OTTOMANS INTO EUROPEANS

Ottomans into
Europeans
State and Institution Building
in South-East Europe

Edited by
ALINA MUNGIU-PIPPIDI
and WIM VAN MEURS, eds.

HURST & COMPANY, LONDON

First published in the United Kingdom in 2010 by
C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.,
41 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3PL
© Wim van Meurs and Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, 2010
All rights reserved.
Printed in India
The right of Wim van Meurs and Alina Mungiu-Pippidi
to be identified as the editors of this publication is asserted
by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act, 1988.
A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-84904-056-3
www.hurstpub.co.uk
 CONTENTS

Foreword Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Wim van Meurs vii

1. The Making of States: Constitutional Monarchies in

the Balkans Edda Binder-Iijima and Ekkehard Kraft 1
2. The Orthodox Church in Modern State Formation
in South-East Europe Paschalis M. Kitromilides 31
3. Failed Institutional Transfer? Constraints on the
Political Modernization of the Balkans Alina Mungiu-Pippidi 51
4. Subversive Movements in the Political Arena Wim van Meurs 75
5. The Development of an Administrative Class in
South-East Europe Andrei Pippidi 111
6. The State and Local Authorities in the Balkans, 1804–1939 135
Dimitar Bechev
7. The Formation of the Rule of Law in the Balkans 153
Ioannis A. Tassopoulos
8. The Making of Citizenship in the Post-Ottoman Balkans:
State Building, Foreign Models, and Legal-Political Transfers 179
Constantin Iordachi
9. Organized Violence in the Service of Nation Building 221
Mogens Pelt
10. Institutions, Violence, and Captive States in Balkan History 245
John Gledhill and Charles King

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 CONTENTS

11. The Media and State Power in South-East Europe up

to 1945: A Comparative Study of Yugoslav, Romanian,
and Bulgarian Media Holly Case 277

12. Europeanization of South-East Europe. The Final Act? 305

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

The Contributors 321

Index 327

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 FOREWORD

Regions are conventional constructs, made to fit the needs of scholars and
diplomats. Using different criteria, one can build different “regions”. The exer-
cise is legitimate only as long as borders from one set of criteria do not elide
into those of another. When some of the currently active historians of the
region began their involvement in the field, the grey zone known as “the Bal-
kans” used to comprise only five countries: Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia,
Albania, and Greece (Turkey was sometimes included). Nowadays there are
eleven, the supplementary ones being Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Macedonia,
Montenegro, and Kosovo. But some scholars dispute their placement in the
Balkans. Romania has long claimed to be misplaced, as the Balkan Mountains
are not even close to its territory and its language is Latin-based. By emphasiz-
ing their Habsburg past and their Catholicism, Croatia and Slovenia have also
done their best to escape being marked as Balkan. Greece is content to regard
the “Balkan” label as something positive, and Bulgaria endures it with stoi-
cism. Twentieth century studies of nationalism and nation building in the
region have seen a growing custom of using the term “Balkan” as a negative,
albeit poorly defined, attribute in relation to ethnic diversity, mass violence,
and intricate wars. The legitimacy of such definitions has come under attack,1
but they still prevail in journalistic writing and bestselling travel books.
Nation-states have been, no doubt, the primary movers and shakers in this
region’s history and politics since the nineteenth century. Yet the complex
relationship between state institutions and society in South-East Europe
remains an understudied subject. There are various reasons for that. One is the
relative scarcity of comparative work from the region as opposed to “national

1
Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; Larry
Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

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autism”. The bulk of the South-East European historiography is concerned

with individual national cases. Another impediment, of more recent genesis,
has been the emphasis on the nation rather than the state. It is often symbolic
politics that occupies centre-stage in discussions on South-East Europe. This
comes as no surprise: national ideologies, discourses on identity, stereotypes,
and stigmas are generally considered to be much more interesting than the
painstaking study of bureaucracies, militaries, judiciaries, or party machines.
Yet it is precisely this lacuna that the present volume tries to fill by looking at
institutional change in the post-Ottoman Balkans. We have tried to under-
stand what determined the origin of these institutions, their development,
and finally their survival or demise. Historical institutionalism defines institu-
tions as the formal or informal procedures, routines, norms, and conventions
embedded in the organizational structures of the polity or political economy.
Institutions range from the rules of a constitutional order or the standard
operating procedures of a bureaucracy to the conventions governing social
relations.
What remains uncertain is whether, east of Trieste or south of the Dniester,
there ever was, or still is, a community of some coherence. As Stevan Pavlow-
itch perceptively asked, are the Balkans more than just “a unity imposed by
history”?2 With Slovenia, Romania, and Bulgaria already in the European
Union, Croatia and Macedonia now having achieved candidate status, and
with applications from Tirana and Podgorica under consideration, the region
is shrinking fast. There is, however, a common historical background to South-
East Europe. The region’s countries belong to the same cluster of rural under-
developed societies. They share the experience of a mismatch between
ethnicity and statehood. Politically, in modern times, those countries were all
monarchies, more or less constitutional, and often endowed with dynasties of
Western origin as yet another sign of Western interventionism (otherwise,
they would not even have been granted independent statehood at the Con-
gress of Berlin in 1878). In addition, their Ottoman and Byzantine legacies
are undoubtedly shared, as is a perceived pattern of “abandonment by the
West”. The only question remaining concerns Turkey. Should Turkey be
included? Some of the authors in this book have done so: others have not,
although most chapters are regional and comparative in essence. On most
accounts, Turkey differs from the smaller polities in South-East Europe.
This is an institutional history of state and society building in the modern
Balkans. The authors discuss the choice, evolution, design, and performance
2
Stevan Pavlowitch, History of the Balkans, 1804–1945, London and New York: Addison-
Wesley Longman, 1999.

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 FOREWORD

of institutions in the post-Ottoman Balkans, and try to account for intra-re-

gional differences and, on a larger scale, for the differences between South-
East Europe as a whole and the rest of Europe. The contributions focus on
specific institutions of the modern state and society, in contrast to the proc-
esses of nation building that have already been studied in abundance in recent
years. Evidently, the developmental processes of state institutions and those of
societal institutions are closely intertwined. Theoretically, a strict separation
of state and society is questionable to say the least, and many contributions to
this volume underline the fact that societies in South-East Europe were by no
means passive recipients and top-down reforms, but instead played an autono-
mous role in shaping and subverting the design of the new institutions. Nev-
ertheless, for all practical purposes the institutions addressed in the eleven case
studies presented in this volume have been clustered as control-driven institu-
tions of “state building”, such as the bureaucracy, the army, and the monarchy,
and as integrative institutions of society building, such as parliamentary
democracy, rule of law, the media, and citizenship.
A state bureaucracy, a national army, and the judiciary constitute essential
elements of any state’s institutional “hardware”. In his chapter, Andrei Pippidi
discusses attempts to build the bureaucracies necessary for the functioning of
these new states. Seen from a Western perspective, histories of bureaucracy in
South-East Europe have much in common. At the beginning of the nine-
teenth century, when throughout the region the new ideas of the Enlighten-
ment and the French Revolution brought a new benchmark to these relatively
archaic, closed societies, three distinct types of government operated in the
region. Each of those three traditions (Ottoman, Romanian, Habsburg) influ-
enced the creation of the new national bureaucracy. However, the author also
shows that the reforms occurred within the framework of liberal-inspired
legislation and were not due only to the arbitrary will of a monarch.
By the late nineteenth century a consensus on the core ideas of the rule of
law emerged in Western Europe. However, the constitutional and political
implications of the principles of equality and liberty continued to diverge well
beyond the idiosyncrasies of national legal traditions. Ioannis Tassopoulos
addresses the transfer of the rule of law to both the Ottoman Empire and its
Balkan successor states. Although the message of liberty and equality did
reach Constantinople, it eventually lost out to religion and nationalism as
integrative ideals. Moreover, the Balkan polities of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries had a wide range of examples to choose from in
developing arrangements for the institutionalization of legislative power and

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court systems. Overall, the vital importance of these constitutional projects

and judicial reforms for the institutionalization of the rule of law in the region
can hardly be overestimated. The imposition of modernization by the elites,
however, implied drawbacks in the basis of liberal democracy—autonomous
citizens asserting their rights vis-à-vis state authorities.
Apart from its well-documented contribution to nation building by social-
izing the citizens of newly independent states, a standing army most certainly
constituted a primary prerequisite of any state defending its recently demar-
cated and more often than not contested territorial borders against neigh-
bouring states. Using Greece as a case in point, Mogens Pelt demonstrates how
the process of institutionalizing a regular army proved to be a hybrid of Otto-
man legacies and Western imports. The sultan typically “outsourcing” aspects
of the state’s monopoly of violence to local strongmen invariably blurred the
modern distinction between the military and brigands. Despite the fact that
all the new Balkan states set out to emulate the Western example of a central-
ized national army and the rigorous implementation of the monopoly of vio-
lence, more often than not they ended up actually coopting local brigands.
Together, the nexus between those irregulars and the national independence
movement, the very weaknesses of the new state, and the tradition of using
bandits in anti–banditry measures and irredentism go a long way in explaining
why a real state monopoly of violence and a regular army of conscripts loyal
only to the monarch and the state proved more elusive objectives in the Bal-
kans than in others parts of Europe. In their contribution, John Gledhill and
Charles King revisit the bandits of the region from a societal perspective.
Other state institutions tend to be less tangible within the formal written
rules, and their significance and implications are represented only inade-
quately. Arguably, those institutions are state institutions as they serve, some-
times implicitly but often explicitly, the state’s agenda of shaping and
controlling society. The monarchy certainly belongs to this category, but the
same applies to the conventions of representative institutions and their sub-
version as well as to the mass media. Edda Binder-Iijima and Ekkehard Kraft
emphasize the fact that secession from the Ottoman Empire confronted the
new states with the central problem of what institutions could guarantee their
continued existence. The successful example of the European process of state
building during the nineteenth century was Belgium, and the “lesson learned”
was the importance of the constitution, which was thought to have the great-
est integrative force for creating a new nation-state. Since the mid-nineteenth
century, it was no longer conceivable for a state to come into existence with-

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out a constitution. And as the state in Europe was based on a monarchical

order, the monarchy too was adopted by the Balkan states as the best means
to secure a state. This was emphasized even more emphatically by the choice
of foreign ruler in Greece, Romania, and Bulgaria. The constitutional issue
became important for those new states. It was crucial to their choice of state
institutions and, moreover, had a catalytic effect on the formation of parties
and their ideological programmes. In all countries, an elite consensus existed
that only the Western European state model, with its institutions of monarch,
government, and parliament based on legal norms, would be able to assure the
viability and acceptance of the new state. As in other European countries,
there was dissent concerning the powers to be invested in the various branches
of government, the principal issues being the right of absolute veto for the
monarch, ministerial responsibility, and parliamentary and electoral rights.
That “borrowing” was not imposed forcibly, but grew out of a process of
deliberation and consensus building among the political elite. In all three
countries, the constitutions (1864 in Greece, 1866 in Romania, 1879 in Bul-
garia) were viewed as an elite compromise among the political class, mainly
between liberals and conservatives.
The emergence of political parties, the introduction of universal suffrage
and mass politics, as well as the rise of fascist and communist movements as
contenders of representative democracy were parallel processes in Eastern and
Western Europe. In South-East Europe, however, this initial process of demo-
cratization coincided with an era of national statehood, in between one of
imperial hegemony and one of communist takeover. The chapter by Wim van
Meurs focuses on the political arena as an institution undergoing redefinition.
Irrespective of the much-debated issues as to what extent democracy ever
reached the phase of consolidation in the region and whether the fascist and
communist movements had domestic roots, his study of the political arena
suggests both major similarities to West European polities and significant
intraregional dissimilarities. The dissimilarities in timing and definition of the
political arena in Bucharest, Sofia, Belgrade, and Zagreb cannot be reduced to
ignominious deficits in democratic culture, but derive instead from external
impacts and historical contingencies.
The nation-building process did not consist in the development of
goverment institutions alone, but also of public deducation and media. Holly
Case argues that in South-East Europe the libertarian ideal of the media as a
stronghold of civil society was eclipsed by a strong tradition of the media’s role
in nation and state building and, by implication, the state’s inclination to con-

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trol the media and use them to direct societal developments. As such, this
tendency, exemplified for Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia, was by no
means unique for the region. After independence, the use of mass media for
national integration in society came naturally to the states of the region, a
political agenda that implied on the one hand a steady increase in press runs
and media outlets and on the other continuous censorship.
John Gledhill and Charles King shed new light on the well-known phe-
nomenon of contracted violence in the Balkans. From their perspective, con-
tracted violence is an institution of state modernization rather than a Balkan
exceptional premodern legacy generated by the combination of a strong soci-
ety and a weak state. This case study analyses the functions of informal con-
tracts of violence between the Bulgarian state on the one hand and bandits or
Macedonian revolutionaries on the other. As noted by Pelt, state building
through the contracting out of violence was certainly part of the Ottoman
tradition too. Considering the urgent dual agenda of defending the state ter-
ritory against external threats and of taking control of society in the newly
created states, the contracting out of security operations to irregulars appears
as a rational and thoroughly modern use of violence.
The chapters on citizenship, democracy, the Church, and local authorities
also touch on state building, but they focus mainly on the components of
society building. Constantin Iordachi describes the creation of the institution
of citizenship, and the formal and informal practices related to that. His chap-
ter tests the assumption that South-East European polities merely emulated
Western models that were bound to fail due to different institutional tradi-
tions and practices. Iordachi argues that, particularly as far as citizenship
concepts and regulations were concerned, the Balkan states adapted Western
blueprints to local circumstances through institutional innovation and trans-
lation. This, however, is not to deny a substantial gap between new institu-
tional forms and grass-roots practices. Citizenship may be understood here
both as a legally ascribed identity, with all the rights that entails, and as the
process of the internalization of that identity by citizens and the resultant
cohesion of society. Overall, citizenship legislation represented a mechanism
of state building and the Balkan state adopted and adapted Western models
of integration and closure to suit their agendas of nation and society
building.
In her chapter, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi tries to assess why imported West-
ern institutions failed to shape democratic systems—a failure most authors
agreed upon—and the causes of this lack of achievement. She argues that

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political culture, the factor most primed in connection with the political
modernization of Balkans, explains hardly anything, while other more
important determinants are minimized. It was not the poor fit between
local political culture and the new institutions which led to the early demise
of democracy in the region, but a combination of structural constraints and
an unfavourable international context. She implicitly claims that because
the international context has changed so radically since then, Balkan poli-
tical culture need not be an obstacle to the new attempt at political
modernization.
Paschalis Kitromilides argues that the Church and the newly independent
state entered into a compact whereby the Church was enrolled as a crucial
nation-building actor, as well as being an institution dependent on (even sub-
ordinate to) the state. He discusses how the model spread from Greece to
other Balkan countries, which copied one another. Again, despite the strained
relationship between Orthodox belief and the very concept of national
churches, the Church’s involvement in the struggle for national statehood
substantially enhanced its authority. In the new states of the Balkans, nation-
alism became a substitute primary identity that also absorbed religion. The
Church served as an important transmission belt from state to society, imple-
menting an agenda of domestic integration and homogenization.
Dimitar Bechev argues that after the nineteenth century, the Balkan states
followed suit in the European trend towards expanding state functions and
becoming omnipresence in society. Unlike in the case of their Western coun-
terparts, however, the usurpation of a wide range of functions and centralized
administrative systems and classes did not entail a corresponding increase in
actual state power, i.e. the ability to deliver more and more public goods to all
citizens. On the contrary, states remained weak and despite all pretence to the
contrary failed in the promotion of development and modernization across
national territories and in penetrating to the local level. State building became
tantamount to centralization rather than actually securing public order and
fostering development in the periphery of the national territory. In many
respects the longue durée of central-local relations characterized by the disem-
powerment of the local government includes the communist era too, even
though it does not necessarily represent Balkan exceptionalism.
What emerges from all these chapters is that the crucial source of formal
institutional change was import from Western Europe. Informal arrange-
ments, strongly determined by previous formal institutions, lagged for a while,
but the Binder-Iijima/Kraft chapter as well as the Pippidi and Mungiu-Pippidi

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chapters show that new institutions did bring about new outcomes. The pro-
cess was aborted due to external factors rather than domestic constraints. The
discourses denouncing Western institutional imports as superficial often
showed a lack of patience on the part of the actors when confronted with seri-
ous underdevelopments that could not rapidly be addressed. Balkan revision-
ist economists such as Michael Palairet argue that the region was a stage for
“evolution without development”. Our political review argues that develop-
ment as the main desired outcome was in fact under way in some Balkan
countries. However, it needed the accomplishment of the state, society, and
nation-building processes to take root, and due to domestic but mostly inter-
national constraints those processes were extremely long and painful. How-
ever, the attempt to build modern and democratic institutions was not
completely unsuccessful. First communist and then post-communist regimes
referred back to some of those attempts, however incomplete, and used them,
mostly for convenience (as with the use made by the communists of much of
the police force and gendarmerie of prewar times) or legitimacy (as with the
frequent invocation after 1989 of the “democratic” interwar experience as a
tradition to return to).
This book originated in a three-year-long Volkswagen project, which
included historians, political scientists, and anthropologists. Through the
project’s three meetings, many other scholars contributed their ideas and criti-
cisms. The editors wish to thank the institutional hosts of the project, the
Center for Applied Policy Research in Munich and the Romanian Institute
for Recent History, as well as the Volkswagen Foundation for its support. In
the planning phase, advice from Noel Malcolm, Jürgen Kocka, Andrei Plessu,
and Ivan Krastev was of great help. The reviewers of all the chapters, Stevan
Pavlowitch, Paschalis Kitromilides, and Andrei Pippidi, deserve special
thanks, as do our Munich-based project assistant Edvin Pezo and our language
editor Chris Gordon in Amsterdam. Other colleagues, particularly Vladimir
Gligorov and Isa Blumi, and the participants in the workshops in Constanţa
and Munich made important contributions to discussions.
The period of 2005, when this project began, to 2010, when this book
appeared, saw considerable progress in the Europeanization of the Balkans, as
shown in the concluding chapter of this book. Many doubts persist, but we
hope to have dispelled at least some of them.

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Wim van Meurs

Berlin and Nijmegen, August 2009

xiv