4. Ámbito estratégico y táctico
4.2. Fase 2: “SOMOS UN SOLO PIC”
4.2.1. Plan de Comunicación Fase 2 67
The Balkan Committee had no official standing. It relied on lobbying, rousing public opinion, and the impact of what it felt to be the objective and expert analysis of its members and supporters. Ironically, this liberal pressure group seems to have had more influence under the Conservative Foreign Secretary, Lord Lansdowne, than it did under his Liberal successor, Sir Edward Grey. Lansdowne, it has been claimed, ‘lived in terror of the Committee’ and at least gave the impression that he might be persuaded to press the Great Powers for further reform.146 This led the Committee to arrange a string of conferences and public meetings, and
145 Earl Percy, House of Commons debate on ‘Macedonia’, 25th February 1908, Hansard, Vol. 184, cc.
1663-708 – accessed at: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1908/feb/25/macedonia (last accessed 7th April 2014).
146 Robbins, K., ‘Public Opinion, the Press, and Pressure Groups’, in Hinsley (ed.), Foreign Policy
under Sir Edward Grey (Cambridge, 1977), p. 167; Samardjiev, B., ‘On the role of Public Opinion in
Great Britain Regarding the Reforms in European Turkey and the Idea of Autonomy of Macedonia (1903-1908)’, Balkan Studies (Étudies balkaniques), Issue 2 (2002), p. 18.
to encourage and provide speakers, publicity, and news from the region for many more throughout the country (it estimated that over 300 such meetings were held in the autumn of 1903 alone).147 However, Grey was, initially at least, much more intractable. The Nation wrote that the new Foreign Secretary’s conduct came ‘as a shock to those of us who recall the historic tradition of Liberalism in the Near East’.148
Nevertheless, in February 1908, Grey unexpectedly outlined in parliament that he would propose a new reform scheme for Macedonia. This would aim to secure the appointment of a European Governor, irremovable except by the consent of the Great Powers, with complete control over the civil and military administration of the region. For the Balkan Committee this was a ‘revelation’. It represented the solution to the Macedonian question it had been advocating since 1903, justifying the campaigns of the previous five years, and offering great hope for the future. Although ultimately never implemented (due to the impact of the July 1908 Young Turk Revolution), at the time Grey’s proposal was a moment of triumph for the Committee. Its Annual Report for 1907 (published in 1908) thanked the Foreign Secretary for ‘the great humanitarian effort’ that he was seen to be leading.149
Does this indicate that the Balkan Committee had managed to arouse sufficient public support or assemble so convincing a set of arguments as to force a change in foreign policy? In fact, Grey’s initiative can also be explained, in part at least, by the new diplomatic landscape created by the August 1907 Anglo-Russian agreement over Persia. The subsequent entente between the two states undoubtedly made it much easier for Britain, now sure of Russian support, to call for more extensive reforms in Macedonia.150 On the other hand, it has been argued in a recent study that ‘if it were not for the Committee’s work, the 1900s would have been a forgotten decade for the Balkans’, and that it ‘could probably claim that it had achieved the formidable task of bringing about a continued and positive coverage of Balkan
147 Balkan Committee, Third Annual Report of the Executive Committee, p. 8. 148 ‘England’s Duty to Macedonia’, Nation, 20th July 1907, p. 753.
149 Balkan Committee, Fourth Annual Report, p. 22, p. 27.
150 Steiner, Z., ‘Grey, Hardinge and the Foreign Office, 1906-1910’, Historical Journal, Vol. 10, No. 3
affairs in the British public sphere’.151 This tallies with verdicts offered at the time by the Committee’s supporters.152 When L.T. Hobhouse wrote to Noel Buxton in 1913 urging the Balkan Committee to take up the cause of the Ottoman Armenians, he praised the ‘influence’ that the Committee had exerted and the ‘general efficiency’ with which it had operated. It would be far more effective in drawing attention to the plight of the Armenians, Hobhouse reasoned, ‘than any scratch crowd got together for the purposes’.153 Buxton himself recalled
that the Committee and its supporters ‘secured public notice here and abroad in a measure out of all proportion to our diminutive numbers’.154
The Balkan Committee did have a significant presence in the networks of debate over foreign affairs in Edwardian Britain. A.G. Gardiner and J.L. Hammond were members of its Executive Committee, Brailsford reported from Macedonia for the Manchester Guardian, and both he and Nevinson contributed regularly to the Speaker and its successor the Nation at this time, as well as to the Daily News. Through liaison with sympathetic Peers and MPs (H.F.B. Lynch, G.P. Gooch and Charles Masterman were the most notable supporters in the Commons), the Committee ensured that the Macedonian question received regular parliamentary attention. It was confidently reported in the aftermath of the 1906 general election that over 150 MPs supported the Committee’s policy of placing Macedonia under European control.155 As Buxton recalled, ‘we did not despair of utilizing any means whatever
– e.g. social position, money, advertisement of the cause in any way, by any kind of newspaper, or any other agency’.156
The depth and scale of the agitation movement generated by the Balkan Committee should not be exaggerated, however. The Congo Reform Association (CRA), with its impressive network of auxiliary organisations, fundraisers and international publicists
151 Michail, British and the Balkans, p. 14, p. 15.
152 For example: Young, Nationalism and War in the Near East, p. 103; Conwell-Evans, Foreign
Policy From a Back Bench 1904-1918 (London, 1932), p. 3; Anderson, Noel Buxton, p. 36.
153 L.T. Hobhouse to Noel Buxton, 8th January 1913: Noel Buxton Papers (MS 951 c. 24/2).
154 Draft of an Autobiography, section on ‘Balkan Reform’, p. 147: Noel Buxton Papers, (MS 951 c.
8/2).
155 Balkan Committee, Second Report of the Executive Committee (London, 1906), p. 12.
156 Draft letter from Noel Buxton to his wife, dated 20th December 1914 but never sent: Noel Buxton
(including Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain), was the more redoubtable heir to the Bulgarian agitation as far as Sir Edward Grey was concerned.157 This was the Foreign Secretary’s reference point when he mused of the Congo reform movement that ‘no external question for at least thirty years has moved the country so strongly and so vehemently as this’.158 The impact of the shocking photographs screened in CRA lantern lectures across the
country, purporting to show evidence of the brutality of King Leopold’s colonial administration (including the severing of limbs and other acts of mutilation), can be compared to the impact of the initial written accounts in the British press of the ‘Bulgarian Horrors’ in 1876.
Yet, whilst it was not the most high profile campaign of its time, the Balkan Committee is nevertheless instructive as a case study in dissent over foreign policy. The Committee’s importance in this respect lies less in its policy impact than in the insights that it offers into the changing nature of foreign affairs debate over the course of the period covered by this thesis. As noted in Chapter Two when discussing the Armenian agitation of the 1890s, by the end of the nineteenth century, it was rather less easy than had been the case in 1876 to fit protest against Ottoman rule over Christian populations into the framework of a ‘Cross versus Crescent’ moral crusade. A decade later, it would have been just as difficult to apply the emotional rhetoric of the Bulgarian agitation to the Macedonian question. However, the Balkan Committee’s tried – not always successfully, as we shall see – to adopt a different approach. As an organisation formed, according to Bryce, ‘for the sake of awakening and focusing public interest and of supplying accurate information and just views, to a too ignorant public’, the Committee presented itself as a source of detached analysis rather than horror stories.159 Deliberate sensationalism was notably absent from its publications on the Macedonian question. As H.N. Fieldhouse observes, this was an organisation that targeted
157 Grant, ‘Christian Critics of Empire’, pp. 46-48; Sliwinski, S., ‘The Childhood of Human Rights:
The Kodak on the Congo’, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2006), p. 347.
158 Grey cited in Grant, ‘Christian Critics of Empire’, p. 53.
‘the politically established and the culturally articulate’.160 In this respect, the Committee did enjoy some success. Arthur Evans, Robert Seton-Watson, Ronald Burrows and Arnold Toynbee were all associated with the Committee in this period, and all either were already or would shortly become recognised authorities on international questions. If, as Eugene Michail argues, Balkan questions occupied ‘a central place in the broader history of the rise of international experts on foreign affairs at the turn of the century’, this was in no small part reflective of the influence of the Balkan Committee.161
Rather than professing to speak as the voice of the people, supporters of the Balkan Committee presented themselves as an enlightened minority, battling against both public ignorance and an inherently unaccountable, amateurish, ‘secretive’, and misinformed Foreign Office. As Lynch complained in the Commons, for all the views and public debate on Macedonia that had been directed to the attention of Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary remained the ‘organ of a powerful bureaucracy, whose transactions were screened from the representatives of the people by an impenetrable veil of secrecy’.162 Noel Buxton and Arthur Ponsonby’s experience of the difficulty of uncovering this ‘veil of secrecy’ with regard to the Macedonian question was surely a factor in their decision to form the Liberal Foreign Affairs Committee and campaign for more open diplomacy prior to the First World War. In this case, their approach mirrored that of the Balkan Committee in preferring to combat the ‘secrecy’ and obfuscation of official diplomacy through ‘top down’ parliamentary debate – what Buxton described as ‘a kind of compromise with democracy’. Foreign affairs ‘experts’ in parliament, rather than the general public or the ‘unbalanced enthusiast’, would keep discussion well informed and practical. It was nevertheless hoped that this would achieve a
160 Fieldhouse, ‘Noel Buxton…’, p. 186.
161 Michail, British and the Balkans, p. 33, p. 38. Burrows was Professor of Greek at the universities of
Cardiff and Manchester, then Principal of King’s College London; Seton-Watson, whose activities are covered in more detail in the following chapter, was co-founder of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London and Editor of the influential journal the New Europe during the First World War; Toynbee was Director of Studies at Chatham House between 1929 and 1956.
162 Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 1st August 1906, Vol. 162, cc 1127-36 – accessed online at:
greater degree of accountability to public opinion than was possible through the ‘privileged caste system’ of the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service.163
The cult of the expert in British culture and society – the growing belief that to be qualified to comment and advise on complex political or social questions, one had to lay claim to some kind of specialist knowledge or first-hand experience – is therefore intertwined with the history of the Balkan Committee. Similarly, the Congo Reform Association, although as we shall see associated with a far more populist and deliberately ‘sensational’ approach to dissent over foreign policy, shared Buxton’s faith in the value of detached ‘scientific’ analysis. E.D. Morel was influenced by the anthropological writings of Mary Kingsley far more than he was by the missionary zeal of his religious supporters, and he was always opposed to Congo reform meetings acquiring an overtly ‘religious flavour’, as he put it. Morel’s own analysis of the Congo question was initially centred on secular economic arguments – free trade and the value of peasant proprietorship – rather than on Christian humanitarianism or the exposure of ‘atrocities’.164
In the case of Macedonian question, commentators took care to mention the number of visits they had made to region, or the ‘objective’ evidence on which their arguments were based. When a group of English travellers familiar with Macedonia signed a letter challenging some of the assumptions made in a speech by the Prime Minister, Balfour, in 1903, it was seen to have ‘completely disposed his singular claim to pose as an expert on this question’.165
Yet often travel to the region was in itself seen as an insufficient guarantor of expertise. In a review for the Speaker, Brailsford described Edith Durham as ‘an artist who went to Turkey in search of the picturesque’. Her analysis of the Macedonian question, with its ‘disturbing aesthetic prejudice’, could thus not compare with that of the ‘experts’ whose ‘careful volume
163 Buxton, N., ‘Diplomacy and Parliament’, Nineteenth Century and After, No. 422 (April 1912), p.
636, pp. 638-41.
164 Porter, Critics of Empire, p. 242; Morel to John Holt, 3rd February 1904, cited in Porter, Critics of
Empire, p. 269; Grant, ‘Christian Critics of Empire’, p. 36, p. 38; Morel to W.T. Stead, October 1902,
cited in Louis, W.R., and Strengers, J. (eds.), E.D. Morel’s History of he Congo Reform Movement (Oxford, 1968), p. 112.
of essays’ had been commissioned by the Balkan Committee for the ‘serious purpose of awakening interest and enlightening sympathy’ on the same topic.166
Durham’s book was no more prejudiced than any other, but it seems it was easier to dismiss her work as lacking in scientific scrupulousness or seriousness of purpose than it was to engage with the sometimes salient criticisms it put forward concerning the Balkan Committee’s own bias against the region’s non-Christian population. Nevertheless, the fact that supporters of the Balkan Committee explicitly distinguished their approach from that of ‘mere’ travellers to the region is significant. Most historical analysis of balkanism has been based on travel writing, yet Buxton and Brailsford clearly felt at the time that alternative means of engaging with the region were both possible and necessary. Even if ‘it was through travel writing that the Balkans was largely constructed in this period’, this should not obscure the alternative images of the region constructed through other forms of writing.167 As noted in
the introduction to this thesis, analysis of imaginative geography needs to take account of genre (as well as context). Political debate about the Balkans had a different raison d’être, was targeted at a different audience, and was guided by different stylistic conventions than travel writing. It is clear, from the example of liberal political writing at least, that different representations of the Balkans were produced as a result.
Yet just how effective was this ‘top down’ expert-driven political approach? The regular reports and memos sent to the Foreign Secretary by the Balkan Committee were generally politely acknowledged. The Foreign Office appeared to accept that, at the very least, the Committee’s supporters were sufficiently important to occasionally merit its staff’s time and attention.168 This was a long way from having any direct influence over foreign
policy though. When G.P. Gooch sent a letter to Grey, signed by sixty-four MPs, calling for Macedonia to be placed under European control, he was assured that the government was ‘fully alive to the necessity of still further improving the administration’. However, Grey’s
166 Brailsford, ‘Two Views of the Balkans’, Speaker, 25th March 1905, p. 618. 167 Hammond, ‘Imagined Colonialism’, p. 89.
168 See, for example, the FO minute dated 9th June 1908, in response to a letter from the Balkan
response came with the crucial caveat that ‘progress in the direction must necessarily depend on the view taken by the other European Powers of the situation in Macedonia and the measures which it is necessary to adopt’.169 In other words, humanitarian sympathy alone would not induce the British government to upset the ‘Concert of Europe’ by insisting on a reform scheme that lacked any wider international support. This was the position that Lansdowne had held from the start. In September 1903 he had written to O’Conor, British Ambassador in Constantinople, that, although the news from the region was ‘terrible’, Britain was ‘powerless unless we can move the other Powers, and in attempting this we must be careful not to overshoot the walls’.170
Its diplomatic clout may have been limited, but from the outset the Balkan Committee sought to create an international reputation for expertise on the region. This was pursued through links with likeminded organisations and liberal public figures in America, France and Italy, and in the Balkans itself through relief work and regular ‘fact-finding’ missions. In this aim the Committee had a degree of success, earning the perhaps misleading reputation for being a quasi-official international repository for news, analysis and intelligence. When Noel Buxton visited Constantinople after the Young Turk revolution, he was surprised to find that the Committee was seen in some quarters of the Turkish capital’s foreign press to represent the interests of the British Government, something he was forced to deny. Buxton explained this misapprehension by asserting that the kind of voluntary organisation of public opinion carried out by the Balkan Committee and similar organisations was something laudably common in England but ‘so hard for other nations to understand’.171
Although the Committee did not represent the British Government therefore, it did see itself as representing the best traditions of British political culture and informed public interest in foreign affairs. The implication was that ‘less liberal’ nations did not share these
169 Letter to Sir Edward Grey signed by 64 MPs, 14th March 1906, and FO response, 28th March 1906:
The National Archives (FO 371/148, 18683)
170 Lansdowne to O’Conor, 24th September 1903: Marquis of Lansdowne Papers, The National
Archives (FO 800/143).
171 Extract from Levant Herald, 9th December 1908, enclosed in a report for the FO on the Balkan
Committee from Sir Gerald Lowther in Constantinople: Lowther to Grey, 17th December 1908: The
traditions. Looking back on this period towards the end of the First World War, Brailsford admitted, in a rather more resigned and cynical manner than Buxton, that British humanitarian campaigns over issues such as the slave trade, Congo misrule or Ottoman atrocities ‘puzzled our neighbours so deeply that they usually interpreted them as a disguise for some Machiavellian design’.172 It was perhaps for this very reason that Grey took the time to warn
Buxton against interfering too closely in the internal politics of the Young Turk regime.173
From the Foreign Office’s perspective, the Balkan Committee was more of an irritant than a reason to applaud the liberalism of British political culture. The Foreign Secretary had to contend with the complaints of (among others) Count Mensdorff, the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador to London, concerning the ‘mischief’ created by the activities of certain ‘Committees and independent private people’ over the situation in the Balkans.174 O’Connor was another regular critic of the Committee in his dispatches to the Foreign Office. In February 1908 he complained to Grey that ‘the violence displayed by these writers and speakers and their determination not to recognise the good really done by the reforms in Macedonia and their practical justification of the methods of the bands must do more than anything to encourage these bands to persist in their campaign of murder’.175 O’Connor’s reports seem to have won Noel Buxton few friends amongst the Foreign Office staff. One official accused the Balkan Committee’s Chairman of being ‘disingenuous’; Grey thought him ‘an intelligent ass’. To Asquith he was ‘an amiable nincompoop’.176