In 1878, representatives of Europe’s major powers convened in the capital of the new German nation-state for negotiations that bear all the hallmarks of the more famous effort in decolonization and democratization that transpired at Paris after World War I. At Berlin in 1878, statesmen determined the boundaries, constitutions, sovereigns, and even citizenship of four national states, which like Poland or Czechoslovakia in 1919, had to be created in the wake of imperial decline so as to secure Europe’s balance of power. We date the independence of modern Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia from July 1878.
But in the interests of balance, the statesmen in Berlin traduced the spirit of nationalism by denying to Serbia territory where a plurality of the inhabitants was Orthodox South Slavs. That was Bosnia-Herzegovina, a quilt of ethnicities, which Austria-Hungary was permitted to occupy in 1878 with no purpose other than making sure it did not go to Serbia. Politicians in Vienna and Budapest viewed the prospect of a “great South Slav state” with horror, all the more so as it promised to be a close ally of Russia.
Some have called this frustrated Serb determination to expand “irredentist,” and that is both correct and misleading. The characterization is correct because Serbia felt there were Serbs beyond its boundaries who had to be included, but it is also misleading in suggesting that this agenda was unusual. In fact, every new state, beginning with Italy (where the word “irredentism” originated) and Germany, was irredentist in the sense that it “redeemed” national territory. Piedmont-Sardinia had not been Italy, nor was Prussia Germany. Without irredentism, there would be no Serbia, or any other new East European state, whether created in 1878 or 1919. Therefore, it is not hard to understand the tremendous affront that many Serbs, in and outside Serbia, felt after 1878.
But where Austria-Hungary was concerned, it was not only an affront but also the bizarre act of a troubled imperial state, now taking millions more Slavs under its rule, just a decade after dividing into Austria-Hungary precisely to keep a lid on the empire’s Slavs. But even more intriguingly and confoundingly, the man who negotiated the inclusion of more Serbs and Croats, as well as millions of Bosnian Muslims, was the beautiful hanged man, Count Gyula Andrássy, who became the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister in 1871, and whose own Hungary was trying to make loyal Magyars out of millions of Slovaks, Serbs, Ruthenes, and Croats. Before the Compromise of 1867, Magyar politicians had assured representatives of those groups that their rights would be legally guaranteed. Afterward, those promises were forgotten, and demands for national autonomy were treated as seditious. Austria was not Germanizing its population, but German liberals were deeply concerned about the growing numerical superiority of Slavs. Now Vienna and Budapest took responsibility for 3 million more. How could they possibly make them into loyal citizens?
This story takes place in three acts. The first is the last major uprising of a Christian people against Ottoman rule in Europe, the Herzegovinian rebellion of 1875. The acts of Herzegovinian and then Bosnian peasants generated the pressures leading to the Berlin Congress. The second is the sanguineous military campaigns of Serbia, Montenegro, and Russia against the Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1878, whose success triggered concern among the European powers about the growth of Russian and the decline of Ottoman power. The third is the Berlin Congress itself and how the European powers rescued peace as well as Austria-Hungary, largely by extending their blessings to four new states, each of which considered itself not an end product but rather a toehold from which the respective ethnic nation would expand.
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Internationally, the Congress of Berlin was a major step toward the twentieth century, perhaps its inaugural event. The Congress took a principle implicit in the 1830 London Protocol founding modern Greece—that an ethnicity could be a source of sovereignty—and multiplied it by four. By implication, it also adumbrated the idea of minorities, people in the nation-state who did not belong to the nation and required protection. The idea that ethnicity was the basis of the right to rule—a principle later called national self-determination—had been foreign to the Vienna system of 1815. Berlin was not just a halfway point; it was a rupture with that system. What changed in Paris in 1919 was to make the new principle not simply a result of grudging acceptance, but an explicit and valid—indeed, universal—method of organizing statehood.
For South East European peoples, the events of 1875–1878 had a meaning like that of 1848 in Bohemia: after initial uprisings, events soon cascaded in a way that forced choices about self-identification. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Orthodox still called themselves Bosnians but increasingly desired attachment to Montenegro or Serbia, while Catholics opted for Austria and more clearly than ever identified as Croats. Religious identity was a starting place but not an endpoint; the participants in the 1875 uprising knew that they were united by religion against the “occupier” and were picking up a script from earlier in the century, when Christian populations in Serbia and Greece had likewise risen up and begun carving out autonomous zones from Ottoman territory. Yet the issue was not religion per se—the insurgents did not care about suppression of worship or doctrine—but a sense that religious belonging had condemned much of the population to subservience.
Did Bosnian identity ever stand a chance as a form of nationhood? “Of the basic criteria by which the Serb and Croat nations established themselves during this period, history, language, and religion,” writes Noel Malcolm, “only religion could apply in Bosnia, a country which had its own separate history.” But in fact, history (that is, people’s consciousness of the past) ignored the boundaries of Bosnia and focused instead on a past that Orthodox South Slavs in Bosnia believed they shared with Orthodox South Slavs in Serbia. According to epic poetry, the common history stretched back to the 1389 Kosovo battle and earlier.
In Bosnia, Orthodox and Muslims had separate imaginations: the former told stories in oral poetry of their coreligionists deceiving Turkish authorities; the latter of theirs outwitting the Austrians. And if advocates for Serb nationhood in Bosnia were inspired by the romantic nationalism that was popular at Central Europe’s universities and understood language as a people’s soul, they had to look no further than Vuk Karadžić, who had based his Serb dictionary on a dialect in Herzegovina. Against Karadžić, Benjamin Kállay had not stood a chance; probably ten times the number of schools he built would not have resulted in the Bosnian identity he intended.
If Bosnian identity amounted to anything, it was the beginning of a strategy for Muslims to oppose complete assimilation by Serb and Croat nationalism, each of which expected co-nationals to become Christian, at least nominally. What the Bosnian and Romanian stories share is a hint that twentieth-century European nationalism was vigorously and exclusively Christian, even when its carriers were fiercely secular.
Far Outliers 