the western representation of eastern europe on the eve of world war

8/12/2019 The Western Representation of Eastern Europe on the Eve of World War

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The Western Representation of Eastern Europe on the Eve of World War I: MediatedEncounters and Intellectual Expertise in Dalmatia, Albania, and MacedoniaAuthor(s): Larry WolffSource: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 86, No. 2 (June 2014), pp. 381-407Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/675696.

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Review Article: World War I Centennial Series

The Western Representation of Eastern Europe on the Eveof World War I: Mediated Encounters and IntellectualExpertise in Dalmatia, Albania, and Macedonia

Larry WolffNew York University

In 1911, R. W. Seton-Watson published his book The Southern Slav Questionand the Habsburg Monarchy, in which South Slavic perspectives were synthe-

sized, represented, and publicized by the Scottish author for the British public.1

With this book Seton-Watson helped to dene the political role of a twentieth-century intellectual from Western Europe as the sponsor of a national cause inEastern Europe, while he also made use of South Slavic associates in support-ing and collaborative roles. Dening a Southern Slav Questionthat challengedthe legitimacy of the Habsburg monarchy, just as the Eastern Questionchal-lenged that of the Ottoman Empire, Seton-Watson inaugurated in peacetime acampaign that would escalate and intensify during World War I. He played alarge role in the founding of the School of Slavonic Studies in London in 1915and the journalThe New Europein 1916, giving voice to diverse national spokes-

men who hopefully envisioned the disintegration of the multinational Habsburgmonarchy. The advent of the Wilsonian momentafter 1917, as noted by ErezManela, with its emphasis on self-determination, placed a new premium on self-representation, and if voices from Eastern Europe were more readily heard inAmerica and Western Europe than colonial voices from Asia and Africa, Slavicself-representation still beneted from the assistance, amplication, and advo-cacy of foreign spokesmen like Seton-Watson.2

In his book Seton-Watson acknowledged some collaborative help from theDalmatian political leader Josip Smodlakamy frienda representative from

1 R. W. Robert William Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question and the HabsburgMonarchyLondon, 1911; New York, 1969.

2 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the InternationalOrigins of Anticolonial NationalismOxford, 2007; Hugh Seton-Watson and ChristopherSeton-Watson, The Making of a New Europe: R. W. Seton-Watson and the Last Years of

Austria-HungaryLondon, 1981; Victor Mamatey,The United States and East CentralEurope, 19141918: A Study in Wilsonian Diplomacy and PropagandaPrinceton, NJ,1957; Harry Hanak, The New Europe, 191620,Slavonic and East European Review39, no. 93June 1961: 36999.

The Journal of Modern History 86 (June 2014): 381407 2014 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2014/8602-0005$10.00

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Split in the Reichsrat in Vienna. Seton-Watson, however, was careful to note,concerning Smodlaka, that neither he nor any other Croat politician is in any

way responsible for the opinions expressed in my book.3

This was not strictlyspeaking true, inasmuch as Seton-Watson was much indebted to the South Slavsfor assistance and was seen by them as representing and publicizing their own

perspectives. For instance, Ivo Lupis-Vuki, a member of the provincial Dalma-tian diet, supplied Seton-Watson with English translations of important SouthSlavic documents. Already in 1909 Lupis-Vukihad written from the island ofKorula to thank Seton-Watson for supporting the South Slavic cause: I, in fact,we, all Croats, cannot pay your work, but with gratitude. Your publications are ofgreatest benet to our cause, much more, than were we doing ourselves, what youare doing for us.4 The broken English grammar was evidence enough of how

much Seton-Watsons native uency would serve the cause.At the beginning of the nineteenth century Lord Byron was only the most

famous of the many European philhellenes who took up the national cause ofGreece, and in some sense Seton-Watson worked within a Byronic paradigmamong the South Slavs. Romanticism was generally tempered by professional at-tention to the literary, scholarly, and political mechanics of modern representationin the twentieth century. In 1912, however, Seton-Watson made a triumphal tourof Habsburg Dalmatia and was toasted and celebrated by the Dalmatians as theirByronic advocate. In that same year, the course of the rst Balkan War led to arather sudden Albanian declaration of independence, an event that required some

explanation and justication before the wider world. Ready and eager to assumethe Byronic role of Albanias public partisans were two adventurous British trav-elers, writer Edith Durham and political MP Aubrey Herbert, who adopted theAlbanians as a particular political cause and represented them to the world muchas Seton-Watson represented the South Slavs.

The rapid realignment from the outbreak of the First Balkan War of 1912against the Ottoman Empireto the Second Balkan War of 1913 against Bul-gariaproduced circumstances that were both mystifying in their political mean-ing and horrifying in their violence to foreign observers. The task of studying,documenting, and explaining the Balkan Wars to the wider world was under-taken by a neutral international body, the Carnegie Commission of 1913. A teamof outside experts on the region now presented that regionunder the stigmaticname of the Balkansto the international public with testimony taken fromthe men and women of the region, summarized and synthesized by foreign

3 Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question, x.4 R. W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs: Correspondence 19061941, vol 1, 1906

1918 London and Zagreb, 1976, letter of Ivo Lupis-Vuki to Seton-Watson, November 1,1909, 56; see also Hugh Seton-Watson and Christopher Seton-Watson, The Making of a

New Europe, 66.

382 Wolff




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experts but also translated and published in elaborate appendices that served asguarantors of the intellectual authority of the commission.5

This article will explore what it meant to representEastern Europe in theyears just preceding World War I, and how foreign representation both compro-mised and amplied self-representation. The concept of representationwithregard to the lands and peoples of southeastern Europe will involve the over-lapping meanings of speaking on behalf ofand producing an image ofwith both meanings implicit in the Latin etymology described by F. R. Ankersmitas a making present again of what is absent.6 The representation of the

peoples of southeastern Europe also involved giving voice to what was other-wise unheard, and in this regard it may be considered in the light of the ques-tion posed by postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak, Can the subaltern speak?7

Eastern Europe, ever since the eighteenth century, had constituted a sort of sub-altern domain, hegemonically subordinated to the perspectives of Western Eu-rope, which advocated, investigated, and passed judgment.8 The forms of rep-resentation that were undertaken in the period of Seton-Watsons 1911 book,TheSouthern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy, Albanias 1912 declara-tion of independence, and the work of the Carnegie Commission in 1913 es-tablished precedents for the even more urgent struggle over representation dur-ing World War I, culminating in the work of the delegates at the Paris PeaceConference who undertook the radical redesigning of Eastern Europe.

SLAVENFREUNDLICHKEIT: Seton-Watson in Dalmatia

The whole Eastern coast of the Adriatic still remains an unsolved equationin the arithmetic of Europe,wrote R. W. Seton-Watson in The Southern SlavQuestion, and its solution depends upon the course of events among theSouthern Slavs.9 Highly critical of Habsburg policy after the annexation ofBosnia in 1908, Seton-Watson favored the federalization of Austria-Hungarywith a trialiststructure by which the Habsburg Slavs would form a constitu-

5 Maria Todorova,Imagining the BalkansOxford, 1997, 37.6 F. R. Ankersmit,Political RepresentationStanford, CA, 2002, 109.7 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? in Marxism and the

Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg Urbana, IL, 1988,271313; see also John Beverley,Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in CulturalTheory Durham, NC, 1999; Maria Mlksoo, The Memory Politics of BecomingEuropean: The East European Subalterns and the Collective Memory of Europe,Euro-

pean Journal of International Relations15, no. 4 December 2009: 65380; KlemensKaps and Jan Surman, eds., Post-Colonial Perspectives on Habsburg Galicia,specialissue,Historyka: Studia Metodologiczne42online publication, 2012.

8 Larry Wolff, Voltaires Public and the Idea of Eastern Europe: Toward a LiterarySociology of Continental Division,Slavic Review54, no. 4Winter 1995: 93242.

9

Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question, 343.

The Western Representation of Eastern Europe 383




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tional third force within the monarchy, balancing the political power of Austriaand Hungary.10 He spoke for those who, while perfectly articulate in their own

Slavic languages, and often conversant in German or Italian, could not easily rep-resent themselves in English or reach a British public. The South Slavs becamethe objects of Seton-Watsons very favorable attention, while their voices weresubordinated, interpreted, translated, and even ventriloquized by his own.

Seton-Watsons book lay somewhere on the border between scholarly researchand political advocacy, and its publication in 1911 coincided with the consoli-dation of professional scholarly research concerning Eastern Europe, especiallyin the German and Austrian empires. The same year saw the publication in Berlinof the inaugural issue of the Zeitschrift fr osteuropische GeschichteJournalfor East European History, one of the founding organs of German academic

Ostforschung, the study of Eastern Europe. The scope of the articles encom-passed the historical domain of Eastern Europe, with the four German and Aus-trian editors addressing all of its component parts: Theodor Schiemann of Ber-lin wrote about Russia, the younger German historian Otto Hoetzsch aboutPoland, Hans Uebersberger of Vienna about Orthodoxy and Serbian history,and Leopold Karl Goetz of Bonn about the medieval history of Kievan Rus.These men, furthermore, played other institutional roles in the establishment ofOstforschung, as Schiemann had established the Seminar fr osteuropischeGeschichte und Landeskunde in Berlin in 1902 and Uebersberger was a founderof the Institut fr osteuropische Geschichte in Vienna in 1907. Such scholars

also became active politically when Ostforschungwas implicated in the strate-gic formulation of German war aims during World War I and, in the next gen-eration, in the twisted justication of Nazi policy in Eastern Europe. TheZeitschriftin 1911 constituted an academic forum for exploring the history ofEastern Europe and, at the same time, helped to constitute Eastern Europe itselfas a unied eld for historical study.11

An introductory note in the rst volume of 1911 explained that the journalsets for itself the goal of becoming the central connecting organ Verbindungs-organbetween the historical work of east and west for the eld of the historyof Eastern Europe.The editors proposed to introduce to western researchersthe rich work and activity of the eastern historiansand promised that Russianand Polish manuscripts would be published in faithful translation.12

10 Hugh Seton-Watson and Christopher Seton-Watson, The Making of a New Europe,7576.

11 Zeitschrift fr osteuropische Geschichte, vol. 1 Berlin, 1911, iiiiv; MichaelBurleigh, Germany Turns Eastward: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third ReichCambridge, 1988, 1322; see also Gerd Voigt, Otto Hoetzsch, 18761946: Wissenschaftund Politik im Leben eines deutschen HistorikersBerlin, 1978.

12

Zeitschrift fr osteuropische Geschichte, vol. 11911, 1.

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Addressing the history of Eastern Europe involved not just dening, synthesiz-ing, and unifying the domain of the subject but also specifying representative

points of view and integrating them within the unied academic discourse. Thiswas also the enterprise of Seton-Watson, though his political purposes perhapslay closer to the surface of his work.

Seton-Watsons engagement with the South Slavs began with a rst explor-atory visit to Dalmatia in 1909. During a second visit in 1910 he enjoyed moredirect relations with South Slavic political leaders, who eventually played a partin his book. Among the appendices toThe Southern Slav Question, for instance,Seton-Watson included a translated speech that had been originally delivered

by Smodlaka in the Reichsrat in Vienna.13 Smodlaka advocated economic devel-opment in Dalmatia but deplored any external perspective of sentimental exoti-

cism. We have no wish to play the part of an archaeological cemetery or anIndian reservationwith the authentic Dalmatian Red Indians in their gay cos-tume, heafrmed.14 It was, paradoxically, from within Seton-Watsons appendixthat Smodlaka emphatically rejected the subaltern role of the silent savage.

In his book Seton-Watson presented Smodlaka, who in turn represented theSouth Slavs. The British writer emphasized his own intimacy with the politicalleader from Eastern Europe: I value Dr. Smodlakas friendship too highly toadd words of my own, such as would be superuous to all who know him.15

In fact, it was a recent friendship, with Smodlakas letters to Seton-Watson in1910 still alternating in salutation between Lieber Herr Watsonand Lieber

Freund

and always preserving the formal mode of German address.16

The Austrian journalist and Christian Socialist Friedrich Funder wrote toSeton-Watson from Vienna in January 1911, indicating his interest in the forth-coming book on the Southern Slav Question and noting Seton-Watsons reputa-tion forSlavenfreundlichkeitfriendliness to the Slavs. Funder himself was notunfriendly to the Slavs of the monarchy, but there was perhaps some patronizingelement in his perspective: For our Slavs there is nothing greater than havingfriends in the wide world.17 From a Viennese perspective the Slavs of Austria-Hungary were our Slavs,imperial subjects to whom any Austrian journalistmight lay possessive claim, but from Seton-Watsons Western perspective it was

13 Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question, 406.14 Josip Smodlaka, The Condition of Dalmatia,in Seton-Watson,The Southern Slav

Question, 415.15 Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question, 407.16 R. W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs: Correspondence, vol. 1, letter of Josip

Smodlaka to Seton-Watson, June 19, 1910, 70.17 R. W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs: Correspondence, vol. 1, letter of Friedrich

Funder to Seton-Watson, January 3, 1911, 73; see also Hugh Seton-Watson and Christo-pher Seton-Watson,The Making of a New Europe, 63; and Hedwig Pfarrhofer, Friedrich

Funder: Ein Mann zwischen Gestern und MorgenGraz, 1978.





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possible to adopt the sympathetic sensibility of Slavenfreundlichkeitand therole of the dear friendtoward an entire ethnographic community in Eastern

Europe.Seton-Watsons South Slavic correspondents during these years would write

to him in German, Italian, French, and even English. In February 1911, Lupis-Vukiwrote to Seton-Watson in English from Korula offering English transla-tions of the Croatian and Serbian political resolutions of Rijeka Fiume andZadarZarain 1905, which Seton-Watson then included as appendices to TheSouthern Slav Question. These documents, afrming Croatian-Serbian politicalsolidarity, were originally intended for an international as well as an Austrian

public, and Lupis-Vukiemphasized this purpose when he underlined his ownefforts at translation: I was much hampered by long sentences, hard construction,

and the lack of knowledge of English equivalents of certain words. I, however,tried to be accurate, either in sense or words, and I hope, that you will fullyunderstand all, and that you will easily bring it up to literary style, and spiritof English language. I also enclose a short vocabulary, croato-italian, of certainwords that you may more easily, when reading the originals, and re-touching thetranslations, catch the meaning of certain words.18 South Slavic political afr-mationsfor instance, the resolution that the Croats and Serbs of Dalmatiawill work shoulder to shoulder, as brethren enjoying equal rights in national

political questionscould thus be reproduced in English by means of paral-lel Croatian-English and Croatian-Italian vocabularies transmitted through the

network of the British-Dalmatian correspondence of Seton-Watson and Lupis-Vuki.19

In September 1911, excited about the publication ofThe Southern Slav Ques-tion, Lupis-Vuki was already urging Seton-Watson to visit Dalmatia. Whencan we expect you?. . .The new hotel will be ready by the end of the year, andwhen you make up your plans, please, allow to Korula at least one month. Thenew hotel will have twenty-eight rooms, electric light, good kitchen, and a necaffe . . . and now you can freely recommend your friends to visit CurzolaKorula.20 Therst decade of the twentieth century had brought modern tour-ism to Dalmatia along with many new hotels, aimed perhaps especially at Ger-man and Austrian vacationers. In 1909 the Austrian writer Hermann Bahr

published a gushing travel account calledDalmatinische Reise, rejoicing in thesunny Adriatic coast of Dalmatia: I am a true heiliotrope. I must turn towardthe sun.. . .This draws me every year again to the land of sun, to Dalmatia.

18 R. W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs: Correspondence, vol. 1, letter of Lupis-Vukito Seton-Watson, February 25, 1911, 77.

19 Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question, app. 13, 396; C. A. Macartney, TheHabsburg Empire, 17901918New York, 1969, 76768.

20 R. W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs: Correspondence, vol. 1, letter of Lupis-

Vuki

to Seton-Watson, September 23, 1911, 87.

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Bahr celebrated Dalmatia as the land of sun, of fairy tales, of magicSonnenland,Mrchenland, Zauberland.21 In this context Korula needed a new hotel with

a ne caf, and this touristic upswing also coincided with Dalmatian politicalinterest in Seton-Watsons good will and advocacy. The development of touristinfrastructure, like the evolution of translation and communication networks,contributed to the framework of international spokesmanship.

Lupis-Vuki was reading The Southern Slav Question on Korula, and heexclaimedatteringly to Seton-Watson on the urgency of a South Slavic transla-tion: My opinion? Admirable! It proved what I expected of it: a book whichshould be translated as speedily as possible, and which every Croat and Serbshould read. In our language, we have no such work, that in so short, bright, con-densed way presents the most important moments of our national life. . . .You

have not only given the due prominence to our cause before Europe, and beforehigher quarters,before which your book can not pass unnoticed, but you havealso, in more than one respect, shown us to our own selves, what we, otherwise,might never have perceived.22 Seton-Watson represented Europe from the

perspective of Korula, and Europe was the location of higher quartersthe seats and sites of Western power and knowledge. Among the lessons thatLupis-Vuki hoped every Croat and Serbwould learn from Seton-Watsonwas the lesson of Croato-Serb unityas if that hypothetical unity wouldseem all the more compelling when witnessed from outside the region, fromEurope.23 Later, during World War I, Seton-Watson would play a role in urg-

ing the creation of Yugoslavia, based on the afrmation of Serbian-Croatianunity.

In 1912, after the publication of his book the previous year, Seton-Watsontraveled to Dalmatia and gave an account of his trip in a letter to his Uncle Georgein February. Seton-Watson was traveling together with his new wife, May,whom he had married in 1911.

Our stay in Dalmatia has been one long series of ftes, so that we have hardly had time todraw breath. On the quai at Zara we were met by friends, and from that moment we havehardly ever been alone from morning till night. At Zara we . . .ended with an ofcial

banquet given by about 25 out of 40 members of the Dalmatian Diet, at which FatherBiankini, the leader of the Croat National Party the chief party in Dalmatiamade a eryoration, and I had to respond in Italian. Dr. Smodlaka came with us to Spalato, and to myhorror we were greeted on the quai by a large crowd shouting ivio Scotus Viator.. . .On Monday we were taken in a motorboat round the Riviera di Castelli between Spalato

21 Larry Wolff, Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of EnlightenmentStanford, CA, 2001, 344; Hermann Bahr, Dalmatinische ReiseBerlin,1909, 5.

22 R. W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs: Correspondence, vol. 1, letter of Lupis-Vukito Seton-Watson, September 23, 1911, 85.

23

Ibid.





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and Trauand found at two of the little towns the mayors house decorated with Croattricolours, the population with ags waving on the pier and men ring guns and shoutingin our honour.. . .Finally . . .a banquet, at which there were further speeches and I had totry my hand at Croat in replying!!24

Seton-Watson thus became the object of noisy but largely incomprehensibleSlavic adulation. The cry of long live Scotus Viatorinvoked Seton-WatsonsLatinate pen name, the Scottish Traveler. His whole celebrity was founded uponhis alien Scottishness, even as he took on a sort of assumed Slavic identity, SlavusViator, surrounded by friends and ags, speaking rst in Italian but then nallyin Croatian, and saluting himself with double exclamation points.

The situation among the Southern Slavs is very critical indeed, and it is theelectricity in the political atmosphere that explains my reception,wrote Seton-Watson to his uncle. As you can imagine, this publicity. . .is far from agree-able to me, except in so far as it shows how susceptible the Croats are to a littlesympathy and friendly encouragement and how anxious they are to show theirgratitude.With this modest demurral, Seton-Watson formulated the dynamicsof Western-Eastern intellectual relations as the Eastern susceptibility to Westernsympathy, while he himself acknowledged the Slavic gratitude to his friendly Brit-ish encouragement. That the publicity was, in fact, extremely agreeable to himwas clear from the continuing detailed account of his personal reception, now inDubrovnikRagusa:

Last night was the crowning event of our adventurous tour. The Mayor of Ragusa,Dr. Melkoingrijasee my book, Index successor to his father as Mayorand 60 otherRagusans gave us a big banquet at the Hotel Imperial, at which the 3 town bands playedalternately below the window. This is the rst time in history that all the parties of Ragusahave met upon a common platform: in our honor people came to a banquet organised bymen whom they had cut in the street a week before. . . .There was a large crowd all thetime under the windows, and great enthusiasm. I again had to make a speech, this time inItalian, with a few phrases of Croat at the end. Next day when we left Gravosa the har-

bour of Ragusahalf the people of the town saw us off, and almost every lady and mostof the students came with bunches ofowers to present to May. By the time they had allnished, she herself and three of our friends had their arms full to overowing. As we

sailed off, they threw confetti rockets and sang Hej Slovani, the Slav hymn.25

The gures indexed in his own book, like the mayor of Ragusa, now came to lifeon the coast of the Adriatic, in the sensual context of musical bands and bouquetsofowers. Seton-Watson himself stood at the center of all this enthusiasm, withconfetti rockets exploding all around him, and he presumed to recognize himself

24 R. W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs: Correspondence, vol. 1, letter of Seton-Watson to George Seton, February 2226, 1912, 98.

25

Ibid., 98

99.

388 Wolff




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as the occasion, if not the cause, for achieving the common platform of SouthSlavic unity.

He described these scenes of Dalmatian enthusiasm again in a German letterfrom Korula to Friedrich Funder, commenting further that here in the Southeverything waits as if in an enchanted castleconsistent with Bahrs impres-sion that Dalmatia was a kind of Mrchenland, a fairy-tale land. Seton-Watson

believed that it was only through sympathylike his ownthrough approach-ingEntgegenkommenthat the enchantment of the South Slavic castle could

be broken. Everywhere one nds the greatest gratitude for the smallest ser-vices,he wrote. But Austria leaves its own obligation to foreignersden Frem-den.26 Seton-Watson himself was the foreigner, the foreign prince of the fairytale, who earned the gratitude of the Slavs by approaching them in the spirit of

sympathy andEntgegenkommen, almost magically emancipating them from theenchanted castle of their own political paralysis. At his approach, on his voyageto Dalmatia, bands played, students sang, confetti rockets exploded, and theSouth Slavs suddenly perceived the possibility of their political redemption.

The Albanian Point of View: Independence on the Adriatic

In October 1912 the outbreak of the rst Balkan War brought Bulgaria, Serbia,Montenegro, and Greece into a war against the Ottoman Empire for the purposeof eliminating Ottoman power from Europe. In fact, the westernmost extent of

Ottoman power in Europe in 1912 was the Albanian lands on the Adriatic Sea,so Serbian and Montenegrin forces moved against the Ottoman army in Alba-nia, with Serbia particularly seeking to conquer for itself a port on the Adriatic.Ever since the Young Turk revolution in 1908, there had been tensions devel-oping between Istanbul and the Albanians over the perceived infringement oftraditional Albanian provincial prerogatives. This led to the consolidation ofAlbanian national consciousness across the religious boundaries that separatedMuslims, Orthodox, and Catholics and also focused attention on the nationalAlbanian language, as at the Congress of Manastir in 1908, which approved acommon codied alphabet using Latin letters. Yet, in 1912 Albania was underattack as part of the Ottoman Empire and likely to be seen by the four Balkanallies as the territorial spoils of war. It therefore became a matter of urgency forAlbanians to assert their own claims upon that territory, representing themselvesnot as an Ottoman province but as an Ottoman successor state, comparable instatus to the Balkan allies.27

26 R. W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs: Correspondence, vol. 1, letter of Seton-Watson to Funder, February 25, 1912, 100.

27

Miranda Vickers,The Albanians: A Modern History London, 1997, 53

76.





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With the support of Vienna, which was interested in preserving and extendingits own sphere of inuence on the Adriatic, eighty-three Albanian delegates

gathered at VlorValonaon the Adriatic coast and issued a declaration of in-dependence on November 28, 1912. In a very concise statementwritten in Al-

banianthe delegates declared that Albania, as of today, should be on her own,free and independent.28 The most important communicative problem, how-ever, was how to reach beyond Vlor to the wider world. David Armitage,writing about the American Declaration of Independence, has argued that suchdeclarations have been created principally for international consumption as af-rmations of sovereignty in international law, inspired by the need to seek in-ternational recognition.29 The Albanian language, even with Latin letters, wouldhardly have been suitable for such an international appeal in 1912, and, accord-

ingly, the notications of Albanian national independence were issued in theinternational diplomatic language of French. Ismail Kemal BeyIsmail Qemali,still bearing his Ottoman title as president of the Albanian provisional govern-ment, transmitted from Vlor on November 28 two French telegrams, one ad-dressed to the foreign ministers of the European powers and the other to theforeign ministers of the belligerent Balkan states.

The former telegram, addressed to the European powers, announced that theassembly at Vlor has just proclaimed the political independence of Albaniaand constituted a provisional government charged with defending the rights ofexistence of the Albanian people, menaced with extermination by the Serbian

armies.Appealing for recognition of the change of political lifeof the Alba-nian nation, the telegram summed up the situation with respect to Eastern Eu-rope, the Balkans, and the civilized world. The Albanians, having entered intothe family of the peoples of Eastern Europe la famille des peuples de lEuropeOrientale of which they atter themselves to be the eldest, and pursuing onesole and unique end, to live in peace with all the Balkanic states les EtatsBalkaniquesand become an element of equilibrium, are convinced that the gov-ernment ofname left blank, to be lled inlike all the civilized world will accordthem a benevolent welcome in protecting them against any assault upon theirnational existence and against any dismemberment of their territory.30 For the

28 Robert Elsie,Texts and Documents of Albanian History, The Albanian Declarationof Independence 1912, available at http://www.albanianhistory.net/texts20_1/AH1912_1.html; see also Owen Pearson, Albania in the Twentieth Century: A History,vol. 1London 2004, 2336.

29 David Armitage,The Declaration of Independence: A Global History Cambridge,MA, 2008.

30Telegramme du Gouvernement Provisoire aux Ministres des Affaires trangres

des Grandes Puissances,November 28, 1912, in La Question Albanaise dans les actesinternationaux de lpoque imperialiste, vol. 1, 18671912, ed. Arben Puto Tirana,

1985, 385

86.

390 Wolff




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Albanians, to represent themselves as a people of Eastern Europe and their pol-ity as a Balkan state was to renounce the Ottoman Orient, establishing a new

relation with Europe that was to be achieved through the intermediate domainof Eastern Europe lEurope Orientale. In French this domain was simulta-neously inected as Eastern and Oriental without any clear distinction betweenthe two.

The Albanians thus pursued a form of what Seton-Watson called Entgegen-kommen, though in this case it was Eastern Europe that approached Western Eu-rope in pursuit of a sympathetic hearing. At the same time the Albanians seemedto acknowledge a balance of civilization, associating the powers of Europe withthe civilized world le monde civilis that exercised the prerogative of of-fering benevolent welcome and promising political protection to newly indepen-

dent peoples.Maria Todorova has suggested inImagining the Balkansthat the Balkan Wars

of 1912 and 1913 provided a powerful impetus for the production of a pejorativeEuropean discourse about the Balkans, which came to be associated with po-litical fragmentation, warring forces, and regional chaos.31 Even as the Albaniansasked to be recognized as one of the Balkan states, the powers of Europe madethemselves the arbiters over what they perceived as Balkan political disorder.In mid-December 1912, three weeks after the Albanian declaration of inde-

pendence on November 28, a London ambassadorsconference was convened.The conference, including representatives of England, France, Germany, Austria-

Hungary, Italy, and Russia, with the British foreign secretary Edward Grey pre-siding, promptly recognized Albanian autonomystill formally within the Otto-man Empire. Then, with the coming of the second Balkan War in 1913, theEuropean powers accepted full Albanian sovereign independence. The adjudi-catory role of the ambassadorsconference suggested a dynamic of hierarchicalrelations between Great Powers and small states, the former consisting largely ofWestern European countries and the latter largely of Eastern European ones. Therole of Russia and Austria-Hungary among the Great Powers complicated theWesterncharacter of the group while, at the same time, suggesting the poten-tially imperial interests of the Great Powers in southeastern Europe.

Seton-Watson wrote to Lupis-Vuki on November 27, 1912, the day beforethe declaration of Albanian independence, to express his suspicion of Serbianmotives in seeking a port at Durrs Durazzoon the Albanian coast: The ac-quisition of Durazzo is incompatible with the principle The Balkans for Balkan

peopleswhich is my reason for approving of this warbecause it would makeAlbanian independence impossible.Seton-Watson thus accepted that Albanianindependence was a desirable political outcome, and that Albanians, as they them-selves insisted, were to be counted among the Balkan peoples, looking toward a

31

Todorova,Imagining the Balkans, 3

4.





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post-Ottoman national existence. He furthermore thought, with some historicalforesight, that Servians Serbians cannot be trusted to treat the Albanians

properly.32

Seton-Watson, however, with his primary commitment to the SouthSlavs, was by no means the principal British patron of the Albanians. That role, inthe early twentieth century, was shared between Edith Durham and AubreyHerbert.

Durham, whose travels in southeastern Europe culminated in the publicationof her anthropological study High Albaniain London in 1909, was sometimeswarmly described by the Albanians as their queen.She was later characterized

by Rebecca West as the type of English traveler who came home with a petBalkan peoplea characterization that would also have t Seton-Watson.33

Indeed, the fact that whole peoples were susceptible to being adopted as both

causes and pets clearly indicated the problematic position of the nations ofsoutheastern Europe in the early twentieth century.

As Durham was sick in bed in ShkodrScutariin northern Albania in 1910,she received word of an Albanian rising in Kosovo against the Ottoman YoungTurk government in Istanbul, along with news from England about the death ofEdward VII. Fighting continued in Kosovo vilayet. Meanwhile I was carrieddangerously ill to the Austrian hospital, and lay helpless between bouts of agonyand injections of morphine. The Albanians came and wept over me, and prayedfor advice and help. When I was nearly screaming with pain they implored meto make an effort and write for them to the Foreign Ofce and the papers, for the

Turkish army was approaching. I was dragged to a sitting position, managed towrite two letters, and fainted with the pain.34 This intense dramatization of herown intercessionary role offered a counterpoint to Seton-Watsons status as a cel-ebrated visitor among the Dalmatian Slavs. Patronage was carried to the point ofecstatic martyrdom.

In 1911, on the eve of the rst Balkan War, Durham was in Montenegro, out-raged that King Nikola was encouraging the Albanians to rise against the Otto-mans while actually planning to seize Albanian territory. She worked with theAlbanians to make their case abroad: At their request I helped draw up a letterto Sir Edward Grey, explaining their situation and their wishes, and we sent it.Grey would preside at the London ambassadorsconference in 1912 and wouldreceive the Albanian declaration of independence.35

Durham returned to England in 1913, with the intention of publicizing the Al-banian cause while raising funds for Albanian relief. Before she became a patron

32 R. W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs: Correspondence, vol. 1, letter of Seton-Watson to Lupis-Vuki, November 27, 1912, 120.

33 Rebecca West,Black Lamb and Grey FalconLondon, 1941; New York, 1994, 20;Todorova,Imagining the Balkans, 12021.

34 Edith Durham,Twenty Years of Balkan Tangle London, 1920, 211.35

Ibid., 218

19.

392 Wolff




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of the Albanians, Durham had traveled in Montenegro, dating back to 1901, andhad become a friend to the Montenegrins in their resistance to the Ottoman sul-

tan in southeastern Europe. Now in 1913 she publicly renounced that SouthSlavic friendship: On arriving in London I packed up the Gold Medal given me

by King Nikola and returned it to him.. . .I would not keep his blood-stainedmedal any longer. I communicated this to the English and Austrian Press. The or-der of St. Sava given me by King Petar of Serbia, I decided to keep a little longertill some peculiarly agrant case should occur, and this I expected soon.36 West-ern patronage in Eastern Europe was not necessarily a matter of lifelong com-mitments and could be proffered, withheld, or renounced strategically. Durhamwaited until her return to London from Eastern Europe before sending back hermedal across the continent, in order to obtain for her gesture the greatest possi-

ble publicity.On January 2, 1913, three Albanian representatives were already in London

Rasih Dino, Mehmet Konica, and Filip Nogaand they presented a memoran-dum to the ambassadorsconference in the name of the Albanian provisionalgovernment at Vlor. The Albanians assumed the honor of submitting to themeeting of the Great Powers in London the Albanian point of view le point devue albanais,taking stock of what had been already achieved during 1912 andoutlining a New Years vision for the future.37 Fundamental to their concernswas that Europe recognize an Albanian point of view,to be articulated throughthe Albanian voiceof the newly independent government.

The memorandum cited the noble harshness noble pretwith which theAlbanian people have conserved their characterand the patient tenacity thatthey have put into preparing their independencethus demonstrating their ap-titude to live the life of polished peoplespeuples policsand to prosper on the

path of civilization la voie de la civilisation.38 The Albanians humbly acknowl-edged the civilized preeminence of the West; they almost explicitly acceptedtheir own noble savagery that is, noble harshnessand implicitly outlined amental mapping of Western Europe and Eastern Europe measured in degrees ofcivilization.

Albania believes it has the right to raise its voice to claimen droit dlever lavoix pour rclamerfrom the European Powers, along with the right to live, the

possibility to develop in order and peace, stated the memorandum. Certainly wewould express poorly nous exprimerions malthe sentiments of the Albaniannation if, without further delay, we did not make ourselves the interpreters of

36 Ibid., 251; Todorova,Imagining the Balkans, 12021; Vickers,The Albanians, 5455.

37Memorandum du Gouvernement Provisoire de Vlora, January 2, 1913, in La

Question Albanaise dans les actes internationaux de lpoque imperialiste, vol. 2,19121918, ed. Arben PutoTirana, 1988, 198.

38

Ibid., 199.





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the profound gratitude awakened in the nation by the decision of the Great Pow-ers to accord Albania its complete independence.39 In fact, at the end of 1912

the ambassadors had accorded only autonomy and not complete independence,so that the play of French tenses and moods in the Albanian memorandum con-fused what had actually been achieved with what had not yet been conceded. Lit-erally interpretersas they translated Albanian claims into the French languagefor international consumption, the authors of the memorandum emphasized theissue of language politics that conditioned the declaration of independence: theright to raise ones voice before Europe, the capacity to express oneself wellor

poorly, and the claim of the nation to be able to speak for itself.In 1912 Edith Durham was publishing in Britain folkloric reports on the Al-

banians: Cocks and lambs are still often sacriced when foundations of houses

are laid in North Albania.40 In the period of the Balkan Wars and Albanian in-dependence, her perspective necessarily became less folkloric and more politi-cal. In July 1913 she wrote from Shkodr to the London journal The Near Eastto denounce the great savageryof the Serbs and Montenegrins in burning Mus-lim Albanian villages and to report that she herself was bringing war relief tothe Albanians, distributing clothing given me by friends in England and by theBritish Red Cross.41 Her report sought to construct a new relation of sympathy

between the Albanians and the British public, asking for contributions to theAlbanian Relief Fund established in a London bank.

InThe Near EastDurham reported on the 1913 visit to Albania of the British

Member of Parliament Aubrey Herbert, president of the London Albanian Com-mittee.42 Herbert, the second son of a British earl, traveled in the Ottoman Em-

pire after leaving Oxford and discovered the Albanians in Macedonia in 1904,when he engaged an Albanian manservant from Debar. Herbert, a contemporaryof P. G. Wodehouse, wrote to his mother from Constantinople describing theservant as a sort of quirky Albanian Jeeves: Kyazim has so far been a greatsuccess. He has picked up things about clothes wonderfully quickly, and used tocontrive to cook me Turkish coffee on the engine. . . .He is rather uncivilized,rather too inclined to beat people indiscriminately, but he is dropping that.43

39 Ibid.40 Edith Durham, Albanian and Montenegrin Folklore,Folk-Lore Quarterly Review

23 1912, rpt. in Durham, Albania and the Albanians: Selected Articles and Letters,19031944London, 2001, 2728.

41 Durham, To the Editor,The Near East, August 1, 1913, rpt. in Durham, Albaniaand the Albanians, 31.

42 Durham, Albanian Affairs,The Near East, September 17, 1913, rpt. in Durham,Albania and the Albanians, 36.

43 Aubrey Herbert, letter to Elsie Herbert, April 10, 1904, in Bejtullah Destani andJason Tomes, eds.,Albanias Greatest Friend: Aubrey Herbert and the Making of Modern

Albania: Diaries and Papers 1904

1923London, 2011, 3.

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Herbert visited Albania in 1907with Kyazim, studying the Albanian languageand developing a feeling of committed partisanship, so that in 1913, as president

of the Albanian Committee in London, he was prepared to mobilize support forAlbanian independence.

On February 5, 1913, the Albanian delegates to the London conference,Mehmet Konica and Filip Noga, attended a meeting of the Albanian Committee.Herbert, as chairman, specially welcomed the Albanian delegates,noting thatthe deepest sympathy of the Committee was with Albania in its efforts to se-cure autonomy. The Albanians, in turn, acknowledged the sympathetic re-marks of the chairman and thanked the Albanian Committee for all they haddone to bring the case of Albania before the British public.44 The committeeissued an appeal to the British public, The Plea of Albania,with statistics to

show that the claim to every place included within the boundary of the proposednew Albania is justied by the immense preponderance of Albanian population.A parallel Italian report emerged from an Albanian Congress held in HabsburgTrieste in March 1913.45 To some extent, such efforts could be seen as a rehearsalfor the Paris Peace Conference after World War I.

On May 8, 1913, Herbert, as a member of parliament, spoke wryly in theHouse of Commons on behalf of the Albanians: If they are a wild people, it isof their own choice that they are so, and a very ne choice I think it has been.46

Around this time he was supposedly being considered as a possible king forthe new Albania, but he considered himself, a second son, to be too poor to take

on the job: If I had fty thousand a year, I think I should take Albania. Thereis quite a decent chance of making something of it, if it is properly treated.47

Eventually, the German Prince Wilhelm von Wied received the crown of Al-bania, while Edith Durham remained a symbolic queen. Meanwhile, Herberttraveled to Albania in the summer of 1913, and promptly acquired a newWodehousian manservant. Herberts advocacy of Albanian independence in noway altered his sense of Albanian tness for service, and he described his newvalet as an Albanian whom I found in the street, and who is now unpackingmy dress clothes with much difculty and many oaths.With his dinner jackets

properly unpacked, Herbert nally met Edith Durham for the rst time inShkodr: Dined with Miss Durham.

. . .

She would have been a suffragette if

44 Record of the meeting of the Albanian Committee, February 5, 1913, in Destani andTomes,Albanias Greatest Friend, 7476.

45The Plea of Albania,7678, and Statistical Information about the Population of

Albania with Special Reference to the Contested Territories,7982, both in Destani andTomes,Albanias Greatest Friend.

46 Aubrey Herbert, Parliamentary Speech, House of Commons, May 8, 1913, inDestani and Tomes,Albanias Greatest Friend, 95.

47 Aubrey Herbert, Letter to Elsie Herbertundated, May 1913, in Destani and Tomes,

Albania

s Greatest Friend, 98.





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these other things had not come her way; a clever uneducated woman, veryaggressive.48 Herbert had a clear sense that these other thingsnamely, the

Albanian cause

had derailed and displaced a more predictable political de-velopment.

Herbert was in Vlor, site of the Albanian provisional government, to witnessAlbanian protests against Greek military occupation in the southprotests thatmay have taken place just because he was present, since the occasion became asort of personal and political tribute. The manifestants gathered in front of thehouse at which Mr. Herbert was staying, and gave cheers for Great Britain,reported Edith Durham. In acknowledgement, Mr. Herbert made a short speech,which was much appreciated by the audience.49 Herberts diary for Septem-

ber 10, 1913, seemed to describe the same encounter with the Albanians: They

then came and demonstrated before my room: Oh, Paladin of Liberty, blest ofour grandchildren!I spoke to them in Italian.50 The scenario resembled Seton-Watsons triumphal voyage to Dalmatia the previous year, when he too had beencheered and saluted as the representative of Western sympathy for Eastern

political problems, and he too had replied with short speeches, usually in Italian.Actual linguistic communication was minimal, and the dynamics of Herbertsexperience in Vlorthe Englishman observing Albanian protests, receivingAlbanian cheers, addressing Albanian well-wisherscould almost have been a

pantomime performance. Herberts account of their cheers as a salute to himselfas the Paladin of Libertywas probably a very free interpretation. Durham and

Herbert, both deeply attentive to the Albanians, were also very much aware ofthemselves and of one another as performative gures in the dramatic encounterof England and Albania.

Back in 1903, one year before Herbert engaged his rst Albanian manservant,Kyazim, Durham sent a report From an Albanians Point of Viewto the PallMall Gazette, featuring the gure of the Tame Albanianwho possessed someunderstanding of Europe and European languages. At that time she frankly ac-knowledged the awkwardness of communication, as she quoted the pidgin En-glish of her informant: Englishmans,said the Tame Albanian, silly mans! Nounderstand my people.51 Ten years later, when Herbert and Durham crossed

paths in Albania, they both claimed to have achieved a more serious under-standing of the Albanians. Herberts attribution to them of the invocationPaladin of Libertywas very far from pidgin English. Yet, even as independent

48 Aubrey Herbert, Diary, August 25, 1913, 108, and Herbert, letter to Francis Acland,August 26, 1913, 110, both in Destani and Tomes, Albanias Greatest Friend.

49 Durham, Albanian Affairs,36.50 Aubrey Herbert, Diary, September 10, 1913, in Destani and Tomes, Albanias

Greatest Friend, 123.51 Durham, From an Albanians Point of View,Pall Mall Gazette, March 17, 1903,

rpt. in Durham,Albania and the Albanians, 1.

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Albanian voices in Eastern Europe were raised for the rst time in Europeaninternational affairs, British voices from Western Europe still maintained a sub-

tle interpretive ascendancy.

See Appendix: The Carnegie Commission in Macedonia

The conclusion of the two Balkan Wars of 191213 immediately led to an in-ternational investigation of alleged atrocities that took place especially during thesecond war, when the anti-Ottoman alliance collapsed and Greece and Serbiafought against Bulgaria for the control of formerly Ottoman territory in the re-gion of Macedonia. The American steel magnate Andrew Carnegie had estab-lished in 1910 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which in 1913

assembled a team of experts to establish the facts and understand the causes ofthe Balkan Wars in southeastern Europe. The investigation of 1913 was chaired

by the French statesman and Nobel peace laureate Paul Henri dEstournelles deConstant. The results were published in England and America in 1914: Reportof the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of

the Balkan Wars. This report was also published in France as Enqute dans lesBalkans.52

The whole enterprise was shaped by the relations of Western Europe to East-ern Europe and of the Great Powers to the small Balkan states. Those relations

produced strategies of representation by which the Balkan experience of war was

transmitted to an international public through the medium of the commissionsreport. Unlike the representational advocacy of Seton-Watson or Durham, andunlike the documentary self-afrmation of Albanian independence in 1912, thework of the commission involved collecting testimony in order to pass judgmentupon the states and peoples of southeastern Europe. The reports meticulousand systematic deployment of quotation, citation, and, above all, appendices al-lowed those peoples to speak for themselves, in translationbut for the partic-ular purpose of indicting themselves and one another.

The predominantly Western character of the Carnegie Report was evidentfrom the membership of the commission: the Austrian law professor JosephRedlich, the French politician Justin Godart, the German law professor WaltherSchcking, the British journalists Francis Hirst and H. N. Brailsford who had

published a book about Macedonia, the Russian politician Pavel Milyukov, andthe American professor of education Samuel Dutton, all under the French chair-manship of Estournelles de Constant. The chairman, in the introduction to thereport, emphasized his own Byronic predilection for the Balkan peoples he was

52 Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct ofthe Balkan WarsWashington, DC, 1914; Enqute dans les Balkans: Rapport prsent

aux directeurs de la DotationParis, 1914.





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supposed to investigate. I love Greece,declared Estournelles de Constant. Iam steeped in the heroic memories that live in the hearts of her children, in

her folk songs, in her language, which I used to speak, in the divine air of herplains and mountains.53

Somewhat less hyperbolically, Estournelles de Constant also afrmed his highopinion of Bulgaria and Serbia and claimed even a personal acquaintance withAlbania dating back to his international efforts in the aftermath of the Congressof Berlin: When European disagreements suspended our labors, I proted bythem to travel in solitude through High Albania. I crossed the sad and fertilecountry from Scutari to Uskub, allaying the suspicions of Ypek, of Djyakoo, andof Prisrend, then in full anarchy. I shall never forget the impression of sadnessand astonishment that I carried away from this adventurous expedition. All these

countries, not far from us, were then, and are still, unlike Europe, more widelyseparated from her than Europe from America; no one knew anything of them,no one said anything about them.54 The casual extrapolation from Albania to a

broader domain of these countriesin Europe, not far from us,but unlikeEurope,and unknown to Europewas consistent with attempts to characterizeEastern Europe dating back to the age of Enlightenment.55 The legitimation ofthe commission was afrmed as a matter of expertise, which qualied the com-missioners to investigateand pass judgment uponlands whose alien characterwas emphasized even in the casual enumeration of place names.

It would be impossible to question the disinterestedness of the Commission,declared Estournelles de Constant, and, in fact, the report even-handedly foundall the peoples of the region to be guilty of atrocities, producing a picture of con-sistently murderous brutality that conceptually integrated the Balkan peoples, in-cluding even the beloved Greeks. The conrmation of Balkan atrocities wasqualied by reserving the ultimate blame for Europeitself, which had failed toelevate the peoples of southeastern Europe from their condition of backward-ness, to foster basic infrastructure that would permit economic development, andto make them young clients of civilization.56 Thus the commission articulatedthe long-standing relation of Eastern Europe, a domain of backwardness, to Eu-rope implicitly Western Europea hierarchical relationship of precedenceand subordination, structured by the concept of civilization. In the conclusionof the report the commission characterized the Balkan combatants accordingly:the instincts and motives which inspired them were primitive,and, therefore,

53 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Report of the International Commis-sion to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan WarsWashington, DC, 1914;rpt. 1993, 23; see also Todorova,Imagining the Balkans, 35.

54 Carnegie Endowment,Report of the International Commission, 23.55 Larry Wolff,Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the

EnlightenmentStanford, CA, 1994.56

Carnegie Endowment,Report of the International Commission, 6

8.

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there were many of low, criminal, and even bestial type, with no human feelingand no care for civilized standards, who were ready at all times to do atrocious

deeds.57

The Balkan Wars were declared to have been a ghastly chapter ofhorrors,though, as it turned out, just an introductory chapter to the horrors ofWorld War I in which the Great Powers would no longer remain righteouslyaloof.

The investigation, representation, and publicizing of atrocities in the Balkansby the Carnegie Commission in 1913 was methodologically conceived to per-mit the voices of the Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs to speak from within the nalreport, their testimony transmitted and translated in the appendices. Evaluatingthe violence in Macedonia, the commission reported: Even in the immediateneighborhood of Salonica, Moslem villages were burned by the Greek troops.

See Appendix A, No. 12.The Greek population of the Drama district indulgedin robbery, murder, and violation at the expense of the Moslem inhabitants, un-til order was restored by an energetic Bulgarian prefect. See Appendix B, No.16.58 In fact, the 273 pages of narrative were followed by another 120 pagesof appendices in considerably smaller print, translated testimonies in the rst

person, and autoptic observations including precise and graphic details, as inthis Bulgarian account contained in Appendix D, Number 65: On the roadleading to Strumnitsa between the villages Ormanovo and Novo Selo in thedele on the right bank of the river, I found a soldier of the Tenth RhodopeInfantry crucied on a poplar tree by means of telegraph wires. His face had

been sprinkled with petroleum and burned. The eyes, nose and ears had dis-appeared.59 Balkan bodies could be made to speakand bear witness from the

pages of the report, and Balkan voices shaped the entire narrative, but they spokedirectly to the reader especially from the appendices.

A particular mapping of Europe was thus inscribed in the structure of thereport, whose main textual body was a decorous and judicious narrative com-

posed in Paris by the members of the commission, while horrors and atrocitieswere allowed to proliferate in the Balkan testimonies consigned to the appen-dices. Readers were directed accordingly, as in this account of the mistreatmentof Muslim Turks in Macedonia: Details will be found in the Appendices of aminor massacre, much exaggerated in the press, carried out at Dedeagatch bythe dregs of the local Christian populationGreeks and Armenianswith the aidof some Bulgarian privates of the Macedonian legion, who were accidentallyleft in the town without an ofcer.Appendix A, Nos. 9 and 10.A Bulgarianeyewitness described to us the killing of a large number of local Turks at Uskub

57 Ibid., 265.58 Ibid., 72.59

Ibid., 324.





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by Servians in the early days of the occupation Appendix A, No. 11.60 Thecommissioners sometimes even gestured toward their Western readers, sparing

their sensibilities by reserving graphic details for the appendix, as in the discus-sion of the Greek massacre of Bulgarians at Serres: We are unwilling to dwellon the detailed barbarities of this butchery, of which more than enough is re-corded in the appendices.When the facts were disputed, the commission mighthesitate to assign responsibility, while allowing the rival perspectives to standalongside one another in the appendix. In the case of the reciprocal Greek andBulgarian murders at Demir-Hissar: We print in Appendix BNos. 27, 27a, 28,28a both the Greek and Bulgarian narratives of this affair.61 In this mannerthe commission also scrupulously preserved its own self-proclaimed neutralityof perspective.

The commissioners further stressed the fact that Balkan voices, cited withinthe commissions report, were self-incriminating. The report thus presented itselfas a transparent and neutral medium through which Balkan voices spoke abouttheir own acts of violence. No verdict which could be based on the evidencecollected by the Commission could be more severe than that which Greek sol-diers have pronounced upon themselves,stated the report. Due to the Bulgariancapture of Greek mail bags, the Commission had access to letters home, writ-ten by Greek combatants. The soldiersletters were written often in pencil onscraps of paper of every sort and size,the commissioners observed, emphasiz-ing that they had examined the letters themselves. We studied with particular

care a series of twenty-ve letters, which contained denite avowals by theseGreek soldiers of the brutalities which they had practiced. Two members of theCommission have some knowledge of modern Greek.62 The commissionersthus drew attention to their own expertise and professionalism. They furthernoted the publication of a facsimile edition of the letters and declared them-selves satised that the letters are genuine.Several extracts were reproduced inthe narrative reportwe massacre all the Bulgarians who fall into our handsand burn the villagesand many more extracts were included in Appendix C,

Number 51.63

Balkan voices were thus specically permitted to speak through the commis-sions report for the purposes of incrimination and self-incrimination. Theseletters relieve us of the task of summing up the evidence,commented the com-missioners, as if excusing themselves from a distasteful task, while further en-hancing the impact of the report by letting the peoples of southeastern Europeindict themselves. The commission expected that impact to register upon the

60 Ibid., 7576.61 Ibid., 89, 93.62 Ibid., 104.63

Ibid., 105

6, 307

14.

400 Wolff




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imagination of the civilized world, and the representational strategy of thereport allowed for the inclusion of the uncivilized, but not unmediated, voices

of the Balkan combatants.64

The Coming of World War I: Self-Determination and

Self-Representation

The representational dynamics of 1912 and 1913 crucially prepared the way forthe even more urgently competitive national claims concerning Eastern Europethat arose with the advent of World War I. From the very beginning of the war,national spokesmen on behalf of the peoples of Eastern Europe sought to ar-ticulate their often conicting aspirations, hoping to be heard and acknowledged

when the war was over. Inevitably, these spokesmen depended upon the goodwill and patronage of foreign sponsors. The Czech national leader TomaMasaryk arrived in London during the war in April 1915, and Seton-Watsonmet him at Charing Cross Station, helped him carry his books, and presented himat the British Foreign Ofce a few days later.65

Seton-Watson worked to create the School of Slavonic Studies at KingsCollege London in 1915, and the inaugural lecture was delivered by Masarykon The Problem of Small Nations in the Crisis of Europe.One part of the

problem was being solved as Masaryk took the lecternthe problem of how tobe heardwhile other problems of representation persisted. It would help usgreatly if I could show a good map of the European nations,Masaryk began,but no such map exists.He could only make reference to an inadequate map,inadequate on account of its provenance: If we take one of the few better eth-nological mapsalas! a German one.To say that the war was being waged toredraw the map of Europe, or rather to afrm the legitimacy of one mapping overanother, was simply the literal truth; making the maps meant controlling thediscourse. Think of it!Masaryk exclaimed. The very question of this war isgraphically not represented.His own Czech perspective was represented orallyas he delivered his inaugural address in London in October 1915 as arranged

by Seton-Watsonand outlined a new map of Eastern Europe.66

Six months earlier, in March 1915, it was Seton-Watson himself, in his roleas spokesman, who delivered a lecture at Kings College London on The Spiritof the Serb.The lecture was, predictably, a tribute to the Serbian spirit and anappeal to his audience to sympathize with Serbiaa somewhat problematic

64 Ibid.65 Hugh Seton-Watson and Christopher Seton-Watson, The Making of a New Europe,

124.66 TomaMasaryk, The Problem of Small Nations in the Crisis of Europe,Current

History: A Monthly Magazine of the New York Times 3October 1915March 1916: 425;

Hugh Seton-Watson and Christopher Seton-Watson, The Making of a New Europe, 153.





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sympathy, one year after Gavrilo Princip had wordlessly formulated that spiritat Sarajevo and two years after the Carnegie report had cataloged the atrocities

of the Balkan Wars.67

Seton-Watson was, of course, describing, invoking, con-juring, and representing that spirit, but he could not actually produce it fromwithin his Scottish self.

By the end of August 1914, Edith Durham was reporting from Durrs to bearwitness: Albania seems to have been entirely forgotten by the big world duringthe past two weeks. Since the outbreak of the general war no one has had time togive a thought to this country.68 During the course of the war, Austrian oc-cupation, along with Greek and Bulgarian incursions, threatened Albanian sov-ereignty, and by December 1916 Durham was speaking about Albania in Lon-don at a meeting of the Central Asian Society, not at the School of Slavonic

Studies. No friend of Seton-Watson, and no admirer of the Slavs, Durhampraised the spirit of the Albanians, denounced Serbian aggression dating backto the Middle Ages, and averred that the Albanian since that time has neverceased to regard the Slav as his bitterest and cruelest foe.She seemed to alludecompetitively to Masaryks London inaugural lecture when she noted that Al-

bania had to rank among Europes small nations: We may be, however, allowedto hope, with the Albanians, that as the present war is being waged for the rightsof small nationalities, Albanias day, too, will dawn.69 Giving voice to theirhopes, Durham occupied the almost sacerdotal position of leading the congre-gation in the service of hoping with the Albanians.

After she had concluded her address, the chairman of the meeting, explorerFrancis Younghusband, joined his own sentiments to hers and, by association, tothe hopes of the Albanians: We certainly shall not fail in interest in and sym-

pathy for Albania, after what Miss Durham has told us. We must admire fromthe bottom of our hearts the sturdiness with which the Albanians through allthese centuries of oppression have stuck to their own individuality; and we mayhope that in the years to come they may have that opportunity for which theyare evidently panting to express that individuality to the full. Even as hedeclared his sympathy and admiration, the chairman seemed to dissociate hisdignied self from the panting Albanians; but he did take note of the fact thatthere was, in fact, one single Albanian

one Albanian gentlemanpresent inthe company: He is rather modest in regard to his knowledge of English; but

67 R. W. Seton-Watson, The Spirit of the Serb, lecture delivered at Kings CollegeLondon on March 10, 1915 London, 1915, 31; see also Hugh Seton-Watson andChristopher Seton-Watson,The Making of a New Europe, 17476.

68 Durham, Albanian Letter, The Near East, August 28, 1914, rpt. in Durham,Albania and the Albanians, 62.

69 Durham, Albania Past and Present,presented at the Central Asian Society, De-cember 13, 1916, published in Journal of the Central Asian Society 4 1917, rpt. in

Durham,Albania and the Albanians, 96, 102.

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I am sure we should be only too lenient with him if he would very kindly speakto us.70 After so much ventriloquy it was a remarkable moment indeed when

the Albanian gentleman was entreated to speak in his own voice about his ownnation, overcoming the cultural and linguistic barriers that separated him fromthe rest of the company. Yet his remarks, in the end, were not about Albania, butrather about Edith Durham: The Albanian gentleman referred to said that MissDurham had done more for his country than anyone he could think of. Herwork had earned for her among the people the title of the Queen of Albania. Hetrusted she would be able to continue to help them, and, as in the past, do ev-erything she could for Albanian nationality.71 The discursive dynamics of 1916were such that the Albanian speaker could best express himself and endorse hisown cause by testifying to the credentials of the foreign woman who spoke on

behalf of his nation.It was also possible for a representative from Eastern Europe to decline

altogether to speak for his nation, as in the case of Adam Tarnowski, theHabsburg ambassador to Washington in 1917 when America entered the war.Woodrow Wilsons Secretary of State Robert Lansing attempted to appeal toTarnowski as a Pole, rather than as a Habsburg diplomatyour own nativeland, Poland, may become independentbut Tarnowski declined the bait, stay-ing silent with knitted brows looking off into space.72 In this case, silence wasas eloquent as speech.

In America, however, there existed the special circumstance of immigrant

communities who could communicate bilingually and with the dual politicalidentities of American residents or citizens who were members of Eastern Eu-ropean national communities. A Yugoslav Committee was formed in Paris and

brought to London in 1915, where Seton-Watson helped translate its manifestointo English. In Chicago in 1915 there were Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene im-migrant groups who likewise afrmed their commitment to creating a uniedstate of Yugoslavia. It was in Pittsburgh in 1918 with Masaryk present thatCzechs and Slovaks declared their readiness to join together to form an inde-

pendent Czechoslovakia.73 Immigrant communities in the United States couldboth speak as Americans, attempting to inuence President Wilson and Ameri-can policy and at the same time speak for their national communities in East-ern Europe within an Anglophone public sphere. Both of these declarationsfor Yugoslavia in Chicago, for Czechoslovakia in Pittsburghplayed a mean-ingful part in undermining the legitimacy of the Habsburg monarchy, pointingtoward its postwar dismemberment.

70 Ibid., 102.71 Ibid.72 Mamatey,The United States and East Central Europe, 91.73 Ibid., 11718, 28284; Hugh Seton-Watson and Christopher Seton-Watson, The

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The phenomenon of the American immigrant spokesman also generated let-ters to the editor in the public sphere. While the Serbian assassin Gavrilo Princip

spoke with his pistol in Sarajevo and died in prison in 1918, his young Ukrain-ian counterpart Miroslav Sichynsky, who assassinated the Polish viceroy ofHabsburg Galicia in 1908 in Lviv, escaped from prison and, by 1919, was livingin America and writing in English to the New York Times. His letter to the editordenounced Paderewski and Polish national ambitions while afrming Ukrain-ian self-determination in Galicia.74 Wartime advocacy acquired a new level ofcommunicative facility in the context of American emigration.

Before the war, the publication of Seton-WatsonsThe Southern Slav Questionand the Habsburg Monarchywas both an act of political advocacy and a dec-laration of expertise, while his voyage to Dalmatia became a kind of demon-

stration of friendship and ratication of spokesmanship in which South Slavicvoices acclaimed him as their vocal advocate. Edith Durham and Aubrey Herbert

played similar roles as experts and foreign sponsors for the Albanians within theOttoman Empire. Yet the moment of Albanias declaration of independence in1912, followed by the violations of Albanian sovereignty during World War I,constituted both the culmination of their public roles and the period when theirspokesmanship began to pass into irrelevancy, when the Albanians had to speakfor themselves before the Great Powers, when self-determination became moresignicantly a matter of self-representation.

The networks of foreign spokesmanship that played such an inuential role

on behalf of nonsovereign peoples in Eastern Europe before the war had to besuperseded by direct relations among sovereign states in postwar Europe, andthe mediating operations of the earlier period could appear as awkward remind-ers of dependence within the new international framework. In 1920 AubreyHerbert noted in his diary, I nd that my telegram to the Albanians, advisingthem to join the League of Nations, was never sent, because the Post Ofce saidthey had never heard of Durazzo.75 The port of Durazzo, the site of importantnaval battles during the war, was now Albanian Durrs, but it was also true thatthe Albanians no longer needed a foreign adviser to tell them to join the Leagueof Nations.

Concerning Seton-Watson it has been noted that his closing down of thejournalThe New Europein 1920 roughly coincided with the diplomatic forma-tionwithin the new Europeof the Little Entente among the sovereign states ofCzechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania.76 Seton-Watson traveled to the new

74 Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political CultureStanford, CA, 2010, 37778, 459 n. 72; New York Times, May 25, 1919.

75 Aubrey Herbert, Diary, October 12, 1920, in Destani and Tomes,Albanias GreatestFriend, 319.

76 Hugh Seton-Watson and Christopher Seton-Watson, The Making of a New Europe,

406

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Yugoslavia in 1920 that is, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.There he was ritually honored with a doctorate from the University of Zagreb,

and, echoing the Dalmatian tour of 1912, there were cheering crowds, bouquets,and bands striking up God Save the Kingat every turnwhich, according tohis wife May, was really quite indescribable and atrst very embarrassing.77

Yet, Seton-Watsons old friend Ivo Lupis-Vuki, who had once awaited him soeagerly on Korula, now sent regrets: I am so sorry of having missed you inZagreb, we could have had a long talk about Yugoslav matters.Instead, Seton-Watson traveled on to Belgrade, where he held a more exalted conversation onthose matters: had over an hour with the King, but though we covered a widerange, did not get very deep.78 The postwar politics of spokesmanship werealready being recalibrated at a different depth of engagement.

Conclusion: The Cultural Asymmetry of Continental Encounters

After World War I, with the Paris Peace Conference and the treaties of Versaillesand Trianon, Eastern Europe would be remapped as a domain of sovereign states.Before the war, howeverand even during the warthe Habsburg, Ottoman,and Russian empires ruled over large parts of the region, which still awaited its

postwar geopolitical metamorphosis. The lands of Eastern Europe could not beconsidered colonies precisely analogous to those of the overseas European em-

pires; indeed, within the Habsburg monarchy the peoples of Eastern Europe

actually participated in constitutional parliamentary democracy, joined in parlia-mentary majorities, and held ofce in governing ministries. Yet, a sense of po-litical asymmetry and national grievance was present throughout the region. Anti-imperial sentiments in Eastern Europe encouraged a political imperative to speak,to nd a voice, while at the same time the obstacle of linguistic intelligibility andthe asymmetry of presumptive civilization discouraged such vocalization andcomplicated communication between Eastern Europe and Western Europe.

In 1912the year of Seton-Watsons Dalmatian voyage, of Albanian inde-pendence, of the First Balkan Warone isolated gure struggled vainly to com-municate in Habsburg Prague: People no longer understood his words, though tohim they seemed clear enough, clearer than before

perhaps because his ears had

become accustomed.79 Such were the reections of Gregor Samsa, transformedinto a monstrous vermin in KafkasMetamorphosis, which was written in 1912though not published until 1915. Of course the most dramatic impact of the

77 Ibid., 404.78 R. W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs: Correspondence, vol. 2, letter of Lupis-

Vukito Seton-Watson, June 15, 1920, 85; Hugh Seton-Watson and Christopher Seton-Watson,The Making of a New Europe, 405.

79

Franz Kafka,Die VerwandlungLondon, 2008, 13.





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metamorphosis was visual, but a part of Gregors condition of alienation derivedfrom his having become unintelligible to humans, and indeed this impossibility of

communication was therst intimation of the crisis, at a moment when his familywas still on the other side of the door and had not yet seen his new physical form.Scott Spectors study of Kafkas Prague has suggested the traumatized relation ofGerman-speaking Jewish writers to the German language, as conditioned by thelanguage politics of the late Habsburg monarchy and especially the erce lin-guistic rivalry between Czech and German in Bohemia.80 The silencing of GregorSamsa perhaps reected some awareness on Kafkas part that language, self-expression, and comprehensibility were fraught with extreme anxiety and evenviolent controversy in Eastern Europe.

The issues of representing Eastern Europe were implicitly literary, even when

they were also diplomatic and political, just because representation was gener-ally a matter of voice and narrative. A literary approach to these issues, focusingon 1912, the year that Seton-Watson visited Adriatic Dalmatia, might also addressthe literary sensibility of James Joyce, then resident on the Adriatic at Trieste, atthe edge of the Slavic world, or of Rainer Maria Rilke, who visited Duino, nearTrieste, and began to compose his Duino Elegies in that same year. Thomas Manntraveled to the Adriatic in 1911 and published Death in Venicein 1912. The fa-mous novella described Gustav von Aschenbachs ctional voyage to Venice,where Aschenbach, moving far beyond Slavenfreundlichkeit, fell obsessively inlove with the Polish boy Tadzio. The novella was written by Mann principally

from Aschenbachs point of view, while Tadzio remained largely silent withinthe text, his Polish voice presumed to be as unt for communication, as incom-

prehensible, as that of Gregor Samsa after his metamorphosis.InDeath in VeniceAschenbach does address Tadzio, confesses his love for the

boy, and even composes long Socratic monologues to the godlike object of hisobsession. Yet, in these instances, Aschenbach is actually speaking to himself,and the assumption is that t