H-Diplo Article Review 912 on “The Policy of Serbian Expansion, with Specific Reference to Albanians in the Decade Preceding the Balkan Wars.”

Home , Serbian Militia, Syrmia

H-Diplo H-Diplo Article Review 912 on “The Policy of Serbian Expansion, with Specific Reference to Albanians in the Decade Preceding the Balkan Wars.”

Discussion published by George Fujii on Wednesday, December 18, 2019

H-Diplo Article Review No. 912 18 December 2019

Article Review Editors: Cindy Ewing and Diane Labrosse Web and Production Editor: George Fujii

Ethem Çeku. “The Policy of Serbian Expansion, with Specific Reference to Albanians in the Decade Preceding the Balkan Wars.” The International History Review 41:1 (2019): 23-38. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2017.1402802.

URL: https://hdiplo.org/to/AR912

Review by Roger R. Reese, Texas A&M University

As the title indicates, the theme of this article is Serbia’s desire to absorb Albania and its actions toward making that dream a reality. Most of the literature on Serbian diplomacy and territorial desires in the Balkans prior to the First World War focuses primarily on Serbia’s conflict with Austria- Hungary over Bosnia-Herzegovina and, secondarily, with its rivalry with Bulgaria over Macedonia. Seldom are Serb ambitions for Albania and an Adriatic seaport explored. What this article makes clear is that before the Balkan wars of 1912-1913, Serbian leaders focused a great deal of its diplomatic and subversive activity on Kosovo, which they termed “Old Serbia” (23) with an eye toward gaining access to the Adriatic. This article informs the reader of those ambitions, and both describes the steps the Serbs took and puts them in the context of the general unrest in the Balkans of which Serbia was but one of several players, if not the most prominent. Though this well- researched article does not present a readily identifiable thesis, leaving the readers to come their own conclusions, its value lies in turning our attention to a neglected area of Serb ambition and activity that contributed to the instability of the Balkans and foreshadowed the troubles to come following the First World War through the 1990s.

Although it is well known that Serbs had the goal of independence from the Ottoman empire and the reestablishment of their old medieval kingdom, which had ceased to exist two decades before the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, Çeku, using published documents on the foreign affairs of the Kingdom of Serbia as well as other Serbian primary and secondary sources, goes well beyond the case of Albania to show, rather than argue, that Serb tactics to recreate the medieval kingdom of Serbia in the Balkans were guided by Nacertanije written by Ilija Garasanin in 1844, even before Serbia became a sovereign state. He shows thatNacertanije , which outlined the Serb intent to create a Serb-

Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Article Review 912 on “The Policy of Serbian Expansion, with Specific Reference to Albanians in the Decade Preceding the Balkan Wars.” . H-Diplo. 12-18-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/5548487/h-diplo-article-review-912-%E2%80%9C-policy-serbian-expansion-specific Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Diplo dominated Balkans in the event of the demise of Ottoman control, continued to influence Serb thinking into the late twentieth century. The boundaries of the kingdom, in the diplomatic workings of Serbian officials, were not just the boundaries of the old kingdom, but were wherever Serbs lived, even if they were not in the majority. The tactics included manipulating both the great powers with an interest in the Balkans, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottomans, as well as the local populations against the great powers. The intent, once Serbia acquired its desired territories, was to either “Serbify” the non-Serb populations, or drive them out—a foreshadowing of the ethnic cleansing of the 1990s.

Inspired by Nacertanije, Serbia created a system of state agents who reported on affairs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and northern Albania. They also had agents in Slavonia, Croatia, and Dalmatia, including Syrmia, the Banat, and Backa. By the early twentieth century, Serbia had created an intelligence network in almost all neighboring countries, and especially in the Ottoman territories of the Balkans, whose agents were instructed by Belgrade on where to go, who to observe, and what information to collect in order to give the Serbs important advantages in their diplomatic work.

The Serbs presented themselves to the other Balkan peoples as potential liberators from the Ottomans, but in reality, they sought to displace the Ottomans as rulers rather than setting the peoples free. Essentially, according to Çeku, Garasanin’s plan at the time of the writing of Nacertanije and then carried forward by the next generation of Serb nationalists, “aimed primarily at annexing territories and then cleansing them, homogenising the Serbian population in the process” (25). In the nineteenth century cleansing meant forcing out the Turks and “Turkified” Balkan peoples.

The author shows how the Serbs alternately used diplomacy with the Austro-Hungarians to weaken Ottoman control over Albania, and then with Ottomans and the Russians in attempts to limit Austrian influence in Albania and Macedonia. At the turn of the century they created, armed, funded, and directed revolutionary bands in Macedonia to oppose the Bulgarians. Then, in 1908, the Serbian government planned the steps to be taken in order to achieve its aims in Kosovo and Macedonia. The plan proposed the disarming of the Albanian population, defining the borders of ‘Old Serbia,’ the opening of a consulate in Pec, and creating a Serbian militia and gendarmerie in Kosovo. At the same time, Serbia continued to send army officers into Kosovo in order to organize Chetnik bands, and used consular circles in Kosovo and Macedonia to distribute weapons to those bands. Although the Albanians were not happy under Ottoman rule, they had no intention of being taken by Serbia, and had their own aspirations for autonomy. It was only Russian instructions “to remain calm and not undertake any action that might provoke Austria-Hungary because this would be suicidal,” and the Russian declaration that “Russia could not and would not enter a war with Austria-Hungary over Bosnia and Herzegovina,” that kept Serbia from initiating insurrection and war to seize Kosovo in the aftermath of Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (32). In the meantime, in 1909 the Albanians in Kosovo began their own series of revolts against the Ottomans, which continued into 1911. At that point, the great powers intervened and supported a Turkish plan to extend autonomy to the Albanians, a plan vigorously opposed by Serbian leaders because they feared that since this would mean defying the great powers without Russian support, it would prevent them from taking Kosovo. The formation of the Balkan League and the outbreak of the Balkan Wars finally secured Kosovo for Serbia, but the entirety of Albania was not to be had and Serbia did not get its access to the sea.

Roger R. Reese is Professor of History at Texas A&M University, where he has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on modern European, Russian, and Soviet history since 1990. His research specialty is the social history of the Soviet Red Army and the Imperial Russian Army. He has authored numerous articles in addition to his books: Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers (University Press of Kansas, 1996), The Soviet Military Experience (Routledge, 2000), Red Commanders (University Press of Kansas, 2005), Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought (University Press of Kansas, 2011), and The Russian Imperial Army in Peace, War, and Revolution, 1856-1917 (University Press of Kansas, 2019).