Part 17

Finally, the Italians invoke strategic reasons for demanding at least a part of Dalmatia. The Adriatic Sea forms a narrow couloir, about 400 miles in length but in places scarcely 100 miles across. The western coast of that sea, the Italian side, is almost destitute of harbors that could serve as defensive naval bases; while on the eastern side the Dalmatian coast, with its many fine ports, its protecting chains of islands, its labyrinth of back channels and concealed inner basins, offers the most marvellous basis for naval operations. Obviously, the Italian fleet, with its bases at Venice and Pola at one end of the Adriatic and Brindisi at the other, would be at a grave disadvantage as against a naval power planted midway in the couloir in the impregnable strongholds of Dalmatia. And if it is said that Yugo-Slavia is never likely to have such a fleet as would be a serious menace, the Italians reply that even a small fleet of cruisers, lurking in the recesses of the Dalmatian coast, could be a scourge to Italian commerce and to the unprotected coast of Italy only three hours distant; and for submarine bases Dalmatia offers unrivalled advantages, as the World War has shown. Hence, it is argued, Dalmatia is necessary to Italy’s security. Without it, her long and vulnerable flank will remain undefended and indefensible.

I have tried to set forth the Italian side of the Dalmatian question at some length, because it is far less simple and obvious than the Yugo-Slav standpoint. Nevertheless, I am inclined to think that the latter case is the stronger. In view of the overwhelming Yugo-Slav majority and the attitude which, from whatever cause, the Dalmatian Slavs have come to adopt towards the Italians, the assignment of any considerable part of the province to Italy would, I believe, be a grave violation of the principles of the Allies, and a source of endless embarrassments for Italy.

After a year of discussions the Italian government has come to the point where, if it can obtain a satisfactory settlement as to Fiume, it seems willing to drop its claims to Dalmatia, except for a couple of points. For strategical purposes it still demands the island of Lissa, which Mazzini called “the Malta of the Adriatic”--a claim that seems not unreasonable; and it is also apparently asking that Zara should be constituted a free city--which might be of questionable advantage for Zara.

The main contest, then, is over Fiume.

Fiume is a rather small place in proportion to the commotion it has excited in the world--a city of about 50,000 people. Who founded it or when, we do not exactly know. It appears in the later Middle Ages as a small self-governing commune of the Italian type, which in 1465 passed under the suzerainty of the Hapsburgs, and was by them treated as a part of their hereditary Austrian lands until in 1776-79 Maria Theresia, wishing to endow the Magyars with a port of their own, transferred the city to the kingdom of Hungary. Amid all these changes, the ‘Magnificent Community’ of Fiume kept up its self-government and a very strong spirit of local independence. Indeed, down to a few years ago, at least, the only patriotism that the Fiumani knew was an intense love for their own little city. This spirit helped to preserve them from ever falling under the rule of Venice or any other Italian state; and, equally, it led them to fight strenuously at various times against the incorporation of their city in the kingdom of Croatia, which the Diet of Agram was always trying to put through. On the other hand, they long accepted with enthusiasm the union with Hungary, which did not seem to threaten their independence and which brought great economic advantages to their city as the single port of the Magyar kingdom.

As far back as we can trace it, the population of Fiume seems always to have been a mixed one--in part Croatian, in part Italian. It could hardly be otherwise with a city whose hinterland was solidly Croatian, but whose commercial relations were mainly with Italy. Hence it appears that the lower classes of the population were always chiefly Croats, constantly replenished from the country districts, while the upper classes were partly of the one race, partly of the other. But Italian was the language of society, of business, and of government, and to it the citizens were much attached. During the struggles of the period between 1848 and 1867, when annexation to Croatia was always staring them in the face, the municipal authorities again and again petitioned the Emperor not to permit the violation of “the sacred rights of the Italian language,” “the tongue that has been spoken here ever since Fiume existed.” “It would be superfluous,” they declare, “to demonstrate what is universally known, that in Fiume the Italian idiom has for centuries been the language of the school, of the forum, of commerce, of every public and private meeting; in short, it is the language of the community, and one of the chief sources to which it owes its grade of culture and of commercial and industrial progress.”

Two races living together in harmony, untouched by any national feeling, swayed only by love of their city-state, devotion to its time-honored customs, including the use of the Italian language, and zeal for the connection with Hungary, on which their economic prosperity depended--these conditions began to break down after 1867. The great development of the port carried out by the Hungarian government brought in a flood of new citizens--mainly Italians, since the Magyars favored that element. It was at this time that the Italians seem to have gained the numerical preponderance in the city. Then, in the last few decades, the importation of Magyars set in, at such a rate that the Italian ruling class in alarm concluded that the government at Budapest was bent on Magyarizing the city and that their connection with Hungary was not so comfortable after all. Hence there arose a new Italo-Magyar conflict to complicate the struggle that had already broken out between the Italians and the Yugo-Slavs. Now at last the Italian-speaking population began to turn their eyes across the Adriatic for liberators, and the Croat-speaking citizens began to sigh for the Yugo-Slav fatherland.

In the Fiume problem, as it presents itself today, the respective rôles of the Italians and the Yugo-Slavs are just the opposite of what they are in Dalmatia. In the case of Fiume, the Italian argument rests solely on the rights of nationality and the alleged wishes of the population.

The Italians point out, in the first place, that at the last Hungarian census (in 1910) the city contained about 24,000 Italians (not counting 6000 subjects of the kingdom of Italy), as against 16,000 Yugo-Slavs. To this the Yugo-Slavs retort that the Italian majority has been built up in the last few decades through the deliberate policy of the Magyar government; and that if the suburb of Sušak, which is practically part of the city, and the adjacent rural district were reckoned into the account, the Fiume territory would contain as many Yugo-Slavs as Italians.

Secondly, the Italians lay great weight upon the declarations of the National Council of Fiume and upon a plebiscite held in the city soon after the Armistice, as voicing the desire of the Fiumani to be united to Italy. The Yugo-Slavs deny that either of these things can be taken as a free and genuine expression of the wishes of the inhabitants.

At any rate, the Yugo-Slavs rest their argument mainly on other grounds. They maintain that Fiume is as naturally soldered on to their new state as Marseilles is to France; that this is the only satisfactory port on the Adriatic that that state can obtain; that its control by Italy would mean an intolerable subjection of Yugo-Slavia to her neighbor; and that it is inconceivable that their one good port should be taken away from them simply because within the walls of the city itself, not counting in the suburbs on which it vitally depends, Magyar machinations have built up an artificial plurality of barely 8000 Italians.

The Italians, of course, assert that farther south the Adriatic coast is full of good harbors, which could amply provide for the rather scanty trade of Yugo-Slavia. But it must be admitted that the mountain wall, which lines the coast from Fiume southward to the Drin, opposes very great obstacles to the opening up of a satisfactory outlet through the Dalmatian ports. At present there is, south of Fiume, only a single railway through to the coast--the wretched, winding rack-and-pinion road which comes down from Bosnia to Metković and Ragusa. It would be extremely difficult and expensive to develop and operate this line as a first-class railroad, and to link it up with the various parts of the Yugo-Slav state. Undoubtedly Fiume is the natural gate of Yugo-Slavia to the West; it is the only port that is well equipped today and that could easily adapt itself to the existing lines of communication. Even granted that another outlet could be developed farther south, it would require many years’ time and the expenditure of millions of dollars to bring this about.

It was, I think, because of the undeniable weight of such considerations, and in order that the new, poor, struggling state of the Yugo-Slavs should not be terribly handicapped at the outset by being denied that secure access to the sea for which Serbia had fought so long, that the American delegation at Paris took the stand it did on the Fiume question.

After going through many phases and fluctuations, this question appears to be at least appreciably nearer to a solution. The margin of difference between the two sides has now been reduced to a few points. If Italy gives way altogether on Dalmatia, it would seem only fair that the Yugo-Slavs should make some concessions as to Fiume, providing their economic interests can be reasonably insured. And it cannot be too strongly desired that if a compromise can be effected, the Yugo-Slavs recognizing their great debt to Italy, and the Italians recognizing the right to unity and independence of Yugo-Slavia, the two nations should go back to that attitude of mutual respect, coöperation, and fraternity which was the ideal of the noblest and most far-sighted Italian statesman of the nineteenth century, the great Mazzini.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Probably the best history of Hungary available in any Western language is that by E. Sayous: _Histoire générale des Hongrois_, Budapest, 1900.

Conditions in Hungary before the War are described from the Magyar point of view in: Percy Alden (ed.), _Hungary of Today. By members of the Hungarian Government_. (Apponyi, Kossuth, Wekerle, etc.) London, 1909. C. M. Knatchbull-Hugessen, _The Political Evolution of the Hungarian Nation_. 2 vols. London, 1908.

The author who has done more than any other one man, perhaps, to expose the tyranny of the old Magyar regime to the Western public, is R. W. Seton-Watson, who at first wrote under the pseudonym of ‘Scotus Viator.’ His chief books on this subject are: _Racial Problems in Hungary_, London, 1908; _Corruption and Reform in Hungary: a study of electoral practice_, _ibid._, 1911; _The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy_, _ibid._, 1911.

The Roumanian problem in Hungary naturally forms a chief topic in another recent work by Mr. Seton-Watson: _Roumania and the Great War_, London, 1915. Other noteworthy expositions of Roumania’s claims to what was eastern Hungary are to be found in: M. R. Sirianu, _La Question de Transylvanie et l’unité politique roumaine_. Paris, 1916. D. Draghicesco, _Les problèmes nationaux de l’Autriche-Hongrie. Les Roumains_. Paris, 1918. N. P. Comnène, _Roumania through the Ages. An historical, political, and ethnographical atlas_. Paris, 1919.

A rather copious literature has grown up lately around the Yugo-Slav movement. Among the most useful works on that subject are: A. H. E. Taylor, _The Future of the Southern Slavs_. New York, 1917. V. R. Savić, _South-Eastern Europe_. New York, 1918. E. Denis, _La grande Serbie_. Paris, 1915. R. J. Kerner, _The Jugo-Slav Movement_. Cambridge, Mass., 1918.

* * * * *

For Italian views on the group of questions relating to the Adriatic provinces, one would turn especially to: V. Gayda, _L’Italia d’oltre confini_. Turin, 1914. A. Tamaro, _Italiani e Slavi nell’Adriatico_. Rome, 1915. ***, _L’Adriatico. Studio geografico, storico, e politico_. Milan, 1915. Adriacus. _From Trieste to Valona. The Adriatic Problem and Italy’s Aspirations_. Milan, 1919. G. Dainelli, _La Dalmazia, sua italianità, suo valore per la libertà d’Italia nell’Adriatico_. Genoa, 1915. Dainelli has also published a useful atlas of Dalmatia, entitled _La Dalmazia. Cenni geografici e statistici_. Novara, 1918. A. Hodnig, _Fiume italiana e la sua funzione antigermanica_. Rome, 1917. G. Depoli, _Fiume e la Liburnia_. Bari, 1919.

On the Fiume question it is also useful to consult V. Tomsich, _Notizie storiche sulla città di Fiume_, Fiume, 1886 (the fullest history of the city. Written in a vein of intense local patriotism, in the spirit of the old Fiumano independence party); Sišić, _Abrégé de l’histoire politique de Rieka-Fiume_, Paris, 1919 (review of the history from the Croatian point of view); and the brochure _Fiume_, arguing for Yugo-Slav claims, published at Paris in 1916 by Count Voinovitch and others.

FOOTNOTES:

[57] While these pages were going through the press, the peace treaty with Hungary was signed on June 4 at the palace of the Grand Trianon at Versailles.

[58] H. Wickham Steed, _Edinburgh Review_, vol. 222, p. 234.

VIII

THE BALKANS

It was in the Balkans that the World War started; control of the Balkans was one of the primary objects for which the Central Powers fought; through the intervention of our Balkan opponents, Turkey and Bulgaria, the War was prolonged far beyond what would probably otherwise have been the case; and it was in the Balkans that the victory of the Entente was earliest and, perhaps, most decisively won.

Nevertheless, the War has produced, or is likely to produce, fewer and much less sweeping changes of territory in the Balkans than in the case of Austria-Hungary or Germany. It will probably alter the map of the Peninsula less than did almost any other of the Balkan cataclysms of the last hundred years. That is partly because one of our late enemies, the Sick Man on the Bosporus, had already handed over so much of his estate to his impatient heirs that in Europe at least very little remains to be liquidated; while our other enemy at Sofia possessed very little land that was not Bulgarian in population, and it was not the policy of the Allies to take away territory simply by way of retribution. But the main reason why no very large alterations of frontiers are now in process, is that the most contentious territorial questions of the Peninsula were settled by the two Balkan wars of 1912-13 and the ensuing Peace of Bucharest. Whether they were rightly settled at that time is a topic to which I may revert a little later. At any rate, they were settled in a sense favorable to our allies, Greece, Serbia, and Roumania. And the most salient feature of the Balkan settlement made by the Conference at Paris is that it essentially confirms the settlement made by the Peace of Bucharest.

Bulgaria escapes with far slighter losses than any other member of the defeated alliance. Nevertheless, she is quite as indignant as any of the rest of them over the peace treaty imposed upon her (the treaty signed at Neuilly, November 27, 1919). But she is indignant, not so much over what she has lost, as over what she has failed to gain. There is, of course, not a little irony in the fact that at the close of a war which she entered so perfidiously, conducted so brutally, and ended so disastrously, Bulgaria should still be clamoring that to the vanquished belong the spoils, and should be demanding that the Entente hand over to her, at the expense of its Greek and Serbian allies, the lands which she hoped to gain by fighting throughout the War on the side of the Germans. But there is another way of looking at the matter. Bulgaria and her many friends abroad regard the Peace of Bucharest as a monstrous iniquity--the dismemberment of the Bulgarian nation at the hands of its rapacious neighbors. Therefore, it is argued, at a time when the victorious Allies are remaking the map of Europe on the basis of the principle of nationality and of impartial even-handed justice, it is only right that ‘the crime of 1913’ should be undone, and that Bulgaria should be allowed to attain her national unity, as Greece, Serbia, and Roumania are doing in such rich measure. And unless that is done, it is said, there can be no stable peace in the Balkans.

Since the discussion of the new settlement thus turns largely on the merits of the Peace of Bucharest, it is necessary to revert briefly to the main facts connected with that treaty.

In the First Balkan War (1912-13), the four small allies--Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro--had brought the Turkish giant to earth with an ease and rapidity that astonished the world, and themselves, perhaps, most of all. By the peace treaty signed at London May 30, 1913, all of the Turkish possessions in Europe were ceded to the victors, except for the district along the Straits, bounded by the famous Enos-Midia line, which was to be left to the Sultan, and Albania, which was to be made independent--the one case in history of a people that owes its liberty to Austria-Hungary. As everyone remembers, there then arose a dispute among the victors as to the distribution of the spoils. While negotiations were still going on and the other states were willing to accept the proffered arbitration of Russia, Bulgaria, carried away by a truly Prussian arrogance and recklessness, attempted to seize what she wanted by suddenly and treacherously attacking her late allies. This precipitated the Second Balkan War, in which the despised Greeks and Serbs were completely victorious, while Roumania and Turkey also intervened to complete Bulgaria’s discomfiture. The upshot was the Peace of Bucharest, of August 10, 1913.

By that famous treaty, Macedonia, the chief object of the dispute, was divided up between Serbia and Greece, the former taking the northern and central parts, the latter the southern and southeastern. Bulgaria received only a small fragment of Macedonia--the Strumica salient--together with some territory in Western Thrace, which gave her a narrow frontage on the Aegean and the two mediocre harbors of Porto Lago and Dedeagach. Eastern Thrace, including Adrianople, was restored to Turkey. Finally, Bulgaria had to cede to Roumania the territory called the Southern Dobrudja.

The net result was, in the first place, a great shift in the Balkan balance of power in favor of Greece and Serbia, both of which had formerly been far smaller and weaker than Bulgaria, but both of which, after nearly doubling their territories, had now virtually caught up with their neighbor; and, secondly, that Bulgaria came forth from the crisis mortally exasperated over the loss of her old territory in the Dobrudja and of the new territories she had hoped to gain in Thrace and Macedonia. It is, above all, the Macedonian question that has rankled in her mind ever since. For many decades Macedonia has been the Promised Land to the Bulgars: it has undoubtedly meant for them at least as much as Alsace and Lorraine to the French. Once they had had it in their grasp, in 1878 when Russia won it for them by the treaty of San Stefano--and then the Congress of Berlin restored it to Turkey. Again in 1912 they believed that they had secured it--and it was taken away from them by their allies. A third time they had it, during the present War,--and the Peace Conference has restored it to Greece and Serbia, in accordance with the Peace of Bucharest.

What are the rights and wrongs in the case? Has the Peace Conference simply perpetuated a great injustice, repeated the mistake of the Congress of Berlin, deprived the Bulgarians of a province which is theirs by right of nationality and without which they can never rest?

The Macedonian question has been before the world a sufficiently long time to have thoroughly wearied most people of it, perhaps, but not long enough to produce a clear understanding or any real unanimity of opinion about it. It presents, on the one hand, such a medley of jarring races, long-standing animosities, and ever-recurring atrocities, and, on the other hand, such a jumble of ethnographic riddles, philological controversies, psychological uncertainties, unreliable statistics, assertions and counter-assertions flatly contradictory on every point, that one almost despairs of an idea as to how it ought to be settled, or of the hope of ever seeing it settled at all.

Macedonia contained in 1910--nobody knows what it contains now, after the last three wars--over two million people, including about 1,300,000 Slavs, 300,000 Greeks, and scattered minorities of Turks, Albanians, Vlachs, Jews, and Gypsies. The Greeks predominate in the south and southeast, and can make out a very good claim on ethnographic grounds to most of that part of Macedonia which they acquired in 1913. The dispute turns much more upon central and northern Macedonia, where the Slavs predominate, and upon the question whether these Slavs ought to be considered as mainly Bulgarians or Serbs.

For the elucidation of this question, it is necessary to go very far afield. When the Southern Slavs first settled in the Balkans, they formed a great, undifferentiated mass, stretching from the Alps and the Adriatic to the Aegean and the Black Sea--a mass of ethnographic raw material out of which almost any number of ‘nations’ and ‘languages’ might have been developed in accordance with the accidents of history. As it turned out, two centres of political crystallization arose--a northeastern centre, in the region between the Balkan Mountains and the Danube, where a Turanian people called Bulgars organized the Slavs into a state to which they--the original Bulgars--contributed little except the name and the ruling class; and a northwestern centre of crystallization in Serbia and Montenegro. The modern Serb and the modern Bulgarian nations are closely akin in language and in blood, although the Bulgars have a certain Turanian strain in them, while the Serbs boast of being ‘pure Slavs.’ Sprung from substantially the same stock, the two nations have throughout their history vied with each other in trying to draw to themselves as large as possible a part of their kinsmen; and it is not surprising if the Macedonian Slavs, lying midway between the two centres of gravitation, have been attracted, now to the one and now to the other, without ever apparently taking on completely the imprint of either.