Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [75]
Nicola Pašić, for many years prime minister of Serbia, headed the delegation. In his mid-seventies, with clear blue eyes and a long white beard that fell to his waist, he looked like a benevolent old monk. His private life was exemplary: he was deeply religious, and, although he had married a rich woman, he lived simply. He loved to sit in the evenings singing old Serbian folk songs with his wife and daughters. When he spoke in public, which he did rarely, he was slow and deliberate. (His Serbian was said to be full of mistakes.) He spoke only rudimentary French and German and no English at all. Perhaps because of this, he had a reputation for great wisdom. Lloyd George thought him “one of the craftiest and most tenacious statesmen in South Eastern Europe.” Like another Serb leader, in the 1990s, Pašić was a devious, dangerous old man who loved two things: power and Serbia. Few of his colleagues trusted him; he was, however, adored in the countryside, where most Serbs lived.4
Many people in Paris found the Balkans confusing. At his first meeting with Pašić, Lloyd George inquired whether Serbs and Croats spoke the same language.5 Only a handful of specialists, or cranks, had made it their business to study the area. What most people knew was that the Balkans were dangerous for Europe; they had caused trouble for decades as the Ottoman empire disintegrated and Austria-Hungary and Russia vied for control; and they had sparked off the Great War when Serb nationalists assassinated the heir to the Austrian throne in Sarajevo.
Pašić had been born when Serbia was already free, with its own prince, but he had grown up in a world marked by those long years of Ottoman rule. From Rumania south to Greece, the Ottomans had left their cooking, their customs, their bureaucracy, their corruption and, to a certain extent, their Islam. “Balkan” had become shorthand for a geographic area but also for a state of mind, and for a history marked by frequent war and intrigue. Their past had taught the peoples of the Balkans, as the proverb had it, that “the hand that cannot be cut off, must be kissed.” The cult of the warrior coexisted with admiration for another sort of man, like Pašić, who never trusted anyone, never revealed his true intentions and never took advice.6
Besides the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Albanians, Bulgarians and Macedonians, the Balkan peoples also included the Greeks (who preferred to think of themselves as a Mediterranean race) and, depending on your definition, Rumanians (who preferred to talk about their Roman ancestry), as well as a host of minorities left behind by the tides of the past. The Jewish merchants of Sarajevo, the Italian colonies on the Dalmatian coast, the descendants of German settlers in the north, and the Turks in the south— these were also part of the Balkan reality.
At the heart of the region was Serbia. In Pašić’s childhood it was a simple place. Railways and telegraphs had not yet linked the little principality, as it then was, with the wider world. Apart from Belgrade, the capital, which had only 20,000 inhabitants, its towns were large villages. Its people lived, much as they had always done, from farming and trading. Pašić was one of the handful in his generation who had traveled abroad, in his case to Zurich, for higher education. His little country had great dreams, which he came to share: of a greater Serbia, reaching east and west toward the Black Sea and the Adriatic, sitting astride the great land routes leading down from central Europe to the Aegean. With the spread of nationalism in the nineteenth century, Serb