Europe Since 1918

by Herbert Adams Gibbons

This is only partly due, however, to the innate sobriety and habits of work of the Bulgarian people. They have enjoyed the advantage of not having a large industrial population, herded together in cities, and dependent for prosperity upon ability to compete on equal terms in world markets. And no sooner was the ink dry on the Treaty of Neuilly than the Entente Powers began once more secretly at Sofia to win a favorite position, as they had done in the past. All wanted to do business with the Bulgarians. Great Britain and France were anxious to keep Sofia from a rapprochement with Moscow. This meant everything to Rumania, also. France thought Bulgaria might some day be useful against Greece, and Italy needed a revived Bulgaria with which to threaten Greece and Serbia.

If only Greece and Serbia can be properly “managed” by their supporters of 1919, it is within the possibility of Entente diplomacy to expect to see the Treaty of Neuilly modified, in its political as well as its economic clauses, within the near future. Greece has already had that experience in regard to Turkey. If the Entente Powers feel that it is to their interest to do so, they will not hesitate to offer Bulgaria, at the expense of Greece and Serbia, what they took away from her in 1919, to the profit of Greece and Serbia. There is already talk of Rumania modifying her southern frontier in the Dobrudja in favor of Bulgaria. An offer of this sort Rumania will certainly make if she is threatened with invasion by Russia.

The dominant rôle in post-bellum Bulgaria has been played by Premier Stambulisky, who owed his position to the confidence he won several years ago and has maintained up to the Revolution in the Agrarian party. His remarkable hold upon the Bulgarian peasantry was due to his cleverness in saving this largest element in the country from feeling the financial consequences of losing the war. He has deliberately catered to the peasants, frankly basing his power upon their support and as frankly shaping his attitude toward problems as they arose by the desire to keep the favor of the peasants. In defiance of the Nationalists, Stambulisky came to an agreement with the Reparations Commission to give them powers over Bulgarian revenues in return for low taxation of the peasants. This hastened his downfall.

A grave source of internal danger is the Macedonian League, which is extremely active, and which cannot be controlled because the army is far too small to patrol effectively the Serbian frontier. At least three hundred thousand Macedonian refugees, among them people of wealth and influence, are living in Bulgaria, and they form a third of the population of the capital. From highest to lowest they work to foment the Macedonian revolutionary movement, and this makes serious trouble with the Serbian Government in its new territories, which can be held only by martial law. Bands are formed in Bulgarian territory, make raids, and then return to Bulgaria for refuge. This condition the Bulgarian Government is powerless to remedy. The Treaty of Neuilly, by proscribing conscription, makes it impossible for Bulgaria to raise troops. King Boris told me in the summer of 1922 that of the thirty-three thousand allowed by the treaty he had been able to get only fifty-five hundred. I found on personal investigation that most of the volunteers for the army came from the dregs of the population, men who could make a living in no other way.

On April 22, 1923, Premier Stambulisky won a sweeping victory in the General Election. Out of 246 seats in the Sobranje (Parliament) the Peasant Party won 213. In the previous Parliament he had had only 110 followers. The 50 Communists of the 1920 Parliament dropped to 15. The Bourgeois, united, carried only 12 seats, electing three former premiers, Malinoff, Theodoroff, and Daneff, and two former ministers, Madjarlow and Dankaloff, who were in prison charged with high treason for having misled Bulgaria during the World War.

M. Stambulisky stood for the loyal execution of the peace treaty, on the ground that Bulgaria’s real interests lie in economic and international political rehabilitation, and not in more military adventures. He did not conceal the hope that the establishment of friendly relations with the Entente Powers and Serbia would lead to a radical revision of the Treaty of Neuilly, especially in regard to Western Thrace.

Bulgaria demonstrates the fact that a nation in defeat is not necessarily “down and out.” The country is not going to smash, no matter what burdens are laid upon the people and no matter how harsh may be the fetters forged to keep Bulgaria behind her neighbors. Four years after the war, Bulgaria had completed the deliveries of animals exacted by the Treaty of Neuilly, and yet the country was entirely under cultivation, with a surplus of cereal of more than a million tons for export; and the export had begun again of hides, beef on the hoof, and sheep. Above the reparations coal sent annually to Serbia, Bulgaria was mining enough for her needs and exporting a surplus. With the country in this condition, Bolshevism could be discounted.

This hope was disappointed. At the end of May it was announced at Lausanne that Venizelos had come to an agreement with Ismet Pasha which involved the cession to Turkey of a strip on the left bank of the Maritza around Karagatch, so that Turkey would have control of the railway station of Adrianople and be better able to protect that city. From the Greek point of view this was a diplomatic triumph. It was the slight price paid for Turkey’s renunciation of a war indemnity. But it made more hopeless than ever the fulfilment of the promise to Bulgaria in the Treaty of Neuilly, that she should be guaranteed a free exit to the Ægean Sea. It pointed also to the great moral of the World War, that if one possessed the force one could do in this world what one pleased. The Turks resisted the Treaty of Sèvres. Immediately the Entente Powers released them from all the inconveniences and disadvantages of having been on the losing side in the war. Why, then, should Bulgaria tamely submit to do the bidding of the Entente Powers, especially when being good meant being still further penalized?

Added to the unpopularity of Stambulisky’s foreign policy of abject surrender—so different from the example given by Mustafa Kemal Pasha in similar circumstances—was his domestic policy of running Bulgaria solely in the economic interest of the agrarian population. A few days after the news of Turkey’s crowning Thracian success at Lausanne reached Bulgaria, the bourgeois of Sofia, supported by former army officers and the Macedonian party, overthrew the Stambulisky Government. Stambulisky was pursued and killed. Professor Zankoff, of the University of Sofia, formed a revolutionary government, and Bulgaria entered upon a new Nationalist era which is bound to result eventually in a radical modification of the Treaty of Neuilly.

As part of the price of Italian intervention, the Entente Powers agreed to give Italy the foothold in the Balkans she had so long coveted, offering her full sovereignty over Valona, the island of Sasseno, “and surrounding territory of sufficient extent to assure defense of these points.” Italy, on her side, consented to the eventual division of northern and southern Albania between Montenegro, Serbia, and Greece. But the Albanians proved themselves able to vindicate by arms their right to survive as an independent country. The treatment of Albania is an example of the cynicism of the protestation of “the rights of small nations” as a war aim of the Entente Powers, and an illustration of the necessity for every people to rely ultimately upon its own strength to vindicate its rights.