SERBIA CHANGES COURSE - Autocracy, despotism and democracy

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Autocracy, despotism and democracy
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bet | 39/46 | Sana | 01.04.2020 | Hajmi | 1,31 Mb. | | #9514 |
70. SERBIA CHANGES COURSE
In 1903 a group of conspirators upset at King Alexander of Serbia’s pro-Austrian orientation and proposed cuts to the military budget, killed him and Queen Draga in Belgrade.780 This murder brought the Karadjordjević dynasty back to power in the person of King Peter I, who had been in exile in France and Switzerland since 1858. The crime had the good side-effect that the pro-Austrian Obrenović dynasty was replaced by the pro-Russian Karadjordjević dynasty. But the long-term effects were evil; for the crime was neither deeply repented of, nor investigated sufficiently so as to bring the killers to justice. For, as Rebecca West writes, the new King Petar “was entirely surrounded by the conspirators whose crime he abhorred, and he could not dismiss them, because… with these fierce critics all about him perfectly capable of doing what they had done before, he had to keep order in a new and expanding country, vexed with innumerable internal and external difficulties.”781
West goes on to assert that “when Alexander and Draga fell from that balcony the whole of the modern world fell with them. It took some time to reach the ground and break its neck, but its fall started then…”782 For the shots in Belgrade in 1903 led to the shots at Sarajevo in 1914 (the same fanatical nationalist, “Apis” Dragutin Dmitrijevic, was behind that), which led to the First World War and the Russian revolution. For God is not mocked; He does not allow anyone to touch His anointed.
In fact, the murder was a symptom of a wider revolutionary malaise, not only in Serbia, but in contemporary Orthodox Christendom as a whole, which took on a predominantly nationalist character in the Balkans and an internationalist character in Russia. Soon it was soon to bring down upon it the wrath of God and the end of the whole “Sardian” period of the Orthodox Christian Empire from St. Constantine the Great to Tsar Nicholas II…
Even if the new king had had the desire to resist the irredentist mood in Serbia783, it is doubtful that he would have been able to do so, not only because, as West points out, he was surrounded by a nationalist coterie, but also because Serbia was ruled, not by the king, but by elected politicians. This was evident from the very first day of his reign, when the Prime Minister Avvakumović pointedly introduced him to the Russian minister before the Austrian minister. "That formally signified," wrote the Belgrade Daily Chronicle, "that Austria-Hungary has no relations with the present cabinet."784
This was because under the old Obrenović dynasty Serbia had been in a subservient position to Austria, an economic colony of the great Catholic empire of the West. But introducing the king first to the Russian minister was equivalent to saying that the old pro-Austrian orientation of Serbian foreign policy was over, and that Serbia's Great-Power patron was now the great Orthodox empire of the East. And this in turn signified that Serbia was no longer going to take such a passive attitude towards Austria's occupation of Bosnia with its large Serb population...
The next day the king swore an oath to "maintain inviolate the Constitution". And on June 25 he made a proclamation peppered with references to the Constitution: "I will be a true constitutional King of Serbia. For me all constitutional guarantees of freedom and popular rights, which are the basis of all regular and prosperous development as well as of all national progress and constitutional life, are sacred trusts which I will always carefully respect and guard. I expect everyone to do the same."785 This indicated that the real rulers of Serbia would remain the elected politicians...
Then he went on: "Imbued with these sentiments, to the past I consign the past, and I leave it to history to judge each according to his deeds..." In other words, the murderers of the previous king would not be threatened by him. Nor would he seek to undermine the policy of trying to gather all Serbs under one political roof...
Under the Obrenovičes a secret treaty had given Austria-Hungary a veto over Serbian foreign policy. But now Serbia became more independent and its stance more nationalist. In the 'pig war' of 1906-11 Austria-Hungary retaliated by boycotting Serbia's exports of livestock. But the Serbs found alternative markets and turned from Vienna to Paris as their main artillery supplier. And despite Austrian hopes in 1908 that annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina would dispel South Slav dreams of unification, covert Serb support for Bosnian separatism persisted...
There was a fundamental contradiction in the new direction of Serbian foreign policy. On the one hand, it was now oriented on Russia - an entirely natural and laudable step in view of the fact that Serbia was an Orthodox and Slav country and Russia was the Orthodox and Slav empire, the Third Rome. On the other hand, Serbia's constitutionalism and nationalist irredentism had their roots, not in Orthodoxy or Slavdom, but in the French revolution, and were abhorrent to Russia's tsars. As autocrats, they resisted constitutionalism like the plague it truly was; and as leaders of a multi-national empire, they resisted nationalism and irredentism both within their borders and outside them. The suspicion was, therefore, that Serbia now, under the Karadjeordjevičes, would not so much follow Russia as the leader of the Orthodox world as use her to protect herself when her aggressive foreign policy would bring her into inevitable conflict with the more powerful states of Austria-Hungary or Ottoman Turkey...
These suspicions were partially confirmed in 1908, when Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, enraging Serbs and Russians alike. The Serbs began preparations for war and made secret alliances with their Orthodox neighbours, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Greece. But Tsar Nicholas, although humiliated by Austria's move and under pressure from nationalists at home, tried hard to prevent the passions of the Balkan Orthodox from spilling over into war, which, as he knew better than anybody, would not be confined to the Balkans...
Meanwhile, Prince Alexander, a godson of Tsar Alexander III, "was enrolled in the St. Petersburg Page School, an Imperial Russian institute where well-born boys prepared for careers in military and court service. There he was described as a hardworking if somewhat solitary boy. His background admitted him to close relationship with Tsar Nicholas II and his family."786
This close relationship of Alexander with Orthodox Imperial Russia, which continued through the world war and into the inter-war period, when he invited the Russian Church Abroad to set up its headquarters in Serbia, was to be a vital influence on the world-view of the young Prince, counter-balancing to some degree the constitutionalism and extreme nationalism of his native land.
71. THE YOUNG TURKS
Meanwhile, important changes were taking place in the dominant great power in the region – Turkey, where the old system of Islamic Sharia law combined with the Sultan’s personal decrees was being undermined by a new liberal legal system, introduced under pressure from the Western powers, whose main idea was the equality of all citizens, both Muslim and Christian. The liberal legislation, which was incorporated into the Constitution in 1876, was displeasing to Muslims and Christians alike. For, on the one hand, the Muslims felt that they were losing their superiority to the “infidel”. And on the other hand, the Christians were worried about losing some of the exemptions they enjoyed under the old millet system. For “in some ways,” as Taner Akçam writes, “Christians were better off than the average Turkish peasant, given their exemption from military service, and often the support of a foreign consulate, which excluded them from Ottoman courts, protected their homes from being searched by the authorities and freed them from Ottoman taxes. ‘The maligned Turkish peasant, at the other end of the social scale, was generally no better off than the ordinary non-Muslim and as much oppressed by maladministration… He was as much in need of reformed government as the Church, but [h]e had neither treaty, foreign power, nor patriarch to protect him, and his lot was generally unknown in Europe.’”787
Defeat at the hands of Russia in 1877-78, and the gradual liberation of their European Christian subjects, increased the sense of grievance and frustration among the Turks. Massacres of Christians began, notably of Armenians (200,000 in 1894-96, nearly two million in 1915). And a new nationalist ideology began to be worked out on the basis of the empire’s Muslim Turks being the “millet-i Hakime”, or “ruling nation”.
In 1908 a modernizing group called “The Committee for Union and Progress” (CUP), or “The Young Turks”, seized power in Constantinople. The CUP’s stronghold was the Army in Macedonia, which had learned much from the discipline and conspiratorial techniques of the Bulgarian and Macedonian guerrillas. In fact, some of the rebel soldiers in Macedonia formed pacts with the Albanians, and with the Bulgarian and Serbian guerrillas they were supposed to be fighting.788
The result was a stunning victory for the revolution. On July 23, 1908 the Young Turks imposed a constitution on the empire. In 1909 the Sultan was deposed. And by 1913 the government had come under the complete control of the Committee of Union and Progress. The new government was Masonic, but at the same time nationalist at heart. 789 However, at first they renounced nationalism so as to bring as many members of other nationalities of the multi-national empire onto its side. Similarly, they were secularists at heart, but concealed this in order not to alienate the Turkish masses, who were fervently religious.
And so in Constantinople Muslims joined with Armenians in requiem services for the massacres of 1896. Again, on July 23, 1908, “Salonika’s gendarmerie commander observed how ‘[o]n the balcony of the Konak [town hall], Greek and Bulgarian bishops and the mufti shook hands and then in the name of fraternity, they invited their co-religionists to follow suit… A cry of joy burst from every lung in the crowd and you could see Muslims, Greeks and Bulgarians, the old mortal enemies, falling into one another’s arms. An indescribable delirium ensued as the reconciliation of the races and religions was consecrated underneath an immense flag emblazoned with the words ‘Long Live the Constitution’…”790
It was indeed an extraordinary moment, comparable only to the frenzied joy that accompanied the overthrow of the Tsar only nine years later in Petrograd. Like Herod and Pilate, bitter rivals abandoned their enmity in joy at the overthrow of their common enemy – one-man-rule that recognized its authority as coming, not from men, but from the One God. Instead, a new god, “the Constitution”, was erected and worshipped by all. Meanwhile, the priests of the new religion, the Masons, took over the reins of government – men such as Mehment Talaat Pasha, Grand Master of the Turkish Grand Orient, and Kemal Ataturk, who had been initiated into an Italian lodge in Macedonia. 791 On July 23, 1908, the same day as the celebrations in Salonika, they restored the Midhat constitution on the empire…
However, it was not long before the new government cast off its liberal and cosmopolitan mask. “Over three years of counterrevolution and restoration, revolutionary idealism turned into a regime whose brutality surpassed that of [Sultan] Abdulhamid. ‘The old espionage had returned, the extortion had never ceased, the oppression against non-Moslems had now acquired a fresher and more sinister vigour, for the measure of freedom that each nationality had once enjoyed was now being ruthlessly crushed by a heretofore unknown chauvinism.’”792
For “while the Young Turk revolution had temporarily spread the gospel of harmony among the Empire’s constituent peoples, it had had no such effect on Macedonia’s neighbours in the Balkans – Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia. On the contrary, they saw the success of the revolution as a sign of the Empire’s extreme weakness and it galvanized their expansionist ambitions.
“The most immediate blow to the movement for reconciliation in the Ottoman Empire was delivered by Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary and Greece. In October, Prince Ferdinand exploited the political chaos in the Ottoman Empire by declaring Bulgaria fully independent – until then it had been nominally under the suzerainty of the Empire. Within days, Austria-Hungary followed suit by announcing the full annexation of the occupied territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina and before long Greece proclaimed enosis with Crete. These events, in particular Vienna’s annexation of Bosnia, set alarm bells ringing in the Ottoman military barracks, the real power behind the CUP. Henceforth, any Christian demands which smacked of secessionism would be rejected. In response, the guerrillas in Macedonia – Serb, Bulgarian, Greek and, significantly, Albanian – took to the hills once more. The military establishments of Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire had taken their first steps along the road that ended with the First and Second Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913.”793
Tsar Nicholas II knew better than anyone the true significance of the events of 1908, and the great danger they posed for the whole of Orthodoxy. Basically, the whole vast region of the Ottoman Empire had fallen under the power of Orthodoxy’s greatest enemy, the revolution, albeit in its nationalist rather than internationalist form. The Serbs, the Bulgarians and the Greeks, in spite of their recent rejoicing with the Turks over their revolution, were now gripped by a mad enthusiasm for war against Turkey that might well trigger a far wider war between the great powers.
The Tsar wanted to work with Austria in order to cool passions and avert world war; but his situation was made the more difficult in that Austria’s annexation of Bosnia had involved a trick played by the Austrian Foreign Minister, Baron Erenthal, on the Russian Foreign Minister, A.P. Izvolsky, that humiliated Russia and stirred Serbian and Russian public opinion to a frenzy of anti-Germanism.
The story is told by S.S. Oldenburg:- “On September 3/16, in Buchlow castle, A.P. Izvolsvky met Baron Erenthal. There are various versions of the details of this meeting. The German State-Secretary for Foreign Relations, von Schen, referring to the conversation with A.P. Izvolsky, wrote to Bülow on September 13/26 that in Buchlow Erenthal had put forward the following plan: Austria would limit herself to annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina, but would forbear from moving on Salonika and would take her armies out of the Novi-Pazar Šandjak and would support Russia’s demand that her fleet be given free passage through the Straits. At the same time Turkey’s sovereignty over Bulgaria, which had for long been a pure formality, would be proclaimed to be annulled.
“Izvolsky evidently approved this plan in its general form. We have to bear in mind that already in 1876, at the Reichstag agreement, and then in a special clause of the Austro-German-Russian agreement of June 18, 1881, Russia had declared her consent to the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina: ‘Austro-Hungary,’ declared this clause, ‘retains for herself the right to annex both these provinces at a time when she considers it necessary’. So the hands of the Russian minister were tied, and it was a matter only of this or that compensation. A.P. Izvolsky thought that Austria’s renunciation of the Šandjak, the freedom of travel through the Straits for Russia and the independence of Bulgaria (together with a profitable trade agreement for Serbia) represented enough compensation. Evidently he also counted on these changes to the Berlin congress agreement being accepted at the same time – perhaps with the help of a new international conference.
“But already on September 24 / October 7 Baron Erenthal told the delegations of the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, explaining this step on the grounds of the necessity of giving these provinces representative organs, so that the local population should not turn out to be at a disadvantage by comparison with the Turkish domains.
“At the same time, Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria proclaimed the complete independence of Bulgaria and took the title of tsar.
“Both these acts were undoubtedly a rejection of the obligations undertaken at the Berlin congress, although in essence they only confirmed a situation that had existed de facto for a long time.
“In international relations, ‘c’est le ton qui fait la musique’, and public opinion in Russia and especially in Serbia reacted badly to these steps. In Belgrade they deemed Austria’s declaration as the first step towards the establishment of her hegemony in the Balkans. Bulgaria’s decision was seen as ‘the acceptance of independence from the hands of Austria’, while the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina – as Austria’s self-willed appropriation of Slavic lands”.794
Tsar Nicholas asked the Germans to mediate in the dispute. The Germans refused in a particularly blunt and offensive manner that stirred up a huge wave of anti-German feeling in the two Slavic countries. Although the Russians were too weak, so soon after the Russo-Japanese war and the 1905 revolution, to take decisive action at this point, their humiliation strengthened their determination not to allow the Austrians to get away with it next time…
At the same time, Greece proclaimed her annexation (enosis) of Crete. So in a very short time the status quo in the Balkans which Russia and Austria had pledged to preserve had been blown apart. And now, with the prospect of a further disintegration of Turkish rule in the Balkans, the three Orthodox States of Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece began rapidly rearming themselves, as a result of which all were deeply in debt to western arms manufacturers - the Serbs to French ones, the Bulgarians to German ones.
In spite of their rivalries over Macedonia, the Balkan States were more ready to enter into commercial agreements with each other than turn for help to any great power, including Russia. But they failed to realize – or did not want to take into account – that any war with Turkey would inevitably draw Austria into the conflict in some way or other, since Austria now owned Bosnia - which had to pose a threat at any rate to Serbia’s expansionist plans. Moreover, in alliance with Austria was a new and very powerful enemy – Germany, which had been making significant inroads into the Ottoman Empire through its railway projects, and which was reorganizing the Ottoman Army under the leadership of German generals.
The Bosnian crisis accelerated, although it did not cause, another important international development: the growing rapprochement between Russian and England… The general shift to the right in Russian politics and society since 1905 had had an effect also on the international scene. Liberal England, which before had seen only evil in Russia, sought to come to terms with her geopolitical rival, and in 1907 the two countries signed an agreement on their respective spheres of influence in Tibet, Afghanistan and Persia. The agreement was sealed by a meeting in 1908 between King Edward VII and Tsar Nicholas in Revel and by visits to England by a parliamentary delegation and then the Tsar himself in 1909. Although this was not a formal alliance, it had an important psychological and political effect; people now saw Europe as divided into two alliance systems, with the central powers of Germany, Austria and (possibly) Italy on the one side, and England, France and Russia on the other…
72. THE BALKAN WARS
“Between 1907 and 1914,” writes Dominic Lieven, “the outlines of a coalition between sections of Russia’s economic, political and intellectual élites based on a combination of liberal and nationalist ideas began to emerge. It encompassed a number of leading Moscow industrialists, some of Russia’s greatest liberal intellectuals and many Duma leaders. By 1914 this shadowy coalition had important friends in both the army and the bureaucracy. Prince Grigori Trubetskoy, who ran the Foreign Ministry’s department of Near Eastern and Balkan affairs, was closely linked to the Moscow industrialists and to Peter Struve, the leading intellectual spokesman for the coalition of the liberal-conservative and nationalist elites. Even Alexander Krivoshein, the Minister of Agriculture, was a potential ally of this coalition. His ministry, and indeed he himself, maintained cordial relations with the Duma and the zemstva. On the whole, they enjoyed a good press. And Krivoshein was not merely inclined towards pro-Slav nationalist sympathies, he had also married a daughter of one of Moscow’s leading industrialist families. It needs to be stressed that this coalition was still in embryo in 1907-9 and that Germany’s own aggressive policies played a role in bringing it to life in later years. Nevertheless the Germans were not wrong to watch Russian domestic developments with great concern in the pre-war era. The idea that the liberal-nationalist, anti-German and pro-Slav coalition represented the wave of the future was not unreasonable and was widely believed both in Russia and abroad…”795
But the Tsar had to resist the liberal-nationalist wave; for he knew that Russia was not ready for war – foreign war might well trigger internal revolution. For that reason he wanted to restrain the hotheads in the Balkans. But the problem was: the Balkan hotheads did not see it that way. As one Bulgarian statesman, interviewed by the journalist Leon Trotsky, said soon after the First Balkan War: “We must, of course, say this all politeness, to all the other diplomats from Europe, as they labour in the sweat of their brows for our happiness. ‘Neither honey nor thorns,’ dear sirs! We ourselves will settle with Turkey, without any interference from Europe, and all the more firmly and satisfactorily. Europe puts on an air of being afraid that we shall be excessively demanding. And this from Europe – that is to say, from Austria-Hungary, who annexed Bosnia; from Italy, who seized Tripolitania; from Russia, who never takes her eyes off Constantinople… This is the Europe that comes to us preaching moderation and restraint. Truly, a sight for the gods on Olympus!... Your diplomats are sulking. They would not be averse to freezing the Balkans for another ten years, in expectation of better days sometime. How is it that they cannot understand that less and less is it possible in our epoch to direct the destinies of the Balkans from the outside? We are growing up, gaining confidence, and becoming independent… In the very first years of our present phase of existence as a state, we told our would-be guardians: ‘Bulgaria will follow her own line.’… And so Messrs. Privy Councillors of all the diplomatic chanceries would do well to get used to the idea that the Balkan Peninsula ‘will follow its own line’…”796
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One result of the Young Turk revolution, and the rearming of the Balkan Orthodox, was the stirring of unrest in Albania: what was going to happen to them in the rapidly changing political climate?
Now, as Jason Tomes writes, “it was easy for the rest of the world to overlook the Albanians, given that the Ottoman Empire categorised subjects by religion only. Muslim Albanian were labelled Turks and Orthodox Albanians assumed to be Greeks. At the Congress of Berlin (1878), Bismarck insisted: ‘There is no Albanian nationality.’ Partisans of Serbia and Bulgaria emphasised that Albanians volunteered to fight on the Turkish side in Balkan wars. What sort of oppressed nationality assisted its oppressors?
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