European Revolutions and the Ottoman Balkans

Nationalism, Violence and Empire in the Long Nineteenth-Century

Dimitris Stamatopoulos, Dimitris Stamatopoulos

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780755603282
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Osteuropäische Geschichte

The emergence of the Balkan national states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has long been viewed through an Orientalist lens, and their birth and evolution traditionally seen by scholars as the effect of the Ottoman Empire's decline. As a result, the role played by the great European revolutions, wars and intellectual developments is often neglected. Rejecting these traditional Orientalist narratives, this work examines Balkan nationalist movements within their broader European historical contexts. Drawing on a range of unused archival research and ranging from the Napoleonic era to the Bolshevik Revolution, contributors variously consider the complex roles played by Europe's internal geo-political ruptures in forming the Balkan states, and demonstrate how the Balkan intelligentsia drew inspiration from, and interacted with, contemporary European thought. Shedding light onto the strong intellectual, political and military interconnections between the regions, this is essential reading for all those studying Balkan and European history, as well as anyone interested in the question of national identity. Published in Association with the British Institute at Ankara

1

War and Revolution: A Balkan Perspective – An Introduction

Dimitris Stamatopoulos
University of Macedonia

The War as Revolution

The Balkans emerged as an historical entity in modern times through a dual process, first with the Ottoman Empire’s gradual loss of control over its European provinces – a loss associated with the rise of nationalist movements in the area, especially in the early nineteenth century. The ‘morphogenesis’ of this geographic space as a peculiar geopolitical entity will take place with the complete substitution of the imperial space by new national states in the region.¹ But the loss of this imperial control was not solely the result of successive nationalist revolts; it was also due to the Ottoman Empire’s continuous clashes with other continental empires, that is, the Austrian and Russian empires. In reality, the Balkans were not a mere western border for the Ottomans but a perennial field of military clashes, against both the Austrians and the Russians in the northern provinces above the Danube as well as the Venetians (and French) in the Mediterranean.²

This drawn-out process of military clashes from the end of the seventeenth to the beginning of the twentieth century includes three wars against the Habsburg Monarchy, seven wars against the Russian Empire, and, of course, the Napoleonic Wars and the Great War where the Ottoman Empire faced strategic dilemmas of far more complex alliances and confrontation than those it faced in a one-on-one competition with the other continental partners.³

The wars in which the Ottoman Empire engaged are usually examined from the perspective of the effectiveness of the Ottoman arms and the impact of the military conflicts on attempts to modernize the State and military mechanisms,⁴ while the beginning of nationalist uprisings is linked to the Napoleonic Wars and the dissemination of the ideas of the European Enlightenment. Nonetheless, such a correlation between revolutionary events and armed clashes could be made over a far longer period than the early nineteenth century, where the Serbian and Greek revolts are usually compared to the upheaval wrought by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and to the multi-faceted economic and social crises triggered by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, especially in the Greek islands after 1814.⁵

The relationship between the armed clashes and the restructuring of the Ottoman Empire can already be detected in the Austro-Turkish wars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, which, along with the war against Peter the Great’s Russia, are linked to the first reformist efforts during the rule of Ahmed III (B. Harun Küçük). But even after the French Revolution, the particular relationship developed between Revolutionary France and Selim III’s Ottoman Empire⁶ raised the issue of the military’s modernization (Antoaneta Atanasova). The long period of the Tanzimat and its final collapse leads to new forms of imperial nationalism that peak with the Young Turk Revolution. The Balkan Wars that follow and the great losses suffered by the Empire in its European territories will lead to new ideological processes that lay the groundwork for the establishment of the Kemalist regime (Banu Turnaoğlu).

But the armed clashes did not impact only the Ottomans – they also affected the revolutionary movements that emerged in Ottoman territory: the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774 is directly linked to the failed Orlov Revolt in the Peloponnese (Bill Molos); the 1806–1812 Russo-Turkish War shaped the uprising of the Serbian knezes; and the recognition of an independent Greek State (Dilek Özkan) and an autonomous Serbian State stem from the 1828–1829 Russo-Turkish War.

Yet, the Empire’s breakdown as a result of Russian pressure and the growth of nationalist movements did not only result in geopolitical changes and international political upheavals. It was directly linked to the social and economic repercussions of the wars on the affected populations (Evguenia Davidova) and the different cultural perceptions of those wars, especially when followed in its wake by national liberation characteristics as in the case of the Eastern Crisis and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 on the Bulgarian Question (Dobrinka Parusheva) or the Croatian national movement (Klara Volarić).

The Revolution as War

However, the paradox of the uprisings within the Ottoman Empire was that they were completed with a ‘regime’ revolution, that of the Young Turks; the collapse of various versions of Ottoman imperial nationalism in the nineteenth century will lead one segment of the Empire’s military elite to end reformist experiments while meantime implementing what appeared to be the demand of the times – the fall of Sultan Abdul Hamid and the reinstatement of the 1876 Constitution. The Empire’s transformation by the Young Turk Revolution, but mainly its entry into the First World War, paralleled the transformation of its biggest rival. The Russian Empire, which was responsible for the large wave of (usually victorious) armed clashes with the Ottoman State will be wracked by two great revolts. The first, in 1905, should be viewed and linked to events in Istanbul in the summer of 1908 although, in Russia’s case, its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and social inequality issues were primary factors. Nonetheless, the common denominator in both revolts was the transformation of Russian absolutism and Ottoman despotism to constitutionally controlled monarchies.

Both Russia and the Ottoman Empire were on the losing side of the First World War: Russia was defeated by the war’s losers, the Ottoman Empire by its victors. In the aftermath of the Great War, both were forced to wage long and tough battles against foreign invaders. From 1917 to 1921, the Bolsheviks managed to stabilize their control over Soviet territory, thus legitimizing their struggle (and the October Revolution) through clashes with the Whites and their foreign allies. From 1919 to 1922, Kemal will do the same: he will start a liberation war against many foreign occupation forces by deploying alternately military and diplomatic means. The convergence of these two forces came sooner rather than later, not only in the military sphere – and this is what’s interesting – but also, to a degree, in the ideological realm (Nikos Christofis). But in contrast to Russia, where the October Revolution and the ensuing civil war led to Russia’s transformation to the Soviet Empire, what Kemal’s movement managed under the circumstances was to transform the Ottoman Empire to a national state. In a way, the First World War completed the process of the Ottoman elite’s adaptation of the Western ideology that led to the Empire’s dissolution: nationalism. Meantime, the national groups in the Balkans that had already adopted it had now moved into its irredentist phase. But the big issue for both the Ottoman Empire and the national states was their relationship with the West. If adopting nationalism was a first step towards the Balkans’ Westernization, this did not mean that negotiating the position of either the Empire or each national state in relation to the West was not continual, frequently dissolving old hierarchies. Serbia offers a typical example. When the war began, it was a Russian protégé and seen as an extension of the old pan-Slavism. But its alignment with the Entente reinforced its Western orientation and made possible the establishment of the first Yugoslav State in the twentieth century under its control (Aleksandra Kolaković).

The interactive relationship between the wars waged by the Ottoman Empire against the continental (such as Russia and Austria) and the colonial empires (such as France) and the growth of national movements is not only evident, but also occurs on multiple levels. It is, of course, linked to the regime changes and the appearance of new state entities – that is, with the unravelling of the social and economic fabric of entire regions and subsequent reconstruction. Along with weapons, ideas were also spread by other social groups specializing in military and ideological wars – from the hajduk and klephts to the merchants and travellers. But the armed clashes, especially those extending over a long period, were indicators of gaps in the strategies of the Great Powers and often, as least in the case of the western Great Powers and especially France, linked to the great revolutionary events that marked the history of Western Europe. Earlier, we mentioned the relationship between the Serbian and Greek revolutions with the French Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic Wars. But the 1848 Revolution is also directly linked to the changes in strategic competition in the Balkans which will be expressed with the outbreak of the Crimean War. The parallel dominance of the ideas of Romantic Nationalism will have an important impact on the development of the nationalist movements such as those in Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia.

The Revolution as Civil War

The February Revolution is warmly accepted by the Romantic Nationalists in the Balkans. Their enthusiasm is spurred less by the dethroning of Louis Philippe in Paris and more by the prospect of German, but especially Italian, unification that would strike deeply against the Austrian Empire. Indeed, the prospect of the House of Hapsburg granting a constitution was, in turn, linked to state experimentation in Greece, Serbia, as well as the Ottoman Empire with the start of the Tanzimat reforms roughly a decade earlier. During this period, Greek commentators especially find an opportunity to emphasize that the revolt against the Hapsburg royal house is a type of historical revenge for the death of Rhigas Feraios and Alexander Ypsilantis.⁷ To be precise, the 1848 Revolution is translated in terms of the ‘Eastern Question’. Most analysts from this period will refer to the onset of ‘balance’, a prevalent principle in the West since the beginning of the nineteenth century. The policy of the Great Powers, mainly Austria, ‘as shameless defenders of Turkism’, is seen as a ‘slap’ based on the new situation triggered by 1848. The Western policy that preserved the Ottoman Empire’s position cancelled the hopes of not only the Greeks but of all Balkan nations. Support for the peoples of the Austrian Empire, Germany and Italy was a subsequent vindication of the emergence of national movements in the provinces.

Of course, the Balkans’ Russophile nationalists, especially the Greeks and Bulgarians, found it quite difficult to deal with Russia’s active participation in putting down the revolts in Austria-Hungary and Moldavia-Wallachia; naturally, there was no such dilemma for the Romanian revolutionaries.

For example, an extensive review of Greek foreign policy in the pro-Russian newspaper Aeon by one commentator focuses on the ‘bias’ spread by the English and French party as well as in the Western countries at the time about Russia that shaped Greece’s anti-Russian stance even though Greeks were ‘Russia-leaning’. He describes this animosity towards Russia as ‘unfair’:

We accuse the nation of being pro-Russian as if accusing the light of being white or water of being liquid. We accuse the Russians of being Scythians and barbarians, of being heinous despots, of being treacherous foxes of the freedom of nations. [We accuse] pan-Slavism of tending to absorb the Turkish Empire and Greece, and the Russians of being new Goths and Vandals who intended to destroy and barbarize Europe.⁸

The author cites every characterization of Russia made at the time in order to highlight the exaggerated and excessive effort made by the government domestically and the Western powers abroad to foment an anti-Russian sentiment that he doesn’t appear to share.

But while it was easy for a Russophile to defend Russia in 1848 or even more in 1849, it was hard to do the same after the end of the Crimean War. Supporters of the February Revolution would face even greater difficulties after its radicalization in June. The expectation that constitutionalism would prevail fostered by the February Revolution was overshadowed by the fear and reservations generated by its radical evolution in June 1848:

This Revolution, which in a different era could have assumed a character that was revolutionary and effective against the Monarchy, could not prevail against the principle of national sovereignty. This, which it seems, had as leaders the fans of communalism and the various supporters of those who continued to have claims against the former French crown were moving in the darkness, without meaning or purpose.⁹

The de-legitimization of the Revolution and the ‘horrible dogma of communalism and cooperativism’ that loomed as Democracy’s great enemy and threat to the class of ‘owners and merchants’,¹⁰ paved the way not just for viewpoints that identified the radicals with the pro-monarchists’ intentions of returning to power, but also the legitimization of the New Bonaparte, which would mean a new French foreign policy in the Balkans even though Cavaignac had seemed the most likely solution right up to the elections.¹¹

In 1848, one of the most interesting issues raised by the concerns of the Balkan revolutionaries was the stance of the military, both in France and Austria as well as in Bavaria and the other German states, at least in the early phases of the Revolution when, instead of moving against the rebelling peoples, it aligned itself with them. Primarily, 1848 returned the Revolution’s shadow to the Balkans with uprisings in Moldavia-Wallachia that appeared to extend the uprisings of the Greeks and Serbs: ‘The glorious nations of the Danubian Principalities, Christian nations, or in any case Greek’, as one Athenian newspaper commentator typically described them.¹² The Romanians also perceived the uprisings in a similar vein, that is, as the ‘national struggle of the Romanians who, for three centuries, with the sword defended Christianity against all the forces of Islam’.¹³ The Russian army’s participation in putting down the uprising was seen as a paradox: the Treaty of Adrianople prov...