Imagining the Balkans as a Space of Revolution: The Federalist Vision of Serbian Socialism,1870–1914

Federalism and Models of Sovereignty

Serbian socialists’ interest in a federal solution to the problem of a post-Ottoman Balkans was only one thread of a thick tapestry of federalist ideas in the long nineteenth century. Throughout Eastern and Central Europe from 1815 to 1914, federalist ideas informed the strategies of revolutionary activists, political reformers, and imperial statesmen. As a strategy for the redistribution of state power through the reorganization of political space, federalism suited the purposes of multiple and often mutually contradictory political movements, from the revolutionary left to the conservative right. ² To trace a distinctly socialist genealogy of Balkan federalism, we have to first conceptualize and categorize these various intellectual strands in order to identify those from which Serbian socialism was derived, and against which it was pitted.

The bulk of literature on the history of federalist thought in Eastern and Central Europe has tended to organize these projects either according to the geography with which they were concerned (Danubian, Balkan, Central European) or the ideologies with which they were affiliated (nationalist, socialist, pan-Slavic). The difficulty with such categorizations is that the commonalities they posit between political movements at the level of ideology or geography tend to obscure divergences or even outright rivalries operating at more fundamental conceptual levels. As a result, studies of federalist thought are often reduced to simply cataloguing various ideas, neglecting their underlying political structures and the wider questions of their historical trajectories or intellectual filiations. If, as Holly Case has recently argued, the two overriding concerns of federalist thought in the long nineteenth century were securing state sovereignty over a discrete territory and overcoming ethnic antagonisms in nationally heterogeneous regions, the ways in which federal projects addressed these twin concerns depended on the model of sovereignty upon which they were built. ³ Building on Case’s conclusion, this article proposes four typologies of federalist projects operative in Central and Eastern Europe from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the outbreak of World War I. These are (1) revolutionary-republican, (2) imperial-reformist, (3) imperial-irredentist, and (4) revolutionary-social. As with all typologies, they are not intended to offer an exhaustive catalogue of all the federalist projects articulated during this period, but rather to identify generalizable patterns reproduced across intellectual systems. The goal will be to parse out the varying models of sovereignty around which federalist ideas were structured with an eye to tracing out the intellectual history of a distinctly socialist vision of Balkan federalism.

Revolutionary-republican models of federalism emerged from the nationalist movements of the mid-nineteenth century and sought to replace the post-1815 order of monarchical alliances with federations of national republics. These movements took their cue from the French Revolution and, later, the writings of Giuseppe Mazzini, for whom the “national principle” offered a model of popular sovereignty sharply opposed to claims of dynastic or historical rights. But nestling popular sovereignty within the framework of the national principle necessarily fragmented the space of Europe into a patchwork of different nation states. In an age dominated by large, multi-ethnic empires, such a project seemed unnecessarily narrow, economically misguided, and militarily weak. If this principle of sovereignty was to be preserved against the united forces of the restorationist powers, Mazzini and other revolutionary republicans soon realized it would have to be secured by a Europe-wide alliance of national republics. Federation resolved the tension between a sovereignty exercised through centralized national republics, on the one hand, and the need to forge a durable alliance of anti-monarchist forces on the other. ⁴

This European federal vision prompted republican movements east of the Elbe to develop more modest proposals of regional unification. National revolutionaries inspired by the 1848 revolutions in the Austrian Empire, such as Lajos Kossuth and Nicolae Bălcescu, sought to win and secure national independence through a Danubian Federation composed of Hungary, Romania, and Serbia. ⁵ Pan-Slavic activists such as the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, the Czech revolutionary Josef Frič, or those around the Ukrainian Cyril and Methodius Society, sought the re-organization of the political order of Eastern Europe through the creation of a federation of free Slavic republics. ⁶ And the Bulgarian nationalist Vasil Levski envisioned a future federation of republics across the Balkans, built on Ottoman ruins. ⁷ While the geography of their respective projects rarely overlapped, these figures all sought to realize forms of popular sovereignty through national republics whose security was mutually guaranteed through regional, federal alliances.

If revolutionary-republican theorists sought the destruction of multi-ethnic empires and the total reorganization of Europe’s political space, imperial-reformist projects proposed federalism as a means for reforming those multi-ethnic imperial polities whose centralized models of sovereignty were considered to have become incompatible with modern politics. In the Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires, political theorists set out to develop projects that could at once preserve the territorial integrity of their respective polities and reorganize political space in a way that could realize the demands for autonomy coming from regional or national movements. Although often constitutional in their outlook, these imperial-reformist projects also sought to maintain the ultimate sovereignty of the monarch as a mechanism for transcending national particularities and preserving the territorial unity of the empire. In Russia, such federalist ideas grew out of the Enlightenment thought of Vasilii Fedorovich Marinovskii and were further developed by figures such as the Decembrist Nikita Muraviev and the Ukrainian socialist Myhailo Drahomanov. ⁸ In the Ottoman Empire, federalist ideas appeared later in the century as reformers made efforts to secure national autonomy for ethnic groups within the empire to stem the process of disintegration, and included projects of Bulgar-Turkish dualism, Helleno-Ottomanism, and the more ambitious reforms proposed by the Albanian national activist Ismail Qemali. ⁹

Imperial-reformist projects were pervasive in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where, as Rudolph Schlesinger noted, federalism was “an attempt to solve the contradiction . . . between the historic political units and the desire of the modern national group for unity and self-government.” ¹⁰ Following the rejection of the Kremsier Constitution of 1848 and, subsequently, the 1867 dualist compromise, imperial-reformist models flourished, especially among representatives of the Slavs and Romanians who had been excluded from the dualist reform. Within these projects, we can further distinguish two models of federalism: first, those that sought to divide the empire into several national-territorial units, which included the proposals of Austro-Slavs such as František Palacký, “Trialists” like Josip Strossmayer, Hungarian statesmen such as Oszkár Jászi, and the Romanian national activist Aurel C. Popovici. ¹¹ Like their republican contemporaries, these figures understood sovereignty to be rooted in national claims, but they believed this national principle was reconcilable with monarchism; indeed, for many, the ultimate sovereignty of the emperor was essential to preserve the empire’s social order. The second model of federalism prevalent in Austria-Hungary includes those projects that separated the territorial organization of the state from the question of national self-determination and effectively rendered nationality a personal issue. For theorists such as József Eötvös and, later, the Austro-Marxists Karl Renner and Otto Bauer, the national question of the empire could be resolved through a federation of autonomous cultural institutions dissociated from any geographic territory. ¹² For this second group, the national principle was less the basis of political sovereignty than a concern of individual autonomy and freedom of expression. Internal reform along non-territorial federalist lines was not designed to enshrine popular sovereignty but to remove nationality from the purview of state power the better to manage the empire or, in the case of the social democrats, to hone class antagonisms.

If imperial-reformist programs of federalism sought to preserve the territorial integrity of their respective empires, imperial-irredentist projects saw in federalism a means for expanding the territorial scope of their state’s hegemony, either at the expense of other empires or of smaller nation-states. In these projects, federalism stood on a spectrum of political affiliation that stretched from brief inter-state military alliances, such as the various Balkan ententes, to outright imperial annexation. As a model designed to preserve and extend the authority of a specific state, these projects tended to founder on the unwillingness of the leading affiliate to agree to an equitable power-sharing arrangement. Within this category, we can distinguish two sets of projects: those that emerged as a model for Russian foreign policy in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and those developed by the small monarchies of the Balkans in an attempt to cement their vulnerable authority vis-à-vis the larger Russian, Ottoman, or Austro-Hungarian empires. While the initial vision of a European federation under an enlightened Russian tutelage was conceived by the Polish statesman Adam Czartoryski, its more lasting and familiar form is associated with the anti-western thought of Slavophile theorists Ivan Aksakov, Mikhail Pogodin, and later, Nikolai Danilievskii. For these thinkers, the Russian Empire had a historic duty to unite the Slavic nations of Europe and the Balkans under its own leadership in order to preserve a distinctly Slavic civilization. ¹³ That these plans for federation frequently bled into more forthright discussions of the strategic interests of Russian imperialism in the Balkans indicates the degree to which federalism was merely one of several potential models of political affiliation intended to facilitate Russian imperial influence.

Imperial-irredentist models of federalism also emerged within the political imagination of the small Balkan monarchies from the 1860s onwards. Although, for the most part, the discussions between Greece, Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria merely resulted in military alliances, they occasionally developed into federalist projects through which “liberated” Ottoman territory would become politically affiliated with one of the respective monarchies. In the late 1860s, the Serbian Prince Mihailo Obrenović proposed a Serbo-Bulgarian union under his own crown and signed a treaty of alliance with George I of Greece, both alliances designed to expand the Serbian monarch’s authority in the peninsula. That the latter treaty cynically contradicted the promises Obrenović had previously made to the Bulgarians demonstrates the degree to which such imperial-irredentist models of federalism were rarely more than steps on the way to national expansion. ¹⁴ Greek nationalism around the turn of the century also bore distinct irredentist ambitions and, through the ideas of figures like Ion Dragoumis and Athanasios Souliotis, experimented with the vision of a hellenocentric Eastern Federation. ¹⁵

The emergence of the Albanian national movement and the further destabilization of Ottoman power in Macedonia during the fin de siècle again saw the sprouting of federalist ideas as a means of realizing greater nationalist demands of the small national monarchies. In pursuit of a route to the Adriatic, in 1912 the Serbian state proposed to Albanian leaders the absorption of Albanian territories in exchange for autonomy and a separate Albanian assembly within the Kingdom. As a counter-balance to these Serbian gestures, Albanian national leaders looked to an alliance with Greece, proposing a Greco-Albanian union under the Greek crown. ¹⁶ Unsurprisingly, these models of regional federation, in which ultimate sovereignty lay with one of the affiliates, was a hard sell and none of these projects expanded beyond brief and opportunist military alliances.

Although imperial-irredentist and republican-revolutionary models of federalism both sought to reorganize the territory of Europe in a way that destabilized neighbouring multi-ethnic empires, the models of sovereignty each deployed were quite different. While republican-revolutionaries envisioned a federation of equal nation-states as the surest means of securing a popular democratic sovereignty, imperial-irredentists toyed with federalism as one of several strategies for buttressing the vulnerable authority of weak monarchies and to achieve a degree of autonomy from their Great Power patrons. For the former, federalism was an alternative to empire and the advent of nationally organized democracy; for the latter it was to provide the first step in the re-founding of indigenous imperial power in the Balkans (either in the form of the Hellenic megali idea or in a revival of the Medieval Serbian kingdom). ¹⁷

Finally, and of most significance for the history of Serbian socialism, the late nineteenth century produced what we will term revolutionary-social ideas of federalism. These projects radicalized and deepened the democratic claims of republican traditions by extending the principle of popular sovereignty into the socio-economic roots of society. In these models, federalism stood for a project of radical social transformation that could only be brought about through a revolution of the poor, the peasantry, and the working classes. For Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, one of the leading theorists of European anarchism, a federal decentralization of political power throughout society offered the most effective means of preserving personal and communal liberties. ¹⁸ Placing more of an emphasis on economic concerns, the Russian revolutionaries Aleksander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin envisioned a federation of peasant communes as the basis for an anti-capitalist egalitarian social order. ¹⁹ Anarchist understandings of federalism offered a model of popular sovereignty that sought the decentralization of state power to the smallest composite territorial unit. ²⁰ These ideas operated on a spectrum weighted on one side by libertarian anxieties of political authority and, on the other, by socialist concerns of economic redistribution. While radical liberals such as Carlo Cattaneo, Guiseppe Ferrari, and Francesc Pi i Margall followed Proudhon in prioritizing communal or cantonal autonomy as a safeguard for political liberty, the emerging socialist and anarchist movements of the 1870s, inspired by Bakunin, envisioned a federation of worker and peasant cooperatives as an alternative to the (dis)organization of the capitalist market. ²¹

In the 1870s, these revolutionary-social ideas of federation found fertile soil in a small but energetic network of young intellectuals in the Balkans, including Svetozar Marković, Hristo Botev, Zamfir Arbore, Panagyiotis Panas, and the Democratic Club of Patras. ²² For these figures, the ideas of Proudhon, Bakunin, and later, Marx and Engels, as well as the examples set by the Paris Commune, the Spanish federalist uprising, and (less radically) the Swiss cantonal system, offered captivating models for the revolutionary transformation for the Balkans. While these thinkers recognized their ideological indebtedness to Mazzini and the Republican tradition, the latter’s explicit rejection of class politics as “divisive” of the national movement, his criticism of the Parisian communards, and his subsequent condemnation by both Bakunin and Garibaldi, drew a discrete line between Mazzini’s republican project of European federation and the revolutionary-social federalist reorganization of society. ²³

The above discussion does not exhaust the variety of federal projects developed in the long nineteenth century; the four typologies outlined here are intended to serve as a guide to better demarcate the development of a distinctly socialist tradition of federal thought in the Balkans. The overall claim, however, is that organizing federalist ideas according to their underlying models of sovereignty rather than their stated ideology or geographic focus offers us a more holistic account of the intellectual history of this specific political model that permeated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Starting with sovereignty reveals the unexpected divergences and unlikely bedfellows of different and even rival political projects. With this background in place, we can now turn our attention to tracing the genealogy of socialist federalism in the Balkans, and to compare and contrast this intellectual movement with its contemporary, rival visions of regional unification.

Serbian Expansion and Its Balkan Alliances

Imperial-irredentist projects were the rule for the Balkan monarchies of the late nineteenth century. Despite late eighteenth-century attempts to organize the region according to civic and non-national lines—a project first set out by Rigas Velestinlis in his “Revolutionary Proclamation” of 1797—by the second half of the nineteenth century the independent kingdoms of Serbia, Greece, and Romania were committed to a policy of nationalist irredentism. In the newly formed Kingdom of Serbia, state officials longed to expand their territory at the expense of the Ottomans, and thereby shed their dependence on the Russian and Habsburg empires. ²⁴ In 1844 the then Interior Minister, Ilija Garašanin, inspired by the Polish émigré Adam Czartoryski, composed his Načertanije, which called on Serbia to unite the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Northern Albania as well as independent Montenegro under the Obrenović crown. As a solution to the state question of a post-Ottoman Balkans, this strategy of a “Greater Serbia” proposed to establish a modern vision of Tsar Dušan’s medieval Serbian empire, to construct a kingdom across a territory whose inhabitants were seen by leading Serbian statesmen to be rightful subjects of Belgrade. ²⁵ Although Garašanin fell out of favor with the Obrenović dynasty in 1850, his ideal of Balkan unity under a greater Serbian state continued to inform regional policy during the reign of Prince Mihailo Obrenović. Later it provided the foreign policy model of the conservative Progressive Party, which came to rule the Serbian state in the final decades of the nineteenth century. During the 1890s, intellectuals affiliated with the Progressives, such as Milan Piroćanac and Vladimir Karić, celebrated Prince Mihailo and his efforts at uniting the Balkans under Serbian leadership. ²⁶ For these conservative thinkers, an alliance of strong, centralized, and modernizing monarchies aided by westernized state bureaucracies would be able to secure the Balkans from both Austrian and Russian diplomatic intrigues and ally it with an Enlightened Western European civilization. ²⁷

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, a rival policy of irredentism came to dominate Serbian politics through the political activity of the Serbian Radical Party. Although the party had its roots in the work of the socialist and Balkan federalist, Svetozar Marković, in the decades that followed his death in 1875, his followers moved away from his vision of an egalitarian Balkan federation and toward a politics of Serbian irredentism, especially in Ottoman-controlled Macedonia. ²⁸ While the geographic scope of their visions were similar, the Radicals’ populist irredentism was distinct from the Greater Serbian policies of the Obrenović dynasty and its supporters in the Progressive Party. For the latter, whose ideal of political sovereignty relied on an Enlightened monarch and his Europeanized, modernizing bureaucracy, regional unification would be carried out through closed diplomacy between Balkan statesmen. In contrast, the Radicals celebrated an expansive popular sovereignty and sought the expansion of the Serbian state through the mobilization of the peasant masses. Despite these distinct understandings of sovereignty, however, both the Progressives and the Radicals, by the end of the nineteenth century, agreed on a regional policy that privileged Serbian national interests over those of the other Balkan states. Less than two decades after he had outlined the key ideas of Serbian radicalism, Marković’s radical progeny had rejected his vision of Balkan Federation and come to advocate a policy of Serbian national expansion disturbingly in harmony with the monarchist policy of Greater Serbia.

Imperial Reform versus Social Revolution: Austrian and Serbian Social Democracy

The SSDP’s adoption of a more rigorous Marxist worldview led the fin de siècle socialists to reject the collectivist model of the peasant commune developed by Marković and to prioritize work among the industrial proletariat. The early problem that the party faced, however, was that Serbia was still a thoroughly agrarian economy, with very little working class. ⁴⁶ Although leading activists of the party, such as Dimitrije Tucović, Dušan Popović, and Dragiša Lapčević, worked to organize the few industrial and craft shop workers into trade unions, they were well aware of the structural limitations imposed by the country’s lack of capitalist development. ⁴⁷ This priority of economic development was not only of concern for the party’s recruitment strategy, but underpinned their wider understanding of political sovereignty. For Serbian social democrats, political independence could only be secured through economic self-determination, “by raising one’s own production to the world economic level.” ⁴⁸ In a world of competing imperial powers, only economic sovereignty could underwrite political self-determination. This concern with political-economic sovereignty came to color social democrats’ reading of Marković’s federalism. As the first Balkan Social Democratic Conference proclaimed in 1910, the first step towards achieving the political independence of the Balkan nations was “by combining their economic forces into one whole, abolishing artificially drawn borders, and enabling them to live together in full reciprocity and in united defence against common danger.” ⁴⁹ Balkan federalism, in other words, was offered as both a solution to the region’s complex national question, but also a means for securing economic development.

In Serbia, anxieties over economic dependence on European capitalism were most clearly bound up in the country’s relations with Austria-Hungary. This perspective made socialists especially sensitive to the role their northern neighbor played in the country’s trade and eventually put their revolutionary-social vision of a Balkan Federation in confrontation with the Austro-Marxists’ imperial-reformist project. ⁵⁰ The tensions between these two socialist visions of federalism, which came to a head in the midst of Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, highlight the unexpected divergences that took place within movements with a shared ideology, and point to the importance of excavating their underlying models of sovereignty.

For Serbian social democrats, the specific way in which Serbian capitalism developed under the shadow of Austro-Hungarian imperialism had distorted it and prevented the country from developing into a “normal” capitalist state. Consequently, they perceived any steps to strengthen or expand the empire’s political and economic strength in the region as further compounding the problems of regional underdevelopment. The expansion of the railroads during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which ran through the Balkans and linked Vienna and Budapest with Thessaloniki, was one of the key symbols of the empire’s penetration and came in for harsh criticism from socialist writers and activists. In an article published in 1911 in the SSDP’s journal, Borba, Pante Krekić, a Bosnian socialist, sought to disabuse readers of the claim (promoted, among others, by leading Austro-Marxists) that the industrially advanced Austria-Hungary could be a force of economic development in Bosnia. Rejecting this prognosis, Krekić examined the empire’s construction of rail networks in the annexed territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina and concluded that they had not been developed to promote local economic growth but only served to facilitate the foreign exploitation of Bosnia’s natural resources by the empire’s capitalist industries. ⁵¹ A few years later, in 1913, the SSDP representative in the Serbian parliament, Dragiša Lapčević, called for the government to reject further expansion of Austria-Hungary’s railroads, which, he insisted, would not benefit the Serbian economy. Against this integration into European markets, he argued that the only effective means for Serbia’s economic development lay in a regional unification of the small states of the Balkans and called for the government to negotiate a customs union between Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Turkey, Greece, and Albania. ⁵²

Austria-Hungary’s near monopoly on Serbian foreign trade was another obstacle to the small kingdom’s industrial development and economic sovereignty. When in 1905 the new Karađorđević regime sought to break away from the country’s traditional reliance on Austria-Hungary and to orient itself towards Russia and France, Vienna imposed embargoes on Serbian pork. Although the embargo was ultimately unsuccessful, it demonstrated just how vulnerable the Serbian economy was to the empire’s soft power. When the “pig wars” officially came to an end in 1910 and discussions opened regarding a new trade deal between Vienna and Belgrade, Serbian socialists vehemently opposed the plans. Rejecting further trade with Austria-Hungary, Tucović called instead for greater economic cooperation between the Balkan states as a strategy for region-wide development:

Establishing rational forestry, regulation of the rivers, irrigating the dry districts, draining the swamps, expanding agricultural cooperatives, multiplying the number of schools, raising the moral and intellectual [level of the] peasant, the state will create the elementary conditions for the modern exploitation of natural wealth. . . . [Serbia would] transfer the weight of her trade from foreign markets to local. . . . [Serbia], with all her might, needs to work towards the creation of a Balkan Federation which will be the only correct, secure and cultural solution to the Balkan question and which, on this principle, will create the first path in history to a stable situation in this volatile political sea called the Balkans. ⁵³

Rejecting further domination by Austro-Hungarian markets, Tucović offered a political-economic fantasy of a future moment in which Serbia would turn “inwards,” into a common Balkan economic community. Underpinning this fantasy of agricultural modernization and cultural enlightenment was a deep-seated anxiety concerning the economic backwardness of the state and its dependence on European capital.

The SSDP’s critique of the centralizing and expansionist tendencies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire put them at odds with the Austro-Marxists, in particular, Karl Renner and Otto Bauer, for whom a reformed empire could play a progressive, “civilizing” role in the Balkans. The Austro-Marxists shared with many of the leading representatives of Central European social democracy a profound fear of the Russian Empire and its influence in South-east Europe. This fear colored their understanding of the national question in the region, leading many to see Serbian or Bulgarian national aspirations as mere proxies of Russian state interests. Against this Tsarist threat, even a conservative, semi-feudal state like that of Austria-Hungary seemed preferable for many leading Marxists. ⁵⁴

However, Austro-Marxists were also keenly aware that the demands of the small nationalities of the Balkans and Eastern Europe more generally couldn’t be simply dismissed, but had to be reconciled with what they perceived to be the historical tendency toward large state formations. The attempt to bring about this reconciliation lay at the base of Bauer’s national programme, which divorced nationality from a territorialized political sovereignty. Bauer’s project sought to reform the Austro-Hungarian state in a manner that would guarantee national autonomy for its constituent ethnic groups through a federal network of national-cultural institutions. These institutions would not be demarcated by territory but would allow citizens of the empire free practice of their respective national culture without compromising the historically progressive tendencies of political-economic integration and centralization. ⁵⁵ This was an imperial-reformist project of regional federation that sought to preserve the borders of the empire and modernize its political structures by transcribing the problem of nationality from a political to a cultural register.

To the extent that Bauer’s programme dissolved the connection between national autonomy and state sovereignty inherent in the republican traditions from which socialist thought developed, it was always amenable to the possibility of Austria-Hungary’s territorial expansion; provided, of course, that the empire could be reformed along the lines he had proposed. Coupled with the belief that the Balkan national movements were merely the southernmost outpost of Russian geopolitical power, the Austro-Marxist position on the national question left the party a great deal of leeway in favorably interpreting the empire’s south-east expansion. The party’s response to the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 was indicative of this ambiguous position on their own state’s imperialism. While leaders such as Bauer, Renner, Austerlitz, and Korać condemned the annexation as an ill-advised foray that could disrupt the delicate geopolitical balance in the region, they did not reject the principle of the expansion of Austria-Hungary’s influence into the Balkans outright. Indeed, rather than demanding that the empire relinquish its hold on the former Ottoman province, the party called for Bosnia and Herzegovina to be granted the rights of national autonomy already demanded by Bauer’s nationalities programme, that is, for the territory to be formally integrated into the empire’s reformed administration. ⁵⁶

The position of Austrian social democrats on their state’s south-east expansion was harshly criticized by the Serbian socialists. At the congress of the Second International held in Copenhagen in 1910, Dmitrije Tucović attacked the Austrian party for the insufficient zeal with which they opposed the annexation and their attempt to blame the Balkan states for their region’s instability: “Unlike the diplomats,” he cried in his address to the congress, “we expect Social Democracy in the great and powerful states to oppose most energetically any attempt to label as ‘disturbers of world peace’ the small, oppressed nations who are feebly twisting and turning under the aggressor’s heel.” ⁵⁷ For Tucović, the problems of the Balkans originated not in the petty intrigues of Belgrade, Sofia, or Athens but rather in the diplomatic policies of Vienna, St. Petersburg, London, and Berlin. That the Austro-Marxists were unwilling to hold their own government to account testified to their weak anti-imperialism. Tucović’s comrade, Dušan Popović, was even more confrontational in his attacks on the Austro-Marxists and the “imperialist support” they lent to their state. At a meeting held in the immediate aftermath of the annexation, Popović described the weak responses of the German and Austrian parties as “astonishing” and “in no way different from the official view of the Austrian bourgeoisie.” ⁵⁸ For Popović, the Austrian and German socialists had betrayed a central principle of socialism, which was to stand “against the oppression of one people by another, as against the oppression of one class by another.” ⁵⁹

The conflict between the Serbian and Austrian social democrats was rooted in their rival projects of regional unification. While both accepted the need for larger political-economic structures to facilitate economic and cultural development, the underlying models of sovereignty upon which their respective projects were built pointed in opposite directions. Renner and Bauer’s imperial-reformist project of intra-empire federation sought to guarantee national autonomy while preserving the centralized structures of the empire. National autonomy was to be separated from questions of state or territorial sovereignty. Against this project, Serbian social democrats insisted that integration into the structures of Austria-Hungary (either explicitly through annexation, or implicitly through the empire’s trade monopoly) held back the region’s industrial development and prevented it from securing economic sovereignty. Still rooted in a republican tradition that saw the nation-state as the surest means of realizing popular self-determination, they rejected the efforts of Austro-Marxists to relegate national autonomy to an individual-cultural register. Their alternative of a Balkan Federation sought to defend the principle of economic self-determination through an alternative model of regional unification.

Whither the Balkan Bourgeoisies?

Owing to the shifts that had taken place in the intellectual milieu of radical politics in Serbia since the 1870s, the position of the SSDP was in some ways closer to the tradition of radical republicanism than to Svetozar Marković’s project of peasant socialism. In keeping with Marx and Engels’ assessment that only a national, centralized bourgeois republic would be able to achieve the historical task of political modernization and economic industrialization that could bring about the conditions for capitalism, Second International Marxists rejected anarchist ideas of decentralization and communal autonomy as backwards-looking. In their place, many leading theorists argued that the proletariat of Eastern Europe should help advance the project of national state-building in order to facilitate the growth of capitalism. The Czech-Austrian socialist, Karl Kautsky, was especially important in promulgating this view, and in his influential 1907 piece “The National Tasks of Socialists among the Balkan Slavs,” he argued that the hegemony of dynastic power in the Balkans was the prime cause of the region’s underdevelopment. As these local monarchs sought to “buy their independence from the Sultan by making themselves vassals of the Tsar, or Austria or England,” they crippled the possibility of genuine economic and political independence. ⁶⁰ Against this dynastic principle, Kautsky called for socialists to join the struggle for national unification and the creation of genuinely independent democratic republics. Owing to the complex national question of the Balkans, however, such unification could only be realized in a federation of constituent republics, a project that Kautsky believed was a step towards the growth of capitalism in the region and, consequently, the historical task of the nascent bourgeoisie.

Kautsky’s article had a profound influence on the Serbian social democrats, confirming the importance they placed on the struggle for national unification and against foreign domination as well as their call for a Balkan Federation. However, the theorists of the SSDP also differed from Kautsky on a fundamental point: Whereas the latter understood the historical task of forging a regional federation to fall to the national bourgeoisies, the former argued that it could only be the task of the proletariat and peasantry. As both Andreja Živković and Blagovest Njagulov have shown, Serbian social democrats believed that owing to the poor growth of capitalism in the region, the different national bourgeoisies of the Balkans were economically weak and, consequently, politically dependent on their respective dynastic states and their national irredentist policies. Consequently, the bourgeoisie was unable to play the independent, unifying role Kautsky’s thesis ascribed to them. ⁶¹ As a result, the struggle for a regional unification of national republics, a historically necessary task for the development of capitalism, fell to the proletariat.

The assessment of the local bourgeoisie as economically weak and politically compromised was most clearly developed in Dmitrije Tucović’s writings. For Tucović, the weakness of the bourgeoisie was tied to the colonial relations of dependence that European capitalist states had established with the Balkans. Writing in 1910, he drew attention to the collusion between the national monarchies of the Balkans and the European capitalist powers and argued that it was the irredentist plans of the former that aided the latter’s policies of divide and rule in the region. Through a combination of military aid and debt bondage, the major powers of Europe were able to prop up the local dynasties that vied for regional hegemony and to secure a privileged economic position for their own capital, compounding both the dependence of the state and the weakness of the local bourgeoisie. ⁶²

In his classic text, Serbia and Albania, written four years later in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars, Tucović developed this argument further, demonstrating through a study of the growth of local industry that the Serbian bourgeoisie had become active participants in the monarchy’s imperial-irredentist policy. In effect, the conflicts of 1912–1913, especially Serbia’s brutal attempt to carve out a path to the Adriatic Sea—a military campaign Tucović witnessed first-hand—was the result of a weak national bourgeoisie deferring to the Serbian monarchical state, which in turn operated as a proxy for a faction of European capital:

The government in Serbia is a zealous executor of the desires of all ruling classes and castes for the expansion of borders and the enslavement of foreign peoples to the extent that this answers to the necessities of the economic-financial system on which it is based, which is the pillar of its rule. . . . If the capitalist bourgeoisie in Serbia and the Balkan statelets is not yet developed enough to place the entire state politics in service to its interests, it has as its ally that very state power, which needs to pursue the maintenance of territorial expansion at all costs. ⁶³

Although Tucović did not address his German mentor directly, this position was clearly a departure from Kautsky’s call for the bourgeoisie to play a leading role in the regional unification of the Balkans. Given the way in which the Serbian bourgeoisie developed within a complex of foreign capital investments and local bureaucratic power, their interests aligned with the imperial-irredentist project of the Serbian state that had facilitated and perpetuated the fragmentation of the Balkans along national lines. It was only the proletariat, Tucović concluded, whose class interests transcended the national communities of which they were a part, which would be able to bring about “a political and economic community of all the peoples on the Balkans . . . based on full democracy and complete equality.” ⁶⁴

There was an obvious catch-22 in Tucović’s thesis: on the one hand, the purpose of a Balkan Federation was to create the conditions for capitalist development in the region in order to forge an indigenous industrial proletariat; on the other, the weakness of the region’s bourgeoisies demanded that this task be taken up by an alternative social class—the proletariat. In effect, a non-existent proletariat was being called upon to construct the conditions necessary for its own emergence into history.

Putting aside the circular logic in this strategy, though, it is clear that the SSDP’s position sits within the category of federalist ideas that we have described here as revolutionary-social. While Kautsky’s call for a federation of bourgeois republics echoed an earlier period in the intellectual development of Marxism, when its views on the immediate political-economic transformation of Eastern Europe were closer to those of Mazzini and Kossuth than Bakunin and Herzen, the Serbian social democrats confided the task of founding a Balkan Federation to the region’s proletariat. Although their federalist project did not carry with it a vision of the radical political decentralization that underpinned Marković’s earlier idea of a pan-Balkan federation of peasant communes, it nevertheless presupposed a radical shift in the social balance of power away from the monarchy-bourgeois coalition and towards the emerging proletariat. A Balkan Federation, that is, could only be realized as part of a wider project of social revolution that would anchor political and economic sovereignty in the proletariat. To be sure, Tucović and his comrades did not yet speak of the creation of socialism or a dictatorship of the proletariat. Rather, it appears that they considered it the task of the proletariat to bring about the economic development that should have taken place under bourgeois hegemony. In the eastern periphery of Europe, what would later come to be dubbed the “uneven development” of capitalism forced intellectuals to revise the theory of historical materialism developed by Marx and Engels. By laying the responsibility of the political and economic unification of the Balkan Peninsula on the shoulders of the nascent proletariat, Tucović’s vision necessarily implied a new political order in which state power would be dominated by the representatives of the working class of the region. Once this had been achieved and the region’s economic sovereignty secured from the predatory Great Powers of Europe, the Balkans would be able to modernize politically and economically and only then to begin the transition to a socialist system.