# My American Lectures/Present-day Problems of South-Eastern Europe

PRESENT-DAY PROBLEMS OF SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE
South-Eastern Europe forms no unity in the common sense of the word, as a peninsula of the Balkans. Bulgaria is the only true Balkan country because it is geographically connected with the chain of Haemus, called by the Turks, Balkan, the Rhodope being purely Thracian. All the western part of the peninsula is linked to a much more important range, the Pindus. Greece, with its islands, is a Mediterranean State. North of the Danube, Roumania, inseparably linked as she is to the Carpathians, a mighty sierra, leading to the West, to the Quadrilateral of Bohemia, has its chief geographical features, as for instance the course of the Transylvanian rivers, directed towards the countries of the west.
Putna Monastery. General view
Having this community of ancient memory and aspiration, of tradition and fashion, South-Eastern Europe has necessarily, deeply rooted in the remote past of the region, the same problems today.
All existing states in the peninsula and north of its limits are essentially peasant-states. From the days of the Illyrian pirates and the Thracian shepherds and farmers, their inhabitants have been devoted to pastoral pursuits; in the most remote ages a free warrior-peasantry. The speech of Alexander the Great to his malcontent soldiery in the Persian valleys, reminding them of their humble ​origin and of their modest occupations, is one of the best proofs of this fact. Under the Romans they preserved their freedom. With its regime of « paroikoi » for new colonists, half-vassals to their masters, the Byzantine regime was not responsible for too deep a change. The legends as to the merciless rule of the Turk may now be rejected. The Ottomans came only as a weak band of mercenaries employed in the civil wars of Byzantium and their expansion was due less to their own vitality or to the ambition, which demands the development of the collective mind, than to the abdication of all authority in the peninsula, whether Greek, Serb, Bulgarian or Latin — the Roumanians were the last autonomy to survive because, being a newly-formed territorial and national state, they did not suffer from the same political disorganisations and despondency. Over all the Turks preserved the old laws, the old usages, not being able, owing to their own primitive notions of society, to substitute their own characteristics.
In the occupied territories the peasant pursued his former mode of living. If a Turkish warrior was substituted for the former master, he inherited only the rights of his predecessor, a Latin lord, a Greek landlord, a Slav noble as the case might be. His subjects’ only duty was the yearly payment as tribute of a part of their produce, the « tithe » of the west, and of giving him annual presents at certain seasons. The pagan intruder did not rule, the village following the archaic lines of its local administration. The bondman (the serf in the sense of occidental Europe) was not to be found in this land of traditional liberty. It is, in any event, a great error to blend the abuses of military brutality, following alien conquest, or those of another religious faith, with the necessary actions of a conscious system. ​
Because of this, as the Turkish yoke was thrown off and the national state emerged, first in Serbia in the 19th century, then in Greece, and later in Bulgaria, the agrarian problem was possible of almost immediate solution: in Greece, for Thessaly, a newer annexation, expropriation was only achieved in the closing years of the last century. The landlords were not only foreigners of another creed, but the « tyrants » of yore, the vanquished of today. In Morea, as the flames of the Christian revolt burst forth in the year 1821, the former masters realised that the time to leave had arrived, and they departed accordingly. By this total expropriation the Turks themselves were, albeit unwillingly, the best helpers. From Serbia they emigrated slowly: in Bulgaria they were constrained to depart, the administration doing its best to accelerate their exodus. Now very few of the Turkish villagers are to be seen in the Bulgarian districts of the Black Sea, gained by the Roumanians after the Balkan War: good men, grateful to the new State for the special protection accorded to them. The titles to property presented by the Bulgars were often exceedingly dubious. A concealed violence was at the root of the problem: peasants of western Bulgaria arrived in small groups and in a few years were firmly established by the tolerance of the State and endowed with the fields and houses of the outcast Turk.
An exception must be made in regard to Bosnia and Herzegovina. As the Austro-Hungarian administration came in 1878 to exercise a European « mandate », — to all appearances permanently — later to be transformed into true sovereignty, it found Moslem landlords hard subjects to deal with, of Slavonic blood though they were and of historical descent, as, in the 15th century, when the Turks conquered the two provinces, the landlords, menaced with the confiscation of their properties, preferred ​rather to renounce their religion. An exceedingly powerful class, they continued to thrive, to the great disadvantage of the peasantry. The new regime employed this rich and proud aristocracy of beys with Slavonic names and of indigenous origins as one of its principal supports.
Very different however was the situation in the two Roumanian Principalities which, with the sole exception of the strongholds on the left bank of the Danube, were never conquered, occupied or ruled by the Turk. Here the prince was the overlord, redeeming by the promise of tribute and presents to Constantinople his sovereign rights in their integrity. All his nobility, of ancient lineage, formed by the aristocratic refugees from the countries under the Turkish yoke or by rewards for military services, remained round him, often assisting to rule and giving direction to state policy.
The peasants were certainly originally free. The state of Wallachia was formed by the union of peasant « judicatures » and, notwithstanding the splendid ornaments of purple and gold recently unearthed from the tomb of Bassarab, the creator of Wallachian unity, he was no crowned baron reigning over disarmed slaves. The peasant enjoyed liberty, and riches were possible to him, but in land and cattle, not in money. As the Turkish tribute had to be paid in money, the prince was forced to demand aspers from his subjects, while the peasant in his turn, possessing none, was constrained to sell his property or, more often, to dispose of his share in the common property (which was divided as with the Germans according to his degree and his duties to his family). So, because the soil without the worker was of little value, in 1595 the boyards, employing the strictures placed upon them by their overlord, first in revolt against the Turk and then threatened by him, introduced into Wallachia the Hungarian system ​of bondage then prevalent in Transylvania: the peasants were no longer allowed to quit their former hereditary properties.
The « philosophy » of the 18th century brought some measure of comfort to the unlawfully despoiled farmers, of whom only a small minority had preserved their liberty. The philanthropic prince Constantin Mavrocordato consecrated, by the most solemn ceremonies of State and Church, the absolute equality of « villagers », no longer serfs, with the rest of the population. Thus, freedom was regained: not so property.
In the year 1834 by a new Constitution for both States, (the so-called Règlement Organique) the right of servitude upon their own soil was granted to the peasant, whose departure thence, however, was conditional upon the onerous task of paying all his debts. New regulations followed, the landlords endeavouring to retain the utmost possible of their diminished powers. After the union of the Principalities in 1859, a coup d’ètat (1864) was required before the elected Prince, Alexander Cuza, could proceed to the transformation of this servitude into that of property-holding by right.
But this was not all. The peasant had no capital, no direction and no solidarity. His right to the forest and to the grazing lands was not yet recognised. The natural increase of the population resulted in the appearance of some millions of landless peasants. Revolts broke out. Holding eighty per cent of the national soil, the landlords, most of them possessing neither historical nor national right thereto, but having the political power in their hands (the peasants voted in what was known as the third college, the illiterate of them only indirectly), resisted.
The Roumanian campaign in Bulgaria in 1913 was necessary before the landowners would recognise the benefits ​of a free peasantry enjoying full political rights. Hoping to gain the villagers for his own party, the so-called liberals headed by the second John Brătianu presented to Parliament, at the moment when the world war was imminent, a draft law on expropriation. Roumania entered the universal turmoil before the necessary legislation could be voted by the Constituent Assemblies. The dangers of « bolshevisation » under the influence of the allied Russian troops were needed to inspire the idea of a new force to combat it. I shall always remember the day when I pressed the President of the Council to accomplish the reform. Objecting that the conservative colleagues of the Coalition Ministry were opposing him, he refused and I was then constrained to write personally to the King. On the following day the President of the Council told me that, after more mature consideration, he had reconsidered, but that the proposal had to be made by the President of the Chamber of Deputies — a former Socialist! The measure was passed and the attitude of the landlords was beyond praise: they accepted State bonds of a rapidly diminishing value (today 40%) as compensation for the expropriation of their lands.
After the war, the new Cabinet of General Averescu voted for the distribution of 80% of the land to nearly all peasants as a reward for their gallant conduct in the war. Former landowners were not allowed to retain more than 500 hectares, nor could the new estates be sold. Due allowance was made for those peasants living in barren regions, peasants in the mountains being granted holdings in the Danubian steppe. Many of the peasants so endowed were not even farmers by calling.
In Roumania today, as in other countries, the peasant is master of the major portion of the land. But his mind is not yet sufficiently prepared for so great a role in the ​national economy. Considering first only his relation to the soil itself, he wants, in Roumania, more even than in Serbia (which is a country founded by democratic movements, those of Karageorge; in the Roumanian lands the Karageorge of the nation, Tudor Vladimirescu, was killed by the Greek revolutionaries of the Hetairie and could not therefore form a peasant State), capital, cattle, credit, solidarity. The elementary school does not teach him to till his land by new, and more profitable, methods. The landlord, employing machinery, holding his workers by the bonds established by money-advances, was able to benefit by the prospects of his enterprise, and provided his country with rich exports which not only maintained him personally in luxury but also financed a prospering State. The mediocre products of the small holders' toil today are not sufficient to maintain this trade and the ruin of the public finances was the logical result of this inability. For Roumania as for others, the organisation of the small property is the greatest of all problems. The creation of a class of freeholders in the country, too, is bound to bring forth new fashions in politics.
For the Balkan States this was an easier task than it is for Roumania, because of the fact that expropriation in their case was a consequence of the first acts following the establishment of a national state. It is to be observed that Greece has a relative majority of lower middle-class, especially prior to the recent increases of territory. In Serbia the peasants from the very beginning were the element which formed the State; the Scuptchina was a collection of villagers and, after the revolutionary Karageorge, Milosh, the founder of the Principality, remained to the last a brutal representative of the peasant class from which he had sprung. In Bulgaria, the peasantry plays a very great part in the political life. ​
But in all these countries the peasant is the backbone of the nation, the most active and the most efficient element of the State, the least prone to sudden changes and revolutionary madness. And in none of these countries, except perhaps for a short period in very recent Bulgarian politics, has a party of peasants for the peasantry been formed as have other parties to represent the various classes of society. The peasant organisation of the deceased Stamboliiski was only a weapon in the hands of a talented but monstrously ambitious pedagogue. The « greens » did not represent the traditional, the peculiar standard of life in the villages; their hatred directed against everything belonging to the cities was unnatural and foredoomed to disaster. After the failure of government and the death of the chief, no such organisation of the village remained to assure them of a return to power. This violent interlude in the life of Bulgaria was merely an intermezzo of personal tyranny flattering the interests of a class which had no reason to complain of the role it had played in the social and political organism.
In the peninsula all parties, of all nations, were merely of modern form, and not also a modernised, form of the old clan life as in mediaeval Scotland — or as in the England of Warwick the King-maker. It was most visible in Albania in the days of Essad, the chief of a clan, as it is in these days of the present King, the bey of another. The adherents come to the fortified house, to the koula (viz: tower) of their leader as to their own house and can demand to be housed and entertained. The success of the chief is a guarantee of rich rewards for his followers: all are ruined by his misfortune. In Greece, in Serbia, in Bulgaria the names are taken from the western parties in constitutional countries, but their significance ​has long since faded. What was true radicalism in the party of Pashitch; what was true liberalism in the organisation of Ristitch; what formed the ideology of the Bulgarian parties, beginning with the days when the right wing of Tsankov was opposed to the left of Karavelov? In Roumania, ruled by King Carol, by noblemen and their associated parvenus and intellectuals all bound together by relations of kinship and by the same social life in a restricted place, the Liberals of the Bratianus, who had forgotten their revolutionary creed, their republican and socialist ideology of 1848, were no more Red than the former « Whites » of the degenerate boyards, than the adepts of the German doctrines favoured by Carp and Maiorescu, than the so-called democrats, because they were born in the lower classes of the cities, under Take Ionescu. Here, as in the neighbouring countries, the true parties, bound to a real doctrine or to a solid class-interest, did not exist at the moment when the agrarian reform was decreed. But, as the Liberals initiated the great agitation on the agrarian question and were thus constrained to find a solution to it, so the schoolmasters and priests, in the villages identified their ambitions with the remnants of the Conservatives, to whom expropriation was a death-blow, and to some ambitious intellectuals to form a peasant party. This party, strongly sustained by the electors because of the visions its name conjured up before them, arrived to rule Roumania from 1928 to 1931. But it was obliged to fuse with the « nationals » of Transylvania to do so, a party whose origin and utility is sprung from the struggle against the Hungarian masters of yore and a party without social distinctions, then with the « nationals » of the former Austrian Bukovina, and with such Bessarabians as had, by means of their own, effected the agrarian revolution of that province. No more than the degenerate Liberals, ​supported by their groups of banks and, in short, all manner of vested interests, can such a confederation be considered an organic formation with a solid future. It can be moulded, in Roumania as elsewhere, only after the bulk of the peasants shall have been educated to a greater capacity for forming their own judgement of political ideas and politicians beyond the empty phrases of the demagogues, the cheap and scurrilous press and, with the advent of universal suffrage, the electoral « symbols » for the illiterate.
There is also an economic aspect to the agrarian and political problems.
In the ancient Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman civilisations, the same system of trade routes existed — the imperial « vias » and « dromoi » — and stretched to all points of the peninsula. This system was joined with Pannonia and the Adriatic: the via pannonica and the via aegnatia. Often the presence of a road has promoted the creation of a state (not only of many cities) and, while the roads of the mediaeval states were linked up in an unitary system, the states had perforce to follow in their wake. The great eastern road between Scandinavia and Central Asia favoured the formation of a united Russian state and the counterpart of this road was the new artery joining Moscow to Mongolia. The necessity of sending the products of the western manufacturers in the Low Countries and of the metal workers of Germany to Eastern Europe and of bringing the products of Eastern arts and crafts to the west brought about the creation of the trade route which traversed Transylvania, crossed the mountains and gave to the Wallachian plains and the Moldavian valleys the task of guarding the caravans of eastern and western merchants alike. ​Passing through the cities on either bank of the Danube this commerce was carried yet deeper into the oriental countries. A second route, cutting the peninsula diagonally, passed the Danube at Belgrade, and this was the reason for the creation of a new Danubian Serbia in the 15th century. A third united the Venetian colonies of Albania with the interior by the via aegnatia, or by the narrow and precipitous paths and ravines of the Pindus: the vitality of Bosnia, of Herzegovina and Macedonia was thereby stimulated.
Now the frontiers of the national states form an obstacle. Different tariff systems rule the exchange of goods. Bulgaria can no longer reach the Aegean or Serbia, Salonika, unless she asks the consent of Greece. For Roumania, not only access to the Aegean, but also to the Adriatic, necessary to its natural relations with Italy, is closed. A reversal of the status quo is of the highest necessity.
But to obtain this a political entente between the States concerned is the first essential.
After the formation of the first-born of these States certain good relations were continually maintained. Between the Serb movement of Karageorge and the Wallachian movement of Tudor Vladimirescu, a strong relation of dependency was recognised. The Greek movement of 1821 was supported in the Roumanian principalities by prince, bishop and boyar alike, and Vladimirescu, before separating his own national movement, was a sincere member of the secret association against the Turkish domination. Macedonians were among his lieutenants; the collaboration of the Serbian chief, Milosh, was also not rejected. For the leader of the rebellion, Alexander Ipsilanti, the goal was the revival of the Byzantine Empire and he took the Phoenix as his crest. In Morea the struggle against ​the Turk was supported not only by Clephts and Armatoles, but also by many Roumanians and Slavs. If the first Greek king, the Bavarian Otto, disdained to consider as his equals the princes of the larger Roumanian principalities, who were the vassals of the Sultan, the relations between these latter and the Serbian hospodar were of the most cordial, irrespective of the fact that the dynasty of Karageorge or of Milosh might reign in Belgrade. Rakovsky who, like most Bulgarian agitators, worked in Roumania (for long years the cultural centre of the Bulgarians), dreamed of a Yugoslav state comprising his country as well as an enlarged Serbia; he did not discover in Macedonia the apple of discord because of the doubtful relation subsisting between the Slav races. Under the first Roumanian prince to reign after the union of the Principalities, Alexander Cuza, offers of a general move against the Turk were made to him by Greek, Serbian and Montenegrin emissaries alike, the young prince of Montenegro declaring himself ready to keep watch « at the gates » of the Serbian palace, as that puissant prince, Michael — all too prematurely sacrificed to a family feud — reigned in Belgrade. Serbians and Roumanians gained their independence at the same time (1877—1878) that Bulgarian insurgents, on the road to the creation of a free Bulgaria, joined the armies of the Czar Alexander II on their way to Constantinople. The first Serbian king, Milan, was the son of a Roumanian lady and the first prince of the Bulgarians was the intimate friend of the prince — later King — Charles of Roumania.
Only after the fratricide Serbo-Bulgarian war, provoked by Russo-Austrian rivalry in the Balkans, after the insane strife for the bleak valleys of Macedonia, coveted by all the more probably because it is no-man’s-land and for the most part of no use to anyone, the ​former Carpatho-Balkanic community was troubled. It reappeared then for the moment when Turkey lost, in a desperate struggle with them all, the greatest part of its European possessions, but on the division of such alluring spoils the old enmities burned and blood was shed in encounters between Bulgars on the one side and Serbians and Greeks on the other. The Roumanian intervention and the allotment of certain districts in Southern Dobrudja being considered by the Bulgars to be an unforgiveable injury, sowed the seed for a fresh and still fiercer conflict which was to burst forth like flames from a hidden and—by some—unsuspected fire when the heir of Austria-Hungary was assassinated at Sarajevo and the world war provoked in the Balkans gave to the inimical nations yet another opportunity of testifying to their reciprocal hatred.
Notwithstanding all such disputed territories, the interests of growing production, the daily-increasing extension of political horizons, the care for the moral goods—more precious than a handful of Macedonian or Dobrudjan villages—demand and indicate to all right-thinking politicians in South Eastern Europe the imperative need of a joint understanding. Here lies a more glorious and important path to peace and liberty than that provided by the relegation of all these States to be mere tools in a Franco-Italian rivalry to which France brings a supremacy of culture while Italy presents all the glories of her commercial traditions of the Middle Ages.
It can be accomplished not only by recognising, if only as a provisional measure, the present borders of the States, but also by assuring all individuals the right to cultivate the national soul each claims for himself. An economic millenium could be created; despite differences of language, exchanges