The concept of intervention in the Balkan cases

Situating the Balkan theatre historically at the center of any study of intervention does, however, create an empirical problem. How, in the course of the nineteenth century, does one distinguish intervention from imperial rule, conquest, occupation, or the new (commercial) imperialism, when all aim at domestic reform and all are occurring at the same time and tend to blend together? For example, at the start of the century, the region was ruled by empires – Habsburg, Venetian, and Ottoman. But the first change – replacing Venice with an occupation (Napoleonic) – looks far more like an intervention as we know it in the twenty-first century: temporary, substantial domestic reordering, and widely considered (then and now) as progressive (such as bringing the rule of Roman law, education, and roads).

In addition, whereas intervention proper is conceived as a mode of managing the modern tension between transnational forces and territorially fixed sovereignty, the primary interventions of the Great Powers in the Balkans from 1878 to 1918 (and again in 1990–2008) were focused on the latter, decisions on recognition (or non-recognition) of sovereignty and fixing those boundaries. Although clearly an exercise of unequal power, the targets of such decisions actively sought these interventions in their favour (against rivals in the neighborhood). They also sought the foreign loans and investment in support of their new statehood that entangled them in the transnational aspect of this tension. To add to this, the focus of the literature on a process of nation-state formation out of empires wrongly characterises it as unidirectional. Although these interventions may have been viewed as a tool of containment against the revolutionary pressures of nationalism, the national independence movements in Serbia and Greece that begin the Balkan process were part and parcel of a simultaneous process of nation-state formation within the Ottoman Empire and the complex pattern of autonomies and reforms, varying across the empire, that the Porte rolled out.Footnote ⁵ Although the Habsburg empire ends through defeat in war in 1918 rather than attempts at internal reform, its complex management of national aspirations throughout the century also was a dynamic interaction between reforms in the imperial capital (including the compromise of 1867) and provincial autonomies (including the occupation in 1878 and then annexation in 1908 of a new province, Bosnia-Herzegovina).

Although finding a moment when one could characterise the actions of the Great Powers as intervention pure and simple is fruitless, the politics of intervention in both intervening and target states looks remarkably contemporary by the 1870s: the important roles of newspapers (thus journalists), public opinion, refugees, ‘massacres’, and humanitarian organisations and arguments (former British prime minister Gladstone's pamphlet, ‘The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East’, of 6 September 1876, is often cited even now as a precursor to R2P). This article focuses instead on the empirical regularities of external interference in the Balkans from the 1870s to the twenty-first century, including even the primary focus on the dissolution and recognition of states and the refixing of territorial borders. This choice is reinforced by the conceptual difficulty posed by the Cold War era, when world war and occupation are first followed by intense competition between the US and the USSR to shape Communist Party rule in Yugoslavia, but then by four decades of what would appear to be remarkable non-intervention until the old pattern resumed in the late 1980s. Yet, the political and economic system of socialist Yugoslavia was shaped fundamentally by its international position under a foreign policy aimed, albeit, at national independence and neutrality between the blocs.Footnote ⁶ Was Josip Broz Tito's skill at keeping both powers at bay while exploiting their rivalry for domestic benefit a rare case of the conditions that can prevent intervention, or a strategy of survival on the periphery whereby domestic politics and policy were so penetrated by foreign conditions and options that territorial sovereignty has an entirely different meaning?

Motivations and means in the ‘turbulent frontier’

German Chancellor Bismarck famously referred in 1878 to the Balkans, in the context of the history-defining decisions of the Congress of Berlin, as ‘places of which no one ever heard before this war’.Footnote ⁷ Under public pressure to intervene militarily in the Bosnian war, US Secretary of State Warren Christopher repeated Bismarck's sentiments in 1993 in describing Bosnia as an ‘intractable “problem from hell” that no one can be expected to solve … less as a moral tragedy … and more as a tribal feud that no outsider could hope to settle’.Footnote ⁸ When in 1992, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, the senior military official of the United States, reputedly said to Madeline Albright, then US ambassador to the United Nations, who was pressing for military intervention into Bosnia, ‘we don't do mountains’, signifying not only its strategic insignificance but also the appropriate role for the kind of military forces, doctrine, and qualifications he commanded, it was easy to hear echoes of Germany's Chancellor Bismarck, telling the German parliament in December 1876 that the Balkans were not ‘worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier’.Footnote ⁹ Yet the major powers did intervene, over and over.

In trying to explain such repeated involvement in an area the major powers considered of little strategic interest, whether in 1876 or 1992, the concept of the ‘turbulent frontier’ used by John S. GalbraithFootnote ¹⁰ to explain ‘the paradox of a British society reluctant to imperial expansion beyond areas commercially profitable, and the historical fact of an expanding British Empire’Footnote ¹¹ in India, Malaya, and South Africa in the mid-nineteenth century is helpful. ‘Part of the explanation lies’, Galbraith suggests, ‘in the pull exerted by “turbulent frontiers” adjacent to the area of Imperial authority and in the wide powers exercised by imperial viceroys’ who, as ‘governors charged with the maintenance of order, could not ignore disorder beyond their borders.’ Annexations ‘to eliminate the disorderly frontier’, however, ‘in turn produced new frontier problems and further expansion’.Footnote ¹² The only difference now, Der Ghoukassian argues in his analysis of instability in the Caucasus and Central Asia, is the label: ‘if we replace “expansion” or “annexation” by “intervention” then the “turbulent frontier” metaphor could be useful to shed light on certain security dynamics in the post-September 11 world’,Footnote ¹³ as the US in the Caucasus and Central Asia or in Latin America, where global-local dynamics of both push and pull, not strategic interests, are the driving force.

The immediate pull of turbulence in the late nineteenth-century Balkans to which Bismarck is reacting above – the 1875 rebellion in Bosnia, the 1876 uprising in Bulgaria, the declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire in 1876 by Serbia and Montenegro ‘taking advantage of a turbulent situation’Footnote ¹⁴ – was the ‘Eastern Question’: Great Power efforts to create order out of the process of dismantling the Ottoman Empire. Integral to this process, however, were requests for assistance from local actors who were seeking advantage in their domestic power struggles. The result, ‘the great disaster of 1878’ in Misha Glenny's description of the Congress of Berlin, was that:

Integral to the push-pull dynamic also was a new force: public opinion. Using the new tool of newspapers in the early 1870s, romantic nationalists and liberals in western Europe sought to rally public opinion against the forced population migrations and ‘atrocities’, as the newspapers reported, in support of ‘Balkan Christians’ while the same groups in the Ottoman Empire called for support to Muslims in the Balkans.Footnote ¹⁶ In 1874–5, Catholic clergy in Bosnia-Herzegovina appealed to the Habsburg army commander in Dalmatia for help, while in 1873–6, Russian benevolent societies together with other voluntary organisations such as the Russian Red Cross raised hundreds of thousands of rubles for fellow ‘Slav’ refugees from Bosnia fleeing into Serbia, Montenegro, and border areas of the Habsburg empire.Footnote ¹⁷

The Eastern Question was about more than disorder on the periphery, of course. The primary push for intervention were the territorial rivalries among the major powers; in the Balkans, this meant an ever more powerful Germany, Austria (after 1867, including Hungary), Russia, France, and Britain (and in 1918, Italy). The choice in the Balkans of state creation rather than violent state death (occupation, annexation), which, as Fazal shows, was the more common outcome between 1816 and 1945 for buffer states caught between rival powers,Footnote ¹⁸ actually neutralised their competition in a kind of checkmate, as Stavrianos writes; none could annex new territory so their competition shifted to influence over the foreign relations of each new state (‘decisively’ Stavrianos adds).Footnote ¹⁹

The primary method of responding to turbulence while managing Great Power competition was, then and now, multilateral diplomatic conferences: the 1878 Congress of Berlin, the 1918–19 Paris Peace Conference, the 1991 European Community (EC) (‘Carrington’) Conference, the 1992 London Conference and the 1992–5 standing International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia (ICFY) co-chaired by the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN) at Geneva that London established, the 1995 Dayton conference for Bosnia-Herzegovina and its side negotiations at Erdut for Eastern Slavonia in Croatia, and the 1999 Rambouillet Conference on Kosovo.

In each of these cases, the major-power actions were a response to a similar package. It begins with entreaties from local actors for assistance and major-power reticence, especially to act militarily. Already in 1987, the US made clear to the Yugoslav prime minister seeking aid to keep the country together that its fate was no longer of strategic importance;Footnote ²⁰ so, too, did all Western powers at the annual NATO conference in November 1990 and the US and USSR at the same month's meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), despite intelligence forecasts of impending violent collapse. For more than two years before they declared independence in June 1991, Slovene and Croatian officials sought advice and support in Western capitals and used public relations campaigns to win support for independence (secession), particularly from middle powers staking independent positions from the US and USSR as the Cold War was ending. Early diplomatic support from Austria, Switzerland, and Norway, military aid for Croatia from Hungary, and an aggressive newspaper campaign in Germany that produced parliamentary support there by spring 1991 then provoked Italian and EC involvement. Declaring ‘the hour of Europe’ in seizing EC leadership of the impulse to restore order in June 1991, the Dutch foreign minister leading the EC negotiating delegation, Jacques Poos, meant in place of the United States.

At the same time, public opinion was being rallied by newspaper journalists and human-rights activists in Britain, France, and the US but also in Muslim countries from Malaysia to Turkey in reaction to the growing violence and rival claims of atrocities to insist that governments ‘do something’ – in 1991–5, to save Muslim victims of Serbian aggression in Bosnia, stop the ‘ethnic cleansing’, and protect the refugees and internally displaced, and in 1998–9 to intervene in defence of Kosovo Albanians’ human rights. Even in Russia, the constitutional crisis of 1993, though primarily between Yeltsin and the parliament over economic reform, included such pressure to act in support of Yugoslavia (and later Serbs) that Yeltsin chose to dissolve the parliament, sending in tanks to remove the sitting members – only to face the very same pressures from the new one.Footnote ²¹ These external campaigns are difficult to separate, moreover, from the public relations campaigns increasingly mounted by Bosnian Muslim leaders (using the US private firms employed earlier by Croatians) and later also Kosovar Albanians, to gain Western intervention through parliamentary/congressional pressure.

Pulled by an emerging fait accompli of actions and decisions produced by a process not so different from that of Galbraith's imperial viceroys, the major powers (France, Germany, Britain, reluctantly the US) could no longer stay on the sidelines, in competition with these middle powers and with each other to intervene. At the same time, in regard to each of these conferences beginning in 1878, the mounting pressure to act and the interested positions of individual governments did not alter the diplomatic pattern. Each was driven by one major power that claimed itself disinterested, thus neutral, impartial – Bismarck's Germany in 1878, Wilson's United States at Paris in 1918, the European Union and the United Kingdom in its chief negotiator, Lord Peter Carrington, in 1991, followed by the UK at London in 1992, the EU and UN for the standing ICFY at Geneva, and the US at Dayton, Erdut, and Rambouillet. The participation of other powers was not a sign of multilateralism, in the sense of asserting influence over the outcome of the negotiations, but about an equally or more important component of recognition, having their major power status recognised, and, in turn, their acquiescence to the decisions taken, as if such cooperation was necessary.

In each case, also, invitations to the Balkan parties to participate were issued by the organiser and were discriminatory. Misha Glenny's description of the Congress of Berlin in 1878 where the ‘shabbiest treatment’ was reserved for Serbia, whose foreign minister was excluded even access to the Congress while ‘Persians’ were even allowed to make a presentation,Footnote ²² has echoes in the decision by the US negotiators to include at the Dayton peace negotiations only one of the Bosnian parties, the Muslims/Bosniaks represented by the leader of their main wartime political party, Alija Izetbegovic (treated as president of Bosnia, even though his mandate had ended before the war began, in the spring of 1992, when the constitutional rule of annual rotation among the members of the collective presidency should have transferred the chair to the Croat in December 1991, and then to the Serb at the end of 1992, and back to the Muslim, and so on). The Americans insisted that both Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs – the other two parties to the war – be represented by the presidents of neighboring Croatia and Serbia instead. At Paris in 1918–19, too, the victorious major powers barely tolerated attendance at some meetings by the victorious Balkan governments (Romania, Greece, Yugoslavia) and outright excluded the defeated states (Germany, the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria and the successor states of the Habsburg Empire, Austria, and Hungary).

Also common to this diplomatic form, it appears, is that the powers made most decisions in advance, making the diplomatic meeting itself only symbolically about negotiations and, especially, limiting any active role by the targets (the Balkan actors) themselves. Negotiators commonly have also been impatient: Bismarck, Glenny writes, ‘made no secret of the fact that he wanted the Congress to complete its work as soon as possible’Footnote ²³ because it forced him to postpone his annual holiday; the conference lasted exactly one month, 13 June to 13 July. Negotiators at Dayton were given a deadline of 19 days (November 1–20), and at Rambouillet, only two weeks (February 6–20, then extended three more days to 23 February).

Finally, it is striking how many of these diplomatic conferences were a response to failed diplomatic initiatives earlier on the same issue, from the Three Emperors’ League (Germany, Russia, and Austria) aiming to find a peaceful solution through negotiations to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1875–6 to the limited scope of the Brioni Accord negotiated by a joint EC-CSCE team in July 1991, dealing with Slovenia only (though choosing to send military observers to Croatia), that then required the Carrington conference that September; then the 1992 London conference in response to the failure of the Carrington conference and the EU's Lisbon negotiations of March 1992 on Bosnia-Herzegovina; and multiple attempts by the Contact Group for Bosnian peace in 1994–5 because ICFY was having no success (in part for reasons of obstruction by some members of the Contact Group, as was the case with Lisbon also). The ‘great disaster’ of 1878, in Glenny's assessment, was to create as much confusion, resentment, and dashed aspirations, or more, as were issues and borders settled. Each subsequent conference was to resolve a problem created, or left unfinished, by the previous. The Balkan Wars of 1912–13, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 and World War I, the ‘extreme interwar unrest and bitterness’Footnote ²⁴ caused by the terms and justifications of the Versailles treaties that prevented political stability, the assassination of Yugoslav King Alexander Karadjordjevic in Marseilles in October 1934 (along with the French foreign minister),Footnote ²⁵ the fascist National State of Croatia (NDH) during World War II (generally called a German ‘puppet state’, but going so much farther in its extermination policies toward Roma [Gypsies], Jews, and Serbs that the Nazi authorities even protested), and the World War II alliance of Kosovo Albanians with fascist Italy – all can be seen as reactions to preceding international decisions on statehood and territorial borders. In regard to the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the effect of the EC's Brioni Accord of July 1991 to concede Slovene independence (with a three month moratorium, granted also to Croatia) without addressing the consequences for the rest of Yugoslavia, above all Bosnia-Herzegovina, was horrific war (and was widely predicted).Footnote ²⁶ The 1995 Dayton accord for Bosnia created an unresolved political stalemate there that remains today and ignored the Albanian question in both Kosovo and Macedonia. The result was the subsequent insurgencies in 1996–9 in Kosovo and 2001 in Macedonia led by the Kosovo Liberation Army/Albanian National Army; the NATO bombing campaign against Belgrade; and two more partial settlements, UN Security Council Resolution 1244 of June 1999 that postponed any decision on autonomy or independence for Kosovo and sent a ‘transitional administration’ to govern the unsustainable non-status, directly responsible for the massive revenge attacks to displace minorities and explosions of violence from frustrated Albanians, and then the EU-US negotiated Ohrid Agreement for Macedonia in 2001 that only created greater political fragility and inter-ethnic antagonism and separation between Albanians and Macedonians.

Sovereignty with conditions

It would be easy to sympathise with the Great Powers in 1878 and 1918–19 and the major powers today, however, because the principle of national self-determination to define statehood and borders in an area so thoroughly mixed nationally (physically and in terms of historical claims and myths) has no stable, uncontestable outcome in itself. Although they made the decisions and used this argument themselves, the powers acknowledged as much in each case. Yet their proposed solutions to this problem, embedded in the resulting treaties, appear to have always made matters worse. As Ivo Lederer writes about the Paris Peace Conference ending World War I:

The problems can be seen already in the obligations the powers imposed at the 1878 Congress of Berlin on all Balkan states in regard to equal rights and protected privileges for non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire and the freedom of religion (‘liberty of conscience’) clauses required in the constitutions of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro. This was not, as Martha Finnemore argues, either the beginning of humanitarian justifications for intervention in political response to enraged publics or a ‘sole focus’ – she goes so far as to say, on who was ‘qualified as human’ and thus ‘deserving of humanitarian protection’ – on ‘European Christians’.Footnote ²⁸ A better explanation, Stoianovich argues, is the ‘new imperialism’: ‘The business culture of the nineteenth century required the talents of the people of the Book. The Congress of Berlin (1878) therefore obliged the Balkan states to abolish all legal restrictions against Jews.’ The consequence, he argues, was that where Jews were already ‘entrenched in business’ as in Romania, they also ‘advanced in the liberal professions’, but both there and where ‘there were no Jews in the villages and few Jews in the towns’, as in Serbia, ‘there was an upsurge in anti-Semitism’.Footnote ²⁹

The new states’ reaction was even stronger to the minorities conventions of 1918–19. Again, contrary to the current wisdom that these conventions represent a significant stage in the evolution of transnational human rights norms, recent scholarship on the League of Nations, which was tasked to monitor and enforce the conventions, is that ‘the preeminent goals were political and not humanitarian, with the task of defending the 1919 settlement’, and ‘a concern to protect the fragile peace’ (in this case, finding most petitions involving Macedonia, given both Yugoslav and Greek denial of a ‘Macedonian’ identity, as ‘not receivable’), and secondly, to protect ‘the prestige of the League’.Footnote ³⁰ ‘The plan,’ however, ‘was bitterly resented by the Czechs, Poles, Rumanians, and Yugoslavs as an infringement on their national sovereignty’.Footnote ³¹ First, they all ‘complained at being forced to sign minorities conventions to which the great powers would not adhere’.Footnote ³² Second, as the government in Belgrade made clear, they ‘had reason to fear a system of international obligations and League controls that could in the future lead to foreign interference’ (such as, in the case of Serbia, external manipulation of ‘the Italian, German, Magyar, and Albanian minorities’), a fear that proved justified throughout eastern Europe in the 1930s.Footnote ³³ Lederer finds it surprising, in fact, that after focusing so much of their time and effort on their territorial claims, both in 1878 and 1918–19, it was the minority treaties that the parties seeking national independence and recognition most opposed.Footnote ³⁴ He cites the Yugoslav telegram to the ceremonies for the Treaty of St. Germain (deciding their fate): ‘Explain to Americans the problem is not the rights of minorities [which we accept and recognise] and there is no need to push us on this and dictate to us. The question is our sovereignty which is being violated without reason.’ And then, in further instructions, explain to French premier Clemenceau, ‘the Yugoslavs were willing to guarantee all minority rights through domestic legislation. But they would not submit to a limitation on their sovereignty from outside.’Footnote ³⁵

Nonetheless, reflecting the power imbalance at the conference, the Commission on New States and Minorities established at Paris for this purpose ‘decided to ignore’ the pleas made by the Yugoslav government and delegation that they had already committed in prior treaties and honored those commitments toward Macedonians, Albanians, and Muslims in general.Footnote ³⁶

There is little different in the exercise of unequal power in relation to the Yugoslav disposition in 1991. Although warned formally in July 1991 in a COREU (confidential telegram among EC member states) by the Dutch foreign minister holding the presidency of the EC troika, Hans van den Broek, that any peaceful break-up of Yugoslavia on the principle of the right to national self-determination required a negotiation of new borders for the resulting states that would respect as much as possible the ethno-national composition of territory, the other 11 members ignored this sage advice and insisted that the existing federal borders of socialist Yugoslavia become the new international borders. Then, fully ignoring also the constitutional status of nations and nationalities of Yugoslavia by calling Serbs in Croatia and Albanians in Serbia ‘minorities’,Footnote ³⁷ they insisted on territorial autonomy within those new states. This autonomy solution was no more acceptable to presidents Tudjman of Croatia and Milosevic of Serbia than it was in 1918, but in 1991 it also led, as van den Broek and many others predicted, to brutal and multiple wars by those who did not want to be discriminated minorities in the new states and by the majorities who wanted them gone. Applying the same effort as in 1919 to square the circle of externally imposed borders and national rights in a multinational space to Bosnia (the Dayton peace accord and its constitution) and Kosovo (the Ahtisaari Plan) created such complex administrative structures that public resources will always fall short, transformed the two wars into continuing constitutional conflict but no solution, and have been held together only by forceful international intervention and de facto protectorates.

In sum, has anything changed between 1878 and 1995–9 except the labels we use? The Congress of Berlin of 1878 agreed to the Austrian request that it occupy Bosnia, yet Austrian troops were surprised to find resistance. Arriving in July 1878 with ‘a symbolic show of friendly force’ of 72,000 soldiers, the Austrian army had to escalate within days to 268,000, one third of the entire imperial army, to quell the Bosnian rebellion.Footnote ³⁸ Having been unwilling in the fall of 1991 to deploy ground troops to prevent war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and then only agreeing in 1992 to do so to protect humanitarian deliveries during the war (the United Nations Protection Forces [UNPROFOR]), the major powers (led in this decision by the United States) found themselves increasing its numbers over and over, though they were never sufficient to do the tasks the Security Council mandated. From an initial 50 military liaison officers, then 100, to 7,700 troops in early March 1992, reinforcements brought the number to 13,240 a month later, to 30,655 in March 1994, to 38,130 in November 1994, and its full strength of 38,599 in March 1995.Footnote ³⁹ When even the US agreed to join other NATO powers in a ground force to implement the Dayton peace accord after December 1995, the troop deployment jumped to 60,000 and then 80,000, declining only in 2002 to 12,000.

In 1903, five years before Austrian annexation of Bosnia, Aida Hozic reports, a ‘correspondent of the Chicago-Record Herald and a seasoned world traveler’, one William Eleroy Curtis, referred to the Habsburg occupation of Bosnia ‘as the “remarkable example of administration” over an alien race’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Hozic continues:

Yet, Stoianovich argues, Austrian counterrevolutionary policies favouring ‘the old Muslim landowning class as landowners [against the 1875 alliance of ‘rural and semiurban Orthodox merchant class’ and ‘Christian peasantry’] and relegating the functions of administration to a new official class of non-Bosnian origin’ frustrated ‘both the economic and political ambitions’ of that merchant class and its liberal ideas. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 ‘was the most spectacular expression’ of their first of two goals, to ‘remove the new official class from power’ (the second being to prevent restoration of the ‘ancient authority’ of the old official, landowning class).Footnote ⁴² The assassination in Belgrade in 1903 of the Serbian king, Milan Obrenovic, was also aimed at his ‘Austrophilism’ and his opening to ‘Germano-Western’ capital without any national safeguards.Footnote ⁴³

In 2003, drawing a parallel between the EU-led, UN-mandated administration in Bosnia-Herzegovina to implement the imposed peace agreement and nineteenth-century British rule in India, Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin wrote,

Bosnian obstruction since December 1995 has not gone as far as political assassinations, but violent local resistance against international policies requiring refugee return to their prewar homes and leaders’ systematic and effective lack of political cooperation with most external demands (which, admittedly, rose continually) have prevented any real movement forward for 18 years, justified a continuing large military presence, and, over time, revived fears of a return to war. The external criticism that now accompanies most international interventions has chastised both the interveners and the locals for delays in arresting indicted war criminals (by the International Criminal Tribunal on Former Yugoslavia at the Hague), the local politicians for rampant corruption, and the widespread activities of organised crime, but many locals, Hozic argues, react just as in the late nineteenth century, seeing banditry and smuggling as ‘an expression of patriotism … against foreign invaders’.Footnote ⁴⁵

The German bombing of Belgrade in March 1941 within hours of the air-force-led coup d'état against the Prince Regent for signing the Tripartite Pact with Hitler's Reich was correctly considered an act of war, with an Axis ground invasion following within days, and the first stage of multiple occupations of Yugoslav territory by Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Italy. NATO called its bombing of Belgrade (and Serbia more broadly, including its province of Kosovo) in March–June 1999 a humanitarian intervention (though it, too, led to an occupation, though temporary, of Kosovo under UN authority and initially 50,000 NATO-led troops),Footnote ⁴⁶ but most Serbian citizens, whatever their views on the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, the counterinsurgency in Kosovo, or the responsibility of their president, Slobodan Milosevic, stood together in opposition to the bombing and in daily demonstrations against it.

The League of Nations has been widely criticised for failing to implement the minority treaties by the mid-1930s, overridden Krasner argues by major powers for whom ‘power asymmetries’ meant that ‘outcomes were the result of power and interest’ rather than principles.Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet, the monitoring activities of the European Community Monitoring Mission (ECMM), created at Brioni in July 1991 to prevent escalation of the violence in Croatia into fully-fledged war, failed from the start; ECMM reports (they were eventually deployed throughout the former Yugoslavia and in Albania) were duly sent to Brussels regularly but were never even read, according to credible sources. The OSCE High Commissioner for National Minorities failed to prevent violent conflict in Macedonia as did the OSCE monitoring mission sent to Macedonia in preparation for the Kosovo operation in October 1998.

Economic relations

To focus solely on the new lines drawn on maps and the formal recognition (or non-recognition) of sovereignty at these diplomatic conferences or even on military interventions to implement those decisions would be to miss a far more consequential major-power motivation in 1870–1919 in terms of these new states’ domestic orders: to protect their banks, obtain the infrastructure for their expanding commercial interests, and impose trade agreements benefitting the major power. The economic relations between the major powers and Balkan governments, and their consequences, also best explain the causes of the disorder and turbulence that they intervened to staunch.

Treaties not only drew borders and required minority protections but also imposed economic conditions on new states, beginning with the obligation to repay foreign debts. Although these debts were to private banks, the powers at each conference represented the interests of ‘their’ banks in being repaid. Their primary method was to assume control and administration over the countries’ finances, including requirements on specific government revenues (such as the state tobacco monopolies in all the Balkan states ‘imposed to help repay European debts’ with the consequence of restricting ‘the development of an otherwise promising agricultural industry’)Footnote ⁴⁸ that had to be pledged for debt repayment. In 1881, the Great Powers created an Ottoman Public Debt Administration (PDA) to assume extraordinary European control, especially by Britain, France, and Germany, over Ottoman finance so as to ensure that its revenues first pay Western creditors, then the shareholders of the PDA, and only then into the Ottoman budget and finally Ottoman producers. The PDA continued to manage Ottoman debt up to World War I as a fiscal consortium so as to protect European investments in the empire.Footnote ⁴⁹

The same treatment was given Greece after its failed intervention in Crete in 1898: ‘as part of the peace treaty, Athens was forced to hand over control of its budget to a great- power commission’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The new states also had to assume new foreign loans to pay for the treaty obligations to build railroads for the European powers. The terms of Serbian independence after Berlin, for example, required it to pay an Austrian contractor to build a railway from Belgrade to the Macedonian border, to cooperate in constructing another line to Bulgaria and Turkey, and to agree to an Austrian plan for regulating navigation along the Danube.Footnote ⁵¹ Some of the loans were also taken to buy out European owners of the country's railroads in the interest of greater independence, but Lampe and Jackson argue that ‘the loans served not so much to introduce direct European influence as to push Balkan state budgets into permanent reliance on further loans’.Footnote ⁵² Debt repayment totalled one third of Serbian government expenses by 1887; by 1898, its total European loans had risen sixfold, nearly all of which between 1902 and 1912 was underwritten by major Paris banks ‘at the urgings of the Foreign Ministry for diplomatic advantage rather than on their own initiative for maximum profit’.Footnote ⁵³ The 1919 peace treaty then required the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes to repay the imperial debts of both the Ottoman and Habsburg territories it acquired, on top of the fiscal requirements of creating a new state and repairing war damage.Footnote ⁵⁴ By the end of the 1920s, 82.5 per cent of the Kingdom's national debt was foreign loans.Footnote ⁵⁵ By 1934, it had to default on its foreign debt (as did all Balkan countries)Footnote ⁵⁶ and chose to accept clearing agreements with Germany and ever greater exposure to German economic penetration, the Balkans being the cornerstone of Hitler's policy of Grossraumwirtschaft, what one contemporary called a ‘bloodless invasion’.Footnote ⁵⁷

The diplomatic conferences also imposed rules on these countries’ foreign trade that ‘forbade them to erect protective tariffs’ in the face of competition from European manufacturers at the same time that the countries’ limited domestic capital for industrial development was ‘exhausted’ in the treaty obligation to build European railroads.Footnote ⁵⁸ The Congress of Berlin required all Balkan states to sign a treaty of commerce with Austria (that when finally negotiated in 1881 amounted to a virtual customs union of ‘most favored nation’ trading status with Austria and ‘almost servile foreign policy conditions’),Footnote ⁵⁹ yet by 1895–6, Budapest had persuaded Habsburg authorities to violate the treaty so as to impose a ban on live Serbian hogs (protecting Hungarian producers), then again in 1906, and from 1906 to 1911, a devastating five year Austrian tariff war, the so-called ‘Pig War’ considered a prelude to World War I.Footnote ⁶⁰

Intervention in the economies of these sovereign states did not end, of course, with diplomatic negotiations and treaties. All of ‘the powers strove to gain their diplomatic goals in the Balkans’ with what one might call continuous interference if not intervention: ‘from troop crossings of the Danube and blockading of ports, to closing of markets to Balkan exports and granting or withholding of loans’.Footnote ⁶¹ At the same time, political independence, whether in 1878, 1912–13, or 1919, entailed major new budgetary expenditures for state administration and territorial defence. All primarily agrarian and poor countries, these new states’ primary sources of finance were foreign trade and foreign loans. Although all aimed at economic independence and domestic industrialisation, the vast military budgets (between 34 and 50 per cent of Balkan states’ budgets after 1918)Footnote ⁶² and state expenditures only increased their dependence (total, for Albania)Footnote ⁶³ on foreign loans and trade. The result was repeated cycles of fiscal crisis, further dependence on foreign loans and terms of repayment, and onerous tax burdens on the population (still largely peasants).

This pattern takes us to the second important aspect of the economic relations of intervention: the initial causes of the Balkan turbulence to which the Great Powers responded in the 1870s. The dissolution of the Ottoman empire was provoked by a long fiscal crisis, managed by the Porte's ever greater governmental resort to foreign loans, with a growing dependence on and indebtedness to foreign banks, 1854–74. Efforts at economic and political reform to obtain sufficient revenues internally by increased exactions through tax farming on peasantsFootnote ⁶⁴ explain much of the revolt, then general rebellion, in Bosnia-Herzegovina beginning around 1871. The global economic crisis of 1873–96, when many of the foreign banks in Istanbul collapsed and new financing dried up, compounded the problem. What Stavrianos labels the ‘new imperialism’ of ‘intensive Western economic penetration’Footnote ⁶⁵ in the Balkans from the late nineteenth century led to increasing ‘impoverishment of the Balkan peasantry and artisan class’,Footnote ⁶⁶ a ‘recrudescence of brigandage’ and ‘violent way of life’Footnote ⁶⁷ that fed into the nationalist politics of the age (from guerrillas and terrorist organisations to the Balkan wars of 1912–13) and even, in Austrian-annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, ‘a sharp rise in prostitution in Sarajevo’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The next global economic crisis, beginning in 1925 in the Balkans with the collapse of world agricultural prices before the 1929 crash of global finance, led British and French banks to abandon the Kingdom to German economic penetration after 1934 but, already in 1929, according to their governments’ policies toward Germany (considered appeasement by many), to remove any constraints on the King's declaration of dictatorship and an end to the liberal constitution.

The politics of the 1920s were already infused with partisan conflict and political revolt over growing foreign dependence. As Barbara Jelavich describes it, after World War I the ‘participation of foreign financiers, businessmen and technicians’ in all of the Balkan states was widespread and criticised. Whereas some of their contributions were positive, the one area ‘that was subject to massive foreign influence was the state loans’, including ‘foreign supervision over their finances’, while the ‘loans were often attached to political considerations, and the European governments used them to achieve objectives in foreign policy’.Footnote ⁶⁹

Looking backward, it is worth noticing that among the many protest movements in Yugoslavia in the 1920s–1930s against these economic and political dependencies was the decision of many intellectuals to join the Yugoslav Communist Party and to develop its political strategy.Footnote ⁷⁰ AustroMarxist in their orientation and obsessed with Marx and Engels’ distinction between historic nations which had a right to self-determination (statehood) and Slavs who were ‘nonhistoric nations’, ‘relics of peoples’, who would disappear with the march of global capitalism, they analysed their conditions as confined to a petty bourgeois peripherality in Europe, a land of ‘vagabonds, travelling salesmen, smugglers’ and a stunted indigenous bourgeoisie based on increasing state dependence on foreign connections and capital to keep itself in power. To escape this peripherality, they strategised, the Communist Party should become a substitute bourgeoisie, beginning with a change in popular consciousness against the cultural hegemony of the Great Powers, then political emancipation, and ultimately economic emancipation.Footnote ⁷¹ Though originating in the north-west of Slovenia and Croatia, this argument was of great appeal to the broader national front forged by the Partisans (Communist-led) during World War II against the Axis occupations and also after the war, in the struggle for international recognition – first from anti-communist Western powers led by the US in a policy ‘to undermine the new regime with economic collapse’Footnote ⁷² and then, unsuccessfully, from the Soviet Union over quarrels on foreign and development policy.

Yet, in keeping with the argument of this article that intervention is a push-pull dynamic, it is difficult to say whether the liberal constitutions adopted by all the new states after World War I were imposed by assertive imperial powers, particularly Britain and France as conditions for foreign loans, or whether they were the choice of new, liberal-oriented economic and political elites, or of governments eager to attract foreign capital. Equally, economic historians agree that the policies of financial orthodoxy (cutting expenditures and increasing taxes to balance budgets) that were adopted in the 1920s to address their fiscal crisis and debt repayment obligations, then the consequences of agricultural depression and then great depression, 1925–32, were totally inappropriate and a direct cause of the worsening living conditions of the population.Footnote ⁷³ But did they adopt these policies because foreign creditors required them or because they either believed in them or believed they were necessary to attract more foreign capital and loans (as Lampe and Jackson write, ‘they hoped thereby to reopen the flow of long-term European credit’)?Footnote ⁷⁴

The parallels, once more, of this story and the one leading up to the interventions of the 1990s are very strong. The dissolution of Yugoslavia was, like the Ottoman empire, a consequence of a long fiscal and especially foreign debt crisis, financially orthodox policies (this time explicitly required by the International Monetary Fund [IMF] in exchange for stopgap funding, from 1979 through 1987), and, also required in IMF conditionality, constitutional changes that generated system-destroying political conflict. The cost of the strategic independence won in 1949 from the two Cold War rivals, as discussed above, had been dependence on foreign debt (largely from the IMF and World Bank) that drove all economic and political reforms for forty years even if negotiated and, thus, by consent. Against Macedonia, trying to remain at peace and achieve independent statehood in the morass of the Yugoslav collapse, Greece imposed two economic blockades, making conditions much more unstable and eventually violent, just as did Austrian treatment of Serbia from 1906 to 1911. The UN Security Council imposed economic sanctions on Serbia (and then Serb-claimed areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia) beginning in May 1992 through 1999, with the effect of increasing resort to smuggling and what Stoianovich had called ‘the violent way of life’ in the economy and politics in the late nineteenth century. External efforts to influence local authorities were, as then, port blockades, closing of markets to Balkan exports (repeatedly after 1975 by the EC), troop crossings (plus no-fly zones, maritime blockades, and ‘close air support’ to the UN troops on the ground, that is, bombing), and withholding of aid to influence behaviour (for example, for two years after the peace agreement against one of the two Bosnian entities, the Serb Republic) and rewarding others. Peace treaties, too, now require repayment of foreign debt, although the process is now institutionalised in a negotiated agreement with the IMF as a precondition of any new foreign borrowing (public or commercial). That agreement, as with all subsequent IMF loans, require the same orthodox financial policies (‘macroeconomic stabilisation’) that did such damage in the 1920s. The organisation of creditors is now more institutionalised – the Paris and London Clubs for banks, the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD for development donors, the World Bank through its reconstruction programmes and donors’ conferences for peacebuilding interventions – but the oversight, conditions on the use of funds, accounting procedures, limits on public expenditures, and major reform of economic and political institutions, all for the purpose of eventual repayment, may even be more intrusive than the Ottoman Public Debt Administration.