Der „Carnegie Report on the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars 1912/13“. Wirkungs- und Rezeptionsgeschichte im Völkerrecht und in der Historiographie

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International Law and Conciliarist Internationalism under Pressure: Political Profiles of the Carnegie Men framing the Carnegie Report on the Balkan Wars c. 1914 and Beyond

The Carnegie Report on the Balkan Wars could neither pacify the regional conflicts nor ban future ethnic violence. Yet it signifies a highly symptomatic moment in early 20th-century US Big Philanthropy. In order to assess its historical relevance, this article traces the report’s historical setting in contemporary US American political and legal debates from 1910 to the early 1920s. Two major features stand out: First, the report testifies to the contemporary programmatic creed and political leanings of its most renowned trustees – such as Elihu Root, James T. Shotwell, James Brown Scott and Nicholas Murray Butler – who envisioned an international world order based on increasingly professionalized international law. Most of them judicial experts, some of them staunch republican foreign policy elites, others more progressive intellectuals, they felt authorized to scientifically analyse and advise international diplomacy. Second, however, the Carnegie Men’s emphasis on law-based internationalism was no static endeavour. It rather succumbed to the turmoils of their time. Under the unfavourable auspices of World War I since 1914 and, even more so with the United States entering the war in 1917 and during the complicated peace negotiations in 1918/19, the philanthropic experiment of propagating a law-based vision of the world order was gradually transformed into a new version of conciliarist internationalism based on close cooperation with the new League of Nations in the early 1920s.

Four out of the seven chapters of the Carnegie Report on the Balkan Wars were written by Pavel N. Miliukov, a Russian historian and deputy of the Russian parliament. During his long travels in the Balkans between the end of the 19th century and the First World War, Miliukov had fulfilled duties of a researcher, a journalist and a politician. Having lectured at the University of Sofia, he left Bulgaria to take part in archaeological expeditions in Macedonia. In liberal Russian newspapers, he later wrote regularly about the current political situations in South-Eastern Europe. As a historian, Miliukov backed up Bulgaria in the struggle over the Macedonian question by relying on ethnological reasons. As a journalist, he initially preferred the establishment of a Balkan union that included the Ottoman Empire and then advocated the formation of a Balkan federation against the Young Turks. As a politician, he defended the national interests of Russia at the Bosporus and Dardanelles, which also went hand in hand with a Bulgarian predominance in the Balkans. Contrary to Miliukov’s articles in newspapers or his speeches in the parliament, his contributions to the Carnegie Report miss analytical insights. Miliukov defended the Bulgarian position in the Balkans by condemning the Treaty of Bucharest, which was signed in the aftermath of the Second Balkan War, and regarding it as a source of new conflicts. 

The British journalist and Labour politician Henry Noël Brailsford was probably the most knowledgeable member of the Carnegie Commission to the Balkans of 1913. Between 1897 and 1904, he had spent several months in Greece as well as in Ottoman Macedonia, and in 1906 he published his widely read book Macedonia. Its Races and Their Future. Accordingly, a substantial part of the commission’s report of 1914 was written by him. In Serbia and Greece, he was accused of pro-Bulgarian leanings, and indeed in World War I he opted for an incorporation of the Macedonian region into the Kingdom of Bulgaria. During World War II, however, Brailsford developed sympathies for Tito and supported his post-war project of founding a new Macedonian nation. 

This paper examines the Greek attitude towards the Carnegie inquiry on the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars of 1912/13. At first, the study shows that the Greek government had launched long before the setup of the Carnegie inquiry a propaganda campaign accusing mainly Bulgaria of committing terrible massacres against both combatants and civilians. Furthermore, Athens was requesting that the Great Powers allow for an investigation of the Bulgarian war crimes by an international expert commission. Nevertheless, this alleged willingness to shed light on the horrors of the Balkan Wars turned into reluctance when the Carnegie men arrived in Thessaloniki. Before the arrival in Greece, the commission had visited Belgrade where the Serbian government refused cooperation by accusing two commission members, namely Pavel Miliukov and Henry Brailsford, of being pro-Bulgarian. The Greek government as well as the Greek media followed closely how Belgrade turned down the commission and expelled it from Serbia. They did this by showing a complete understanding for the Serbian position. Thus, not surprisingly, the Greek authorities also refused to work with the Carnegie commission when its members reached Thessaloniki at the end of August 1913. Like the Serbs, the Greeks claimed that the objective criteria of the inquiry could not be guaranteed because of Miljukov’s and Brailsford’s pro-Bulgarian bias. The other two members, Samuel Dutton and Justin Godart, were offered individual permission to conduct research, but they both turned the offer down. The Carnegie Report, published in 1914, charged the Greek army and irregulars with war crimes and other violations of humanitarian international law. The Greek reaction was either to completely ignore the report, or, if not so, to dismiss it as a “Bulgarian pamphlet”. The Greek historiography has until now showed little interest in the Carnegie commission and its report, but in the cases it has, the focus has been on the “false” ethnological data on Ottoman Macedonia being introduced into the report by the “Bulgarophile” Miljukov. On the other hand, the Macedonian historiography has in the last years “rediscovered” the Carnegie Report in writing a history of the Balkan Wars as a history of “ethnic cleansing”, even “genocide” against the Macedonian people.

In the autumn of 1913, the so-called Carnegie Committee visited the Balkan countries. The committee consisted of unbiased intellectuals, sent by the Carnegie Endowment for Peace in New York, in order to investigate the mutual accusations that the Balkan states uttered against each other about the course and conduct of the Balkan Wars. They were especially welcome in Bulgaria, the country that had sparked the second Balkan War and thus faced the largest number of war crime allegations. After their return, the members of the committee published the results of the investigation in an extensive volume, both in French and English. In the report, they concluded that the committed atrocities were generally characteristic of military actions at the time and that one could hardly determine that any of the Balkan nations was more guilty than the other. The paper examines the activity of the committee and analyses its publication by referring to the archives of the Carnegie endowment, materials from Bulgarian archives and the contemporary press.

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