The world war period

World War I

No Balkan state wished to become embroiled in World War I, even though it was precipitated by the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne by a Bosnian Serb nationalist who worked in collusion with elements in the Serbian secret police. To Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum of July 1914, Serbia sent an abject reply, accepting most of the demands and offering to submit the most unreasonable ones to international arbitration. Once conflict had been forced upon the peninsula, Montenegro declared war with reluctance in early August, Bulgaria stood aside until committing itself to the Central Powers in September 1915, Romania was not persuaded to join the Allied powers until 1916, and Albania was powerless to avoid being partitioned by the warring parties. Moreover, the Balkans were not a major theatre of operations. The Central Powers finally subdued Serbia after their second onslaught, launched in 1915. In that same year the Allies sent their ill-fated expedition to Gallipoli in the Dardanelles, and in the autumn of 1916 they established themselves in Salonika (now Thessaloníki, Greece). However, their armies did not move from the latter location until toward the end of the war, when they marched up the Danube to become the main instrument of Allied authority in south-central Europe in the immediate postwar years.

Nevertheless, although they may have had no desire for the conflict, the Balkan states and peoples could not escape its consequences. All suffered serious economic dislocation, and the mass mobilization resulted in severe casualties, particularly for Serbia. In less-developed societies the impact of total mobilization was felt in other ways. The requisitioning of draft animals, for example, caused severe problems in villages that were already suffering from the enlistment of young men, and many recently created trade connections were ruined.

Greater Romania and Yugoslavia

In the 19th century, state formation in the Balkans occurred when the region’s Christian population induced foreign intervention to secure its separation from Ottoman power. This process had not been allowed to penetrate into the Habsburg and Russian empires, however, which retained their own territories and interests in the Balkans—Russian aspirations concentrating on Constantinople and the Dardanelles and Austria-Hungary’s thought to be in securing Salonika. World War I destroyed those two empires. The future of their Balkan possessions—Croatia-Slavonia, Dalmatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Vojvodina, Slovenia, Bukovina, the Banat of Temesvár, Transylvania, and Bessarabia—had to be decided by delegates at the Paris Peace Conference (1919–20), not in gradual and piecemeal fashion but altogether and immediately. Because the population of Transylvania, the Banat, Bessarabia, and Bukovina was predominantly Romanian, the bulk of those areas were included in the Romanian kingdom. Most of the remaining areas were predominantly Serbo-Croatian-speaking and became constituent parts of the new triune Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

Inevitably the settlements could not completely follow ethnic lines of division. The Banat and the Vojvodina were very mixed in ethnic composition; Transylvania had substantial Hungarian and German minorities; Bessarabia and Bukovina had many Jewish and Ukrainian inhabitants; the Slovenes did not speak Serbo-Croatian, and neither did the Macedonians nor the Albanians of Kosovo. The rationale for including so many minorities in the new states was that it was impossible to draw proper lines of division in such an ethnic kaleidoscope, that larger states would be more economically viable than smaller, more ethnically homogeneous ones, and, most important, that the large states would be more effective barriers against Russian and Hungarian bolshevism. It was also hoped that serious minority problems would be avoided by requiring all states in the area to sign minority-protection treaties that guaranteed the civil rights of all citizens, irrespective of ethnicity. These hopes, unfortunately, have never been fully realized.

Problems of integration

In the years immediately after World War I, the Balkans experienced instability and insecurity. Political extremists exploited the political unrest caused by mass demobilization and a return to civilian production. As the chief threat to the newly emerging order was believed to be that of Russian bolshevism, it was not surprising that communist parties had been outlawed in all Balkan states by the end of 1925.

There were also immense long-term difficulties in uniting the previously disjointed territories. Where railway networks existed, they served the needs of the old empires rather than the new states; those in the former Russian areas even had a different gauge. In addition, legal codes and taxation systems had to be unified, and common currencies had to be forged. The latter process was made difficult in the early postwar years by rampant inflation, which was caused not least by the new governments’ spending beyond their means to create or extend the state machinery.

The problems of integration were made much more complex by the fact that the territories involved were differentially developed. The Ottoman conquest had deeply divided the Balkans, those areas under the sultan’s authority being subject to different laws, to different social customs, and to a system that adapted painstakingly slowly to economic change. The states that emerged from Ottoman domination—Serbia, Albania, Bulgaria, and, to a lesser extent, Romania—were therefore less developed and poor. Into them were now merged former Russian or Austro-Hungarian territories, some (though not all) of which were more developed. Slovenia, Croatia, and Transylvania had more developed intelligentsias, more efficient and honest bureaucracies, an emerging economic infrastructure, and extensive and frequently profitable trade links with other parts of the empire. These relatively prosperous and advanced areas were now subjected to political cultures that they could regard only as more primitive and less honest. Furthermore, those political cultures were becoming more inclined to centralism rather than the devolution that the new provinces would have preferred. Herein lay the origin of many of the problems that beset interwar Yugoslavia and Romania.

One issue that was settled with relative ease was land reform. Land redistribution was very much the order of the day, not least because the new governments were convinced that the peasants would be forced into the arms of the communists if the great estates were not broken up. The Romanian government delivered on its promise of land reform as soon as the war was over; the new Yugoslav government passed similar legislation, as did that of Bulgaria, where nearly all land, except church and monastic properties, was already peasant-owned. In the former Habsburg and Russian territories, land reform had clear ethnic overtones. The dispossessed aristocracy belonged primarily to the formerly dominating elements: German, Hungarian, or Russian. The new owners were predominantly from the formerly subject groups: Croat, Romanian, Ukrainian, and Slovene—though poor Magyar or German peasants were also allowed a share of the redistributed property. The process of redistribution was not equally enforced; it frequently created resentment and perpetrated injustice, and it was perhaps of questionable economic value. Nevertheless, it was a social and political necessity in the climate of the early 1920s, and in many ways the ordered reallocation of property, with compensation to the previous owners, was a considerable achievement for the Balkan regimes.

With the exception of Albania, internal stability was achieved by the mid-1920s. However, stability came at the cost of stronger central authorities, a trend that was to intensify in the following decade. International relations also stabilized. From the early 1920s until the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the Balkan states enjoyed a large degree of freedom from foreign influence and interference, owing to the disappearance of the Habsburg and Russian empires and the neutralization of the Dardanelles. The fascist Italy of dictator Benito Mussolini did try to extend its influence in the eastern Adriatic, but it was not strong enough to attempt unilateral territorial expansion. The dangers from the other revisionist states, Hungary and Bulgaria, were controlled by the Little Entente, an alliance of Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia created in 1920–21 and backed by the French. Sources of interstate tension did remain, not least over the ultimate destiny of Macedonia, but there was a presumption that international disputes would be contained by the newly formed League of Nations. Although the League of Nations would later falter, it was able to contain the bitter dispute between Bulgaria and Greece in 1925–26.