Balkans

As we have said, the freedom that was won by the Orthodox Balkan nations in the nineteenth century also brought the West to the political stage, and its life patterns soon became Balkan's patterns. Applied in politics, they caused the separation of the liberated Balkan nations, intoxicated with the Western national romanticism. Since then to the present day, Eurasia has been in constant retreat.

Having this in mind, misunderstanding and conflicts between the Serbs and the Bulgarians, which caused the general disturbance in relations in the Balkans, were particularly tragic. To make things even more ironic, the Serbs and the Bulgarians are the two most similar nations in the Balkans and they share not just a unique cultural, Eurasian identity but they have a unique origin as well. A great number of Balkan experts thinks that they are one people that has the same origin and a rather similar language.

Actually, the relations between the Serbs and the Bulgarians have been quite ambivalent. Depending on historical conditions, these relations shifted from excellent to catastrophic, ending in bloody conflicts. From all those conflicts the West had the greatest benefit, above all Austria-Hungary, which, using this lack of mutual understanding, succeeded in becoming a Balkan force after The Congress of Berlin in 1878.

A positive trend in the relations between Serbia and Bulgaria lasted from the 1860s until the end of the 1870s. It was the time when Bulgarian emigrants, great ighters for national liberation, lived in Serbia. Those were above all Georgi Sava Rakovski, Vasil Levski, Ljuben Karavelov and Hristo Botev. This generation, owing to Serbian authorities, founded in Belgrade Bulgarian printing houses, schools and two Bulgarian legions in which future Bulgarian liberators were trained. In this period the well-known plan was created to form a Serbian-Bulgarian monarchy that would have been ruled by the Serbian Duke Mihailo Obrenovic and that would turn to Russia for protection. However, the untimely death of the Serbian ruler postponed this idea for some other time.

The second phase of the Serbian-Bulgarian relations started after the Peace Treaty of San Stefano which ended the Russo-Turkish War in 1878. According to the terms of the Treaty, Russia, that had its troops fighting in both Serbia and Bulgaria, decided to include almost entire territory of Macedonia into the newly-formed Bulgarian state, an act that could not be supported by the Serbian side. In agreement with the Western forces and due to Serbian insistence, this Treaty was declared invalid in Berlin later that year. «The Macedonian Issue» has been a stumbling block in the relations between Serbia and Bulgaria ever since.

For the subject that this paper analyses the Peace Treaty of San Stefano is extremely important, because it represents an attempt of Russian diplomacy to cut the stumbling Balkan nations loose from the Western way of thinking and to put them back on the path of their own identity.

As the winning side, Russia thought that Bulgaria should be strengthened because, due to its geographical position, it could contribute the most to a hypothetical liberation of Constantinople. On the other hand, according to the Treaty, as a compensation for the loss of Macedonia, Serbia would have gained much in Kosovo, Raska and Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the Serbs would gain considerable autonomy within the Ottoman Empire. Thus Russia wanted to create two strong Balkan states, one of which would be directed towards Constantinople and the other to the Adriatic Sea. This also reveals a paramount need for a union between Serbia and Bulgaria today, which is the most important precondition for returning the people of the Balkans to the Balkans, i.e. to Great Eurasia.

If we look at the annulled Peace Treaty of San Stefano from today's perspective, we will easily notice that its annulment was only damaging for Serbia, not beneficial. Namely, had this Treaty remained in force, the majority of Serbian people,that lives outside Serbia today, would have been uniied in one state that would cover the space from Serb-populated areas in the present-day Croatia

to the modern borders in the East. But the Western spirit that had possessed the Serbian elite, that is clearly manifested in Duke Milan Obrenovic's opinion that «Serbia has only one goal: to become a modern European country or to disappear», inally won a victory.

The defeat of Russian diplomacy brought the apple of discord into the Balkans, since Bulgaria was, primarily because Serbia wished so, unjustly divided into the Principality of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia. The latter remained, along with Macedonia, under Turkish dominion. But a far worse consequence is reflected in the fact that Serbia came under the influence of Vienna. After these events were over, Serbian students stopped going to Russia to complete their studies and went to Austria-Hungary instead. Such policy on the Serbian side lead to renouncing its claim to Bosnia and Herzegovina and to the irst armed conlict between Serbia and Bulgaria in 1885. Encouraged by Vienna, the Serbs started it and finally lost it.

Thus all the subsequent conlicts between these two nations, conlicts that ripped the Balkans to the west of the Drina in all their might, creating cracks into which the Western thought penetrated even deeper, are just a residue of wandering between San Stefano and Berlin. Thinking about this problem, Konstantin Leontyev was able not just to fully understand it but also to offer an adequate solution:

«Therefore it is not good only to have in mind just the banishment of the Turks from Europe, just the emancipation of the Slavs... but something wider and in its idea more independent. This wider and more independent notion should be nothing else but the development of our own original Slavic-Asian civilization. Otherwise all the other Slavs would soon become worse than continental Europeans, and nothing more. Russian eagles did not ly over the Danube and the Balkans so that the Serbs and the Bulgarians could later, in freedom, hatch the chicks of civic Europeanism»¹⁷.