The Sleepwalkers (7 page)

An imagined Serbia, projected on to a mythical past, came to brilliant life within this song-culture. Observing performances of epic songs among the Bosnian Serbs during the anti-Turkish uprising of 1875, the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans marvelled at their capacity to ‘make the Bosnian Serb forget the narrower traditions of his [. . .] kingdom in these more glorious legends', to merge his experience with that of his ‘brothers' in all Serbian lands and thereby ‘override the cant of geographers and diplomatists'.
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It is true that this culture of oral epic entered an era of gradual decline in the nineteenth century, as it began to be displaced by popular print. But the British diplomat Sir Charles Eliot heard the epics performed by travelling players at markets in the valley of the river Drina when he made a journey through Serbia in 1897. ‘These rhapsodies,' he noted, ‘are sung in a monotonous chant to the accompaniment of a single-stringed guitar, but with such genuine feeling and expression that the whole effect is not unpleasing.'
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In any case, the immensely influential printed collections of Serbian epic poetry compiled and published by Vuk Karadžić ensured that they remained in circulation among the growing literary elite. Moreover, the epic corpus continued to grow.
The Mountain Wreath
, a classic of the genre published in 1847 by the Prince-Bishop of Montenegro, Petar II Petrović-Njegos, glorified the mythical tyrant-slayer and national martyr Miloš Obilić and called for the renewal of the struggle against alien rule.
The Mountain Wreath
entered the Serb national canon and has stayed there ever since.
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The commitment to the redemption of ‘lost' Serbian lands, coupled with the predicaments of an exposed location between two land empires, endowed the foreign policy of the Serbian state with a number of distinctive features. The first of these was an indeterminacy of geographical focus. The commitment in principle to a Greater Serbia was one thing, but where exactly should the process of redemption begin? In the Vojvodina, within the Kingdom of Hungary? In Ottoman Kosovo, known as ‘Old Serbia'? In Bosnia, which had never been part of Dušan's empire but contained a substantial population of Serbs? Or in Macedonia to the south, still under Ottoman rule? The mismatch between the visionary objective of ‘unification' and the meagre financial and military resources available to the Serbian state meant that Belgrade policy-makers had no choice but to respond opportunistically to rapidly changing conditions on the Balkan peninsula. As a result, the orientation of Serbian foreign policy between 1844 and 1914 swung like a compass needle from one point on the state's periphery to another. The logic of these oscillations was as often as not reactive. In 1848, when Serbs in the Vojvodina rose up against the Magyarizing policies of the Hungarian revolutionary government, Garašanin assisted them with supplies and volunteer forces from the principality of Serbia. In 1875, all eyes were on Herzegovina, where the Serbs had risen in revolt against the Ottomans – among those who rushed to the scene of that struggle were Pašić and the military commander and future king Petar Karadjordjević, who fought there under an alias. After 1903, following an abortive local uprising against the Turks, there was intensified interest in liberating the Serbs of Ottoman Macedonia. In 1908, when the Austrians formally annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina (having held them under military occupation since 1878), the annexed areas shot to the top of the agenda. In 1912 and 1913, however, Macedonia was once again the first priority.

Serbian foreign policy had to struggle with the discrepancy between the visionary nationalism that suffused the country's political culture and the complex ethnopolitical realities of the Balkans. Kosovo was at the centre of the Serbian mythscape, but it was not, in ethnic terms, an unequivocally Serbian territory. Muslim Albanian speakers had been in the majority there since at least the eighteenth century.
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Many of the Serbs Vuk Karadžić counted in Dalmatia and Istria were in fact Croats, who had no wish to join a greater Serbian state. Bosnia, which had historically never been part of Serbia, contained many Serbs (they constituted 43 per cent of the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, when the two provinces were occupied by Austria-Hungary) but it also contained Catholic Croats (about 20 per cent) and Bosnian Muslims (about 33 per cent). (The survival of a substantial Muslim minority was one of the distinctive features of Bosnia – in Serbia itself, the Muslim communities had for the most part been harassed into emigration, deported or killed during the long struggle for independence.)
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Even more complicated was the case of Macedonia. Superimposed on to a present-day political map of the Balkans, the geographical region known as Macedonia encompasses, in addition to the former Yugoslav Republic of the same name, border areas along the southern Serbian and eastern Albanian periphery, a large chunk of south-western Bulgaria, and a huge swathe of northern Greece.
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The precise historical boundaries of Macedonia remain controversial today (witness the still smouldering conflict between Athens and Skopje over the use of the name ‘Macedonia' for the Skopje Republic) as does the question of whether and to what extent this region possessed a distinctive cultural, linguistic or national identity (to this day, the existence of a Macedonian language is acknowledged by linguists everywhere in the world except Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece).
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In 1897, when Sir Charles Eliot travelled through Serbia, he was surprised to find that his Serbian companions ‘would not allow that there were any Bulgarians in Macedonia', but rather ‘insisted that the Slavonic inhabitants of that country were all Serbs'.
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Sixteen years later, when the Carnegie Foundation dispatched a commission to the area to investigate atrocities committed in the course of the Second Balkan War, they found it impossible to establish a local consensus on the ethnicity of the people living in Macedonia, so polarized was the atmosphere in which these issues were discussed, even at the universities. The report the commission published in that year included not one, but two ethnic maps of the region, reflecting the view from Belgrade and the view from Sofia respectively. In one, western and northern Macedonia pullulated with unliberated Serbs awaiting unification with their motherland, in the other, the region appeared as the heartland of the Bulgarian zone of settlement.
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During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Serbs, the Greeks and the Bulgarians all ran highly active propaganda agencies inside Macedonia, whose purpose was to proselytize the local Slavs to their respective national causes.

The mismatch between national visions and ethnic realities made it highly likely that the realization of Serbian objectives would be a violent process, not only at the regional level, where the interests of greater and lesser powers were engaged, but also in the towns and villages of the contested areas. Some statesmen met this challenge by trying to package Serbian national objectives within a more generous ‘Serbo-Croat' political vision encompassing the idea of multi-ethnic collaboration. Among them was Nikola Pašić, who wrote at length in the 1890s about the need for Serbs and Croats to unite in a world where small nations were bound to go under. Underlying this rhetoric, however, were the assumptions, first, that Serbs and Croats were in essence the same people and, second, that the Serbs would have to lead this process because they were a more authentically Slavic people than the Catholic Croats, who had so long been exposed to ‘the influence of foreign culture'.
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Serbia could ill afford to pursue these objectives before the eyes of the world. A degree of clandestinity was thus pre-programmed into the pursuit of ‘liberty' for Serbs who were still the subjects of neighbouring states or empires. Garašanin articulated this imperative in 1848 during the uprising in the Vojvodina. ‘The Vojvodina Serbs,' he wrote, ‘expect from all Serbdom a helping hand, so they can triumph over their traditional enemy. [. . .] But because of political factors, we cannot aid them publicly. It only remains for us to aid them in secret.'
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This preference for covert operations can also be observed in Macedonia. Following an abortive Macedonian insurrection against the Turks in August 1903, the new Karadjordjević regime began to operate an active policy in the region. Committees were established to promote Serb guerrilla activity in Macedonia, and there were meetings in Belgrade to recruit and supply bands of fighters. Confronted by the Ottoman minister in Belgrade, the Serbian foreign minister Kaljević denied any involvement by the government and protested that the meetings were in any case not illegal, since they had been convened ‘not for the raising of bands, but merely for collecting funds and expressing sympathy for co-religionists beyond the border'.
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The regicides were deeply involved in this cross-border activity. The conspirator officers and their fellow travellers within the army convened an informal national committee in Belgrade, coordinated the campaign and commanded many of the volunteer units. These were not, strictly speaking, units of the Serbian army proper, but the fact that volunteer officers were immediately granted leave by the army suggested a generous measure of official backing.
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Militia activity steadily expanded in scope, and there were numerous violent skirmishes between Serb
četniks
(guerrillas) and bands of Bulgarian volunteers. In February 1907, the British government requested that Belgrade put a stop to this activity, which appeared likely to trigger a war between Serbia and Bulgaria. Once again, Belgrade disclaimed responsibility, denying that it was funding četnik activity and declaring that it ‘could not prevent [its people] from defending themselves against foreign bands'. But the plausibility of this posture was undermined by the government's continuing support for the struggle – in November 1906, the Skupština had already voted 300,000 dinars for aid to Serbs suffering in Old Serbia and Macedonia, and this was followed by a ‘secret credit' for ‘extraordinary expenses and the defence of national interests'.
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Irredentism of this kind was fraught with risk. It was easy to send guerrilla chiefs into the field, but difficult to control them once they were there. By the winter of 1907, it was clear that a number of the četnik bands were operating in Macedonia independently of any supervision; only with some difficulty did an emissary from Belgrade succeed in re-imposing control. The ‘Macedonian imbroglio' thus delivered an equivocal lesson, with fateful implications for the events of 1914. On the one hand, the devolution of command functions to activist cells dominated by members of the conspirator network carried the danger that control over Serb national policy might pass from the political centre to irresponsible elements on the periphery. On the other hand, the diplomacy of 1906–7 demonstrated that the fuzzy, informal relationship between the Serbian government and the networks entrusted with delivering irredentist policy could be exploited to deflect political responsibility from Belgrade and maximize the government's room for manoeuvre. The Belgrade political elite became accustomed to a kind of doublethink founded on the intermittent pretence that the foreign policy of official Serbia and the work of national liberation beyond the frontiers of the state were separate phenomena.

‘Agreement and harmony with Austria are a political impossibility for Serbia,' wrote Garašanin in 1844.
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Until 1903, the potential for open conflict between Belgrade and Vienna was limited. The two countries shared a long frontier that was, from Belgrade's perspective, more or less indefensible. The Serbian capital, handsomely situated on the confluence of the rivers Danube and Sava, was only a short drive from the border with Austria-Hungary. Serbian exports went mainly to the empire and a large proportion of its imports were sourced there. The imperatives of geography were reinforced by Russia's policy in the region. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Russia had helped to carve a large Bulgarian entity out of Ottoman Europe, in the expectation that Bulgaria would remain a Russian client. Since it was foreseeable that Bulgaria and Serbia would one day be rivals for territory in Macedonia, Prince (later King) Milan sought to balance this threat by seeking a closer relationship with Vienna. Russia's support for Sofia thus pushed Serbia into the arms of Vienna. As long as Russia continued to play its Balkan policy with Bulgarian cards, relations between Vienna and Belgrade were likely to remain harmonious.

In June 1881, Austria-Hungary and Serbia agreed a commercial treaty. Three weeks later, it was supplemented by a secret convention, negotiated and signed by Prince Milan himself, which stipulated that Austria-Hungary would not only assist Serbia in its efforts to secure elevation to the status of a kingdom but would also support Serbian claims to territorial annexations in Macedonia. Serbia, for its part, agreed not to undermine the monarchy's position in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Article II stated that Serbia ‘would not permit any political, religious or other intrigue to be directed from her territory against the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, including Bosnia, Herzegovina and the Sanjak of Novi Pazar'. Milan reinforced these agreements with a personal engagement in writing not to enter into ‘any kind of treaty' with a third state without first consulting Vienna.
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These agreements were, to be sure, a fragile foundation for good Austro-Serbian relations: they had no anchorage in the sentimental life of the Serbian public, which was deeply anti-Austrian; they symbolized a relationship of economic dependency which was increasingly unacceptable to Serbian nationalist opinion; and they depended on the cooperation of an erratic and increasingly unpopular Serbian monarch. But as long as Milan Obrenović remained on the throne, they at least ensured that Serbia would not side with Russia against Austria, and that the sharp end of Belgrade's foreign policy would stay pointed in the direction of Macedonia and the coming contest with Bulgaria, rather than at Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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A new trade treaty was signed in 1892 and the Secret Convention was renewed for ten years in 1889; it was allowed to expire thereafter, though it continued to be the operative platform for Serbian policy vis-à-vis Vienna.