Events in the Balkans, and the wider ‘Eastern question’ presented by the decline of Ottoman power in the region, generated considerable political and humanitarian concern in the ‘age of empire’.Footnote 1 British liberal engagement with the Balkans, shaped by the famous agitation movement in response to Ottoman ‘atrocities’ in Bulgaria in 1876, was particularly strong. A later traveller to the region, Rebecca West, felt that ‘the problems of India and Africa never produced anything like the jungle of savage pamphlets that sprang up in the footsteps of the Liberals who visited Turkey-in-Europe under the inspiration of Gladstone’.Footnote 2 Implicit in West's remark is an important question about British interaction with the Balkans: why did a matter of European policy produce such a ‘jungle of savage pamphlets’ in a period when Britain's imperial challenges and responsibilities were at their peak? How did political engagement with the Balkans relate to empire and imperialism?
In considering these points, this article seeks to contribute to a wider historiographical debate about the relationship between ‘Europe’, empire, and internationalism in British political culture.Footnote 3 The impact of European affairs on British liberal politics has been underlined in studies of the High Victorian period.Footnote 4 Yet, as one such study argues, by the end of the nineteenth century ‘a much more hard-headed, essentially Tory language of empire…put Liberalism on the defensive’.Footnote 5 The ‘new imperial history’ of the last decade or so, meanwhile, has done much to enhance our appreciation of the wide-ranging impact of the empire (and the colonial world more broadly) over British domestic society and culture.Footnote 6 Yet the ‘imperial turn’ should not involve turning away from Europe altogether. There has always been an important body of scholarship premised on the conviction that ‘British imperial policy only made sense within the context of international relations’ and which has approached British imperialism as an aspect of its foreign policy as a European power.Footnote 7 This article suggests that a synthesis can be forged between this ‘traditional’ approach and more recent post-colonial perspectives.
The Balkans and the Ottoman world provide an apposite context for ‘putting Europe back in’ to the relationship between empire and metropole in early twentieth-century Britain. In a recent collection of essays, the region is listed as a part of the globe that ‘fell awkwardly between the two poles of the civilised and the barbarian’ as far as liberals were concerned.Footnote 8 The fate of the Ottoman empire and its successor states at this time, another study notes, ‘exemplified the ambivalent process’ through which ‘barbaric’ states might (or might not) be brought into the ‘magic circle’ of civilization.Footnote 9 Davide Rodogno's Against massacre notes similarities between humanitarian intervention in the Ottoman lands and contemporaneous campaigns against human rights abuses in colonial Africa – similarities that this article suggests are worth exploring in detail.Footnote 10
There is also a considerable body of work on British representations of the Balkans, drawing heavily on post-colonial approaches and in particular the work of Edward Said.Footnote 11 Yet, rather than pointing to what linked the Balkans to the ‘imaginative geographies’ of empire, these studies have actually tended to stress what distinguished the discourse of ‘balkanism’ from that of ‘orientalism’.Footnote 12 This is a perfectly valid approach. The Balkan peninsula, whilst often portrayed as a semi-Oriental and liminal borderzone, has nevertheless just about managed to retain its status as part of ‘Europe’. The colonial rule under which it spent over five centuries of its history was that of a Muslim power over a supposedly ‘Christian’ land (albeit one with significant non-Christian populations) – the inverse of the rule of the European imperial powers and, as Vesna Goldsworthy notes, ‘the mirror image of the types of colonization normally studied in the framework of literature’.Footnote 13 The ‘burden of the Balkans’ created by the region's complex national questions, religious and ethnic tensions, and political instability cannot be seen simply as a variant of the ‘White Man's Burden’ of empire.Footnote 14
Nevertheless, whilst drawing attention to the specific challenges presented by the Balkans to the British liberal mind, this article argues that engagement with the region was part of a much broader culture of political campaigning and argument. It considers the intersection between Balkan questions and empire through the example of the political activism of the Balkan Committee, the main hub for British liberal interest in the region in the decade before the First World War. The issues around which the committee campaigned are related to humanitarian protests against the use of forced labour in tropical Africa, in particular the Congo Reform Association (CRA), as well as to the activities of the Persia Committee, formed to protest against the 1907 Anglo-Russian Agreement over Persia. It is argued that political interest in the Balkans and political interest in imperial and colonial policy were not mutually exclusive, and that approaches to ‘Europe’ and ‘empire’ were essentially interconnected aspects of one overarching liberal-internationalist worldview and reformist conscience.
I
Formed in 1903 by the reformist politicians Noel and Charles Buxton to co-ordinate public and parliamentary criticism of British foreign policy towards the region, the Balkan Committee was an emphatically liberal organization. Of the sixty-four MPs listed as supporters in its annual report for 1906, fifty-five were liberals and just three were conservatives (admittedly, of course, in a liberal-dominated parliament).Footnote 15 A further six MP supporters came from the Labour party, including Ramsay MacDonald, with whom, Noel Buxton recalled, ‘we were all sympathetic’.Footnote 16 Yet, the committee was by no means ‘anti-Establishment’, counting the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishops of Hereford, Lincoln, Worcester, and Oxford, and several peers amongst its members and supporters. There was room within the committee's brand of political activism for more radical critics of British foreign policy, such as the journalists Henry Brailsford and Henry Nevinson. Yet, for all Buxton's commitment as a young man to ‘slumming’ and spending time amongst the poor of Whitechapel, as H. N. Fieldhouse has observed, his correspondence still evokes ‘a world for which England north of the Trent exists only to provide safe Liberal seats’.Footnote 17
In terms of its activities and agenda, the committee railed against the indifference displayed by successive British governments towards the fate of the population that had remained under Ottoman rule after the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. Its primary focus was ‘Macedonia’ – that part of the ‘Big Bulgaria’ fashioned by the Treaty of St Stefano (March 1878) that had been promptly returned to Ottoman rule at Berlin three months later. In August 1903, a revolt under the leadership of local nationalist movement IMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization) was suppressed with a violence that rekindled memories of the infamous ‘Bulgarian horrors’ of 1876. Although diplomatic pressure led to the appointment of a team of European officers to oversee the local administration, the Balkan Committee condemned the half-hearted application of this reform programme and pressed repeatedly for the British government to adopt a stronger stance: ‘If concert is to continue…let GB be conductor’, as Arthur Ponsonby – who would emerge as one of the most vocal radical critics of British foreign policy – noted at the time in preparing to address the House of Commons on the subject for what was his maiden parliamentary speech.Footnote 18
Noel Buxton recalled that the committee and its supporters ‘secured public notice here and abroad in a measure out of all proportion to our diminutive numbers’.Footnote 19 Over 300 public meetings were held on Macedonia in the autumn of 1903 alone, for example, and the committee had a significant presence within the networks of debate over foreign affairs in Edwardian Britain.Footnote 20 Brailsford reported from Macedonia for the Manchester Guardian, and both he and Nevinson contributed regularly to the Speaker and its successor the Nation at this time, as well as to the Daily News, whose editor, A. G. Gardiner, was another prominent supporter. Memos and resolutions were routinely sent to the Foreign Office; a deputation to the foreign secretary headed by the archbishop of Canterbury in July 1907 was considered sufficiently important to merit a lengthy statement in defence of British policy.Footnote 21 Arthur Evans, R. W. Seton-Watson, Ronald Burrows, and Arnold Toynbee were all associated with the committee in this period, and all either were already or would shortly become recognized authorities on international questions. The extent to which this actually translated into policy influence is considered further below, but if, as Eugene Michail has recently argued, Balkan questions occupied ‘a central place in the broader history of the rise of international experts on foreign affairs at the turn of the century’, this is in no small part due to the efforts of the Buxtons and their supporters.Footnote 22
II
The situation in Macedonia was not, however, discussed in isolation. Rather, it was part of a wider movement of liberal humanitarianism and political activism towards international questions. The association of the Macedonian question with the Congo reform campaign was particularly explicit – Macedonia was described in the House of Commons by the ‘new liberal’ MP, historian, and journalist G. P. Gooch as ‘the Congo of Europe’. It was common for public meetings and parliamentary speeches to denounce the ‘outrages’ in both territories.Footnote 23 As Davide Rodogno notes, there was a significant degree of cross-pollination between the two movements in terms of the political networks and cultural memories on which they drew.Footnote 24 Reflecting the reverence within Edwardian political culture for the triumphant abolitionist campaigns of the previous centuries, and amidst the controversy over ‘Chinese slavery’ in South Africa, Macedonian peasants were often depicted as an enslaved population; those who campaigned on their behalf saw themselves as ‘liberationists’.Footnote 25 For Noel Buxton, the Balkan Committee followed in the traditions of the more celebrated example of the political activism of the family provided by his great-grandfather, the abolitionist campaigner Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton (‘the Liberator’).Footnote 26 For Henry Nevinson, who led a long-running campaign at this time to expose the slave trade in Portuguese Angola, those who questioned the right of Britain to interfere in the treatment of the ‘subject races’ of other states were simply repeating ‘the same cry as was raised when the right of slave-owners to “wallop their niggers” was first questioned’. Having abolished slavery in her own colonies, it was argued elsewhere, Britain ‘ought not now to shrink from remedying a state of things, in regard to Macedonia, for which she more than any other was responsible’.Footnote 27
This sense of national responsibility and guilt – even, in more overtly religious rhetoric, a sense of sin – provides another clear point of intersection between the Macedonian question, the earlier abolitionist campaigns, and contemporaneous colonial reform movements. As Kevin Grant has highlighted, the CRA stressed Britain's responsibilities regarding the Congo Free State as a signatory of the 1885 Berlin Act, which had sought to regulate European colonization and trade in tropical Africa. In a similar vein, the campaign against slavery in Angola underscored, nowhere more effectively than in Nevinson's journalism, the humanitarian cost of the British public's consumption of cheap cocoa. In the case of Macedonia, as far as the Balkan Committee was concerned, the region would already be ‘liberated’ had British diplomacy not acquiesced to its return to the Ottoman yoke in 1878. To press firmly for the liberation of Macedonia ‘would relieve the national conscience of a burden which has not wholly been forgotten’ the Buxtons affirmed.Footnote 28
This burden had a long history, dating back beyond the Eastern Crisis of 1875–8 to the ‘backing of the wrong horse’ in the Crimean War.Footnote 29 By the 1900s, however, there was a new dimension to British liberalism's guilty Balkan conscience. The Macedonian question was not only a moral crusade comparable to campaigns against other European powers’ imperial misrule in Africa, it also fed off what Davide Rodogno identifies as an ‘unasked question’ within British politics following the Boer War: ‘Were British authorities acting towards Christian Boers (and African heathen populations) as the Ottoman authorities did towards Ottoman Christians?’Footnote 30 The ‘pro-Boer’ Stop the War Committee had indeed denounced the war in South Africa as ‘a campaign of extermination, carried out by a policy of systematic devastation, the like of which for atrocity can only be paralleled by the operations of the Turks in Armenia and Bulgaria’.Footnote 31
That the ‘civilizing mission’ of Britain in Africa seemed to have gone awry was all the more reason, so British liberals reasoned, to advance the spread of civilization through other means, including by honouring national responsibilities towards the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Porte. Noel and Charles Buxton placed an attack on what they termed ‘the material aspects of political dominion’ and a determination ‘to regain for England the moral prestige which she has lost’ at the centre of their analysis of the Macedonian question.Footnote 32 As a result, despairing critics of British jingoism such as Brailsford were relieved to find ‘that there was something in the English people, and in English policy, which was worthy and great’.Footnote 33 British liberal guilt about the situation in the Balkans was therefore now fused with unease at recent events in Britain's own empire, as well as in other African colonies, encouraging a renewed emphasis on a politics of conscience that encompassed both imperial and European questions.
III
Yet, there was a considerable complicating factor to this liberal morality tale as far as Macedonia was concerned: nationalism or, more specifically, nationalist violence. The anti-Ottoman stance of the Balkan Committee was undermined from the start by regular reports of atrocities committed not by the Turkish authorities but by rival Greek, Bulgarian, and Serbian nationalist bands.Footnote 34 Macedonia was indeed often depicted as a region of ‘race feeling and hatred’ and ‘artificial race propagandas’ rather than of nationalism in any positive, liberal sense. This was no ‘Balkan Risorgimento’.Footnote 35
For many committee members, the much-contested nationality of the Macedonians was, if anything, a distraction from more immediate goals. When the ‘new liberal’ politician and journalist Charles Masterman asserted in an article for the Nation, more as an aside than anything else, that the native population of Macedonia were ‘the Bulgarian population’, he precipitated a string of both critical and supportive correspondence debating this point. This in turn forced Masterman to complain that such arguments were ‘irrelevant’ to the most important issue, which was to secure European control of the region so that the population would be free from ‘alien marauders and Turkish misrule’.Footnote 36 British liberal internationalism, as Casper Sylvest defines it, was above all ‘focused on encouraging progress, sewing order and enacting justice in international affairs’.Footnote 37 In applying these principles to the Balkans, British liberals were far less interested in the region's national questions than they were in securing the region's stability and orderly governance. There was consistent liberal support, on this very basis, for the ‘civilizing mission’ of Austria-Hungary in Bosnia and Herzegovina during this period. As the Economist argued in 1909, Habsburg administration had successfully ‘settled and pacified this one-time wild and barbarous country’.Footnote 38
As far as Macedonia was concerned, it was still assumed in most quarters that such progress was impossible under the rule of the ‘unspeakable Turk’, an attitude that owed much to long-standing prejudices against Islam. Even for a secular commentator such as Brailsford, it was the Turks’ Islamic faith, with its ‘Asiatic’ origins and its supposed predispositions against any kind of civic progress, that remained at the centre of their perceived incapacity to govern their ‘subject races’.Footnote 39 As had been the case in 1876, a basic emotional identification with the ‘Macedonians’ as fellow Christians also still tended to outweigh concerns with the ‘superstition and formalism’ of their ‘unproductive’ Orthodox faith.Footnote 40 ‘Cross versus Crescent’ discourses died hard as far as the British and the Balkans were concerned. As discussed further below, this would negatively affect the Balkan Committee's credibility in diplomatic circles as a conduit for detached ‘expertise’.
Nevertheless, despite the persistence of religious prejudice, engagement with the Macedonian question did not rely on hostility to Ottoman rule over Christians any more than it did on support for liberal nationalism. This is made clear by reactions to the ‘miracle of reform’ that seemed to be promised by the ‘Young Turk’ revolt, which was launched from the Macedonian capital of Salonika in July 1908.Footnote 41 The Balkan Committee and its supporters (notably Brailsford and Nevinson writing in the Daily News) felt almost immediately able to offer the new regime in Constantinople their support.Footnote 42 With an apparently liberal, secular, and modernizing regime in power, uncomfortable questions of how to reconcile rival religions and nationalisms in the Ottoman Balkans no longer seemed so urgent. Brailsford wrote to Buxton that the demand for Macedonian home rule was now ‘an extreme position’, that instead ‘equal civil and political rights for all Christians’ would represent adequate progress.Footnote 43
From this reaction, we can conclude that events in the region were approached above all from what Peter Mandler has termed the ‘civilisational perspective’ – something that valued institutional freedom and civil rights over national independence.Footnote 44 Support for the Young Turks did not mean that the Macedonians were being abandoned, but it signalled that the priority of British liberalism in the Balkans was securing orderly and ‘progressive’ government rather than addressing national questions or expressing solidarity with ‘fellow Christians’.
Such faith in the progressive and civilizing potential of the revolution in Turkey was in the end relatively short-lived. The Balkan Committee's patience had already run out by early 1912.Footnote 45 Yet, the next chapter in the Macedonian question, the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 – as a result of which Macedonia was first ‘liberated’ by and then divided between Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria – did not affect the ‘civilizational’, rather than nationalist, principles on which British liberal engagement with the region was based. The First Balkan War caused the British relief worker Eglantyne Jebb (of future Save the Children fame) to ponder ‘our debt of gratitude to the small nations which have done what we couldn't do, – put a stop to the suffering which we had watched for so many years with aching hearts’.Footnote 46 Nevertheless, when peace was restored and the region's national questions again came up for discussion, it was the relative level of ‘civilization’ in the country in question, rather than any ‘principle of nationality’, that was invariably felt to be the decisive factor. Brailsford supported the granting of self-rule to the Albanians, for instance, because he felt they were equipped with a sufficient ‘foundation of civilization’; R. W. Seton-Watson assumed the opposite and thus saw no reason to give the Albanians rights that were not enjoyed by the ‘more civilised subjects’ of Austria-Hungary.Footnote 47
In the summer of 1914, another ‘Balkan crisis’ unexpectedly but inexorably turned into an international catastrophe. Yet, those British liberals who eventually supported Sir Edward Grey's decision to take Britain into the First World War certainly did not come to this view out of sympathy for Serbia, soon to be the darling of British propaganda. The Nation even pondered whether, had Archduke Franz Ferdinand lived, the Habsburg empire might have eventually been expanded to include within its borders not just Bosnia-Herzegovina but both Serbia and Macedonia too.Footnote 48
IV
How did this liberal ‘civilizational perspective’ on the Balkans relate to other international questions and causes? The concept of British foreign policy as a ‘civilizational mission’ was not unique to the Balkans and Europe. As Richard Huzzey has shown with regard to British anti-slavery politics, it was also embraced by those who campaigned for greater attention to be paid to the social and economic development of colonial Africa.Footnote 49 Unlike for the Ottoman Balkans, neither home rule nor equal civil and political rights was ever realistically proposed for the colonial world in this period, but the fundamental approach to both contexts was the same. It was about Britain's responsibility and duty to advance the forces of civilization and progress. The most effective means towards that end was certainly seen to depend on the particular geo-political circumstances of each case, and of course the ‘racial-cultural typology’ applied to colonial Africa was different to that applied to a European region such as the Balkans.Footnote 50 Nevertheless, ‘good government’ rather than self-government remained the overriding concern of British liberals, regardless of the geographical context.
A further example is offered by British engagement with the Persian constitutional revolution of 1906–11. As Mansour Bonakdarian has argued, despite Persia's standing as a ‘historic nation’, supporters of the constitutional regime that came to power in Teheran in 1906 tended to stress the movement's social and political, as opposed to its nationalist, agendas. In tune with British liberal approaches to the Ottoman Balkans, events in Persia were related to ‘universal’ notions of legal rights, social justice, and constitutional government, rather than to the narrower doctrine of Persian nationalism.Footnote 51 Moreover, although orientalist depictions of backwardness, immaturity, violence, and disorder were never absent from the imaginative geography of Persia at this time, sympathetic British activists displayed (at least initially) considerable faith in the capacity of Persia to join the ranks of the liberal, civilized, and progressive societies of the West. As with the Macedonian question, it was argued that misguided British foreign policy was callously obstructing this process from taking place.Footnote 52
There were still important distinctions to be made between a European and predominantly Christian region such as the Balkans and an ‘eastern’ Muslim region such as Persia (a point addressed further below). Nonetheless, there was a close relationship between the Balkan Committee and the Persia Committee when the latter was formed in response to the 1907 Anglo-Russian entente (the brokering of which appeared to give Russian imperialism a free hand to suppress the reformist government in Persia).Footnote 53 E. G. Browne (the Persia Committee's founder), Noel Buxton, Brailsford, Gooch, Nevinson, and Ponsonby, among others, joined both committees.Footnote 54 As such names suggest, both the Persian question and the Macedonian question were essentially radical-liberal causes, similarly conceived as campaigns against despotic and inherently illiberal powers (Russia and, prior to July 1908 at least, Turkey). Brailsford explicitly related the Macedonian question to the struggle against tsarist autocracy: ‘The link between them’, he wrote, ‘is the attitude which both must inspire in a man who interprets in a generous spirit the Liberal tradition.’Footnote 55
In this vein, the Anglo-Russian agreement was to be opposed not (as for someone like Lord Curzon) due to its apparent disregard for British imperial and strategic interests, but because it entailed a partnership with a reactionary power to the distinct disadvantage ‘of a weak nation struggling to be free’.Footnote 56 For Brailsford and Nevinson, moral protest against Russian despotism was intrinsically connected to other radical causes, both international and domestic.Footnote 57 As they argued after they had resigned from the Daily News over its refusal to denounce the forcible feeding of suffragettes, publicly cutting their ties with the Liberal party in the process: ‘we cannot denounce torture in Russia and support it in England, nor can we advocate democratic principles in the name of a party which confines them to a single sex’.Footnote 58 Female suffrage was an issue on which the Balkan Committee was in fact divided; however, its members included two of the principal targets of Brailsford and Nevinson's outrage, the editor of the Daily News (A. G. Gardiner) and the deputy home secretary at the time (Charles Masterman). The Buxtons had close ties with the social and political establishment, as discussed, and this inevitably created friction amongst some of their supporters. Yet, the Balkan Committee was nevertheless part of what Kevin Grant calls ‘a multifaceted, radical campaign for reform in the Edwardian era’.Footnote 59
Foreign critics, meanwhile, saw the hallmarks of ‘perfidious Albion’ in such readiness to condemn the illiberalism of other regimes (be it those of King Leopold, the sultan or the tsar) at a time when ‘Britannia ruled the waves’. Brailsford found the German delegate to the Hague Peace Convention in June 1907 completely indifferent to Macedonia, though he reflected that this had ‘the saving merit of frankness. We are pleased to call the attitude “cynical”; Germans watching coldly the failures and inconsistencies of our more idealistic professions, think us “hypocritical”.’Footnote 60 Whilst, as noted, British liberals were in fact critical of the jingoism of British society after the Boer War, few questioned Britain's basic right to have an empire. For all the liberal universalism of the ‘civilizational perspective’, the overarching cultural framework through which ‘good causes’ overseas were viewed ‘effectively reinforced the British position at the pinnacle of hierarchies of development and civilization’.Footnote 61
Indeed, British liberal support for ‘oppressed nationalities’ was never felt to be inconsistent with a broader paternalistic worldview that readily distinguished between ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ races. Such views were certainly held, and expressed publicly, by the Balkan Committee's first two presidents, James Bryce and John Westlake.Footnote 62 In this respect, Bryce exemplifies the intersection between imperial and international ideologies (‘imperial internationalism’, to use Mark Mazower's term) in British liberal political culture at this time.Footnote 63 This came to the fore during the First World War when Bryce, amongst other British foreign affairs ‘experts’ with a background in Balkan questions, applied his earlier proposals for international control of Macedonia to new schemes for the administration of ‘backward’ or ‘politically immature’ nationalities outside of Europe. This included the mandates system that was imposed on the former Ottoman Middle East (as well as the former German colonies in Africa and the Pacific).Footnote 64 In this way, what had essentially been an aspect of European policy and the wider ‘Eastern question’ influenced the development of an approach to international government that is now understood primarily as an aspect of the final stages of European imperialism.
V
What do such intersections say about the idea of ‘Europe’ in British political culture? Was there essentially no distinction between the Balkans and the imperial world? In fact, the Balkan Committee was always keen to stress that in Macedonia a fellow European people were being deprived of their share in the material and cultural progress of ‘the West’.Footnote 65 It was not just that the Ottoman empire was illiberal, it was that it was ‘an Oriental tyranny on the very highways of European commerce and culture’ – and, as was repeatedly stressed, only three days’ travel from London.Footnote 66 Indeed, in some cases, it was felt that the peoples of the Balkans could do more than just ‘belong’ to Europe; they were felt to have the potential actively to enhance its civilization and culture. Bryce presented ‘the Mediterranean East’ as ‘almost the only part of the world in which there are left nationalities with the capacity for developing into independent nations that may create new types of character and new types of literary and artistic life’.Footnote 67 Elsewhere, he referred to the ‘new types of culture, new centres of productive intellectual life’ that had been made possible by the ‘liberation’ of the Balkans.Footnote 68
This clear sense of the progressive potential of Balkan society as part of Europe gave the issues at stake in the region a resonance that was not necessarily provided by other foreign causes at the time. Ending forced labour in the Congo might lift a burden from the humanitarian conscience of the West, it might bring greater material prosperity in tropical Africa or pave the way for a more enlightened colonialism, but it was not expected to raise the intellectual life of Europe or contribute directly to the progress of Western civilization. Although the hopes invested in the leaders of the Persian constitutional revolution came far closer to matching the Balkan Committee's sympathy for the Macedonians, as ‘Europe unredeemed’ the Balkans definitely occupied a specific place in the British liberal conscience.Footnote 69
For a generation of liberals that was deeply uneasy with the urban ‘cosmopolitanism’ of the age, and in the wake of the Boer War and amid widespread fears of ‘racial degeneration’ amongst England's urban-majority working class, the rural population of Macedonia showed many of the physical, moral, and cultural qualities that were felt to be so lacking at home.Footnote 70 The journalist and literary critic (and Balkan Committee secretary) R. A. Scott-James thought the Macedonians were ‘a people full of vital force which Europe can ill afford to lose’. Criticizing the apparent readiness of the powers to give Austria-Hungary a free hand in the region, he asked ‘whether our almost sterile western civilization should be content to lose the new stock of vital force which the Balkans can offer’.Footnote 71 Scott-James's influential 1908 study of ‘modernism’ includes an enthusiastic discussion of Edith Durham's Through the lands of the Serb, in which ‘the moral poverty of the West’ is contrasted unfavourably with ‘the people about whom all the world has been talking, the very men who have hated and fought the Turk, and have set up their governments and thrown them down with so little respect for western ideas’. This was intended not as a criticism of Balkan political instability or backwardness, but rather as an appreciation of the vitality and strength of feeling inherent in the peninsula's culture and society.Footnote 72
The typical English city-dweller (described by Charles Masterman as ‘stunted, narrow-chested, easily-wearied; yet voluble, excitable, with little ballast, stamina or endurance’) would not have compared favourably with the Macedonian peasant, whose morality, martial qualities, virility, self-reliance, industriousness, and healthy diet were commonly noted.Footnote 73 Writing shortly after the Balkan Wars, the ‘pacificist-progressive’ diplomat George Young confirmed that ‘a Bulgarian peasant is of more value than the proletarian soldier of a developed country such as ours, the latter being often a social surplus product’.Footnote 74 Similarly, during the First World War, the Buxton brothers paid tribute to the fact that the majority of the Bulgarian population were peasant-proprietors rather than ‘mere wage earners’, something that was held to account for the absence of poverty ‘in the sense in which that term is used in the West’.Footnote 75
Analysis of British representations of the Balkans has focused overwhelmingly on the power and prevalence of negative, ‘balkanist’, discourses.Footnote 76 Yet, rather than constructing the Balkans negatively as a backward, uncivilized, and problematic ‘other’ to the West, such discourse inverts the binary entirely, inscribing the region with a host of positive characteristics that in the more materially advanced half of Europe, certainly in Britain, were seen to belong only to a rural-nostalgic past. A social structure based around peasant proprietorship was seen to give the Balkans a solid basis for economic growth and moral character. This image may have been misleading at a time when across the peninsula the effects of mass emigration, increased reliance on a money economy and the market, growing literacy, increased contact between towns and villages, and acute land-hunger were all helping to undermine the assumptions and attitudes of traditional peasant life.Footnote 77 Nevertheless, it highlights the deeply ingrained liberal belief in the value (both moral and economic) of the ‘village community’, with its traditions of local self-government and peasant proprietorship, at a time in British politics when land reform was ‘a central topic of controversy and a crucial dividing line between the two parties’.Footnote 78
Yet, if Balkan peasant culture provided British liberals with a specific source of hope for the regeneration of a shared European civilization (a trope that would feature heavily in the First World War propaganda of ‘heroic Serbia’), this nevertheless still fed into a wider debate about British foreign policy.Footnote 79 Macedonia was specifically chosen in the 1905 publication England: a nation as a ‘test case’ for the articulation of an alternative foreign policy that was based on the principle that Britain ‘should defend as a whole and throughout the world, the institutions which are the growth of the soil against the institutions which are superimposed upon them’.Footnote 80 That the other two ‘test cases’ chosen for the study were South Africa and Ireland exemplifies the interconnected nature of imperial, European, and domestic questions in British politics at this time.
VI
How effective were such pleas? What impact did such dissent over foreign policy have in a society with such interconnected international agendas?
In the case of the Balkan Committee, reflecting its close association with the Bulgarian agitation of 1876, nonconformist chapels and provincial liberal associations provided an expected source of support. From 1903 to 1908, resolutions from public meetings held to push for British diplomatic intervention over Macedonia poured in to the Foreign Office from these organizations.Footnote 81 In September 1903, the foreign secretary Lord Lansdowne noticed ‘considerable signs of the revival of the old atrocities agitation’.Footnote 82 Yet, this proved to be less threatening than he anticipated. The nonconformist conscience of the Edwardian period posed less of a challenge to British foreign policy-makers than had been the case a generation earlier over Bulgaria. Those who hoped for a more far-reaching assault on the structures of British diplomacy and foreign policy were left frustrated. Attacking what he saw as a policy of ‘futile pinpricks’, H. F. B. Lynch felt that meaningful results would never be achieved if ‘we…merely play at the question, and go home to our comfortable dinner after an interview with the Foreign Office, feeling “Oh! What a good boy am I!”’Footnote 83 Another Balkan Committee member, Aubrey Herbert, later characterized the organization as ‘a lot of cursed old women who cannot even protest with any effectuality about massacres and who do take a ghoulish delight in mentioning them’.Footnote 84
This gets to the heart of a fundamental weakness in the Balkan Committee's position, one that also exposes some important nuances in the wider political culture of international dissent of which it was part. Despite the preoccupation of its leaders with ‘supplying accurate information and just views to a too ignorant public’, the committee's claims to expertise were undermined by a tendency to lapse into the superficial ‘Cross versus Crescent’ superficialities that had characterized earlier moral crusades against the ‘unspeakable Turk’.Footnote 85 Its publications and pamphlets routinely described the inhabitants of Turkey-in-Europe as Christians, although this was true of perhaps only two-thirds of the population in Macedonia, a region with sizeable Jewish and Muslim minorities.Footnote 86 Drawing repeated attention to the sufferings of the ‘unhappy Christian populations’ of the region ignored the fact that atrocities were also committed against Muslims.Footnote 87 In this respect, the Balkan Committee's reliance on support from Christian leaders and networks did little to promote a more impartial approach. In 1912, the London Muslim League accused the committee of trying ‘to strangle Islam in Europe’.Footnote 88
It was a question of some debate as to who were the main perpetrators and victims of the atrocities being committed in the Balkans. As Edith Durham put it:
When a Moslem kills a Moslem it does not count; when a Christian kills a Moslem it is a righteous act; when a Christian kills a Christian it is an error of judgment better not talked about; it is only when a Moslem kills a Christian that we arrive at a full-blown ‘atrocity’.Footnote 89
In fact, it was Grey's conviction (based on Foreign Office intelligence) that it was clashes between rival Christian bands, rather than the oppression and misgovernment of the Ottoman officials, that was the cause of the majority of atrocities and ‘outrages’ by 1906.Footnote 90 Nor was this view confined to the diplomatic sphere. Supporters of the Balkan Committee struggled to overcome the British public's increasingly negative view of the ‘barbarous Balkans’. Eglantyne Jebb found fundraising efforts on her return to Britain from Macedonia in 1913 hampered by this very problem. One of her correspondents complained: ‘It's very difficult to rouse people's imaginations when they think the countries more or less barbarous. Surely barbarians always live on nothing, they think.’Footnote 91
The tension found within the Balkan Committee between explicitly Christian moral high-mindedness and other, more secular, and less ‘sensational’ forms of protest and dissent is something that has previously been studied mainly in the context of colonial politics and humanitarianism. Indeed, the CRA is a notable example of this.Footnote 92 E. D. Morel shared Noel Buxton's faith in the value of ‘scientific’ analysis and he was always opposed to Congo reform meetings acquiring an overtly ‘religious flavour’, as he put it. Nevertheless, Morel quickly came to recognize the value of the support of missionaries and churches. Although this was a marriage of convenience that was already strained by 1908, it was remarkably effective.Footnote 93 Whereas for the Balkan Committee the support of religious leaders and a Christian bias served to undermine the moral force of its arguments, at least in some quarters, for the CRA it became a major advantage.
Morel realized that the support of religious organizations provided a rich source of publicity, speakers, and venues, as well as the impetus for an extensive network of local auxiliary organizations and fundraisers.Footnote 94 More important, however, in terms of the impact of the Congo reform movement on British society, was the far more populist way in which he was able to present his cause. Rather than trying (and failing) to avoid ‘sensationalism’, the CRA made reports and, most notably, photographs of gruesome crimes committed in the Congo the hallmark of its publicity campaign. Extensive use was made of the lantern lecture to publicize the brutality of the Congo Free State's colonial administration, making the CRA ‘the first humanitarian movement to use atrocity photographs as a central tool’.Footnote 95
The CRA presented the situation in the Congo Free State as a horror story with one very clear villain – King Leopold of the Belgians – and one straightforward and practicable solution – the ending of his malevolent system of personal rule. No doubt the Congo question was more complicated than this; indeed, the veracity of the atrocity photographs as evidence of what they purported to depict was questioned by Morel's critics and King Leopold's own propagandists. Nevertheless, the CRA's lantern lectures became less a question of providing objective ‘evidence’ of crimes committed than melodramatic ‘phantasmagoric theatrical productions’ underpinned by a Christian evangelism that ‘appealed to a mythic ideal of universal human dignity’.Footnote 96
Backed by international publicists (including Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain), the Congo reform campaign has been claimed as ‘the largest humanitarian movement in British imperial politics during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras’.Footnote 97 Genuine cross-party support meant that the CRA was less reliant than both the Balkan and Persian Committees on sympathetic Liberal party MPs retaining their seats (something that became an issue for the latter two organizations after the 1910 general elections).Footnote 98 The Foreign Office official G. R. Clerk believed the national impact of the Congo reform movement had surpassed even that of Bulgarian agitation of 1876: ‘Whereas Gladstone was supported by the expressed opinion of eleven important towns,…Mr Morel, had sixty-nine at his back.’ Sir Edward Grey, too, was thinking of the Bulgarian agitation when in 1908 he remarked that ‘no external question for at least thirty years has moved the country so strongly and so vehemently as this in regard to the Congo’.Footnote 99 The fact that the memory of a protest movement relating to a matter of European foreign policy should have been invoked when dealing with political and humanitarian activism in relation to Africa, of course, only reinforces the arguments of this article about the essential interconnectedness of these aspects of British foreign policy.
VII
This comparison with the CRA underlines the difficulties that Balkan nationalism and ethnic tension created for the Balkan Committee. The success of earlier protest movements, the campaign against the slave trade being an obvious example, had depended in part on the clarity of the arguments employed.Footnote 100 Morel was able to make a ‘one-sentence answer to a two-volume question’ as far as the issue of Congo reform was concerned.Footnote 101 It was almost impossible to present the Macedonian question in such terms. When (perhaps influenced by the success of the Congo reform movement?) the Balkan Committee published some relatively shocking atrocity photographs of its own, showing mutilated corpses and smouldering villages, it crucially had to admit in the accompanying notes that the ‘Macedonian massacres’ therein depicted were often the result of violence between rival Christian bands. The argument that ultimate responsibility for the anarchy and bloodshed lay with the sultan, for deliberately encouraging ethnic violence as part of a policy of ‘divide and rule’, failed to convince.Footnote 102 It was easy to find victims of ‘atrocities’ and ‘barbarism’ in the Balkans; it was rather more difficult to agree where to point the finger of blame.
Of course, this says much about the restricted goals of humanitarian protests relating to colonial Africa at this time (and for many years to come): the Congo question could be presented in such ‘black and white’ terms because, unlike with both Macedonia and to some extent Persia, the question of self-government was never under discussion. In Macedonia, according to the liberal politician J. A. Simon, such were the complexities and complications of the racial, religious, and linguistic divides that ‘only the student with special knowledge could hope to find his way through the labyrinth’.Footnote 103 For the CRA, in contrast, there was no Congolese national movement to take account of, no ‘labyrinth’ of ethnic diversity and conflict, or at least not one through which its humanitarian reformers were expected to navigate. Whereas the native population of the Congo could be presented as essentially passive and helpless victims of colonial misrule and economic exploitation, the inhabitants of the Balkans had a far more contested claim to the sympathy of the British public.
The persistence of superficial black-and-white generalizations about the plight of ‘oppressed Christians’ under the rule of ‘the Turk’ did not help the Balkan Committee's cause, however. The idea of the Balkans as a Christian morality tale could not be reconciled with the complex realities of Balkan nationalism. Nor, perhaps more fundamentally, could the basic liberal universalism of the ‘civilizational perspective’. The Balkan Committee did issue periodic notes and memos condemning the ‘fratricidal strife’ in the region, but it also consistently downplayed the importance of Balkan national antagonism and violence. As Nevinson casually remarked: ‘It is not as though the problem in Macedonia were insoluble. There have been mixed races and rival races in all the countries that have been delivered from Turkish dominion, and all without exception have prospered.’Footnote 104 At a time when anti-Semitism in the former Ottoman territory of Romania, to take one example, was a recognized issue, this was patently not true.Footnote 105
In any case, the activities of the nationalist bands in Macedonia offered sceptics more than enough reason to doubt that the ‘liberation’ of the region would automatically bring peace and civil order, or that under European rule, as one Balkan Committee statement claimed, the region's ‘normal racial tendencies would assert themselves’ as if by some benign, passive process.Footnote 106 The British ambassador in Constantinople, a regular critic of the Balkan Committee, argued that the public attacks levelled by the Buxtons and their supporters on British policy towards the Macedonian question actually did ‘more than anything to encourage these bands to persist in their campaign of murder’.Footnote 107
This illustrates British liberalism's uneasy relationship with nationalism, one that remained unresolved by 1914, and one in which the Balkans was a perennial source of tension. Although not confined to the region, Balkan questions would certainly feature heavily in what became an increasingly fractious debate around the concept of ‘national self-determination’ during the First World War and its aftermath.Footnote 108 By 1917, the history of Balkan liberation from Ottoman rule would be viewed in some quarters as the ‘rise of nationality’ rather than as a struggle based around the pursuit of universal liberal goals such as constitutional government or freedom from ‘slavery’.Footnote 109 Yet, this analysis was still vigorously contested. Radical critics, including prominent Balkan Committee supporters such as Brailsford and Charles Buxton, denounced national self-determination as ‘an inspiration of anarchy and individualism’ and a recipe for economic dislocation and ‘a decline in civilisation’.Footnote 110 By the end of the war, in this perspective, the successor states of the Habsburg empire represented not the triumph of liberal principles but an uncertain and dangerous ‘balkanization of Europe’.Footnote 111 This was a wide-ranging debate, but one that was clearly already brewing in respect of the Macedonian question in the 1900s.
Given such ambivalence within British liberal perceptions of what was effectively at stake in the region, it is understandable that A. J. P. Taylor dismissed the Macedonian question in his classic survey of dissent over foreign policy as ‘the affair of a few specialists’, with ‘not enough in it to rekindle radical enthusiasm’.Footnote 112 Yet, this article has sought to show how historians might profit from revisiting British liberal interaction with the Balkans. The significance of the Balkan Committee lies less in its policy impact than in the issues it raises about the nature of foreign affairs debate in Edwardian Britain. As a case-study in how overseas humanitarian and foreign policy concerns were received, reported, and represented within early twentieth-century British political culture, the committee's interaction with Macedonia offers insights into the dilemmas faced by British liberals in confronting nationalism and ethnic violence, and in trying to fit sympathy for ‘oppressed nationalities’ within an overarching ‘civilizational perspective’ on the management of ‘backward’ or politically ‘immature’ regions. At the same time, the often positive ‘imaginative geography’ of the Balkans produced by the Balkan Committee and its supporters seems to challenge our understanding of the supposedly ‘balkanist’ representation of the region at this time, and in turn to offer insights into tensions and debates within British domestic political culture on the eve of the First World War.
Perhaps most insightfully, the example of the Balkan Committee and the Macedonian question provides a context for rethinking the relationship between colonial and European questions in early twentieth-century humanitarianism and activism. The situation in Macedonia was clearly felt to relate to other liberal-international and humanitarian causes and campaigns, pointing to a far greater degree of overlap and interdependence between continental and colonial affairs than has tended to be acknowledged in studies of this period. As Jan Rüger argues, ‘for too long, historians studying Britain's external relations have opted for one of two lenses, the first focusing on the Continent as the main source of influence, the second emphasizing British history as distinct from that of Europe and best understood in an Atlantic and imperial context’.Footnote 113 Research into British liberal engagement with the Balkans seems to offer a fruitful way of merging these two analytical ‘lenses’.
This was a political culture in which networks of dissent overlapped, in which Macedonia could be viewed as the ‘Congo of Europe’, in which the political memory of the Bulgarian agitation seemed to be as relevant to activism concerning colonial Africa as it did to events in the Balkans, and in which the same overarching ‘civilizational perspective’ could be applied to the activities of Balkan peasants, Persian revolutionaries, and Young Turks. During the First World War, a contributor to the journal War and Peace pondered British concern with the events in the Balkans and asked why ‘the interesting nationalities whose home it is have always exercised a fascination over the mind of the English politician’.Footnote 114 Further research into this question perhaps holds one of the keys to the challenge of integrating analysis of the ‘imperial’ and the ‘European’ aspects of British political history.
