained uneven. More detailed study of cross-​border transfers, adaptations, and learning processes between the Communist countries of Southeastern and Eastern Europe (including the USSR) will be needed in order to place collectivization into the wider perspective of comparative and entangled history.

Selected Readings Bokovoy, Melissa. Peasants and Communists. Politics and Ideology in the Yugoslav Countryside, 1941–​1953. Pittsburgh, 1998. Creed, Gerald. Domesticating Revolution: From Socialist Reform to Ambivalent Transition in a Bulgarian Village. Pennsylvania, 1998. Francisco, Roland A., Betty A. Laird, and Roy D. Laird, eds. Agricultural Policies in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Boulder, Colo., 1980. Hollos, Marida and Bela C. Maday, eds. New Hungarian Peasants: An East Central European Experience with Collectivization. New York, 1983. Iordachi, Constantin and Arnd Bauerkämper, eds. The Collectivization of Agriculture in Communist Eastern Europe. Comparison and Entanglements. Budapest, 2014. Kideckel, David A. The Solitude of Collectivism:  Romanian Villagers to the Revolution and Beyond. Ithaca, NY, 1993. Kligman, Gail and Katherine Verdery. Peasants under Siege.The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949–​ 1962. Princeton, NJ, 2011. Sjoberg, Orjan. Rural Change and Development in Albania. Boulder, Colo., 1991. Verdery, Katherine. Transylvanian Villagers. Three Centuries of Political, Economic, and Ethnic Change. Berkeley, Calif., 1983. Wädekin, Karl-​Eugen. Agrarian Policies in Communist Europe. A Critical Introduction. The Hague, 1982.

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43 THE SOVIET FACTOR IN BULGARIA’S FOREIGN POLICY Mihail Gruev

It is well known that during the entire period of Communist rule, Bulgaria was heavily dependent on the Soviet Union. Its existence as an independent state was questioned to such extent that the diplomatic services of major Western states could wonder if it was necessary to maintain their missions in Sofia at all. How did this come to pass and why, regardless of changes in the Soviet leadership, did Bulgaria invariably retain its reputation as the “the most loyal ally” of the Soviet Union? This chapter addresses four distinctive periods the history of Bulgarian-​Soviet relations with their own dynamics. The first covers the open Soviet occupation of the country, which continued until the end of 1947. A second, that we may call the Stalin period, continued from the establishment of an open communist dictatorship in Bulgaria until the first wave of de-​ Stalinization in 1956. The third lasted from the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 until the transfer of power to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. The fourth period started Gorbachev’s policy of Glasnost and Perestroika (Openness and Restructuring) and ended with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union in 1991.

Historical antecedents There were also historical, cultural, and geopolitical preconditions for the particularly close Russian-​Bulgarian proximate relations, dating back to the nineteenth century. They stated with Russia’s role as liberator of the Bulgarians from almost half a millennium of Ottoman rule in 1878. This turned Russia into a powerful player in the political life of Bulgaria for the rest for the pre-​1914 period. The so-​called “Russophiles” generally dominated the ruling elite of the young Bulgarian principality. The shared affiliation of Bulgarians and Russians to Eastern Orthodoxy, a relatively closely related language and a common alphabet fed a cultural reciprocity which would maintain the Russian presence up to and into the Communist period. For the pre-​1914 period, we should add that a significant portion of the Bulgarian political and cultural elite had received their education at Russian universities. Then the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 interrupted the massive Russian influence in the country.Yet, by the end of the Russian Civil War in 1921, Bulgaria had become a safe haven for tens of thousands of members of the vanquished White Guard troops and their families, many of

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whom settled permanently in the country.They became leading anti-​Soviet agitators, but at the same time they would remain ardent promoters of Russian culture over the next two decades. A wave of interwar sympathy for the Soviets and their political system drew on the traditional Bulgarian “Russophilia,” which was successfully transformed by the Bulgarian Communist Party (BKP) into “Sovietophilia.” Established in 1919, the BKP immediately became a founding member of the Communist International and one of its most loyal and at the same time strongest sections in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Bulgarian Communists were well represented in its governing bodies. Two of them, Vassil Kolarov and Georgi Dimitrov, become its formal leaders. Illegal after its failed coup in 1923, the BKP soon reemerged as a shadow Bulgarian Workers Party supporting trade union activities and a youth organization. With the aid of a broad Soviet network of agents and collaborators, the massive transfer of Soviet press, Marxist publications, and contemporary Soviet literature that began in the early 1920s could continue through the interwar period. Propaganda flowed through official channels after the government of Kimon Georgiev had recognized the Soviet Union and established diplomatic relations in 1934. Stalin’s regime of the 1930s invested substantial resources in attracting and financing world-​renowned intellectuals to promote the success of the “first socialist country in the world.” For Bulgaria, this was the popular scientist and politician Asen Zlatarov. He began organizing public talks and in 1936 published the first volume of his propaganda series, entitled “In the Land of the Soviets.” In the bigger cities, legal Bulgarian-​Soviet associations were founded, usually promoting communism although the BKP remained formally forbidden. They also disseminated contemporary Soviet literature and promoted (again) Russian culture. Even during World War II, when Bulgaria was a member of the Axis, the Russian language was invariably taught in Bulgarian schools, along with French or German.

The Soviets and the Communist takeover At the beginning of World War II, when Hitler and Stalin were still allies, the Bulgarian government made a number of goodwill gestures toward the Soviet Union. The royal regime nevertheless rejected Moscow’s proposal for the two countries to sign a bilateral non-​aggression pact. It feared that this could only lead to losing independence as had happened with the Baltic States. Even after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the government of Bogdan Filov sought to keep the country as distant from the war as possible. It did not send troops to the Eastern Front, and Bulgaria remained the only member of the Axis to maintain its diplomatic relations with the USSR. Ultimately, this would not prevent a Soviet incursion. In Moscow in May 1944, the famous meeting between Stalin and Churchill agreed on a first preliminary division of spheres of postwar influence in Eastern Europe. Bulgaria clearly fell in the so-​called “Soviet zone of responsibility.” In the spirit of these decisions, the USSR intensified its diplomatic pressure on the Bulgarian government to allow the opening of new consulates and for Bulgaria to leave the Axis. The active support for the underground Communist movement grew as it turned toward an armed seizure of power. The decisive defeat of the Germans in Bessarabia in August 1944 prompted Romania to leave the Axis, and Soviet troops of the Third Ukrainian Front were soon at the Bulgarian border. On September 2, 1944, a new coalition government was formed in Sofia, consisting entirely of supporters of the legal opposition, which made a last-​ditch attempt to avoid Soviet occupation. However, three days after its formation, the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria. On the same day, the government decided to seek a ceasefire from Moscow and, as a gesture of goodwill, declared war on Nazi Germany, to go into effect on September 8, 1944. Thus, 440

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paradoxically, in the first days of September, Bulgaria found itself at war both with the anti-​ Hitler coalition and with Nazi Germany. On September 8, Marshal Tolbukhin’s troops advanced into the country. On the next day, a Communist-​led military coup was carried out in Sofia, transferring power to the pro-​Soviet coalition called the “Fatherland Front,” dominated by the BKP. From that moment, Bulgaria fell under the Soviet sphere of influence for nearly half a century.

1944–​1947: Soviet occupation Even before the formal signing of the armistice between Bulgaria and the anti-​Hitler coalition, the new government of the Fatherland Front committed itself to participate in the war against Germany. At the insistence of the Yugoslav Communists, a tripartite agreement was signed in Craiova on October 5, 1944, between the Soviets, represented by Marshal Tolbukhin, the Yugoslavs, represented by Josip Broz Tito, and Bulgaria, represented by the Minister Without Portfolio from the Communist government quota, Dobri Terpeshev. It put Bulgarian and Yugoslav military units under the general operational command of the Third Ukrainian Front. In the liberation of larger urban centers, Tito’s military units were supposed to move forward first. Thus, in less than a month, a country which had entered the war as an ally of Nazi Germany, ended up joining its adversary. Moving through Yugoslavia and into Hungary with Soviet forces, the Bulgarian army would suffer some 11,000 dead and 20,000 wounded by the time that Germany capitulated. On October 28, 1944, an armistice between the victors and Bulgaria was already signed in Moscow. It formalized the Soviet occupation of the country. Bulgaria was obligated to make available its entire infrastructure, natural and economic resources to further the war effort against Nazi Germany and at the same time to support the occupying Soviet forces. In the beginning, when the front was on Yugoslav territory, they numbered around 300,000. At the end of 1947, when the Soviet troops left the country, they were about 70,000. In addition, under the aforementioned armistice, an Allied Control Commission was established to monitor Bulgaria’s compliance with the conditions of the armistice and its commitments. Its Soviet members dominated its decision-​making as the British and Americans had no troops on the ground, helping to secure Soviet control over the country’s social and political life. Its Chairman was the Commander of the Third Ukrainian Front, Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin, but the actual leadership rested with the Committee’s Deputy Chairman General Sergey Biryuzov. Apart from the Soviet military, key officials of the Bulgarian Communist Party began returning after years in exile in the Soviet Union. One of the first was the future party leader Vŭlko Chervenkov. A year later,Vasil Kolarov came back, followed in November 1945 by BKP and former Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov.Within the leadership of the Communist Party, two main factions now emerged, the so-​called “local” and “Moscow” Communists. The separation between them was not unambiguous, since many of the former had also spent time in the Soviet Union. They did not however enjoy the full trust of Moscow. Very soon, the Moscow communists took control of the army, the security services, and key ministries and diplomatic posts. In addition to their presence at the head of government, so-​called “Soviet advisers” were officially instated in all ministries and agencies during the first months after the coup d’état. Formally, these were specialists commissioned to assist their Bulgarian counterparts in the country’s postwar reconstruction effort. At the same time, they were officers of the Soviet security service. In some cases, their opinion became more important than that of the ministers. Thus by 1945, although formally governed by a coalition government of the Fatherland Front’s 441

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four parties, Bulgarian Communists with the support of Soviet occupation authorities and “advisers” had become the absolute masters of the country. In the division of the continent into spheres of postwar influence, the Soviet Union had initially promised in February 1945 to adhere to the Yalta Declaration for a Liberated Europe. At the same time Stalin clearly had no intention of retreating from the countries the Soviet Army had occupied. One of the important preconditions for the recognition of postwar governments in the defeated states, as agreed at Yalta, was the holding of representative, multi-​party elections. In Bulgaria, unlike Hungary as the one exception, they did not take place. Nevertheless, on August 14, 1945, the Soviet government already announced the recognition of Bulgaria. A new Soviet ambassador, Stepan Kirsanov, was sent to Sofia. Bulgaria’s unelected coalition government sent an envoy to Moscow, Professor Dimitar Mihalchev, who had already held the position when diplomatic relations between the two countries were initially established in 1934. In any case, Bulgarian-​Soviet relations evolved to a minimal extent through formal diplomatic channels. Their relations were soon reduced to direct instructions by Stalin to Georgi Dimitrov, the Communist party leader even before he became prime minister in November 1946. Following the 1947 ratification of a peace treaty by the victorious states, Bulgaria lost what remained of its independence and became a full satellite of the Soviet Union. The peace treaty did stipulate the withdrawal of the Soviet occupation forces, who left in December, but Bulgaria was already so tightly bound to the Soviet orbit that keeping Soviet troops in Bulgaria was no longer necessary. At the same time, the regime made a concerted effort to cultivate Sovietophilia among the Bulgarians “from below.” Formally non-​governmental organizations were formed to promote Bulgarian-​Soviet friendship. The existing Slavophile movement, with its long, aforementioned history in Bulgaria, was transformed into an organized pro-​Soviet oriented structure.To this end, a Slavic Committee was established in Sofia in September 1944 and at the beginning of 1945, the Bulgarian capital even hosted an International Slavic Convention. Although it was attended by delegations from all Slavic countries (dominated entirely by representatives of the respective Communist parties), its main message was that their natural center was the Soviet Union. Thus, the old PanSlav idea was put into the service of Soviet foreign policy in postwar Europe. Gradually, the Slavic Committee took over the various Slavic societies which had existed before the war, and in 1947 their merger was renamed Union of the Bulgarian-​Soviet Societies. Its first honorary Chairman was instructively Georgi Dimitrov himself. The Union, renamed as the Nationwide Committee for Bulgarian-​Soviet Friendship in 1957, became one of the most significant formal organizations in the Communist regime and a major propagandist of the country’s ever closer affiliation with the Soviet Union. Its long-​time Chairman was Tsola Dragoycheva, a member of the Politburo of the BCP and one of the party’s iconic figures because of her long-​time underground credentials. Each year, the committee organized a Bulgarian-​Soviet friendship month. In 1974 it initiated an appeal for nationwide voluntary work to build a large-​scale park-​monument to the Bulgarian-​Soviet friendship in the vicinity of the city of Varna (renamed Stalin from 1949 to 1956).The monument was completed in 1978 to commemorate the centenary of Bulgaria’s liberation by the Russian army. Constructed with some 10,000 tons of cement, its bronze edged cube is cracked open to reveal an “eternal flame” of friendship burning at the center.

1948–​1956: the Stalin period On March 18, 1948, the People’s Republic of Bulgaria and the Soviet Union signed a Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance for 20 years. Such bilateral treaties between 442

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the USSR and its satellites represented their formal binding into the Soviet Bloc. Article 4 of the treaty envisaged that its signatories shall “consult” each other on all key international issues. As expected, these “consultations” took place in Moscow on the urging of the Soviet side. The Bulgarians, like other East European Bloc members, found themselves in the role of the “consulted.” In early January 1949, a meeting of the governments of the USSR, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary in Moscow discussed the further idea of a coordinating body for the economic cooperation between them.Their governments agreed to establish a common organization, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), whose headquarters would be in Moscow. In reality, this decision was a response to the Marshall Plan, in which the East European governments had refused, under Soviet pressure, to participate. CMEA aimed to increase planning coordination in each of the participant countries as well as to combine their efforts for fulfilling their common demands for raw material. In the next month, Albania joined CMEA as well, followed in 1950 by the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In the following years, the Bulgarian economy became closely dependent on the CMEA countries. By 1955, they accounted for over 86 percent of Bulgaria’s foreign trade, of which 46 percent was with the Soviet Union. The split between Stalin and Tito in 1948 and, accordingly, between the Soviet Bloc and Yugoslavia heightened the suspicion and paranoia of the Soviet dictator. He began to suspect “Titoists” among the other Eastern European Communist leaders and to encourage seeking them out. One of the first suspects was the second ranking person in the leadership of the BCP, Traicho Kostov. In his capacity as Deputy Prime Minister, increasingly stepping in for the ailing Georgi Dimitrov, he issued an order for compliance with the Law on State Secrets that inadvertently excluded the Soviet “specialists” assigned to all Bulgarian ministries. In particular, he tried to keep in secret the price at which Bulgaria sold tobacco, its major export. In his forced confession, Kostov claimed that he was not actually aiming to protect the state secrets from the USSR, but to centralize the channels for dispatching the information to Moscow. This explanation seemed logical, but not to Stalin. In Kostov’s actions, he detected a manifestation of “Titoism,” and this predetermined his fate. Proceedings against Kostov and the economic ministers ended with his death sentence after a show-​trial in December 1949. His execution had a profound intimidating effect on the other members of the Communist leadership. Stalin had made it perfectly clear what would happen to anyone take even minimal steps to assert national sovereignty. No one even tried. Vŭlko Chervenkov, who followed Dimitrov as both Communist party leader and head of government in 1950, also belonged to the so-​called Moscow Communists. He was loyal to the Kremlin to such an extent that he sent the minutes of the meetings of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party’s Politburo for approval to Moscow. Searching for a commander-​in-​chief of the armed forces, he asked Stalin to send him a suitable Soviet general, but here the dictator stopped short and recommended that, after all, a Bulgarian should be chosen. In 1955, Bulgaria became one of the founding members of the Warsaw Treaty Organization.The creation of this pact represented the Soviet response to the Western decision to allow German re-​armament. In 1954, the Paris Accords ended the occupation of West Germany, authorizing its re-​armament. Days after its accession into the NATO alliance and the final ratifications of the Paris Accords in May 1955, the countries in the Soviet Bloc signed their own military alliance in Warsaw. Bulgaria joined the USSR, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Albania in the Warsaw Pact. The GDR joined the next year. Thus, the Warsaw Treaty Organization duplicated the linkages of the CMEA but with more immediate effect. The supreme authority of the Pact was the Political Advisory Committee of 443

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the member-​states, comprising of the general secretaries of the respective Communist parties. The treaty envisaged mandatory consultations on all important international issues, the immediate provision of individual or collective military assistance in case a contracting party was assaulted, and the establishment of a joint military command and headquarters in Moscow. The Marshal of the Soviet Union, Ivan Konev, was appointed Commander-​in-​Chief of the Joint Armed Forces of the Warsaw Pact. The treaty provided that deployment of the Joint Armed Forces on the territory of the participating states would be based on “the need for mutual defense under the treaty between these states.” It thereby created a legal basis for the deployment of Soviet military forces and even for the direct occupation of these countries.The precedent for Soviet intervention came soon, in 1956.

1956–​1985: “the most loyal ally” Prior to the Soviet military intervention in Hungary in November 1956, Nikita Khrushchev undertook emergency consultations with the Communist leaderships of the Warsaw Pact countries. All of them supported the invasion of Hungary, and some, like the new Bulgarian leader Todor Zhivkov, suggested a collective intervention by all of the Warsaw Pact countries. The Kremlin choose to go ahead on its own, perhaps trusting its own army more. Another reason may have been the proposal of Romania’s leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-​Dej to take part. The startled Soviets worried that Romanian troops led to even more determined resistance by the Hungarians, already in conflict with Romania over their large minority in Transylvania. In any case, Zhivkov emerged as one of the hardliners among the East European Communist leaders and as someone, who sought to support the Kremlin as much as possible. Zhivkov would preserve this reputation into the coming decades. In demonstrating their subservience toward Moscow, the Bulgarian party leadership reached a high point at a plenum of the Central Committee of the BCP, held on December 4, 1963. It decided to propose to the Soviet Union a future “unification” or “merger” with the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. In the spirit of this decision, Todor Zhivkov sent a letter to Nikita Khrushchev. Although the Soviet leader rejected the proposal, as a potentially embarrassing international situation, the initiative reflects the readiness of the Bulgarian Communist leadership to sacrifice even formal national sovereignty. Recent Bulgarian scholarship has paid considerable attention to this proposal and prospect of becoming the sixteenth Soviet Republic. Some argue that Zhivkov was most likely to be aware of the Kremlin’s negative response to his proposal but made the attempt in the hope of securing new financial support, more supplies of iron ore and oil, or new technology. This may well have been the case, but it does not alter the uniqueness of this initiative, which has no parallel in the Kremlin’s relations with other Eastern European countries. A decade later, in 1973, now with Leonid Brezhnev as the General Secretary of the Soviet party, Zhivkov repeated this proposal, albeit in a more veiled form. At a plenary session of the Central Committee of the BCP on July 17 to 19, 1973, the issue of “comprehensive rapprochement with the Soviet Union” was discussed again. The Central Committee accepted a resolution for “Basic directions for the development of comprehensive cooperation with the USSR in the stage of building a developed socialist society in the People’s Republic of Bulgaria.” The document referred to a “qualitatively new content” for cooperation, without formally mentioning the words “unification” or “merger.” This time the regime in Sofia clearly managed to capitalize on it by obtaining Soviet oil and other raw materials at cheaper prices, some for resale to the West, as well as preferential access for its agricultural products to the Soviet market. 444

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In those years, Zhivkov maintained his role as a self-​proclaimed spokesman for the Kremlin at joint meetings of world Communist leaders. His behavior reinforced the reputation earned at a meeting in Moscow in 1960, when the Soviet-​Chinese conflict entered its open phase. Zhivkov strongly and without hesitation condemned Mao and the “Chinese dogmatists.” His position was similar in 1968, when the Warsaw Pact Political Advisory Committee (except Romania) discussed collective intervention in Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring. There he was one of the “hawks,” along with the GDR’s Walter Ulbricht and Polish party leader Władysław Gomułka. All three insisted on collective intervention, but the decision, of course, rested with Brezhnev. As the invasion began on August 20, 1968, the People’s Republic of Bulgaria provided a land contingent of about 2,000 soldiers, who were responsible for securing central Slovakia. Thus, Bulgaria became the only non-​neighboring country of Czechoslovakia to take part in the Warsaw Pact intervention.

1985–​1991: the twilight of Bulgarian-​Soviet relations When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Kremlin in 1985, he found in Sofia one of the most conservative Communist regimes in the entire Soviet Bloc. Zhivkov himself had been leader of the party for more than 30 years. It appeared that he had no desire or intention for undertaking any substantial reorganization. His regime had received a very poor international reputation after the assassination of the dissident writer Georgi Markov by the Bulgarian State Security (DS) in London in September 1978. Presumed “Bulgarian traces” in the attempt on Pope John Paul II’s life in May 1981 added to criticism from the Western media and policy-​ makers. Then Zhivkov’s campaign for the forced change of the names of the Bulgarian Turks further damaged the regime’s reputation abroad. It put Moscow and Bulgaria’s other allies in the awkward position of having to justify and play down for the international community this drastic breach of the 1975 Helsinki Agreement’s provision on human rights. Facing internal criticism over his long rule, Zhivkov initially declared his support for Gorbachev’s program of perestroika (restructuring), if not for openness (glasnost). In his established fashion, Zhivkov transferred some Soviet practices to Bulgaria and talked about pereustroistvo. He launched a campaign against drinking, raising prices on alcoholic beverages, and restricting the sale and serving of alcohol in shops and restaurants. To some extent, the crimes of Stalinism were once again discussed, and the portraits of members of the Bulgarian and Soviet Politburo members were removed from public places. Overall, throughout the initial period of perestroika, Zhivkov tried to do what Gorbachev did in Moscow. Zhivkov gradually became aware that he was unappreciated in Moscow. A heavy blow from the new Soviet leader to the regime in Sofia was the termination of annual subsidies amounting to 400 million rubles to Bulgarian agriculture. The abolition of preferential pricing of energy supplies also had an extremely negative effect on the Bulgarian economy. When the changes in the Soviet Union began to threaten the foundations of the system, Zhivkov decided to take things in his own hands. Indeed, he was not ready for an open confrontation with Gorbachev, but his plan was to undertake a reform of his own with limited changes that would not threaten his authority. One of the most striking examples of this mimicked reform was the so-​called July Concept of 1987, adopted at the plenary session of the Central Committee of the BCP. It pretended to initiate major changes in the economy, in social policy and in administration. Zhivkov’s attempt to bypass Gorbachev led to open conflict with him, despite the continuous public repetition of clichés about Bulgarian-​Soviet friendship. After two quiet years in bilateral relations, the Soviet leader took direct steps to expel Zhivkov in 1989. The Soviet ambassador in Sofia and former KGB general Viktor Sharapov 445

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was given the assignment. It was he who initiated the establishment of a conspiracy against Zhivkov in the Bulgarian party leadership, led by long-​time foreign minister and member of the Politburo, Petar Mladenov. The internal party coup of November 10, 1989, put an end to Todor Zhivkov’s three-​and-​a-​half-​decade rule. Conceived by its organizers as a means of preserving the Communist system by removing its most anachronistic representative, this change soon led to others. Irresistible public demands for multi-​party elections, press freedom, and the disbanding of its security service put an end to the Communist regime that had ruled Bulgaria for more than 45 years.

Selected Readings Baeva, Iskra and Evgeniia Kalinova. Sledvoennoto desetiletie na bŭlgarskata vŭnshna politika 1944–​1955. Sofia, 2003. Baeva, Iskra and Evgeniia Kalinova. 16-​ta republika li? Izsledvaniia i dokumenti za bŭlgaro-​sŭvetskite otnosheniia sled vtorata svetovna vojna. Sofia, 2017. Banac, Ivo, Introduction and ed. The Diaries of Georgi Dimitrov, 1932–​1949. New Haven, Conn., 2003. Dimitrov, Vennelin. Stalin’s Cold War. Soviet Foreign Policy, Democracy and Communism in Bulgaria, 1941–​ 1948. Basingstoke, 2008. Draganov, Dragomir. Kak za malko shteshe da ni niama? Vsichko ot archivite za ideiata:  “Bŭlgariia  –​ 16-​ta republika na SSSR.” Sofia, 2015. Kramer, Mark. “Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the Establishment of a Communist bloc in Eastern Europe, 1941–​1948.” In Stalin and Europe. Imitation and domination, 1928–​1953, ed. Timothy Snyder. Oxford, 2014, 264–​94. Nikova, Gospodinka. Sŭvetat za ikonomicheska vzaimopomosht i Bŭlgariia 1949–​1960. Sofia, 1989. Toshkova,Vitka, et al., eds. Bŭlgariia v sferata na sŭvetskite interesi. Sofia, 1998. Znepolski, Ivaylo and Mihail Gruev, et al. Bulgaria under Communism. Abingdon, 2019.

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44 ENVER HOXHA’S ALBANIA Yugoslav, Soviet, and Chinese relations and ruptures Elidor Mëhilli

Albania’s ruling Communist party (renamed Partia e Punës e Shqipërisë, Party of Labor of Albania in 1948) was a product of war –​a war not only against fascism, following the country’s occupation by Italian troops in 1939, but also a war waged within the party’s ranks. This latter struggle outlived the country’s liberation from Nazi Germany in late 1944. Over the years, as political alliances with Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and China rose and fell, the ranks of so-​called enemies of the state periodically swelled. Making enemies served domestic uses, but relations with the outside world became enmeshed in local struggles. Geopolitical insecurity in the Balkans, in turn, fueled even more conspiratorial thinking, which outlived the alliances with the foreign powers. Throughout these ups and downs, party operatives grew to appreciate the importance of maintaining ties to foreigners. At the same time, they learned the hard way that breakdowns in alliances came with a price. To consider the party’s origins and development against this broader regional and international background is to come to terms with how secrecy became a way of life, how conspiratorial thinking turned into an enforced routine, and how personal loyalties became imperative as the broader socialist world fractured.

Identity crisis: 1944–​1948 For an inexperienced party,Yugoslav backing seemed essential in the 1940s, although Belgrade would later exaggerate its role and the Albanian party leadership –​embarrassed by its Yugoslav ties once bilateral relations had soured –​would vehemently deny it. After 1944, several Yugoslav advisers did help to shape the party’s structure and they also become involved with economic planning. The two countries signed a friendship and mutual assistance treaty and a customs agreement. Belgrade agreed to supply aid in return for Albanian goods. A number of joint companies were set up to cover the construction of railroads, oil, mining, electricity, navigation, and trade. Belgrade also urged closer coordination in currency policy. The path to economic and political integration between the two countries seemed open.Yugoslavia’s leader Josip Broz Tito clearly had the upper hand. Stalin initially approved of Yugoslavia’s “handling” of its smaller and poorer rural neighbor. Albania’s rulers had to go along with the arrangement. Heading its party was Enver Hoxha (1908–​1985), a teacher-​turned-​activist who spent his student years in France and Belgium, later joining the Communist ranks at home. Hoxha lacked the revolutionary credentials of someone like Mehmet Shehu, an experienced military man 447

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who had participated in the Spanish Civil War. His wartime contributions were no match for Shehu’s. Neither was Hoxha widely known in the early 1940s. Still, he lacked neither cunning nor charisma and above all he had political instinct. At delicate moments, he was particularly adept at presenting himself as an arbiter among competing sides. In his way he quickly came to dominate the party’s inner circle, which included members who were intellectually more impressive. How Hoxha handled the maneuvers in dealing with Yugoslavia is instructive. Understanding the importance of Belgrade’s support, he had agreed to postpone settling the thorny issue of Kosovë/​Kosovo and its Albanian majority population. The idea was that the region’s future would be settled within a postwar international arrangement. Careful not to alienate his Yugoslav counterparts, Hoxha was nevertheless hardly blind to the unequal nature of this relationship. After the war, he was party secretary but also served as Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Defense, and Commander in Chief. (He would be forced to relinquish government posts after Stalin’s death, when high-​ranking officials in Moscow demanded changes.) The higher echelon of the Central Committee consisted of other former fighters, tested in battle and trusted for their personal loyalty rather than their level of education or ideological literacy. Indeed, the ideological training came after the Communist seizure of power. The party’s upper tier was largely unschooled, as was most of the country’s populace. The figures surrounding Hoxha were relatively young and inexperienced in government. They believed that a world-​ defining war had placed them on the right side of history. But like Hoxha, they cut their teeth in the ups and downs of the relations between Tirana and Belgrade. As disagreements between Stalin and Tito erupted in full view in 1948, Hoxha saw an opportunity: escape Yugoslav tutelage by declaring loyalty to Moscow. To lose ties to Yugoslavia carried risk. After all, he himself had publicly lauded Josip Broz Tito. Party apparatchiks had lavishly praised their Yugoslav counterparts. But the move also came with advantages. Hoxha came to learn during the crisis that a sense of insecurity in the party could be productive. The schism with Belgrade, for example, prompted the top party brass to launch a vicious purge in order to “cleanse” party ranks of supposed enemies and saboteurs. The powerful security police chief Koçi Xoxe, formerly a tinsmith, was declared a pro-​Yugoslav conspirator and shot in 1949. Yugoslavia and its local henchmen, according to the new party line, were responsible for recent planning failures and heinous crimes. Signed economic arrangements were now evidence of Belgrade’s “colonial” policy vis-​à-​vis the smaller country. Hoxha could influence neither how Stalin handled Tito, nor how anti-​Yugoslav fervor would envelop the other Communist leaderships in the late 1940s. But he saw –​and seized –​a rare opportunity to bypass a regional power and establish a direct channel to the man in charge at the Kremlin. Hoxha’s political survival thus drew on the officially sanctioned story of national survival.Throughout the 1950s, propagandists extolled Stalin as the savior of Albania. Over time, as the cult around his own personality grew, Hoxha would take on the mantle of a kind of a savior himself.

Premature Stalinists: 1949–​1960 After 1948, the rhetoric of warfare permeated day-​to-​day affairs within the party as well as outside its ranks. In the shadow of the Greek Civil War, the party mounted a vigorous propaganda effort. Albania stood encircled, it warned. This notion did not refer just to the reality of the “traitorous”Yugoslavs to the north and the “monarcho-​fascists” in Greece to the south. The Anglo-​American boogeyman, which Hoxha would tirelessly bring up, was not entirely fictitious. One outcome of the Stalin-​Tito split was to make Albania seem “detachable” from the 448

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Communist sphere. Anglo-​American intelligence operatives saw potential for overthrowing the regime in the late 1940s. The plan was to train Albanian exiles and drop them into the country with the goal of fomenting a rebellion.The Western services also airdropped Albanian-​language leaflets lambasting the regime and issued radio messages (including a short-​lived “Voice of Free Albania” edition beginning in 1951) urging locals to resist Communist rule. But the operation proved a disaster. Local security forces promptly ambushed the infiltrators. Radio Tirana issued angry on-​air tirades against the meddling. The doomed experiment lent potency to the official party line that the country was under siege.Vigilance became a rallying cry; the security of borders an obsession. The Sigurimi security police seemed to become omnipresent though its operations were frequently inept. It was hard to underestimate the challenge of building socialism in such a country. The regime presided over a largely peasant and illiterate populace. Modernization was therefore not merely necessary; it was at the core of the regime’s sense of its own survival. In 1949, Albania attained membership in the Council for Mutual Economic Aid (COMECON). Six years later, it was a founding member of the Warsaw Pact –​an important security guarantee. But the scope of Soviet assistance during this period was broader than this. Local officials pleaded with their counterparts in Moscow for qualified technical personnel, who were in short supply. To fund the five-​year plans for rapid industrialization, Moscow supplied loans, along with machinery and skilled personnel. The Russian language entered local schools and workplaces. Albanian students enrolled in Soviet universities, thanks to state-​supplied scholarships. “The relations we established with Albania were not just fraternal,” Soviet party boss Nikita Khrushchev would later write: “After all, fraternal relations are relations on an equal footing. But from the point of view of the aid we supplied, our relations were like an elder brother toward a younger brother.” No matter how brotherly the bond, Soviet economic advisers could hardly ignore Albania’s poor agricultural performance, its persistent problem of pushing industrialization onto the back of an unskilled labor force. Stalin’s death and the ensuing developments in Soviet policy under Khrushchev reverberated in Tirana, too. Efforts to rekindle relations between Moscow and Belgrade deeply offended Hoxha, whose close Politburo circle had been implicated in the anti-​ Yugoslav purges. Indeed, a handful of upper-​level party members questioned the official version of recent events, going so far as to challenge the way the anti-​fascist struggle had become a party myth. They took issue with how history textbooks and official propaganda had made Hoxha a dominant wartime figure. Until then, much of the grumbling had been done in private. After 1953, however, it seemed possible to speak up. Considered from Hoxha’s vantage point, such complaints were neither symbolic nor strictly matters of history. Any kind of rapprochement with Belgrade, he deemed, would require a deeper revision of the party’s foundational core. He vehemently resisted the calls for reform. Then, in February 1956, Khrushchev delivered his famous “secret speech” heaping blame on Stalin for crimes and foreign policy blunders. The speech shocked the delegates present in Moscow as well as the countless others who heard about it afterwards. Emboldened, a number of party officials gathered at a city conference in Tirana in April.There, they took the party leadership to task. Their goal was not to remove Hoxha from power, as later accusations would put it. In fact, the speakers picked up on the theme of the “cult of personality,” which Khrushchev had highlighted, but they adopted the idea into Albania’s party scene.Why was no self-​reflection forthcoming in light of the Soviet example? What about the elite privileges that had emerged in Tirana? Some mistakenly assumed that Hoxha might be prone to a softer approach, mirroring erroneous ideas among Western observers that Hoxha was somehow constrained by other hardliners. In fact, Hoxha decisively intervened in the proceedings, blaming the reformers as 449

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rotten anti-​party elements.This crackdown in the second half of 1956 made it potently clear: no such reform would be forthcoming. The uprising in Hungary that year  –​and Moscow’s handling of it  –​further reinforced the party chief ’s anxieties that de-​Stalinization could turn into self-​destruction. But Hoxha downplayed these concerns in public, paying lip service to Moscow’s recommendations. After all, the country was highly dependent on the Soviets for economic and technical support. Still, there was no rehabilitation of political prisoners. Paranoia about Yugoslav meddling in internal affairs did not disappear. When Khrushchev finally paid a visit to Albania in 1959, the rhetoric was contentious despite the celebratory visits to factories and collective farms. Internal discussions betrayed differences on a number of key issues. The Soviet leader tried hard to keep Yugoslavia out of discussions, for fear of offending the hosts. On matters of economic planning, the two sides held opposing ideas. Khrushchev thought that Albania might best serve as a specialized agricultural supplier to an economically integrated Eastern bloc. The country was too small to try and develop in many directions at once. His hosts, however, were obsessed with industrialization as a path to economic self-​reliance. Were the Albanian-​Soviet divergences a matter of ideology or a power struggle? A better question might be whether it was possible at this point, to extricate one from the other. Infatuated with the idea of a division of socialist labor within the Soviet bloc, Khrushchev was not impressed by the geopolitical anxieties that animated his Albanian counterparts. He was unmoved by their old-​fashioned obsession with the enemies that surrounded them. For Hoxha, on the other hand, building socialism had become inseparable from Albania’s geopolitical security in the Balkans. Industrialization and weapons production were not policy options but matters of survival. As relations between Moscow and Beijing worsened in 1960, Hoxha initially tried to keep a distance. He insisted that the two larger Communist parties settle their disagreements on their own. As party representatives gathered in Bucharest in June 1960, Khrushchev and his colleagues tried to bring the disgruntled Chinese under control. Hoxha’s political instincts kicked in once more. He skipped the meeting, where the Sino-​Soviet disputes would inevitably come up, sending instead his ally Hysni Kapo. As the Soviets worked to discipline the Chinese, they also tried to get the Albanians to fall in line. Hoxha stalled. He signaled sympathy for the Chinese position but also kept insisting on the importance of the Soviet Union and the need for resolving disputes through proper tactics. For their part, Chinese party functionaries were pleased that Albania seemed sympathetic to their criticisms. Mao deemed that de-​Stalinization had been a mistake. China’s anti-​Yugoslav (and anti-​revisionist) rhetoric, moreover, had received a warm welcome in Tirana. The harder the Soviet side pushed, the angrier Hoxha’s response grew. Earlier resentment with Soviet tactics on a range of issues now resurfaced more publicly. At a party plenum convened in July, Hoxha catalogued the “mistakes” made by leading Soviet officials going back to Stalin’s death. After consultations with the Chinese later that year, the Albanian delegation denounced the Soviet leadership at the November international meeting of Communist parties in Moscow. The hosts set up a meeting with the Albanians, urging them to reconsider. It was in vain. The meeting ended with the visitors angry and storming out. A parallel can be drawn between these events in the summer and fall of 1960 and the lessons learned back in 1948. As he had done then, Hoxha strived to turn insecurity into an advantage. Abrupt foreign policy moves could be disorienting. But they were also opportunities to mobilize party ranks in the name of vigilance. The very fact that the party itself had vigorously promoted the Soviet Union made any signs of reformism all the more damning. Moscow’s attacks against the Chinese, Hoxha told his colleagues, would have disastrous consequences similar to those of the secret speech. In the meantime, Beijing supplied much-​needed wheat 450

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and promised more technical support. By 1961, Albanian and Soviet disagreements spilled over into military, economic, and diplomatic relations. The two sides rowed over the Soviet-​ manned submarines stationed in the southern city of Vlorë. Attempts to normalize relations were rebuffed. In retaliation, Moscow withdrew the Soviet ambassador. Khrushchev delivered an angry attack against Tirana at the Soviet party congress in October. In response, Hoxha famously declared that his compatriots would “eat grass” if it came to it, but they would not “sell themselves for thirty pieces of silver.” In perspective, the 1960s’ Sino-​Soviet-​Albanian dynamics show that socialism had worked well enough to create transnational affinities. It had generated a shared language among people inhabiting distant parts of the globe, who used that shared language to describe realities far removed from their own. This was no small thing. But socialism had not yet provided a formula for defeating postwar capitalism and it had not provided an enduring way to handle foreign affairs. Without Soviet subsidies and hardware, building Albania’s socialism would have been a steep challenge. China’s own interests and Mao’s reservations, on the other hand, created some unexpected room for maneuver. These were external factors that Hoxha could not control. His cunning instinct was to try and exploit them, to make international disarray politically useful. The schism shows how strongmen strive by infusing global developments with local meaning. They describe their own struggles in the language of a world-​spanning conflict between good and evil.

The uses of China: 1960–​1976 The loss of Soviet credits and personnel was a serious problem for the economy’s immediate planning. So Tirana turned to Beijing for support. Over the years, the requests ranged from specialized factories to weapons, gear, and military installations. At times, the bloated requests irritated Chinese government officials. The Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, who visited Albania three times between 1963 and 1966, complained about them. Nevertheless, Beijing went along with them at this time, occasionally opting to satisfy Albanian demands by purchasing supplies for them in the West. Unequal as it was, the relationship also carried symbolic significance. Albania served as an advocate for China’s membership of the United Nations. Moscow, in turn, initially attacked the top leadership in Tirana as an indirect way of criticizing the Chinese. Throughout the 1960s, a number of high-​ranking Chinese officials made the trip to Albania. These included Politburo member Kang Sheng, deputy premier Li Xiannian, and leading Cultural Revolution activist Yao Wenyuan. After the Soviet-​led invasion of Prague in 1968, as panic set in about a possible military confrontation, the Chinese sent a delegation headed by Chief of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army, Huang Yongsheng. At the height of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–​70), moreover, Chinese workers, engineers, scientists, athletes, agricultural specialists, women activists, and youths made choreographed visits to Tirana. From the outside, such exchanges and profuse professions of admiration made the Sino-​Albanian bond seemed strong. Looking deeper, however, it becomes clear that the relations were constantly tested both at the party and government levels. Hoxha was initially nervous about the Cultural Revolution’s destructive potential in China. With little information forthcoming initially, he panicked that Mao’s rule might be in jeopardy. All the frenzied talk of revolutionary action was shared between the two sides. But was Mao going too far? It took strong reassurances from Beijing to make Hoxha throw his support behind the campaign. But he was careful to portray the events in China as necessitated by distinct local circumstances there. The upshot was that one could not generalize from the Chinese context into the Albanian one. In 1967, as Albanian delegations 451

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were invited to witness the revolutionary upheaval firsthand, officials in Tirana spoke enthusiastically of the struggle for the soul of a future China. In his later accounts, published after relations with Beijing had soured, Hoxha painted a favorable picture of this period. Since his books were translated into foreign languages, the manipulations took on a transnational life of their own. They have perpetuated the myth that Hoxha had stood against Mao all along. It is true that reservations about China predated the Cultural Revolution. In the early 1960s, for example, Hoxha had warned his close colleagues not to exaggerate Mao’s global significance.The possibility of improved Sino-​Soviet relations back then had also left him cold. Public pronouncements spoke of rock-​solid unity between the two far-​flung countries. Internally, however, the Politburo discussions were about being cautious. While Mao’s publications were eventually translated into Albanian, state-​enforced propaganda for the Chairman was kept in check. Then, as the Cultural Revolution peaked in 1967, propagandists disseminated Mao’s translated quotations. Hoxha embraced the Red Guards in Tirana, showering them with praise. Still, higher-​ups were careful to portray Mao as one political thinker among many and certainly not the greatest. Albania’s party apparatus launched its own revolutionary campaign in early 1967, designed to look like a spontaneous bottom-​up effort aimed at revitalizing party discipline and rooting out bureaucracy and bourgeois practices. Erroneously, observers assumed (and some still continue to claim) that Albania copied Mao’s Cultural Revolution. This sees the Balkan country as a perennial client state. In fact, anti-​bureaucracy talk was not new in Albania; party leaders had spoken about it for years. Hoxha saw an opportunity in 1967 to escalate this “uninterrupted revolution.” And though Albania’s revolutionary campaign coincided with the Chinese, it was crucially different in scope.The movement involved attacks against customs and norms deemed to impede a socialist way of life. Administrators shuttled to the countryside to learn from the masses and to engage in physical labor. Places of worship came under vicious attack, as churches and mosques were sacked, destroyed, or converted into warehouses. But this was hardly designed as an attack against the party apparatus. Indeed, the party was thoroughly in control of the process. Mao’s gamble was thus read as a warning and a counter-​example. Hoxha’s later memoirs ridiculed Mao’s personality cult, but by the late 1960s Hoxha’s own personality cult was growing. His citations (like Mao’s) appeared on the title pages of academic books, on building façades, and on gold-​trimmed red banners in workplaces. In 1968, a specialized party section began collecting and publishing his speeches, articles, and wide-​ranging directives on subjects ranging from party discipline and agriculture to aesthetics and music. Seventy-​one volumes were put out until 1990. The maroon-​covered Works became a common feature of daily life in the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, speeches at congresses and party gatherings were sprinkled with references to Albania’s push for “self-​reliance” (mbështetje në forcat tona). Against the “blockade” that had been imposed by the Soviet Union and the other “revisionist” countries, Albanians were repeatedly told, the country had to learn to stand on its own. Within a few years, there were signs of a shifting Chinese foreign policy. Suggestions from Chinese top officials that Tirana might rethink relations with Yugoslavia produced displeasure. Chinese overtures toward Romania were unwelcome. The meeting between Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin and Zhou Enlai in September 1969 was similarly disconcerting. Finally, Kissinger’s visit to Beijing and the news of a planned visit by Richard Nixon were hard blows. This was taken as definitive confirmation that Beijing had moved away from its ideological resolve. The Chinese premier rushed to Hanoi and Pyongyang to brief local officials on the rationale behind Nixon’s visit. But the Vietnamese appeared unconvinced, and so did the Albanian higher-​ups. Zhou tried to convince the Albanian ambassador that Nixon’s trip was an “escalation” of earlier meetings. But he could not downplay its significance, much as he 452

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tried. “Of course, Nixon is not coming as a tourist,” Zhou offered. “What would be the point of that?” In a tense Politburo meeting in August 1971, Hoxha warned that the Chinese aimed to become the world’s third superpower. In this “game of big alliances,” he warned his colleagues, Albania might fall through the cracks. “The time will come when we will be in conflict with the Chinese,” he went on, “unless they backtrack from this path that they have taken. We did not change course. They did.” There was concern that if the Albanians voiced their opposition, Beijing might curtail or even cut assistance. Hoxha and his colleagues weighed the options. The Chinese had lavishly praised Albania so the thinking was that they might be reluctant to cut everything off immediately. Still, Hoxha urged vigilance within party ranks because news of Nixon’s visit might cause, as he put it, “some people to waver.” The near future might call for further sacrifices. Albanians “had experience with these situations,” he explained, “so these events should not find us unarmed.” A few days later, Hoxha signed a long letter to Beijing detailing all the reasons why bringing Nixon to China was a mistake. The irony of Sino-​Albanian relations was that both sides had worked hard to sustain the myth of deep friendship, only then to find themselves in the awkward position of having to explain Nixon in China. In Tirana, a Central Committee letter instructed local party chiefs to be careful “not to go into too much detail” when talking about Nixon in China. Administrators, managers, and party members were not to discuss it at all with their Chinese counterparts, even if they brought it up. A few years earlier, as the Cultural Revolution was raging, Chinese officials had demanded that their Albanian counterparts take the Chinese to task for their ideological errors. In 1971, Tirana took Beijing to task about Nixon, with the consequence of infuriating the Chinese. After the letter from the Albanian party, Beijing explained that it would not send a delegation to an upcoming party congress. In a tense discussion, Premier Mehmet Shehu called the act “despicable, brutal, contemptuous –​the posturing of a big state against a small one.” At such key moments, Hoxha took care to appear assured and steady. Other Politburo members raged as they vigorously criticized the Chinese. He urged caution. A discussion about world politics was also a performance of power within a small Balkan political circle. Back in the 1940s, the Albanians had been upstarts. By the 1970s, however, they could claim to have sparred with Stalin, Tito, Khrushchev, and now Mao Zedong. The Chinese, Hoxha explained, were moving away from the ethos of the Cultural Revolution. At the same time, he referred to “good currents” in China, which left a future possibility for a reversal. In the meantime, local propaganda for Mao would be pared down. “The interests of our country and the international communist movement,” Hoxha explained, “require that we do not break with China, even though it is clear to us who we are dealing with.” Continuing to squeeze Beijing as much as possible was not hypocritical, he reasoned. Socialism required it. Even the applause at the upcoming party congress had to be proper and measured: not too much applause for Mao and China, but no dead silence either. Delegates would receive “signals” about when to applaud. They were to show only limited enthusiasm when China was mentioned in speeches.

The price of self-​reliance: 1976–​1990 The 1970s were marked by a series of internal purges. These attacks came in waves, targeting specific sectors: arts and culture, the army, and economic planning. A speech by Hoxha railing against “foreign influences” in 1973, for example, would be followed by top-​down investigations against “liberalism” in music, novels, and architecture. References to supposed saboteurs in the army and in planning would be followed by frenzied “party work” to identify culprits. Arrests and internment followed, as did the execution of high-​level officials. The long-​serving Minister 453

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of Defense Beqir Balluku was arrested in 1974 on fabricated charges of organizing a coup and sentenced to death. This was followed by the arrest of the Chairman of the State Planning Commission, Abdyl Këllezi, the Trade Minister Kiço Ngjela, and the Minister of Industries and Mining, Koço Theodhosi. Punishment was not exclusively an individual affair; the accused’s immediate family and relatives would also suffer. In 1976, the country got a new constitution, which enshrined Marxist-​Leninism as official ideology. The document forbade credits from or concessions to foreign companies of “capitalist, bourgeois, and revisionist states.” This had the effect of enshrining an autarkic mentality that had developed over time. As a result, unlike other Eastern bloc states, Albania did not rush into foreign borrowing to mask its economic problems. Instead, the regime tightened people’s belts and demanded grueling savings campaigns under the much-​touted banner of “self-​reliance.” Chinese generosity had provided hydroelectric plants, copper-​and iron-​smelting plants, oil refineries, textile mills, and more. And while Sino-​Albanian relations were not severed by Nixon’s visit, they did not survive Mao’s death in 1976 and the ensuing power struggle in Beijing. Even before relations with Chinese had completely broken down, state planners had understood the necessity of making do with internal resources. But the “siege mentality” also proved costly, as resources were funneled into the construction of military tunnels, fortifications, and pillboxes around the country. In December 1981, Hoxha’s long-​time collaborator Mehmet Shehu was found dead in his family villa. The official cause was given as suicide. The event has been a matter of controversy ever since. Shehu had been widely expected to succeed the ailing party chief. He had been unflinchingly loyal for 40 years. Shortly after his death, Hoxha declared that Shehu had been a foreign agent all along. After Hoxha’s own death in 1985, Ramiz Alia, a longstanding Central Committee official, assumed leadership. Born in 1925, Alia had initially joined the Communist youth and then the party. He rose through the ranks, becoming a full Politburo member at the time of the Soviet-​Albanian crisis. Alia promised to stay the course but by the late 1980s, Albania’s economic catastrophe was evident. Boosting foreign trade had come up before, but how? Forays to West Germany had amounted to little. As agricultural production tumbled, the state went after villagers’ livestock and private plots, forcing them into subsistence farming. Crucially, the momentous events of 1989 emboldened youths, especially university students in Tirana. When faced with mass storming of foreign embassies in the capital and mounting pressure throughout 1990, Alia strove to play a difficult balancing act. Soon, the country headed toward chaotic multi-​party elections, as thousands of Albanians desperately fled the country. More than 40  years of fractures and purges also came with constant revisions of history textbooks. Records had to be “corrected,” party lineages revised, myths maintained. In writing and rewriting the histories of Yugoslav, Soviet, and Chinese alliances, Albania’s officialdom projected itself as both embattled and internationally relevant. As destabilizing as it could be, a history of geopolitical ruptures was also productive for writing narratives of resolve against nefarious enemies. From today’s perspective, quarrels within Marxism-​Leninism seem hopelessly outdated, even bizarre. In the background, however, were the fears and the hopes of millions of people. One can look to a small place like Albania and be struck by the otherworldly quality of its recent past. But this was a regime very much of this world and of Eurasia in the twentieth century.

Selected Readings Biberaj, Elez. Albania and China: A Study of an Unequal Alliance. Boulder, Colo., 1986. Fejtő, François. “La deviazione albanese,” Comunità, no. 107 (1963): 18–​32.

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Enver Hoxha’s Albania Fevziu, Blendi. Enver Hoxha. Tirana,  2011. Fischer, Bernd J. “Enver Hoxha and the Stalinist Dictatorship in Albania.” In Balkan Strongmen: Dictators and Authoritarian Rulers in South Eastern Europe, ed. Bernd Fischer. West Lafayette, Ind., 2007, 239–​68. Idrizi, Idrit. Herrschaft und Alltag im albanischen Spätsozialismus (1976–​1985). Berlin, 2018. Lalaj, Ana. “Ndarja me sovjetikët dhe aleatja e fundit e Shqipërisë komuniste,” Studime historike, no. 3–​4 (2010): 239–​57. Mëhilli, Elidor. From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World. Ithaca, NY, 2017. Naimark, Norman. Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty. Cambridge, Mass., 2019. Tönnes, Bernhard. Sonderfall Albanien. Enver Hoxhas „eigener Weg” und die historischen Ursprünge seiner Ideologie. Munich, 1980. Vehbiu, Ardian. Shqipja totalitare: tipare të ligjërimit publik në Shqipërinë e viteve 1945–​1990. Tirana,  2007.

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45 CEAUȘESCU’S NATIONAL COMMUNISM AS NATIONAL STALINISM Vladimir Tismaneanu and Marius Stan

After proposing to relax Romania’s Communist regime, Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918–​1989) walked in the footsteps of his predecessor Gheorghe Gheorghiu-​Dej and re-​imposed Stalinism. Initially, the regime mobilized and exploited legitimate national grievances. Posturing as the guarantor of national sovereignty, Ceaușescu and his circle managed to construct a legitimizing narrative rooted in a romanticized past and promising the advent of an ethnically pure, classless society. Instead, Ceaușescu’s Romania became a classic case of neo-​Stalinist repression cloaked in the language of extreme nationalism. Ceaușescu’s knowledge of Marxism was rudimentary. His readings, mostly during the prison years, were limited to Stalin’s interpretation of Bolshevism, to which he stubbornly adhered until the end of his life. Hence his deep suspicion of any form of Marxist revisionism and the enduring insistence on the unquestionably leading role of the Communist party. To enhance the distinction from his predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-​Dej, Ceaușescu proclaimed to be the exponent of a self-​styled “creative Marxism.” In fact, neither he nor his associates added a single original idea beyond the welding of hollow Marxist rhetoric to nationalist slogans.

Introduction: conceptual clarifications The concept of national communism was often used in Western accounts to distinguish the regime that ruled in Romania after 1965. A  more accurate description of what Nicolae Ceaușescu called a “multilaterally developed society” would be national Stalinism, a blend of Stalinist methods of repression and manipulation with the anti-​Western resentment often found in the Third World. To the chagrin of many Communist leaders in the Soviet Bloc, the Romanian autocrat practiced a highly personal version of socialism, one in which the individual was bound to the messianic party line and the leadership of Ceaușescu family. As for its political philosophy, Ceaușescu’s regime was Stalinism-​ Leninism rather that Marxist-​Leninism. Its kind of “totalism” saw the superiority of the whole and the inescapable primacy of the society over any individual. For the Romanian Communist regime, as for the Soviet model, the individual was nothing but an element of abstract reference, a cog in the wheel in the Grand Mechanism. The source of all authority was the monolithic party apparatus, or, more precisely, the collective dictates of the party leadership as articulated by the General Secretary. 456

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In order to assure his hegemony, Ceaușescu used the rotation of cadres to push down any rising figures in the state bureaucracy, thus cutting short their chances for personal leverage. A  faithful disciple of Stalin, the Romanian leader did not permit any alternative centers of power. Those few who ignored this reality had paid a high price for even suggesting minimal objections in debates within the party. The notion of “collective leadership” soon vanished from political tables in Bucharest. The couple at the top of the party, Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu, had been substituted for the entire oligarchy. Even if the Leninist theoretical legacy was often called on after Gheorghiu-​Dej’s April 1964 declaration of independence from Soviet oversight, Ceaușescu never relinquished the rules that had emanated from the Bolshevik party after 1921, such as the elimination of any trace of intra-​ party democracy, a ban on factions, bureaucratic centralism, and the omnipotence of a narrow group within the party’s Central Committee. Nor could there be any separation between party and leader, both were equally venerated.

The Romanian cult of personality With the exception of Enver Hoxha (1908–​1985) in Albania, no other East European leader of the post-​Stalin period had managed to create such a celebrated yet coercive and pervasive cult of personality. The celebration seemed grotesque in the rest of the Soviet Bloc. His asphyxiating cult prompted the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to speak in private of Ceaușescu as “the Romanian Führer.” The cult included not only Nicolae, but his wife Elena and his son Nicu, too. In November 1985, at the First Congress for Science and Education, the barely educated Elena Ceaușescu had been appointed (unanimously!) president of the newly established National Council for Science and Education. Member of the Political Executive Committee, head of the party Cadre Commission, Deputy Prime Minister, and president of the National Council for Science and Technology, Elena was creating a parallel cult of personality. There are numerous volumes of dubious literary quality glorifying her “monumental scientific accomplishments” and “affectionate generosity.” The same 1985 Congress identified Nicolae Ceaușescu as the strategist of global economic policy for Romania, while hailing Elena as the first guardian of that strategy. His son, Nicu, seemed destined to inherit his father’s political throne. At the “Cenaclul Flacăra” gatherings, slogans praising the presidential dauphin were commonly repeated. He was alleged to have the revolutionary youth on his side. Nicu was also reputed to have become “a scientist of international reputation” and author of books on nuclear physics. Nicolae Ceaușescu’s own ideological interests revolved around the essential myth of “socialist Romanianism.” It focused on what was deemed as specific for Romanians, a cocooned historical past and traditions with shared interests and values. His internationalism looked to similar national narratives. The General Secretary fancied himself as the oracle of the revolutionary upheaval in the Third World, as close to Tito, Fidel Castro, and Robert Mugabe, rather than Soviet Bloc leaders like Erich Honecker, Janos Kádár, or Todor Zhivkov, protected by the Soviet Union’s “community of socialist states.” The same personality cult, inspired by the Stalinist, Maoist, Albanian, and North Korean models, was meant to advance Ceaușescu’s allegedly providential mission. The factors that have contributed to the development of a deep and explosive social, political, and economic crisis in Romania toward the end of the 1980s came from such a personal regime: a highly centralized model of leadership based on clan instead of party dictatorship, an obedient and demoralized political class, reliance on coercive methods of domination, and Ceaușescu’s own opposition to liberal reforms. His regime had not begun that way. 457

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Short-​lived liberalization, 1965–​1971 Nicolae Ceaușescu succeeded Gheorghe Gheorghiu-​ Dej as Romanian Communist Party General Secretary in March 1965. He also inherited a limited margin of independence in foreign policy and a Stalinist system controlled by an ideologically orthodox party. To consolidate his power, he initiated some liberalization in domestic policy and expanded Romania’s international relations with France and even West Germany. He eliminated leading members of Gheorghiu-​Dej’s team, and helped younger party cadres move up in the hierarchy. The new “party apparatus group” became Ceaușescu’s power base. Many of them had worked under Ceaușescu since the mid-​1950s, when he was Dej’s lieutenant in charge of personnel. They identified themselves in these early days with the General Secretary’s initial effort to “modernize Romanian institutions and accelerate economic growth.” Ceaușescu’s calls for an independent Romania enhanced his image as the chief exponent of an increasingly self-​assertive foreign policy. Consistently neutral in the Sino-​Soviet conflict, he rejected Moscow’s claim to hegemony in world communism. He also rehabilitated nationalistic symbols and values and embedded them in the official party ideology. Ceaușescu favored an oligarchic power structure during his first stage of his rule. At the same time, he praised collective leadership and criticized past repression in the style of Khrushchev. He also encouraged economic experimentation and abandoned socialist realism as the mandatory cultural model. Ceaușescu curbed the prerogatives of the secret police and passed regulations to separate party and state institutions. In response to these limited reforms the standard of living improved and his public standing rose as well. Nicolae Ceaușescu cynically used the suppression of the Prague Spring, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968, as the perfect occasion to strengthen his own public standing. His refusal to join in the invasion and instead to mobilize the Romanian army against a similar Soviet incursion allowed him to play the hero’s role, the symbol of the strong bond between the Party and the people. The organization of a new National Guard, with universal membership, sustained the momentum. In 1968, “RCP-​Ceaușescu-​Romania” became the official slogan. The origins and the first expressions of his own personality cult date from this sequence of events, rather than 1971, as was long presumed.

Re-​Stalinization, 1971–​1979 The liberalization in Romania did end abruptly in 1971, after Ceaușescu’s state visits to China and North Korea.What his Communist prime minister, Ion Gheorghe Maurer saw as troubling signs in the mass demonstrations and personality cults in the rigid regimes of China and North Korea were impressive examples to Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu. These foreign trips did however provide the Romanian ruler with a reputation for independence in Western circles and among the Euro-​Communist parties in Italy, Spain, and Greece. In the early 1970s, however, confident that his authority had been consolidated, Ceaușescu began to ignore and often challenge the party’s collective bodies. Subordinates began to worry about the emergence of a neo-​Stalinist dictatorship, but Ceaușescu only accelerated elite turnover, demoting influential members of the “party apparatus group.” Others committed suicide or died under strange circumstances. The re-​Stalinization started in 1971 was in fact accepted by the nomenklatura and continued de facto until 1989. The July Theses of 1971 marked the end of a relatively modest political and intellectual thaw in Romania. Adopted immediately by the Executive Committee, the July Theses became the prescribed rule book. It appeared that soon after Ceaușescu had returned from the 458

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aforementioned visits to China and North Korea, and exhilarated by what he saw there, he aspired to receiving the same fevered devotion from Romania’s youth. In the summer of 1971, there were however not many foreign observers who took seriously the prospect of a Stalinist revival in Romanian politics. After all, the RCP’s Plenary of April 1968 had rehabilitated two old party leaders falsely accused in the 1940s and in August, Ceaușescu had stood up against the invasion of Czechoslovakia. After Ion Gheorghe Maurer’s retirement as Prime Minister in 1974, Ceaușescu established total control. Ideologically, his socialism was autarchic and nationalist. Literature and the arts could only serve “the people,” celebrating their organic community rooted in Romanian ethnic origins and original settlement. Minorities were by definition suspect. Intellectuals had to be enlisted in the service of the Party. Any rejection of this role would be treated with intimidation. Ceaușescu shared Stalin’s vision of complete social transformation. Domestically, Ceaușescu followed the same Stalinist obsessions: increasing the leading role of the party through the strengthening of the Securitate apparatus; forcing investment in heavy industry projects; and tolerating no private initiative in the economy, let  alone any market mechanisms. The much acclaimed “socialist democracy” was an empty phrase to camouflage a monopoly of economic power. Increasingly convinced that he was fulfilling a historic mission, Ceaușescu saw himself as the apostle of a renewed national identity in a homogenous socialist nation. Ethnic and intellectual minorities alike were seen as malignant agents of dissolution. In culture, he focused on an idealized past and relished the quasi-​official doctrine known as “Protochronism,” a nationalist perspective postulating an alleged Romanian precedence in scientific and artistic achievements.

The parallel cults The cultivation of her own personality cult presaged the rise to political prominence of Ceaușescu’s wife, Elena. Elected to the Central Committee in 1972, she rapidly climbed the career ladder. By 1979, at the twelfth Congress of the Romanian Communist Party, Elena Ceaușescu was the second most important person within the party leadership. As Chair of the Central Committee’s Personnel Commission, she supervised all significant party and government appointments. Many of the couple’s relatives were entrusted with important assignments, including control of the army and the Securitate. Their son, Nicu, was appointed an alternate member of the Political Executive Committee. Elena Ceaușescu truly saw herself as an intellectual. She believed to be a distinguished scientist equal to other academicians, despite the lack of any legitimate credentials for a university education. Regime favorites praised her continuously as “a woman, a politician, and a brilliant scientist.” Elena’s cult of personality became the twin ritual of her husband’s, and her interventions instilled just as much fear. She was always around, watching so that no one would ever disturb her “comrade’s” peace of mind. After all, a providential man like that is only “born every 500 years.” Elena was also jealous. She could abide only her own relatives and was condescending toward Nicolae’s family. Elena had few friends and concentrated instead on reaching the top of the political pyramid. She has been compared to Nexhmije, Enver Hoxha’s wife, who wanted to oversee every one of her husband’s actions. Back in the 1930s, one of the jokes in circulation in Moscow ridiculed the Marxist theory and practice by dividing human history into three stages: the Matriarchat, the Patriarchat, and the Secretariat. Both Elena and Nicolae Ceaușescu belonged to all three stages. Elena never trusted the Securitate and saw conspirators all around. Ideologically, she was a true believer in the official dogma. There are certain similitudes with 459

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Mirjana Marković, Slobodan Milošević’s wife. The sudden radicalization of the Romanian dictator’s spouse took also place during her visit to China in 1971. She took note of the influence that Mao’s partner had.

Ceauşescu’s Stalinism and his last decade During the 1980s, the omnipresent cult of Nicolae Ceaușescu and his political leadership continued to grow. During his lifetime, he had been a follower of the Bolshevik doctrine in the codified version presented by Stalin in Problems of Leninism, and The Short Course (October 1938). This was the system by which Ceaușescu rose to become supreme leader, basically a set of institutions, values, commitments, nostalgia, and emotions that served as an ideological framework. The Communist party was seen as the keeper of all ultimate truths about nature, man, and society. The system found a trustworthy steward in Nicolae Ceaușescu. The mystique of the infallible party became his existential lodestar. Never aware of the intricacies of Marxist dialectic, Ceaușescu apparently never read any of Marx’s Das Kapital and little of Lenin. Theoretically speaking, he took his only instruction from Stalin. He had learned his political economy in 1946–​7 from hardcore Stalinist militants. Into the late 1980s, he was thundering against Gorbachev’s reforms, remaining convinced that private property is the cause of all social ills, calling it the supreme injustice. As a member of the Agricultural Commission (1949), he had waged a fierce campaign against peasants resisting the drive for collectivization. As deputy minister of the armed forces, in 1957, army troops under his orders killed several peasants and injured dozens during a local anti-​collectivization uprising in east-​central Romania. Nicolae Ceaușescu used the Soviet pejorative kulak for a peasant landlord (in Romanian chiabur) and called them nothing but “blood suckers” and “pure vermin.” Ceaușescu believed wholeheartedly in the revolutionary transformation of the human condition, in the forging of a New Man. The creation of such a New Man –​the perfect person dreamed of by Stalin and Mao –​remained their common political and ideological aspiration. Such a person would be automatically loyal to the party’s leaders and would put society’s interests above his or her own.Through the “leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom” he would put an end to the age-​old conflict between self and the world. Ceaușescu lived by the Internationale’s famous line, “Let’s make a clean slate of the past.” Ceaușescu’s aspiration to mold society in his own vision and to impose total control of the state extended to the most personal aspects of life. Worried by a fall in the birth rate, which threatened his declared goal that the population of Romania should exceed 20  million, his regime introduced a ban on abortion in 1966. After passing 20 million inhabitants, the birth rate again slowed in the 1970s. Now seeking 30 million and fearing a labor shortage, Ceauşescu ordered the ban’s rigorous enforcement from 1980. State authorities closely monitored the reproductive behavior of women, forcing them to undergo regular tests so that no pregnancy would go unrecorded. Women having abortions, and anyone found carrying them out, faced prison sentences. The radical enforcement of the ban on abortion did lead to an increase in the birth rate but also many unwanted children. Many of them ended in homes for abandoned children notorious for their horrific conditions. Culturally, Ceaușescu remained convinced that literature and arts should be subordinated to the Marxist-​Leninist principle of partiinost, the Party above all. He rejected any ideological concessions. His July 1971 Theses came not only from the influence of the Maoist Cultural Revolution and North Korean Juche but from his own worry that the limited liberalization under way in Romania could lead to the collapse of socialism. Ceaușescu had not contested the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 because he appreciated “socialism with a 460

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human face” but because of his obsession with national sovereignty and non-​interventionism in domestic affairs. Ceaușescu had cultivated cordial relations with some Euro-​communist leaders, primarily with the General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party, Santiago Carrillo (1915–​2012), but he did not embrace their semi-​pluralistic vision. He declared as late as 1976 that the RCP did not give up on the necessity of a proletarian dictatorship, which the Eurocommunists had already abandoned. He maintained the same ideological apparatus and kept the repressive controls enforced by the Securitate in place. Ceaușescu’s internationalism was built on solidarity with all “anti-​imperialist forces.” He felt comfortable with leaders of liberation movements in the Third World. He came to enjoy also close relationships with dictators such as Jean-​Bédel Bokassa (1921–​1996) and Mobutu Sese Seko (1930–​1997). Fancying himself as the true leader of the Non-​Aligned Movement, he failed to win the wider support promised by his trade offensive in Africa and the Middle East during the 1970s. By the early 1980s, the Romanian economy faced a severe debt crisis from covering trade deficits that exports to the Third World had failed to repair. Even before the International Monetary Fund, which Romania had joined in 1972, could impose restructuring measures, Ceauşescu embarked on radical austerity policies with the goal to pay back the principal sum, rather than just service, of all debts to Western creditors before they were due. In 1982, the government began restricting agricultural imports and exporting the domestic food and fuel supply in order to earn hard currencies for repaying the Western debts. The health system was badly strained even before hospitals received no heating fuel in the winter of 1984–​5, leaving many patients and newborns to die. Intrahospital infections were already rampant and medical drugs scarce. Doctors’ salaries were so low that most demanded to be paid with Kent cigarettes and other coveted imports in exchange for their services. Romania ended the 1980s with the highest recorded maternal mortality of any country in Europe –​159 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1989 (in part as a result of complications following clandestine abortions). The notorious Rational Nourishment Program for a more healthy diet was in fact an attempt to justify the food shortages created by the forced export surplus. Data on growing HIV and AIDS cases was deliberately concealed by the government. As the regime’s food crisis grew, the Draconian natalist policies to monitor pregnancies and promote a population of 30 million nevertheless became more repressive. Mandatory gynecological controls in all institutions created a climate of fear and humiliation.Autonomous thinking was also under siege. The private use of typewriters was banned and their keys confiscated. The Securitate kept the few courageous dissidents under surveillance and often arrested them on bogus charges. Yet the regime was facing increasing opposition. In November 1987, a protest movement erupted among the workers in Brașov. It turned into a civic revolt and led to violent repression by the police. Manifestoes were circulating, in spite of the regime’s attempt to keep copying machines under strict control. A final straw in Bucharest was his plan to destroy many buildings and churches in the city center to make way for a monumentally large presidential palace and administrative center. Another late Stalinist project that drew international condemnation was sistematizarea, a program for political centralization that was to require peasant villagers to move to controlled apartment complexes and work the fields as virtual state labor, a task already assigned to some army units. Seen as aimed especially at Hungarian villages, the rural restructuring was barely under way when the opposition to the destruction in Budapest combined with religious repression in western Romanian Banat to trigger the regime’s overthrow late in December 1989. After the army commanders balked at repeating initial firing at demonstrators in the Banat, they joined in demands for Ceauşescu’s dismissal. They echoed from the huge crowd in Bucharest 461

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that shouted down Ceauşescu at his televised public meeting to mobilize support on December 21. The next day, his attempted flight with Elena in an army helicopter ended at a provincial barracks with their summary trial and execution.

Conclusion Did Ceaușescu ever abandon his own Cominternist internationalism? He did appeal to chauvinistic nationalism. He had however gambled on the advance of Third World revolutionary movements, believing until the very end that Stalinist socialism would prevail globally. He denounced the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as a renegade and “right-​wing opportunist.” He died before the firing squad singing the Internationale, not Awaken thee, Romanian!, the national anthem. Nicolae Ceaușescu was a true believer, not a patriot. When Gheorghe Gheorghiu-​Dej died in March 1965, Ceaușescu inherited not only his political mantle, but also a platform with the potential for either “Albanization” (Stalinist nationalism) or Tito’s reformist but paternalistic Yugoslavism. After a short-​lived relaxation, Ceaușescu chose the strategy of accelerated industrialization and increased political repression. Especially after 1971, when fascinated by the discipline in Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, he curtailed liberalization and re-​imposed rigid orthodoxy. Drawing on the new practice of consultative mobilization, he engineered an ever-​growing cult of his personality, later paralleled by a cult for his wife. Political leadership turned from the oligarchic concentration of power characteristic of the Dej period into a fully-​fledged autocracy. Incessant propaganda glorified him as the architect of the national destiny, the visionary builder of the nation’s future. There was nothing less than celebrating an increasingly grotesque cult of personality. Until the violent upheaval of December 1989, the RCP epitomized adamant anti-​reformism. Its complete collapse followed from its obstinate refusal to engage in de-​Stalinization. One of the most vocal critics of Gorbachevism, Nicolae Ceaușescu emerged as the champion of an updated version of militant Stalinism. He seemed intent on rejecting his own advocacy of “creative Marxism” and single-​mindedly returning to Stalin’s definition of Leninism. In his opposition to Gorbachev’s own neo-​Leninist, revisionism, Ceaușescu relied on the logic of national Stalinism.

Selected Readings Câmpeanu, Pavel. Ceaușescu, anii numărătorii inverse. Iași, 2002. Chirot, Daniel. Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Times. New York, 1994. Deletant, Dennis. Ceaușescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965–​1989. London, 1995. Fischer, Mary Ellen. Nicolae Ceausescu: A Study in Political Leadership. Boulder, Colo., 1989. Ionescu, Ghiță. Communism in Romania. Oxford, 1964. Kligman, Gail. The Politics of Duplicity. Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania. Berkeley, 1998. Pons, Silvio and Robert Service, eds. A Dictionary of 20th Century Communism. Princeton, NJ, 2010. Shafir, Michael. Romania: Politics, Economics and Society. Political Stagnation and Simulated Change. Boulder, Colo., 1985. Tismaneanu,Vladimir. “The Ambiguity of Romanian National Communism,” Telos, no. 60 (1984): 65–​79. Tismaneanu,Vladimir. Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism. Berkeley, 2003.

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46 YUGOSLAVIA’S THIRD WAY: THE RISE AND FALL OF SELF-​MANAGEMENT Vladimir Unkovski-​Korica

Unlike the first Yugoslavia, the second one had a leadership with global ambitions. Following its dismemberment by the Axis Powers,Yugoslavia re-​emerged as a unified state, forged in the fires of anti-​fascist Partisan struggle, at the end of the Second World War. Having led the resistance, Tito and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) seized absolute power by November 1946, earlier than other Communist parties in Central and Eastern Europe. Brimming with confidence, they saw Yugoslavia as the center of a new Balkan Federation. More than that, they were convinced that they were the vanguard of a new wave of international revolution that would grip the peasant masses of the colonized and oppressed countries. This process was already visible in Southeast Asia and the Far East. The new states arising from this wave of popular revolt would transform world affairs at the expense of the United States and Western Europe.Together, and aided by the Soviet Union, they would achieve fast industrialization and urbanization, and break from the underdeveloped state in which they were kept by an unjust world system dominated by the imperialist centers of power. This vision crumbled early on as Yugoslavia was faced with Joseph Stalin’s reluctance to risk open confrontation with the Western powers after an exhausting war. Having agreed with Winston Churchill to a division of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence, Stalin rebuked the Yugoslav Communists for promoting their own wider federation in the Balkans in 1947. Before then, the Soviet Union had not appeared to be as benign an ally as expected. Following early tensions surrounding the abusive behavior of Red Army officers and troops liberating Yugoslavia in the fall 1944, further problems arose: the Soviet Union did not defend Yugoslavia’s claims to Trieste. Soviet advisers behaved arrogantly and were often accused of working as intelligence agents. Mixed or joint Soviet-​Yugoslav enterprises appeared to be designed to obtain Yugoslav raw materials for Soviet benefit. Amid deepening suspicions on both sides by 1948, the Soviets decided to orchestrate the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the nascent Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe. After several months of secret correspondence and recrimination, the Tito-​Stalin split came into the open in June 1948. The Cominform, an organization of major Communist parties in Europe, publicly expelled the CPY. Aggressive media campaigns, an economic blockade, and military pressure by the Soviets and their allies followed for several years.

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The Tito-​Stalin split and the rise of self-​management It was in this context that the self-​management system, for which Yugoslavia became famous, began. For almost a year, the CPY resorted to mass mobilization born of patriotic enthusiasm to complete the bare essentials of its ill-​fated, Soviet-​style first five-​year plan, started in 1947. Tito had told the Central Committee in April 1948, at the start of the quarrel with the Soviets, that: On the question of the economy, my position […] has been that our country should show what it can do with its own forces. I thought that that would be a big and beautiful step for the progressive movement in the world. Tellingly, as an indication of how important global public opinion was to him, Tito referred to Burma and other countries as examples of countries Yugoslavia should inspire. It was during this period, in late spring of 1949, that the idea of introducing workers’ councils in industry was first officially mentioned in the Economic Council chaired by the highly regarded Boris Kidrič. Workers’ councils would institutionalize and channel the fervor of the growing working class, eager to develop the country in the face of foreign opposition. Yet it was already becoming clear that mass enthusiasm would not be enough.To survive and ensure economic growth and military security,Yugoslav leaders decided that the country had to balance between East and West in the Cold War. At this precise point, they felt that Yugoslavia had to tilt to the West. Tito announced in July 1949 that he had closed the Yugoslav-​Greek border, cutting off military aid to the Greek Communists in their civil war. The United States had approved critical export licenses to the tune of US$17 million earlier in the summer, but now approved one for a militarily sensitive steel blooming mill in September 1949. The US Import-​Export Bank approved a loan for US$20 million and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for US$3 million in the same month. The United States also supported the election of Yugoslavia to the United Nations Security Council in October 1949. On his triumphant return from New York, foreign minister and leading ideologue, Edvard Kardelj addressed the Central Committee in December 1949. Critically, he argued that domestic policies were important for external appearances. In the first recorded mention of workers’ councils in any party document, he stated unambiguously: I think that the strengthening of the democratic relations in our production –​with the formation of workers’ councils, of which we have spoken, it seems to me, almost a year ago, as well as all the other forums –​is exactly that what we shall be able to present to the world as the difference between us [Yugoslavia] and them [the Soviets]. Self-​management from its early days, therefore, was wedded to the principle of national independence and bore the imprint both of mass participation and the geopolitical balancing act. Over the next three years, until Stalin’s death in March 1953, self-​management became the cornerstone of a transformation that involved the so-​called three Ds: de-​bureaucratization, decentralization, and democratization. The immediate aim was the liberalization of economic, political, social, and cultural life. Introduced on an experimental basis in December 1949, the formal establishment of workers’ councils spread to all industrial enterprises in June 1950.Their role was to give elected groups of workers a voice in management of economic enterprises and

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from there representation at all levels of government, from the local People’s Committees to republic-​and federal-​level legislatures. A series of laws abolished central planning by targets and quotas, decentralized management in industry, liberalized many prices, and introduced elements of competition in the system in 1951 and 1952. The Minister of the Interior, and a close confidante of Tito, Aleksandar Ranković, delivered a speech in June 1951 heralding “democratic socialist legality” and independence of the courts. The famous critic of socialist realism of the interwar period, Miroslav Krleža, announced a more pluralist approach to literature at the Third Congress of the Yugoslav Writers’ Union in November 1952. In the same month, at its Sixth Congress, the CPY changed its name to the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY), emphasizing its new methods of persuasion over the previous reliance on coercion and command. Similarly, at its Fourth Congress in February 1953, the CPY’s mass front organization, the Popular Front, changed its name into the Socialist Alliance of Working People of Yugoslavia (Serbo-​Croatian abbreviation: SSRNJ), symbolically taking over the executive function from the CPY/​LCY. At the end of March 1953, Yugoslavia effectively abandoned its drive to collectivize agriculture, started in 1949 (see Arnd Bauerkämper’s chapter). Codifying many of the reform trends, a new constitutional law became effective in January 1953. Just where and how far such a transformation should go was uncertain. In February 1953, Yugoslavia signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation with Greece and Turkey, bringing it closer to NATO. Earlier, in June 1950, Kidrič had stated that self-​managed Yugoslav enterprises should, in the future, become profitable, export-​oriented firms. Although Yugoslavia remained a largely protected and insular market through most of the 1950s, it slowly opened to trade with Western Europe, Italy in particular, and received significant aid and credit from the United States. Some members of the leadership began to warm to more fundamental political changes. Some started to cultivate a closer relationship with Western Social Democracy. The British Labour Party was an important early partner, and the leading light of the left of Labour, Aneurin Bevan, became personally close to Milovan Djilas, a member of Tito’s inner leadership, who headed the party’s propaganda agency and was appointed one of the country’s four vice-​presidents in January 1953. In late 1953, Djilas wrote increasingly critical columns in the party newspaper Borba, attacking official privileges and questioning the LCY’s monopoly on power. He was swiftly sacked from the Central Committee in January 1954, with Tito blaming the influence of West European Social Democracy for his deviation. Djilas responded by leaving the party and calling for multi-​party democracy in an interview to the New York Times. For Tito and many LCY officials, Djilas’s defection represented the risks that overly close cooperation with the West entailed. Djilas’s rebellion had come just after the United States and Britain had decided in October 1953 to hand over the administration of Zone A of the disputed Free Territory of Trieste to Italy, which included the city itself, almost sparking a regional war. The crisis subsided temporarily in December 1953, when the United States and Britain effectively reneged on their promise of withdrawing troops from Zone A until a more permanent solution partitioned the Free Territory of Trieste. Signed by Yugoslavia and Italy in October 1954, it immediately opened up the chance to trade with Italy. Since domestic living conditions had still not caught up with their prewar level, the Yugoslav Communist leadership was livid with Djilas for opening fissures at the top so obviously. They also worried that there might be significant support for Djilas’s ideas among intellectuals and lower echelons of the LCY. Indeed, Djilas had probably rebelled at that time in part because he feared that Stalin’s death in March 1953 would spell the end of reforms. He had reasons to be suspicious. An LCY plenum in June 1953 had called for stricter party discipline and increasing vigilance against the West. Following the demise of Djilas, Tito wrote a letter to party organizations stating that the LCY should not 465

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limit itself to education, and that, in the organs of self-​management, it had to “set the tone for the work of the worker’s councils.”

Self-​management, non-​alignment, and the challenge to the Soviet Bloc To ensure against the possibility of Western destabilization, the Yugoslav leadership decided to take more seriously Soviet overtures that had started soon after Stalin’s death. The subsequent Yugoslav-​Soviet rapprochement in the period from summer 1954 to autumn 1957 acted as a brake on domestic reform in Yugoslavia. Tito and the new Yugoslav Foreign Minister, Koča Popović, believed that a normalization of relations with the USSR was in Yugoslavia’s long-​ term interests. If executed carefully, it would not jeopardize good relations with the West, but would make Yugoslavia more independent, allowing more room for maneuver internationally and domestically. Tito’s ambitions did not stop at easing Soviet pressure on Yugoslavia. He hoped to spur relaxation in the Soviet Union and its satellites but without Yugoslavia having to join the Soviet bloc. Following a secret correspondence with the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Tito welcomed him and a Soviet delegation to Belgrade in May 1955. This visit signified the normalization of state relations. Their signing of the Belgrade Declaration legitimized the idea of “national roads to socialism.” There were immediate economic benefits for Yugoslavia, first in the mutual cancelation of debts.Then came a new trade deal and by 1956 a promise to help with commercial atomic energy development in Yugoslavia, followed by loans at favorable rates to build industrial plants and purchase raw materials. After Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in his secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, political benefits appeared as well. In June 1956,Tito signed the Moscow Declaration, which normalized relations between the two ruling parties as independent equals. Tito also asked for the removal of the East European party leaders who had sided with Stalin in 1948 across Eastern Europe. Bulgarian former party leader Vŭlko Chervenkov had already resigned as Prime Minister before a visiting Yugoslav delegation in April. Later, Khrushchev’s ally Anastas Mikoyan was dispatched to Budapest in July 1956 to secure the removal of Mátyás Rákosi as party leader in Hungary. Although he was removed to dampen the rising Hungarian unrest, Mikoyan traveled on to Belgrade to report the change to Tito. Tito duly invited Khrushchev for a private stay in Yugoslavia in September, and made a return visit to the USSR, which ended in October. The new Hungarian leader Ernő Gerő joined them during their holiday in the Crimea. In the same month, reformer Imre Nagy was allowed to rejoin the party and the body of former minister László Rajk, who had been executed as a Titoist spy in 1949, was given a re-​burial in front of 200,000 people on October 6, 1956. In a symbolic demonstration, a group of 200–​300 went to the Yugoslav Embassy to express support for Yugoslavia. Tito’s gamble on Khrushchev appeared to be paying off, but disappointment followed. The reformist leadership in Hungary proved unable to contain popular demands for change. Students of the Budapest Technical University and the Petőfi Circle called a demonstration on October 23 to demand the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the formation of a government under Nagy. The Petőfi Circle was an intellectual discussion group formed in the Communist Youth League in 1954, which had given favorable publicity to Yugoslav self-​management. Gerő denounced the demonstrations, sparking a crowd’s seizure of the Radio Station in Budapest on October 24. The Soviet army intervened and fighting in the capital city followed for four days. Janos Kadar replaced Gerő as party leader on October 25, while Nagy called on the Patriotic People’s Front, rather than the Party, to set up the new government with him as Prime Minister. Belgrade initially greeted the formation of this government but grew uneasy about Nagy’s 466

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intentions. As workers began to occupy their factories and set up workers’ councils, Nagy called for a ceasefire, a withdrawal of Soviet troops and “socialist democracy.” On October 30, Nagy broadened his government to include the parties that had shared power in 1947, recognized the workers’ councils as organs of revolutionary power, and announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. Khrushchev secured the backing of other bloc party leaders for a second invasion of Hungary but first traveled to Yugoslavia on November 2, 1956, to convince Tito. Tito agreed but did seek assurances that there would at least be attempts at a political solution and at co-​opting the workers’ councils. A second Soviet invasion followed on November 4. By the end of November, the new pro-​Soviet government under János Kádár denounced the Central Workers’s Council of Greater Budapest as counter-​revolutionary and arrested its leaders. The Hungarian Revolution and its suppression hurt the reputations of both Khrushchev and Tito, but did not end the prospects for self-​management in Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, Khrushchev faced conservative pressure at home and abroad to rein in the centrifugal forces which threatened the unity of the Communist bloc led by the Soviet Union. In an attempt at appeasement, he announced a conference of the ruling Communist parties in Moscow to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Rather than achieve unity, the November 1957 conference reinforced open division. The Yugoslav delegation even refused to sign the public declaration. It rejected references to the leading role of the Soviet Union, since that would legitimize Soviet interference in Yugoslav affairs and violate the 1956 agreement on the coequal status of the two parties. Furthermore, Tito accepted a renewed push for reform at home led by Kardelj. Perhaps designed by Kardelj to confront Moscow, the new LCY program adopted at the Seventh Congress in April 1958 condemned both blocs in the Cold War. A renewed period of frosty relations continued until the intensification of the Sino-​Soviet rift in the summer of 1960. Chinese leader Mao Zedong represented the hardliners in the official Communist movement and was increasingly critical of Khrushchev’s pragmatic dealing with the West. Khrushchev and Tito met at the September 1960 United Nations General Assembly, re-​opening a period of warmer relations. Khrushchev also seemed ready to move once again in a direction more acceptable to Tito. The Twenty-​Second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October 1961 set out ambitious domestic reforms which called for a more participatory “all people’s state.” As long as Khrushchev held out against conservatives in the Soviet Union,Tito did what was possible internationally and domestically to facilitate Khrushchev’s position. That set Tito on a collision course with Kardelj. Tito believed that great care had to be placed on the pace and success of domestic reforms, since Yugoslavia’s international position depended on its stability. Any problems could be used by Soviet hardliners to denounce their own domestic reforms. The reforms that Kardelj championed were however increasingly contentious at home. Having formally joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), Yugoslavia by 1961 had embarked on an increasingly export-​oriented path, reforming its currency, price system, and self-​management structures. Indeed, in March 1961,Yugoslavia decentralized investment further to the self-​managed enterprises, allowing them to divide net income between new investment and wage increases. Inflation began, in part, with the widespread wage increases. While insisting that he did not oppose reforms, Tito simultaneously called for greater political controls over self-​management to demand increased productivity in return for higher wages. This was the major message of his May 6, 1962, speech in the city of Split. Khrushchev appeared to respond in a speech in Varna, Bulgaria on May 16, 1962, saying the Soviet Union “must do everything to co-​operate with Yugoslavia and thus help her to consolidate her socialist position.” Later that year, the Soviet Head of State, Leonid Brezhnev, visited Yugoslavia from September 24 467

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to October 4, announcing a new trade agreement. More significantly,Tito and Ranković traveled to Moscow December, 4 to 22, 1962. There, at a reception, Ranković toasted the “working class of the whole world and all the progressive forces, headed by the Soviet Union.” On his return to Yugoslavia, Tito made several major speeches stressing closeness to the Soviet Union, and not using words like “non-​aligned” to describe Yugoslavia. In a closed meeting of the LCY leadership on December 27, Tito rebuked Kardelj, who had simultaneously been visiting countries in the Global South and expounding on the virtues of the new Non-​Aligned Movement that Belgrade had just hosted for its 1961 meeting. In Tito’s view, Kardelj was jeopardizing a hard-​won reconciliation with the Soviet Union. Aware that Khrushchev’s position in the Soviet Union was tenuous, Tito was careful to have Kardelj sidelined but not removed. Nevertheless, at a meeting of the Central Committee in May 1963, Tito and Ranković argued for continuing close relations with the Soviet Union. They then hosted Khrushchev in Yugoslavia again from August 20 to September 3. Khrushchev visited the famous Rakovica motor and tractor factory near Belgrade with Ranković and spoke of the “joint struggle to build a new society.” Later, in his memoirs, Khrushchev called this visit to Yugoslavia the moment that convinced him to study self-​management and “involve working people more actively in the plan.” Indeed, he invited Tito in April 1964, replaced Brezhnev with Mikoyan as Head of State in July 1964, and days later said to a government commission that the new constitution he was pushing for should “prepare the conditions for a transition to general communist self-​management.” What exactly he had in mind would however remain a mystery, as Khrushchev was removed from power in October 1964. Tito worried that the new Soviet leadership would not be as well-​disposed to reform or toward Yugoslavia. He was not wrong. The new Soviet leadership under Brezhnev distrusted reformers in Eastern Europe.When Alexander Dubček embarked on a major reform program in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviets criticized him for being “under the complete influence of the Yugoslav ambassador.”The Warsaw Pact invasion of the country in August 1968 sent a signal that the Yugoslav leadership could not misinterpret.The era of reform in the Soviet bloc was over for the foreseeable future. So was any chance for Yugoslav influence.

Self-​management, market reforms, and shocks from the global economy The fall of Khrushchev ended the careful domestic balancing act that Tito had engaged in ever since the end of the 1950s. This was now Kardelj’s moment, and he succeeded in ousting his rival Ranković by July 1966. The strength of the reform forces in the country lay in large part with the original purpose of self-​management as part and parcel of the geopolitical tilt to the West.With the pendulum swinging their way in geopolitical terms in the mid-​1960s, reformers could push ahead with a raft of changes. Their ascendancy was indicated at the Eighth LCY Congress in December 1964, which announced major market transformation starting in July 1965. The self-​managed sector, Tito announced, would increase its access to investment funds from the current 30 to 70 percent. The desired aim was to shift trade from bilateral or clearance arrangements in the developing world to multilateral trade, largely in Western Europe. As US lending moved from grant to loan basis, hard currency exports were needed to finance the import of capital goods and raw materials from Western economies. This meant reducing protection to force its enterprises to compete, making exchange rates more flexible, and using monetary over fiscal policies to achieve reform ends. The reformers believed that monetary instruments were less liable to be politically manipulated. There was no illusion that this might not increase unemployment or indeed lead to enterprise liquidations. One contemporary analyst expected that, “on entering the world market 468

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intensively, more than one-​third of our industrial production would find the question of existence more acute than the question of growth.” Such a painful undertaking proved difficult for Yugoslavia.Though the economy had in the 1950s enjoyed one of the fastest growth rates in the world, second only to Japan, its population only recovered its prewar living standards in 1960. High rates of investment and the import of capital goods had kept wages low. It is no wonder that work collectives used increasing self-​management freedoms in the 1960s to try to increase their wages. But more than 2,000 strikes took place in the country between 1958 and 1969, suggesting that these increases were not enough. More and more, the reform coalition that had seemed united around the LCY program of 1958 began to fracture.Workers themselves were no longer as encouraged by calls for more self-​ management freedoms as they had been in the late 1950s. For many, this was a ruse to empower greedy, party-​appointed managers. Workers wrote thousands of letters to Tito complaining about increased inequalities and injustices at work. One asked, “Do you really believe that workers manage factories?” Others complained of “a socialist bourgeoisie” or that “behind the mask of self-​management, the same people are managing the way they have wanted for years…” The situation became so difficult that the formerly pro-​reform trade union leader Svetozar Vukmanović Tempo resigned in February 1967, arguing that the reform had empowered the market against workers. Rank-​and-​file pressure continued and made itself felt with a challenge to the leadership at the trade union congress the following year in June 1968. Such concerns were also expressed by a vocal left-​wing opposition at the universities. The Praxis group of philosophers and the students of Belgrade University protested against the “red bourgeoisie” in July 1968. Tito was able to diffuse tensions that summer by publicly backing the students and using the invasion of Czechoslovakia to call for calm. He also called for institutional change. There seemed no end to social discontent as market reform intensified. Unions opposed legal changes in 1969 that explicitly made it possible for directors to appoint their own board of directors but were half-​hearted in their opposition. In the absence of any independent labor movement, other forces were prepared to articulate opposition more forcefully. In fact, the reformist leaderships of the richer north-​western republics were ready to tolerate and encourage nationalist feelings. The Slovene party leadership had already been accused in 1958 of stoking a major miners’ strike in Trbovlje to demand changes in federal policy. In the summer of 1969, the Slovene leadership again protested against the diversion of funds from the Bank of International Reconstruction and Development away from the completion of a major motorway project in Slovenia. But the crisis that gripped Yugoslavia over the following years had its epicenter in Croatia. In a series of articles for Borba in November 1969, a Belgrade-​based Croatian politician, Miloš Žanko, accused the Croatian party leadership of weakness in the face of an ever more confident national cultural institution, Matica Hrvatska. Tito and Kardelj refused to take action against the republic leaders, though, and appeared to still favor the reforms being pushed from Slovenia and Croatia. These republics had the most intense economic relations with Western Europe and brought in the most hard currency. The Croatian party leadership secured a change of the constitution in 1970 to proclaim the republics as sovereign and began to demand that republics should retain the foreign currency that they earned. This demand was consistent with the claims made by significant sections of the reform movement that, in the era of self-​management, the republics had the right to retain that the fruit of the labor on their territory. Croatian party leader, Miko Tripalo, started to share platforms with nationalists and in May 1971 told a Croatian Central Committee Plenum that “nation and class are identical.” Tito publicly disagreed in an interview on the same day, proclaiming that Yugoslavia had an army that was “innocent of nationalistic tendencies.” He delivered a 469

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similar warning to a closed meeting of the Croatian party leadership in July 1971. Thereafter, a schism opened within the Croatian party between supporters of Tito with his close colleague in Croatia,Vladimir Bakarić, and supporters of Miko Tripalo.The latter appeared unable to tame an increasingly nationalist mass movement, failing to end a student strike in late November.Tito and Bakarić used this to bring Tripalo and his associates down, while using police to repress the student movement, in December 1971. The defeat of the “Croatian Spring” did not end Yugoslavia’s period of crisis. Rather, it showed that attempts at opening Yugoslavia to deeper market reform risked major political ruptures. Some Yugoslav federal politicians worried that the United States supported the “Croatian Spring,” after US president Richard Nixon toasted Croatia as well as Yugoslavia at a reception with Croatian officials during a visit to Yugoslavia from September 30 to October 2, 1970. Leonid Brezhnev’s telephone warning to Tito that he was prepared to offer fraternal aid in the event that the Croatian events slipped from control in April 1971 suggested that Soviet intervention in Yugoslav affairs also remained a possibility. Caught between the superpowers, Belgrade placed ever more importance on the Non-​Aligned Movement, but also the New International Economic Order. The NIEO was an attempt to use the United Nations to push for the restructuring of the global economy to be more inclusive of the developing countries. Yugoslavia also remained an important point of reference for countries in development. Peru, for instance, took a major interest in the Yugoslav model for self-​management. To shore up Yugoslavia’s international position and the party’s position at home, Tito and Kardelj once again turned to a major refashioning of self-​management. They used the threats posed by the “Croatian Spring” to purge the technocratic elements of the reform coalition across Yugoslavia, most dramatically removing the so-​called liberals in the Serbian party leadership, Marko Nikezić and Latinka Perović in October 1972. Though Tito and Kardelj also made major concessions to national feeling in February 1974 with a new decentralizing constitution, Tito had successfully argued for a strengthening of the role of the LCY in the new system. Such legislation as the Law on Social Planning and the Law of Associated Labor in 1976 also reinforced the role of self-​management organs in planning. Kardelj’s Basic Organizations of Associated Labor (BOAL) divided all enterprises into component units with their own rights and workers’ councils. Rather than mobilizing new worker enthusiasm and participation, the BOALs only added more levels for political bargaining between labor and enterprise management.

The decline and fall of self-​managed Yugoslavia Even increased political control and channeled mobilization proved unable to improve Yugoslav performance in the world market. During the preceding period of market reforms, the increased decentralization of monetary policy had led to a boom in debt-​financed investment by the republics, as municipal governments and enterprises resorted to US and Western European bank loans to finance new investment. Moreover, the global recession following the oil shock of 1973 worsened global terms of trade for countries like Yugoslavia and largely closed the European Economic Community off from Yugoslav exports in precisely those sectors in which Yugoslavia had competitive advantage (beef, tobacco, textiles, and steel). The five-​year plan covering the years 1976 to 1980 signaled a return to investment in import-​substitution, but even this did not stem the tide. By 1979, Yugoslavia was in recession, and the sustained increase in US interest rates led to the swift bankruptcy of a series of indebted states globally. Yugoslavia, too, had to turn to the IMF in 1981, heralding a decade of austerity, social unrest, and instability in that country, and the rise of neo-​liberalism internationally. 470

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The self-​ management system did not collapse immediately following the death of its creators, Kardelj in February 1979 and Tito in May 1980. There was residual, though declining support for the system. Despite the problems associated with market reform, the system had afforded growing living standards and increased spending on welfare measures in the preceding period. If 10.5  percent of Gross National Product was spent on welfare in 1960, the figure had grown to 20 percent by 1980. This figure was still rising in the early 1980s, in the face of growing unemployment, but mounting inflation meant that the value and quality of services was declining. Real income declined by half between 1980 and 1985. With Western Europe taking fewer guest-​workers since the second oil shock of 1979, the arrival of returnees from abroad deepened the sense of crisis. Support for the LCY fell from three quarters of those surveyed in 1974 to one third of the population in 1983. Older workers still tried to use the organs of self-​management to secure access to various workplace-​based forms of welfare, like housing, medical care, and nurseries. They also tried to raise worker demands as strikes became more frequent in the second half of the 1980s. Such actions were however short, atomized, and unsuccessful. The uneven distribution of employment and benefits among the republics also generated different levels of attachment to the LCY and self-​management. Almost until the end, however, the republic party leaderships continued to clothe themselves in the language of self-​management. Slovenia and Croatia were largely seen as the defenders of the 1974 constitution and its rights for each republic. In 1987, the new leader of the League of Communists of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, decided to challenge those rights. He supported the recentralization of the federation, starting with the centralized banking system, also demanded by the IMF, that would be needed to determine responsibility for the unattributed half of the US$19 billion debt still owed by Yugoslavia. He also presented himself to workers as the leader of an anti-​bureaucratic revolution who would re-​centralize Yugoslavia in order to end the disputes and indecision at all levels of society. Already in 1989, however, federal authorities began to dismantle self-​management, starting with the BOALs. Over the following years, the federation itself disintegrated. Self-​management had never been about working-​class power, but it has continued to be fondly remembered as a welfare system superior to what followed the collapse of Yugoslavia.

Selected Readings Archer, Rory and Goran Musić. “Approaching the Socialist Factory and its Work Force. Considerations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia,” Labor History 58, no. 1 (2017): 44–​66. Bernard, Sara. Deutsch Marks in the Head, Shovel in the Hand, and Yugoslavia in the Heart. The Gastarbeiter Return to Yugoslavia (1965–​1991). Wiesbaden,  2019. Bonfiglioli, Chiara. Women and Industry in the Balkans. The Rise and Fall of the Yugoslav Textile Sector. London, 2019. Flaherty, Diane, “Economic Reform and Foreign Trade in Yugoslavia,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 6, no. 2 (1982): 105–​43. Jović, Dejan. Yugoslavia. A State that Withered Away. West Lafayette, Ind., 2009. Mihaljević, Josip. “Social Inequalities from Workers Perspectives in 1960s Socialist Yugoslavia,” Revue d’études comparative EastOuest 1, no. 5 (2019): 25–​31. Schierup, Carl-​Ulrik. Migration, Socialism, and the International Division of Labour: the Yugoslavian Experience. Aldershot, 1990. Swain, Geoffrey. Tito. A Biography. London, 2011. Unkovski-​Korica, Vladimir. The Economic Struggle for Power in Tito’s Yugoslavia, From World War II to Non-​ Alignment. London, 2019. Woodward, Susan L. Socialist Unemployment. The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945–​1990. Princeton, NJ, 1995.

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47 GREECE’S COLD WAR Exceptionalism in Southeastern Europe Othon Anastasakis

The Cold War in Greece was a period of major sociopolitical changes. After six years of civil war, an illiberal parliamentary political process in the 1950s, seven years of military rule and the abolition of the monarchy, a successful transition to democracy began only in 1974, followed by accession into the European Economic Community. Unlike the Communist dictatorships in its northern Balkan neighbors, under their long and comparatively predictable and unchallenged leadership, Greece experienced a fair amount of political instability and social unrest before it reached a path toward relative political stability and social peace before the end of the Cold War.

The formation of an anti-​communist state The end of the Second World War introduced a new global geopolitical reality marked by the military competition between the two superpowers  –​the United States and the Soviet Union  –​and the division of the world between two broad ideological blocs  –​liberal capitalism and communism. Between 1944 and 1949, Greece stood out as the precursor of the global bipolar competition as its brutal civil war left the country politically divided and economically devastated. The dominant Greek left-​wing historiography has consistently portrayed the civil war as essentially an ideological battle between capitalism and communism which resulted in the defeat of the latter and brought about the succeeding political and ideological repressive hegemony of the capitalist right. Alternative historiographical approaches have gone beyond the macro-​ideological to include other divisive parameters –​geographical, local, economic or sociocultural –​in analyzing the Greek civil war. They help us to understand the local specificities, duration, intensity, and extent of violence by both sides. Be that as it may, the five-​ year civil war traumatized the country to such a degree that it took decades to achieve some sort of reconciliation within Greece’s society. It remained fertile ground for politicians to manipulate the legacy and memories of this traumatic period of Greek history, even as recently as the economic crisis of the 2010s. It is undeniable that following the Greek civil war, the political right, emboldened by its decisive victory over the communist forces, dominated the Greek political scene for 11 uninterrupted years (1952–​63) and established its hegemony through a combination of parliamentary procedures and extra-​parliamentary tactics. Starting as Greek Rally under Marshall Papagos 472

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(1952–​5) and then as National Radical Union (ERE) under Konstantinos Karamanlis (1955–​ 63), the parliamentary right-​wing forces consolidated their governmental power through the use –​and often abuse –​of a hybrid illiberal parliamentary process based on the exclusion of the Communist Party and the containment of the parliamentary United Democratic Left (EDA). The political right sustained its rule through parliamentary majorities, on the one hand, and manipulations of the electoral system, pre-​election fraud, and voter intimidation on the other hand. A system of robust state surveillance monitored the ideological leanings of most citizens, often resorting to mechanisms of repression and exile for those with communist sympathies. But the political right was not alone in such illiberal practices. It was reinforced by three powerful actors. The Crown (King Paul until 1964 followed by his son King Constantine), who far from staying above politics, seemed to perceive their powers to be limitless. The king frequently overstepped his constitutional rights and intervened in party-​politics occasionally to serve his personal agendas. The army as the second powerful actor did not limit itself in matters of external security but frequently served as military police in internal security affairs. Their secret military networks forced the exclusion of leftist groups from the political process. And last but not least, the United States was determined to maintain its grip over a country which was crucial in the international fight against communism in a very sensitive geostrategic location between the Balkans and the Middle East. Its ambassadors intervened often and openly in the internal affairs of Greece. Moreover, by giving substantial military aid, the United States contributed to the strengthening of the institutional autonomy of the military vis-​à-​vis parliamentary politics, leading eventually to the military intervention in politics in 1967. The role of the United States, while not reaching as deeply as in some Latin American countries at the time, was crucial in the formation of the post-​civil war environment in Greece through substantial political, economic, military, and ideological support of the anti-​communist state, to such a blatant degree that Greeks became among the most passionate anti-​Americans in Europe for many decades to come. At the same time, Greece was a primarily European country. It renewed close links with its Western European trading partners, mainly for economic reasons but also as a counterbalance to American hegemony. Indeed, the Cold War years brought the Greek economy and society closer to the Western European mainstream, through increasing economic links with the European market. Having been a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) since 1952, Greece became an associate member of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1961.

Economic growth Against the backdrop of a hybrid democratic process and the intense ideological polarization, the Greek economy grew rapidly during the 1950s and 1960s, achieving one of the highest rates of GDP growth in Europe, averaging 7 percent. Of course, the first post-​civil war years marred by food shortages, budget deficits, and rampant inflation constituted a very low point of departure for the Greek economy. From the mid-​1950s, the economy witnessed major transformations, marked by price stability and growth supported by US aid, foreign direct investment from the West, and labor mobility through a noticeable shift from agriculture to industry and services. In parallel, the country underwent substantial demographic transformation through emigration from the countryside to the cities, with the capital Athens, in particular, doubling in size during the 1950s and 1960s. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Greeks moved abroad, most of them to West Germany, North America, and Australia, in search of employment. Their remittances became a substantial source of domestic income to balance the trade deficit and of capital to finance new investment. 473

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The main characteristics of postwar economic development were the boosting of the manufacturing sector, the shift in investment from light consumer goods to durable and capital goods, the change in the structure of exports from agricultural to industrial goods and a significant concentration of capital in industry. Construction was the other main area experiencing a boom. The policy of antiparochi, a very particular type of property swap which entailed the concession of construction land to developers in return for a share in the form of flats in the resulting apartment buildings, reached meteoric proportions with the creation of a sizeable group of small and medium-​sized contractors. It helped fight unemployment and alleviate the housing problem which was the result of massive urbanization. This process appeared to be a purely positive practice for the economy at the time.Yet it was also responsible for the destruction of the neo-​classical look of Athens as well as of some other major cities and led to their transformation into urban spaces of high-​density construction, in most cases with poor aesthetics and limited open-​air space for city dwellers. Despite the impressive rates of economic growth, some core elements of Greece’s prewar socio-​economic structure continued to prevail, such as the powerful state sector, the lack of technological or agricultural development, and the ever-​increasing power of shipping interests. The state sector, in particular, continued to provide the bulk of the employment for the majority of the middle and lower classes. Although the economic changes of the 1950s and 1960s did not affect in any radical way the peripheral status of the Greek economy in relation to the developed world, they brought about some qualitative improvement in the standard of living of the Greek population, a rise in education, and a degree of independence for civil society.

First challenges to the illiberal status quo Already from the late 1950s, political pressures to the system to liberalize were evident. In the 1961 elections the veteran centrist politician George Papandreou put together a union of political parties ranging from the left to the right in a new party called the Center Union, which came in second to the incumbent National Radical Union. The results of this election were disputed by the opposition parties, who claimed that the ruling party had won by using intimidation tactics with the help of the military and the police and by manipulating the vote in the countryside. It was at that time that Papandreou began what came to be known as the Anendotos (Unyielding Fight) to contest the electoral results and win power from the right. The Anendotos brought together not just the opposition parties but a wide swath of society in demands for honest and fair elections and a more democratic system. The 1963 elections eventually brought George Papandreou to power in what was a major blow to the hegemony of the post-​civil war Triarchy of Crown-​Right-​Military. The Center Union professed a more progressive political philosophy, including the relaxation of the anti-​ communist ideology, the loosening of repressive mechanisms in the countryside, the organization of social groups free from control by the right-​wing forces, and reform in education. They also demanded that the armed forces be put under civilian control. Amid a new period of elite challenge and bottom-​up mobilization, the rising popularity of Papandreou’s son Andreas, on the left of the Center Union, exacerbated the fears of the anti-​communist elites; his anti-​ Americanism, anti-​NATO, pro-​national independence ideology became a vociferous reaction against the anti-​democratic practices of the postwar political arrangement and the repeated interference of the United States Embassy. During the 1960s the Greek youth were inspired by youth movements elsewhere and were fed up with illiberalism at home. They became a prominent autonomous presence demanding the protection of civil liberties and social rights. Indeed, one of the most significant 474

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developments of the recent past had been the increase of the Greek student population, and the strengthening of its organization and politicization. Slowly during the 1950s and more intensely during the 1960s, the student movement developed its own voice by demanding specific changes in the educational system. In 1963, the Fourth Conference of Greek Students created the National Students Union of Greece (EFEE) calling for the “Rebirth of Education,” emphasizing issues such as ending the use of the Byzantine-​era katharevousa (purified) language. They demanded measures to raise literacy levels and to reform the hierarchical and rigid system of higher education. The years 1965–​7, after George Papandreou was forced to resign, have been recorded in Greek history as a period of governmental instability, political recriminations, royal interference, and civil unrest, which gave the military the pretext to intervene in politics. As for George Papandreou, his reputation grew with these last years of his political career, remembered as a politician who fought for democracy (called “the old man of democracy”) and reform in education. His funeral in November 1968, more than a year after the imposition of military rule in Greece, became the first important moment of popular reaction against the new military dictatorship.

Military rule, 1967–​1974 The 1967 coup can be seen as the radical redistribution of political power within the “Triarchy” in favor of the military. During the years prior to the coup, the military had performed a variety of political functions and held under its control the intelligence and security services. It had considerable influence in the mass media and was the stalwart guardian of the anti-​communist status quo. Internally, the army had kept up the appearance of a united anti-​communist and royalist front which assisted in the exclusionary practices of the state. Despite such a unified appearance, the military intervention of 1967 grew out of the conspiratorial activities of two military groups within the Greek Army: the “big junta” of the generals and the “small junta” of the colonels. Although the army agreed as a whole on the need for intervention in parliamentary politics at that particular moment in time, it was divided internally on the nature and structure of the military regime.The “big junta” of royalist, higher-​ ranking officers had planned to stage their coup on April 24, 1967, as a sort of a “palace coup” which would respect and maintain the hierarchy of the military apparatus under the higher political command of the King. A second coup d’état was masterminded by the “small junta” of colonels who shared more anti-​royalist and stronger anti-​communist sentiments. They came from lower social backgrounds than the generals. Being fully aware of the generals’ intentions they prepared their own intervention on April 21, in order to pre-​empt the “big junta’s” coup; the colonels’ coup proved to be more successful and better organized and their regime lasted for seven years. The April 21 coup d’état proclaimed a “state of siege” which suspended basic constitutional rights and imposed martial law. Following a failed counter-​coup attempt by King Constantine on December 13, 1967, the King had to flee the country and the military was purged of its royalist officers, thus enhancing the colonels’ position for the years to come. As rulers, the colonels, under the leadership of George Papadopoulos, sustained their power through the passive acceptance of the United States and an internal system of repression and control of their opponents. Familiar with the practices of surveillance, the military set up a system of informers across society thus enabling the regime to monitor the dissidents, the Greek Orthodox Church, business interests, and the armed forces. Within the civil service, the military government carried out an extensive purge of several thousand dissenters, replacing them with retired army 475

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officers, soldiers, and their relatives. They introduced into each ministry and bureau a military “watchdog” to follow the activities of the civil servants. One of the foremost goals of the junta was to suppress civil resistance and reverse the mobilizational tide of the pre-​junta years. It proceeded with the dissolution of all youth organizations of every persuasion. Through a policy of mostly “sticks” and some limited “carrots,” it sought to control higher education. On the one hand, the regime tried to intimidate students by promulgating authoritarian laws such as the “student code of behavior” or other measures such as stopping the interruption on the deferment of military service for disobedient students and purging dissident professors. On the other hand, it gave free books, scholarships, exam accommodation, interest-​free loans, free medical care, and new halls of residence in order to woo the students. Broadly, the regime sought legitimacy through its economic policy with emphasis on maintaining economic growth, investment, shipping, real estate, construction, consumerism, and tourism, all in line with previous economic policy. And indeed until 1973, the Greek economy continued to record growth in GDP and in per capita income, creating the impression that Greece was a liberal economy, open for business and investment. For their part, the politicians of both the Right and the Left were overwhelmingly against any collaboration with the dictatorial regime, even when the junta attempted to liberalize by seeking links with civilian politicians. Such efforts at liberalization exposed more acutely the division within the army ranks between soft-​liners and hard-​liners, the latter led by Lieutenant Colonel Ioannides, who overthrew Papadopoulos in 1973, ruling as invisible dictator during the last part of the junta period. Ioannides assumed power immediately after 1973’s November 17 Polytechnic uprising, whose violent suppression discredited the military regime. Once again, the student movement was at the forefront of resistance demanding at first democratic elections in the university and free discussion of their educational curriculum, and eventually calling for the fall of the military junta. Ioannides and his disciples believed in the indefinite continuation of military rule. They objected to the limited liberalization under Papadopoulos and viewed their “revolution as incomplete.” Their reign was short lived, and their downfall was brought about by economic disarray, exacerbated by the oil price shocks, and internal infighting. The final straw was a humiliating defeat by Turkey in Cyprus, following an ill-​conceived and failed attempt by the military junta to impose a puppet government on the island in order to achieve union with Greece.

Transition to democracy and political reconciliation The collapse of the military regime in 1974 marked a new beginning for Greek politics and society, known as metapolitefsi (regime change). Against the background of the debacle in Cyprus, the change from military to civilian rule was surprisingly peaceful and swift. An elite based compromise was dominated by the political personality of the conservative politician Konstantinos Karamanlis, who returned from his self-​imposed exile in Paris as the “savior of democracy.”The image of Karamanlis on July 24, 1974, coming down from the airplane, lent to him on this occasion by the French President Valerie Giscard d’Estaing, cheered by a big crowd around the plane, has remained in the collective memory of most Greeks as a historical signifier of the definite end of the much-​hated dictatorship. Despite Karamanlis’s earlier engagement with the illiberal politics of the pre-​junta period as leader of the National Rally, his reputation has been largely defined by his successful management of the transition to democracy as well as his commitment and vision regarding the country’s membership of the EEC. Karamanlis brought back into politics the political class which had been marginalized during the years of dictatorship. With his newly formed New Democracy party, he won a 476

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record electoral victory with over 54 percent of the vote in the November 1974 elections. As Prime Minister he took some quick and decisive steps toward a steady transition to democracy by legalizing the long outlawed Communist party and freeing all political prisoners. He also conducted a referendum on the question of the monarchy, where an overwhelming majority (over 69 percent) voted for its abolition and the establishment of a republic. In addition, he oversaw a series of trials against the military conspirators, known as “the trial of the instigators of the 21st April 1967 coup.” They were convicted and received heavy sentences. These first moves were important signals that the young democracy was ready to stand on its constitutional feet, over and above any extra-​or para-​constitutional interventions, including the military. From then on, it was subsumed firmly under civilian rule.The post-​dictatorial constitution of Greece, which came into force in 1975, introduced the Third Hellenic Republic, confirmed the separation of powers, and secured civil and political liberties. The original text established a “presidential parliamentary democracy” assigning executive power to a president elected by the parliament and his government and giving legislative authority to a single national parliament elected directly by the people. At the same time, Karamanlis took the country away from the military wing of NATO to indicate his displeasure with NATO’s inaction during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and as a symbolic reaction to the heavy handedness of the United States in Greek internal affairs. He then made the most important strategic decision of his rule, to commit Greece to accession to the EEC, at a time when a large part of the Greek population viewed the West with some suspicion. Karamanlis’ strategy in foreign policy was threefold, aiming to bind Greece to Western Europe, to limit US paternalism in domestic politics, and to strengthen Greece’s security vis-​ à-​vis Turkey. After the 1974 Turkish military invasion of northern of Cyprus, Greek-​Turkish relations were dominated by disputes over the Aegean (air space, continental shelf, territorial waters, and demilitarization of Greek islands) and the Cyprus problem. These disputes would continue to haunt relations until today. At the same time, the era of superpower détente in the 1970s helped build links between Greece and its neighbors. While these more cordial relations signaled a period of rapprochement with Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia, such diplomatic re-​engagement failed to translate to deeper economic or societal ties. Greece’s agenda was driven, in the main, by the opportunities and challenges for European integration. During his two terms in office, Karamanlis negotiated the accession of Greece to the EEC, becoming a member in 1981. All the same, despite the domestic and external achievements of New Democracy as the first post-​junta government in Greece, there was a sense among many Greeks that the political process was still based on elites whose continuity with the pre-​1967 political class had not been totally broken and that those who had been excluded for so long had not yet spoken. These attitudes were successfully captured by the charismatic Andreas Papandreou, the once radical politician of the Center Union Party of the 1960s. They were translated into a victorious political campaign that would bring his Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) to the forefront in Greek politics. In 1981, PASOK, a center left party, which had been formed from fragmented resistance movements during the dictatorship, came to power and dominated the 1980s and beyond. The victory of Papandreou’s party constituted another decisive moment in the country’s post-​ authoritarian political trajectory, a peaceful electoral alteration from a conservative to a socialist party, under the banner of “change.” PASOK won a convincing victory with 48 percent of the vote, empowering new political leaders with a more inclusionary and equitable message and a promise for a radical break with the pre-​1974 past. 477

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PASOK and its leader Andreas Papandreou remained in power until 1989, following two electoral victories in 1981 and 1985. They changed the face of Greek politics irrevocably. Opinions are deeply divided on the legacy of the socialist 1980s for Greece, between those who argue in favor and those who argue strongly against. Supporters claim that PASOK created a fairer and more egalitarian society, which was needed after years of social injustice and political exclusion. Among the most prominent changes, PASOK recognized the left-​wing Resistance movements of World War II, which had been ostracized after the Greek civil war. It adopted sweeping reforms of social policy by introducing welfare measures, and most prominently the “National Health System,” which expanded health-​care coverage to a wider population and made modern medical procedures available in rural areas for the first time. It modernized and liberalized the civil and penal codes by introducing reforms in family law and the rights of women, and it also eliminated many authoritarian vestiges of the Greek educational system. PASOK’s economic policy was marked by increases in public spending, expansionary policies, and a policy of redistribution. The 1986 constitutional revision curtailed many of the powers that had been attributed originally to the president, making the latter a largely ceremonial figure and the prime minister the strongest political figure in Greek politics. This constitutional revision reflected the reality of difficult co-​habitation between Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou and President Konstantinos Karamanlis, reflecting the former’s resentment of the latter. As Greece has no second chamber, no federal system, and no constitutional court, the power of the prime minister and his government in institutional terms became almost omnipotent. At the same time, while legislation belonged to the parliament, according to the constitution, in practice legislative initiatives were overwhelmingly the domain of the prime minister’s cabinet. Their power was further enhanced by the right to amend bills that were pending in the parliament. For its critics, PASOK contributed greatly to the legitimation of some of the perennial problems of the Greek polity, most prominently the swelling of the public sector, the linkages between the state apparatus and the party machinery, the spread of clientelist abuses, the introduction of a flat, anti-​elitist system of educational mediocrity. The expenditures of the Papandreou government during 1981–​9 have been described by the critics as excessive, falling short of revenues and increasing the budget deficits and public debt. Greece’s finances have struggled in both past and present. As for Andreas Papandreou, himself, opinions are also divided between his followers, who see him as a well-​meaning and daring leader who understood the needs of his society and made the necessary changes, and his critics, who see him as a populist tactician who glorified a valueless society, access to easy money, lust for political power, and the consolidation of strong and rigid interest groups. Papandreou’s charisma, style of leadership, and appeal to the public opinion was emulated by many subsequent politicians in Greece, from the far right to the radical left. The 1980s were the formative years of Greece’s membership of the EEC. PASOK followed a tactical, transactional, and non-​ideological approach. A skilled orator, Papandreou had won his first election on Eurosceptic and anti-​NATO rhetoric, but as Prime Minister he kept the country in both organizations, negotiating successfully for benefits and subsidies. Together with the other Mediterranean countries, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, all of which had strong socialist governments at that time, they managed to introduce the structural funds from the EEC budget for the support and development of economically disadvantaged regions. While this was a major achievement, underwriting the modernization of the country’s infrastructure and financial support for the agricultural sector, a good deal of criticism was leveled against the ineffective and politically expedient use of these funds by the political elites. Be that as it may, the European Union became a very popular anchor for the country. Despite its 478

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original Eurosceptic discourse, PASOK converted to being a firm advocate of the deepening of European integration, supporting subsequently all the big EEC projects such as the single market, East European enlargement, the common foreign and security policy, and a single currency. PASOK’s two initial terms in office ended with domestic financial and political scandals which led to a polarized political environment and a short period of electoral instability. Between June 1989 and April 1990, Greece conducted three contentious elections and struggled with two short-​lived coalition governments before New Democracy returned to power in the 1991 election. Despite the polarization and vitriolic political confrontations, this short period of electoral instability signaled another important moment in the consolidation of democracy in Greece. The inclusion of the Communist party in the two short-​lived coalition governments was a breakthrough for political reconciliation and a coming to terms with the emotional and politically sensitive past of civil war legacies. The fact that this took place in parallel with the momentous collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe was also an indication that Greece had entered the new international order as a more mature society, ready to re-​engage with its Balkan neighbors, having buried its own bitter and divisive past. By the early 1990s, the Europeanization of the country was visible in the established two-​party system, which had replaced the ideological polarization between Right and Left with a more political competition between Center-​Right versus Center-​Left. This pattern was more consistent with the European ideological spectrum of Christian Democracy versus Social Democracy. The smaller parties in Greece were more ephemeral, with the exception of the Communist Party (KKE), still a resilient political force in the Greek parliament albeit with single digit percentages in the elections.

Greece at the end of the Cold War The end of the Cold War saw Greece as the region’s most stable democracy, most prosperous economy, and the only country to enjoy membership in all major Western international organizations. By the early 1990s, Greece, a country traditionally of emigration, became a destination for immigration from (South) East European countries, particularly from neighboring Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania, as well as from other countries such as the Philippines or Ethiopia. During the 1990s, the percentage of immigrants rose to around one-​tenth of the population, challenging the hitherto image of a homogenous Greek society. Despite the impressive advances in the quality of democracy and the rise in living standards, Greece retained some structural problems which continued unabated under the context of democratic pluralism and modernization. As such, the state remained an important tool of clientelism in the hands of the governments, resulting not only in a very large but also inefficient bureaucracy. Under the governments of New Democracy and PASOK between 1976 and 1988, according to an OECD estimate, government expenditure rose from 21 percent of GDP in 1976 to 51 percent in 1988, accompanied by a substantial increase in public sector employment. Similarly, from the mid-​1970s until the mid-​1980s the number of public enterprises increased as New Democracy nationalized a few debt-​r idden private enterprises and PASOK created new state-​owned companies to compete with the private sector of the economy. As a result, total employment in the wider public sector (including utilities, firms, and banks under state control) accounted for almost 30 percent of total employment in 1990. This is the period in which government finances started to spiral out of control, leading to double digit fiscal deficits, high inflation, falling or stagnating productivity, the devaluation of the drachma, and rising public debt. 479

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Despite its accession to the EEC in 1981, the economy of Greece lagged behind the other members. Greece’s GDP per capita was one of the two lowest (next to Portugal), and inflation the highest. Greece ended the 1980s with a desperate need for reform along the lines of the post-​1993 European Union’s integration goals, needing cuts in generous government spending, the privatization of state enterprises, and reform in the public sector, the labor market, and the pension system.

Conclusion During the Cold War, Greece underwent substantial modernization of its economy and society. As an international actor, following the end of the Second World War and the Greek civil war, the country proved to be on the right side of history, avoiding the imposition of totalitarian regimes as in the other countries of Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Moreover, the choice to become a member of the EEC had an overwhelmingly positive impact and gradually gathered support with the Greek public.They became some of the most enthusiastic supporters of European integration. At the same time, the path toward modernization and convergence with the West was also hindered by ideological polarization, social division, political clientelism, and slow structural change. The notion of progress became a rather controversial term which meant different things to different people. The political process was characterized by steps forward and backward, reaction and counter-​reaction, and bold leaders versus their opponents.The end of the Cold War left a mixed image of Greece’s post-​1945 modernization, its successes and failures still leaving a gap between high expectations and a more modest reality.

Selected Readings Allison, Graham and Kalypso Nicolaidis. The Greek Paradox:  Promise vs Performance. Cambridge, Mass., 1997. Anastasakis, Othon. Authoritarianism in 20th Century Greece. Ideology and Education under the Dictatorships of 1936 and 1967. PhD thesis, University of London, 1992. Clogg, Richard. A Concise History of Greece. Cambridge, 2013. Featherstone, Kevin, ed. Politics and Policy in Greece: The Challenge of Modernisation. London, 2005. Hatzivassiliou, Evanthis. Greece and the Cold War: Frontline State, 1952–​1967. London, 2006. Kalyvas, Stathis. Modern Greece.What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford, 2015. Karamouzi, Eirini. Greece, the EEC and the Cold War, 1974–​1979: The Second Enlargement. London, 2014. Kornetis, Kostis. Children of the Dictatorship. Student Resistance, Cultural Politics and the “Long 1960s” in Greece. New York, 2013. Sotiropoulos, Dimtri. Populism and Bureaucracy. The Case of Greece under PASOK, 1981–​1989. South Bend, Ind., 1996. Woodhouse, C. M. Karamanlis, the Restorer of Greek Democracy. Oxford, 1983.

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48 YUGOSLAVIA’S POLITICAL ENDGAME Serbia and Slovenia in the 1980s Jasna Dragović-​Soso Tito’s death in May 1980 changed very little for Yugoslavia on the surface. The transition of power to the collective presidency was smooth, based on the agreed strategy of the leadership to continue “along Tito’s path.” The lavish state funeral of Yugoslavia’s late leader symbolized the commitment of his successors to maintaining the status quo. Yet these appearances hid underlying tensions. The collective presidency lacked both vision and unity of purpose to deal with the challenges of the 1980s, while the country descended into economic and political crisis. The increasingly public differences between Serbia and Slovenia came to the forefront, creating the space for a broader public debate on the causes of the crisis and possible solutions. As the Serbian and Slovenian leaderships sought greater legitimacy, they allowed progressive liberalization of the public sphere, enabling the “critical intelligentsias” in the two republics to gain greater public exposure for their increasingly nationalist platforms. In contrast to 1971, when the Croatian “mass movement” led by its intelligentsia was brutally suppressed, the Serbian and Slovenian leaders of the late 1980s decided instead to embrace their intelligentsias’ nationalism. By 1989, Serbia’s new leader Slobodan Milošević embraced tactics that explicitly sought to overturn the existing political order and recentralize the Yugoslav federation under Serbian control. Meanwhile, under the leadership of Milan Kučan, Slovenia decided to pursue multi-​party democracy and seek as much independence as possible from the common state.

The crisis of the 1980s and the Serbian-​Slovenian debate The grave economic crisis that coincided with Tito’s death set the stage for the radically divergent visions of Yugoslavia within the Serbian and the Slovenian party leaderships. As it became evident that economic reform went hand-​in-​hand with political reform, the two republics came to embody opposite solutions. While the Serbian leadership called for a re-​centralization of the federation and a coordinated pan-​Yugoslav effort to address economic woes, the Slovenian leadership sought at first to defend the loose confederation that Yugoslavia had become since the early 1970s and later pushed toward even greater de-​centralization. These divergent standpoints reflected radically different understandings of the two republics’ own “national interests.” By Tito’s death in 1980, Yugoslavia had depleted its foreign reserves and accumulated an external debt of $19 billion. As the debt crisis detailed in John Lampe’s chapter descended, the

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largely “confederalized” structure set up in the 1970s began to expose itself as unworkable. The Constitution of 1974 had effectively endowed the federal units with a jealously guarded “proto-​statehood.” By the 1980s, the lack of accountability of republic leaderships of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ) to the center made it difficult to agree on the dimensions of the economic challenges. The system of decision-​making by consensus at the federal level, combined with the locally controlled implementation of reforms, effectively blocked substantive change. It became increasingly clear that resolving the economic crisis would have to go hand-​in-​hand with political reform. In this context of generalized social and economic distress, Serbia’s and Slovenia’s situations were widely divergent. For example, “inner” Serbia’s unemployment rate (minus the two provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina) reached 17 to 18 percent, while Slovenia maintained near full employment until 1989. Despite Serbia’s decline, its contribution to the federal budget remained calculated on the premise that it was a developed republic. Serbia’s leadership thus became the champion of the federal government’s Economic Stabilization Program of 1983, which called for both continued liberalization and the simultaneous reintegration of the Yugoslav economy. Serbia’s communists also saw in this strategy a chance to resolve their own overarching internal problem –​the question of the republic’s territorial integrity. Since the 1970s, the Serbian leadership shared a sense of injustice because Serbia was the only republic to be “cut in three” by the presence of two autonomous provinces, Vojvodina and Kosovo, on its territory. In the 1970s, these were raised to the level of republics in all but name while formally remaining a part of Serbia. On the one hand, the provinces –​like the six republics –​received all the trappings of statehood, such as their own legal, political and education systems, national symbols and institutions, police force, and even territorial armies, along with the right to change their constitutions independently, pursue relations with other countries, and have veto powers in the federal bodies. On the other hand, they remained nominally part of Serbia, which meant that, in practice, consensus was required between all three units for all decisions pertaining to the full republic and even just to “inner” Serbia. Affirming their independence, the representatives of Vojvodina and Kosovo not only voted consistently against Serbia in federal bodies and refused any consultation with Serbia’s leadership in their affairs, but they also blocked decisions on the level of the republic, making it impossible to pass a number of badly needed laws and implement economic reform. In a situation of worsening economic crisis, some sort of constitutional clarification of this incongruence was required: either the subordination of the provinces to the republic, or a formalization of the prevailing practice by the creation of three completely independent federal units. However, the latter option meant that there would be some 3 million Serbs left outside Serbia, amounting to 40 percent of the total Serb population in Yugoslavia. This meant, for example, that there were approximately twice as many Serbs outside “inner” Serbia as there were Slovenes in Slovenia or Albanians in Kosovo. The unrest that broke out in Kosovo in the spring of 1981, demanding the creation of a “Kosovo Republic,” enabled the Serbian leadership to press for their preferred solution:  to reduce the autonomy of both provinces and reintegrate them into the Republic of Serbia.With a generational change in the Serbian party elite and Ivan Stambolić’s rise to power in 1984, the Serbian leadership became increasingly assertive, although it maintained its commitment to achieving a unified republic only through negotiation and consensus within the SKJ. In 1985, Stambolić began couching these demands in the language of “national interest.” The Serbian leadership’s call for the republic’s reintegration was blocked not only by the provinces but also by Slovenian Communists, who saw it as the first step toward a re-​ centralization of the Yugoslav federation which they fervently opposed. Slovenian party leaders, who had led the “confederalist” camp since the mid-​1970s, argued initially for the maintenance 482

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of the status quo. Slovenia was the polar opposite to Serbia in the federation’s distribution of population: 98 percent of Slovenes in Yugoslavia were located in the republic, which also had no large minority populations. Slovenes also spoke a distinct language and many felt they culturally belonged to “Central Europe” –​a concept revived in the 1980s, particularly through the activism of the Alpe-​Adria framework with Italy and Austria. Living in the economically most developed and prosperous part of the common state, Slovenians increasingly saw inclusion in Yugoslavia as more of a liability than an asset. In particular, the Slovenian leadership opposed any influx into the republic of workers from the Yugoslav “south” and sought to avoid higher contributions to the federal fund for the less developed republics, even calling for local retention of foreign currency holdings. Milan Kučan, the leader of the Slovenian Central Committee, resisted any infringement on the republic’s considerable sovereignty. In April 1982, the Slovenian Central Committee issued a clear warning to its Yugoslav partners that “any attempt to change anything in the present system would mean a grave danger for our unity.” With the Serbian and Slovenian parties at loggerheads, by the mid-​1980s, the disputes on political and economic reform were paralyzing the collective presidency and the Federal Assembly. At the same time, the comparatively freer press in Serbia and Slovenia increasingly reported on the growing chasm in the Yugoslav leadership.

Enter the “critical intelligentsias,” 1985–​1988 It was now that Serbian and Slovenian “critical intelligentsias” began to act at first tentatively and by the late 1980s, openly as a political opposition in their republics. They called for greater liberalization and also for substantial changes in the system. As the most vocal poles of opposition activism, the Serbian and Slovenian intelligentsias initially cooperated to a limited degree, leading some to believe that there was potential for a “Yugoslav” political alternative. It soon became clear, however, that the critical intelligentsias’ platforms contained more traditionally narrow nationalist agendas.Their irreconcilable visions of the common Yugoslav state precluded the formation of any broader opposition movement. In both Serbia and Slovenia, Tito’s death in 1980 removed the main pillar of pan-​Yugoslav authority and inaugurated a period of liberalization, which enabled the critical intelligentsias to attract greater public resonance. In Serbia, small groups of dissident students and intellectuals that had emerged in the more repressive 1970s had no real social impact or wider public influence. Then, after 1980, the activism broadened with the creation of committees for the defense of free speech and the co-​optation of established intellectual institutions, notably the Writers’ Association of Serbia and its literary journals. By mid-​decade, “protest evenings” against the regime’s infringements of freedom of thought and speech were attracting hundreds of people in Belgrade. The cultural sphere buzzed with presentations and publications of revisionist history and calls for change. Concurrently, Slovenia went through its own liberalization, giving rise to a vigorous youth alternative from a combination of rock bands, art groups, and new single-​issue social movements (for pacifism, environmentalism, feminism, and gay rights). They came together in 1983 under the auspices of the relatively independent official Slovenian Youth Alliance. Through its autonomous media, the youth movement mocked the untouchable Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) and other symbols of Yugoslav socialism, such as the “image and legacy” of the deceased President Tito. Along with youth activism, Slovenian critical intellectuals began critiquing the Yugoslav system and official historiography. In the early years of post-​Titoism, links were created between the Serbian and Slovenian critical intelligentsias, particularly around the defense of freedom of thought and speech. But between 1985 and 1987, common actions largely dried up in the face of rising nationalist 483

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sentiment in both intelligentsias. The catalyst for the breakdown was the resurgence of the “Kosovo question.” Reporting on the repression of Kosovo Albanians following the 1981 demonstrations for a “Kosovo Republic,” the increasingly free press in Serbia also carried stories of human rights violations and forced emigration of Serbs and Montenegrins from Kosovo. The progressively more assertive Kosovo Serb activists gained exposure in the Serbian press and forged links with members of the Belgrade intelligentsia, who in turn criticized the state’s attempts to cover up the problem. Many critical intellectuals saw the plight of the Kosovo Serbs as a cause by which to transcend their existing defense of freedom of speech and embrace a wider human rights issue. However, the Serbian critical intelligentsia came to define the “Kosovo question” by turning it away from liberal, universalist aspirations toward a narrow nationalist agenda. The dissident committees generally continued to emphasize their commitment to a peaceful, democratic resolution of the problem and defended the civil rights of Kosovo Albanians standing trial for “verbal crime.” Yet, along with support for human rights, they increasingly affirmed a historical Serbian “national right” to Kosovo and endorsed calls for reducing the province’s self-​rule against the wishes of its majority Albanian population. Over the course of the 1980s, the intelligentsia’s discourse on Kosovo became radicalized and one-​dimensional, using selective readings of history and exaggerating claims of Serbian historical mistreatment by Albanians to portray Kosovo Serbs as victims of “genocide.” Like their republican leadership, they called for the re-​centralization of the Republic of Serbia as a “state” to rectify the “injustice” that Tito’s regime had perpetuated against the Serbs. In this way  –​like their Kosovo-​Albanian counterparts, who were calling for their own republic –​the Belgrade intelligentsia exposed its own inability to move beyond the established Titoist practice of providing territorial solutions to problems of human and minority rights, along with the model of ethnic domination of federal units that had characterized such solutions. Seeking solidarity within Yugoslavia for their new “battle for Kosovo,” Serbian intellectuals had looked in particular to their Slovenian counterparts for support. However, it soon became apparent that Slovenian intellectuals shared neither the Serbian claims of the human rights violations of Kosovo Serbs nor the proposed remedy of reducing Kosovo’s autonomy. As the Slovenian sociologist Dimitrij Rupel explained in a 1985 public polemic with Serbian intellectuals, the Serbs’ characterization of the Kosovo problem was being read in Slovenia as “an attack on Slovenian statehood” and a return to “unitarism.” For the Slovenes, admitting that the Kosovo Serbs were facing discrimination and abuse opened the possibility of changes to the constitutional framework and represented an assault on the established order, while the rising nationalist hysteria with which Serbs approached the Kosovo question appeared unsavory and even threatening. For Serbian intellectuals, on the other hand, the lack of support for what they considered a pressing human rights issue and a national problem represented a betrayal, which only confirmed their deep disappointment with the common Yugoslav state. The disagreement over Kosovo fed into the Serbian and Slovenian “national” reconsideration of the Yugoslav experience, leading to the production of diametrically opposed nationalist platforms. The revisionist history emerging in Serbia and Slovenia in the 1980s focused on several historical moments, notably the two world wars and the creation and history of the two Yugoslav states. They broached taboo subjects, such as the official version of the “national liberation struggle” of the Second World War, the mantra of “brotherhood and unity” and Tito’s role as its pan-​Yugoslav symbol. Adding the liquidation of political opponents at the end of the war, Serbian and Slovenian intellectuals constructed new historical visions in which their own nations had been thwarted in their development or even oppressed in the common state. In Serbia, much of the focus was on the continuum of “genocide” of Serbs at the hands of other 484

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Yugoslavs, positing a clear link between the mass killings of the Second World War with present-​ day Kosovo. In addition, the postwar leadership’s division of the Serbian population across several federal units was branded a Communist “stab in the back.” In Slovenia, on the other hand, the focus was on the Communist Partisans’ massacre of Slovenian fascists and collaborators at the end of the war and on the threat of Yugoslav “unitarism” throughout the twentieth century. Contemporary projects, such as the creation of common core curricula for schools, were decried for allegedly denying Slovenian linguistic specificity and national identity. By the mid-​1980s, Josip Vidmar, the President of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences was calling the Slovenes as “the most tragic people in Europe.” Ciril Zlobec, the President of the Writers’ Association of Slovenia, was expressing the fear that Slovenes were under threat to “disappear” as a nation. The Slovene Writers’ Association conference on “The Slovenian Nation and Slovenian Culture” in January 1985 represented a “defense” of the nation, in the same way that the “Kosovo cycle” of protest evenings in the Writers’ Association of Serbia represented a “defense” of Serbian “rights.” The worsening relations between the Slovenian and Serbian critical intelligentsias, the polemics over Kosovo and the accompanying revelations of radically opposed visions of the common Yugoslav state came to the forefront in the publication of two documents within four months of each other. The working draft “Memorandum” of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) that was leaked without authorization to the Serbian press in September 1986 was followed in January 1987 by the appearance of “Contributions for a Slovenian National Program” of the Slovenian journal Nova revija. The two documents were written in parallel in the context of the increasingly acerbic public debates between Serbian and Slovenian intellectuals in the press. The first half of the “Memorandum” was devoted to an assessment of the Yugoslav crisis, as already espoused in critical intellectuals’ articles, blaming the country’s woes on excessive decentralization, the precedence of political over economic considerations in decision-​making, and competing “bureaucratic nationalisms” inherent in the prevailing confederal arrangement. The second half of the text, which focused on the situation of “Serbia and the Serbian nation,” reflected the discourse that had come to predominate in revisionist history and the defense of the Kosovo Serbs. Arguing that Serbs were not only threatened in Kosovo but also in Croatia, the “Memorandum” blamed a “Slovene-​Croat coalition” led by the tandem of Tito, the Croat, and Edvard Kardelj, the Slovene, for controlling Yugoslavia. Thanks to their domination, the “Memorandum” argued, the two most developed republics had “accomplished their nationalist agendas” and were now “zealous defenders of the existing system.” They supported the fragmentation and subordination of the Serb nation and the “genocide” of the Serbs in Kosovo. Without advocating the redrawing of republican borders or the creation of a “Greater Serbia” as has sometimes been alleged, the “Memorandum” nevertheless called for a “resolute defense of the [Serb] nation and its territory.” The “Memorandum” thus drew together on 40 pages all the various strands of the emergent Serbian nationalism: the historical vision of the Serbs as a victim nation, the continuous threat of “genocide,” the national claim to Kosovo, and the “stab-​in-​the-​ back” by the non-​Serb Communists.The fact that its authors drafted the text under the auspices of Serbia’s most important cultural institution –​the Academy of Sciences and Arts –​gave the contentious document greater weight than it would otherwise have had. Then came Nova revija’s “Contributions for a Slovenian National Program.” Like their Serbian counterparts, its editors argued that creating a national program was vital for the Slovenes’ “survival” because they were threatened with “disappearance as a nation.” They complained of Slovenia’s “unequal” status in the federal state, arguing that the Slovenian language was “second class” in Yugoslavia and that Slovenia’s economic development suffered from having to sustain the underdeveloped republics. The fact that Slovenian troops had been merged into one of 485

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four new districts for the Yugoslav People’s Army represented a “military-​defensive castration,” while the JNA’s presence in Slovenia was depicted as “a military occupation by a nationally foreign army.” The “dangerously high” influx of immigrant workers from the “southern” parts of Yugoslavia, combined with the low Slovenian fertility rate, raised “the prospect of a national catastrophe” of Slovenia becoming a “multinational republic,” a “time bomb” comparable to Kosovo. Recalling the language of the “Memorandum,” the Nova revija’s editors’ aim was “to give Slovenes self-​confidence and the desire to fight for their future by their own forces.” However, contrary to the “Memorandum,” Nova revija made no pretension of offering solutions for Yugoslavia. Exactly what solution remained a matter of some disagreement, ranging from overt calls for secession to a more moderate position that the Slovenes were still better off within Yugoslavia, albeit only a substantively reformed, even looser confederal Yugoslavia –​and that only as a temporary solution. One author noted that “among many Slovenes, the wish is awakening that –​after having liberated ourselves from foreign nations –​we finally gain our independence from kindred peoples.” The irreconcilable nature of the two emerging nationalist platforms became clearer in the course of the constitutional debate of 1987–​8 when the party’s presidency presented a “Proposal for Change of the [1974] SFRY Constitution.” These amendments were proposed after years of debate, partly in response to the pressures by the IMF to strengthen the federal administration in order to establish monetary discipline and repay the foreign debt. In response, several alternative political platforms emerged from the critical intelligentsia. A first, in fall 1987, was an open “Call to the Yugoslav Public for Different Constitutional Amendments.” It argued that the disagreements over the state structure (federation or confederation) were impeding the “true democratization” of Yugoslavia and called instead for agreement of all democratic forces in the country on demands common to all sides (abolition of the single-​party monopoly, the creation of an independent judiciary, human and civil rights). Within four months, the list of demands had 6,000 signatures from all parts of the country. This basic agreement on the need for multi-​party democracy did not however thwart the rising nationalist momentum in Serbia and Slovenia. In March 1988, the Serbian critical intelligentsia overwhelmingly endorsed a new platform, entitled “Contribution to the Public Debate on the Constitutional Changes.” This document received that backing of the Writers’ Association of Serbia, the republic’s sociological and philosophical societies and the Serbian Academy of Sciences. It called for the abolition of the single-​ party state and its ideological foundations, the respect of human and civil rights, free elections and democratic institutions, as well as provisions to establish a social-​democratic model of market economy. At the same time, it advocated not only a revival of the Yugoslav federation to ensure “the establishment of total national, spiritual and cultural integrity of each Yugoslav people, regardless of republic and province,” but also the revision of the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia as a “state” with powers extending over its whole territory –​the autonomous provinces thus losing all the trappings of statehood, their direct representation in the federal center and their veto power in the republic. The Serbian intelligentsia’s national program was thus burdened with a fundamental contradiction: on the one hand, the Republic of Serbia was to become “equal” to other republics in the federation by becoming a state while, on the other, Serbs were to be guaranteed national unity in Yugoslavia regardless of republic boundaries. The first part of the equation implied a maintenance of Yugoslavia’s existing “confederal” structure, republican statehood, and existing borders, whereas the second effectively ignored them. This inherent contradiction was the only way that Serbs could claim the ethnically preponderantly Albanian province of Kosovo while concurrently promoting their own national unity. Despite their many grievances against Yugoslavia, this platform reflected the fact that 486

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Serbian intellectuals still viewed the common state as the best framework for the solution of their national question. There was no such contradiction in the Slovenian National Program, which was adopted a few weeks later, in April 1988, by the Slovenian Writers’ Society and the republic’s sociological and philosophical societies. This “Proposal for a New Slovenian Constitution” called for a democratic transformation of the Republic of Slovenia but did not envisage any reform of Yugoslavia other than to allow greater republican independence. In a republic with coinciding ethnic and political boundaries, the “Proposal” simply defined the Republic of Slovenia as “the state of the Slovenian nation” and demanded the “historical right to self-​determination, including the right to participation in a union of states or the secession from such a union of states, the right to free decision making about internal political relations and about matters of defense.” Only when this right had been put into practice should the republic enter negotiations to define its future relationship with the rest of Yugoslavia. By 1988, Slovenian and Serbian intellectuals had arrived at a dead end. Their uncompromising stand in the defense of their narrow national interests left no room for agreement on a common Yugoslav state. For Slovenes, who represented a small nation even by Yugoslavia’s standards, “equality” implied total national sovereignty and the right to veto any decisions they disagreed with, regardless of the majority view in the federation. For Serbs, who were the most dispersed throughout Yugoslavia and whose republic was the only one containing two autonomous provinces, “equality” meant both republican statehood for Serbia and national unity in a reintegrated Yugoslavia.Yet, the more each of the two intelligentsias insisted on their nation’s “equality,” the more the other one felt that their own nation’s “equality” was threatened. By mid-​1988, the incompatibility of the Slovenian and Serbian national programs indicated that Yugoslavia could not accommodate both of them, despite the lack of historical animosity or minority issues between the two peoples.

The end of the road: “national homogenization,” 1988–​1989 In mid-​1988, the Slovenian and Serbian political leaderships adopted uncompromising national policies that echoed those of their intellectual oppositions. When they did so, the death of Yugoslavia became a virtual certainty. In Serbia, Ivan Stambolić, the republic’s president, was trying to achieve change through intra-​party consensus and constitutional reform. He saw the “Memorandum” as a threat, putting the Serbian Academy and its authors under pressure. But in short order, the President of the Serbian Central Committee Slobodan Milošević ousted his former mentor Stambolić in an internal party coup. He then adopted a nationalist platform that echoed the standpoints of the Belgrade intelligentsia. In Slovenia meanwhile, the Communist leadership took a conciliatory stance toward Nova revija, refusing to comply with federal directives to take legal action against the journal. Several Slovenian politicians went so far as to state that Nova revija was merely asking –​albeit in a politically unacceptable way –​ the “same questions as others in the republic.” Milan Kučan, the President of the Slovenian Central Committee, rejected accusations that the journal was promoting secessionism. Although Nova revija’s editors had to step down, the journal suffered no further consequences. These concessions represented the first steps toward the “national homogenization” that became full-​ blown in the course of 1988 and 1989. The first dramatic event was the “Mladina affair” in spring 1988, sparked by the trial of an army officer and three journalists from the opposition journal Mladina by a military tribunal in Ljubljana, conducted in Serbo-​Croatian, for disclosing military secrets. Widely viewed by most Slovenes as part of a policy orchestrated from Belgrade to reduce Slovenia’s sovereignty, 487

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this event unified all the various tenets of Slovenian society and its political elite in a mass protest. Representing over 1,000 organizations and more than 100,000 individual members, the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, set up in response to the trial, organized rallies and engaged in a direct dialogue with the Slovenian regime. Milan Kučan, the leader of the Slovenian Communists, publicly defended the protest and spoke at the first rally in June 1988. The petition to free the defendants garnered half a million signatures –​a quarter of Slovenia’s population –​and the demonstrations in front of the courthouse drew thousands of protesters. This national homogenization of the republican leadership with the intelligentsia and the public represented a major step on Slovenia’s road to independence. In Serbia, the convergence between the critical intelligentsia and the new Serbian regime began in June 1988. Milošević openly embraced the intelligentsia’s claims and appealed for the unity of all national forces wishing to overcome the economic crisis. He proposed to establish Serbia as a state and to rejuvenate the Yugoslav federation. Calling the intelligentsia “our great, inestimable treasure,” Milošević gave intellectuals unprecedented space to express their ideas in the state-​owned media, to publish their work and to undertake projects prohibited only a few years earlier. Meanwhile, the dramatic mass rallies of Kosovo Serbs in summer and autumn of 1988, known as “the happening of the people” –​supported by Milošević and used by him to topple the “bureaucrats” in Vojvodina and Montenegro –​swayed most Serbian intellectuals, like the rest of the population. While the “anti-​bureaucratic revolution” in Vojvodina in October 1988 had been smooth and bloodless, Kosovo was a harder case. Not only did its Albanian party leadership resist the reduction of the province’s autonomy, but large demonstrations took place in November 1988 against the impending constitutional changes. The moment of truth came in winter 1988–​9, when Milošević decided to force the replacement of the province leadership with “loyal” Albanians. The purge of the Kosovo leadership provoked the largest popular revolt in the province since 1981, spearheaded by the hunger strike of Albanian miners at Trepča. In response, the federal government proclaimed a state of emergency in the province, and confrontations led to the death of at least 24 Albanian demonstrators. Faced with a choice between human and civil rights or national reunification, the Serbian intelligentsia chose the latter. The final straw in the deteriorating relationship between Serbs and Slovenes came in February 1989, when the various associations of the Slovenian intelligentsia organized a mass rally in Ljubljana’s Cankar Hall to protest the impending changes of Kosovo’s status and gather financial assistance for the striking Albanian miners. Serbia’s main television channel transmitted the event directly, showing Slovenian demonstrators wearing badges with the yellow Star of David and chanting the slogan “Kosovo, my homeland.” Comparing the plight of the Albanians to that of the Jews in Hitler’s Germany, the Slovenian activists made impassioned speeches that condemned Belgrade’s policy and proclaimed that “the Kosovo tragedy is above all a tragedy of Albanians and not of Serbs and Montenegrins.” The republic’s leaders joined in the protest, and Kučan made a speech lauding the Kosovo miners not only for defending their own equality but also “the equality of all republics and nations within Yugoslavia –​including the Slovenian.” As Predrag Palavestra, the president of Serbia’s PEN Association, noted: Some of my Slovenian friends do not want to believe it, but it is the truth  –​the greatest demonstrations in Belgrade in March 1989 were not provoked by unrest in Kosovo but by the anti-​Serbian rally in the Cankar Hall. Belgrade was in uproar. A volcano of pent-​up frustration, sense of injustice, and bitterness blew its top, unleashing a flow of insults, denunciations, and accusations against the Slovenes. Over 488

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the course of 24 hours, a crowd of 1 million people gathered in front of the federal parliament, chanting “Slovenia is lying” and “Slovenia is a traitor” and calling upon the Serbian leadership to stand firm against the Albanians and their “sponsors.” All the institutions of the Belgrade intelligentsia joined in the demonstration against the Cankar Hall rally. The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts characterized it as “the greatest insult to the Serbian people in its history.” The editorial board of Književne novine declared that finally the Slovenes’ “false democratic jargon” had been uncovered to be nothing more than support for Albanian separatism, a first step toward ensuring their own secession. On the heels of the two rallies in Ljubljana and Belgrade, Yugoslavia witnessed the disintegration of its first federal institution. The Yugoslav Writers’ Union had only just managed to elect a Serbian writer, the novelist Slobodan Selenić, to its rotating presidency after three years of standstill. In February 1989, however, the Writers’ Association of Serbia announced that it was breaking off relations with its Slovenian counterpart due to the Cankar Hall rally and, in turn, the Kosovo Writers’ Association broke off with Serbia’s. At the final meeting of the Yugoslav Writers’ Union in spring 1989, members of the Associations of Croatia and Kosovo did not even show up, while those from Serbia, Montenegro, and Slovenia argued for hours, unable even to produce a concluding statement. When the Slovenian representatives tried to force a vote on a number of controversial issues, the others simply refused to comply. Refusing to be outvoted, the Slovenian writers announced that they would no longer participate in such an organization and left the meeting. Soon a joint letter followed from the Slovenian and Croatian associations announcing that “because of the discontinuation of relations between several members of the Yugoslav Writers’ Union, the Union no longer exists.” Most Serbian writers saw the Slovenes’ and Croats’ exit from the Writers’ Union as merely a “rehearsal for something much more serious.” As Slobodan Selenić, the Union’s last president, noted when he resigned after several months of unsuccessfully trying to get the various sides to talk to each other, the fate of the Writers’ Union was inextricably linked to that of Yugoslavia as a state. By this time, the process of national homogenization was well under way in the republics and provinces and the leaderships had adopted the same uncompromising positions as their intellectual elites. The demise of the Yugoslav Writers’ Union thus foreshadowed the fate of other federal organizations. It was left to the League of Yugoslav Communists to convene for one last time in Belgrade in January 1990. Its proposals defeated, the Slovenian delegation left to cheers from the Serbian party members, and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia entered the violent final phase of its disintegration.

Selected Readings Benderly, Jill and Evan Kraft, eds. Independent Slovenia: Origins, Movements, Prospects. London, 1994. Cohen, Lenard. Serpent in the Bosom: The Rise and Fall of Slobodan Milošević. Boulder, Colo., 2002. Cohen, Lenard and Jasna Dragović-​Soso, eds. State Collapse in South-​Eastern Europe:  New Perspectives on Yugoslavia’s Dissolution. West Lafayette, Ind., 2008. Dragović-​Soso, Jasna. “Saviours of the Nation”: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism. London and Montreal, 2002. Jović, Dejan. Yugoslavia: A State that Withered Away. West Lafayette, Ind., 2009. Popov, Nebojša, ed. The Road to War in Serbia: Trauma and Catharsis. Budapest, 2000. Ramet, Sabrina. Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia 1962–​1991. Bloomington, Ind., 1992. Spaskovska, Ljubica. The Last Yugoslav Generation:  The Rethinking of Youth Politics and Cultures in Late Socialism. Manchester, 2017. Vladisavljević, Nebojša. Serbia’s Antibureaucratic Revolution: Milošević, the Fall of Communism and Nationalist Mobilization. London, 2008. Woodward, Susan. Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War. Washington, DC, 1995.

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49 CHANGES OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE FROM THE LATE 1940s TO THE 1980s Ulf Brunnbauer

Now, after four years of hard work as technical manager of the construction site of the copper factory “G. Damjanov” in Pirdop, I  started my new job  –​at the Kremikovci metallurgical combine. A  few years ago there was already talk of the construction of this giant of our metal industry and I impatiently longed for the day when I would start work on its construction, and behind me I had almost ten years of construction work as a technical manager, exclusively on national construction sites […]. And so … passed the first day of construction of MK Kremikovci. I lay down in a hard bed and imagined in my thoughts how in the next few years hundreds of machines will resound in this endless plain, how thousands of construction workers will come, and with joint efforts factory halls and factories will rise up, how the smokestacks will smoke and how the enormous heart of the giant MK Kremikovci, which I have so far only seen on plans, will beat, but … let’s see what tomorrow will bring. This is how, in his unpublished diary, a technical engineer remembered his first day on the construction site of the new steel factory Kremikovci near Sofia, which would become the largest in the Balkans. His expectations call attention to salient features of the profound social change that Southeastern Europe underwent after World War II. Heavy industries were built; vast investments improved infrastructure; workers were mobilized for sites of large-​scale socialist construction and they moved from one place to another, and further on. In addition many people showed genuine enthusiasm for building a new, modern society (in the case in question, the engineer was not even a Communist). Once the question of political power was settled in the late 1940s, the respective governments initiated far-​reaching economic and social reforms.The most ambitious ones were implemented by the new Communist regimes. They modeled themselves as revolutionary forces that once and for all would lead their countries out of centuries of backwardness. Their ideas and toolkits were initially copied from the Soviet playbook, but with the break between Tito and Stalin in 1948, national variations soon became visible in economic policies as well. By the end of the period, the four socialist economies of the region (Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia) differed substantially from each other in their socio-​economic outlook, and also in the foreign policies of their Communist governments.

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Greece, in contrast, was ruled by forces of the right in the 1950s and the center before and after the military dictatorship of 1967–​74. Then in 1981 the avowedly socialist PASOK party won a majority in the parliamentary elections and formed a government. Greek governments had a blueprint for socio-​economic transformation that was less clear and radical than their Communist counterparts.The Greek economy continued to operate on the principles of capitalism and the free market, although with substantial state intervention and new state enterprise. Nevertheless, Greek society experienced radical social and economic transformations as well, inviting comparison. Why did societies transform so deeply across the region, despite regimes with very different ideological agendas? Change in Southeastern Europe was not only the result of local conditions but much affected by international and technological developments, from which Southeastern Europe –​with the partial exception of Albania –​was not isolated. All countries of the region also had to adapt to the Cold War circumstances, not least because the region was one of its major fault lines. This complex of relations meant that the results of social change were regularly different from the intentions of the governments, which created a constant dynamic of reform and modification. Southeast European societies in the 1980s looked markedly different than those in the 1940s, and in many respects similar to other places in Europe, east and west. This chapter highlights the transformative changes in three important, closely intertwined social domains: demography, economy, and gender relations.

Demographic change The postwar period was characterized by momentous change in reproductive behavior. The so-​called demographic transition (see the chapter by Siegfried Gruber) came to an end, save in Albania. Like other European regions, Southeastern Europe experienced a short-​lived baby-​ boom in the 1950s, but after that population growth flattened out. With the exception of Albania and Greece, the population of the other countries reached its high mark by the 1980s, but in Bulgaria it even began to decline. If we take 1939 levels as equal to 100, the populations of Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia reached between 138 and 152 by the end of the 1980s. Only Albania registered substantial demographic growth, as its population increased threefold in that period. These trends meant that the prewar problem of so-​called “overpopulation” was now a thing of the past. The industrialized economies of the region actually began to experience a shortage of labor by the late 1960s. The most visible change in the demographics of the region was the decline in the birth rate, pointing to a fundamental transformation of social roles, especially for working women. Mirroring other industrializing societies, birth rates sank to the low tens (measured as the number of life births per 1,000 population); Albania was the exception, where this process took longer and reached into the 2000s. There were notable differences within the countries, especially for continuously high birth rates among marginalized ethnic minorities/​nationalities, such as the Roma across the region, Albanians in Yugoslavia, or ethnic Turks in Bulgaria. In highly urbanized countries, such as Bulgaria, birth rates in villages were even lower than in cities because the rural population tended to be older. From sociological surveys in the 1960s and 1970s, we know that the two-​child family had become the norm and that few women expressed the desire to have more. Many of them actually had only one child and or none. Rapidly increasing rates of female employment as well as the increasing “costs” of raising children (longer schooling, more parental care, etc.) effected a momentous change in reproductive behavior. The success in quickly lowering child mortality rates also played a role as

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the overwhelming majority of newborns now would reach adulthood. In general, large-​scale investments in health care contributed to much better medical conditions than before the war. People also lived longer. The average life expectancy was between 72 and 76  years in the early 1980s, more than 20  years higher than half a century before. Grandparents now could expect to see their grandchildren grow up, allowing many working parents to engage grandmothers in childcare. The Bulgarian family law of the 1980s even introduced paid grand-​ parental child-​leave in case grandparents were still employed, and grandparents received a legal right to maintain contact with their grandchildren, even if their parents were opposed to it. An aging population also meant that providing old age pensions became a major priority for the expanding welfare state. Gradually, more and more categories of people were included in state pension schemes. Pensions were however low, so that internal household transfers of money and support remained very important. In Yugoslavia, private farmers, who still constituted a sizeable proportion of the population, were, however, not included in the state pension systems, with only Slovenia increasing coverage to them. These demographic developments were generally in line with European post-​war trends. Some Communist policy makers, notably in Bulgaria and Romania, were disappointed. They had thought that under socialism, more children should be born. Economic planners worried about labor shortages, and the military about a lack of recruits. In the mid-​1960s Romania’s Ceauşescu set the goal of at least 20 million inhabitants for Romania and Todor Zhivkov in Bulgaria was concerned about the relative increase of the country’s Turkish minority. Romania and Bulgaria, therefore, took strong pro-​natalist measures in the late 1960s and through the 1970s. Most infamously, Romania banned abortion in practically all circumstances and stringently enforced this ban. The Bulgarian government introduced generous welfare benefits for parents with two and three children and called procreation a patriotic duty. While birth rates experienced an increase in both countries, the overall demographic trend could not be halted in either case. In Romania, the radical anti-​abortion policy led to a high number of abandoned babies by the 1980s. They ended up in inhumane state orphanages where they faced serious malnutrition, neglect, and mistreatment.

Industrialization, rural exodus, and urbanization Demographic changes were closely related to the transformation of the economic structure, although the lines of causation were not always clear. Communist governments had a clear vision of modernity shaped by industry, urbanity, and technology. Greek governments of all stripes also subscribed to policies of industrial development. By the end of the 1940s, the Communist governments had adapted the major features of Soviet-​style industrialization: five-​ year plans (the Yugoslavs were the first in 1947), nationalization of industry and banks, high investment in industrial development (Romania’s first five-​years plan, for example, earmarked 51 percent of all investments into industry, most of it in heavy industry). Another important feature was the collectivization of agriculture, which would free its rural workforce for industrial expansion and feed the growing urban populations. Having learned from the catastrophic consequences of forced collectivization in the Soviet Union, the Balkan Communists were more patient, and completed collectivization only in the early 1960s. Even though there was peasant resistance, the whole process was much less disruptive than in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Uniformity among the Communist economic policies did not last long. After the break between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Bloc in 1948,Yugoslavia developed its own economic model. Earlier than other socialist countries, the Yugoslavs reduced the investment surge into heavy 492

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industry, introduced efficiency criteria, and opened more space for market relations. Forced by a Soviet economic embargo,Yugoslavia turned to Western trade, even creating export-​oriented firms which had to compete for market shares with capitalist rivals. In the early 1950s, collectivization of farming was abandoned and farms in Yugoslavia were again predominantly private, although suffering from legal and credit restrictions. Market-​oriented reforms in the mid-​1960s led to a further decrease of industrial investments. A downside was that Yugoslavia struggled with officially recognized unemployment, which grew from 6  percent in the mid-​1960s to 16 percent in 1990. Yugoslavia’s move away from a command economy also helps to understand why regional disparity in the country did not decrease but even increased despite substantial transfers from “developed” to “underdeveloped” regions. The per-​capita wealth differential between the most prosperous republic, Slovenia, and the poorest region, Kosovo, was seven to one at the end of the 1980s. Unemployment in Kosovo, where the population continued to grow strongly, was 25 percent in the early 1980s (likewise in Macedonia), while Slovenia enjoyed full employment. Political unrest in Kosovo should be seen against this background. In the mid-​1980s, only a quarter of the working age population of Kosovo was employed, and less than 40 percent in Bosnia-​Herzegovina. In Slovenia, the employment rate was over 70 percent, while the Yugoslav average of 46 percent was an exceptionally low level compared to most other European countries. Emigration allowed since the 1960s and labor remittances relieved some of the income differences in the less developed regions like Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Kosovo, but many gastarbeiter were forced to return in the West European downturn of the 1970s. Emigration also created shortages of skilled labor. In contrast to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania’s more restrictive regimes allowed no legal emigration, economic or political.They stuck to the emphasis on industry and central planning, with limited innovation in economic policy. They continued to direct the bulk of investment into heavy industry, although consumption levels were also increased after the shock of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, closely watched by the Communist leaderships as a cautionary tale. In the 1970s, growing living standards and continuously high levels of industrial investment were increasingly financed by loans from Western banks. Cheap Soviet oil and other raw materials helped Bulgaria in particular. At the end of the period, Bulgaria and Romania were among the most heavily industrialized countries in the world. Almost 60 percent of Bulgaria’s GDP was produced by manufacturing, mining, and construction, and 45 percent of its workforce was employed in the secondary sector. Romania’s most notable economic policy measure was Ceauşescu’s ill-​advised decision in 1981 to repay all the country’s foreign debt early. He preferred austerity, in the name of independence, to an IMF imposed restructuring program (Romania was member of the IMF). The population had to bear the brunt, as living standards plummeted in the 1980s. The economy also suffered from under-​investment, leaving Romania in a much worse starting position in 1990 than Bulgaria. Albania constituted yet another exception. After its break with Yugoslavia in 1948, with the Soviet Union in 1961 and finally also with the People’s Republic of China in 1978, it pursued a strategy of radical autarchy, limiting external trade to the minimum. This put severe constraints on industrial development as the country lacked modern technology. Although industry grew sharply (starting from almost nothing), farming remained the largest sector for employment. The farm share was still 50 percent in 1989 according to official figures which were probably undercounting. The Albanian leaders thought that industrial labor should replenish itself only from urban sources, and farming from rural ones, limiting the shift of workers from the primary to the secondary sector. A few big factories, such as the steel plant in Elbasan, could not hide the fact that the country’s economy was greatly lagging behind the rest of Europe. 493

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In Greece, the government pursued a different set of economic policies. The country’s economy remained based on private property and the open market. However, the state intervened quite strongly. The two main banks providing industrial investment were controlled by the government. The government share of GDP grew from around 16 percent before 1941 to 30 percent at the end of the 1970s and a whopping 50 percent under the PASOK government, which took power in 1981. Greece benefited greatly from foreign investments: it received substantial US help through the Marshall Plan; hundreds of thousands of migrant workers sent back savings; tourists brought money into the country (in the early 1970s, the country recorded already more than 4 million tourists per year); foreign businesses invested in the country; Greece borrowed from foreign banks; and after joining the European Community in 1981, it recorded a substantial inflow of subsidies from European structural funds. Economic transformation in Greece as well implied a large-​scale shift of labor from farming, which continued to suffer from low productivity, to industry and services. With 25 percent in 1976, the share of agriculture in total employment had more than halved since 1961, but was still substantial. Its contribution to GDP was only 11 percent, though. The economic importance of industry increased (it produced almost 20 percent of the GDP in 1980), but the service sector grew even more. In 1980 services (trade, transport, food, hotel, banking, insurance, etc.) accounted for 43 percent of employment (the state sector added another 16 percent, industry and construction 28  percent). So while the socialist economies quickly transited from agriculture to industry, the Greek economy became dominated by the service sector. In Greek industry, consumer goods, especially foods and textiles, remained more important than capital goods. Another major difference was the size of enterprises: while socialist countries heeded to the principle “big is beautiful,” most Greek industrial firms were small. In the 1970s, more than 90 percent of them employed less than ten people. At the end, the market-​oriented strategy of Greece, and its better position to acquire funding from abroad, paid off. Its GDP per capita was more than 150 percent of the Bulgarian and Yugoslav ones at the end of the 1980s, and more than double Romania’s. The Communist vision of industrial modernity was fond not only of smokestacks and blast furnaces but also of new, modern cities. No other endeavor like socialist model towns, such as the Bulgarian new town of Dimitrovgrad, or whole new city quarters, like New Belgrade (Novi Beograd) and New Zagreb (Novi Zagreb) represented this idea better. These modern sites were envisioned not only as the place where the new working class would reside but also as the fermenter of a new, “socialist” way of life. Their layout was geometric and “rational,” and once Stalinist kitsch came out of fashion, distinctively modernist, especially in Yugoslavia. Given the size and speed of the rural exodus, however, the construction of housing could often not catch up with the need for it, so that new city residents often lived in cramped conditions.The constant pressure for new housing led to the downscaling of aesthetic pretensions: neighborhoods built quickly and cheaply in the 1980s were a far cry of the earlier socialist visions. Ceauşescu managed to largely disfigure the old city center of Bucharest by massive, ugly new buildings in the 1980s. In total, the societies of the region experienced a massive relocation of population from the countryside toward cities. In 1950, the highest share of urban population was displayed by Greece, with 37  percent. By the late 1980s, more than half of the population of Greece, Romania, and Bulgaria lived in urban areas.Yugoslavia reached 48 percent, roughly three times the share in 1950 (with a strong north-​south divide, as urbanization levels were much lower in the south). These numbers reflect massive migration of villagers to cities, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, moving to new jobs in industry, state administration and the service sector. In Bulgaria more than 1.7 million people moved from a village to a town between 1945 and 1975; in Yugoslavia almost 3 million people left their villages from the end of the war until 1960. In 494

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Greece, 560,000 people relocated from rural to urban areas in the 1950s, and further 680,000 in the 1960s. Large cities grew quickly, Athens from half a million inhabitants in the 1930s to more than 2.5 million in 1971, Belgrade’s population sevenfold between the 1920s and 1971. By then, less than a third of its population was born in the city. As a result, agriculture faced a huge drain of labor, both where it was collectivized (Romania, Bulgaria) and where it was private (Greece, Yugoslavia). In Bulgaria and Romania, collective farms faced such a labor shortage that their governments built up small factories in the countryside, so that village families had access to industrial jobs. Students were mobilized to help during the harvest. In Bulgaria collectivized farmers received the right to lease small personal plots (of up to 0.5 hectares), so that they could add to their meager income from the collective farm. As it turned out, they put much more effort in these personal plots, freely appropriating manure, seeds, and machinery of the collective farm, and thereby achieving high yields, whereas collectivized farming suffered from low efficiency despite its economies of scale. In Greece, farming productivity remained below the European average but improved with the country’s growing access to European markets, sealed with entry to the European Community in 1981. Commercialization of farms reduced the number of hands needed. Whole rural regions in Southeastern Europe became almost devoid of any younger people. Such a pattern highlighted the systematic neglect of the countryside by the government, regardless of its political color, a tradition seamlessly continued from before the Second World War. The exception to the rural exodus was Albania, where the government imposed stringent restrictions on the resettlement from village to town. People needed a permission by party officials and by their employers to relocate. This is why the share of urban population in Albania reached only 35 percent at the end of the 1980s, even then an optimistic number since many settlements classified as towns were not much more than large villages.The artificial brake on domestic mobility under the Communist regime in Albania led to a massive population movement from the countryside to cities, especially to Tirana, and to foreign countries in the 1990s. In all countries of the region, the connection between town and village remained close, despite the demographic exodus. Elderly parents who had remained in the village often supported their offspring in the cities with food, given frequent shortages of food supply in state run shops. Canadian anthropologist Eleanor Smollett spoke of an “economy of jars.” For families in Athens, the old rural home provided a much-​appreciated retreat from the unbearable summers in the constantly expanding metropolis (or a source of income if rented out to tourists). In some industrial areas, daily commuting between village and factory was common, a result of the housing shortage in cities and the persistence of small-​scale subsistence farming. In 1981 in Slovenia, more than half of the workforce consisted of commuters, a result of good roads, short distances, and widespread car ownership.

Gender relations One of the areas, where social change became especially visible and durable, was gender relations, particularly the position of women. The Communist regimes declared the full emancipation of women as a major goal and immediately after taking power, they enacted legislation that gave women equal rights with men. While the situation of women had already improved before the Second World War, Communist rule marked a major breakthrough. The importance of the socialist commitment to the advancement of women and the change in values becomes immediately apparent if these countries are compared to Greece. There, it took until the 1980s for women to be granted even legal equality. 495

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In Greece, the right-​wing and centrist regimes that ruled Greece after the Civil War promoted “traditional” family values which were built on male domination.The Greek Orthodox Church, an important pillar of these regimes, also promoted reactionary family mores. Women attained the active and passive right to vote only in 1952, and no parliament until 1967 included more than four female members at one time. The military regime of the Colonels (1967–​74) was exceptionally reactionary when it came to the role of women in society and family. Its slogan was “Fatherland, Family, Religion.” The Panhellenic Union of Greek Women, which struggled for more rights for women, was banned under the military dictatorship. The Greek government did little to support female employment. Public childcare, for example, was rare. From 1928 to 1981, despite major changes in the economic structure of the country, the employment rate of women increased only by six percentage points, reaching 32 percent. Less than a quarter of women of working age in Athens worked for wages. It should, however, be noted that a substantial number of women worked in the large informal sector and thus did not appear in the official employment statistics. But working informally also meant that social security and pension benefits were foregone. By the mid-​1980s, Greece’s female employment rate was not only much lower than in the socialist economies but also less than in most other European countries. The progressive government of PASOK at least revoked repressive family law, declared legal equality between women and men, and joined the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, adopted in 1979. Civil divorce was legalized and the burdensome dowry for women abolished. In 1986, PASOK also liberalized the extremely restrictive abortion law. Evaluations of the success or failure of Communist women’s policies vary. Obviously, they failed to achieve full equality between women and men, and in many ways Communist leaders themselves subscribed to conservative values when it came to family and sexuality. But compared to Greece, the progress was impressive. One of the most important developments was the rapid integration of women into the paid workforce. Women entered typically “male” occupations such as heavy industry, although in general, light and service industries had a much higher percentage of women workers. Female employment was also needed for rapid industrialization, not only the result of emancipatory ideas. But whatever the motives, the results were momentous not only with respect to female employment levels which were surpassed only by Nordic countries. In Bulgaria, the share of women in (formal) employment increased from 26 percent in 1952 to 39 percent in 1965 and 50 percent in the 1980s. By that time, practically all women of working age had become integrated into the wage labor force. Apart from wage levels, where women’s rates were still lower than men’s, the expansion of public childcare facilities as well as the huge educational gains of women were also positive gains. Changing economic roles of women were closely connected with a change in values. Sociological surveys from the 1970s in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, for example, showed that most women considered having a job an important goal in life and would not quit their job even if their husband’s salary was sufficient. The women’s organizations incorporated into the Communist apparatus could exert some limited influence.They criticized continuing shortcomings in terms of gender equality and supported women’s interests within the narrow bounds of Communist party politics. In Bulgaria, for example, it was female members of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party who in 1967 called a proposed ban on abortion a reactionary measure. Access to abortion was indeed restricted in Bulgaria as well, but implementation was superficial, also thanks to strong female opposition. One of the most significant shortcomings remained the division of roles within the household. It changed less than in the public sector. Contemporary observers spoke of a double burden that women had to bear, a job outside the home and responsibility for most of the 496

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household chores. Time-​budget studies clearly indicate that women carried out much more reproductive and caring work than men, who in turn had more time to spend on hanging out in cafeterias, playing cards, reading newspapers, or watching television, etc. In 1960s Yugoslavia, for example, women worked a total of 60 to 70 hours a week, 20 to 30 of which was unpaid household work. A survey from Bulgaria in 1973 showed that the average adult woman spent more than four hours a day on the household, men only two. In the economy as well, gendered divisions in the workplace were not abandoned. Women tended to work in sectors that paid less and had less political clout, whereas they were under-​ represented in those industries which enjoyed political privileges. The rule of the thumb was that the higher the echelon, fewer women were represented. The pro-​natalist turn in social policies, especially in Romania and Bulgaria since the late 1960s, also impeded emancipation, as women’s “natural role” of giving birth became increasingly emphasized by party propaganda. New restrictions on divorce and the stress on family stability in these two countries, in Albania as well, limited women’s room for maneuver. Yet there was no official push for a “back to the kitchen” policy. On the contrary, female employment remained a political priority, also strongly demanded by women themselves. In 1990, Bulgaria had the seventh highest percentage of female employment (54 percent) among 175 countries, while Greece occupied the 113th place with a rate of 35 percent. It is therefore fair to conclude that gender relations were one area where the socialist economies left the biggest footprint. As insufficient as it might seem when compared with the initial ideological visions, this was nevertheless a remarkable achievement and proved more lasting than the economic build-​up of heavy industry. But more generally, and despite the momentous socio-​economic change of the 1990s, substantial continuities and path-​dependencies have continued to shape social change in the region.

Selected Readings Brunnbauer, Ulf. “Die sozialistische Lebensweise”: Ideologie, Gesellschaft, Familie und Politik in Bulgarien (1944–​ 1989). Vienna, Cologne, Weimar, 2007. Grothusen, Klaus-​Detlev, ed. Südosteuropa-​Handbuch, 8 vols. (Albania, Bulgaria, Greece,Yugoslavia, Romania, Turkey, Hungary, Cyprus). Göttingen, 1977–​1998. Jouganatos, George A. The Development of the Greek Economy, 1950–​1991. Westport, Conn., 1992. Kligman, Gail. The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceauşescu’s Romania. Berkeley, Calif., 1998. Kligman, Gail and Katherine Verdery, eds. Peasant Under Siege. The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949–​1962. Princeton, NJ, 2011. Lampe, John. Yugoslavia as History.Twice there Was a Country. Cambridge, 1997. Schnytzer, Adi. Stalinist Economic Strategy in Practice.The Case of Albania. Oxford, 1982. Sjöberg, Orjan. Rural Change and Development in Albania. Boulder, Colo., 1991. Smolett, Eleanor Wenkart. “The Economy of Jars: Kindred Relationships in Bulgaria,” Ethnologia Europaea 19, no. 2 (1989): 125–​40. Woodward, Susan. Socialist Unemployment. The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945–​ 1990. Princeton, NJ, 1995.

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50 FINANCING INDUSTRIALIZATION, 1949–1989 From foreign aid to foreign debt John R. Lampe One common feature of the postwar economies of Southeastern Europe was their industrialization from a low prewar base. By 1970, industry contributed more to national income and employed more capital, and, if not yet everywhere, also labor than the previously predominant agricultural sector. Fiscal funding provided initial investment among the four Communist regimes. State budgets taxed consumers and state-​owned enterprises for their revenues and left no space for state banks, let alone private enterprise. In Bulgaria and Romania, their initial reliance on central planning and ministerial allocation of investment in heavy industry, primarily metals and machinery, shifted only slightly in the mid-​1950s to include consumer goods if not agriculture. The Romanian and Albanian Communist leaderships resisted any diversion from heavy industry, in which Romania had the largest base and Albania the smallest. After its break with the Soviet Union in 1948,Tito’s Yugoslavia abandoned central planning from the Belgrade ministries. Their republic counterparts continued the commitment to heavy industry. For non-​ Communist Greece, its independent National Bank joined the Finance Ministry in promoting industry and shipbuilding. The other common feature of the five economies was their turn –​sooner or later –​to foreign aid or foreign loans in order to support the significant industrial growth that vindicated their political regimes. By 1970, deficits in Western trade not only for Greece but also the Communist regimes except Albania created new demand for Western credits. Servicing their hard currency debts made monetary policy a new priority, requiring single exchange rates from their central banks rather than the multiple ones in the bilateral clearing agreements for Soviet trade. Other domestic banks were now expected or created to provide industrial credit. As foreign and domestic lending expanded elsewhere, the Albanian loss of further Chinese credit after refusing repayment had already identified the dangers of debt service. By the 1980s, huge Western obligations confronted the other four states of the region. The governments of Bulgaria. Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia responded in different ways. All of them nonetheless carried fateful political consequences, cutting away the public support that the borrowing had been intended to maintain. This chapter follows the route to the final debt crisis from the initial reliance on foreign aid and for the Communist regimes on centrally planned investment from state budgets. A  variety of domestic banks played important roles, but none of the prewar foreign banks or debt obligations was allowed to return. 498

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Financing industry from foreign aid to foreign loans, 1949–​1965 Foreign aid had begun by 1945 with Western and Soviet assistance in recovering from the damages and shortages left by the Second World War. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) provided largely American food and transport support to wartime allies. Greece received supplies worth US$352 million and Yugoslavia US$415 million by 1947. Albania accepted only US$26 million before ending the transfer in 1946, fearing it as a vehicle for US penetration. Some limited Yugoslav assistance also arrived to Albania before the Soviet financial advisors and credit arrived after the Tito-​Stalin split in 1948. As former German allies, Bulgaria and Romania were not eligible for UNRRA aid. However, cost-​free Soviet grain shipments in the hard winter of 1946–​7 relieved a serious food shortage in Bulgaria as well as adding to the credentials of its new communist government. Moscow also negotiated relief from Greek reparations but offered none to Romania for its invasion of the USSR. Instead, the Soviet-​Romanian companies primarily for transport served to remove industrial and railway equipment to cover reparations. The same joint companies elsewhere were helpful in Albania but resented in Yugoslavia, where their monopoly of river transport encouraged the break with the Soviet Union. American aid to both Yugoslavia and Greece, from the UNRRA shares forward, would amount to US$3.7 billion over the next 20 years, most of it during the 1950s. It started earlier in Greece with US$300  million in military assistance. Peaking in 1950–​1, the funding had turned by 1953 to financial stabilization and economic investment. Under the guidelines of the US Marshall Plan, the Greek Currency Committee from the UK’s London Agreement of 1946 used the aid to reduce the balance of payments deficit and inflation. The Committee’s devaluation of the drachma by one half and the elimination of multiple exchange rates reduced the trade deficit and inflation. Reparations payments from Italy and West Germany also helped to cut the payments deficit. US economic aid was initially intended to promote industrial development but its distribution from the Central Bank to the large National Bank of Greece favored agriculture instead. Under a plan from a past Governor of the Central Bank of Greece, its credits went to buy farm equipment and support American agricultural advisors. With more tractors than the Soviet Union sent Bulgaria, the Greek economy moved toward self-​sufficiency in food supplies. As their imports fell, rising tourist income eliminated Greece’s payments deficits by the 1960s. American aid to Yugoslavia began in 1950 with food supplies to relieve a severe shortage and then provided mainly military equipment through 1952. From this initial US$500 million under the Marshall Plan,Yugoslavia received another US$3 billion in aid and soft loans by 1964. Although authorized under the Mutual Security Act for 1953–​61, the military share shrank after the Soviet rapprochement with the Tito regime in 1955–​6. US food shipments did help the regime to abandon collectivized agriculture. Yet American efforts to shift its investment away from too many industrial projects succeeded only in allowing each republic to cut back on light industry to favor metallurgical complexes on the Soviet pattern.The clearer advantages were the coverage of three quarters of the deficits in the Yugoslav balance of payments for 1954–​61 and the regular repayment, albeit in dinars, of the soft loans that comprised most of the assistance for 1962–​4. Already in 1960–​1, with a short-​term US credit plus contributions from Western Europe and the international Monetary Fund allowed Yugoslavia to devalue its currency, eliminate multiple exchange rates, and join the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT). Foreign trade tripled in value during the 1960s, its Western half led by Italian exports and imports to and from Slovenia and Croatia. Growing income from tourism and remittances from almost a million guest workers mainly in West Germany covered most of the 499

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continuing trade deficit.Yugoslavia’s record in repaying US road-​building loans opened the way to further lending from the World Bank. It would total US$4 billion by 1980 and earn Yugoslav enterprises as much as in Third World contracts for comparable infrastructure projects, from Bosnia in particular for Muslim countries. Enver Hoxha’s Albania with its inconvertible currency and restricted foreign trade would remain isolated from the Western economy. Its economy still proceeded with industrialization under first Soviet and then Chinese support that would total US$2 billion by the early 1970s. The smaller Soviet share was balanced by the arrival of technicians to oversee industrial startups and the construction of urban housing. Technical training followed for young Albanians in Moscow as did assistance in opening a university in Tirana in 1957. Soviet bloc credits and soft loans were however cut in half in 1954 to force a cut in the large number of state employees and enterprises. As the regime struggled with the mechanics of central planning, the Soviet leadership felt obliged to cancel all past debts and offer another 300 million rubles of Bloc aid in 1957. Soviet leader Khrushchev used his visit in 1959 to pressure the Albanian leadership to step away for major metallurgical projects and invest in light industry and collectivized agriculture.Wheat imports from the Soviet Bloc were still providing half of the economy’s needs. The Hoxha regime refused and, spurred by the threat from Soviet rapprochement with Yugoslavia, turned to Mao’s China. Chinese experts replaced the Soviets and went ahead with both investment in heavy industry and an accelerated campaign for collectivization. Both succeeded in the short-​run. The Five-​Year Plan for 1966–​70 met its targets for the first time. Food imports fell and industry’s share in national product grew from 26 to 39 percent. The Chinese deliveries of plant and equipment were however slow in coming and the same connections with technical education in China as in Russia never materialized. Then the Chinese refused to cancel existing debts as the Soviets had done and ended their assistance by 1973. Only tightening internal controls would allow the Albanian economy to continue industrialization from a resource base that included only non-​ferrous metallurgy. Central planning and all-​powerful ministries also kept Romania and Bulgaria committed to the rapid industrialization that had led their economies to annual growth rates of 5–​10 percent in the 1950s. They shared the same concentration on heavy industry but without the same endowment in coal, iron ore, or petroleum. Romania had a full set of these resources plus a large metallurgical industry from the interwar period. Bulgaria had only lower-​g rade coal unsuitable for smelting, but it benefited from its connection to the Soviet Bloc as Romania did not. The Bulgarian advantage did not come from direct Soviet aid but from the clearing agreements with the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. The rest of the Soviet Bloc needed raw material plus tractors and industrial machinery were available to the Bulgarians at low import prices, while the exchange value of Bulgarian cigarettes, cosmetics, and light equipment increased in the 1960s. Before then, however, renewed emphasis on heavy industry in the Great Leap Forward of 1957–​60, to complete the Five-​Year Plan in three years, had created a trade deficit caused by machine imports from West as well as East Germany. The previous export surplus in the Soviet clearing agreement had vanished with the end of the joint-​Soviet-​Bulgarian enterprises. The small 6 percent of Bulgarian exports to West Germany covered only half the value of its imports from the FRG. Soviet banks in London and Paris furnished credit in convertible currency needed to reduce the deficit. At least the crisis pushed the Bulgarian National Bank, important to this point only for short-​term credit to industrial enterprises, to revalue the currency, lowering its excessive gold backing and issuing new banknotes at a lower, if still overvalued rate.The payments crisis in Western trade that now amounted to 15 percent of a rapidly rising Bulgarian total was only resolved in 1964. It required that the entire Bulgarian gold reserve, already stored in Moscow since the end of the war, be transferred to the Soviet Union, 500

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a transaction never revealed to the Bulgarian public. There was however no Soviet pressure to abandon the emphasis on heavy industry that party leader Todor Zhivkov called essential if Bulgaria were to become a developed economy like East Germany or Czechoslovakia. The Romanian party leadership was hardly as well treated by Stalin’s successors as Bulgaria. Moscow used its leverage under the Soviet-​Romanian enterprises (Sovroms) and the war reparations to drive hard bargains in trade under their bilateral clearing agreements. There was no chance for Romanian oil exports under a Sovrom to reenter the world market and little profit in their export to the other Bloc members under their respective clearing agreements. The Sovrom for petroleum was sold back to Romanian ownership in 1955 but only at the cost of paying the USSR for the value of the oil and the refineries. To counter the threat of a reaction from the large Hungarian minority in Transylvania to the Hungarian Revolution and its suppression in 1956, the Soviet leadership under Nikita Khrushchev canceled the remaining debt and reparations. The sizeable sum was worth US$700 million. Then Soviet troops finally left Romania in 1958, easing relations. They turned down again by the early 1960s under the Soviet effort to breathe life into the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), that it had created in 1949. Now it was to be used to reshape the members’ investment priorities based on their comparative advantage. This socialist international division of labor, as it was called in Marxist terms, would not endorse the Romanian emphasis on using its coal, iron ore, and petroleum, the same resources as in the Soviet Union. Khrushchev used his visit to Bucharest in June 1963 to demand a shift to investment in agriculture, only 10 percent of Romania’s exports, and light industry. Gheorge Gheorghiu-​Dej, the aging leader of the internally repressive Romanian regime, refused. Under a new, initially reformist leader in 1965, Nicolae Ceauşescu, the Romanian economy would seek to preserve it emphasis on heavy industry by turning to Western imports and Third World exports.

Financing industry from domestic bank credit, 1965–​1979 By the mid-​1960s, all the region’s regimes confronted the need to find more funding for industrial investment. Only Albania continued to rely solely on revenue from the state budget. The other three Communist regimes turned to the domestic bank credits on which Greece’s industry already relied. By the 1970s, these turns had not generated the further funding that only Western bank credits could provide. At a different pace, they joined Greece using sizeable sums from Western loans to continue investing in their economic priorities, which remained heavy industry for the Communist regimes. Before addressing the crises from servicing foreign bank debt that that they all faced by the 1980s, we must first acknowledge what their own banks had tried and failed to do. Both the Romanian and Bulgarian planning ministries had agreed to found new banks to provide short-​and long-​term credit to industrial enterprises. A Romanian banking reform in 1967 was advertised as creating a two-​tier system with separate authority for two existing banks beyond the central bank. Two more banks were created in 1968, one for foreign trade with France and one for West Germany.The regime had just established full diplomatic relations with both of them, defying the Soviet Bloc ban on relations with West Germany until it recognized East Germany. These banks as well as the central bank remained subordinate to Ceauşescu’s Politburo and with too little lending authority to be called even a single tier banking system. Meanwhile, to finance Western imports of industrial machinery and inputs, the regime expected to create a huge export surplus by conducting one third of its foreign trade with the less developed Third World. 501

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Already in the 1950s, the Bulgarian National Bank (BNB) was authorized to grant short-​ term credits to industrial enterprises and to collective farms after absorbing the prewar credit cooperatives. There was also a State Investment Bank with little authority until 1964. For the next three years, under the New System of Management, it extended long-​term loans at 4 percent interest to the participating enterprises in clothing and light industry that were judged on profit and loss rather than meeting planned targets. The Council of Ministers also created a Foreign Trade Bank in 1964 to credit the import of Western machinery that had led to the abovementioned payments crisis in the early 1960s. The BNB absorbed the Investment Bank in 1967 and took over the extending of long-​term as well as short-​term loans. The BNB did receive representation if not membership on the Council of Ministers, and two more new banks were created in by 1969 to join the Foreign Trade Bank. Censured by the Council in 1974 for enterprise defaults on their loans, they were all absorbed into the BNB. Unable to establish an independent second tier for its banking system, Bulgaria at least had a single tier, albeit in a single bank. The Greek banking system remained unchanged from the early 1950s through the end of the restrictive military regime of 1967–​74. Dominated by the Central Bank of Greece and the large National Bank of Greece, some 30 commercial banks were also offering short-​and long-​ term loans by the late 1950s. The afore-​mentioned Currency Committee restrained inflation with reserve requirements. In 1957, it required first 10 and then 15 percent of bank lending be directed to industrial investment. By 1962, the Committee was promoting industrial exports with reduced rates of interest. As deposits of private savings shrank under the military regime, the Bank of Greece became the major source of new lending. Joint-​stock issues were little relief since the Greek aversion to incorporation kept the stock market small. Having disbanded the Currency Committee, the military regime, which came to power in 1967, relaxed reserve requirements and restrictions on consumer credit by 1972.When combined with higher import prices from the Oil Shock of 1973, the result was a jump in the rate of inflation from the long-​ maintained 5 percent to 27 percent in 1974. The new civilian regime of Konstantin Karamanlis had only the Bank of Greece as an instrument to control the inflation that would come from expanding consumer credit and renewed industrial lending. For Yugoslavia, inflation had already become a problem by the time that a major banking reform was launched in 1965. Pushing the inflation rate past 10 percent a year were not only the wage increases that Workers Councils were empowered from 1961 to choose over reinvestment of enterprise profits, but also the expanding credit from some 380 communal banks. To finance their investment, local industrial enterprises were routinely tolling over repayment of the banks’ short-​term loans. A major feature of the economic reforms of 1965 was the replacement of these local banks with 15 larger regional banks. Each republic received at least one bit. Its mandate was to provide short-​or long-​term loans only to profitable enterprises from any republic.Yet the promise to lend across republic lines was not kept. Nor did the promise of the reform keep its promise to open industrial enterprises to direct foreign investment. As the political promise to rein in the wage increases voted by Workers Councils faded, annual inflation continued past 10 percent. The capacity of the central bank, the National Bank of Yugoslavia, to oversee the economy ended in 1971 when it was divided into separate branches for each of the six republics. Regional rivalry also grew over the less developed southern republics and the autonomous region of Kosovo. Its largest share in development support prompted complaints from Bosnia-​ Herzegovina in particular, while Slovenia and Croatia objected to diverting any of their taxes. Lending from republic banks to their own enterprises jumped past 40 percent of total investment during the 1970s. Its rapid increase also pushed the annual rate of inflation past 15 percent, 502

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reducing the real value of this credit. More was needed, and so enterprises and municipalities joined their republics in contracting loans from American and West European banks. The debt crisis of the 1980s lay ahead and not just for Yugoslavia.

Financing foreign debt, 1979–​1989 The overwhelming burden of servicing the Western debt assumed to maintain industrial growth descended first on Yugoslavia and Romania. They followed for Bulgaria and Greece later in the 1980s. Inflation increased the cost of service for Yugoslavia, Romania, and Greece, while the government’s determination to persist with investment in heavy industry compounded the burden for Romania and Bulgaria. For Albania, any Western borrowing remained forbidden even after Hoxha’s death in 1985. When trade relations were opened with Greece and Western Europe, Albanian exports for hard currency were too meager to cover the imported industrial machinery and inputs needed to sustain heavy industry. Economic growth virtually vanished there as in the rest of the region in the late 1980s. It vanished in Romania because the Ceauşescu regime decided not only to cut itself off from further Western loans but also to pay off the entire principal. The borrowing had started after 1975, when it was clear that rival petro-​chemical production in the Third World had prevented the expected export surplus. Then the 1977 earthquake caused enough damage in Bucharest to add to what was now an overall trade deficit. Several New York banks were quick to provide the loans needed for rebuilding. Rising interest rates for more loans after the 1979 Oil Shock confined further Romanian borrowing to short-​term credits. Only a small World Bank loan could be obtained after the bad harvest of 1980–​1. By then Romanian debt service had risen by 60 percent since 1975. Pending service of $4 billion on a Western debt of $10 billion confronted Romania by 1982, domestic shortages had pushed up the rate of inflation to 17 percent. Western lenders were ready to accept an IMF plan for rescheduling in 1983 when the regime broke off negotiations. Planning to pay off the full amount by 1987, the Ceauşescu regime cut essential imports and diverted much of the domestic food and fuel supply to exports. Housing and hospitals were left to freeze in the hard winter of 1984–​5. Hunger threatened in Bucharest and the major cities. By 1988, the debt was indeed paid off. Even the reduced statistical record released by the regime revealed a renewed decline in economic growth and living standards. The regime’s only strategy for economic revival was to concentrate the large agricultural population in centers where they might be more easily controlled and mobilized. Opposed by the Hungarian minority as aimed at them, political opposition spread to Bucharest with the destruction of the city center to make way for a huge new Presidential Palace. Political opposition in Yugoslavia came from rivalry between the republic Communist parties but became fatal only in the 1980s. Its failed struggles with the debt crisis ended with hyperinflation in 1989. Belated economic reforms came too late to prevent the dissolution of the League of Yugoslav Communists (SKJ) early in 1990. The rapid rise of foreign debt, along with deficits in current account despite remittances and tourist income, began from 1976. By 1980, economic enterprises and related associations had founded 169 Basic Banks, some combined. Together they accounted for three quarters of Yugoslav bank assets, leaving the National Bank branches and the republic banks far behind. As universal banks charging the still standard interest rate of 6 percent to borrowers, they drew in loans from US and West European banks. For 1975–​80, foreign debt jumped from $5.5 billion to $20.5 billion. As doubled after 1980 to 36 percent a year, domestic savings had shifted to foreign exchange accounts, leaving the Basic Banks to service their hard currency debts in depreciating dinars. After a New York bank refused another large loan,Yugoslavia faced default on debt service of $4 billion due in 1982. 503

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Under US leadership, an international consortium of lenders dubbed the Friends of Yugoslavia assembled the full sum in 1983 needed to reschedule the debt and guarantee its deferred payment. Extended with more support to 1984, its terms however required a Stand-​ By-​Agreement with the IMF for dinar devaluation and interest rates raised 1 percent above the rate of inflation. Frustrated by new legislation to restrict further borrowing, many industrial firms resorted to inter-​enterprise credits outside the banking system. Soon legalizing the practice as Internal Banks, they added to the momentum for inflation. The Federal Executive Council (SIV) had convened a forum on economic reform to restrain the excessive borrowing and the leverage of the Workers Councils in 1983 and on political reform to restrain the republic rivalries in 1986. Both failed, and the SIV could only agree on abandoning the IMF agreement. The rate of inflation doubled again by 1988 and then soured past 2,000 percent in 1989. Individual republics, led by Slovenia, began looking for and soon finding a political exit from a single economy and a single party. Bulgaria’s smaller Western debt of US$10 billion was slower to accumulate and made a lesser contribution to the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989. The continuing commitment to investment in heavy industry played a larger role. By the late 1970s, hard currency earned through Bulgarian exports to Western Europe were not enough to cover the industrial machinery and inputs needed in return. Lending from the BNB was already providing over half of industrial investment by 1975. After the State Planning Commission relaxed its restriction on enterprises’ own investment in 1978, they already accounted for almost half of industrial investment by 1981. BNB oversight failed to prevent many of them from finding Western credit to cover their needed imports. A new Mineral Bank founded to fund supportable loans for mining soon found itself making industrial loans as well. The Soviet Union had stepped in to help, as the United States did for Yugoslavia, here by allowing Bulgaria to resell its petroleum exports for hard currency. IMF and Western objections forced a stop to the practice in 1984. By 1986, Bulgaria faced the prospect of default on its Western debt service.The BNB was able to react with an overdue devaluation of the currency and the elimination of multiple exchange rates. The next year, it abolished or rescheduled half of its loans as non-​preforming and created a second tier of seven new specialized banks. Freed for universal operations by1989, the BNB converted its own branches into 60 equity-​based banks. However, it was too late to reopen the access to Western lending or to reverse the leverage of the large metallurgical complexes accustomed to a semi-​automatic flow of investment.The pollution from the Kremikovski complex near Sofia and post-​Chernobyl fears from the new Soviet-​built nuclear power plant at Kozlodui weakened a political regime that could not survive the fall of the Berlin wall and the demise of other Communist regimes. Greece’s larger Western debt, $20 billion like Yugoslavia’s, was also slow to build up in the 1980s but its political and economic consequences were enduring. New leadership by the ruling PASOK party and the opening to West European banks had apparently reduced the burden during the 1990s.With new confidence, Greece adopted the euro as its currency in 2002 and its banks opened branches across Southeastern Europe. Then excess state borrowing and weak tax collection left Greece with a harder and longer recovery from the Western financial crisis of 2008 than any other member of the Eurozone or any of its neighbors. The economy endured a decade of domestic austerity under the IMF and EU restrictions that went with rescheduling more than the amount of the original debt. At least political democracy survived without the populist reaction to the demands of EU membership seen elsewhere in the former Communist Bloc. It was however a populist regime from 1981 to 1989 that put the economy in its original predicament. Andreas Papandreou led the Pan-​Hellenic Socialist party PASOK to a 504

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sweeping victory in the 1981 elections with a campaign for Allaghi (Change). Mixing socialism with populism and nationalism, it defeated the conservative ruling party of New Democracy under Konstantin Karamanlis, who had come to power after the end of dictatorship in 1974 (see the chapter by Othon Anastasakis). Its anti-​elite “movement for the non-​privileged” also targeted the conditions for membership of the European Economic Community and a NATO alliance that left half of Cyprus still occupied by fellow member Turkey. In power, Papandreou pursued Third World economic ties, as Romania had but without the advantage of oil exports. Domestically, his regime worked around the conservative lending policies of the major banks, still led by the National Bank of Greece to enlarge the public sector of the economy. It created a Public Sector Borrowing Requirement (PSBR) that drew directly on state budget revenues for loans and grants to subsidize the expansion of state enterprises in transport, energy, and telecommunications. State loans from European banks covered the shortfalls in state revenue. The swelling work forces were all state employees, receiving higher wages for shorter hours. Union contracts followed with further increases and higher pensions guaranteed in the face of mounting inflation. By 1985, the PSBR had provided a 31 percent rise in enterprise credits and accounted for almost 20 percent of GDP. That year, a new program for industrial reconstruction was launched to keep open some 250 manufacturing enterprises operating at a loss. Facing an annual inflation rate of 25 percent and a current account deficit of 10 percent, the regime agreed in 1986 to a Stabilization Program. Under a new economics minister, Kostas Simitis, both the inflation rate and the deficit were sharply reduced and the PSBR share of GDP cut to 13 percent by 1987.Yet with his dismissal, the gains were wiped out by 1989. The swollen public sector did not vanish after Papandreou’s forced resignation through illness and PASOK’s defeat in the 1990 elections. New Democracy’s regime elected in 1990 did allow regulation from the Bank of Greece and competition from foreign banks to aid in the privatization or elimination of loss-​making industrial firms. The other public enterprises, their state employees, and union contracts were still there. The PSBR support still took 13 percent of GDP. With debt servicing reduced by the adoption off the euro in 2002, fellow EU banks readily granted new state loans.Yet borrowing to finance the large public sector could not cover the mounting budget deficits exposed in the Western financial crisis of 2008. Since then, the Greek economy and society has continued to pay a higher price for servicing foreign debt than elsewhere in Southeastern Europe.

Conclusion Looking back from 1989 across the past four decades, we see predominantly industrialized economies and urban societies that had taken shape across Southeastern Europe since 1949. This was major accomplishment, replacing the poorly educated peasant majorities and little modernized rural agriculture of the interwar period. Removing the interwar burden of pre-​ 1914 and world war debts was an initial postwar advantage. To go beyond postwar recovery, however, capital was needed if labor was to be mobilized for modernization. All of the five new governments were committed to expanding the state-​sponsored investment that had begun by the late 1930s. All of them except non-​Communist Greece were also committed to rapid industrialization on the Soviet model. Its central planning had no place for private enterprise or the issuing or the issue of joint-​stock shares that had also contributed to interwar industrial growth. At the start, domestic taxation and foreign aid had financed the necessary investment. Everywhere but Greece, nationalized industrial enterprises drew heavily on subsidies from state budgets. Through the 1950s, this direct investment accounted for one third of national income, well beyond the Western shares. Foreign aid from the United States also supported economic 505

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growth in general in Greece and Yugoslavia. Soviet aid helped industrialization in Bulgaria and Albania, omitting Romania in favor of exacting reparations. From the mid-​1960s, as support from state budgets continued in the Communist regimes, domestic banks and Western bank loans, initially in Yugoslavia and then elsewhere stepped in to maintain rapid rates of growth, industry-​led everywhere but Greece. By the 1980s, however, all of them including Greece with a belatedly enlarged state sector, proved unable to revive growth rates and reassure their consumers. The burdens of debt service, familiar from the region’s history, had returned. Government responses varied, from inflationary devaluation in Yugoslavia and then Greece, combinations of a smaller number of large enterprises in Bulgaria to forced export and agricultural surpluses in Romania and Albania. None of these approaches succeeded in restoring the new investment capital needed from their own resources and no longer available from Western loans. Their failures contributed greatly to the Communist collapse and the change of government in Greece that began in 1989. Future financing was then left to privatization and revived stock markets, bank credit, and foreign direct investment. Initially promising prospects have since been called into question by the European financial crisis of 2008.

Selected Readings Avramov, Roumen. De-​stabilizatsiia, 1948–​1989. Sofia, 2008. Dragoumis, Mark. The Greek Economy, 1940–​2003. Athens, 2004. Haliiakis, Dimitri J. Money and Credit in a Developing Economy: The Greek Case. New York, 1978. Joint Economic Committee of the Congress of the United States. East European economies, Slow Growth in the 1980s. Washington, DC, 1986. Lampe, John R., Russell O. Prickett, and Ljubiša Adamović. Yugoslav-​American Economic Relations since World War II. Durham, NC, 1990. Lydall, Harold. Yugoslavia in Crisis. Oxford, 1989. Nedyalkov, Oleg and Lyudmila Dimova. The Bulgarian National Bank and its Role in Bulgarian Economic Development, 1879–​2008. Sofia, 2008. Sjöberg, Örjan and Michael Wyzan. Economic Change in the Balkan States Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia. New York, 1991.

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Epilogue

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EPILOGUE Southeastern Europe after the Cold War John R. Lampe and Ulf Brunnbauer

History’s judgment on Southeastern Europe in the 30 years since 1989 remains to be rendered. Readers nonetheless deserve some brief review in two final chapters. Since 1989, the new regimes and leaders across the region struggled initially with a transition to the single set of European standards to which most of them aspired. As the chapters assembled in this Handbook have demonstrated, these aspirations emerged not from a blank, premodern Balkan slate but from national identities and state-​building with a modernizing momentum.They had advanced from imperial division to a set of nation-​states on the European model in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Constraints continued from oversight by the Great Powers to the boundaries of the Cold War.The starts and stops since 1989, still unfolding, cannot be understood apart from the region’s own early modern and modern aspirations and constraints. Neither can they be understood without looking at the approaches of powerful players, especially the European Union and the United States, to Balkan politics after state-​socialism. National sovereignty as represented by the ethnic majority has been both a European aspiration and constraint. Rival ethnic claims, overlapping from premodern settlement, emerged only in the nineteenth century and then then became lethal in the two Balkan Wars and the two world wars. Rival claims and grievances burdened especially the two Yugoslavias. They fed the wars between 1991 and 1999, which divided the six former Yugoslav republics into seven separate successor states as seen in Map 50.1. Marie-​Janine Calic reviews the hard course of these armed conflicts. They began almost bloodlessly in Slovenia in 1991 and continued in Croatia in 1992 with 20,000 dead in a stalemate with Serbia-​supported armed Serb groups. Then the several-​sided Bosnian war from 1992 cost over 100,000 lives and confounded UN peace-​ keeping forces. NATO intervention ended the conflict in 1995 and its air campaign forced the Serbian evacuation of Kosovo in 1999. Some 900,000 Kosovar Albanians returned from their forced flight to Albania or Macedonia, unlike Bosnia’s 1 million refugees who fled abroad or to their ethnic entities, ratified by the Dayton Agreement between the three sides. Sparked by a mobilized youth movement, Serbia’s opposition parties and disillusioned public rose up. They replaced the authoritarian regime of Slobodan Milošević with multi-​party elections and European aspirations. Croatian elections did the same after the death of President Franjo Tudjman in 1999. Similar aspirations made less progress in Bosnia-​Herzegovina. Secured with disarmament and a NATO contingent, confederal authority was divided between the Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), 509

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Map 50.1  Southeastern Europe today.

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Croats, and Serbs, the later receiving their own entity. The Office of the High Representative, created by the UN Security Council in 1995, was supposed to bring these disputing ethnically based factions together –​so far with limited success. In Macedonia, a National Liberation Army formed from the large Albanian minority with some Kosovar Albanians clashed with the hastily formed Macedonian army and police until another international intervention and European-​American mediation brokered the Ohrid Framework Agreement in 2001. A small NATO contingent stayed to secure the border with Kosovo and Serbia. Albanian representation in the parliament and later also in public administration moved ahead, and Albanian became the second official language of the country. Relations with Greece would remain unsettled over the “name issue” all the way to 2018, when both sides accepted “North Macedonia” as the new name of the country. Until then, Greece had refused to recognize what was till 2018 officially called FYROM, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, as a candidate for NATO and EU membership. Now, after the name change, Greece is no longer blocking EU accession negotiations, which the European Commission long ago has recommended opening, but France is (as of March 2020). In Kosovo, only as recently as in 2019 did a generation of politicians take over government, whose roots do not lie in the either peaceful or violent opposition to Serbian domination in the 1990s. Elsewhere in Southeastern Europe, the early years after 1989 witnessed little progress despite the absence of armed conflict. By the mid-​1990s, widespread economic hardship had followed from declining national income and disconnected foreign trade. Half a million emigrants had left Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania. Serbia had to accept the same number of Serb refugees from Bosnia and Croatia, joined by more from Kosovo in 1999. By then, however, a variety of promising turns affirmed the political pluralism and launched the other reforms needed for membership in the European Union and for accelerating economic growth. The slow start and then domestic advance in meeting these standards would win EU membership for Slovenia in 2004, Romania and Bulgaria in 2007, and Croatia in 2013. In 2003, the EU’s European Council set down the Copenhagen Criteria to open the way to new EU candidates under the Stability and Association Agreements already authorized since 1997. Copenhagen conditionality ranged from democratic governance after open elections and under legitimate and transparent public institutions, the rule of law, and minority rights to a functioning market economy. Here we call attention to the region’s struggle with electoral democracy and economic reform. The final chapter by Klaus Buchenau moves from the promise of European integration past “the lost decade” of the 1990s for the post-​Communist regimes to the Greek financial crisis of 2008–​10 and the wider challenges of EU conditionality and intervention, now in the face of its own travails. By the mid-​1990s, multi-​party elections in Albania and Romania ended the virtual single-​ party regimes that had consolidated in the first years of transition. The Democratic Party in Romania won the election of 1996 with a coalition that included representatives of the large Hungarian minority. In Albania, widespread corruption in the 1996 election and the collapse of regime-​backed pyramid schemes the following year forced the increasingly authoritarian Sali Berisha to resign the presidency. Fair elections followed in 1998 under a new constitution. Bulgarian elections in 1997 dismissed the last government led by an unreformed Socialist Party and their catastrophic economic policies, which had led the economy into hyperinflation. In subsequent elections, different political parties alternated in power in Sofia, including one led by the former King Simeon. While this was a testament to the robustness of Bulgaria’s multi-​party system and fairness of elections, it also indicated widespread frustration with the status-​quo and the “establishment.” In Greece, the new PASOK leadership reined in the state enterprises and

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seemed to pursue enough debt reduction and economic reform to decide to adopt the euro in 2001. As it later turned out, they had subsequently pursued creative book-​keeping in communicating budget numbers to Brussels that greatly understated the deficits. Then from 2008, as detailed by Buchenau, Greece’s own budget deficit and foreign debt crisis forced the return of the foreign financial oversight with which Greece had century-​long experience as noted in our earlier chapters. Now it came from the EU, the European Central Bank, and the international Monetary Fund. Harsh domestic austerity from 2008 forward created a new political landscape, now minus PASOK but plus an insurgent radical left, which gained power in 2015 before the conservatives came back to power in 2019 in a sign of forgetfulness of the Greek electorate. In the process, the financial functioning of a market economy in Greece has come under the same fire raised by the country’s foreign debt burdens such as before and after the First World War, but now with the potential to bring down the common European currency, hence the massive intervention and bail-out by Brussels. However, in the Yugoslav successor states and Albania, now dubbed the Western Balkans, much had been accomplished by 2008. Fiscal reform in balancing state budgets and trimming public employment were major accomplishments. GDP per capita had climbed by nearly one half since 1999, while shares of foreign trade with EU members were approaching one half. Interregional shares also increased. Direct foreign investment and credit largely from foreign banks had fueled rising rates of economic growth, now surpassing foreign aid as it retreated from its peak in 2002. Small and medium-​sized enterprises grew with privatization for the great majority. Large public enterprises were slower to be privatized or create the job growth needed to relieve double-​digit unemployment. The few large new private enterprises were largely conglomerates for food marketing or mass media assembled by so-​called “oligarchs” who relied on political connections for privileges. Wide-​spread corruption and nepotism has been one powerful driver of still massive emigration from the region, much higher wages in Western Europe, notably in Germany, another. Less had been done for public administration, the rule of law and judicial reform, crucial chapters to be closed in applications for EU accession. Kosovo declared independence in 2008 hoping to launch its own application. Despite the support of the EU’s legal mission to Kosovo (EULEX) that replaced the NATO-​led UNMIK, Kosovo has not resolved the dispute with Serbia on the common border that would be needed for EU membership. Nor has the High Commissioner in Bosnia-​Herzegovina ended the disqualifying impasse between the three constitutive peoples. Internal political divisions have also continued to trouble the region’s other states and societies. Since the European financial crisis of 2008, direct foreign investment and bank credit fell back, with only conditional loans from the IMF and the World Bank to take its place. The recent influx of Middle-​Eastern refugees, who transited the region on their way to Austria, Germany, and northern Europe, has added to the economic and political instability that has descended not just on Greece and the rest of Southeastern Europe. The refugees and still fragile economic recoveries have fed nationalist agendas in the region, just as political fractures in a European Union threaten the further integration the caesura of 1989 was expected to advance. At this writing, both European integration and its inclusion of Southeastern Europe are unfinished business. Meanwhile, renewed external influence from Russia and Turkey, now joined by China, are intruding across the region while the long American engagement is seen to recede. Here lies another continuity of the region’s history, as emphasized in the Overviews to our chapters. First Balkan and now Southeast European polities have not been fully “the masters in their own house.” They remain surrounded by Great Powers whose interests are not necessarily their own. 512

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Selected Readings Bartlett, William. Europe’s Troubled Region: Economic Development, Institutional Reform and Social Welfare in the Western Balkans. London, 2007. Bieber, Florian, Gülnur Aybet, eds. EU Conditionality in the Western Balkans. London, 2013. Bogdani, Mirela and John Laughlin. Albania and the European Union. A Transition Journey Toward Integration and Accession. London, 2007. Cohen, Lenard J. and John R. Lampe. Embracing Democracy in the Western Balkans: From Postconflict Struggles Toward European Integration. Washington, DC, 2011. Dimitrov,Vesselin. Bulgaria,The Uneven Transition. London, 2001. Inotai, András. The European Union and Southeastern Europe: Troubled Waters Ahead? Brussels, 2007. Papadimitrou, Dimitriu and David Phenemore. Romania and the European Union. From Marginalization to Membership. London, 2008. Pasioutas, Fotios. Greek Banking from the Pre-​Euro Reforms to the Financial Crisis and Beyond. London, 2012. Pridham, Geoffrey and Tom Gallagher, eds. Experimenting with Democracy. Regime Change in the Balkans. London, 2000. Ripiloski, Sasho. Conflict in Macedonia: A Paradox in the Former Yugoslavia. Boulder, Colo., 2011. Siani-​Davis, Peter, ed. International Intervention in the Balkans Since 1995. London, 2003.

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51 YUGOSLAVIA’S WARS OF SUCCESSION 1991–1999 Marie-​Janine  Calic

Following the death of Josip Broz Tito in 1980, the multi-​national state of Yugoslavia started to disintegrate. The federation, which was composed of six republics, had suffered from grave structural problems since its creation in 1945  –​including unresolved historical conflicts, regional disparities, as well as severe political disputes over constitutional and economic matters. In the mid-​1980s, the country entered deep economic and political crisis. The postwar boom, the idea of “brotherhood and unity,” and Yugoslavia’s international prestige faded away. Eventually, the break-​down of socialism and, in January 1990, the dissolution of the League of Communists, Yugoslavia’s single ruling party, resulted in total political deadlock over necessary reforms. Orderly transfer to multiparty democracy and a market economy became impossible as federal institutions, the media, and the state security apparatus underwent an unprecedented process of disintegration. By that time, the diverging interests of the republics’ leaderships seemed to be irreconcilable. Serbia was pushing for greater centralization at the federal level. Cutting down Kosovo’s autonomy in March 1989 was a first step. Meanwhile, Slovenia and Croatia insisted on more decentralization, seeking to promote democratization, a market economy, and closer relations with the European Community. The move toward more independence by Slovenia and Croatia threatened the national unity of the Serbs, more than one quarter of whom lived outside Serbia. There were 580,000 Serbs living in Croatia (12.2 percent of the republic’s population), 1.4 million in Bosnia and Herzegovina (31 percent) and 200,000 in Kosovo (10 percent). Belgrade’s aim was to preserve Yugoslavia, the first state ever to have unified the Serbs. If this would not be possible, then the goal was to hold together all of the areas occupied by Serbs. Key Serbian political and military leaders later acknowledged that they had decided to “defend” Serbs living in Croatia and to seek full control over Bosnia and Herzegovina. They also considered creating a new Yugoslav state which should include all Serbs and Montenegrins. On June 25, 1991, both Slovenia and Croatia unilaterally declared their independence. The international community of states was split over the issue of whether this meant unlawful secession from Yugoslavia, or whether the federal state had legally disintegrated into its constituent parts. When Slovenia took the first step toward establishing an international border with Croatia, the first armed confrontation with the Yugoslav People’s Army erupted. Slovenia 514

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emerged relatively unscathed from the ensuing “Ten-​Day War,” having lost 18 soldiers, as opposed to 44 dead from the isolated units of the federal army.

The war in Croatia Representatives of the European Community hosted negotiations on July 7, 1991, over the future of Yugoslavia and the modalities of its eventual break-​up on the Adriatic island of Brioni. Although Slovenia and Croatia agreed to postpone their independence for three months, the situation in Croatia was heating up. In the spring of 1991, isolated incidents of violent clashes between Croatian Serbs and Croatian police forces had already occurred in places like Plitvice and Borovo Selo. After Croatia’s declaration of independence more serious armed conflicts erupted in the regions of Banija, Dalmatia, and Slavonia between Croatian armed forces, on the one hand, and the Yugoslav People’s Army and rebel Serb forces, on the other. The first mass killing of Croatian civilians and soldiers by local Serb units took place in Kozibrod on July 26, 1991, followed by atrocities in other villages in Slavonia, Banija, Dalmatia, and in the town of Vukovar. The Croatian government decided on September 14, 1991, to attack all garrisons of the Yugoslav People’s Army on the territory of its republic. The Yugoslav General Staff responded by launching a major offensive from eastern Slavonia, expelling non-​Serbs from the areas over which they took control. Yugoslav troops surrounded the city of Vukovar and shelled the city center. Serb paramilitary units invaded the city and its surroundings, leaving a bloody trail of dead bodies behind them. For weeks, the city suffered from massive bombardment until, reduced to rubble, it surrendered in November.The historic city of Dubrovnik, “the pearl of the Adriatic,” was attacked in October 1991. Within a few weeks, eastern Croatia and the Krajina region along the border to Bosnia came completely under the control of the rebellious Serbs. The Croat population, a total of more than half a million people, were systematically driven out by them or fled. On December 19, 1991, the formation of the “Republic of Serb Krajina” was proclaimed. All international attempts to mediate a political solution between the warring factions failed, including a peace conference hosted by the European Community in The Hague on September 7, 1991. Innumerable ceasefires were broken. Despite international voices of warning, including the United States and the United Nations, Germany, in the face of escalating combat operations, decided unilaterally to recognize Slovenia and Croatia before Christmas 1991. The hope was that by internationalizing the crisis, the Yugoslav People’s Army would be deterred from further attacks. To maintain political unity, the European Community as well decided to recognize Slovenia and Croatia on January 15, 1992. Following a UN-​brokered truce in January 1992, an international United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) was deployed a month later in those areas in Croatia where Serbs constituted the majority or a substantial minority of the population. Its mandate comprised peacekeeping, return of refugees and IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) as well as preparing for a political solution to this conflict. By 1993–​4, 18,200 Croats lived within the Krajina, as compared to 353,595 before the war. On the other hand, tens of thousands of Serbs fled Croatia or were expelled. By mid-​October 1991, 78,555 refugees from Croatia had arrived in Serbia.

Bosnia-​Herzegovina Against a background of escalating war in Croatia, the government of Bosnia-​Herzegovina in Sarajevo was deeply concerned about the future of its multi-​ethnic republic. According to 515

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the 1991 census, the population of Bosnia-​Herzegovina totaled 4.37 million people, of which 43.5 percent were Muslims, 31.2 percent Serbs, 17.4 percent Croats, and 5.5 percent (ethnically undetermined) Yugoslavs. The remaining 2.4 percent consisted of numerous other nationalities. Not a single municipality was homogenous, and clear ethnic boundaries did not exist. Following the German recognition of Slovenia and Croatia, representatives of Bosnian Croats and Muslims decided that Bosnia-​Herzegovina should become independent too. They did not want to keep their republic in a Serb-​dominated Yugoslav rump state. On October 14, 1991, the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) SDA and the Croat HDZ-​BiH party groups in Bosnia’s parliament drafted a resolution for independence against the votes of the Serb party SDS. The incensed Serbs then quit the three-​party coalition government and, in protest, refused to participate any longer in the institutions. All of the republic’s institutions and organizations split into ethnic components, including parliament, city councils, factory assemblies, the media, and security forces. In one public speech, Radovan Karadžić, the Serb political leader, called for ethnic segregation “like in Turkish times.” On December 24, 1991, Bosnia-​ Herzegovina’s rump government successfully petitioned the European Community for official recognition, along with Macedonia, Slovenia, and Croatia. In contrast, Montenegro decided to remain united with Serbia. In 1992, the two republics formed the new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). Starting in the fall of 1991, Bosnian Serbs worked on their transition to independence much in the same way as their fellow Serbs in Croatia did. In November, they held an illegal plebiscite to remain in Yugoslavia and on January 9, 1992, proclaimed the Republic of the Serb People of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was later renamed the Serb Republic (Republika Srpska). The illegally formed entity was to include all municipalities, local communities, and populated places in which a majority of Serbs had voted in the self-​organized plebiscite to remain in Yugoslavia. However, nearly all of them were ethnically mixed. The Bosnian Serb leadership started preparations for what was later to be known as “ethnic cleansing.” In accordance with the terms set by the European Community for the recognition of new states, the Bosnian government organized a referendum on independence, held on February 29 and March 1, 1992, which the Serbs boycotted. Voter participation in this referendum was below 64  percent, of which 99  percent voted in favor of independence. On April 6, 1992, Bosnia-​ Herzegovina was officially recognized by the European Community as a sovereign state. The next day, the Bosnian Serbs declared the independence of their republic from Bosnia-​Herzegovina. Prior to these events, local violent clashes had already occurred. Both Bosniaks and Serbs erected barricades and checkpoints in Sarajevo in order to take control of strategic buildings, military equipment, and city quarters. The first shooting began on April 5, triggering extensive gunfire and shelling from both sides. Violent clashes also occurred in many other parts of Bosnia-​Herzegovina in early April 1992 and quickly escalated into a major armed conflict. Once independence was declared, the armed forces of the Bosnian Serbs, aided by the Yugoslav People’s Army, launched an assault and first overran eastern Bosnia along the Drina River, the northern Posavina corridor, eastern Herzegovina, and Bosnian Krajina, thereby creating a territorial bridge between Serbia, Bosnia-​Herzegovina, and Croatia. General Ratko Mladić ordered his 250,000-​man army to drive the non-​Serb population out of the areas they conquered. Within a couple of months, hundreds of thousands of people were on the move, and several tens of thousands were killed. The 100,000 soldiers from the Bosnian-​Muslim (Bosniak) Territorial Defense Force and loyal paramilitary troops were poorly armed and thus unable to stop the Serbs. By July 1992, barely four months after the outbreak of war, the Serbs controlled more than two-​thirds of Bosnian territory. 516

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As early as fall of 1991, many regions with a Bosniak majority, for instance in Eastern Bosnia, were declared to be part of the future Bosnian Serb state. When the war started in spring 1992, Bosnian Serb armed forces began shelling towns with grenades and artillery, before paramilitary units and volunteers like Arkan’s Tigers,Vojislav Šešelj’s Chetniks, and the White Eagles combed the streets and houses. They forced men and women to line up, then systematically separated and herded them into camps. The paramilitary bands revived practices known from the Second World War: the men were driven to the bridges, shot, and their bodies thrown into the river. Within a few weeks, nearly the entire Bosniak population had been driven out. The Serb forces encircled Sarajevo and maintained their siege of the city for 44 torturous months until the war ended. From the hills surrounding Sarajevo, they shelled the city incessantly, sometimes showering it with as many as 500 grenades per hour. Snipers arbitrarily gunned down civilians when they went out to get water, stood in line for food, sat in the streetcar, or simply walked down the street. UNPROFOR organized an international humanitarian air lift to the besieged city. Although Bosniaks and Croats in Bosnia-​ Herzegovina had established joint command structures and had been fighting side by side against the Serbs since the start of the war, relations deteriorated in the autumn of 1992 when disputes arose over the future constitution of the independent state. The nationalist wing of the Bosnian Croat HDZ party, centered in Herzegovina, advocated the unification of areas settled by Croats with Croatia. In November 1991 the autonomous region of Herceg Bosna was formed and declared to be a separate state on July 3, 1992. Its army, the Croatian Defense Council, now began to seize control of areas in which the majority of the population were Bosniaks. In October 1992, the so-​called Second War broke out between these two former allies, resulting in serious violations of international humanitarian law against civilians on both sides. Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, sent troops to support his fellow countrymen militarily. After a meeting between the Croatian president and Slobodan Milošević in Karadjordjevo on March 25, 1991, rumors spread that Zagreb and Belgrade might now reach an agreement on the division of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the Muslims’ expense. The war between Croats and Bosniaks caused horrendous destruction in central Bosnia and in Herzegovina. It changed the world’s image of Croatia as an innocent victim of Serb aggression and greatly perplexed the Western powers. Not until March 1994 could international mediators settle the conflict and commit the adversaries to the formation of a common state entity, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.Yet, the fighting continued in many regions. As the war expanded, so-​called “ethnic cleansing,” the planned and violent removal of undesired populations from conquered territory, occurred on a large scale. More than 2.2 million people had already been driven out of their home territories between April and August 1992. Serb armed forces had attacked 37 municipalities, most notably Zvornik, Bratunac, Vlasenica, Višegrad, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Ključ, and municipalities along the Sava River Valley. In total, approximately 850 Bosniak-​and Croat-​occupied villages were obliterated, and entire families disappeared. Roma communities were also heavily affected. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was able to prove later that the political preparation of mass expulsion in Bosnia-​Herzegovina dated back to the first half of 1991 when the Bosnian Serbs, led by the SDS, had decided to form a separate state and to arm their compatriots. In December 1991, so-​called Crisis Staffs (later War Presidencies) began to convene as extraordinary administrative bodies, which took steps to prepare for separating ethnic groups. After the Bosnian Serb parliament proclaimed the Bosnian Serb Republic in January 1992, the new bodies brought the claimed regions systematically under their control starting in late March. Ethnic exclusion was a key organizing principle of the new state. It was 517

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planned and prepared by politicians and administrations, and carried out within the framework of military operations by special forces of the regular army or by paramilitary units. As had been done during the Second World War, the attackers tortured and massacred civilians, burned down houses and entire villages. The ethnic composition of many municipalities thereby changed radically. Overall, 81.74 percent of all non-​Serbs were driven out of the territory of the Republika Srpska during the three and a half years of war. At the same time, the number of non-​Serbs in the territory of the Croat-​ Bosniak federation in Bosnia and Herzegovina increased by 41.18 percent. Whereas most incidents of “ethnic cleansing” were attributed to the Bosnian Serbs at the beginning of the war, the Croat and Bosniak armed forces also homogenized those regions they conquered in order to consolidate territorial gains. According to estimates made by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Serb population fell between 1991 and mid-​1994 from 43,595 to 5,000 in Western Herzegovina; from 79,355 to 20,000 in the Zenica region; from 82,235 to 23,000 in the Tuzla area; and from 29,398 to 1,609 in the Bihać region. At the same time, a clear majority of the dead and displaced were Bosniaks. In the spring of 1992, published photographs of Serb war prisoner camps, such as Omarska, Keraterm, and Manjača, resembled German concentration camps from World War II. Experts would later compile a list of about 400 prisons, police stations, schools, warehouses, or factories in which the warring sides interned men, women, and children under inhumane conditions. On the heels of these revelations came other shocking reports of mass executions and mass rapes, torture, and mutilation. “Bosnia” became a code word for the extreme brutality of the war –​and for the guilty conscience of the international community for allowing it to happen. The more numerous and defiant the unwanted population groups were in a region, the more brutal were the measures taken against them. “Ethnic cleansing” was sometimes carried out through intimidation and discrimination, sometimes by way of detention and deportation or by torture and mass murder. Houses, neighborhoods, town centers, and infrastructure were targeted for complete destruction. All cultural evidence of these groups was also to disappear, which explains why the historic centers of cities were deliberately shelled and churches, mosques, cemeteries, libraries, archives, and other buildings were destroyed. Nearly every mosque and three out of four Catholic churches were damaged or completely demolished during the war. Orthodox churches and monasteries were also targeted for attack. The Yugoslav People’s Army in Serbia supported the campaign for a separate Serb state by providing supplies of arms and gasoline to the Bosnian Serb armed forces across the border. As many as 2,000 of its soldiers fought alongside the Bosnian Serb forces, and various Yugoslav officers served under their command. Special operation units of the Serbian ministry of internal affairs, such as the “Red Berets” also operated on Bosnian territory. This would later lead, for the first time in history, to the trial of a former head of state of Serbia –​President Slobodan Milošević –​before an international criminal tribunal on the charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and violations of the laws or customs of war. His unexpected death in 2006 at the detainment center in The Hague brought a sudden end to his trial. The Western states, in the meantime, focused on a strategy of humanitarian damage control. They imposed an arms embargo on the whole former Yugoslav area and tasked the UN with distributing food and medicine in Sarajevo. Serbia and Montenegro, which together formed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, were hit with comprehensive economic and diplomatic sanctions in May 1992. In the spring of 1993, the UN Security Council declared Srebrenica, Sarajevo, Tuzla, Žepa, Goražde, and Bihać as “safe areas.” Under the cover of NATO war planes, lightly armed Blue Helmet-​clad peacekeepers were to provide humanitarian relief for the 518

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growing tide of refugees. Their rules of engagement were to remain impartial, using force only in self-​defense. Moreover, the Blue Helmets lacked the mandate and human and military resources for a combat mission. On the morning of July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb army and police units stormed the Srebrenica safe area after days of siege. More than 8,300 men and boys were systematically executed. The tragedy brought the wholly insufficient response of the international community to the attention of the entire world. The mass murder in Srebrenica, which the ICTY later qualified as genocide, became a turning point in Western policy toward the conflict. NATO began a massive air bombardment of Serbian positions in Bosnia-​Herzegovina. With the help of American weapons and military advisors, previously outgunned Croat and Bosniak forces gained new strength. The Croatian government likewise received American support, allowing it to overtake the Serb Republic of Krajina in its Operation Oluja (Storm) of August 1995, and to expel around 150,000 to 200,000 Serbs from Croatia. By the end of the summer of 1995, there was a military stalemate in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Bosnian Serbs and the allied Croat-​Bosniak forces each held around half of the state’s territory. Neither side could count on further territorial gains. In light of this situation, the Bosnia Contact Group presented a new peace plan. After difficult negotiations, the war ended with the Dayton Agreement on November 21, 1995. Bosnia-​Herzegovina remained a unified state with its prewar borders but was now divided into two largely independent federal entities. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, governed by Croats and Bosniaks, received 51 percent of the state’s territory, while the Republika Srpska received 49 percent. All refugees and IDPs were to be allowed to return to their home regions. A High Representative with quasi-​dictatorial powers, supported by a NATO peacekeeping force of 60,000 was tasked to oversee the implementation of the highly complex constitution and other administration. Altogether more than 100,000 people had lost their lives.

Kosovo With the Dayton Peace Accord, the Yugoslav war of secession had not ended. Amidst grave violations of human rights and an intensifying economic crisis, the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army appeared on the scene in 1996, after Serbia and the West had continued to ignore the calls for independence by those “forgotten by Dayton,” i.e. Kosovo’s Albanian majority population. After Serbian security forces cracked down hard on the rebels, the conflict escalated into war in March 1998. Once again, thousands took flight. When 45 Albanians were murdered in the village of Račak in January 1999, determination grew in the West to end the conflict militarily in order to prevent a “second Bosnia.” Attempts at international mediation, leading to negotiations at the Château de Rambouillet in France, were unsuccessful. Without a UN Security Council resolution, NATO began airstrikes against Serbian military installations, infrastructure, and industrial sites in March 1999. One of the largest population movements in postwar European history took place parallel to the war, as around 800,000 people fled or were expelled from Kosovo. However, the accusation persistently leveled by Western governments and NATO that the Serbian armed forces were deploying a long-​prepared “Horseshoe Plan” of targeted “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo was later proven to be false. Three months after the beginning of the military intervention, Belgrade accepted a UN resolution to turn Kosovo into an international protectorate. The UN Security Council passed Resolution 1244 on June 10, 1999, established the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, and shortly thereafter, a peacekeeping force under NATO command arrived there. The international civilian and military presence would oversee the return of refugees and 519

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IDPs and the withdrawal of military forces from Kosovo. The main objective was to promote “the establishment, pending a final settlement, of substantial autonomy and self-​government in Kosovo.” Resolution 1244 was however contradictory in terms of international law:  it confirmed territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on one hand, while referring to the right of self-​determination for Kosovo on the other. Therefore, a process to determine the future status of Kosovo was started. UN Special Envoy Martti Ahtisaari proposed to grant Kosovo “supervised independence.” Because this plan did not obtain Security Council approval, Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence on February 17, 2008. By February 2019, 113 out of 193 UN member states have recognized Kosovo including 23 out of 28 EU member states. With the end of the war in Kosovo in 1999, the Kosovo Liberation Army sought a new field of action in neighboring Macedonia. In 2001, there was an escalating conflict between Albanian rebels and Macedonian security forces over the union of all Albanian-​occupied areas. More than 200 people were killed, and around 100,000 fled or were expelled. In August 2001, the EU and the United States brokered a peace agreement that gave the Albanians in Macedonia more rights. Today, seven states have emerged where Yugoslavia once existed: newly North Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-​Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. Many municipalities in that area have changed their ethnic structure substantially and, perhaps, permanently.

Selected Readings Calic, Marie-​ Janine. “Ethnic Cleansing and War Crimes.” In Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies. A Scholars´ Initiative, eds. Charles Ingrao and Thomas A. Emmert. West Lafayette, 2nd ed., 2013, 114–​53. Calic, Marie-​Janine. A History of Yugoslavia. West Lafayette, Ind., 2019. Djokić, Dejan, ed. Yugoslavism. Histories of a Failed Idea 1918–​1992. London, 2003. Glaurdić, Josip. The Hour of Europe:  Western Powers and the Breakup of Yugoslavia. New Haven, Conn., 2011. Jović, Dejan. Yugoslavia: A State that Withered away. West Lafayette, Ind., 2009. Lampe, John R. Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country. Cambridge, 2000. Ramet, Sabrina P. Thinking about Yugoslavia. Scholarly Debates about the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. Cambridge, 2005. Woodward, Susan. Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War. Washington, DC, 1995.

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52 FROM FOREIGN INTERVENTION TO EUROPEAN INTEGRATION Southeastern Europe since 1989 Klaus Buchenau

European integration From the perspective of 2019, it is impossible to give the post-​1989 history of Southeastern Europe either a simply optimistic or pessimistic twist. In a region which, since the early modern period, has suffered from the rivalry of external powers more than it profited from it, European integration has clearly been a promising prospect. It would bring a new form of bonding, leaving large parts of nation state sovereignty intact while setting up a single legal and political framework which facilitates cooperation within Southeastern Europe and on the continent as a whole. Theoretically, European integration not only diminishes the arena for conflict and but also promotes economic development through access to the Common Market and to the EU’s Structural Funds. But so far, European integration has produced uneven economic results in Southeastern Europe. It only strengthened differences between the states within the region, especially between those already members of the Union and those who are not. Another cleavage goes right through the societies themselves, dividing citizens who feel they benefit from European integration from those who doubt it. At its 2003 summit in Thessaloniki, the EU provided all countries of the region the opportunity to join the Union. At that time, accession negotiations had already been concluded with Slovenia and were under way with Romania and Bulgaria. In the case of Croatia, negotiations had not yet begun, but were clearly forthcoming. The promise from Thessaloniki came in an era of optimism  –​before the financial and economic crisis of 2008/​9 produced a populist backlash across Europe, which greatly strengthened so-​called enlargement fatigue. Slovenia and the Republic of Cyprus managed to join the EU in 2004. Romania and Bulgaria followed in 2007. Since then, only Croatia was added in 2013. For all the other (potential) candidates, the accession process is under way but at a slow, hesitant pace. Even those who have proceeded furthest in their negotiations with the EU, such as Montenegro, have not been given a possible date for accession. Montenegro has been negotiating for EU membership since 2012, and Serbia since 2014. In March 2020, the EU eventually took the decision to start membership 521

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negotiations with North Macedonia and Albania. North Macedonia, for its protracted conflict with Greece over its state name and state symbols had been “waiting in line” as an official membership candidate since 2003. Albania’s path was somewhat less difficult but even here, eleven years passed between the membership request (2009) and the opening of negotiations (2020). Bosnia-​Herzegovina submitted its membership application in 2016 but is not yet considered an official candidate for accession by the EU. Kosovo has not submitted such an application and is still not recognized by all EU members as an independent state. Waiting in the antechamber can be frustrating. At the 2019 EU-​Western Balkans summit in the Polish city of Poznań, representatives of the potential members were told that they must further reform their administrations to meet EU requirements, especially to tighten the rule of law. Promises of a quick accession, once a strong soft power tool of the EU to sweeten the hardships of transformation, were omitted by EU leaders. Unlike Bulgaria and Romania, the desire to prevent Russia’s return to the geopolitical stage no longer helps to accelerate negotiations. Russian interests have returned along with other geopolitical actors like China and Turkey, all creating their own network of loyalties. The reasons for the stagnation of EU enlargement are however not to be found there or within the region, but rather in Brussels and in the capitals of other member states. The rule of law, organized crime, and partly also the freedom of the media is certainly a problem in the Western Balkan states; but in 2007, similar issues did not stop the EU from accepting Romania and Bulgaria, under the condition that they submitted to a “cooperation and verification mechanism,” which is still in force today. Its objective is to assist judicial reform and to ensure that the countries undertake serious measures to fight corruption and organized crime (the latter pertains only to Bulgaria). The main difference between the cases of Romania/​Bulgaria on the one hand and Albania/​ Serbia/​Montenegro on the other seems to be a higher level of EU disunity at present, discouraging collective action not only with respect to enlargement. A second difference is today’s abundance of other conflicts and problems facing the EU that often are given a higher priority than the Western Balkans. These problems range from the rise of autocratic governments and serious rule of law violations within the EU, the rupture between the United States and leading EU states, the Brexit drama, and the conflict with Russia over Ukraine to global warming.

Historical legacies of communism and the 1990s It still remains a question why Southeastern Europe took over a decade to begin the integration into the EU which had gone more smoothly and quickly in Central Europe and the Baltic states. The immediate answer can be found in the 1990s, though the causes go back much farther. Unlike larger parts of Central Europe, the countries of Southeastern Europe had entered the communist period as agrarian societies, which were transformed into urban industrial ones only by communist rule. After 1945, comparatively weak elites and middle classes were easily destroyed by the communists and largely replaced by a new establishment, which literally owed everything, including their biographies, careers, and memories to the communist regime. Consequently, and unlike Central Europe, Southeastern Europe’s existing socialist states lacked strong dissident movements that developed alternative political visions. As their communist regimes struggled in the 1980s, no state-​socialist country in Southeastern Europe had an “alternative intelligentsia” large or strong enough to share or take over political power, let alone introduce a new, Western-​type political model. In that respect, only Yugoslavia was different, since its relative liberalism to some extent allowed the creation of alternative elites. But there, as a consequence of a divisively federalized and ethnicized political system, too many dissidents 522

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criticized communism from a nationalist point of view. Too few thought in terms of democratization or economic development as such, leaving a majority of critical voices to blame fellow Yugoslav nationalities for all kinds of shortcomings. Consequently, the region lost a whole decade that Central Europe used for a systematic reconfiguration of its political and economic system along Western lines. While Poland’s 1990 shock therapy brought an immediate closure of unprofitable state companies but also attracted private capital into economically more sustainable new ventures, post-​communist elites in Bulgaria and Romania continued to support socialist enterprises or their corrupt privatization to insiders with state funding.These policies secured them support from their voters for a while but discouraged foreign direct investment. The same was true for the agrarian policies in both countries, which favored land restitution to small landowners over the capitalist transformation of socialist collective farms. The failure of banking reform drove the governments into financial difficulties or led to, in the case of Bulgaria in 1997, to a bank run and outright economic collapse. New political elites with alternative programs were slow to come forward, and only in the late 1990s did a clear course toward political and economic reform, as well as toward EU membership, emerge in both countries. Albania, which only started transformation at the end of 1990, even suffered a full-​scale implosion of the state. Decades of crude communist authoritarianism, deep isolation, and ill-​ fated economic priorities –​manifest, for example, in the bloated steel industry –​had left an extremely poor country without viable institutions. In the 1990s, social and political tensions easily turned into violence; the emerging party competition between the Socialist Party and the Democratic Party was burdened with old “tribal” rivalries between the South and the North, further amplified by the difference between the Tosk and the Geg dialects. Uncontrolled mass emigration and crime undermined the state institutions that existed. When large-​scale Ponzi schemes collapsed in 1997, social protest turned into an armed upheaval which emptied all of the country’s prisons and military arsenals while destroying half of its police stations. The state vanished, and was only slowly rebuilt, a process that is still ongoing. While Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania went through “wild” 1990s but at least kept their countries together, Yugoslavia broke apart in war over a series of ethnic conflicts. Given Yugoslavia’s relatively close relationship with the West, its political elites were in principle better prepared for Western-​oriented political and economic transformation; Yugoslavia had even negotiated with the European Community over associate status. But after a phase of mutual blockades between the republics within Yugoslavia, the communist elites of Slovenia and Croatia came to the conclusion that the creation of full national statehood was a prerequisite for all other reforms of the system. Serbia under Slobodan Milošević reacted with a strategy to carve a Greater Serbia out of the ruins of Yugoslavia, claiming to only protect Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia-​Herzegovina and arming them for violent struggle against the independence of their republics. Slovenia’s and Croatia’s declaration of independence in June 1991 triggered a chain reaction throughout the country, leading to similar declarations in Macedonia (September 1991) and Bosnia-​Herzegovina (March 1992). The Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia-​Herzegovina fought against the new states and violently expelled non-​Serb populations from the territories their armed forces began to control.The term “ethnic cleansing” was coined in the process.This strategy triggered another chain reaction and led to murderous warfare against civilians of the respective “enemy nation” by all warring sides. Once the West, the United Nations, and NATO massively intervened in the former Yugoslavia, these external actors must be considered co-​responsible for the outcomes. The diplomatic recognition of Slovenia and Croatia did not cause the violence in Croatia, but the Serb-​ Croat fighting there made the further declaration of independence in Bosnia-​Herzegovina and 523

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its international recognition a prescription for a far deadlier conflict. As in Croatia, half-​hearted UN military interventions in the Bosnian War failed to stop the fighting, except between Bosnian Muslims and Croats. Only a US-​led NATO intervention forced the Bosnian Serbs to accept the Dayton Peace Agreement of December 1995. At least ending the war, its terms made Bosnia-​Herzegovina a temporary Western semi-​protectorate, divided on ethnic lines in a complex confederation. Croatia, helped by Western weapon deliveries, had “liberated” its Serb-​occupied territories some months earlier, its military forcing a mass exodus of the Serbian population. Serbia’s Autonomous Province of Kosovo, where Serb police had been suppressing the Albanian national movement since the late 1980s, was at first passed over by the international peacemakers at Dayton, who chose not to burden their settlement endeavors in Bosnia by new charges against Serbia. The escalation of Serbian repression in Kosovo entered a new phase in 1997 when Albanian guerilla forces (UÇK) began to attack Serb police and military. The mass expulsion of Albanians and the outbreak of open war led to international military intervention in March 1999. NATO proceeded to bomb targets in rump Yugoslavia for three months without a UN mandate. NATO’s goal was to force the Serbian police and army to withdraw from Kosovo and to allow the almost 1 million Kosovar Albanians who had been forced to flee to return.They did soon return in the process that followed Serbian defeat in June 1999, leaving a small Serb minority. Kosovo became another western semi-​protectorate, which even after its unilateral declaration of independence in 2008 remained under close surveillance. In the zones affected by violent ethnic conflict in former Yugoslavia, functioning markets, democratic institutions, or the rule of law were especially hard to develop. The belligerent sides assembled around strongmen who blended politics and warfare, installing their cronies in state institutions and in enterprises. When the wars were over, transformation could finally start, but shady wartime networks proved a heavy burden for the introduction of the rule of law. This is true for Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-​Herzegovina, and Kosovo, less so for Slovenia, where the war was too short to leave a warlord heritage. A special case is Macedonia, which almost faced a civil war between Macedonians and Albanians in 2000, also as a consequence of the inflow of weapons from Kosovo after the end of the war there. Here, international diplomatic intervention was quick and strong, and prevented the war to fully break out. In September 2001, the main political parties of Macedonia signed, under international supervision, the Ohrid Framework Agreement. It greatly increased self-​rule of Albanian majority areas and made Albanian the second official language throughout the country. Its guarantees for the Albanian minority helped to curb irredentism. But Macedonia turned into yet another post-​Yugoslav republic where political discourse was, for a long time, almost completely preoccupied by ethnic issues and nationalism. For many contemporary observers, the 1990s seemed to demonstrate the heavy hand of history. During the Cold War few people had thought in terms of differences as “Western” or “Central,” or “Southeastern” Europe but subordinated all these divisions to the confrontation between capitalist democracy and communism. For many, Southeastern Europe was just part of a rather uniform model of communist modernity. In the 1990s, this surface cracked, giving way to the older image of the “chaotic” and “violent” Balkans. The wars in Yugoslavia, with their brutality against civilians and their striving for ethnic homogeneity, with their paramilitary violence and attacks on “alien” cultural heritage, reminded many observers of the Balkan Wars of 1912–​13. Especially in the beginning, the war in former Yugoslavia was frequently explained by pointing to allegedly ancient hatreds. While war was actually limited to a smaller part of Southeastern Europe, it had consequences for the region and its image as a whole. Sanctions against Serbia, which was considered the main 524

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culprit by the West, affected the trade and transportation in Romania and Bulgaria as well. Often being labeled “Balkan” instead of “Yugoslav,” the wars tainted also the image of the neighboring states, although they remained peaceful. For foreign direct investment, Southeastern Europe seemed to be a less promising place to go anyway, offering neither political stability nor promising markets such as Central Europe. That Southeastern Europe possessed a widely educated population and a trained labor force with rich human, if not yet institutional resources waiting to be used, has been tacitly acknowledged but rarely appreciated by the West.

Economic woes While the post-​communist states of Southeastern Europe reached bottom during the 1990s, Greece’s problems became apparent only with the financial crisis of 2008. Before that, the post-​ socialist economies of the region looked at Greece as an example of stability and growing prosperity. In Greece, 1989 did not mean the breakdown of a system but enhanced possibilities for development, since the country’s “backyard” suddenly opened up for investment and banking as well as trade. Both Greece and Turkey took this chance. The economic crisis in Albania triggered the migration of almost half a million people to Greece. In this way, Greece became the first country in this traditionally emigration-​prone region that became a net-​receiver of economic migrants. The pattern was echoed in Slovenia, which attracted migrants from the other former Yugoslav republics. With the turn of the millennium, post-​communist Southeastern Europe stabilized, and governments pursued serious, EU-​oriented reforms, especially in the economy. The region experienced a half dozen years of high growth rates until interrupted by the financial crisis of 2008. Since then, growth returned but at lower rates than before. Only in Slovenia was growth sufficient to approach income levels such in Central and Western Europe. Greece, by contrast, suffered from a terrible economic meltdown. It appeared that the country had managed to adopt the euro as its currency in 2002 only to borrow recklessly from European banks. The burden of repayment for low interest government bonds created budget deficits that official statistics hid from public view until the financial crisis forced the shortfall into the open. The government deficit was much higher than the 3 percent of GDP authorized under EU guidelines, reaching almost 13 percent. Interest rates for Greece’s sovereign bonds sky-​rocketed. In order to avoid state bankruptcy, which threatened a breakup of the Eurozone, Greece received a massive bailout of almost €300 billion from the European Union and the IMF (the largest in financial history). But the Greek government was forced to impose extremely harsh austerity measures, dramatically cutting spending and raising taxes.There followed not only a decade of deep recession and limited financial sovereignty but also an end to Greece’s reputation as a role model in the region. The Greek crisis was not only about over-​spending but also about circumventing formal procedures of keeping accounts. The European Union is a legal construct that depends heavily on the observance of formal procedures. It makes a difference whether member states comply with rules in reality or only on paper. Closer examinations of the Greek state apparatus after the 2009 breakdown soon revealed that tax evasion was extremely widespread, and that irregularities in spending EU money were frequent. In this perspective, Greece did not seem so different from most post-​socialist countries of the region, as they were struggling to overcome informal arrangements between privatized enterprises and state actors that made corruption commonplace. Before the financial crisis, international advisors and policymakers were optimistic and believed that shortcomings could be improved by introducing new laws and establishing new 525

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institutions. Rooting out corruption and informality has proved to be more difficult than the optimists expected. Anti-​corruption agencies, for example, have achieved little without the independent power to investigate and persecute. Even where such institutions were created, they could still be obstructed and defied by strong political networks. Romania, for example, was internationally lauded for the creation of the powerful National Anti-​Corruption Directorate (DNA), but in 2018 the Social Democratic government in Bucharest managed to dismiss the DNA chief prosecutor to save, among others, its own party leader Liviu Dragnea from prosecution (he was later sentenced to jail). In such cases, it is crucial that society backs those political forces fighting for strict rule enforcement and against corruption. In Romania, such public engagement was clearly present, manifest in large demonstrations and public opinion pressure. But one should keep in mind that in countries undergoing mass emigration such as Romania, many young people decided to leave their country instead of pressing for changes inside it, a fact that can make it easier for political elites to control and distribute resources as they wish.

Appraising international intervention In those countries of the region that were (re-​)created with Western help, institutional dysfunction can also be seen as a failure of the International Community. This is true, first of all, for the two semi-​protectorates Bosnia-​Herzegovina and Kosovo, to a lesser extent also for Macedonia and Albania, both of which underwent violent upheavals and were stabilized after massive international intervention. In Bosnia, the complicated constitutional mechanisms created by the Dayton Agreement in order to balance collective ethnic interests led to poorly functioning statehood. In the initial postwar years, the UN appointed High Representative made use of his prerogatives to enable, for example, the return of refugees. But since then the international representatives, while theoretically still retaining the final authority in Bosnia, have become passive, opening possibilities for obstruction especially on the side of the Bosnian Serbs. In Kosovo, as in Bosnia, ethnic mistrust and a widespread feeling especially among Serbs that the International Community is biased against them makes the development of nationally inclusive institutions difficult. In order to achieve the promise that Kosovo becomes a lawful democracy, the EU installed a costly rule-​of-​law mission named EULEX. So far it has not achieved the desired results. EULEX has been unable to overcome the networks of UÇK warlords, which transformed themselves into a new political and economic elite. But if EULEX were strong enough to do so, it would surely be dubbed “colonial” by many people in Kosovo and not without reason. A sign of hope in this respect was the victory of opposition leader Albin Kurti in Kosovo’s parliamentary elections in October 2019, since it means that Kosovo’s society is on the way to disengage from the warlord-​type politicians of the UÇK generation. A key question is why the International Community, after its rather successful military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, achieved little in creating functioning states. One reason is that even if a formal order can be imposed from outside, its real functioning depends on the people living their lives in this new order. If inter-​ethnic mistrust is high, institutional rules can do little to change it. The International Community in fact had launched a great experiment when trying to reconstruct multi-​ethnic societies from outside instead of accepting the results of ethnic cleansing. Success was unsure from the outset. Another possible reason is that the West lacked and still lacks decisiveness. Increasingly, there is disunity between the United States and the major EU powers and also within the EU. Governments in Hungary and Poland stand against the prospect of multi-​ethnic societies and the rule of law. There is also a tendency to back authoritarian or corrupt politicians if they promise to fulfill certain Western policy wishes and in the name of “stability.” For that reason, Kosovo’s Prime Minister Hashim Thaçi was 526

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tolerated in spite of allegations of war crimes and corruption because he accepted a certain de-​ centralization of Kosovo. Serbia’s increasingly authoritarian president, Aleksandar Vučić, enjoys especially German backing as long as he keeps promising some sort of deal with Kosovo that might facilitate the EU accession of both. Not only in the semi-​protectorates, but also in the candidate countries, EU conditionality has proved less effective than initially expected. It is true that during the EU negotiation phase, the governments of Bulgaria, Romania, and Croatia passed reform after reform in order to comply with EU requirements. But have these governments and societies implemented reforms because they are convinced of the need for them, or only to get recognition or support in return? It is obvious that for many Southeastern European citizens waiting at the door of the EU, entrance is associated with stability and well-​being. Closing the many negotiation chapters required is not always seen as directly leading to such improvement but rather as technical regulations with which one needs to comply. EU requirements have sometimes been perceived not as necessary ingredients of a just order but as expressions of Western European domination. It was therefore no surprise that when both Croatia and Serbia extradited people indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, many people remained convinced that these were war heroes and not war criminals. From today’s perspective, it is obvious that EU conditionality cannot replace indigenous change within a society. The same is true for the anti-​corruption struggle, the rights of sexual minorities, and other important issues.This also implies that the possibilities to promote change from outside are limited, since any authentic discussion within a society means that the result of it is not prescribed in advance. Transnational practices have indeed diminished the importance of national borders to a considerable extent, but Southeastern European resistance to some of the EU expectations also shows that the national state still remains an important framework in which many issues are decided on local grounds. At the same time, Southeastern Europe, unlike Central Europe, is not engaged in open conflict with Brussels and the EU core states. Romania and Bulgaria are still operating under the European Commission’s cooperation and verification mechanism, and the Western Balkan countries are waiting to be admitted into the EU. In both cases, these conditions are not conducive to voicing the sort of opposition against mainstream EU policies seen in Hungary and Poland. An unfortunate parallel between Central and Southeastern Europe has now appeared in a trend toward populist politics and authoritarian governance. If Hungary is restricting the freedom of the media, so is Serbia. Romania has joined Hungary and Poland in restricting the independence of the judiciary. The difference is only one in style. In Southeastern Europe, such restrictions are not announced as explicitly and openly advertised but conducted quietly, reflecting the wish of their governments not to tarnish their European credentials. If common values, as leading EU politicians frequently stress, are essential for a successful future of the European project, the continuing notion of volatile “Balkanness” seems to suggest substantial value differences between Southeastern and Western Europe. That stereotype is contradicted by the region’s relative restraint in the current European debates on social values. Far less outspoken criticism of liberal democracy comes from Southeastern Europe than from Poland, Hungary, Russia, or from the current US administration. This does not mean that public opinion wholeheartedly endorses all abstract Western norms and all Western policies. It indicates rather a certain degree of flexibility, a readiness to adapt, and a constant influx of ideas typical for societies undergoing frequent, deep, and sometimes chaotic change. So far, this influx has not created a clear set of values, either pro-​or anti-​Western. Crucial for Southeastern Europe’s ambivalence on values are the struggles of societies not yet empowered to feel fully established in the EU. They are tempted to treat “European” values more as an instrument or 527

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object of negotiation than as a moral foundation stone, telling Brussels what it wants to hear from the countries of the region.This can change in the future in both ways, either if the region becomes more integrated into the European Union or if a weakening Union opens more space for openly anti-​European voices and for other geo-​political players.

Selected Readings Bohle, Dorothee and Béla Greskovits. Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery. Ithaca, NY, 2012. Cohen, Lenard J. and John R. Lampe. Embracing Democracy in the Western Balkans: from Postconflict Struggles toward European Integration. Washington, DC, 2015. Fouskas,Vassilis K. and Constantine Dimoulas, eds. Greece in the 21st Century. The Politics and Economics of a Crisis. London and New York, 2018. Inotai, András. The European Union and Southeastern Europe.Troubled Waters Ahead? Brussels, 2007. Melčić, Dunja, ed. Der Jugoslawien-​Krieg. Handbuch zu Vorgeschichte, Verlauf und Konsequenzen. Wiesbaden, 2002. Noutcheva, Gergana and Dimitar Bechev. “The Successful Laggards: Bulgaria and Romania’s Accession to the EU,” East European Politics and Societies 22, no. 1 (2008): 114–​44. Petrovic, Milenko. The Democratic Transition of Post-​Communist Europe. In the Shadow of Communist Differences and Uneven Europeanisation. Basingstoke, 2013. Petrović, Tanja, ed. Mirroring Europe. Ideas of Europe and Europeanization in Balkan Societies. Leiden and Boston, 2014. Richmond, Oliver P. and Sandra Pogodda, eds. Post-​liberal Peace Transitions. Between Peace Formation and State Formation. Edinburgh, 2016. Roth, Klaus and Jutta Lauth Bacas, eds. Southeast European (Post) Modernities. Part 1: Changing Practices and Patterns of Social Life; Part 2 (co-​ed. with Jennifer Cash): Changing Forms of Identity, Religiosity, Law and Labour. Münster, 2012 and 2014.

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INDEX

Abdülhamit II, Sultan 163 abortion 496 Adrianople Treaty (1829)  40 agrarian policies 241‒3, 523 Ahtisari, Marti 520 Albania 18‒19, 523; Communist Party of 365‒72; in the early 1920s 257‒9; independence of 163‒71; under Enver Hoxha 447‒54 Aleksandar, King 208‒11, 228, 265, 268‒9, 279, 282‒8; as Prince Regent 118, 177, 189, 192‒7 Alexander II, Tsar of Russia 92, 123, 156 Alexander III, Tsar of Russia 73‒4, 94, 156 Alfred III Windischgrätz, Prince 108 Alia, Ramiz 429, 437, 454 American aid to Greece and Yugoslavia 414‒15, 473‒4, 499 Americanism and anti-​Americanism 214‒15, 473 Anatolian campaign (1919‒22) 178‒80 annexation 39, 54, 96 Antal, Lajos 344 Anti-​Fascist Council for the Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) 401, 403 anti-​Semitism 237, 250, 345, 389 Antonescu, Ion 254‒5, 359‒62, 375‒82 Antonescu, Mihai 380‒1 Atanacković, Milena 225 Atatürk, Kemal 154, 178‒9, 233 Athens 55, 150–​1, 176–​7, 211, 220, 225, 237–​8, 295, 319–​20, 360–​1, 409, 412, 414–​5, 427, 473–​4, 495–​6 Auschwitz 390 austerity measures 512, 525 Austro-​Hungarian rule in the Balkan region 128‒33; and Bosnia-​Herzegovina 128‒9, 135‒54; easing of restrictions 139‒40; economic and cultural relations 132‒3; political relations 130‒2

Autonomous Albanian Republic of Korçë 167 Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus (ARNE) 165 Bach, Alexander von 105 Ba Congress (1944) 399 Bagriana, Elizaveta 350‒1 Bakarić,Vladimir  470 Balás, Károly 344 Balch, Emily Greene 334 Baldwin, Stanley 233 “Balkanization” 2 Balkan Wars (1912‒13) 59, 61, 96‒7, 120, 122, 142, 147‒8, 155, 158‒61, 164, 173‒4, 182‒4, 213, 223, 233, 330, 509, 524‒5 Balluku, Beqir 453‒4 Bank of International Reconstruction and Development 469 Banovina period (1929‒41) 278‒9 Barbu Ştirbei, Prince 380 Bauer, Ante 194 Belgrade 14, 18–​20, 32, 55, 57, 59–​60, 87, 95–​7, 115, 119, 129–​33, 148–​9, 152, 182–​3, 186–​7, 191–​6, 204, 218–​9, 227, 239, 260, 262, 264–​70, 273, 275, 277, 282, 284–​5, 287, 295, 297–​9, 310, 312, 314, 320–​2, 340, 347, 358, 384, 392–​4, 399, 402, 415, 426–​7, 468, 483–​4, 487–​9, 494–​5 Belgrade Declaration (1955) 466 Belgrade University 469 Benedek, László 344 Berisha, Sali 511 Berlin Congress and Treaty (1878) 49, 57‒9, 72‒3, 122‒5, 128‒30, 135, 155, 163, 326, 328, 347 Bernstein, Eduard 75 Bevan, Aneurin 465 Bibó, István 66 Bićanić, Rudolf 218

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Index Binski, Leon Ritter von 142 biologism 344 birth rates 491 Biryuzov, Sergey 441 Bismarck, Otto von 90, 94 “Black Hand” organization 118 Blaga, Lucian 215 Blagoeva,Vela  221 Blagoev, Dimitŭr 352 Bleiweis, Janez 107 Bokassa, Jean-​Bédel  461 Bonaparte, Napoleon 15‒16, 104 borderlands 2, 11‒13, 16‒17, 27‒9, 33, 45‒6 Boris, Tsar of Bulgaria 153, 156, 161, 209‒11, 228, 240, 242, 245‒6, 358‒9 Bosnia-​Herzegovina seeking independence 516 Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian (BCS) language 135‒6 Bosnian assembly 140‒2 Bosnian Muslims 42‒9 Bosnian war 523‒4 Botez, Calypso 226 Botta, Dan 215 Bozhilova-​Pateva, Zheni  228 Brâncoveanu, Constantin 36 Brătianu, Constantin 380‒1 Brătianu, Ionel 151, 153, 207 Brezhnev, Leonid 444, 467‒70 Briand, Aristide 233 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 398 Bucharest 14, 16, 37, 39, 59, 100, 102, 122, 127, 131–​2, 148, 151, 159, 161, 164, 168, 173, 193, 204, 207, 210, 218, 220, 225–​8, 252, 253, 295, 310, 314, 319, 320, 343, 345, 347, 359, 373, 374, 376, 378, 380, 381, 427, 429, 450, 457, 461–​2, 494, 501, 503, 526 Bucharest Treaties (1913 and 1918) 148, 159, 161, 173 Budapest 55, 86, 87, 128–​33, 153, 188, 189, 194, 295, 297, 309, 312, 342, 461, 466, 467 budget deficits 525 Bŭlcescu, Nicolae 67 Bulgaria: 72‒9, 155‒62, 240‒7, 523; as an emerging nation-​state 328‒9; evolution of national ideology 325‒6; Greek population in 325‒33; national agenda prior to the Balkan Wars 76‒9; proclamation of independence (1908) 77; relations with Russia 73‒4; with the Soviet Union 439‒46 Burián von Rajecz, István 139 Byzantine Empire 2 Çabej, Eqrem 216 Calinescu, Armand 211, 373‒4 Cankar Hall (Ljubljana) rally (1989) 488‒9 Cankar, Ivan 182 Cantacuzino, Alexandrina 221, 225‒6

Cantemir, Dimitrie 39 Caragiale, Luca 221 Carol I, King 56, 59, 130 Carol II, King 207‒11, 251‒4, 357‒8, 373‒6 Carrillo, Santiago 461 Castro, Fidel 457 Catholic Church 23, 138, 405 Catholicism, mass conversions to 388‒9 Ceauşescu, Elena 429, 457‒60 Ceauşescu, Nicolae 427‒9, 432, 435, 456‒62, 494, 501, 503, 591 Ceauşescu, Nicu 457, 459 Çelebi, Evliya 43 Celje 105, 108, 110, 185 central planning 500 Chervenkov,Vŭlko 363, 424‒5, 434, 441, 443, 466 Chetniks 360, 393‒402 China 451‒3 Churchill, Winston 381, 399, 411‒15, 440, 463 Ciano, Galeazzo 374 Cioran, Emil 216 circulation of ideas in Europe 63‒6 civil war: in Greece 361, 410, 414‒17, 464; in Yugoslavia 394‒400 class identities 217‒20 Clemenceau, Georges 192 Codreanu, Cornelius Zelea 249‒54, 357, 374 Cold War 400, 421, 431, 438, 464; ending of 479‒80; in Greece 472‒80; up to 1959 423‒5 collectivization of agriculture 424, 431‒8, 465, 523 COMINFORM organization 463 Commission for Cooperation and Security in Europe (CSCE) 427 communism, historical legacies of 522‒5 concentration camp system 388‒90 Concert of Europe (1856) 56, 129 Constantine, King of Greece 150‒1, 154, 174‒9, 208‒9, 232, 473, 475 Constantinople Treaty (1913)  159 constructivism 66 cooperative movement 110‒1 Copenhagen Criteria 511 corruption 512, 522‒6 cosmopolitanism 351 Costin, Miron 39 Council for Mutual Economic Aid (CMEA) 427, 449, 501 Crainic, Nichifor 374 Crane, Charles Richard 166 Crete 172‒3, 360 Crimean War (1854‒57) 55‒6, 123‒4 Croatia: Independent State of (declared 1941) 383‒4; in the 19th century 80‒8; under dualism 86‒8; declaration of independence (1991) 514‒15, 523; Ustaša regime in 383‒91 Croatian Peasant Party (HSS) 263‒70, 357, 384 “Croatian Spring” 470

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Index Croatian war (1992‒95) 515‒19 Cultural Revolution 451‒3, 460 Čuvaj, Slavko 142 Cuza, Alexandru 56, 99‒101, 250 Cvijić, Jovan 215 Czechoslovakia, invasion of (1968) 425‒7, 458‒61, 468, 501 Dagklis, Panagiotis 176 Dako, Kristo 164‒7 Damaskinos, Archbishop 413 Danev, Stoian 158‒9 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 195 Daskalov, Rayko 240 Davidović, Ljuba 273 Dayton Peace Accord (1995) 519, 524, 526 Deakin, Bill 397 death camps 246, 359 deaths recorded, number of 148, 161, 403, 417, 509, 515‒16, 519‒20 death trains 379 debt servicing 312‒17, 498‒9, 504‒6, 512 Delivannis, Theodoros  56‒7 Delmouzos, Alexandros 235‒6 Demertzis, Konstantine 236 democratization 115 demographic change 301‒6, 491‒2 de-​stalinization 449, 462, 466 détente 421 Die lustige Witwe  91 Dimaras, Konstantinos 216 Dimitriev, Radko 159 Dimitrijević-​Apis, Dragutin  192 Dimitrov, Georgi 243, 350, 352, 363, 442 Djilas, Milovan 465 “double-​yoke theory”  325‒6 Dragnea, Liviu 526 Dragoumis, Ion 177 Dragoycheva, Tsola  442 Drašković, Janko 81 Dreikaiserbund 130 Dual Monarchy 128‒33, 147 Dubček, Alexander 468 Dubrovnik 9‒11 Duca, Ion 211 Dŭnov, Petŭr 31 Durham, Edith 166 Durrell, Lawrence 198 Durrës Congress (1919) 168‒9 Dušan, Stefan 21, 23 Džabic, Ali 138‒9 economic growth, financing of 308‒12 election law 114, 116; see also franchise reform Eliade, Mircea 215 elite groups 218‒19, 523, 526 emancipation of serfs 98

emigration see migration Enlightenment thinking 66, 70 Erbiceanu, Constantin 41 Erlich,Vera Stein  221 d’Espèray, Franchet 191 “ethnic cleansing” 360, 385, 516‒19, 523, 526 ethnic identity 14, 24‒5, 53, 63‒5, 203, 206‒7 eugenics 342‒5; aims of 344; “nationalization” of 344 EULEX 526 Europeanization and the European Union 65, 70, 346‒8, 477‒80, 495, 504, 511‒12, 515, 521, 525‒8 “Europeanness” 132 European Union, accession to 521‒2 “façade democracy” 121 family networks 25 fascism 248, 344 feminism 223‒6, 229 Ferdinand of Saxe Coburg-​Gotha, Prince/​Tsar of Bulgaria 58‒61, 74‒5, 105, 148, 153, 156‒61, 208, 240, 349 fertility 303–​4 Filov, Bogdan 246, 358, 440 financial retreat in the 1930s 315‒16 financial systems 308–​12 Fine, John 1 Firdus, Alibeg 139 First World War 129, 133, 143, 147‒52, 163‒6, 172‒80, 214, 216, 349; start of 193, 407 Florence Protocol (1913) 164 Florian, Aaron 40 folk culture and folklore 65‒9 food shortages 360, 409‒10, 461 forced labor 403, 407 Foscarini, Jacopo 28 Foscolo, Leonardo 32 franchise reform, 60‒1, 72, 109, 114, 116, 140, 184, 203, 209 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke 86, 118, 129, 135, 142‒3, 185, 407 Franz Joseph I, Emperor 106, 126, 128, 130 freedom of association 114, 119 freedom of the press 114, 118 Friends of Yugoslavia  504 Gabe, Dora 350 Gafencu, Grigore 374 Gaj, Ljudevit 81 Garašanin, Ilija 57 Garvanov, Ivan 126 gendered images 220‒2 gendered relations 495‒7 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 467 genocide 383‒5, 519

531

532

Index George I, King of Greece 56 George II, King of Greece 175, 209, 232‒7, 358, 361, 409‒14 Georgiev, Kimon 244, 440 German unification (1871) 128 Gërmenji, Themistokli 165, 167 Gerő, Ernő 466 Gerov, Naiden 348 Gesemann, Gerhard 221 Geshov, Ivan E. 156, 158 Gheorghiu-​Dej, Gheorghe 363, 427, 432, 444, 456‒8, 462 Gigurtu, Ion 374 Giscard d’Estaing,Valerie  476 Gladstone, W.E. 91, 122, 125‒7 Glasnost policy 439, 445 Glavaš, Radoslav 387 Glicsman, Iosif 345 Glinos, Dimitris 235 global financial crisis (2008) 525 “golden age of Serbian democracy” 113‒15 gold exchange standard 233, 312‒17 gold sales 361 Gomułka, Władysław 445 Gorbachev, Mikhail 439, 445, 457, 460, 462 Gosar, Andrej 220 Gospodinov, Nikola 352 Goumaris, Dimitrios 177 Gradaščević, Husein-​kapetan  47 Grady, Henry 416 Grazzi, Emanuele 238 Great Leap Forward 500 Greece: border changes 172, 180; Cold War period in 472‒80; constitutional revision (1986) 478; domination by the political right (1952‒63) 472‒3; during and just after the First World War 172‒80, 409‒17; economic conditions 473‒4, 525; 1949‒89 421; government expenditure, public sector employment and GDP per head 479‒80; interwar period (1924‒40) 231‒9; military rule (1967‒74) 475‒6, 496; modernization of economy and society 480; national schism in 172, 174, 177, 180, 231‒2; New Democracy in 477, 479, 505; “Old Lands” and “New Lands” 231, 235‒6; Second Hellenic Republic 231‒5; structural problems 479; transition to democracy 476‒9; trial of instigators of 1967 coup 477 Greek influence 64 Greek language 235‒6 “Greekness” 327‒8 green cadres 188, 194‒5 Grey, Edward 174 Groza, Petru 103, 362, 382 Gundulić, Ivan 83 Gusti, Dimitrie 210

Habsburg Empire 16, 19, 49, 88, 128‒9, 133, 181–​9 Hadzhiiski, Ivan 218 Haussmann, Georges-​Eugène  347 Hellenism and Hellenization 69, 236‒9 Helsinki Agreement (1975) 427 Herbert, Aubrey 166 Herder, J.G. 65‒6 historical documentation 4 Hitler, Adolf 239, 246, 374‒7, 380‒1, 394, 397, 440 Hoffman, Leopold Friedrich von 136 Honecker, Erich 457 Hötzendorf, Franz Conrad von 187 household work 497 Hoxha, Enver 363, 366‒71, 424‒5, 429, 433, 436‒7, 447‒54, 457, 500 Hoxha, Nexhmije 429, 459 Hribar, Ivan 107 Huang Yongsheng  451 Hudson, Bill 394 Hungarian uprising (1956) 450, 467, 501 hygiene 343‒5 Iaşi 37, 39, 249 identity formation 70 identity politics 65 Ilinden Uprising (1903) 125‒6 immigration see migration industrialization 492‒5; financing of 498‒505; in the 1930s 297‒8, 315‒16 institutions, functioning of 116‒17, 526 intelligentsia, the 219‒20 International Community, successes and failures of 526 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) 517, 519, 527 International Danube Commission 129 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 430, 461, 464, 470, 493, 503‒4, 512, 525 International Women’s Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) 224‒5 interwar period 349‒51; ideas and images in 213‒22 Ioanaid, Radu 378 Ioannides, Lt-​Col  476 Iovkov, Iordan 350 Iron Guard 376 irredentism 184, 186 Islamization 28‒9, 43‒4 Istanbul (Constantinople) 78, 148, 154, 157, 159, 163, 243, 302, 303, 326‒8 Jahn, Ferenc 344 Janissaries 46 Janković,Vladimir Velmar  219 Jeftanović, Grigorije 138‒9 Jelačić, Josip 56, 81‒2

532

533

Index Jewish communities, persecution of 246, 378‒9, 384‒6, 389‒90, 409‒10 joint-​stock companies  323 Josip, Frank 183 Jovanović, Slobodan 216 Juričev, Dionizije 387 Kádár, Janos 457, 466 Kafandares, George 282 Kalan, Janez 186‒7 Kállay von Nagy-​Kálló, Benjamin 137‒9, 142 Kanellopoulos, Panagiotis 415 Kapo, Hysni 450 Kapodistrias, Ioannis 54‒5 Karadjordjević dynasty 54‒5, 60, 89, 95, 182, 194, 226, 281 Karadžić, Radovan 516 Karadžić,Vuk 63, 84 Karamanlis, Konstantinos 424, 429, 473, 476‒8, 502, 505 Karavelov, Liuben 59, 348 Karavelov, Petko 73 Kardelj, Edvard 216, 426, 430, 464, 467‒70, 485 Karima, Anna 221 Karlowitz Treaty (1699)  9 Kavčič, Stane 426 Kaznačić, August 82 Këllezi, Abdyl 454 Kelmendi, Ali 366‒7 Kemal, Mustafa see Atatürk, Kemal Khrushchev, Nikita 436, 424‒7, 444, 449‒53, 466‒8, 501 Khuen-​Héderváry, Károly  86 Kidrič, Boris 464‒5 Kim Il Sung 462 Kirsanov, Stepan 442 Kiselev, Pavel 55 Kissinger, Henry 452 Klaras, Babis 410 Klein, Micu 40 Kogălniceanu, Mihail 100 Kolarov,Vasil 352, 441 Kondylis, George 233‒6 Konev, Ivan 444 Konitza, Faik 67 Konstantinov, Aleko 221 Kopitar, Jernej 104 Korneyev, General 398 Korošec, Ante 194 Kosovo 118‒20, 259‒60, 270‒9, 519‒20, 524‒7 Kossuth, Ferenc 87 Kostov, Traicho 363, 443 Kosygin, Aleksei 452 Koundouriotis, Pavlos 176 Kovachev,Yordan  353 Krek, Janez Evangelist 110

Krleža, Miroslav 465 Kruja, Mustafa 169 Krulj, Uroš 343 Kučan, Milan 481, 487‒8 Kučar, Savka Dabčević 426 Küçük Kaynarca, Treaty of (1774) 39 Kun, Béla 153, 195 Kupi, Abaz 371 Kurtćehajić, Mehmet Šakir 48 Kurti, Albin 526 Kuzmanić, Ante 83 Kvaternik, Eugen 84 Kvaternik, Slavko 384 Labour Party, British 465 Lampadarios, Emmanuel 343 land regimes 11‒12, 38, 45‒6, 101‒3, 141, 207, 292‒4 landlord‒peasant relations 98‒101 language issues 1‒2, 14, 24, 69‒71, 80‒2, 104, 107‒8, 135‒6, 235‒8, 511 Lausanne Treaty (1923) 154, 180, 231, 293 Lazăr, Gheorghe 40 League of Nations 244 Legion Archangel Michael 248‒55, 374‒6; ideology 249‒51; the political trajectory of, 251‒3; in power 253‒5; social structure and membership 253 Lehár, Franz 91 Leninism 462 Leo XIII, Pope 110 Levski,Vasil  59 Levstik, Fran 107 Liapchev, Andrei 208 life expectancy 492 literary culture 350‒1 Little Entene (defensive alliance) 204, 211, 224‒5 Little Entente of Women (LEW) 224‒30 Li Xiannian 451 Ljubljana 105–​9, 111, 152, 184, 186, 189, 194, 195, 208, 285, 295, 309, 316, 320, 426, 487–​9 Lloyd George, David 154 local culture and tradition 64 Locke, John 67 Lojo, Hadži 136 London Agreement (1946) 361, 499 London Treaty (1915) 168, 187, 193, 195 Lorković, Mladen 390 Luburić,Vjekoslav  391 Luca,Vasile  362‒3 Lushnje Congress (1920) 258 Lyapchev, Andrei 243 Macedonia 2–3, 77–​8, 122‒7, 240, 270‒9, 524 Maček Vladko 211, 268‒70, 283, 357, 384 Maclean, Fitzroy 398

533

534

Index MacVeagh, Lincoln 413 Madgearu,Virgil  375 Mălăieru, Mircea 100 Malinov, Aleksandar 61, 161 Malinova,Yulia 221, 228 Mandić, Nikola 139, 141, 182 Maniu, Iuliu 207, 209, 376‒7, 380‒1 Manliu, Ioan 343 Manoilescu, Mihail 220, 374 Mao Zedong 451‒4, 460, 467, 500 maps 10, 13, 58, 149‒50, 205, 422, 510 Maria Theresa, Empress  83 Marinković, Pavel 119 Marković, Ante 430 Marković, Mirjana 459‒60 marriage patterns 24, 304‒5 Marshall Plan 416, 499 Martel, Gordon 148 Marulić, Marko 27 Masaryk, Tomas  G.  87 massacres 179, 386, 389, 395, 518 Matoš, Antun Gustav 218 Maurer, Ion Gheorge 458 Mavrocordat, Constantin 36‒7, 98 Maximos, Dimitros 415 May Declaration (1917) 188, 192, 194 Mažuranić, Ivan 81, 86 Mazzini, Giuseppe 66 media influence 119‒20 Melas, Pavlos125‒6 Meštrović, Ivan 192 Metaxas, Ioannis 172, 177, 209, 236‒9 Metternich, Prince 103 Michael, King 359, 362 Michalakopoulos, Andrei 232 Midhat Pasha 57 migration 1‒2, 14, 18‒22, 299, 331, 351, 423‒4, 435‒6, 479, 494‒5, 511, 516, 525; before the First World War 335‒8; before the Second World War 303‒6; overseas 334‒40 Mihai, King of Romania 375, 378, 381‒2 Mihailović, Draža 360‒1, 393‒400, 402 Mihailov, Ivan 245 Mihalchev, Dimitar 442 Miklošič, Franc 104 Mikoyan, Anastas 466 Mikulić, Branko 430 Milan, Prince (later King) 57‒60 Milev, Geo 220 millet system 12, 15, 43, 48 Milošević, Slobodan 430, 487‒8, 509, 517‒18, 523 Minucci, Minuccio 26‒31 Mitsotakis, Theodoros  210 Mladenov, Petar 446 Mladić, Ratko 516 “Mladina affair” (1988) 487‒8 modernity and modernization 68, 70, 91

modern manufacturing 318‒19 Mohács, Battle of (1526) 45 Moldovan, Iuliu 343‒4 Molotov‒Ribbentrop pact (1939) 373 Molotov,Vyacheslav  412 monarchical government 55, 72‒5, 86, 88, 117, 174, 187‒9, 282, 401, 411, 414, 473, 477 monetary policy 470, 498 money transfers 339‒40 Moscow Declaration (1956) 466 Moţa, Ion A. 249 Mugabe, Robert 457 multilateral trade 468 Munda, August 344 Mussolini, Benito 224, 380, 384 Myers, Edward 411 “mystical racism” 71 Nagy, Imre 466‒7 Napoleon see Bonaparte Napoleonic Code 16 “national communism” 421, 427‒8, 456 “national homogenization” 487‒9 national identities 2, 65‒9, 326‒30; hardened through insurgency and war 329‒30 nationalism 2, 48, 63‒71, 137, 155, 181‒9, 227‒30, 343, 427‒8, 462; liberal-​nationalism and ethno-​nationalism 2, 71 national movements 111‒12 nation-​building 53, 66‒8, 71, 213‒17, 224 nation-​states 2, 63, 66, 68, 70, 123, 527 Nazism 345 Nedić, Milan 360, 393 Neuilly Treaty (1919) 177, 240, 330 new cities 494 New Course (1905) 182 New Economic System (1979) 428 New International Economic Order (NIEO) 470 Ngjela, Kiço 454 Nicholas I, Tsar of Russia 123 Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia 74, 94, 126, 130, 156‒7 Nietzsche, Friedrich 70 Nikezić, Marko 426, 470 Nikola, Prince (later King) 60, 89‒97, 196 Nikolaievitch, Nikolai 89 Nikolaievitch, Peter 89 Niš agreement (1923) 241 Nixon, Richard 452‒4, 470 Njegoš, Petar Petrović 57 Noli, Fan 164‒70, 204, 258‒61, 365 Nordic tradition 66 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 423, 429, 477, 505, 509, 511, 518‒19, 523‒4 North Korea 460, 462 Novaković, Milan 119 Nušić, Branislav 221

534

535

Index Obrenović, Aleksandar 60, 113 Obrenović, Michael 57 Odessa 347, 358, 359, 377–​9 Ohrid Framework Agreement (2001) 511, 524 oil crisis (1973) 470 Old Slovenes 107 Operation Oluja 519 Operation Trio  396 Operation Weiss  397 Orange Guild 241‒2 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) 427‒8 Orthodox Christianity 2, 9, 14‒15, 24, 63, 69‒70, 123, 199, 389, 405, 424 Ottoman Empire 3, 9, 12, 18‒28, 35‒8, 42, 47‒9, 123, 243 Ottoman-​Russian War (1877‒78)  326 Otto of Bavaria, Prince 55 Paisii, Fr. 325 Palacky, František 105 Palavestra, Predrag 488 Pangalos, Theodoros 209, 232‒6 Panitsa, Todor  126 Papacy, the 136 Papadopoulos, George 425, 476 Papagos, Alexandros 238, 363, 416, 424 Papandreou, Andreas 477‒8, 504‒5 Papandreou, George 411‒12, 415, 425, 474‒5 Papanstasiou, Alexandros 232 Paris Convention (1858) 99 Paris Peace Conference (1919) 147, 153, 167‒71, 178, 195, 198‒9, 203 Paris Peace Conference (1946) 414 Partisans in Yugoslavia 360, 393‒403 Pârvan,Vasile  215 Pašić, Nikola 60, 115, 117, 148, 152, 192‒8, 208, 265 PASOK (political party) 427, 429, 477‒9, 491, 494‒6, 504‒5, 511‒12 Pătrăşcanu, Lucreţiu 216‒17 patriarchates 2, 14‒15, 24, 43, 59, 63, 69‒70, 123‒4, 136, 424 Pauker, Ana 362‒3 Paul, Prince Regent (later King) of Greece 210, 357‒8, 414, 416, 425, 473 Pavelić, Ante 210, 383, 386, 389‒91, 396 Pavlović, Jovan (Jovo) 92 peasant communities 9, 12, 33, 48‒9, 60, 67‒9, 98, 102‒4, 136, 141, 217‒18, 241, 336 peasant-​soldiers  83 peasant revolts 101–​2, 434 Pelin, Elin 218 Penev, Boyan 216 Perčec, Gustav 383 “Percentages” agreement 381, 412 Perestroika policy 439, 445

Perović, Latinka 470 personality cults 452, 457, 459, 462 Petar, King 113, 118, 196, 210, 399, 402 Petković, Leposava 221, 225‒8 Petőfi Circle 466 Petrov, Gyorge 340 Petrov, Toshko  343 Petrović-​Njegoš, Božo 91, 93 Phanariot regime 36‒41; challenges to 38‒41 Philippovich, Joseph 136 physical geography of the Balkans 2‒3, 9 Pilar, Ivo 214 Pius XI, Pope 344 Planinc, Milka 430 Plastiras, Nikolaos 413, 232‒5 Plovdiv 14, 16, 59, 72, 155, 230, 295–​6, 299, 318, 327–​9, 332, 346‒8, 351‒3 Podgorica 90–​2, 196 pogroms 185, 379 Poland 523, 527 political culture 121 politicization 69, 87 Popa, Augustin 344 Popović, Koča 466 Popović, Simo 93 popular culture 214 population exchanges 173‒4, 180, 330‒3 population figures and structure before the Second World War  301‒3 population increases 16, 302, 491 population movements see migration populism 116, 504 Porter, Paul 414‒15 positivism 70‒1 Potierok, Oskar 140 Poznań summit (2019) 522 Prague Congress (1848) 105 Praxis group at Belgrade University 469 Pribićević, Svetozar 87, 195 Princip, Gavrilo 143, 148 Prishtina 20–​1, 191, 259, 426 propaganda 120, 187, 213, 245, 344, 395‒6, 440, 462 Protić, Stojan 197 Pupin, Mihajlo 192‒3 purges 177, 390‒1, 453 Qemali, Ismail 164 questions about the Balkans (Macedonian, Greek etc) 3‒4 quotas: agricultural 434; for immigration 337‒9 racial laws 345 racism 345 Rački, Franjo 83 radicalization 125 Radić, Antun 87, 263

535

536

Index Radić, Stjepan 60, 87, 184, 195, 208, 263‒70, 282‒3 Radomir Rebellion (1918) 349 Radoslavov,Vasil  159 Radović, Andrija 95‒6 Radulović, Marko 95‒6 railway construction 310‒11 Rajk, Laszlo 466 Rakosi, Matyas 466 Ranković, Aleksandar 465, 468 real income 471 Red Guards 452 refugees 153, 161‒2, 173, 177, 511‒12, 518‒19 Relgis, Eugen 344‒5 religion, “nationalization” of 217 religious authorities, control over 136‒7 religious divisions 14‒15, 22‒5, 29, 70, 123‒4, 206‒7 remittances 39‒40, 233‒4 reparations 161‒2 reprisals 394 Republika Srpska 516‒19 return migration 338‒40 revolution of 1848 105 Ribbentrop, Joachim von 373‒4 Rijeka (Fiume) 82, 195, 295, 337–​8, 390 Roberts, Peter 334 Rodrigo, Daniel 30 Roma people 345, 384‒5, 390, 392 Romania 101‒3, 523, 527; the agrarian question in 98‒103; in the Second World War 373‒82; under Ceauşescu 456‒62 Romanticism 65‒71 Rosetti, C.A. 101 Roucek, Joseph 126‒7 rural populations 69, 98, 343; transformation prior to Second World War  292‒5 Russo-​Turkish War (1877‒78) 54, 124 Sadoveanu, Mihail 218 Said, Edward 111 Salonica 14–​6, 22, 43, 148, 150–​2, 157–​8, 160–​2, 167–​8, 173, 175–​6, 192, 230, 295–​8, 319–​20, 337, 349, 352; Treaty of (1913) 173 Salonica Front 147, 174, 191, 194, 384, 393 Sami, Shemseddin 67 San Stefano Treaty (1878) 58‒9, 89‒90, 122‒5, 155, 161, 163, 326, 346‒7 sanctions 518 Santos, Georgios 410 Sanudo, Marino 27 Sarafov, Boris 126 Sarajevo 14, 16, 20, 30, 42–​8, 118, 129, 136–​42, 147–​9, 185, 194, 198, 282, 309, 385, 391, 407, 515–​8 Sarrail, Maurice 175 Scanderbeg, George Kastriota 19

schooling 274, 277 Schützkorps 185‒6 Scobie, Ronald 412 Sebastian, Mihail 219 Second World War 357, 440‒1; in Albania 368‒72; ending 472; Greece in 409–​11; Romania in 373‒82; run-​up to 291‒9; switching sides in 378‒81, 441 security services in the Balkan states 423 Seferis, George 216 Sekulić, Isidora 221 self-​management  421, 468‒71 Selim III, Sultan 46 Serbia 113‒21, 527; constitution of 113‒14, 117; political parties in 115‒16 Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (SCS), Kingdom of 240, 243, 274‒8 Sese Seko, Mobutu 461 Sèvres Treaty (1920)  178 Sharapov,Viktor  445‒6 share-​cropping 9, 12, 60, 137 Shehu, Mehmet 371, 429, 447‒8, 453‒4 show trials 180 Sima, Horia 374‒6 Simeon, King of Bulgaria 359 Simitis, Kostas 505 Simović, Dušan 194 Sinar, Minnar 347 Skopje 3, 19, 20, 78, 124, 130, 131, 157, 273–​5, 277, 279 Skršić, Milan 139 Slaveikov, Petko 73 Slomšek, Anton Martin 108‒9 Slovenia 104‒12; education and culture in 106‒9; political parties in 109‒12; declaration of independence (1991) 514‒15, 523 Smirnenski, Khristo 350 Smodlaka, Josip 87, 195 Smollett, Eleanor 495 Smyrna, Great Fire of (1922) 231 social activists 164, 166 social change: before the Second World War 298‒9; after the Second World War 490‒7 Social Darwinism 70 socialist governments 478 Sofia 60–​1, 72, 74, 125–​6, 130, 132–​3, 151, 155–​7, 159–​61, 165, 193, 208, 210, 240–​4, 246, 295, 299, 320–​2, 331, 343, 346‒53, 359, 427, 439–​42, 444–​5, 490, 504 Sofoulis, Themistocles 232, 413, 416 Sokolović, Pasha 44 Šola,Vojislav  138 South Serbia, integration of 272‒4 South Slav politics 191‒4 Southeastern Europe: first use of the term 147; seen as part of a model of communist modernity 524

536

537

Index Special Operations Executive (SOE) 360, 384, 398‒9, 411 Spring of Nations (1848‒49) 81‒2 Srebrenica 519 Stadler, Josip 138‒40, 183, 189 Stahl, Henri 218 Stalin, Joseph 246, 362, 381‒2, 394, 399, 401, 406, 412, 415‒6, 440‒3, 447‒50, 453, 460, 463‒6, 490 Stalinism 445, 456‒62 Stambolić, Ivan 487 Stamboliiski, Aleksandŭr 60, 75, 77, 153, 157, 160‒1, 208, 218, 228, 240‒2, 349, 433 Stambolov, Stefan 59, 73‒4 Štampar, Andrija 343 Stanojević,Vladimir  342 Starčević, Ante 84 state support for industry between the world wars 320‒4 Stepinac, Alojzije 194, 405 Stergiadis, Aristeidis 178 sterilization 344 Stoilov, Konstantin 73‒4 Stoilov, Nikola 352 Stojadinović, Milan 210, 357 Strossmayer, Josip 56, 83 student activists 142‒3 Šubašić, Ivan 361, 384, 402 suffrage see franchise reform Supilo, Frano 87, 192 Švabić, Stevan 195 Szlávy von Okány, Jószef 136 Taaffe, Eduard 85, 106‒8 Tanzimat reforms 46–​7, 55 Tardić, Murat 28 Tartaglia, Oskar 187 Tashko, Koço 367‒9 Tătărescu, Gheorge 362 Tavčar, Ivan 184, 186 tax collection 12, 15, 46‒9 Teheran Conference (1943) 401 Tekeli, Ibrahim 32 Tennyson, Alfred (Lord) 91 Terpeshev, Dobri 441 Tesla, Nikola 91 textile industries 318‒23 Thaci, Hashim 526‒7 Theodhosi, Koço 454 Theodoropoulou, Avra 225‒6, 229 theosophy 351 Tirana 131, 260–​2, 296, 313, 361, 448–​54, 495, 500 Tisza, Kalmán 86 Tito, Josip Broz 360, 362, 393‒402, 405‒7, 415, 417, 424‒6, 432‒3, 441, 443, 447‒8, 453, 457, 463‒70, 481, 485, 490, 514

Tolbukhin, Fyodor 441 Tomašić, Dinko 215, 218 Tomić,Viktor  389 Tönnies, Ferdinand 70 Toptani, Esat 165‒8 Tóth, Tihamér  344 Totis, Béla 344 Toto, Ismet 216 Tracy, David 1 trade routes 9, 11, 14, 30‒1 Trialism 142 Trieste 13–​14, 16, 85, 105, 108, 109, 133, 165, 183, 280, 294, 295, 298, 304, 319, 337, 400, 402, 463, 465 Trikoupis, Kharilaos 57 Tripalo, Miko 469‒70 Tripartite Pact (between Germany, Italy and Japan, 1941) 246, 358, 392 Truman, Harry (and Truman Doctrine) 414‒16 Trumbić, Ante 87, 152, 192, 195‒8 Tsaldaris, Konstantinos 413‒16 Tsaldaris, Parayis 234‒5 Tsankov, Aleksandar 208, 242 Tsankov, Dragan 73 Tsouderos, Emmanouil 411 Tudjman, Franjo 509, 517 Tzara, Tristan  222 Ulbricht, Walter  445 United Nations (UN): Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women 496; General Assembly 417; High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 518; High Representative 526; peacekeeping forces 509, 519; Protection Force 515, 517; Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRAA) 361, 413, 499; Security Council 414‒15, 464, 509‒11, 518‒20, 523 United States: emigration to 335‒40; Import-​ Export Bank 464; intervention in Greece and Yugoslavia 414‒15, 473‒4, 499; intervention in post-​Yugoslav wars 515, 520 urbanization 492‒5; prior to Second World War 295‒6 Ureche, Grigore 39 Ustaša regime in Croatia 383‒91; origins of 383‒4; treatment of Serbs by 385‒90 Vakaro family 351‒2 values, European 527 Van Fleet, James 416 Varešanin, Marijan 140 Varvaressos, Kyriakos 413 Vazov, Ivan 348, 350 Velchev, Damien 363 Velimirović, Nikolaj 194

537

538

Index Venizelos, Eleftherios 61, 150‒4, 172‒9, 208‒9, 232‒8, 415 Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy 89, 237 Vidmar, Josip 485 Vidovdan Constitution (1921) 272‒3 Vienna 9, 14–​16, 19, 32, 42, 55, 56, 82–​4, 87, 94, 104–​8, 111, 120, 123, 128–​33, 137, 138, 148, 152, 165, 187–​9, 194, 262, 275, 295, 297, 298, 308–​9, 311, 312, 319, 358, 365, 366, 374, 375 Vlachs 28, 31 Vode, Angela 221 Vokić, Ante 390 Vošnjak, Josip and Mihael 110 Voulgaris, Petros 413 Vucinich, Wayne 336, 339 Vučić, Aleksandar 527 Vukovar 515 Vŭlkov, Ivan 242 Vyshinski, Andrei 382 warlords 11‒12, 20, 526 Warsaw Pact 423, 439, 443‒5, 449, 467 war weariness 179, 400 Washington, Booker T.  334 Wenyuan,Yao  451 “Western Balkans”, accomplishments and remaining challenges of 512 Westernization 67, 348 Wilhelm of Wied, Prince 150, 164‒5, 170, 257 Wilson, Woodrow 167‒9, 178, 196, 198 women’s movements and roles 220‒30, 495‒7 Woodhouse, Christopher 411, 413 workers’ councils 430, 464, 467, 502 World Bank 503, 512 Xoxe, Koçe 363 Yalta Declaration 442 Young Bosnia 120, 142

Young Croatia 182, 396 Young Turks 130, 140, 156, 158, 163, 172 Yovkov,Yordan  218 Yugoslavia: consolidation of Communist rule in 404‒7; exceptionalism for 522‒3; liberation of 401‒7; nationalism seen in 181‒5; Partisans and Chetniks active in 392‒400; postwar repression in 403‒4; revolts and resistance to occupation in 392‒3; “Third way” in 463‒71; wars of succession 514‒20, 524 Yugoslav identity in the interwar period 280‒8; and “royal dictatorship” 282‒7 Yugoslavism 86‒8, 142, 462 Yugov, Antin 352 Zachariadis, Nikos 410, 413, 416 zadruga sytem 11‒12 Zagorka, Marija Jurić 221, 223 Zagreb 16, 56, 81, 84, 86–​8, 152, 189, 194–​6, 207–​8, 210, 267, 275, 280, 286, 295, 296, 309, 314, 316, 319, 320, 322, 323, 384–​7, 389–​91, 400, 405, 426, 494, 517 Zaimis, Alexandros 176 Zane, Mateo 31 Žanko, Miloš 469 Zarnik, Boris 344 Žerajić, Bogdan 140 Zervas, Napoleon 411, 416 Zhivkov, Todor 426, 428, 434, 444‒6, 457, 492, 501 Zhou Enlai 451‒3 Zimmerwald Conference (1916) 166 Zisi, Andrea 367 Zlatarov, Asen 440 Zlobec, Ciril 485 Zog, King 209‒11, 357 Zogu (formerly Zogulli), Ahmed 258‒62, 365‒71 Zurukzoglu, Stavros 344

538