Stavrianos on the nineteenth-century Balkans

It is by no means correct to state, as is so often done, that the Balkans were the ‘powder keg of Europe’. It was all Europe that provided the powder for the keg.

I recently finished reading a brief volume by the late historian Leften Stavros Stavrianos, The Balkans: 1815–1914. Stavrianos’s book is a brisk but remarkably powerful history on an eventful period – it actually begins with the revolts of Black George in 1804 and the Greeks in 1821, and ends with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. Several themes crop up repeatedly: the first, of Turkish administrative reforms actually stoking the fires of ethnic nationalism in the Balkans, rather than appeasing them; the second, of the contradictions that arose between religious and ethnic belonging among the peoples of the region; and the third, of the Balkans as a ‘test case’ for the imposition of military-œconomic imperialism and finance capitalism by Western powers on foreign territories.

The cases of the Serbian and Greek revolts against Turkish rule show an Ottoman political structure that was unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with the fallout of the commercial-capitalism and administrative decentralisation which its leadership actually did its best to encourage. Ironically, Turkish rule disintegrated precisely where and when it was most urgently driven to ‘reform’. Stavrianos indicates that the leader of the Serbian revolt, Đorđe Petrović (later known by his revolutionary sobriquet ‘Karađorđe’ or ‘Black George’), was, as a prosperous pig farmer, in fact a representative of the commercial class; the leaders of the Philikē Hetaireia (the Greek revolutionary secret society), too, were shipping agents and merchants. They were often placed in opposition to local bureaucrats, state functionaries and ‘dragomans’ who, though themselves Christian and Greek or Slavic, had high Ottoman connexions. The Phanariotes (the Greeks of the lighthouse district in Constantinople, among whom were selected the political and ecclesiastical leaders of Greeks under Ottoman rule) were for a long time opposed to their Greek brethren seeking independence. Likewise, the chiflik leaders were often drawn from local, rather than Turkish notables, and ruled their local fiefdoms in many cases more harshly than the Turks would have done.

And this is where we begin to see the third of these themes rear its head for the first time – the selective and often self-interested intrusion of the Western European powers in to Ottoman politics. The Greek bid for independence from the Ottomans was gladly supported by Britain, France and Russia. In this, the Europeans were led either by a philhellene idealism in the case of Britain and France, or by Orthodox religious solidarity (and the possibility of reconquering Constantinople) in the case of Russia. But the realpolitik of nineteenth-century Europe reared its head in the case of the Serbs – unfortunately not even the Russians would support Karađorđe’s revolt, despite the natural ties of language and religion between the Serbs and the Russians. The first Serbian uprising ended in failure and base betrayal – as Miloš Obrenović, one of Karađorđe’s commanders, ordered him murdered and beheaded, and sent the head to the Turks to placate them. (This set the stage for a long and bloody dynastic feud between the Karađorđević and Obrenović houses.)

Later, the Great Powers moved in hungrily on the Balkans. Austria-Hungary and Russia were the big two imperial powers who managed to salami-slice bits and pieces off of the failing Ottomans, but Britain and France also had vested œconomic and cultural interests in the Ottoman lands. Britain, naturally, wanted to keep her mercantile interests and ready sea access to her Indian holdings that the Suez provided; France also had interests in the ‘holy places’ debate (and would for the foreseeable future), and found herself dragged deep into the cultural renaissance of the Romanians, who emphasised their shared Latin heritage. The formation of these power blocs in the Balkans actually managed to set the stage for the Crimean War, with both Britain and France siding against Russia over not only the Crimean Peninsula, but also over Palestine and Romania. The Crimean War was a perfect and spectacular conflagration of the vulgar-shopkeeper Whiggery of Britain’s mercantile-capitalist class (embodied in Lord Palmerston) and the quasi-Catholic sham piety of Napoleon III, as they clashed with the overbearing autocratic self-love of Nikolai I.

The Ottoman Empire then embarked on several broad-based reforms aimed at holding the other Great Powers at bay and keeping what was left of the rebellious Balkans inside the empire. This strategy backfired spectacularly. They often relied on local pashas to implement these reforms, who themselves behaved like little despots in their own fiefdoms – to murderous effect, as we have seen, in the Levant and in Ægypt. Instead of creating a singular Ottoman patriotism as they had intended to do, the reforms they bollocksed up (to put it crudely) instead managed to inflame nationalism in practically every area they touched. Palestinian, Syrian and Ægyptian Arab nationalisms all had their roots in the Ottoman reform movement. So too did the nationalisms of the Balkans – Bulgarian, Romanian and Serbian as well as Greek. Midhat Pasha of Bulgaria, though he was an effective ruler and dynamic reformer, nonetheless proved by the fact that his successors failed to measure up to his standard that he was an exception to the general rule.

Bulgarian nationalism at this time was as much mobilised, however, against Greek churchmen as it was against the Turks, and their anti-Greek fervour was precisely what precipitated Pobedonostsev, in a bit of anti-nationalist conservative sentiment, to back the Phanar against the Bulgarians (which he was right to do, in my own humble opinion). When the Bulgarians rose up against the Ottomans, however, the reprisal was bloody enough to earn the title of the ‘Bulgarian horrors’ in the Western press. Entire villages were burnt and tens of thousands of people butchered. I have noted before how accounts of the atrocities committed by the Ottomans against Bulgarian peasants managed to radicalise William Morris and play a significant part in turning him toward socialism. Bulgaria did, however, manage to gain its independence with help particularly from Russia.

The various interventions in the Balkans by the European powers continued, however – and the actually managed to provoke a split in British conservatism between the belligerent Disraeli and the more old-fashioned non-interventionist Lord Salisbury. For their part, the Whigs vacillated between the naked, vulgar greed of Lord Palmerston and the hypocritical sentimentalism of William Gladstone. But it demonstrated a growing trend of European interventions in the Balkans to maintain their commercial and œconomic interests – a trend which also beggared the Balkan peasantry. The sudden European interest and investment in the Balkans meant an equally-sudden transition to a money œconomy. Stavrianos dwells at length on how the growth of the money œconomy in the Balkans sent the peasantry into spiralling debt, created cottage industries of petty usury, unravelled the traditional communal solidarity that had prevailed in the Balkan zadruga and opština, and provoked a massive flood of people into the cities from the surrounding countryside. Capitalism, in its primordial form, was every bit as destructive on the traditional fabric of Balkan society as it has been anywhere else.

War was an almost-constant reality in the Balkans, and more often than not it had to do with the competing interests of the Great Powers. The road to Sarajevo 1914 was lined with constant violence – both over the fate of the Bosnian Serbs under Austria-Hungary, and over the fate of Macedonia (in which all three Orthodox countries of Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece had material interests). The Yugoslav ideal has never been a mere peaceful pastime of disconnected intellectuals; it was largely forged in these conflicts, and posited as a solution to them – because it would guarantee a certain level of independence from these great power conflicts. Little wonder, also, that Yugoslavia would be so keen on the non-aligned movement in yet another era of great power conflicts! So when Stavrianos objects, roundly, to the stereotype of the Balkans as a ‘powder keg’ in Western European historiography, he is reacting precisely against an interpretation of history that makes the Balkans a scapegoat for the dysfunctionality and violence of Europe as a whole.

Stavrianos gives a good flavour for the land, the people and the various ethnic and religious divides; but he also keeps a realistic eye on the broader trends that have shaped the Balkans. I was somewhat surprised to see that his work dates from the 1960’s: it manages to presage certain revisionist forms of historiography that call into question the standard bromides of Cold War politics. Again, this is a brisk read, but I would certainly recommend it as an introductory text for recent Balkan history.