Balkan Federation

Three phases of the project

The Balkan Federation project developed in three phases: articulation in response to the collapse of Ottoman power at the start of the 20th century; adoption by the Balkan Communist parties in the interwar period (1919-1936); and the post-WWII clash between Balkan Communist leaders and Stalin, who opposed the project.

Pre-history and the first phase

The 18th-century revolutionary Rigas Feraios envisioned a pan-Balkan federation in his 1797 pamphlet. An 1865 Belgrade initiative founded the Democratic Oriental Federation, from the Alps to Cyprus, on political freedom and social equality. An 1894 League for the Balkan Confederation in France involved Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian and Romanian socialists, and a further attempt followed the 1908 Young Turk Revolution.

Socialist organizing continued at the First Balkan Socialist Conference, held 7-9 January 1910 in Belgrade under the platforms of Balkan unity and action against the impending wars. A 1915 Bucharest conference created a Revolutionary Balkan Social Democratic Labour Federation, aligned with Zimmerwald and opposed to WWI, initially headed by Christian Rakovsky with Vasil Kolarov and Georgi Dimitrov prominent.

Interwar period

A Balkan Communist Federation was formed in 1920-1921 as a Comintern umbrella of all Balkan Communist parties, dominated by Soviet requirements and advocating a Balkan Federative Republic including Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey. It oversaw the BKP, the KPJ, the KKE, the TKP and partly the PCdR, and was disestablished in 1939.

The national question was central content. At the Sixth Conference of the Balkan Communist Federation in November 1923, Kolarov moved and Dimitrov backed the autonomy of Macedonia, Dobruja and Thrace; the May Manifesto of 1924 set objectives including independence and unification of partitioned Macedonia and the formation of a Balkan Communist Federation. Stalin compelled the BKP to endorse the formation of Macedonian, Thracian and Dobrujan nations so that those states could be included in a Balkan Communist Federation, and a BCF resolution of 7 January 1934 recognizing a Macedonian ethnicity was approved by the Comintern Executive. The Macedonian case was separated from Thrace and Dobruja in 1936.

The Cominform phase

In 1946-1948 Tito and Dimitrov worked to merge their two countries into a Balkan Federative Republic. The agreement signed by Dimitrov and Tito at Bled on 1 August 1947 paved the way to future unification of Bulgaria and FPR Yugoslavia, foresaw unification of Vardar and Pirin Macedonia and the return of the Western Outlands to Bulgaria, abolished visas and allowed a customs union. Bulgaria was obliged to introduce Macedonian cultural institutions and education in Pirin, and the Yugoslav side proposed including Bulgaria in Yugoslavia as a seventh republic. On 27 November 1947 at Evksinograd near Varna the Yugoslav-Bulgarian Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance formalized the earlier conference terms, with press indicating it was a forerunner of a federation of the two countries.

The Soviet government stated that the two governments had erred by making a treaty of unlimited duration without Soviet consultation, and required advance notice for major foreign-policy agreements. On 17 January 1948, returning to Sofia from Bucharest, Dimitrov endorsed to the press a possible federation of Eastern European countries including Albania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and possibly Greece; on 28 January 1948 Pravda carried an editorial note rejecting the position. FRUS records the embassy's view that any full-fledged Balkan political federation had probably become less attractive to Moscow because direct Soviet control was the ultimate aim, and that Balkans federation talk was subordinated to binding the orbit countries to the USSR while decrying blocs.

Federation ambitions were a central issue in the Tito-Stalin clash. Ted Grant argued the dispute's key lay in Tito's repeated demand for a federation of Bulgaria, Albania and Yugoslavia, and that Stalin would fight to prevent independent groups of states in Eastern Europe; the KPJ restated its Balkans federation policy just after its Cominform expulsion, and Dimitrov had recently been rebuked by Moscow for advocating federation. The conflict was a geopolitical struggle in the Balkans also involving Albania, Bulgaria and the Greek insurgency; Yugoslavia hoped to admit neighbouring Albania to the Yugoslav federation, and Stalin used Bulgaria to pressure Yugoslavia.

Policies from the Bled agreement were reversed after the Tito-Stalin split of June 1948, when Bulgaria, subordinated to Soviet interests, was forced to take a stance against Yugoslavia. When the Cominform campaign against Yugoslavia severed the KPJ leadership, the Bulgarian government on 1 October 1949 deleted the Bled Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance with all its agreements.

Distinctions and examples

The Balkan Communist Federation (1920/21-1939) was a Communist umbrella organization of Balkan parties under Comintern and Soviet requirements, whereas "Balkan Federation" also names the long-running cross-factional political project and the proposed federal state; the two are related but not identical. A federation is a common federal state, while treaties of friendship and alliance are a step toward, not the realization of, federation.

Distinct from the Balkan Federation was the Balkan League, a 1912 quadruple alliance of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro directed against the Ottoman Empire, which dissolved over the division of conquests and led to the Second Balkan War; a military alliance, not a socialist federation project.

The Balkan Pact signed by Greece, Romania, Turkey and Yugoslavia on 9 February 1934 in Athens was a conservative status-quo pact to maintain the post-WWI order and present a united front against Bulgarian territorial designs. It effectively ceased to exist after the 1941 Axis invasions of Yugoslavia and Greece, with Turkey its only signatory avoiding WWII conflict.

The Balkan Pact of 1953, an Agreement of Friendship and Cooperation signed by Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia on 28 February 1953 in Ankara, was intended to deter Soviet expansion in the Balkans and provided for a joint military staff, de facto associating non-aligned Yugoslavia with NATO. In the same era on the non-communist side, Greek statesmen Eleftherios Venizelos and Alexandros Papanastasiou supported a Balkan union on an EU-like model; Papanastasiou proposed a Balkan-wide non-aggression pact, deeper economic cooperation, and freedom of movement and work within the Balkans, but Yugoslavia and Bulgaria took little interest.

Contemporary resonance

Article 142 of the Croatian Constitution prohibits procedures leading to a South Slavic state union or any form of consolidated Balkan state; in 2009 Zoran Pusic of the Civil Committee for Human Rights criticized it as an ethnically-based restriction on association. In a 2012 interview at the Subversive Film Festival in Zagreb, Tariq Ali argued for creating the Balkan Federation as part of wider European regional federations balancing major powers like Germany or France.