Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [91]
I gave four horses
To bring the Serbs here—
I would give eight
To take them away.25
During the Second World War, Hitler’s Germany and Hungary divided up the area; it then became a battleground between the occupiers and the resistance. Szeged, the town that the Americans had insisted on giving to Hungary, became the site of the camp where Jews from the Vojvodina, and indeed from all over that part of Europe, were killed. Today there are few Jews or Gypsies left in the Vojvodina, but the population is still mixed. Only half is Serb, and almost a quarter is Hungarian. Belgrade has fallen back on the familiar techniques of intimidation and repression to keep it under control. It is difficult to see a peaceful future.
Of all the victors at the Peace Conference, Rumania made by far the greatest gains, doubling in population and in size. Moreover, it has, unusually, managed to hang on to most of its gains. Bessarabia, it is true, went back to the Soviet Union after the Second World War. The Soviets also took about half of the Bukovina in the north, and the Bulgarians took back part of the disputed Dobrudja in the south. But Rumania still holds its greatest gain: Transylvania.
11
Bulgaria
WHILE THE BANAT was being discussed, the possibility of making it part of a complicated series of land deals was floated by, of all people, the Americans. If Rumania got more of the Banat, then it might be willing to give back some of the territory that it had seized in 1913 from Bulgaria, its neighbor to the southwest; Bulgaria might then be willing to give up some pieces of land to Yugoslavia, which would then be happier about losing some of the Banat.1 Not surprisingly, this came to nothing. Rumania and Yugoslavia were in no mood to compromise.
Bulgaria, the one Balkan nation to have fought on the side of the Germans and Austrians, was of course not represented at the Peace Conference. Nevertheless, it came surprisingly close to gaining rather than losing territory. It had some friends, particularly in the United States, and even its enemies were halfhearted. Moreover, the principle of self-determination was in its favor; Bulgarians were in a majority in at least two areas outside the country: in the southern Dobrudja, along the west coast of the Black Sea; and in western Thrace at the top of the Aegean. It is also possible, as the Bulgarians argued, that they were in a majority in the parts of Macedonia belonging to Yugoslavia, but, as so often in the Balkans, establishing this was extraordinarily difficult.
It was not clear what made a Bulgarian. Not religion, because, while most Bulgarian speakers were Orthodox, some were Muslim. Race possibly, but were they Slavs, or nomads from Asia, or a mixture? And how were they different from Serbs and Macedonians? Their languages, after all, were very alike. Bulgarian nationalism was as new a growth as the others in the Balkans, newer perhaps because Bulgarians had lived under Ottoman rule since the fourteenth century, longer than any other Balkan nation. In the 1870s, they had finally revolted. Gladstone had made some of his greatest speeches when the Ottomans had massacred them by the thousands. But by 1919, Bulgarians were seen in western Europe less as victims than as unreliable thugs.2
From the time it first came into existence as a modern state, Bulgaria had been fluctuating like a Balkan amoeba. In 1878 a huge, autonomous Bulgaria had emerged out of the Ottoman empire, reaching westward to the borders of Albania and down to the head of the Aegean. That was too much, both for its neighbors and for the Great Powers. Serbia grabbed much of Macedonia, and Greece western Thrace. The Ottomans managed to hang on to eastern Thrace. After a short-lived expansion in 1912, Bulgaria lost