Some of the implications for international affairs of the political trends outlined above, and in particular the emergence of multiple nationalisms, will be readily apparent. It should not be forgotten, however, that traditional great power rivalries, some of them rooted in clashes of economic interests, also played a role.
All the great powers, for instance, but especially Russia, Austria-Hungary and Britain, took an interest in the 'Eastern Question', that is, how to manage the perceived decline of the Ottoman Empire. In particular this revolved around the powers' strategic interests in the Straits and with them access to both the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The Crimean War had already been fought over this issue, and until 1870, when the Black Sea clauses of the Treaty of Paris were finally revoked by international agreement, Russian diplomacy was dominated by the desire to shake off restrictions on its right to maintain naval bases on the Black Sea. Both Russia and Austria-Hungary continued to fear one another's presence in the Balkans. The Habsburg Monarchy in particular was apt to see a 'Pan-Slavist' tendency in Russian policy, erroneously assuming that every Slavic people and government in the region was a puppet in Russia's hands. This did not prevent periodic ententes between the two powers over Balkan issues, but the fundamental antagonism remained. Britain also feared Russian influence in the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire generally, at least until the late 1890s, when the British government concluded that an Ottoman Empire which either could not or would not reform itself was no longer defensible.
In addition to strategic concerns there were economic conflicts of interest. The drive to modernise led the Ottoman government further and further into debt to West European banks, and by the mid-1870s more than half of state revenue went towards paying the interest alone.9 When in 1876 the Ottomans suspended payment, the great powers intervened and by 1881 an international financial commission, the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, was empowered to earmark certain revenues for debt servicing.10 Western capital, with the tacit and occasionally overt support of western governments, continued to seek concessions for trade and investment in the Ottoman realms. The same was true in the Balkan states, where competition to lend money to these countries' impoverished governments, to build their railway lines, to arm their troops, was increasingly fierce.
One final aspect of great power rivalry which deserves mention is the looming antagonism between Russia and Germany. Until the late nineteenth century the conservative community of interest between the three northern empires had sufficed to keep Russia and Germany on relatively cordial terms. The industrialisation of Russia from the 1890s, however, reinforced Russia's strategic interest in the Straits because of the overriding necessity of exporting grain along this route; any threat to this economic windpipe was increasingly seen as a life-or-death issue for Russia. At the same time the rapidity of Russia's industrialisation, and the seeming certainty that this would enhance its military effectiveness, despite Russia's defeat by Japan in 1905, helped to radicalise German policy in the two decades preceding 1914. German nervousness was also increased by the conclusion of a Franco-Russian defensive alliance in 1894. German fear of a two-front war against the French and Russians was an obsession by 1914; Germany's own growing economic interest in the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire as fields for investment gave this an added edge. But this area where Germany's drive to establish economic and political hegemony, short of outright colonial empire, was strongest and most successful was also of vital interest to Russia.
The complications that nationalism introduced took several forms. Firstly, the very existence of the Balkan nation-states, and their increasing number, was potentially destabilising. Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and, after its creation in 1878, the autonomous Principality of Bulgaria all sought to expand at the expense of the Ottoman Empire or other neighbours, and in the process liberate fellow nationals. Only Romania did not seek such expansion, although this did not prevent its nationalists from eyeing Habsburg Transylvania, nor did it stop Romania in 1913 exploiting the Balkan Wars to seize Dobrudja from Bulgaria. In the meantime, those peoples still under Ottoman rule were encouraged to seek independence or unification with their 'home' state, aspirations which could lead to international crisis and great power involvement.
The multinational empires, thus threatened, had their own strategies for containing nationalism. Continuing to sit on the Polish question was one of the few causes Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary had in common by the end of the century. The Habsburg Monarchy and Russia, traditional rivals in the Balkans, could nevertheless live and let live for substantial periods, through active commitments to consult one another over contentious issues such as Macedonia. Austro-Hungarian diplomacy, in addition, coped with the potential danger of nationalism in three main ways. Firstly, it secured the occupation of Bosnia—Hercegovina in 1878, a move designed above all to forestall the expansion of Serbia, whose attractive power over the Monarchy's own South Slav population it feared. Secondly, the momentous decision was taken in 1879 to conclude a defensive alliance with Germany, which gave the Monarchy the ultimate insurance against Russia. Thirdly, the Monarchy coped with the threat of 'irredentism' by prophylactic alliances with each of the three nation-states on its borders which shared nationality with minorities within the Monarchy. By concluding alliances with Serbia in 1881, Italy in 1882 and Romania in 1883, the Monarchy hoped to neutralise the nationalism that undoubtedly existed in each.
The great powers generally exercised a form of clientism among the Balkan states, but these attempts at control could backfire. Russia, through its war against the Ottomans in 1877—8, created Bulgaria in the belief that the new state would act as an outpost of Russian influence in the Balkans; no one, however, was more surprised than Russia when it turned out in the 1880s that the Bulgarians had minds of their own and repudiated Russian tutelage. Most fatefully, the Habsburg Monarchy's long political as well as economic domination of Serbia blew up in its face when, in 1903, a revolution in Belgrade ushered in a new, democratic regime which was also strongly nationalist, anxious to throw off the restraints imposed on Serbia in the 1880s. Trade relations between the Monarchy and Serbia broke down in 1906, and the so-called 'Pig War' of 1906—11 resulted in Serbia finding alternative markets for its produce, and escaping from its dependent position.
The crises which shook the European state system between 1871 and 1914 almost all had their origins in the Balkans. Revolts in Bosnia and the Bulgarian vilayets in 1875—6 provoked Ottoman reprisals, international outrage, an unsuccessful Serbo-Montenegrin war against the Ottomans in 1876 and finally, by prior agreement between Russia and Austria-Hungary, Russian intervention. The resulting crisis over Russia's attempt to create a 'big Bulgaria' in 1878 led to the Congress of Berlin and a paring down of Bulgaria to the area between the Balkan Mountains and the Danube, with a strip to the south-east accorded a limbo-like existence under great power supervision as Eastern Rumelia. The Berlin Congress was also a milestone because it sanctioned the Habsburg takeover of Bosnia-Hercegovina and the formal independence of Serbia, Montenegro and Romania.
Bulgarian nationalism produced another crisis in 1885-6 when there was a revolution in Eastern Rumelia and the Principality responded to calls for a union of the two halves. This was subsequently ratified by the great powers but not before Serbia had gone to war with Bulgaria in 1885 in a vain effort to win territorial compensation. In 1897 Greece provoked its own crisis when it responded to an uprising in Ottoman Crete by attacking the Empire on its own; despite a speedy defeat, Greece was saved from reconquest by great power intervention, and effectively rewarded for its aggression when the powers pressured Constantinople into granting Crete autonomy, with a son of the Greek king as high commissioner.
The 1890s also saw the eruption of the Macedonian question: the attempts by armed bands, armed and financed by the governments of Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria, to carve out territory in advance of any partition of this remaining corner of the Ottoman domains, by 'ethnically cleansing' entire areas of their national rivals. For years this murderous state of affairs bedevilled international politics, with the powers reluctant to sanction a predictably ferocious suppression of the bands by the Ottoman authorities, yet unable to agree on an effective international police force to maintain order in Macedonia.
In the end it was the Macedonian question, and the sultan's powerlessness to resist either Balkan nationalism or the ceaseless interference of the powers, which prompted the 'Young Turk' revolution of 1908. This final effort to reform from within, while at the same time holding the Empire together, led to a crisis over Bosnia, which the Habsburg Monarchy decided formally to annex in October 1908, to forestall Bosnian delegates being summoned to a parliament planned by the revolutionary government. Annexation nearly led to war with Serbia, where government and public opinion had long regarded Bosnia as a Serb land, but in the absence of great power backing Serbia had to accept the result, which poisoned relations thereafter. Simultaneously Bulgaria profited from the turmoil in the Ottoman Empire to proclaim its formal independence.
In 1912—13 came the final, catalytic crisis of the Balkan Wars. Encouraged by Italy's success in attacking the Ottoman Empire over Tripoli in 1911—12, and incidentally winning cession of the Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean into the bargain, Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and Bulgaria attacked the Ottomans themselves in October 1912, rolling back the Ottoman imperium almost to Constantinople. Great power intervention, again, brought the combatants to the negotiating table, but not before Bulgaria had fallen out with its allies over the division of Macedonia and attacked them in July 1913. Bulgaria's defeat, ensured by the entry of both the Ottomans and Romania against it, meant that it finished the wars with the loss of the Dobrudja to Romania and eastern Thrace to the Ottomans and was denied access to the Aegean, while Serbia and Greece took the lion's share of Macedonia. In the meantime Albania had been conjured into existence by the Habsburg Monarchy, supported by the other powers, as a counter to Serbia's doubling in size and population and to deny it access to the Adriatic. With the Ottoman dominion in the Balkans effectively at an end, the stage was set for a final confrontation between the Habsburg Monarchy and Serbia. At least, that was the reasoning of policy-makers in Vienna by the summer of 1914.
World History
