The peoples of Europe

by H. J. Fleure

In Hungary they have formed a landed aristocracy with its rural dependants, while leaving the peopling of the towns largely to Jews and Germans and persons of mixed blood. In the Balkan Mountains under less spacious conditions and with Turk interference they have merged into a South Slav people, but have modified that people and its language in the course of the process. In South and East Russia there are many groups still distinct, and the Crimea has long been theirs in principle. The relation of these Asiatic warriors with Muscovy makes up the political history of the Middle Ages in the future Russian plain, and when that plain did become Russian, its religious autocracy found greater possibilities of co-operation with the Asiatic element than with the Western Powers then developing so fast towards industrialism. So it came about that Peter the Great's historic experiment in westernization, difficult for reasons of climate, position, and opportunities, failed, and the Tsardom was drawn towards the Orient on the whole against its will.

The westward path of the Asiatic herdsmen beyond South Russia led them into Moldavia and Wallachia, where the native Vlach population sought refuge in the Carpathians and in the hills of the centre of the Balkan Peninsula. It is a population with a language of Latin syntactical affinities, and a 60 per cent. Slav vocabulary, and is spoken by people who looked back with pride to the days of Roman occupation of their land as Dacia. So the Vlach people, essentially Central European round-heads like the Slavs generally, have come to be distinct from their neighbours in speech and in pride. In the matter of religion the openness of the Danube entry and the coastal ways up the west side of the Black Sea have made the people members of the Eastern Church so far as Moldavia and Wallachia are concerned, but the Vlachs of the Transylvanian hills are, or were, to a large extent members of the Uniate Church ([p. 70]), intermediate, as has been said, between the Roman and the Eastern. After centuries of subjection and fractionization the Vlach peoples have (1919) suddenly found themselves united in the new Rumania, with the political and agrarian influence wrested from their former Magyar, Szekler, and German lords, and the peasantry of Wallachia and Moldavia have also secured a good deal of the land previously in aristocratic, though in this case often not alien hands. The old direction of the country was in the hands of the aristocracy, and was often much criticized in the west. The Jewish and German town populations were said to be specially held down. Whether the new government will merely continue the old with a peasant admixture or whether it will seek to take a new line, remains to be seen. It is at any rate interesting that this large language group is, for the first time, a governmental unit, and tragic that so inexperienced a group has within it such large and, for that matter, valuable elements of alien language. It is said that the Oriental aspect of society is well marked in the lesser towns, the greater having been westernized, but it is questionable whether we should not be more correct in describing these lesser towns as more resembling our own in early mediaeval times before the garden-closes were built upon to accommodate people crowding within their walls for protection.

The Vlachs beyond the new Rumania, in the centre of the Balkan Peninsula, illustrate for us a noteworthy problem of that troubled region. Whereas if we wish to get a picture of the early stages of the settled life of cultivation in Europe we naturally look to Russia, we may go to the Balkans for glimpses of the remnants of the still earlier scheme of society when kinship groups moved from place to place with flocks and herds. In the Peninsula the western mountains shelter many a clan of ancient local lineage, and much as these mountain clans have been affected by Slav, Bulgar, Greek, Roman, Turkish, Magyar, and German-Austrian pressure, a considerable group have remained true to their pre-Slavonic language (Albanian), and, despite deep religious differences amongst themselves, seem to tend towards some vague national unity, largely as a protection against Greek and Slav in the next generation. It is well to realize that these old populations, even when Slavonized, are often most distinct from the Slavs, and that they and the Vlachs are the nearest approaches we have to an autochthonous population in the Peninsula. They for the most part limit their movements to seasonal shifts up and down hill, and, like the Highlanders of Scotland and others similarly situated, have done their share of raiding on valley cultivators, for if 'the mountain sheep are sweeter, the valley sheep are fatter', as Peacock put it. Among the Albanian peoples the Greek Church has done a good deal of propaganda at various times, and as they are near the Adriatic and the Roman Via Egnatia, the Roman Church has also used opportunities of reinforcing them against Greek pressure. Moreover, all along this mountain country Manichaean ideas replaced old heathendom and primitive Christianity alike, and with the Manichaean objection to symbolism and all approach to idolatry there was a natural tendency to accept Islam without too much difficulty, when it was brought by conquerors. So along the western mountains of the Balkan Peninsula are many old groups confirmed in their ancient possessions by the Turk, and practising Islam in succession to Manichaean doctrines rather than to Christianity. As the people on the fringes of the truly Albanian clans speak two languages, in many cases there is as much doubt about the proper political boundary of an Albanian state as there would be about that of a Welsh state were it proposed to make one separate from and hostile to England! Much harm has recently been done by conscientious demarcators taking the frontier line along 'empty' ridges which were really summer pastures or ways thereto for many a shepherd clan now cut off from its livelihood and ruined or forced to maraud. Among the Albanian clansmen the leaders are often rather fine types with the strength arising from a long maintenance of tradition, the change to Islam not having been as fundamental as might be supposed. It is the more regrettable that the antipathies between them and their Slavonized brethren should have become so acute.

In the west of the peninsula, north of the region of Albanian speech, many of the people are Slavonized autochthones, rather than real Slav intruders, and this is true of the mountains of Montenegro and of Bosnia, in the latter of which large numbers of the landed folk are Muslim. The Slav peoples have, however, penetrated everywhere from the valleys of the Save and Morava, though one can still often recognize the old hill-type at sight. Both are broad-headed, and are branches of the same basal stock, but the old hill-type is often bigger and more lithe, and there seem to be accompanying mental differences. At any rate these distinctions were found practically useful in contacts with refugees from Serbia in the recent war. The distinction between the Illyrio-Slav and the Bulgar-Slav on the west and east of the Balkan Peninsula is one with indefinite gradations and with collateral complications due to Vlach elements on the hills and long-established Greek elements along the coastal plain. The appeal to race and language as a basis for political division is almost futile; the appeal to history is misleading, for as in the early west of Europe, so also here we find sudden growths and more sudden collapses of empires based upon the ability and ambitions of a leader; the appeal to religion has been encouraged by the fact that Eastern Christianity tends to encourage national churches and has education in its hands. We thus find that the Bulgars by educational propaganda made their variant of Balkan speech the definitive one in most of Macedonia, and that the conflict between them and the Serbs has become fatally acute, the more so as both have been used as cat's-paws by the Great Powers of Europe ever since the Turkish hold weakened. The erection of organized political frontiers within the Peninsula limited the power of movement of the wandering shepherds, and seems to have affected especially the Vlach elements of the centre, which are said to be losing their separate character and to be settling down. It also sharpened the internecine conflict, especially since Russia, France, and Britain saw their opportunity of using Serbia, from 1906 onwards, to resist the Central Powers, while Bulgaria became of less interest to the Tsardom as she grew strong enough to do without Russian tutelage.

Broadly then, while Russia gave us an example of the poor success of an attempt to fasten a State organization on a population deeply immersed in localism and traditionalism but settled and cultivating the land, the Balkan Peninsula illustrates tragically the weaknesses of competing attempts to fasten State organizations on a population, parts of which have as yet barely reached the stage of settlement. The difficulties within the Peninsula are undoubtedly enhanced by the sharp contrasts between the highland interior and the coastal fringe on which for milleniums already the influences of Crete and Babylon, Phoenicia, Greece and Rome have been playing.

It is a Mediterranean fringe with its hoe cultivation and olive-trees already long established as the successors of an ancient barley culture, and it has trade as such a long-standing secondary feature of its life that observers not infrequently mistake it for the primary one. Roman ideas have spread along the Istrian and Dalmatian shores, and, in spite of Slavonizing influences, have remained strong at Zara, Fiume, and Trieste, while, though Croatia and Slavonia have remained Slavonic, their religion has become Roman Catholic and their alphabet western. It thus comes about that a not very deep difference of language between the Slav regions of Serbia, on the one hand, and of Slavonia and Croatia on the other is emphasized because the one uses the Cyrillic alphabet, the others the western, and each has its systems of schools on a religious basis, a serious problem for the new State of Yugoslavia. It is probable that the recent settlement of the Adriatic quarrel between Italy and Yugoslavia represents a fair compromise so far as the two are concerned.

South of Albania and around the Aegean the coastal fringe is dominated by the Greek element, and the new Greece claims to include all these coastal lands and to have the reversion of Constantinople, the great inter-continental city which at the same time commands the way from the steppe-lands to the Great Sea. Constantinople is the more maritime successor of the less maritime Troy of antiquity, and this, in conjunction with its history as the basis of the Eastern Empire, the head-quarters of the Eastern Church, and the seat of the Caliphate of Islam, all seems to argue against its absorption in a nation-state organization and its government by trustees acting not less for Islam than for Europe. The problem of Constantinople is also that of the coastal fringe, wherever the interior is non-Greek. On the language basis the Greek claim is strong; on the economic basis, again, the traders have rights of protection, but the cutting off of the coast from the interior must be prejudicial to the latter. Unfortunately, a trusteeship for government is almost put out of the question by the fact that practically every European Great Power has intrigued for a paramount influence, and all are justly suspect. Thus both the national and the international solution of the problem of a political and social organization of Balkan life seem fraught with difficulty, and one can but urge the old, old argument against preaching 'Peace, peace', where there is no peace. The present hope would seem to be in the smaller nations of Europe and perhaps in the American powers, for Latin America seems likely to wish to play such a part in the reorganization of the world as its growing economic importance justifies.

The real difficulties of the Balkan peoples are enhanced in every way by their disastrous political history, for none have, for centuries past, had reasonable opportunities of self-expression. They therefore lack the experience and the discipline of government, and they have little effective written tradition, with the result that what is written now is often very different from the spoken language of the peasantry, and is correspondingly artificial and lacking in healthy standardization. One may contrast the good fortune of the Norwegians in having relatively peaceful opportunities of revival of folk life and in having the wise and luminous Bjornsen to develop literary expression in continuity with folk tradition.

Of the Turk in Europe one cannot at present say much that is definite. He is largely Europeanized in physique, and it is doubtful whether much that is truly Turk remains in Europe outside eastern Thrace. The Muslim elements in Albania and Bosnia have other origins for the most part, as has been discussed. Constantinople and Adrianople are markedly Turk.

While, then, the various new states of the Peninsula are largely on a language basis, it should be noticed that Vlach-speaking peoples are scattered in groups in what is now Yugoslavia, and their numbers are variously estimated up to 250,000 or more. A considerable portion of Yugoslav Macedonia would probably consider itself Bulgar, and there are Greek elements in the Macedonian towns. Apart from Greek elements in the towns there is little that is alien in the reduced Bulgaria. Rumania has groups of many languages and traditions in all her newly acquired territories, and will need to exercise every care to prevent serious trouble in the near future. Yugoslavia includes a good deal of German, a little Italian, some Magyar, and some Rumanian, as well as Greek and more or less Bulgar elements, and a neutral commission should go carefully into the question of the Albanian boundaries. Italy's gains in Istria include a large Yugoslav element. Greek acquisitions have such a mixed population that little can be stated in detail. Finally, the Jewish element is of widespread importance in the towns; the Ashkenazim (Central European) element being very strong in Wallachia, and especially in Moldavia, and the Sephardim element (once Spanish) having its head-quarters at Salonica. Before leaving the Balkan peoples it should be pointed out that, apart from their ancient hatreds, there is really every reason for mutual help between them. Rumania with its wheat and maize, Serbia with its forest-fed pigs and its plums and other fruits, Bulgaria with its mixed farming, and the Greek zones with their oil and wine, could supplement each other if suspicions were diminished and mutual credit arranged. The Greek element, with its long experience of commerce, would be a natural intermediary, as Venizelos saw when he planned a Balkan Federation; the obvious danger would be that of exploitation of producers by middlemen, especially if the latter were in a strong position politically.