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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.53: the Balkans

Last time we walked through everything we already knew about the deep background of World War I from stuff we’ve already talked about in the podcast. This week, we are going to combine that old information with a bunch of new information regarding the infamously fractious and complicated Balkan peninsula, and why a crisis there could possibly trigger a great power war that would consume the entire world.

The big picture setting for all of this is the Eastern Question, and the Eastern Question is: what is going to happen now that the Ottoman Empire is clearly in collapse. Imperial power games are very zero sum; if one empire recedes, another empire advances, that’s how it works. By the late 19th century, Britain, France, Austria, Hungary, Germany, and Russia all believed that they could take advantage of the situation. For the Russians, advancing at Ottoman expense was a centuries old game. Since the time of Peter the Great, the Russians had steadily advanced south, fighting nearly a dozen different wars with the Turks in the process. Their grand overarching dream was to one day maybe control the entire Black Sea Basin, and seize the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosphorus, what were collectively called the Turkish Straits, so that they would have direct access to the Mediterranean. This dream of course, included expelling the Turks from Constantinople. And there were many things fueling this grand ambition: militarily, it would give Russian fleets direct access from the Black Sea out into the Mediterranean and defend against any enemy power from ever getting in; economically, they would be tapping the entire Mediterranean basin for trade, commerce, and new markets; and ideologically, the Russians tsars had always considered themselves the premier defenders of Orthodox Christianity, and ending 500 years of Muslim occupation and returning Constantinople to its rightful Orthodox owners would be the work of God. All of that combined then fed into an emotional yearning for that nebulously defined concept we call prestige. If the Russians controlled Constantinople, it would be very prestigious.`

By the late 19th century, Russia was tantalizingly close to realizing this dream. They had extended their empire deep into the Black Sea Basin, enveloping the east coast, and controlling principalities at the mouth of the Danube on the west coast, which meant that the Russian Empire now directly abutted the Balkans. Projecting an overarching hegemonic authority over the Balkan Peninsula — in essence, replacing the Ottoman presence there — would be essential to protecting the Western flanks when Russia made their final thrust south, and claimed Constantinople. Beyond territorial, economic, and political motivations though, Russia wielding power and influence in the Balkans fit squarely in with the longstanding ideological belief that the tsars were the defenders and patrons of all Orthodox Christians everywhere. Many of the ethnic groups in the Balkans were Orthodox Christians, who were seen by the Russians as oppressed cousins, who needed to be liberated from the cruel yolk of Muslim despotism.

Russia’s long-standing support for Orthodox communities living under Muslim rule merged with the new strains of nationalism that had grown up in the 19th century, especially during and after the Revolutions of 1848. Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians, Romanians and Albanians all developed their own dreams of national unification and self-determination and independence. Even before 1848, for example, both the Serbs and the Bulgarians had both achieved something like autonomous home rule, but still inside the Ottoman empire. These were a result of nationalistic, revolutionary uprisings against the Turks. And as we talked about a bit during the Revolutions of 1848, these individual national aspirations merged with a larger pan-Slavic movement to unify all Slavic peoples into a single nation. By the 1870s, they had direct models to look to for inspiration, as Florentines, Venetians, and Romans had all recently joined together in a new thing called Italy, and Bohemians, Hessians, and Rhinelanders joined together in a new thing called Germany. For such pan-Slavic idealists, the debate came down to whether or not they would be unified under the greatest Slavic power of them all, Russia, or whether they would merely look to the Russians as the great power who would help them achieve their dreams.

In the mid 1870s, all of this came together in a succession of simultaneous explosions we call The Eastern Crisis. Smelling Ottoman blood in the water, most of the Christian communities under Ottoman rule — that is the Serbs and the Bulgarians and the Romanians — rose up separately and simultaneously over the course of 1875 and 1876 and 1877. These uprisings knocked the wobbly Ottomans well off balance, and the Russians happily took advantage, entering the war on behalf of the Balkan insurrectionists in 1877. The Russian army wound up marching practically to the gates of Constantinople before the suddenly alarmed British sent a navy down to fly the colors and warn the Russians not to get any crazy ideas in their head about conquering Constantinople.

The subsequent Congress of Berlin in 1878 drew up treaties ending all these conflicts. But much to the frustration of the Russians and the various Balkan groups, the other great powers in Europe seemed primarily interested in limiting Russian gains and short-circuiting any hope that pan-Slavic unification was a possibility. Instead of allowing a unified and independent Slavic state to emerge, the other powers, well, balkanized the Balkans. Bulgarians were divided into two separate principalities, and though defacto independent would still be considered technically Ottoman possessions. The principalities of Serbia and Montenegro and Romania were recognized as independent states, no longer the subjects of any great power, but they were kept as small as possible, and abutting the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they were clearly meant to be client satellites of the Hapsburgs. Finally, the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the northwest of Serbia would still be considered the sovereign possessions of the Ottomans, but under a military and administrative occupation by the Austrians, which would be recognized under international law. If all that didn’t make a whole lot of sense, don’t worry. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to anybody.

The upshot of the Congress of Berlin was wary satisfaction from the other European powers that may be this new map would hold the region together. But this was matched by intense dissatisfaction among the various Balkan groups and the Russians, who all felt that they had been kind of screwed over and denied their rightful spoils of victory. Why was unification and national dignity cool for Germans and Italians, but not for us? The Russians wondered why the British and French were able to spread their tentacles across the whole world, but if Russia decided to advance even a little bit, it was somehow the end of the world. It led to increased resentment among the Slavs, who thought that the other nationalities of Europe did not really see them as possessing equal dignity or stature. Certainly they did not feel respected. They felt like the other powers considered Slavs only good to be ruled by superior races. The Congress of Berlin may have settled things temporarily, but it all but ensured things would not be settled permanently. All it did was move the pieces on the board into the rough position that would create a succession of crises 30 years later that would lead directly to World War I.

To add a wrinkle to all of this, all the Slavic nationalities in the Balkans were able to look to the incredibly recent examples of the unification of Germany and Italy to follow as their model. These were events they did not read in history books, these were events they read in the newspaper. And in both of those cases, unification came when a strong military power did the unifying. In Germany, that role was played obviously by Prussia, and in Italy, remember, it was played by the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. But the question was, who is going to play the role of Prussia and Piedmont in the Balkans? And just to oversimplify things a bit here, it’s either going to be Serbia or Bulgaria, and both fancied themselves for the job. After their independence was recognized at the Congress of Berlin, Serbia elevated themselves to the dignity of being called the Kingdom of Serbia in 1882. A few years later, Bulgaria annexed their southern compatriots out of that completely made up second principality that they had been placed in by the Congress of Berlin specifically to prevent the unification of the Bulgarians. This led to a little war between Serbia and Bulgaria in 1885, which Bulgaria won, and for the moment really started envisioning themselves as the Prussia of the Balkans.

But events in Serbia will wind up playing a much bigger role in our story, so we’re going to stick with them. After independence, they were ruled by a royal dynasty that was very friendly with the Hapsburgs, but nationalistic elements among the Serbian political elite and in the officer corps of the army believed that achieving their dream of greater Serbia — that is uniting all the Serbs together into a single polity — meant including the large contingent of Serbs living in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which remember was still du jour provinces of the Turks, but de facto provinces of the Austrians, it’s good and confusing times in the Balkans all the time. Now, the kingdom of Serbia seizing Bosnia and Herzegovina is obviously going to mean breaking it away from the Hapsburgs, which almost certainly required help from the Russians to accomplish. In 1903, a powerful nationalist clique, including some of the most prominent leaders and military officers in Serbia, orchestrated a violent coup. They assassinated their pro-Hapsburg king and queen, as well as several government ministers, and installed a new dynasty who had close ties to Russia.

Now, this was an era where monarchs and ministers and world leaders were getting assassinated left and right by various revolutionaries and terrorists and nationalists and reactionaries — the turn of the 20th century for the record was a very hazardous time to be a political leader, as it seems like somebody somewhere was likely planning to drop a bomb in your lap or fire a few rounds into your chest as we have seen repeatedly over in Russia — but regicide is still regicide. And in the wake of the coup, Serbia found itself very isolated diplomatically by the other powers. Even the Russians, who clearly benefited in the long run from the coup, condemned the crime of regicide. And this diplomatic isolation did not start to ease up until the new Serbian government agreed to prosecute, demote, or otherwise retire many of the people implicated in the coup. Or at least make a good show of it.

The dream of greater Serbia lived on, though. And the same general group of leaders who organize the assassinations and coups continued their efforts to achieve that goal. The most immediate and clear object was wrestling control of Bosnia away from the Austrians. Now, Serbia and Bosnia shared a border, and there was plenty of action back and forth across the lines. Bosnian Serbs activists got support from Serb nationalists in Belgrade, and were ultimately backed and encouraged by the Russians, who viewed greater Serbia as the clearest path to them becoming the dominant power in the Balkans. Increasingly fed up with Serb agitation on their border, in 1906, the Austrian government imposed economic sanctions, and refused to import Serbian goods, particularly livestock, but particularly pork, which is how this little economic conflict becomes known as the Pig War. But Austria’s attempt to strangle Serbia economically by cutting off their primary export pipeline just led the Serbs to find other markets, and they actually increased their net exports, as well as tying them closer to other foreign powers like France, who started to see supporting the Serbs as a good way to please their Russian allies and tie up the Austrians and the Balkans. The French were happy to provide loans to the government and munitions to their army.

Now the Austrian concern about Serbian agitation in Bosnia was never just about the Serbs or just about Bosnia. They never considered it in the narrow context of the fate of a few small principalities on the periphery of their empire. It was always discussed in the wider context of the fate of the whole Austro-Hungarian Empire. If the Serbs succeeded in peeling off Bosnia and forging a regionally powerful kingdom of Serbia, it would be the green light for every other subject nationality to do the same — Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, they would all try to follow suit. And the Hapsburg empire had only barely survived 1848, and then they had gone and lost their Italian possessions. So checking Serbia was never just about checking Serbia. They were well on their way down the road to a domino theory where allowing Serbia to get their way would collapse the entire empire.

In 1908, Austria received what they believed to be an unexpected gift from the Russians, thanks to some diplomatic freelancing by the new Russian foreign minister Alexander Izvolsky. A career diplomat, Izvolsky had taken over the foreign office right alongside newly appointed Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, who was his political ally. They were part of a new team that was supposed to get Russia out of its deeply troubling and humiliating waters that had recently swamped them thanks to the Russo-Japanese war and the Revolution of 1905. Both Stolypin and Izvolsky knew that Russia was in a precarious place internationally. Their army and navy was in shambles. Their reputation was in severe decline. Izvolsky undertook reorienting Russia towards Britain, who had for decades have been on the opposite side of Russia on the Eastern Question. But in 1907, Britain and Russia signed a convention that mutually settled some of their disputes in Central Asia, and open the vague possibility that Britain, down the road, might change their policies regarding the Russian claim to the Turkish Straits and Constantinople — at least, that’s what the Russians hoped. In the meantime, the Convention of 1907 brought Britain, France, and Russia into a very rough and general alignment.

Izvolsky however, envisioned a quick advance down the Turkish Straits, and he secretly approached Austria about a deal. If Austria decided to officially annex Bosnia and Herzegovina and thus crush the Serbian dream of national unification and greater Serbia, Izvolsky said the Russians would not protest. In exchange, austria must support the Russian claim to the Turkish Straits.

Now, this is a huge promise Izvolsky is making. The Russians supporting the Serbs had been policy for ages, and really the only thing stopping the Austrians from annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina was the possibility of Russian intervention. So what Izvolsky is saying here is that he’s willing to sell out the Serbs in exchange for the Turkish Straits. The Austrian foreign minister indicated that he would go along with this, mostly because he believed Austrian support for the Russians wouldn’t make a bit of difference, because France and Britain would never agree to giving the Russians exclusive run of the Turkish Straits in a million years. Izvolsky, though, thought he had time to line up support for his plan with the French and the British, and then the Austrians and Russians would jointly announce the deal that they had secretly struck.

But then suddenly in October 1908, without any warning at all, the Austrians unilaterally announced the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This announcement shocked the rest of Europe and double triple quadruple shocked Izvolsky, who believed the Austrians had stabbed him in the back. All of this triggered what we call the Bosnian Crisis.

The annexation of Bosnia put Russia in a very tight spot, and caught Izvolsky way out on a limb that could not support him. Their longtime clients the Serbs howled in protest and demanded Russia defend their interests against the Austrians. But there was little the Russians could do. They were in no position politically or militarily or financially to get drawn into a war against Austria in the Balkans. Now the military did start preliminary war mobilization, but then Germany stepped in and issued a blunt ultimatum to Russia: that they better accept the annexation or face war with Austria and Germany. Meanwhile, Izvolsky had created just enough scandalous evidence that he had agreed to sell out the Serbs that he was more or less blackmailed into not protesting the annexation, even though Russia now received basically nothing in return. So Russia accepted the annexation of Bosnia, and made no further protests and rattled no more sabers. The tsar was personally furious at how everyone around him had behaved, especially because they now made Russia look so duplicitous and weak.

Izvolsky was soon enough removed from his position as foreign minister and demoted to being a mere ambassador again. But critically, they made him ambassador to France, where he spent every waking moment in Paris, promoting the Russian and French alliance against the Germanic central powers who had betrayed and humiliated him on a personal level in 1908. These things too help start wars.

The Serbs were not content to sit back and just let all this happen though, and in response, hardcore Serb nationalists formed a new underground group called Unification or Death that basically grew organically from the same group who had staged the murderous coup in 1903. They were casually referred to as the Black Hand. Their goal: using any and all means necessary, including violence and assassination, to achieve the dream of greater Serbia.

The ties between the Serb government and Black Hand were not formal, but there was a lot of overlap between the two. And, for example, the head of Serbian military intelligence doubled as the leader of Black Hand. They planned to be aggressively provocative to destabilize the general situation in the Balkans and enlarge Serbian territory in the resulting chaos with the specific non-negotiable objective of taking Bosnia away from the Austrians. So we will end today with the final round of Balkan destabilization before the July Crisis of 1914, which, as I’m sure you know, was set off when Black Hand assassins murder the heir to the Austrian throne Franz Ferdinand as he was on a good will tour through the oh so recently and controversially annexed Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.

But before that can happen, the Balkans have to go through not one but two Balkan Wars. These new Balkans Wars were advanced recapitulations of the uprisings that we refer to as the Eastern Crisis from back in the mid 1870s. The Balkans Wars exploded in 1912, because in 1911, the Italians had launched a successful invasion of what is now Libya, and peeled it away from the tottering Ottoman Empire. The reason this is relevant is because none of the other great powers in Europe protested or came to the Turk’s defense; they just let Italy do it. Germany and Austria were formal allies of Italy, and the British and French were now lining up with the Russians in what everyone was clearly understanding to be a post-Ottoman world. It did not take long for the nations in the Balkans to decide the time had come to toss the Turks out of Europe once and for all, and divide their remaining territory amongst themselves. In 1912, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Greece formed the Balkan League. And after agreeing in advance to what a rough post-Ottoman map of the Balkans would look, like they declared war on the Turks. The combined forces of the Balkan league, all but expelled the Ottomans from their last foothold in Europe.

None of the other great powers got into this conflict. Russia was still not ready to fight another war, their military experts predicted they would not be ready until at least 1917, though they certainly welcomed an aggressive Slavic uprising. The Austrians, meanwhile, were caught flat-footed and couldn’t mobilize quick enough to get troops into the field to defend their. Interests. And by that, I mean stop Serbia from getting any bigger. But even if they had been able to get into the war, it’s not clear they would have, since that would have surely brought in the Russians, whether they were ready for war or not.

And this time, crucially, the Germans indicated to the Austrians that there was no support in Germany for a war in the Balkans. So if Austria started fighting, they would fight alone. This left Austria mighty miffed at their allies in Germany, who weren’t supporting them as they tried to contain a grave and unstable threat on their border. Germany walked away well aware that Austria was miffed at them, and since Germany’s main interest was not being isolated and left to stand alone against France and Russia, they resolved that in the future, they would be far more vocal about standing by Austria, if for no other reason than to prove to Austria that Austria should stand beside Germany.

At the resulting peace conference in London in the spring of 1913 to redraw the map of the Balkans yet again, the Bulgarians felt like they were about to be denied territory they believed was rightfully theirs. Now they also happen to believe that they were bigger and stronger than the rest of the Balkan League combined, and declared war on their erstwhile allies in June 1913 to get a better deal at the conference table. But this turned out to be a serious miscalculation. The rest of the Balkan League quickly defeated the Bulgarians in this second Balkan War, and the Serb armies advanced all the way to the Adriatic Sea. Now the Kingdom of Serbia with a port on the Adriatic was intolerable to the Austrians, so at the peace conferences, the Austrians demanded the creation of an independent state called Albania. Albania only exists to stop the Serbs from having a port on the Adriatic. In response to this, the Serbs again called on the Russians to protect and defend them, and again, the Russians deemed themselves insufficiently positioned to help. And so instead, they pressured the Serbs to withdraw their armies from Albania, which the Serbs did, to their great frustration and annoyance.

The Balkan Wars resulted in the final expulsion of the Ottomans from Europe after 500 years, and the liberation of all these Orthodox Christianities from the ‘tyranny of the Muslims,’ but nearly every group, especially Serbia, walked away full of resentment at what they had been denied, rather than reveling in what they had achieved.

And that is where we are going to leave them all this week. Serbia believes that it has the power and the momentum to be the Prussia/Piedmont of the Balkans, but they are feeling unfairly stifled. They are going to become even more emotionally committed than ever to seizing Bosnia from the Austrians. The Russians, meanwhile, understood that their relations with the Serbs were fraying. Their inability to help the Serbs in 1908 and then again in 1912 and again in 1913 was a national humiliation for the Russians that could simply not be repeated again. No matter what, the next time the Serbs called for help, the Russians had to respond, they had to. Hopefully though, nothing would happen before 1917 when Russian war planners believed they would actually be ready for another great war. The Germans, meanwhile, walked away well aware that the Austrians felt let down by them, and resolve that next time the Serbian question came up, that they had to back the Austrians to the hilt, they had to. By the time 1914 rolled around, everyone for their own separate reasons believed that they had something to prove, and that in the next great power confrontation, they could not back down. The fear of looking weak, the fear of letting down their allies, absolutely saturated Europe the dawn of 1914.

And next week we will merge these foreign storylines with the domestic storylines back in Russia. Because it was not just fears on the international front that worried Tsar Nicholas and his ministers, but also they had fears at home. They were living in this post-1905 world that involves things like newspapers and speeches and public opinion and gross things like that. National opinion makers were getting very frustrated by the government’s willingness to endure humiliation after humiliation on the global stage while leaving, for example, the noble Serbs out to dry. From the Russo-Japanese War on, the tsarist regime had clearly proven itself to be an impediment to the true potential of Russian national greatness. Foreign policy failures had become a stick for critics to beat the government with. Meanwhile, down on the ground, the window of social and labor piece was starting to give way to more militant action. Strikes, protests, and labor unrest were picking up again by 1912 after a few years of dormancy. Liberal critics in the press, upset over foreign policy debacles, combining with angry working classes upset over wages and conditions, were the revolutionary coalition of 1905, and they are starting to come back together. So when the July Crisis comes in 1914, the tsar was less concerned that going to war might lead to revolution, and far more concerned that if he did not go to war, there would be a revolution. And in fact, going to war would be the very thing that ended all revolutions forever.

But before we go today, please remember to go pre-order Hero of Two Worlds. Uh, somebody on Twitter noted that there were 10,800 registered booksellers in the United States, and I think it would be very cool and great if the book was ordered from each and every one of them. I should also mention that a few people took my threat to quit podcasting if we didn’t get to 10,000 pre-orders a bit too seriously. Um, that was playfully tongue in cheek. I’m not actually going to quit podcasting if we don’t get 10,000 pre-orders, which I thought would have been obvious, but for some people it wasn’t. Um, my dry sense of humor does get me into trouble sometimes. The last time I got a bunch of irate emails over something I said in the show was that time I deadpan said that ancient aliens were the cause of the Neolithic agricultural revolution, which I also don’t believe. Uh, archeologists were mad at me about that one. But anyway, pre-order the book! And I’ll see you next week as our Nicholas convinces himself that he’s going to save his regime by going to war.