Europe Since 1918

by Herbert Adams Gibbons

If the Paris Conference had in mind a durable peace, no problem ought to have received more careful and judicial attention than that of the Balkan settlement. Since the first revolts against Turkish rule in Serbia and the War of Greek Independence, a hundred years of unsettled political condition in southeastern Europe had passed. It had become a truism that the conflicts among the powers began in the Balkans. Serbia’s difficulties with Austria-Hungary had precipitated the World War. But the causes of the war went back deep into the roots of Balkan history, long before either Germany or Italy played leading rôles in the councils of the great powers. What the Balkan peoples had sorely needed, in their bloody struggle for freedom from the Ottoman yoke, was non-interference of the great powers in their internal affairs and their relations among themselves. But this they had never enjoyed.

Disinterested friendship was not shown to the Balkan peoples in their fight for emancipation. They were encouraged to seek backing from powerful European states, and then, when they had done this, they provoked the enmity of the powers who were rivals of their actual or supposed backers. In the game for political and economic influence in the Balkans, the great powers were accustomed to use the little Balkan peoples as pawns. Thus they were set against each other. When they became independent states their boundaries were not fixed by mutual compromises but by the great powers. Thus they were not allowed a normal political evolution. It was hoped that the World War had taught the powers a lesson, and that they would have become converted to the idea of a “live and let live” policy for the Balkans, attainable only by a “hands off” policy on the part of the great powers.

Experts in Balkan affairs knew that the three great problems of the Balkans—Thrace, Macedonia, and Albania—had not been solved by the Balkan wars and the Treaties of London and Bucharest. The Turks were still in Thrace. Macedonia had not been equitably divided. The frontiers of Albania had not been fixed. It was hoped that the bitter experiences of the World War would demand of the peacemakers a courageous and far-seeing solution of these problems.

But from the moment the armistice was signed the attitudes of the powers toward Turkey became divergent; the sufferings of the Armenians and Greeks were forgotten; and Italy was given a free hand in Albania in the hope that she would not demand too much in Asia Minor or anything at all in Africa at the expense of French and British ambitions. As for Bulgaria, it was decided to impose upon her a punitive peace, following the lines of the treaties imposed upon Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians.

Eastern Thrace, to the Maritza River line, was all that had been left of the Ottoman Empire in Europe after the two Balkan wars. Western Thrace, with a stretch of sea-coast from the mouth of the Maritza west for sixty miles, had remained Bulgarian by the Treaty of Bucharest. In answer to President Wilson at the beginning of 1917, the Entente Powers had declared their intention of driving the Turks definitely out of Europe. Seemingly living up to this promise, the Big Four decided to take Eastern Thrace away from Turkey. But at the same time they took Western Thrace from Bulgaria, thus cutting her off from exit to the sea. The Treaty of Neuilly provided that transit and port facilities be granted Bulgaria. But this provision has not been executed.

The reason for separating Western Thrace from Bulgaria was the same as for separating Eastern Thrace from Turkey, that the two nations had joined the Central Empires in a war of aggression and were unworthy to rule over these provinces. But, later, Eastern Thrace was given back to Turkey. When the Bulgarians begged for the return of Western Thrace, on the ground that it was their outlet to the sea, the plea was rejected. It is clear, then, that the reasons invoked, punishment for a war of aggression and unfitness to rule over minorities in the ceded territories, were simply subterfuges. The rearrangement, like the arrangement, was made in the interests of the Entente Powers, without consideration for the wishes of the inhabitants or the economic needs of Bulgaria.

All the world knows that Macedonia has been for more than forty years the great bone of contention among Bulgarians, Serbians, and Greeks, who have been pitted against one another in this region by the Turks and the great powers alike. The Balkan alliance came to grief over the question of the partition of Macedonia. The crying injustice of the Treaty of Bucharest was what gave Germany her most powerful argument to induce Bulgaria to join the Central Empires. The bribe offered Bulgaria by Germany was the same as the bribe offered Italy and Rumania by the Entente Powers, the emancipation of “unredeemed” provinces. Because there had not been a fair partition of Macedonia in the Treaty of Bucharest, Bulgaria joined the Central Empires, and was able to do tremendous mischief to the cause of the Entente Powers. Germany had her bridge through to the Ottoman Empire. She was enabled to go to the aid of the Turks, attacked at Gallipoli. The war was probably prolonged by two years because of the Macedonian question!

But the Treaty of Neuilly, far from providing a solution of the Macedonian question, only made it worse by depriving Bulgaria of still more territory inhabited by Bulgarians. The new line between Serbia and Bulgaria was drawn still more to the advantage of Serbia than in 1913; and Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, was brought nearer the frontier, and placed at the mercy of armies advancing along the railway lines from the northwest and the southwest. In vain did experts on the Balkans bring to the attention of the Peace Conference the fact that the frontiers of the Treaty of Neuilly would tend to increase and not diminish causes for a new war in the Balkans. Bulgaria, cut off from the Ægean Sea by the loss of Western Thrace, excluded still more rigorously from Macedonia, and put in an indefensible military position as regards her capital, would have economic, ethnographic, and strategic reasons to take the first opportunity to get rid of the inequalities imposed upon her and the discriminations against her normal national development.

The Treaty of Neuilly presupposed, as did the other treaties of the Paris settlement, the complete encirclement of the victim by neighbors bound together by the common interest of keeping her permanently in a position of inferiority. It did not take into account, moreover, two possibilities: the intervention of Russia and the drifting apart of Rumania, Serbia, and Greece. A patchwork peace, a peace based on expediency, could ignore these possibilities. A durable peace would have to take them into account. Already we have seen the Turks back in Eastern Thrace, with a common frontier once more with Bulgaria. We have seen Greece, strong in 1920, grievously weakened, internally and internationally, in 1923. Greater Serbia and Greater Rumania are not really friends. They still claim against each other the Banat of Temesvár. Greater Serbia is not at the end of her difficulties with Italy. Greater Rumania holds Bessarabia in defiance of Russia. If Italians and Serbians, or Russians and Rumanians, come to blows, the aid of Bulgaria would once more be solicited by great powers. If the war between Greece and Turkey is renewed, Turkey, perhaps with Russia behind her, will once more solicit the aid of Bulgaria in a war that would be bound to spread to western Europe. Instead of saying that the Bulgarians would be foolish to try for the third time to change their luck in a war, is it not wiser and saner, in view of the mischief Bulgaria could still accomplish, to insist upon a peace of justice, so that Bulgaria could not again be tempted?

We cannot get rid of the latent power of any of our former enemies simply by damning them, the Bulgarians least of all. Their progress during the last half-century has been remarkable. They were the last of the Balkan peoples to be allowed to establish a separate national life, free from Turkish interference. Despite this handicap, Bulgaria has developed more rapidly than her neighbors in literacy, communications, cultivation of the land, and peasant ownership of farms. Out of every hundred inhabitants thirteen children go regularly to school, while Greece counts but six, Rumania five, and Serbia four. Among European countries Bulgaria is second only to France in distribution of the ownership of land. The World War did not seriously affect the prosperity of the people, and the crushing defeat of their hope made slight, if any, difference in their productive energy. Since the war they have forged ahead fast; their Government has succeeded in maintaining its stability against great odds; and in the spring of 1923 Bulgaria, first of all the vanquished, was able to make definite and satisfactory reparations arrangements with the victors.