The Balkans: A Short History (20 page)

Nor did the ethnic civil war come to an end as soon as the Germans pulled out. Fighting in Kosovo between Albanians and the Yugoslav partisans lasted for months, even years in some areas. Ethnic Germans were expelled from Voivodina and Romania, and their lands resettled. Albanians were driven out of northwestern Greece in 1944–1945, and the Greek civil war, which lasted from 1946 to 1949, became in part a war between the Athens government and the members of the Slavic-speaking minority in the north, who hoped to win some form of autonomy and perhaps connection with the Communist states emerging over the border.
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By 1950, the ethnic composition of the Balkans had been drastically altered. Its Jewish population dropped from roughly 856,000 in 1930 to under 50,000. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans were expelled from Yugoslavia and deported from Romania. Slavs and Albanians fled northern Greece and the Serbs fled Kosovo. As a result of total war, genocide and large movements of refugees throughout the first half of the twentieth century, ethnic homogeneity had increased in all the Balkan states. Nevertheless, substantial minorities remained—among them, Muslims in Bulgaria, Greece and Bosnia and Hungarians in Romania.

In Yugoslavia, Tito attempted to solve the country’s deeply rooted national problems by substituting multinational rule by a single dictatorial party for the interwar system of rule by Serbs and the Karajordje dynasty. At one stage, he even sought to use the idea of Communist federation as a means of dominating Bulgaria, Albania and Greece. While this dream ended with the Yugoslav break with Moscow in the summer of 1948, federalism remained the Communist strategy for handling nationalities within Yugoslavia. “Brotherhood and unity” may not have been a reality but it was something more than a slogan. Even after the Tito–Stalin split, Moscow’s hegemony in Eastern Europe helped to ensure that minority issues and irredentism, while never entirely absent, would not disrupt relations between states in the way they had before 1940. But the tensions had not vanished, and would reemerge when communism collapsed.
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In the first half of the twentieth century, land was worked by the majority of the inhabitants of the Balkans, coveted by diplomats and fought over by armies. Balkan states shared the hunger for land found throughout Europe, believing in the need to expand—whether to redeem unredeemed brethren, to regain provinces they claimed by historical right or simply to demonstrate the nation’s vitality in a Darwinian world. In the decade after 1914, Greece’s territory and population both increased by nearly a quarter; Romania grew from 53.5 to 122.3 thousand square miles and from 7.5 to 17.6 million people. Bulgaria, which had lost territory, dreamed of rebuilding the San Stefano giant state it had been briefly promised in 1878. Albania, whose borders were formally agreed upon only in the early 1920s, looked to its irredenta in Greece and Yugoslavia.

Yet the urgent issue facing all these states after a decade of war was how to make this land feed the people who lived on it. Before 1912, transatlantic emigration on an enormous scale had demonstrated the difficulty of this task: several millions of impoverished peasants fled southeastern Europe—from Slovenia to the Peloponnese—for the United States in despair at the impoverished living offered by farming. With the closing of the prewar emigration routes after 1921, the new states of southeastern Europe had to show they could function as viable economies.

War made everyone aware of the need to be able to guarantee self-sufficiency, but it also vastly complicated this task. Beyond the huge problems of immediate postwar relief—so large that agencies such as the Near East Foundation, the League of Nations and the Rockefeller Foundation had to be called in to help—lay deeper structural dilemmas. The cost of prosecuting war had led by 1918 to the total economic and financial disruption of prewar monetary systems. Hence a priority for postwar states—before they could hope to raise loans on money markets abroad—was currency stabilization and banking reform. But this implied tightening taxes and reducing spending.

In one respect, peasants benefited enormously at the war’s end: fear of Bolshevism spreading from Russia to eastern Europe made governments enact sweeping land reforms. By creating a class of peasant smallholders, politicians hoped to buy social tranquillity and prevent revolution. Hence peasant smallholdings increased their already dominant presence in the Balkans at the expense of large landholders. But the political benefits of this move were offset by the economic costs: parceling out the land forced farmers into cash crop production, increased their dependency on market forces and pushed them into debt. By the early 1930s, peasant indebtedness was a millstone around the neck of agrarian reformers, and the modernization of the countryside looked as far off as ever. As crop prices plummeted on world markets, peasants’ incomes fell, yet they continued to bear the bulk of the national tax burden, which in all Balkan countries was sharply weighted toward indirect taxes on consumption goods. “A state cannot be democratic,” warned the preamble to the 1923 Romanian tax law, “if at the moment when the large rural property disappears, it allows a few people to accumulate fortunes from trade and industry while leaving the mass of the people in the state of serfs of yesterday.”
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Why did peasants not take advantage of the democratic rights they enjoyed to vote pro-peasant parties into office? The fact that Balkan parliamentary systems were, behind the liberal façade, corrupt and autocratic systems that retained power in the hands of courts, cliques of military officers and urban elites was only part of the answer. The weakness of peasant politics was one of the striking features of interwar Europe. Who today remembers the Green International, which was formed to unite the peasant parties of Europe against both Red Communists and White reactionaries? In theory, a largely peasant society should have seen parliamentary governments responsive to agrarian needs, but in reality peasants—still mostly illiterate, slow to move, reluctant to travel—were hard to mobilize politically. Peasant parties did emerge in Bulgaria and Romania, but they were neutralized—by force in the case of the Bulgarian Agrarian Union, which won a sweeping electoral victory before being ousted in a coup. The Romanian National Peasant Party held power for two years until its leader, Iuliu Maniu, resigned in a dispute with the King. The popular Croatian Peasant Party was marginalized for most of the interwar era by a Serb-dominated political elite. In Greece, agrarian parties remained largely irrelevant to a system polarized between royalists and republicans.
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More fundamentally, these parties had no real answer to the economic problems their countries faced. Lightening peasant tax loads and encouraging the spread of credit cooperatives would not solve the structural crisis of overpopulation and underindustrialization that confronted Balkan states. Smallholders could not compete on world markets; but they could not retreat back into the nineteenth century and self-sufficiency either, since they had debts to pay and rapidly growing families to feed. Despite the idealization of the peasant life promoted by urban intellectuals and new official tourist offices, it was evident that the solution to growth and prosperity did not lie in the villages. Peasants streamed into the cities in the 1920s and 1930s, but there were not enough jobs there either.

In the brief moment of optimism in the 1920s, between the end of postwar reconstruction and the Wall Street crash, most states in the Balkans opted to rebuild by rejoining the liberal international economy. They established independent central banks, joined the gold standard and tried to attract foreign investors by keeping budgets tight and repaying their debts. French, British and American funds poured into the region. However, international capitalism was a hard task-master. After 1930, Balkan exports dried up and a debt crisis loomed. Neither the British nor the French governments would allow Balkan states to earn foreign exchange by taking specified quantities of their goods. The result, by 1932, was widespread debt default, suspension of exchange rates and the collapse of the open international economic order that had been so deliberately rebuilt after 1918.

Thus in the 1930s, Balkan economies were thrown back upon their own resources. Raising tariff barriers and rationing foreign exchange, the state was forced to adopt a more directive and interventionist stance: for the first time, governments attempted to plan the allocation of resources, to protect their farmers by buying up the harvest and writing off their debt. Industrial growth in the 1930s was buoyant for a few years, while barter trade with the Third Reich substituted for the collapse of former markets. On the other hand, attempts to coordinate trade policy regionally through regular Balkan conferences met with very limited success and the efforts of some politicians to move toward a Balkan Federation made little headway.
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The economic crisis also eroded the frail foundations of parliamentary government. Even before 1930, interwar democratic institutions had failed to win legitimacy. Greece was plagued by incessant military coups and conspiracies. The dispute over the 1921 constitution in Yugoslavia exposed the gulf dividing the main Serbian and Croatian parties, a gulf that yawned inescapably following the assassination of the Croatian Peasant Party leader Stjepan Radic
on the floor of the parliament. In Bulgaria, the Agrarian Prime Minister Aleksandŭr Stamboliskii was brutally assassinated after a coup. In Albania, Ahmed Bey Zogu established permanent rule by invading the country with a mercenary force in 1924 and having himself declared first president and then king. Communist parties, which briefly threatened in the early 1920s to gain widespread support, were banned in most countries. The main threat to liberal democracy between the wars came rather from the right.

After 1929, right-wing dictatorship replaced democracy everywhere in the Balkans. But the form of dictatorship was not fascism—rule by a mass party, coming to power through the democratic process—but authoritarian government by kings and their handpicked ministers. Nothing so revealed the weakness of mass politics in southeastern Europe as the fact that both left-wing and even popular fascist movements, like the Romanian Iron Guard, were so easily crushed and suppressed by the state. King Alexander dissolved parliament in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1929, and henceforth ruled the country, now hopefully renamed Yugoslavia, through a personal dictatorship. In Bulgaria, King Boris followed suit in 1935, turning the assembly into a consultative body, and holding elections under close police supervision. King George of Greece dispensed with parliament in 1936; the much disliked Carol II of Romania had the popular fascist leader Corneliu Codreanu arrested and shot, created his own new Party of the Nation which struck observers as “a complete flop,” and presided over a Government of National Union.
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Thus, despite the region’s early experience of democratic politics, mass parties of the left and right failed to survive. By the end of the 1930s, the parliamentary system and political parties had disappointed the hopes invested in them by liberal intellectuals. Few mourned their passing. Yet the royal dictators and their henchmen were themselves uncertain of their mission and little loved; they were too obviously defenders of the prevailing order, too unprepared for the radical socioeconomic changes that were necessary to bring Balkan states out of the dead end of agrarian underemployment. This disillusionment both with bourgeois politicians and with the conservatives who had succeeded them paved the way for the emergence after 1945 of leftist projects of economic renewal under the eyes of the Soviet Union.

In the 1940s, the devastating shock of total war and its aftermath swept away the prewar political elites. Nazi (and then Soviet) occupation underlined in the starkest way the inability of the state to protect its citizens from violence, malnutrition and impoverishment. Greece suffered a devastating famine after the state failed to gain control of the country’s food supply; Yugoslavia was dismembered and subjected to a regime of reprisals against civilians, internal civil war and social dislocation that left hundreds of thousands dead. The flight into exile of the Greek and Yugoslav heads of state estranged them from their own subjects. By 1943–1944, mass resistance movements, dominated by Communists, seemed poised to take over power once the Germans withdrew.

In October 1944, Churchill and Stalin agreed on postwar spheres of influence in southeastern Europe: Greece would fall under the British and the Americans; the rest would be left to the Soviet Union. The Greek Communists, however, refused to believe there had been a carve-up and were defeated only after a long civil war, which, by the time it ended in 1949, left more people dead, imprisoned or uprooted than German occupation itself had done. Thus the crisis of the Greek state lasted the entire decade of the 1940s and was resolved only thanks to massive British and American military and financial backing for anti-Communist forces. In Yugoslavia and Albania, on the other hand, Communist partisans quickly seized power. The Red Army passed through Yugoslavia in pursuit of the withdrawing Germans, but Tito’s takeover was a domestic affair, achieved entirely through the military predominance of his partisan movement. Rivals like the Serbian Chetniks, the Croatian Ustache and Slovenian collaborationist units were crushed within a year.