Balkans | A Short Review

Bismarck once said that "the whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier."

The Balkan peninsula is a region where civilisations and social systems have collided and merged for thousands of years. For over four hundred years, the Ottoman Empire headed by a Muslim sultan in Constantinople controlled most of the Balkans. The Ottomans taxed their subject peoples heavily and conscripted their young men to fight in frequent wars. But the west European obsession with ensuring that the religion of the people matched that of the ruler was not shared. The Orthodox Christian Church and the Jews enjoyed freedom of worship. They were allowed to maintain their own courts and judges, applying their own laws to their communities in a whole range of civil matters. Forcible conversions to Islam were rare. But among certain peoples, particularly the Slavs of Bosnia and the Albanians, large-scale conversions took place, not least because of the opportunities for upward mobility in the Ottoman bureaucracy or the military provided for Muslims.

The autonomy enjoyed by the Orthodox Church preserved cultural values pre-dating Islam, particularly memories of the Byzantine Empire which had lasted until 1453. This sense of religious and historical separation would provide the seedbed for nationalism when the Ottoman empire decayed. A Byzantine heritage was also preserved by influential Greek families, known as the phanariots, who administered parts of the Empire on behalf of the Sultan.

The Orthodox Church was a supranational body that was non-national in its doctrines and outlook. Sometimes the harshness of church courts and the exactions of the phanariots made ordinary Greeks view the Turks as less onerous oppressors. During the seventeenth century Greek peasants in the Peloponnese welcomed the return of the Turks after periods of Venetian rule marked by heavy taxation and forcible conversion to Catholicism.

Memories of the sacking of Constantinople in 1204 by Crusaders who looted and massacred, desecrating churches and fatally weakening the Byzantine empire, created long-term enmity between western and eastern Christianity. Today in Greece these images of western treachery and barbarism enable opinion formers to appeal for solidarity with fellow Orthodox Serbs and condemn what is seen as Nato aggression first in Bosnia and later in Kosovo.

Two hundred years ago, as the Ottoman empire became enfeebled and corrupt, it was the West which appeared to offer the path to modernisation and renewed greatness for local Christian leaders and especially restless intellectuals in the Balkans.



In 1807 the Serbs were the first South Slav people to establish their independence. This achievement encouraged the view among Serb rulers that they were entitled to play the leading role in creating a union of South Slav peoples. When Yugoslavia emerged in 1918, the domineering attitude of the Serb leadership provoked resentment among other peoples, particularly the Croats, who, because of their experience of Austrian Habsburg rule from Vienna, had acquired different governmental traditions and expectations.

Before their current demonisation, the Serbs had long enjoyed a vogue in Europe because of their martial sacrifices in the cause of political freedom as well as the beauty of their poetry. Writers from Goethe and Walter Scott to Rebecca West expressed their admiration for the lyric beauty of Serbian popular songs, while Jacob Grimm ranked Serb poetry alongside that of Homer.

The romantic nationalism pioneered by the German philosopher Herder found a ready audience among restless intellectuals in Eastern Europe. With its emphasis on the unique value of every ethnic group and on each group's `natural right' to carve out a national home of its own, romantic nationalism was able to undermine the multi-cultural traditions of the Eastern world. When Herder hailed the Slavs as `the coming leaders of Europe', intellectuals were encouraged to explore the past and all-too-often invent glorious historical pedigrees meant to give reborn nations the inalienable right to enjoy contemporary greatness. If this meant dominating territories shared by more than one ethnic group, then many nationalists justified such a course even if it meant that they were imitating the imperialists whose rule they were seeking to throw off.

The prospects of cultural nationalism were transformed by the French Revolution and Napoleon's humiliation of dynastic empires. The revolution against the traditional political order legitimised a West European concept of nationalism allowing a people to identify with a territory on which they were entitled to establish a state and government of their own.



The appeal of romantic nationalism for European public opinion was first revealed by the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s. Acts of cruelty were committed on both sides but it was the Ottoman atrocities against the Greeks that moved the liberal European conscience. The Ottoman massacre of Greeks on the island of Chios in 1822, immortalised in Delacroix's painting, enabled European public opinion to overrule governments that might have wished to limit Greek ambitions. It was not just Byron, but Shelley, Goethe and Schiller who unleashed a storm of enthusiasm for Philhellenism that cautious governments found hard to stem. In 1824, a series of privately financed loans, which in effect made the City of London the financier of the revolution, proved critical in ensuring Greek success.

One hundred and fifty years later, philhellenism was still a strong enough force to ensure that Greece entered the European Union even though there were nagging doubts about her real commitment to a post-nationalist agenda based upon European integration. In the 1980s and early 1990s Greece would earn the reputation of being arguably the most nationalistic of the Balkan states, under the populist premier Andreas Papandreou. Persistent interference by outside powers in its internal affairs had produced a culture of suspicion and complaint which helped nationalism to flourish.

After Greek independence was achieved in 1832, Great Power interference' combined with local factionalism to weaken the prospects of effective government. Russia and Britain in particular had conflicting interests and ambitions in the Balkans. As a multi-national empire in its own right, Russia was hostile to the pretensions of European small state nationalism. But the tsars claimed to be the legitimate successors to the Orthodox Empire at Byzantium and the defenders of east European Christendom.

In 1774 Catherine the Great of Russia extracted from the sultan the right to appoint consuls in the Ottoman empire who could make representations on behalf of its Christian subjects. Between 1787 and 1792, Russia fought a war with Turkey whose aim was to partition the Ottoman empire and establish Russian control of Constantinople and the Bosphorus Straits. For the first time Britain became aware of conflicting British and Russian interests in the Near East. The realisation gave birth to long-standing international tensions as two rival European powers sought to fill the vacuum left by the retreating Ottoman empire on their own terms.



Britain feared that its imperial possessions in India would be threatened if Russia became a Mediterranean power. Thus the Foreign Office became associated with the policy of propping up the Ottoman empire, or at least preventing its slow decline becoming a rapid collapse that might overturn a precarious balance of power.

An anti-Russian coalition headed by Britain waged war in the Crimea in 1853-54 to foil the tsar's bid to partition the Ottoman empire. Thus the only general European conflict in the hundred years between 1815 and 1914 was due to the Eastern Question. An independent Romania emerged afterwards under the sponsorship of France. The victors in the Crimean War chose to sponsor Romania to prevent Russia controlling the mouth of the Danube. The Romanians claimed Latin ancestry and could act as a bulwark preventing a union of South Slav peoples which Britain feared would enable Russia to clinch its ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean.



Thus the precedent was established for map changes in the Balkans in order to satisfy a precarious balance of power rather than to suit the wishes of the local inhabitants. Emerging peoples threw in their fortunes with a Great Power in the hope that they could achieve their territorial goals. Prospects of co-operation between the Balkan peoples diminished as outside powers were prepared to sponsor rival nationalisms for short-term goals. In 1876 the power of events in the Balkans to galvanise international opinion was shown by the reaction in Britain to massacres perpetrated by Turkish forces against Christian Slavs in Bulgaria. William Gladstone, the leader of the Liberal opposition, published his pamphlet The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East in September 1876 and by the end of that month it had sold 200,000 copies. He demanded that prime minister Disraeli use Britain's authority to compel the sultan to grant freedom to the Christian Bulgarians.

The Balkan Rebellion

In the twilight of Ottoman history, the European power that looms largest was Russia. The expansionist Russians desired several key territories from the Ottomans, and the only thing that really prevented them from aggressively annexing them was the balance of power in Europe. In particular, they feared Austria and Germany, which did not want to see Russia in control of eastern Europe. The real prize for the Russians was the city of Istanbul, which the Russians still called Constantinople. If they could seize this city, that meant that they would control all trade between Europe and Asia that proceeded through the Black Sea. The Ottomans, for their part, had lost morale. The old military state, confident in its ability to protect the Islamic world from European predation, was crumbling in its confidence because of a series of defeats and draws in wars with Russia.

In 1875, the Slavic peoples living in the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina (currently the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina), led an uprising against the Ottomans in order to gain their freedom. The general weakness of the Ottomans led two independent, neighbor Slavic states, Montenegro and Serbia, to aid the rebellion. Within a year, the rebellion spread to the Ottoman province of Bulgaria. The rebellion was part of a larger political movement called the Pan-Slavic movement, which had as its goal the unification of all Slavic peoples&emdash;most of whom were under the control of Austria, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire&emdash;into a single political unity under the protection of Russia. Anxious also to conquer the Ottomans themselves and seize Istanbul, the Russians allied with the rebels, Serbia, and Montenegro and declared war against the Ottomans.

The war went very badly for the Ottomans, and by 1878 they had to sue for peace. Under the peace treaty, the Ottomans had to free all the Balkan provinces, including Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria. Russia also took substantial amounts of Ottoman territory as "payment" for the war. The Ottomans fell out of the picture, but the Russian victory produced a European crisis over the expansion of Russia.