To be young, perchance to dream

A review of Miloš Vojinović's “The political ideas of the Young Bosnia”

He got to the river quay, or more exactly to the sidewalk on the other side of the paved road running along the river, in the late morning. Too many people came out to see his Royal and Imperial Majesty. It was a beautiful, warm June day, the first week of what seemed likely to be a glorious summer. The pistol in his light summer jacket made him feel uncomfortable. Strange, he thought, that no one has noticed the big bulge yet. He covered it first with his hand, then by putting his tightly squeezed fist in the pocket. Suddenly there was some commotion. The crowd shouted and moved. At first, he could not understand what they were saying. Then he heard the word “attentat”. That meant that one of his four co-conspirators shot his Majesty. A feeling of pride and fear mounted in him. Then another commotion, more yelling, disorder, running: nothing has happened they were shouting now: his Majesty was unharmed, a fiendish and dilettantish attempts on his life has failed. People began to slowly trickle back home. He thought of doing the same. But perhaps it was not good to be seen running away right now. It may be suspicious. He walked into a pastry shop. Should he take a baklava or a millefeuille? He decided for the latter even if it was more expensive. He realized that the money was in the same pocket with his pistol, moved a little away from the crowd and carefully took out 12 hellers. He counted them one by one. He had very little money. Like all 19-year olds he liked cakes. Somebody yelled again; cries became stronger and closer. He left the millefeuille after the first bite and walked three or four steps out of the store. There right in front of him was a stopped car, with His Majesty and the wife, berating the driver. He touched the pistol as if to make sure it was still there. Then he took it out…”

The new book by the young Serbian historian Miloš Vojinović The political ideas of the Young Bosnia (in Serbian: Političke ideje Mlade Bosne) discusses the intellectual and political background to the assassination in Sarajevo in 1914. The topics of the book could be roughly divided into two parts. The first is rather short description of the changing perceptions of the reasons for, and judgments on, the assassination. The second is Vojinović’s own attempt to recreate the social and intellectual milieu within which the conspirators lived and to explain the reasons which impelled them to proceed with the plot and to eventually succeed killing the heir to the Habsburg throne.

The first part impeccably illustrates Marc Bloch’s view that history is often being rewritten in accordance with what is believed at the given point in time (the so-called “virus of the present”). The judgments borne on the assassination fully vindicate Bloch: when the Austria-Hungarian (A-H) empire was reviled and was at war with Western powers, the assassination was supported, or at least understood as inevitable; when Austria was the ally of Western powers, the act was reviled. Similarly, within Yugoslavia. When Titoist regime needed to build a domestic and foreign image of South Slavic peoples striving for freedom, Princip and friends became proto-Yugoslavs. When Yugoslavia disintegrated, the new nationalist petty governments rejected them for their integral Yugoslavism or treated them as Greater Serb chauvinists.

Not surprisingly, the Austrian authors were extremely negative from the very beginning, uninterested in uncovering the roots or ideology of an assassination conducted by high-school kids; their main objective was to link the assassins and the Young Bosnia movement with the Serbian government and to use this connection as the casus belli. The Austrian views however changed after Austria was declared Republic in 1919. Then, working for the destruction of the Habsburgs suddenly appeared as an understandable action. The English-language literature, after it became clear that A-H would not abandon its coalition with Germany, and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies was founded in London to help break up the Empire, became more critical of the Austrian political and economic system as practiced in its de facto colony of Bosnia, and by that fact evinced increasing sympathy with the conspirators in Sarajevo. (Perhaps even more so as all conspirators were subjected to torture and most died in jail before the end of the war.) As Vojinović shows, the sympathy is clear in the writings by AJP Taylor and Robert Seton-Watson.

Interestingly, even Adolf Hitler driven by his hatred of the multi-ethnic A-H Empire wrote in the first edition of the Mein Kampf “that [in Sarajevo] the hand of the Goddess of justice has removed the greatest and most murderous enemy of the German Austria” (translated from Vojinović, p. 13). This changed however when Hitler became Chancellor and annexed Austria and when he decided to brutally attack Yugoslavia and bomb the unprotected city of Belgrade: one of the justifications then became the reprisal for the treasonous assassination in Sarajevo.

The Sarajevo events were treated in a rather subdued way in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia although it owed its very existence to the act of several youngsters in June 1914. Observers noticed that when the remains of Princip and two of his co-conspirators were moved from an unmarked grave in Czechoslovakia (where they died) to Sarajevo, the Czechoslovak delegation was of high level, and Yugoslav Royal Delegation rather low-key. No place or square was named after Princip in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Why? This is somewhat of a mystery. Did King Alexander dislike tyrannicides? (He himself would soon be killed, in an almost exact replica of the Sarajevo assassination, in 1934.) Did he try, as many allege, to negotiate with A-H when he and his entire Army were in exile in Greece? Was he angry that a bunch of hotheads plunged his country and the world into a catastrophe?

Princip and friends achieved their apogee in Titoist Yugoslavia. Their mixture of Serbian national myths and medieval history, and passionate desire for all-Yugoslav unification patterned after Italian and German unifications was interpreted as a proof of South Slav “eternal” striving for liberty from foreigners and social emancipation (as indeed the Young Bosnia had a strong anarcho-socialist ideology). The threat of Soviet invasion that existed between 1948 and 1956 as well as the conflict with the West over Trieste, added urgency to the need to find heroic martyrs in the past. At that time the Young Bosnia seemed to embody the spirit of defiance and resistance needed to maintain Tito’s Yugoslavia in a hostile world between the East and the West. The ideology of the Young Bosnia began to be studied more seriously, famously in a much-translated book by Vladimir Dedijer The Road to Sarajevo. Princip and friends were remembered through street names, squares and schools. Princip’s photos became ubiquitous. Dedijer, who was at times close to Tito, refashioned the Young Bosnian movement along the lines of what Eric Hobsbawm called the “primitive (early) rebels”: people who rebelled against manifest and manifold injustices in their societies, were influenced mostly by the anarchist literature (in the case of the Young Bosnia by Chernyshevsky, Kropotkin and Mazzini) and reflected this original thirst for justice to which Marxism would later give a much stronger ideological grounding.

But that too changed with the dismemberment of the country. Now the pro-Serbian element of the Young Bosnia was emphasized by all the seceding republics, and Princip and friends eighty years after their act became Serbian nationalists. (The only Muslim co-conspirator was killed after atrocious torture during the World War II by the Croat fascists.) Within Serbia herself Princip did not enjoy much support because of his previous lionizing by the Titoists and because of his integral Yugoslavism that held that Serbs, Croats and Muslims were one people. This universal domestic repudiation of Princip led the Belgrade writer and art critic Muharem Bazdulj to quip, around the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War, that “there was nobody left to defend Princip”.

The end of the Cold War, the demise of Marxism and the civil wars in Yugoslavia additionally damaged the reputation of the Young Bosnia. Now, the A-H Empire appeared as a precursor of the European Union, a multi-ethnic community with many problems but neither a totalitarian empire nor in the throes of chaos. Austria (although cleverly enough not Hungary and much less the colony of Bosnia) was presented as a prototype of the European Union by Pieter Judson (The Habsburg Empire: A New History, see my review here).

Much further went Christopher Clark's in his best-selling Sleepwalkers, where for Bosnia, Clark searched deep down in his own imagination to dream up of its rule as associated with “wide straight boulevards” and “tree-lined streets”. It was a strange metaphor to have for a province, run along the colonial lines from Vienna by people who did not speak the language of the indigenous population and maintained feudal institutions of the forced labor and large latifundias. It is estimated that up to 100,000 people out of the population of 2 million, that is one family out of each five, were subject to forced labor on large estates in this proto-European Union state. (Reference is to Marie-Janine Calic, A History of Yugoslavia.) It was a typical European mission civilisatrice with no voice for the domestic population, forced labor, and pervasive censorship. The only European thing that the Habsburgs used well was divide et impera among the three constituent groups in Bosnia. (For Vojinović’s devastating review of Clark, see here.)

The A-H Empire, like the Russian, was an empire of miracles: it is thus that the governor of Bosnia who decided to ban all books dealing with Serbian history had to likewise put his own on the index since in his early career he wrote a history of Serbia!

What were the ideological motives of the Young Bosnia movement? What was their real inspiration and who were their ideological leaders? Here Vojinović lists several elements. The first was the desire for national unification of South Slav peoples that took the unification of Italy and Germany as its models. In both cases one state (in the Italian case Piedmont; in the German case Prussia) was able to pull together all the other states and to unify the country. In their view Serbia as a free country should play the same rule. It is not by accident that the official organ of the secret movement “Unification or Death”, sharing the same ideas as the Young Bosnia, named its official journal The Piedmont.

Secondly, there is a social element. Almost all conspirators came from very poor or impoverished families. They were the first generation that went to school and became literate. They contrasted their own position in Bosnia where many of them had parents who were landless with the fact that Serbia was a land of small-holders.

The third element was political. Bosnia was ruled like a colony with top appointees coming from Vienna, and local administrative jobs only up to a third filled by local population where moreover the advantage was given to Catholics. As AJP Taylor had insisted, lots of national struggles in the A-H empire were originally motivated by the struggle for government jobs, and then escalated to other areas. The same was true in Bosnia. On the other hand, Serbia was an almost fully-franchise male democracy since 1903.

Serbia thus in the minds of the Young Bosnia movement possessed three advantages: one of self determination and common language as opposed to the occupation by a non-native elite; land-holding vs landlessness, and democracy vs. absence of the right to vote. These were (let’s call them) the “objective reasons” that led the members of the Young Bosnia into the opposition to the A-H rule.

But there were also other elements: the general intellectual climate in Europe with its fascination with anarchism, individual acts of courage, and martyrdom. Vojinović meticulously documents reading patterns and exchange of political opinions in the letters written by conspirators and in their later autobiographies (of those who have survived). Russian democratic and anarchist literature (Herzen, Kropotkin and Bakunin) played the most important role. Not Tolstoy, whose works, Princip once quipped, should be all burned “because he advocates peaceful acceptance of all evils”. Mazzini was also popular; the Paris Commune and Victor Hugo; and finally Nietzsche, Italian futurism and German expressionism. The members followed the literature of the smaller European nations that were able to extricate themselves from under the power of the empires. This is how Vojinović explains a strong attraction for Belgian and Norwegian (Ibsen) writers. These were all ideologies of the rejection of the existing bourgeois world. Pace Keynes, few people outside Britain and rich continental European states loved that world. Several of the members of the Young Bosnia lived or travelled abroad: they would bring the most recent books, translate them, discuss them. Literary magazines (because the political ones were banned) and literary soirées were the places where the politics was learned and discussed. Books were read, over long nights, in tiny rented rooms, with a single light or a candle.

There is also a generational element. The young generation despised their parents. Not only because they were uneducated but because they were cowards. They believed in doing nothing, being patient, accepting every insult quietly, turning the other cheek, fearful of what radicalism of the young could produce. Parents advised them to be cautious, to wait. All of that was rejected with contempt. (One is reminded strongly of Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons.”)

This was also the “golden age” of political assassination in Europe. Between 1895 and 1914 were killed: two Russian ministers of internal affairs (1902, 1904) and Prime Minister (1911); French president (1904) and most important socialist politician (1914), Greek king (1913) and Greek Prime Minister (1905). Italian king (1900), Great Vizier of the Ottoman Empire (1913), Portuguese king and heir to the throne (1908), Serbian king (1903), two Spanish PMs (1897 and 1912), two Bulgarian PMs (1895, 1907), Premier of Egypt (1910), Russian general ruling Finland (1904), Governor of Galicia (1908), US President (1901).

Vojinović emphasizes an extraordinary sway that literature, and especially poetry, held on the young generation. Their desire for self-sacrifice and martyrdom sprang from romantic literature and constraining political circumstances where the system was, as the current expression has it, “rigged”. When youth is idealistic and when making political change is impossible, individual acts of terror appear as the only venue left.

He came in front of the hotel early. He was travelling and has not slept the entire night. His eyes felt very tired. It is cold in December, especially in the mornings. Lights were still on. He looked towards the hotel doors. It had siding automatic doors. They keep things warm inside. Three men walked out of it briskly. One looked like him, but only for a moment; he was shorter and had reddish hair. He did nothing, just made a couple of steps to the left. Then he waited again. The sliding doors opened again. Now, he, the businessman, the CEO –there was no doubt—with his wife, came out. His hands were cold from the morning frost. He touched the pistol in his right pocket as if to make sure it was still there. Suddenly the palm of his hand felt sweaty and the pistol slippery. But he firmed his grasp, and then he took it out..