So I'm often on this, the psychics and I'm the director of South-East European Studies at Oxford and of the European Studies Centre.
And on behalf of Caesar and My Convenors, Elizabeth Roberts and David Madden,
I would like to welcome you to our most important event for this year a conference to
commemorate World War One and its legacy on Southeast Europe titled The Past Is Never Dead.
A quote by William Faulkner is hugely relevant in our part of the world,
where historical memories are always influential and dominant as a direct or indirect reference affecting current developments,
perceptions, attitudes, provoking debates, passionate and emotional,
but also interesting academic debates such as the one that we are hoping to conduct today in this lecture theatre.
Let me start from the beginning by pointing out that this is not just an exceptional phenomenon of the Balkans on how history affects the present.
The commemoration of the hundred years from World War One has been a hotly debated issue, not just there in Sarajevo,
but other Balkan states where the war officially started, but also in this country, in Germany, in Austria or France.
All of the main actors in the period preceding, during and after the war.
But there's also something Balkan about the origins of the war itself, in that this is the region that experienced the collapse of two empires,
the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman was impact and the percussions are being felt up until today.
In many ways, World War One did signify the start of a new era of nation state building,
a new understanding of human and minority rights, a new way of elite and mass involvement in political, economic and social affairs.
What we've seen in Southeast Europe is a polyphony,
often cacophony of views and perceptions as to what actually happened, who were the culprits or the victims of this war.
What makes this region so particularly exciting is that Southeast Europe was the battleground in military,
political or ideological terms of most proxy wars and competitions between the great powers of the time.
The middle of all the antagonism, the rivalries of the powerful patrons in Europe.
But it has also led to local conflicts, indemnities, and let the Balkan elites to make difficult choices and decisions to take sides,
the legacies of which have been disputed and abused until nowadays.
I myself come from a country, Greece, where history textbooks up until the 1980s terminated with World War One,
and there was no official memory after that historical moment.
The bitter infighting between Venizelos and Royalists,
which is remembered as the great schism in Greece and the subsequent end of Greece's great idea,
became a shameful and divisive historical moment that could not be handled for many decades to come.
But for the political elites and the political parties in Greece and for the over 1 million refugees from Anatolia,
the outcome of this great war was felt and affected their everyday lives and practices.
Turkey, for its part, chose to forget about the Ottoman roots of the New Republic, and it is only recently that historians,
social anthropologists and the official Turkish state are revisiting the significance of the Ottoman Empire in other parts of the region.
States and people have had to live with the consequences of this period, not least in Yugoslavia,
the country, which was the direct outcome of the collapse of the two empires.
With all these issues in mind, my co-convener and I decided to engage with this past through the organisation of this conference,
which forms part of the wider cluster of activities around Oxford on the 100th anniversary of the Great War.
And we deliberately chose a speakers historians with a big experience and massive
archival work on World War One to contemplate on the legacies of this period.
So we are grateful to have with us today five hugely respected historians who have written numerous
volumes on this particular period and will be introduced by the chairs of the two panels.
But let me also think from my part. Professors IV about evil bandits from Yale University in Zagreb University.
Richard Crampton My very own Balkan historian, Eugene Rogan from the Middle East Centre.
Leslie Warner is a dphil graduate from St Anthony's and professors at the Aristotle University into Salonika.
Thank you all for joining us today and we look forward to having you with us in this debate.
And last but not least, Margaret Macmillan, our eminent historian and leader of this college, who will kick off this first panel.
Now, Margaret, I know that you don't like us praising your personality and work,
but I just want to mention that I'm lucky to have had the opportunity this past couple of years to discuss and learn from the latest volume,
one of the best books to have been published on the origins of the First World War.
And one of the bestsellers as well. And I was also very pleased to have convened your book launch back last January in this very
room with other historians from Oxford in what was a particularly regarding discussion,
a rewarding discussion on this topic. Let me also add that I'm very pleased to see all of you here,
and in particular to mention three names that have been part of this college
for many years and have produced some of the best writings of this period.
And I'm referring to Professor Richard Kellogg, emeritus fellow who has worked on the history of Greece in the Balkans,
has been reference reading for countless scholars around the world.
Michael Smith, a different graduate from St Anthony's and an honorary fellow now whose book on the Ionian Vision has been one of the
best on the end of Greece's great idea and an invitation with a dedicated work and books on the 1922 refugees in Greece.
I mentioning these names because I want to stress the contribution of these scholars,
all of them part of this college, to the study of history of Southeast Europe.
I would also like to thank our colleague and historian differ Virgil from Saint Anselm College,
currently professor of history at Sacramento State University, Katharina Laws, who contributed with their ideas and constructive input.
This event is video recorded for our website and will be shown to the students and scholars at the other side of the Atlantic or the Pacific,
I should say, in Sacramento, where Katarina is leading a program on Greece in the Balkans and will generate a further debate over that as well.
Katharina has also contributed financially via the Acropolis Foundation for the organisation of today's conference, for which we are grateful.
And we would also like to mention the financial contribution from Saint Anthony College,
whose logo in our program is not just because she is part of this college, but also for the funding which has been provided for this event.
Before I finish, I would like to thank my colleague Convenors and chairs of the next two panels,
Elizabeth Roberts, who is a member of this steering committee.
But her major claim to fame is her historical work and her two volumes, one on Montenegro and one on Sunday.
And David Madden, chair of the Caesar Development Committee, who has lived as ambassador in different parts of this region,
including Greece, Cyprus or Bosnia, and with whom we conspired on a daily basis.
What should be our next project for C6? The three of us work together with great enthusiasm to put together this event.
But I should say for rather, because Julia Adams, the Seahawks administrator, has worked tirelessly not just on the administrative part of this event,
but also doing her own archival research to come up with the relevant photos or other
information and pictures which would decorate our program today and the website.
I hope that you will enjoy commemorating with us the not so enjoyable historical event,
but certainly enjoy the quality of our talk and the debate that will follow in our speeches.
And I would like to invite you to participate as much as you like.
And we have until 6:30 for this symposium with a coffee break in the middle.
And with this, I would like to invite Elizabeth and the speakers of the first panel to kick off the debate.
Well, thank you often for that introduction to the thinking behind the Centenary Symposium.
The past is never dead. Broken legacies of the First World War.
Enough for me to introduce the speakers for the first section, first session of the symposium.
So our first speaker, Professor Margaret Miller, and the Warden of St Anthony scarcely needs an introduction,
but I would like to say just a few words about why she is the perfect person to set the scene for the symposium.
Margaret's two magisterial books on the subject of the First World War Span the entire period.
Her book, The War that Ended Peace How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War, takes us from the very beginning of the 20th century,
a time which she writes seemed to be the very symbol of harmony and peace for all humanity.
The outbreak of war in the 4th of August 1914, when, as she quotes Theodore Roosevelt, that great black tornado broke over Europe.
Her multi-award winning peacemakers, the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, published in 2001,
recreates in vivid details the steps leading to the signing of the West Side Treaty on the 28th of June 1919.
Five years to the day after Gavrilo Princip fired the shots that unleashed the Great War.
To tackle both subjects was to take on a truly daunting task.
Had been, according to The Economist, some 25,000 books and scholarly articles written on the subject since 1918.
Nevertheless, she has succeeded in bringing these periods with her myriad complications to life
in a manner that combines penetrating social analysis with psychological insight,
and to do so in an immensely readable way. She's thus speaker,
superbly suited to introduce a symposium which takes as its subject not simply the causes of and calamities occasioned by the First World War,
but also its enduring influence in Southeastern Europe on the ways in which she continues to be remembered and used selectively, even 100 years on.
Margaret will be followed by a second speaker, Professor Eva Bernhardt's,
who's emeritus professor of history at Yale University and a former minister
for Environmental Protection and Urban Planning in the Government of Croatia.
Professor Banos is also admirably qualified to take up the question of Balkan legacies.
The First World War. Born in Dubrovnik, he moved to the US at the age of 12, completing his master's and doctoral degrees at Stanford University.
His award winning book, The National Question in Yugoslavia Origins History, Politics, published in 1984,
which which established him as the foremost authority in this highly contentious field,
has never been surpassed in its detailed and immensely knowledgeable analysis of the South.
Slav National Question. Zaslow national question is one that emerged vividly, vividly from the collapse of all multinational empires,
the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman in particular at the end of the Great War.
And it's one that remains highly topical. As Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and others continue to debate the collective responsibility,
collective responsibility for that war and the subsequent wars today.
Both Margaret McMillan and Professor Bennett's have written on the abuses of history
and on the highly toxic legacy of the continuing glamour and use of national myths.
Professor Barnard's second prize winning book With Stalin against Tito, looks at another traumatic period in recent self-love history.
Having once invited French treatment to speak at Yale, he became in the 1990, is one of presidents most vocal critics.
He's been president of the Croatian Helsinki Group for Human Rights and editor of the prestigious journal Eastern European Politics and Societies.
Our third speaker in this first session is Professor Richard Crampton, who is also somebody who needs no introduction at Sydney's,
where for many years he taught history and politics of southeastern Europe.
Richard Frampton's first degree was from Trinity College, Dublin, and he read his doctorate at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies.
Professor Crampton is a particular specialist in the history of Bulgaria, which is a nation state siding with the Triple Alliance.
We consider in this separate symposium as a counterpoint to Serbia.
As the title of his talk was The First World War, the turning point in which Bulgarian history failed to turn suggests.
Professor Frampton's Ph.D. research on Anglo-german relations in the Balkans from 1911 to 1914 culminated in his book The Hollow Détente,
published in 1981,
a detailed and scholarly account of the tensions accumulating over southeastern Europe in the period just prior to the First World War.
But not only does Professor Crampton understand the background to today's symposium.
His many books on Bulgaria, including his Concise History and His History of Bulgaria,
published in the Oxford History of Modern Europe Series, his Eastern Europe in the 20th century and after,
and most recently his Balkans since the Second World War,
make him abundantly qualified to speak on today's subject of the Balkan legacy of the First World War.
I've said more than enough, and I now have great pleasure in crossing the floor to ask the speaker, Margaret Macmillan.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
And it's a great pleasure to be here on a panel with such distinguished historians and to be talking about the subject,
which is sadly, of enduring fascination. My title is Too Much History and Too Many Neighbours Europe in the Balkans before 1914.
In the summer of 1914, shortly before the First World War broke out,
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reported on the recent Balkan wars, the wars of 1912 and 1913.
It deplored the tendency of warring peoples to portray their enemies as subhuman and
the all too frequent atrocities committed against both enemy soldiers and civilians.
And went on to say, In the oldest civilisations,
there is a synthesis of moral and social forces embodied in laws and institutions giving stability of character,
forming public sentiment and making for security.
Well, Europeans were shortly to learn that being part of an older civilisation, as they defined it,
made absolutely no difference at all to what peoples were capable of doing to each other.
And I think this points to one of the questions that we need to consider when we look at the Balkans,
and that is how much were the Balkans unique in European civilisation, in European history,
and how much were they part of that history and of that civilisation?
And I would argue that it's very important to treat the Balkans very much as part of a wider world,
not to see them as somehow an aberration in terms of European history,
not to see them as a small part of Europe, which somehow doesn't share in the other values and the norms and the standards of European society.
I think it's also very important to remember, as we look at the outbreak of the First World War,
is it could have broken out over any number of issues.
The period before 1914 in Europe was a time of intensified nationalism, national rivalry,
competition on any number of levels, from arms races to colonies to trade.
It was a period in which European powers were increasingly wary of each other and in
which Europe was sadly becoming more and more used to the idea of a general war.
War could have happened. A general war could have happened on a number of occasions before it finally broke out in 1914.
It could have happened or certainly could have been a major war in 1898 when Britain and France confronted each other in Africa.
That could have been a major war in 1905, when Britain and Russia found themselves at odds,
particularly because they were backing different sides in the war that Russia was fighting against Japan.
There could have been a general war in 1908 over the Bosnian crisis that could have
been was over the two Moroccan crises that could have been general wars in 1911,
1912 and 1913. Now, having said that doesn't mean that war was bound to break out.
And I think one of the dangerous things looking at the First World War is we
assume that because there were so many possible causes that it had to happen.
And I think war had been avoided on previous occasions and could have been avoided in 1914.
What happened in 1914 was, in my view,
an incident which was then seized upon for various reasons by outside powers and turned into the sequence of events which led to a general war.
But I think we do have to look at the Balkans, because that is, after all, where it started.
And so I think we need to look at the ways in which what was going on in the Balkans intersected with what was going on in Europe.
I would argue that much of what was happening in the Balkans in the 19th century, the development of the Balkan national states,
the increasing tensions and rivalries between those states really was a reflection of what was happening elsewhere in Europe.
In fact, people in the Balkans were picking up ideas that were very much current elsewhere in Europe,
the ideas of Mazzini, for example, about the rights of nations to have their independence.
And increasingly, of course, young men, mostly young men from the Balkans,
were travelling abroad, getting educations, picking up ideas, bringing them back.
And increasingly, of course, thanks to modern communications, they could stay at home and get many of the same ideas.
Nicholas Passage went off to Zurich for his education, graduating in 1872.
Princip and his co-conspirators were affected by ideas coming in from outside.
Every sort of idea from Russian nihilists to the ideas of nature.
Nietzsche was always very convenient because nobody understood what he meant anyway, and you could find almost anything you wanted in.
And I mean, everyone from Hitler to vegetarians has found inspiration in nature.
So I think we can see that it was a perhaps a rather dangerous.
Set of ideas. Nationalism itself, which plays such a prominent part in what was happening in the Balkans in the 19th, early 19th,
in the 19th and early 20th centuries was, of course, something very much stimulated by what was going on in Europe.
The whole idea that nations had the right to independence and that independence was somehow coterminous with national territory.
The idea that a nation was only complete when it could establish itself on a clearly defined piece of territory was something,
of course, that the whole of Europe was grappling with in the course of the 19th century.
What you also saw in the Balkans was, again, very much the sorts of developments you were seeing elsewhere in Europe,
where you have people like all of us playing a part in creating national myths.
National stories, national pasts, tales of triumph or tales of humiliation,
all of which fed into nationalist narratives and helped to create national movements.
An English traveller who was travelling through Macedonia when it was still Ottoman territory,
and that a school master from Serbia who was acting as a sort of missionary,
and he believed that his purpose in life was to help to win over Macedonian.
For the Serbians, he said, We got, said the schoolmaster to the English traveller.
We got the children. We made them realise they were Serbs.
We taught them their history. And this is just one example of something that was happening pretty much everywhere in Europe.
Having said that, I think we need to situate the Balkans very much in a wider European story.
And I think we also need to look at the particular factors that made the Balkans particularly unstable.
And I would argue that's really two things or perhaps three things.
One is, of course, what was happening to the Ottoman Empire, which had controlled so much of the Balkans.
And as the Ottoman Empire grew weaker, of course,
it became more and more of a temptation both for the peoples within the borders of the Ottoman Empire, to think in terms of national independence,
but also more and more of a temptation for those from outside to meddle,
to try and play off one party against another, and to try and advance their own interests.
And then, of course, you get the further danger, which as it was, as many perceived it,
when the ottoman suddenly looked as if they were going to pull themselves together,
which for a number of reasons was not something that people in the Balkans or people in the wider European community thought was desirable.
What you also had, of course, happening in the Balkans was the development of local strongly,
strongly felt nationalisms, which often were in conflict with each other.
You think of the competition between Serbian and Bulgarian nationalism, for example, or the conflict between Serbian and Montenegro nationalism,
a conflict which was in some times Fed, and especially in the cases of Serbia and Montenegro, by dynastic rivalries as well.
And what you increasingly got in the Balkans was these states, as they became independent,
developing strongly held nationalist myths, which look back as is not surprising.
Look back to the greatest moments of their past. And so you didn't get Balkan states and you didn't get states elsewhere in Europe
saying we once had a nice little compact country about the size of Switzerland.
That's what we'd really like to have now. Well, of course, they look back to is the time they were at their largest extent.
And so Serbia tended to look back to the 14th century.
Bulgarians tended to look back to the 10th century.
And what that meant, of course, was they were often claiming the same pieces of land, which was going to lead to endless trouble.
What also made the Balkans particularly troubled, I think,
was not just the internal rivalries in the Balkans and the pressures to free remaining Balkan lands from the Ottoman Empire.
But of course, it was the fact that the Balkans were always and had always been a subject of interest for outsiders.
And geography plays a very important part here. The Balkans are at a crossroads.
They are in a part of the world where outside powers have a great many interests.
And you see this, I think, very clearly in the 19th and early 20th centuries,
up until the second part of the 19th century, the outside powers had tended to act as a consort of Europe.
Not always very perfectly, but had tended to act to in the interests of stability.
It was a conservative arrangement. It did not want rapid change.
When powers were obliged to accept change, they tended to do so in concert.
And so the Concert of Europe recognised the emergence of Greece after a certain delay,
gradually recognised the emergence of Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania as independent nations.
But it was done, I think, on the whole with a reluctance.
But what began to happen towards the end of the 19th century as the Concert of Europe began to break down?
And increasingly you've got the great powers.
And again, it was not particularly those close to the Balkans, but they tended to take a more direct interest.
But also the further off great powers such as Britain and France and Germany increasingly at odds with each other.
And so what you had, I think this toxic mix in the Balkans of local rivalries, hostility to the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman Empire itself,
trying desperately to maintain its position in the Balkans, and then the outside powers playing increasingly their own and separate games.
The Ottoman Empire had, I think, as its purpose to simply to hang on.
But what worried outside powers, of course, was was towards the end of the period in 1908, when the Young Turks took over,
and it looked, in fact, as though the Ottomans would begin to think in terms of getting back what they had lost.
And that was, of course, particularly worrying for the Austrians in the case of Bosnia, but it was worrying in more general terms.
The Ottoman Empire offered huge temptations for outside powers.
The Straits, of course, which led from the Black Sea through into the Mediterranean, and the great prize of Constantinople itself,
territory still in North Africa islands in the Eastern Mediterranean, and of course,
all the lands which stretch through from the Levant into the Middle East.
I mean, these were temptations, particularly in a in an age of heightened imperialism.
Increasingly, it became apparent by the end of the 19th century that the great powers had less
interest in working as a concert and more interest in promoting their own interests.
In the case of Germany, for example, very new nation on the map of Europe.
Germany, by the end of the 19th century, was feeling that its economic and military power was not matched by any sort of imperial power.
And the Germans were looking for an empire.
They managed to get a few bits of Africa, managed to get a few bits of the South Pacific, managed to establish a foothold in China.
But of course, much more tempting in many ways was the Ottoman Empire so close at hand?
And you also had in the personality of the German ruler Kaiser Wilhelm the second someone who was,
I think, intoxicated by the ideas of somehow establishing a great empire close at hand,
who called himself the protector of the Muslims, went to Constantinople,
talked in rather grandiose terms about how he and the Ottomans were the best of friends.
Perhaps more worryingly, from the point of view of those who had their own interests in the Ottoman Empire,
the Germans began construction of a railway, the Berlin to Baghdad Railway.
It was never finished. But in the days when railways were ways of spreading power and influence,
the building of such a railway was something that caused alarm among those who also had designs on the Ottoman Empire,
and the French had an interest in what was happening in the Ottoman Empire.
They had extensive and extensive possessions in North Africa, and they had very direct concern in what happened to the rest of the Ottoman Empire.
The Italians, also with their dreams of building an empire, again,
looked southwards into the Mediterranean and further afield at the Ottoman
Empire as something that was which could could fill their imperialistic goals.
The British, as the world's biggest power, were really more and more had more interest in the status quo.
But they did have concerns about the fate of the Ottoman Empire and protection of the Suez Canal,
and a very important lifeline out to the Far East and to British possessions in the Far East was extremely important for the British.
And increasingly before 1914, they were worried not just that the Ottoman Empire would collapse,
but that there was going to be a very serious naval race in the Mediterranean.
Austria-Hungary and Italy had ordered Dreadnoughts before 1914, which were now in service.
In 1911, the Ottomans ordered one from the British and in 1913 brought one boat, one from Brazil, which was temporarily bankrupt.
And so there was really fear, I think,
in Britain of a of a shifting strategic balance in the Eastern Mediterranean, in the Black Sea, Austria-Hungary,
which of course, was much more closely involved with what was what was going on in the Balkans,
became increasingly concerned about what was happening there.
I mean, from the point of view of Austria-Hungary, if the Ottoman Empire had remained, this would not have been a bad thing.
It was the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire that really, I think caused concern in Austria-Hungary.
More than that, there was the growth of Serbia,
which after 1903 moved increasingly into a position of hostility towards Austria-Hungary and increasingly
for Austria-Hungary began to be seen as an existential threat to the survival of Austria-Hungary.
If the Serbian nationalists could have their way, which was frequently expressed of bringing in South Slavs into some form of union with Serbia.
That would of course meant the disintegration of the southern part of Austria-Hungary and if Austria-hungary's South Slavs had begun to go,
then that really would have meant the end of the empire. The Poles were already restive.
There were seen instead of becoming restive, the Czechs were beginning to think in terms of greater autonomy within Austria-Hungary.
And so Serbia was not just an irritant for Austria-Hungary, it was a threat they fought by by 1914 to its very existence.
I think what Austria-Hungary would have preferred is some sort of standstill agreement
in the Balkans and in fact it had such an agreement with Russia up until 1908.
In 1897, Russia and Austria-Hungary agreed that they would respect the territorial status quo in the Balkans.
Neither would interfere in the internal affairs of existing Balkan states and they would not make sudden moves without consulting with the other.
In 1903, they made a further agreement to work together to put pressure on the Ottoman Empire to bring about reforms in Macedonia,
where Christians were feeling increasingly restive.
In 1904, Austria-Hungary made a neutrality agreement with Russia, which allowed Russia to send more troops out to the Far East.
And so up until this period, relations between Austria-Hungary and Russia were in fact reasonable.
Certainly as far as the Balkans were concerned, what began to change was, first of all,
the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and then Russia's attempt to reassert itself and the Russian government after 1905,
very, very badly shaken by both the war itself and the subsequent near revolution in Russia, began to rethink its international relations.
And after a considerable debate in ruling circles in Russia, it was decided that Russia would switch its attention more to the West than to the east.
It would give up on the attempt to build an empire in the in the Far East, in opposition to Japan, and would begin to concentrate more on Europe.
And what that meant was that the Balkans became a lot more important in Russian thinking.
They already were. But the Russian attention now begins to turn increasingly to the Balkans, and it is further fuelled by two developments.
One is the increasing importance of the Black Sea in the straits for Russian trade.
By 1914, something like 40% of all total Russian exports were going out through the Black Sea,
through the Straits into the Mediterranean, and increasing amounts of imports were coming in.
Russia was exporting mainly foodstuffs and importing machinery,
which were both of which were absolutely crucial for Russia's very rapid economic development.
In 1911 and 1912, the Straits were temporarily closed during the Italian Turkish war and then again in the first Balkan War of 1912.
And it caused very, very serious economic repercussions in Russia.
And so the Russians were becoming increasingly concerned for economic reasons about what happened to that part of the world.
What also was beginning to happen, of course, was the growth of public opinion in Russia and Pan Slav ism.
The idea that somehow Russia was the natural leader of all the Slavic peoples begins to play a part.
I think it was used by government, but nevertheless begins to play a part in what you begin to get.
Is the government in Russia feeling itself, pressured by what is now becoming the increasingly important factor of of of Pan Slav ism.
And so what you have is the Russians and the Austro-Hungarian Hungarians, both with very strong interests in the Balkans.
Those relations, that relationship reaches a crisis point in 1908 when Austria-Hungary without so Russia feels proper warning annexes Bosnia.
And that really marks the end of any attempt to get a stand standoff agreement between Austria-Hungary and Russia in the Balkans from that point on.
And I won't go into all the details because they're rather complicated from that point on.
They see themselves as rivals, and they begin to look into the Balkans increasingly for possible allies.
And so the Russians look increasingly to Romania.
They toy with the idea of making a relation, an alliance with Bulgaria.
But there are various reasons why this is difficult.
Increasingly, the Russians focus on Serbia as the focus of their attention and the way in which they can get influence in the Balkans.
And increasingly Austria-Hungary works to try and counteract that.
And so what you're getting in the Balkans is an increasing interference from outside
powers and increasingly the Balkan nations themselves trying to influence affairs.
This is this is noticed by European diplomats.
In 1912, a French diplomat says in St Petersburg in the history, for the first time in the history of the Eastern question,
the small states have acquired a position of such independence of the great powers that they feel able to act completely without.
Them and even take them in tow. And so what you're having is great power, interest and involvement.
But increasingly, the nations of the Balkans making their own policies.
And so what you get very, very rapidly is a deterioration in the Balkans,
fed by outside influences, fed by the decline, and then brief revival of the Ottoman Empire.
And increasingly a willingness and a propensity of the Balkan peoples to take matters into their own hands.
And it is not just Balkan governments that are doing this. Increasingly, what you're getting is young Balkan peoples making their own decisions.
I mean, it is very, very clear that terrorists and other young and young nationalists see themselves not just in conflict against outside powers,
not just trying to fill a national dream, but also against their own establishments that they see the older generation as not moving fast enough,
not doing enough to fulfil the nationalist dreams of the younger ones.
Well, you probably all know the final stories, and I'll make it very brief as I think my time is up.
In 1911, the Italians really helped to make the whole situation very, very much more dangerous by moving against the Ottoman Empire.
The Italians have long had their eyes on the two provinces of North Africa, which they were going to put together as Libya,
and on a number of islands belonging to the Ottomans at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, then they move in.
What is a thoroughly cynical move, they claim that Italian citizens are being beaten up in Benghazi and Tripoli.
They send an ultimatum and I think with two days notice, with a fool of impossible demands.
This, of course,
is going to be a precedent for a similar ultimatum that is going to be sent three years later and demand absolutely impossible things.
People around Europe call it the policy of the stiletto.
The Italians having prepared the ground and having loaded their troops onto troop ships already,
then declare war on the Ottoman Empire and seize the territories that they want.
What that does is show everyone in the Balkans that it's now possible to break previous agreements, attack the Ottomans and get away with it.
Trotsky, who was a war correspondent in the Balkans in this period,
talks to a leading politician in Serbia as the Italians are breaking, breaking apart.
They the the peace in the Balkans attacking the Ottoman Empire as a leading politician in Serbia,
says to Trotsky, there's no longer any status quo in the Balkans.
Why should why didn't the powers defend the status quo when Italy seized Tripoli?
And why should the Balkan states be treated as if they were not European, but like Morocco?
And so what you get with the Italian war on the Ottoman Empire, I think is very, very important.
Watershed or threshold been crossed that it is now possible to attack the Ottoman Empire without really making very much excuse at all.
And so in 1912, a Balkan League is formed under the patronage of the Russians who seem to have thought that they could control it,
which was a very wrong assumption indeed.
The Balkan League was set up and Bulgaria, Serbia first signing a treaty agreeing to divide the Macedonian lands.
Greece then coming in. Montenegro coming in. And finally, Serbia and Montenegro making a deal.
So by September 1912, the Balkan League is complete.
They say that it is purely defensive, but of course it's directed against the Ottoman Empire and it is a league, really, that exists for aggression.
So the war breaks out in late October 1912.
The Ottomans are rapidly defeated. The great powers still managing to keep some semblance of the concert of Europe doomed.
There is a conference in London, both of the Balkan nations themselves,
and a conference of the great powers to try and bring about some sort of peace.
But what is very, very dangerous, I think, is that increasingly, even among the great powers, there's talk of a general war breaking out.
And what it does, it also foreshadows in a very alarming way what's going to happen in 1914.
France apparently gives a guarantee to Russia that if it comes to a general war, it will support it.
And Germany gives not yet a firm guarantee, but gives an assurance to Austria-Hungary that it will stand by it if a general war comes.
What the Balkan war also does, and it's succeeded by a very short war in 1913 when the Balkan nations plus the Ottoman Empire,
turn on Bulgaria, which has done too well out of the first Balkan war.
And it's a very complicated and not very edifying story.
But what you also get coming out of that are resentments.
You get the Russians saying to themselves, We will not let Austria-Hungary push Serbia around in the future.
Austria-Hungary itself is increasingly obsessed with Serbia and Berchtold, the chancellor of Austria-Hungary says.
Or. Foreign Minister Foster Hungary says in a very revealing word in his memoirs.
Later on, he said Austria-Hungary was emasculated in the Balkan wars when it stood by and allowed Serbia to come out.
Much increased inside. For the Serbians themselves, however, although they have grown markedly in size, their national project is still uncompleted.
And so I think what you get happening in the Balkans is European rivalries playing themselves out,
but also being caught up and feeding on and helping to feed local Balkan rivalries.
And so when the second or the third crisis comes in 1914, you have a set of memories, you have a set of resentments.
You also have, I think, a rather dangerous feeling that we got through the crises of 1911, 1912 and 1913.
We'll get through this one.
So it's a very, very bad mix of some of those who don't want to get through the crisis and some of those who think that they will get through it.
And as we know, it leads to war. I don't think even so, that what happened in the summer of 1914 was inevitable.
I think decisions were made different decisions, and those had been made in previous crises in the Balkans.
But this time the decisions were made by statesmen who knowingly took a risk that the decisions they were making could lead to war.
We will never agree on how the war started,
and of course we are going to go on as the commemorations come around talking about how to remember that war.
And there are as many memories, I think, as there are national viewpoints on the war.
Christopher Clarke and I have both been attacked for saying unkind things about Serbians.
I've been well, he's had it worse than me. I've been accused of well, I've had emails saying I should be fired because I call Princip a terrorist.
It seems to me that he was. If you stand on the car of a running board of a car and shoot people point blank, that seems to me a terrorist act.
But others would call him a freedom fighter. And I think it just gives we will probably be discussing this day.
It just gives you an idea of the disagreements that we can have about it.
How we remember the war, I think, is very much tied up with current politics.
And I think the reason that so many Serbian nationalists are very sensitive about memories of the war has as much to
do with Serbia's position in Europe today as it does with actually remembering something that happened 100 years ago.
And I think the same thing is happening in Britain why we have this debate over
whether the war should be remembered as a great moment of triumph for the British or
whether it should be remembered as a catastrophe has something to do with Britain's
relations with Europe today and something to do with British domestic politics.
And so curious, though, it seems the events of 100 days ago are going to be something that go on haunting us.
And I don't think we're not going to reach any agreement today that I hope we'll have a good argument.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I, too, am very grateful for the opportunity to speak to you this afternoon.
I shall focus on the Yugoslav state as a phase in the resolution of the South.
Slav question or is it questions?
And I shall begin rather.
Before the First World War, the crisis of dualism in Austria-Hungary entered an acute phase after 1903 as a result of three developments.
First of all, the demands of the Hungarian opposition for parity in language and insignia within the Imperial and royal military,
which escalated into national resistance against Austria and contributed to the electoral victory of the opposition
coalition in 1905 that simultaneously provoked national demands among the minority nationalities in Hungary.
Second, the national movement in Croatia exploded into May one when taking area and riots and seriously destabilised the regime of Bern.
Karl Coyne, Heather Ruddock and his pro unionist and Serb proteges.
And three,
the dynastic revolution in Serbia removed the pro Austrian Abramovich dynasty in favour of an expansionist and pro-Russian ideology of its dynasty.
The Abramovich foreign policy, which, thanks to the secret convention with Austria-Hungary over 1881 pursued southward expansion
increasingly was being revised in favour of expansion into Bosnia and Herzegovina.
As a result, the South Slavic question became the most dangerous threat to the security of the dual monarchy.
In response to the South Slavic question, really the role of the predominantly South Slavic provinces in Austria-Hungary within the dual system,
the Austro-Hungarian elites reacted variously. The dualist circle of Emperor King Franz Josef, the second developed really?
No. Abolishing the great Austrian circle of Archduke Franz Ferdinand extended a trial estate to the South Slavs,
with the unlikely prospect that the circles objections to the federal going dualism in the monarchy would be addressed by
an even more decentralising realist system in which the South Slavs would gain the third unit besides Austria and Hungary.
And third, the Hungarian politically elite was secretly gleeful over Austria's troubles in the Balkans,
but maintained a myopic view that the South Slavic grievances were nothing but an expression of Vienna schemes at the expense of Budapest.
These circumstances promoted a new political initiative by the political leaders that would argue against the old,
sterile policy of relying on Vienna against Budapest and maintaining a vigorous front against the frozen agrarian Serb parties in Croatia,
Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The new political initiative, or the new course, as it has traditionally been dubbed,
commenced in 1905 under the leadership of two notables, both from Dalmatia.
Journalist Francis Pillar of Dubrovnik, the editor of the field and newspaper novelist and Antithrombotic of Split.
Lawyer and politician. Later the mayor of Split.
Although both belong to the Dalmatian branch of the Nationalist Party of Right,
the Romanian background militated against the anti-Mafia or ordeal of craft nationalists in the Hungarian half of the dual monarchy.
They promulgated the platform of the new course, which included some traditional crop demands, the revision of the agreement or not by 1868,
the acceptance of Croatia's financial independence and so on,
but developed also some new calls on behalf on Croat, Serb National Oneness and the Cross State right.
With the extended hand to the Slovenes and then the idea of a common front with all the anti-German forces in Austria-Hungary.
In addition, reliance on Karageorge, which Serbia and ultimately Russia was among the unofficial A2 and secret strategic concepts of the new course
with the ultimate and subversive goal of creation of a South Slav state of Yugoslavia with Serbia and Montenegro.
Needless to say, outside of Austria-Hungary, Sophia Loren Trowbridge scored initial successes in their designs.
By the autumn of 1905. The rifts among most of the current oppositional parties in Croatia,
Slovenia and the Ameesha were healed, as were those between the craft and Serb oppositional parties.
By December of 1905, the cross circulation developed a joining developed as a junior partner in the oppositional Hungarian coalition.
And then on the wings of the Hungarian coalitions.
Electoral victory of 1905 scored its own electoral victory in 1906, balloting for the Croatian Sabah Diet.
Still just a founder. It clipped the wings of the Hungarian coalition.
Once it came to power, he worked a civil effect on the victorious craft the Serb coalition,
by engrossing it in the permanent displays of loyalty against the spectre of pan Serbian grand treason.
After the Young Turk revolution,
when the Foreign Minister Alois from NSL precipitated an international crisis by pressing for unilateral annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
and after the triumphs of the Balkan states in the wars of 1912 1913,
the real Serbian grand treason could no longer be notice for the crying, for the crying of wolf in the intervening years.
By the time Gavrilo Princip fired his shots at Sarajevo Superior and Throne,
which were spent politicians sufficiently alert to the dangers that were bound to follow by making
a hasty retreat to Italy and from there to France and Britain under the new war circumstances.
They place themselves at the head of the South Slav emigres from Austria-Hungary and created a self-appointed Yugoslav
committee that resurrected the secret program of the new course no longer constrained by loyalties to Austria-Hungary.
They opted for a union with Serbia and Montenegro, which they got in the most unwelcome form.
Great Serbian form already, really during the course of the war itself.
Even before Serbia's military collapsed in 1915,
the Serbian government declared in December of 1914 that the unification liberation of all of our and free brethren.
This is a quote. The Serbs, Scots and Slovenes of Austria-Hungary was one of its war aims.
This did not prevent it from adjusting to the far more reduced and found offers which,
in the event of an Allied victory after the signing of the Secret Treaty of London with Italy in April 1915,
would have secured for Serbia most of southern back, most of Slovenia, and lost about me sheer and the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Nor did it prevent it from seeking a separate peace with Austria-Hungary after the February revolution in Russia.
Still sensing its weakness in July of 1917, the Serbian government signed an agreement with Yugoslav Committee,
the so-called court for Declaration, which had bound itself to establish a united and independent Serb Slovene state.
That would be a constitutional,
democratic and preliminary monarchy headed by the kind of Georgia rich dynasty through which signed a declaration on behalf of the Yugoslav committee.
So below this, enchanted by the policies of the Serbian government and convinced that Croatia was about to be partitioned between Italy and Serbia,
departed from the Yugoslav committee and created his own grand committee,
which would promote the independence of Croatia to the Allies ignored and isolated.
He died in London in 1917.
Serbia's choice between the small solution a supposedly allied sponsored safe expansion into the predominantly Serb territories of Austria-Hungary,
which Serbia's Prime Minister, Nikola Passage and Regent Aleksandar supposedly rejected in favour of an unsafe,
great solution of a union with the Krauts and Slovenes of Yugoslavia is still used as an argument against
those who would begrudge Serbia the supposedly allowable missteps in the process of Yugoslav unification,
as if the choice was real, as if nobody else had a choice in the matter.
And as if states and governments can pick and choose between alternative futures.
In fact, the war results turned out a lot better for Serbia than its political leadership anticipated.
The Yugoslav committee and the political leadership of the South Slavs in the monarchy were ignored by the victorious allies,
which failed to recognise the state of the Slovenian, Scots and Serbs that emerged out of the rubble of the monarchy in October of 1918.
Unable to protect themselves against Italian territorial claims,
domestic turmoil and the encroaching Serbian army, the monarchists Slav politicians, led by the liberal elite,
caved in to Serbia and concluded an arrangement that brought forth a new state, the kingdom of the Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes, with all the features of a perversely red program of the new course.
Carrots and Slovenes were indeed red Austrian and fingering tutelage and retain most of their ethnic territories.
But the continuity of the Serbian state and institutional centralism,
which was enshrined in the Constitution of 1921 without any provisions for
federalist safeguards or recognition of historical and ethnic particular reasons.
But I wanted a new tutelage, admittedly under Masters, less formidable than those in Austria-Hungary,
but certainly less committed to the rule of law and parliamentary procedure.
Still the wealth and security of the South Slavs could have been enhanced in time through evolutionary adjustments had not.
The results of the First World War created the conditions for the growth of communist and fascist totalitarianism.
The real tragedy of Yugoslavia was not what transpired.
Under the various. Corrupt and arbitrary.
BELGRAVE Regimes of the 1920s and the early 1930s.
Although these regimes undoubtedly radicalised political relations in the country,
the real tragedy was that the occupation in 1941 put an end to the initial federalist measures.
The February tragic agreement of 1939 that the Demons unleashed in 1941 made the post-war democratic state impossible.
And the theatrics, federalism and non-alignment were as fake as they were welcomed by the West.
Under the Cold War conditions. It was the tragedy of perversity and omission.
Just as being is less transpired in Austria-Hungary, if we are to indulge in counterfactual speculation, however,
we must also consider what the South Slavic area would have looked like in the 1960s
in the absence of the First World War and presumably the Second World War as well.
End of Yugoslavia. Public ostrich across from the liquor curve of a county of Croatia proper.
And the Secretary of the Yugoslav Committee in London wrote the following in 1971.
I quote Opatija near Rijeka was in 1918, purely Croat.
Then came the Italians, the Italian schools, etc.
In the summer of 1945, I went to a party to see what trace the Italians left behind.
I walked the city streets and addressed the children. Elderly people did not interest me.
All these exclusively in Croatian. They all answered my question.
They understood them. My questions. They understood them.
But not a single child. A child answered in Croatian.
They responded in Italian. That was their language and what could have been the language of the country.
Once they were of age.
It follows from this that well-conceived, well conceived schools can change the character of a population within two generations.
We like to brag that we withstood the threat of German ization, Italian ization, etc., which of course is not true.
We were protected by our backwardness, primitivism, illiteracy, and the fact that previously the means of rapid nationalisation were not available.
Nor was anybody particularly interested in such things.
Now that nowadays it is otherwise. Had the Italians skipped, though meesha only 50 years.
There would be no more Croats there. Moreover, in boy, were they not.
The situation was similar. The elite, the educated folk who went to the Hungarian schools, spoke in the area.
Dr. Milan Turchin, who was a Serb from Chamchamal, told me once that the liberation had the liberation been deferred by 50 years?
There would have been no Serbs involved, were they? Not at all.
And of course, for the purpose of identification,
I should add that Ostovich was a lifelong friend of Iran marriage and of the New Europe Group RW Citizen Vets and became Steed and the rest.
For these men, the fulfilment of the new course, fully or partially successful, came not a moment too soon.
Now, a century after the Great War.
Those whose outcome allowed for a Yugoslav solution to the South Slav oppression.
Moreover, from a post Yugoslav perspective,
it might be concluded that the contrasting legacies of this process were connected with the pluralisation of what were always South Slav questions.
There there were and still are, several. This does not mean that their 20th century Yugoslav interface was in some sense
wrong or avoidable errors are not plausible in the kinetic process of history.
This interface cannot be discussed in isolation from the overreaching and overarching European and international issues of the 20th century.
There still remain a number of the South, Slav and Balkan questions, and I think before we conclude,
we might as well mention some of them which can and probably will be resolved in various ways in future.
First of all, the Serb question, which of course, involves the fact that in the absence of the Yugoslav state,
circulation is now divided among several successive states of Yugoslavia.
And this is something that in various quarters in Belgrade is not the dead issue.
If you read such things as pronounced opinions from your friends, your mentors, the to atrocities recently deceased,
the issue of integration of Republika Srpska in Serbia with Serbia is something that is a long range foreign policy aim of the Serbian government.
To what extent that is still lively in the present government, of course, is a matter for discussion.
But this is something that is very much in the air.
The question of the Serbs outside of Serbia proper, to a smaller extent,
there is a question that involves the disposition of the courts in Bosnia Herzegovina,
to some extent manipulated by the current government, but nevertheless an issue that keeps stirring in Bosnia Herzegovina itself.
Needless to say,
the Bosnian question is something that transcends the borders of Bosnia Herzegovina and involves neighbouring states of Serbia and Montenegro.
The status of the soundtrack and indeed the status of Bosniaks outside of the central area, further to the southeast.
This too is something that is not by any means over the Montenegrin question, which of course does not involve the status of Montenegro as a state.
At least not in Montenegro, but elsewhere.
Of course, the identity of Montenegrins, whether they are strictly that or besides also Serbs, is something that is by no means over.
As anybody who follows the various examples from press outside of Montenegro and inside from European
testify to the Macedonian question is also allowed to issue not just the question of the Macedonian state,
which is, for all intents and purposes, partitioned between a Albanian third and the Slavic Macedonian two thirds.
But the status of ethnic Macedonians in their community.
The propagating spirit has once again become extremely lively.
Needless to say, the question of the Macedonian state itself is something that is part of the
larger Balkan issue in the relations with neighbouring neighbouring Greece.
Besides these South Slavic questions.
We have the Albanian question, which is a Balkan question, and that is, by anybody's judgement, the most lively of those mentioned,
because the unification of Albanians into a single state is something that was the
order of the day already in 1914 and is still as important as a hundred years ago.
And finally, although I do not wish to make much of it, there is the Yugoslav question,
because there are some who think that the resolution of all of these questions requires still a new version of the Yugoslav solution.
I do not, of course, share that particular view,
but we should not dismiss this as entirely implausible in the very complicated world of Balkan politics.
Thank you. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
I, too, would like to begin by thanking hosts this afternoon for organising this meeting.
Margaret said in her introduction,
or Elizabeth said in her introduction that my PhD thesis was on Anglo-german relations in the Balkans from 1911 to 1914.
I should just like to point out that I began work on that thesis in 1964, which is as the arithmetic begins amongst,
you will realise, precisely halfway between the outbreak of the war and this year.
So I do not know whether I am here as a combatant or a commentator, but to turn to Bulgaria.
Bulgaria, of course, was defeated in the First World War, and no nation really wants to dwell on its defeats.
So in fact, at least until the last ten years or so, the First World War has not played a large part in Bulgaria's national consciousness.
It's not the sort of thing they want to dwell on.
Also, I think it's very important to point out that for Bulgaria, as indeed for the other Balkan states,
the First World War is inseparable from and is basically a continuation of the Balkan wars of 19 1213.
The Bulgarians speak of the second Balkan war in which they lost the conquests they made in the first as the first national catastrophe.
They referred to it as a national catastrophe. When it happened, they refer to the First World War as the second national catastrophe.
So there is a continuity and there is a similarity of outcome for both the Balkan wars and the First World War.
To look at legacy as well. If you went into Bulgaria, then you would immediately be affected by one consequence of the First World War.
Though you may not realise it because if you looked at your watch or the calendar,
you would see that the date in the western Canada, in the Gregorian calendar and it was during the First World War.
And as part of the process that the First World War that Bulgaria switched from the Julian
calendar favoured by the Orthodox Church to the Western Canada favoured by its allies.
Now you may think, oh, well, that was going to happen anyway, which it probably would. But it had been tried before.
It had been tried in the 1890s by a modernising Bulgarian government, and the process of the attempt to change the calendar had been defeated.
And it had been defeated essentially by the power and influence of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in 1916.
The Church was in no position to make that resistance and also the Germans pressed for it.
And conveniently Eastern Easter, which and Tide and Ascension Day in 1916 were the same in the Western and the Eastern calendars.
So that made it quite easy to switch. So there is one permanent, lasting consequence legacy of the First World War.
Another one immediate consequence, which was not so long lasting but in some ways was quite important,
was that after the First World War, Bulgaria was occupied by various allied troops.
The largest number were at Italians. One of the things they brought to Bulgaria were Masonic lodges, which were already there before,
but which flourished enormously and expanded enormously under Italian influence.
In the immediate years after the First World War,
and they became important politically because they became vehicles through which opposition politicians,
politicians opposing the agrarian government, which I come to in a moment,
a vehicle through which opposing politicians could meet, could organise and basically could conspire in which they did.
As I say, it was a useful way to hide from the grey and ice after the allied occupation and certainly after the advent of the Communists,
after the Second World War. Of course, the Masonic lodges came under enormous pressure and were eventually dissolved,
but it was one of the early signs of the relaxation of the communist regime in Bulgaria in 1986,
when a Bulgarian historian called Village of Gay Ogier Sullivan Vale give.
Published a book on masonry in Bulgaria.
It sold out within hours. It was an absolute sensation.
Fascinating book, too. But the whole process of the whole phenomenon of Masonic lodges in Bulgaria was very much a consequence of the First World War.
Well, I wasn't going to turn to more obvious and important effects and consequences of the war,
or should I say the wars, the Balkan wars and the First World War and the First World War,
of course, being concluded as far as Bulgaria was concerned by the Treaty of many nations and on the 27th of November 1919.
I'll talk first about the implications and of the Treaty in Foreign Affairs, and then I'll talk about domestic affairs.
Once in a BBC Bulgarian service broadcast on the First World War and its consequences.
I said that the Treaty of Nice and was not particularly harsh in territorial terms,
that the Bulgarians didn't get off too badly as far as territory was concerned.
The next time I was in Soviet, I was in deep water and deep trouble, because of course, the Bulgarians don't see it that way.
But it's true. I mean, content compared with the territories lost by Hungary, by the Ottoman Empire, by Germany.
What Bulgaria lost may have been important, but it was not extensive.
There were four areas in which the treaty made territorial stipulation.
The first was that three small enclaves on Bulgaria's western border,
its border now with the state of the Yugoslavia of the prime kingdom that were taken, were ceded to the new Yugoslav state.
They were predominantly Bulgarian in population and probably still are.
It's not a serious issue in Bulgaria, but Bulgarian nationalists will not forget the fact that there are these three areas
on their Western territory and to the west of them which are essentially Bulgarian.
And again, I got into trouble by mentioning that once in a broadcast and an attack by a Yugoslav young Yugoslav student who said very interestingly,
in fact, that most of those Bulgarians, most of those constituencies in these enclaves voted for Milosevic to were pro Milosevic in the 1990s.
The second area, which Bulgaria lost was the southern region, which had been occupied in the First Balkan war and then in the First World War.
If you think of the map of the Balkans, where the Danube turns north, 90 degrees north,
the WGA is the area between the north and Danube in the Black Sea and the southern part of it.
It was part of Bulgaria, a very mixed area in terms of ethnic composition, a lot of Turks and other races there.
But from Bulgaria's point of view, this great importance was that it was the most fertile area of the whole country,
and it produced large quantities of grain.
And so it was an important area from that point of view.
The third area, Bulgaria, lost whilst Bulgarian Thrace.
And between basically the right of the mountains and the Aegean Sea, that area had been occupied again,
most of it during the first Balkan War and then again in the First World War.
It was a territory which contained 90,000 ethnic Bulgarians, by most accounts.
And it was an important area for Bulgaria because after the the Balkan wars, despite the defeat in the second book War,
Bulgaria retained a strip of territory from Bulgaria, a problem that might as well go down to the Aegean coast,
down to the port of the or Alexandroupolis as it is now.
And this was important for the Bulgarians and the idea that was not much use to then perceive that as a port,
because the railway took down the many severely wound in and out of Ottoman territory.
So the Bulgarians spent a lot of money and a lot of effort starting to build a new port at Port Lagos on the Indian coast.
It was very important, this whole business,
because it enabled the Bulgarians to export their goods through this southern port directly into the Mediterranean.
It cut off three or four days of sailing for from the port seven of Burgas on the Bulgarian coast,
down the Black Sea, through the Straits into the Mediterranean.
The corridor to the Aegean was extremely important.
The Aegean itself was important too, as I say,
because of the access to the Mediterranean and after the defeat of the Second Balkan War, the Bulgarians had been allowed to keep it.
After the defeat in the First World War, the Allies recognised the importance of this and in Article 48 of the Treaty of Milan,
which probably is the most important article in the whole treaty as far as most Bulgarians were concerned.
And still today, you will find Bulgarians arguing about the importance of Article 48 of the treaty.
Article 48 of the Treaty of Nice said that Bulgaria would be allowed economic access to the Aegean.
It didn't say how that was to be achieved, and it never was achieved.
But it was a very important concession to the Bulgarians and one which they constantly raised.
It was very important to them, I say.
They became resentful, increasingly resentful of the fact that the Western allies, the victorious allies, never fulfilled their promise in Article 48.
It also had other effects. It was useful diplomatically for the Bulgarians because it enabled them to argue for
territorial change without arguing for the redesign or the tearing up of the treaties.
It made them to be to make territorial gain or demands without being what,
in the contemporary jargon was revisionist, you know, without wanting to revise the peace treaties.
It also enabled them to establish ties with revisionist states.
And in the 1920s, the chief diplomatic thrust of Bulgarian foreign policy was to seek the cooperation with Italy, another revisionist power.
But in this case, of course, the victorious power. So Article 48 and the Aegean, the third territorial area, was very important to Bulgarians.
The fourth and final territorial settlement affected Macedonia.
And this, of course, is one of the great issues in Bulgarian history.
It's one of the leitmotif of Bulgarian history.
The fact that Bulgaria and Macedonia are not joined.
Were not joined. But I'm going to spend a couple of minutes on this because it is very, very important,
not only in terms of diplomacy and in terms of the territorial settlement, but it's important because of the dynamics of nationalism in the Balkans.
Elizabeth. Sorry. Margaret referred to her Serbian teacher, referred to the Serbian teacher in Macedonia.
Now it is almost certain that that Serbian teacher was working alongside four with the Serbian Orthodox Church because the main thrust for national
recruitment in Ottoman Macedonia by the Christians was to persuade the local Christians to enrol in that particular branch of the Orthodox Church.
Greek, Bulgarian music. Those were the three.
And the church has made enormous efforts to popularise themselves and to gather in supporters.
There was one church, but for example, in the far southwest of Macedonia in Harrison,
which had huge support, the Bulgarian church, because the Cantor had the most stupendous voice.
He had a wonderful voice and people flocked to hear him.
Many more people flocked in later years on a wider stage to hear his son, who was the great operatic bass, Boris Christoph.
But the fact that the Christian populations were operating in this fashion trying to recruit support through
their churches was only possible because the Ottoman Empire had an indulgent attitude towards religions.
As long as those churches did not revolt, oppose the Sultan.
They were free to conduct their own religious affairs.
So the Serbs and the Bulgarians and the Greeks were free to try and attempt to attract support to their own particular churches.
And they did that.
And one of the interesting things about the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, for example, was that contrary to the usual Orthodox tradition,
the head of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church was not in the Bulgarian state, but he was in Constantinople.
And that was because from Constantinople he could operate in favour of the Bulgarian exile exile churches in Macedonia,
as well as dealing with the Bulgarian churches in Bulgaria.
After 1913, the Bulgarians lost Macedonia.
But Macedonia and the Macedonian territories they coveted were now included in Greece or Serbia,
where the attitude towards the Bulgarian Orthodox Church was entirely different.
The Bulgarian population of Macedonia was now ruled by assertive, centralised, nationalist, modernising states,
not by an indulgent Ottoman Empire based on the notion of the military to separate religious communities.
And it was a cruel blow to Bulgarian national aspirations in Macedonia that this happened in the after, in fact, the second Balkan War.
The head of the Bulgarian church eventually moved his headquarters to Sofia, giving up on the struggle for Macedonia in the First World War.
Of course, the Bulgarians occupied Macedonia again. So the Bulgarian Orthodox Church moved in with its priests, etc.
But after this, to the First World War, the loss of the territory once again meant the loss not just of the territory,
but the loss of the means by which that territory could become more Bulgarian ized.
And this was the critical factor.
Now, the title of my lecture was it was in 1919 of the First World War, the turning point at which Bulgaria failed to turn.
So an answer that. The answer is yes, but in most respects it turned back again in 1923 after the First World War,
if there was a contest between the urban left, the socialists, communists and the agrarian.
And the contest was won by the Aryans who dominated Bulgarian politics from 1919 until a violent coup in June 1923.
The agrarian leader Alexander establishing did not take Macedonia very seriously.
His idea was that, okay, this is a terrible settlement.
It's stupid, but like the settlement in 1878 with eastern Romania, that too is stupid.
In time people see it, you'll see it stupid and it will rectify itself.
In the meantime, we must come and cultivate good relations with Yugoslavia in a venue that's not a state.
And in any case, in all probability, history will so evolve that the whole of the Balkans will soon be dominated by agrarian style government,
in which case national boundaries will be a little significance, and Macedonia will cease to be an important question.
He was certainly not going to let this question complicate his relations with Belgrade,
and he signed a convention with the Yugoslav government march on the borders of Serbia and Bulgaria,
agreeing that Bulgaria had no claim on Macedonia and agreeing that he and his government would
do what they could to suppress the Bulgarian of Macedonian terrorists or freedom fighters,
calling them what you will who were operating out of Bulgaria and stumbling U.S. government moved
thousands of Macedonians from near the Yugoslav and Greek borders to the east of Bulgaria.
After stumbling fell, they reasserted themselves, particularly in the extreme southwestern corner of Bulgaria,
in a place called Putin in the pit Pétain area, the pit in mountains.
They formed a basically a state within a state, and they then became an extreme embarrassment to the Bulgarian government.
Their internal feuds, as well as their attacks upon Greece and Serbian Institute,
Greek and Serbian institutions of Macedonia embarrassed the Bulgarian government,
and it angered both Serbia and Greece to the extent, for example, that in October 1925,
a division of the Greek army occupied part of southern Bulgaria for a number of days in 1933.
These activities became dangerous to the Bulgarian government, with the signature in London of a convention on terrorism.
The convention said that any state which did not suppress terrorists on its own territory, which were operating in the territory of another state,
were that any state in that position was committing, and it was breaching international law and breaching the convention against terrorism.
This was dangerous because immediately the Bulgarian government realised that here the danger was Greece and Serbia.
Greece and Yugoslavia now would align together against Bulgarian actions as they had in 1913.
It would be a recreation of the disastrous Serbian Bulgarian axis, Serbian Greek axis of 1913, which destroyed Bulgarian aspirations in Macedonia.
Now we get another rerun.
The Second World War again saw Bulgarian occupation of Macedonia, and again the Bulgarian church flowed in Bulgarian schools were established.
The first university ever was established in Skopje during the Bulgarian occupation.
Again, of course, the Bulgarians lost.
And then from 1944 to 1948, as the Communists were becoming more and more powerful, there was essentially a rerun of the position from 1919 to 1923,
when the new incumbent radical government was really dismissive of Macedonia,
dismissive of Bulgarian claims to Macedonia in 19 9023 that had been an agrarian government which had taken that line from 1994.
From 1944 to 1948, it was a communist dominated government which took the same attitude.
Okay. Yes, Macedonia has it now has a new, separate identity as the People's Republic of Macedonia.
The Balkans will evolve into a new. Confederation in which, again, national boundaries will cease to be of great importance.
So we needn't worry about Macedonia and even the Bulgarian government.
In the end of 1947, 48 began to encourage the teaching of Macedonian in schools in those parts of Bulgaria,
which were part of Macedonia pitying Macedonia.
They set up a theatre in the main town in Macedonian theatre and they taught Macedonian history in the schools in that area.
It all came to an end,
a rapid end in 1948 because the chief drivers of this move towards Balkan Confederation or consolidation were Tito and David Dimitrov,
the Bulgarian leader. But they didn't keep Stalin fully informed of what they were up to.
And Stalin took this as one, one of his pretexts for breaking off relations with Tito.
After the break with Tito, the Bulgarians became totally subservient to the Soviet line.
And I think with a heavy sigh of relief for many Bulgarian communists,
they dropped this Macedonian line, but this supporting Macedonian separate identity.
And from 1948 until 1989,
the Macedonian question in Bulgaria was essentially a means of promoting what's
the Bulgarians regarded as their rightful historical cultural claims on Macedonia?
And any historic historian from the West or elsewhere who went to Bulgaria was deluged with free books by the Institute of Balkan Studies in Sofia,
nearly all of them about Macedonia and how it had always been Bulgarian and always would be Bulgarian.
The only time, as far as I know, that the Bulgarian Communist government sent a note of protest to the Soviet government was when
the Soviet Academy of Sciences published a Russian Macedonian Macedonian Russian dictionary,
and the Bulgarians protested, saying This was totally unnecessary. There's no such thing as a separate Macedonian language.
And for the Bulgarians to protest to Moscow in those years, it was really quite unusual.
As I say, I think it's the only one. The only case I know of it happening after 1989.
There was a period of instability in the sense in terms of Bulgaria's attitude towards Macedonia.
But in 1992, Bulgaria became the first state to recognise the newly separated Macedonian state.
And finally. They did this because they feared that Turkey might do said before them,
and thereby establish a greater diplomatic and cultural influence in Macedonia than Bulgaria would enjoy.
But they also did it because there were rumours, apparently fairly credible rumours that the 1913 Greek Serbian axis was again being considered.
And there were rumours that the Greeks and the Serbs had talked about the partition of Macedonia,
in which case, of course, Bulgaria would be left out. But it was a sort of half and half measure, this really recognition of the Macedonian state,
because the Bulgarians specifically said, we do not recognise the Macedonian nation.
And that remained the case. And during the 1990s, relations were patchy and difficult.
And inside Bulgaria itself, there was still considerable pressure and agitation over the Macedonian issue.
Then in 1999, in February 1999, the second agreement between Skopje and Sofia was signed,
in which case in which both sides renounced all territorial claims on the other,
and it was agreed that negotiations between them would be conducted in, quote, the official languages of the two countries.
Didn't say what they were. This was done primarily because Bulgaria was seeking admission to Natal and to in the long term, to the European Union.
And of course, both those organisations are extremely reluctant to accept any state with serious border problems, nearly always.
But in in effect, so far,
the February 1999 agreement between Skopje and Sofia seems to have settled this Macedonian issue as far as internal Bulgarian politics are concerned.
That is not to say all Bulgarians have forgotten about Macedonia, far from it.
But in terms of official policy, it is not now a feature of Bulgarian diplomacy or Bulgarian activity.
And in that sense, at long last, perhaps that particular legacy of the Balkan First World War has been laid to rest.
So those are the main external effects and legacies of the First World War and the Balkan wars are now.
Say a few words about the domestic effects.
Obviously, there was a huge impact on human life in terms of lives lost, lives ruined and lives disrupted.
Bulgaria mobilised a greater percentage of its male population than any other combatant in the First World War.
And so the effect was considerable. It produced the war itself, produced internal dislocation with men away.
And also, as I say in the moment, animals mobilised, the crops were harder to take in.
The harvests fell. And by the end of the war, there was severe malnutrition and there were food riots in Bulgaria.
And really throughout 1918.
One of the stipulations, the Treaty of No, a domestic one, but one closely associated with foreign affairs, was the Bulgarian military establishment.
This was to be limited to a maximum of 20,000 men in the army who were all to be volunteers.
And there were two. There was to be no general staff, no Air Force and various other restrictions.
And these very often were evaded arms were smuggled in and buried.
People were trained secretly, secretly in military camps.
And later on, in the 1930s. The evasion of the military clauses of the Treaty of No became a useful means for
the King to enlist the support of the Army and against his other internal foes.
Another treaty stipulation concerning reparations, Bulgaria, was to pay 2.25 billion gold francs to the allies within 37 years.
The sum was reduced in 1923 and the payments abolished by the Convention on Reparations in Lausanne in 1932.
By which time Bulgaria had paid over 40 million gold francs to in reparations.
This was not just just a cache of gold that the Bulgarians had to part with.
They had to hand over to Yugoslavia, Greece and Romania.
Coal, railway equipment and livestock.
Of the latter, there were they were to hand over a total of 125 bombs, 13,500 million cows, 12,500 horses and a mass and 2500 meals.
Now, I just mentioned those figures for a particular reason.
As I said a little bit earlier, mobilisation in Bulgaria, in England, not merely humans, but also animals and particular draught animals.
And in Bulgaria, the need for draft animals was probably greater than in any other of the combatant states, because the areas occupied by Bulgaria,
except in the dungeon, but mainly the areas in the south, in Thrace and in particular in Macedonia, had very few roads and almost no railways at all.
The only way you could move equipment and supplies was by draft animals.
So huge numbers of animals were moved into Macedonia to support the Bulgarian military occupation.
And the fact of course, most of them didn't come back and that then more had to be handed over,
had a very serious effect upon Bulgaria's agricultural capability.
War also caused in Bulgaria as elsewhere,
a centralisation of the economy and indeed it caused a military takeover of the economy
in 1917 because of maladministration and corruption by the civilian authorities.
The problems were intense and manifold. I mean, the problems were the Germans were buying up huge amounts of food.
They were allowed to spend so much. Each German soldier was allowed to send so much food home per month, per year.
The numbers of the amount sent were huge and in excess 50 100,000 times more than was permitted by law,
partly because the Germans controlled the telephone service most of the railway system,
but also mainly because German and Austrian currencies have been made legal tender in Bulgaria
during the war and they were much stronger than the Bulgarian lives of the Austrian farmers.
Those who were left sold their produce when they could to the Germans and the
Austrians before the Bulgarian requisitioning authorities got their hands on.
Corruption again was another problem. There was one case where some this is my by-line the binder.
Before the event, a Bulgarian arranged for a fake air raid on Burgas Harbour,
during which he loaded 30,000 sheep into two ships in bogus harbour and made an absolute fortune of it.
And I say it's my reminder of on the left,
the precedent for the takeover in command setting of a command economy was followed in Bulgaria at the beginning of the Great Depression,
when the Bulgarian government set up a green purchasing agency and trading agency controlling the business,
which means of import or export of grain, and then in the Second World War.
And of course, then but in the setting up of the command economy.
Under the Communists, there were clear precedents to follow.
The political impact I mentioned radicalisation through deprivation.
And then the defeat which produced the agrarian versus communist contest.
And then the agrarian regime which proved to be very corrupt.
It was it lacked an administration cadre, administrative cadre, and it did prove corrupt,
and it did spawn a whole series of conspiracies, many of them hatched inside these Masonic lodges.
And it's this these brought about in 1923, the violent coup by the army and the then non agrarian, non socialist political union parties.
There was a repeat of the agrarian communist duel after after the Second World War.
But of course this in this occasion the Communists came out on top.
But there was no doubt when that struggle began that the agrarian who had the stronger force,
the communists were strong in Bulgaria, that the agrarian in terms of popular support were strong.
Some people believe that one of the reasons why the non-Communist anti Aryans were so supine in this period, why,
which enabled the Communists to take over, helped them to take over, was the fact that many unable to stop many,
many non-aggressive non-communist who had been frightened by agrarian successes after the First World War and
therefore did not want to do anything which would enable them to come back to power after the Second World War,
which meant that the communist task is easier. Easier.
Lie 30 minutes is up until the.