Forging the state

Once the national movements had reached fruition and foreign intervention had taken place, external forces again played a major part in determining the nature of the states that were to be created—though this was less the case with Montenegro and Serbia, which emerged earlier and more gradually than the other states. In all cases the new states were required by the European powers to be monarchies, and—again with the exception of Serbia and Montenegro—they were also required to accept nonnative dynasties. All states except Serbia and Montenegro underwent a change of dynasty, and almost all ended with a minor German princeling on the throne. (Albania was the exception, because it began with a German and ended with a native prince.) The great powers also played an important part in determining legal and constitutional structures, usually with the intention of protecting minority rights, as with the Muslims of Bulgaria and the Jews of Romania.

Once established, the new Balkan states, both before and after World War I, attempted to build political and economic structures based upon those that had evolved in the West. However, their endeavour was hampered by their own histories, which had produced societies and psyches much different from those to the west. Population shifts—which inside western Europe had ceased in the 10th century—continued in the Balkans into the 20th century. The Roman and Byzantine empires had suffered constant incursion, and Saxons, Szeklers, and Swabians had been brought into Transylvania to help repair the depredations of the Mongols and other invaders. After the Ottoman conquest, Muslims moved into Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia—some of them migrants from Anatolia, others former prisoners of war or freed slaves, and still others simply converts. When the Russian armies withdrew north of the Danube after the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29, thousands of Bulgarians left with them, settling eventually in southern Bessarabia. After the Crimean War the sultan’s government settled 100,000 to 250,000 Muslim Circassians, who otherwise would have been included in Russia, as a defensive force on the northern fringes of the Ottomans’ Balkan possessions.

Further ethnic relocations and atrocities perpetrated by both Ottoman forces and Christian rebels occurred during the process of liberation, and, after the creation of the nation-states, Muslims left in large numbers. Some of these were driven out by force during or immediately after liberation, but many more left voluntarily in subsequent decades. Many Muslims could not adapt to a system in which they were no longer the privileged element. Now that Islamic law did not have automatic supremacy over other legal codes, Christian women could walk freely unveiled in the streets, and mosques could be secularized and turned to profane usage. Even worse, in most new nation-states, Muslims were conscripted into the new armies, in which, even if they did not have to wear the cross on their uniforms, they could not escape having to observe Christian holidays and rituals. Those who left were both peasant and landlord. In Moldavia and Walachia, Muslims were forbidden to own landed property, and in other countries they were subject to a land tax. Previously, Muslims had paid taxes on what they produced rather than on what they owned, and, because they customarily left up to a third or half of their land fallow, the shift to a tax based on possession rather than production was a considerable burden. As large numbers of Muslims emigrated, fewer remained to pay for and manage schools and other Muslim institutions—even though some of the latter were maintained by vakifs (waqfs), estates left in perpetuity for this purpose.

There were ethnic shifts for all major religious groups. After the creation of the Bulgarian state in 1878, not only did Muslims leave, but Christian refugees arrived from Macedonia and Thrace. Jews suffering discrimination in Russia moved into Bessarabia, Moldavia, and Walachia throughout the 19th century, and Armenians fleeing the appalling massacres of the 1890s found safety in Bulgaria. After the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, many Muslims moved into Macedonia and Thrace. After the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, the flood of refugees between Greece and Anatolia led to the first of a series of population-exchange agreements, and there were similar agreements between Bulgaria and Greece after World War I.

At times the creation of independent states exacerbated ethnic problems. The complexities of the ethnic map made it impossible to draw state boundaries that entirely coincided with ethnic divisions and thus created minority problems that were to plague the region for generations. There was a further complication in that the new boundaries frequently interrupted established patterns of economic, social, and cultural activity. For many generations Aromani (Vlach) shepherds had driven their flocks from region to region in the centre of the peninsula, just as Bulgarians had traditionally driven their sheep to market in Edirne or Constantinople. These established activities became more difficult when new state boundaries were established. Traditional fairs, for generations the established medium for the exchange of many products, were also disrupted. In some instances—for example, when the Albanian state was created in 1913—new borders separated villages from their summer pastures or, even more seriously, cut them off from a favourite shrine, church, or monastery. Similarly, new frontiers often separated monasteries from distant properties on whose income they relied. These problems arose from the creation of supposedly modern states in areas where social and economic conditions were far from modern.

The task of creating Western-style modern states was made more difficult by the lack of capital. With the exception of Romania, where commercialized, export-oriented agriculture was widely developed, most of formerly Ottoman Europe was dominated by small, self-sufficient peasant proprietors. They generated little surplus capital, and, until the end of the 19th century, those peasants or merchants who did have surplus funds found that money lending provided much higher rates of return than did any form of productive investment. Meanwhile, financial sophistication was so limited that double-column bookkeeping was hardly known. Thus, these states were dependent on the external developed world for capital and commercial expertise as well as for arms and for manufactured goods, though such dependence did not necessarily lead to political subservience.

In the late 19th century Balkan peasants suffered from a fall in world food prices. The situation was made worse in that, because income from the sale of agricultural produce was declining, governments were less willing to rely upon the tithe as a major form of taxation. Coming at a time when peasant cash incomes were falling and indebtedness was widespread, the decision to require that taxes be paid in cash produced considerable tension. This tension in turn led to outbursts of unrest, to the formation of cooperatives, and, subsequently, to the development of the agrarian political parties that were to play a significant role in most Balkan states after World War I.

In their political evolution the Balkan states saw strong pressures toward centralization and toward the strengthening of executive as opposed to legislative powers. These trends frequently clashed with the populace’s political instincts, particularly in Serbia and Bulgaria, where local power, frequently vested in the village and its elders, had served as a cushion against Ottoman pressure and had been one of the means by which national identity had been preserved. Consequently, much of the constitutional instability that afflicted 19th-century Serbia derived from clashes between the new royal authorities in Belgrade and local village chieftains. Likewise, Alexander of Battenberg, the first prince of Bulgaria, attempted to reconstruct Sofia’s municipal council in 1879 and was told that not even the Turks would have dared to do that.

Political participation in all Balkan states soon became restricted to a small segment of the population. The large landowners had a great influence on the politics of Romania before World War I and on Albania after it, but in all countries the intelligentsia was also actively engaged. A distinction emerged, however, between that part of the intelligentsia that remained politically independent and the part that became linked to the ruling apparatus through the system of clientism and jobbery (public corruption) that soon affected the entire peninsula. This development had deleterious effects on the Balkan states. It lured a substantial part of the intelligentsia into state office in return for political obedience and thereby corrupted some of the ablest citizens by leading them to close their eyes to abuses of power. Corruption, in turn, produced a widening rift between the peasants and those who wielded power; throughout the Balkans it was commonly observed that the worst oppressor was the peasant who had only just entered the ranks of the influential.

Influence and wealth could be acquired in the bureaucracy, which before 1914 expanded steadily in all states except Montenegro and Albania, but the same goals could also be pursued in the army. The military became a significant factor in Bulgaria after the deposition of Prince Alexander I in 1886 and in Serbia after the overthrow of the Obrenović dynasty in 1903. In Romania the military played a less prominent role in political power brokering, but it was an avenue for social advancement. After World War I and even during the years of communist domination after World War II, the army remained a powerful factor in the political affairs of all Balkan states.

The Balkan states emerged separately and at different times. Although their freedom of action was limited by the great powers, they all had claims to further territory that they considered theirs by ethnic or historical right, and notions of Balkan union or solidarity were therefore rare and transitory. The Serbs toyed with such ideas in the 1860s, and the Balkan states did manage to cohere long enough in 1912–13 to destroy what was left of Ottoman power in the peninsula. But fleeting cooperation soon gave way in 1913 to recrimination and bloody conflict. Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece were unable to agree upon a division of Macedonia, and they clashed again over the same issue in 1914.