The Balkan Pact

On 9 February 1934 in Athens the foreign ministers of four states signed a short, three-article agreement officially called the Pact of Balkan Entente. Yugoslavia was represented by Bogoljub Jevtić, Greece by Dimitrios Maximos, Romania by Nicolae Titulescu and Turkey by Tevfik Rüştü Aras. The text had been initialled a few days earlier, on 4 February. The agreement, most often referred to by historians as the Balkan Entente, was intended to consolidate the borders drawn in the Balkans after the First World War. Four of the peninsula’s six states joined it. Bulgaria refused because it would not renounce its claims against its neighbours, while Albania, dependent on Italy, kept its distance, although it had taken part in the earlier Balkan conferences.

The pact is sometimes described as a military alliance concluded to counter Italy’s territorial ambitions and Bulgaria’s efforts to recover its lost lands. The second half of that description is accurate; the first needs qualifying. The pact was not a full military alliance, and against Italy, as it turned out, it did not work at all.

Why the Balkans needed an agreement

After 1918 the Balkans were divided into victors and vanquished. Yugoslavia, Romania and Greece emerged from the war enlarged. Bulgaria, which had fought on the side of the Central Powers, lost its access to the Aegean Sea, its western border districts and southern Dobruja under the Treaty of Neuilly, and hundreds of thousands of its refugees settled in the country with a sense of grievance. The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO) operated from Bulgarian territory, and its armed bands crossed into Yugoslav and Greek Macedonia. Turkey, after the Treaty of Lausanne, no longer had any claims in the Balkans, but it wanted calm on its European border and in the Straits.

Italian policy also hung over the region. Benito Mussolini had made Albania dependent on Italy, supported Hungarian and Bulgarian revisionism, gave refuge to the Croatian Ustaše, who wanted to break up Yugoslavia, and from the Dodecanese islands looked towards the coast of Anatolia. In 1933 he proposed a Four-Power Pact under which Italy, France, Britain and Germany would decide the affairs of Europe among themselves, including any revision of the treaties. The smaller states took this as a sign that their borders might be bargained away over their heads. In January 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and in October Germany left the League of Nations.

The agreement had been several years in the making. From 1930, on the initiative of the former Greek Prime Minister Alexandros Papanastasiou, unofficial Balkan conferences brought together politicians, scholars and public figures from all six states: in Athens in 1930, in Istanbul and Ankara in 1931, in Bucharest in 1932 and in Salonika (Thessaloniki) in 1933. Delegates dreamed of a Balkan union, but the talks foundered on the question of minorities, especially the Bulgarian minority in Yugoslav Macedonia. At the same time a network of bilateral agreements was taking shape. Greece was reconciled with Turkey: in 1930 Eleftherios Venizelos signed a treaty of friendship in Ankara with Mustafa Kemal and İsmet İnönü, and in September 1933 the two states concluded a pact mutually guaranteeing their common border. In the autumn of 1933 Turkey signed treaties of friendship and non-aggression with Romania and Yugoslavia. Romania and Yugoslavia were already bound to each other and to Czechoslovakia in the Little Entente, which was directed against Hungarian revisionism. The last attempt to draw Bulgaria in came with the meetings of monarchs in the autumn of 1933. King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and Tsar Boris III improved their personal relations, but Sofia would not recognise the borders of Neuilly.

What the pact contained

The preamble referred to the Kellogg–Briand Pact and stated that the parties wished to ensure respect for existing treaty obligations and the maintenance of the territorial order established in the Balkans. Article 1 stated that Yugoslavia, Greece, Romania and Turkey mutually guaranteed the security of all their Balkan frontiers. The word “Balkan” mattered. The guarantee did not cover the Romanian–Hungarian or Romanian–Soviet borders, the Yugoslav–Italian or Yugoslav–Hungarian borders, or Turkey’s Asian borders. Article 2 obliged the parties to agree on measures in the event of a threat to their interests, and forbade each of them to take any political action towards another Balkan state without informing the others, or to assume any obligations towards it without their consent. Article 3 left the door open to any Balkan state – in practice, to Bulgaria and Albania.

The most important provisions were contained in a confidential protocol annex signed the same day. It defined aggression in the same way as the London conventions of July 1933, which the Soviet Union had concluded with its neighbours, among them Romania, Yugoslavia and Turkey. The protocol stated that the pact was not directed against any great power and that its aim was to defend the Balkan frontiers against aggression by a Balkan state. If one of the parties were attacked by a non-Balkan state that was joined by a Balkan state, the other signatories were to take up arms, but only against that Balkan state. In practice this meant that if Bulgaria attacked one of its neighbours, either alone or alongside Italy, the others would stand together against Bulgaria. Some historians also write of a secret military annex on cooperation between the general staffs, and Bulgaria claimed that the signatories had agreed on joint action against armed bands infiltrating from its territory. What is certain is that the staffs of the four armies held talks on joint defence in the years that followed. The Entente’s structure, with a Permanent Council made up of the foreign ministers, was modelled on that of the Little Entente.

There was, then, a military alliance in it, but a narrow one. It was aimed at Bulgaria, not Italy, and it was hedged with reservations from the start. Turkey declared that it would under no circumstances act against the Soviet Union, with which it had been bound by a treaty of friendship since 1925. In Greece Venizelos, then leader of the opposition, spoke out against the protocol. He warned that it could drag the country into war with Italy, for example if Rome attacked Yugoslavia from Albanian territory and Bulgaria joined in. The government of Panagis Tsaldaris gave way and, before ratification, submitted an interpretative declaration: Greece would in no case be compelled to go to war with a great power. With that, the guarantee ceased to apply in the only scenario that really worried Yugoslavia.

The pact came into force on signature and was to be ratified promptly. Yugoslavia ratified it in June 1934, and on 1 October it was registered with the Secretariat of the League of Nations.

Reactions

Bulgaria regarded the pact as directed against itself and as an attempt to perpetuate the wrongs of Neuilly. Italy received it with open hostility, and Mussolini saw it as French handiwork: Paris was the ally of Yugoslavia, Romania and Czechoslovakia and had for years supported everything that entrenched the post-war order. France welcomed the agreement. The Soviet Union, with which Turkey and Romania then had correct relations, raised no objection. In Athens and Ankara it was hailed as proof that the states of the region could see to their own security without the mediation of the great powers. On 1 November 1934 Mustafa Kemal told the Grand National Assembly that the pact testified to the Balkan states’ mutual respect for each other’s rights.

For the Little Entente the effect was ambiguous. Yugoslavia and Romania, now secure on the Bulgarian side, began to treat Balkan affairs as more important than Central European ones, while Czechoslovakia, whose borders with Germany and Hungary the pact did not cover, was increasingly left on its own.

Significance

The Balkan Entente was one of many attempts made by Europe’s small states in the 1930s to protect themselves against revisionism as the League of Nations weakened. In the short term it did its job. Bulgaria did not dare embark on any adventure, and after the military coup of May 1934 the new government in Sofia itself broke up IMRO. In the autumn of 1934 Alexander I visited Sofia, and in January 1937 Yugoslavia and Bulgaria concluded a pact of eternal friendship.

Its weaknesses soon became apparent, however. Yugoslavia, disappointed by France’s attitude after the assassination of the King in Marseille in October 1934, began to pursue its own policy and in March 1937 concluded an agreement with Italy without consulting its partners, as Article 2 required. Greece under the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas looked above all to Britain for support from 1936. On 31 July 1938 in Salonika the Entente states signed a non-aggression agreement with Bulgaria and consented to the lifting of the military restrictions imposed on it at Neuilly and of the demilitarised zone on its border with Greece and Turkey. The revisionism the pact was meant to guard against was now being satisfied with its consent.

The last session of the Entente’s Permanent Council was held in Belgrade in February 1940. A few months later the whole arrangement fell apart. In September 1940 Romania, under German pressure, ceded southern Dobruja to Bulgaria, and on 28 October 1940 Italy attacked Greece. Neither Yugoslavia nor Turkey came to its aid, since the 1934 protocol did not oblige them to go to war with a great power, and Greece itself had excluded any such obligation. In March 1941 Bulgaria and then Yugoslavia joined the Tripartite Pact, and in April Germany attacked Yugoslavia and Greece, with the participation of Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria. Bulgaria then occupied the Macedonian and Thracian lands that the Balkan Pact had been meant to stop it from taking. Of the four signatories, only Turkey came through the war without occupation and without fighting. The experience of the Entente showed that regional guarantees among small states could not replace a balance of power among the great powers. When that balance collapsed, each of them sought salvation on its own.