The century that had passed since the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 promoted a retrospective conference at Leipzig University. Now, a decade later, this volume provides a useful Introduction and ten articles from or inspired by the conference. The passage of time has not resolved or eliminated the national claims or international oversight from the region. Greece's recognition of North Macedonia has resolved one controversy but not the Bulgarian claims to the Macedonian language. And the border between Kosovo and Serbia remains unresolved, as does their mutual recognition.
Dietmar Műller begins his useful Introduction by acknowledging the republication of the Carnegie Report in 1996 as the start of renewed interest. An American critic of Serbian conduct in the Bosnia war wanted to show that Serbian ethnic cleansing was a practice dating from the Balkan Wars. Műller notes that similar charges of un-European barbarism had come from the several Balkan sides against each other. In addition, the Report attracted the attention of western regional historians and students of international law. He notes that one consequence of the Report was to discredit the previous reliance on arbitration by the Great Powers to resolve regional disputes. Műller also reviews the composition of the Carnegie Commission collected by its Paris-based leadership, Nicholas Murray Butler and Baron d’ Estournelles de Constant. Of its eight members, a second Austrian replaced the one German. Only four were regional specialists. The American and French choices did not speak any of the local languages, leaving inquires among the combatants to a British journalist and a Russian professor. Biographical articles follow for both of them.
First come three articles on the consequences for international law from the Report. Helke Rausch looks at the effects during the creation of the League of Nations. Isabella Lohr carries the inquiry through World War II and peace keeping provisions in the United Nations. Katja Castryck-Naumann examines the founding of peace studies at an interwar American college.
The three biographical articles return the focus to southeastern Europe. Nadine Akhund-Lange reviews the origins of the report and its concentration on civilian abuse and casualties. A second Carnegie Report in 1921 added coverage of abused Albanians. Stefan Troebst addresses the lifelong interest in Macedonia of Henry Noël Brailsford. It began with the British journalist's 1906 book on Macedonia. He also spent considerable time in Sofia. Although critical of the Bulgarian army's conduct in Macedonia, he favored its annexation. After World War II, he welcomed its status as a republic in Tito's Yugoslavia. The Russian Carnegie member, Pavel Miliukov, would have been expected to favor Bulgarian claims because of his early years teaching history at Sofia University and continued connections there. But, as Thomas M. Bohn points out in his contribution, Miliukov also travelled widely in southeastern Europe and took pains to avoid favoring the Bulgarian claims in Macedonia. He remains better known as a leading Russian Liberal in the events of 1917.
The four final contributions examine the way in which the Report was received and then remembered across the region. Ivan Ilchev reviews the generally negative Bulgarian reaction to the Report's account of its army's abuse of Macedonian-, Greek-, or Serb-speaking civilians. Late in 1915, the Bulgarian representative in Washington backed a proposal by an American Macedonian association to translate the Report into Bulgarian, but his government in Sofia did not agree. Any such proposal to accept the Report despite the criticisms of its own sides’ conduct was not found in Greece and in Serbia. Adamatios Theodor Skordos titles his entry on the Greece's reaction “Doomed to Fail.” He takes us through the propaganda battle between the Greek and Bulgarian press, each side accusing the other of war crimes. With the subsequent Bulgarian abuses while occupying northern Greece in both world wars, Greek historians continued to condemn the Report for an alleged Bulgarian bias. For Serbia, its postwar Serbian-centered Yugoslav government paid no attention to the Report and its description of Serbian army and militia abuses in Macedonia. As Stefan Djordjević points out, only the joint celebration of victory in both Balkan Wars and the World War I was permitted. The Avala war memorial was inscribed 1912–18. The Carnegie Commission was instead remembered in Belgrade for funding a new university library in 1926. The Report's criticism of Serbian misdeeds in 1913 registered more, he concludes, with Belgrade's resentment against the politically motivated republication of the Report in 1996.
Maria Todorova uses the final entry to address the wider issue of how the two Balkan Wars have been remembered beyond the original Carnegie Report. She devotes useful attention to the Report's only rival for an informed contemporary account. Like the Report, Lev Trotskii's dispatches to a Kyiv journal concentrated on the Second War. Their subsequent scholarly use comes from a compilation in book form in 1924. Todorova admits their Marxist political bias but recognizes their value as others have. They not only record the objections of Serbian socialists to the army's conduct in Macedonia and include interviews with Serbia's political and military leaders. To her surprise, Trotskii also endorses a multi-party postwar government for Macedonia, including the democratic rights as Serbian citizens denied them in 1913. But like many of the senior scholars in the field, she bridles at the continued use of the Balkans to describe what were independent southeast European states by 1913–14. She returns to where the editor's Introduction began, to the republication of the Carnegie Report in 1996. She decries its new Introduction written by George Kennan, the renowned US diplomat and scholar. She cites his description of the entire Balkans, not just Serbia, as “an un-European civilization” limited by “Ottoman domination and Byzantine penetration” and most of all “inherited from deeper traits of character from a distant tribal past” (279). Kennan preferred the pre-1914 European empires to elected governments. While Baron d’ Estournelles de Constant recognized the burden of Ottoman rule, he and the other Carnegie participants in the Report saw their subjects as new nation-states whose conduct would be best regulated, and disputes best settled by themselves under new international standards rather than by the Great Powers.
