Politics of a San Stefano Bulgaria?

Vinization

Suppose that the Treaty of San Stefano is upheld, for one reason or another - either because the vehemently anti-Turkish British prime minister Gladstone keeps his office in 1874 instead of losing it to Disraeli, or because Bismarck supports Russia in the Congress of Berlin - and a Greater Bulgaria is established.

Bulgaria-SanStefano_-%281878%29-byTodorBozhinov.png


Since there already have been some discussions about the international effects of this alternate Bulgaria, I'll ask a different question: what could its internal politics look like? Would it still have Alexander of Battenberg as its first monarch, and if so, would he have a better chance of keeping his throne ITTL?

Last but definitely not least, what would happen to the Muslims in Bulgarian territory? From what I know they'd be a sizable percentage of the population, at least a third.
 

Valentinian

Bulgarian mistreatment of Turks (and potentially others) leads to either a Balkan War or the Great War, depending on who backs who.

The flip side of that is that there are so many different nationalities in these borders, you could see pan-South Slavism originate in Bulgaria as an ideological cover.
 

Vinization

Vinization said:
I don't doubt that at all. My main hope is that they'd be too large a percentage of the population to make wholesale expulsion viable.
Click to expand...
To follow up on this, an interesting point I saw in a thread was that Bulgaria and the Ottomans might become allies, since they'd have few border issues left. If this happens to be the case, hopefully it'd translate domestically into better treatment of Bulgarian Muslims.

Of course, it's probably just as likely that Constantinople would ally with Serbia, Greece and Romania to get some of their lands back.
 
Grey Wolf

Grey Wolf

Donor
Since it will only happen with Russian support, any Serb or Romanian aims of dealing with it will have to wait for another great power to come along, and that's not the already defeated Ottomans. Greece doesn't even have a common border, and those weird areas cut off are all going to be Ottoman

Inside the country, well if its integrity relies on Russia then the power of the Russia power will be stronger, otherwise the opposition getting in, losing Russian support, almost certainly equals a losing war and being carved up

Monarch? If they want Alex, they get Alex. In this scenario there are certainly lots of things for him to do - half the country was never really koined to the other half, so transport and national integration
 

Arkenfolm

Vinization said:
To follow up on this, an interesting point I saw in a thread was that Bulgaria and the Ottomans might become allies, since they'd have few border issues left. If this happens to be the case, hopefully it'd translate domestically into better treatment of Bulgarian Muslims.
Click to expand...
Wouldn't they just arrange a population exchange since that was the vogue thing to do at this point? Based on those borders, there's still 100-200K Bulgarians in Ottoman lands--most of these would be massacred or forced to flee in the 1900-1913 period.
 

Vinization

Arkenfolm said:
Wouldn't they just arrange a population exchange since that was the vogue thing to do at this point? Based on those borders, there's still 100-200K Bulgarians in Ottoman lands--most of these would be massacred or forced to flee in the 1900-1913 period.
Click to expand...
Were there any big exchanges in the 19th century? I thought that was a 20th century thing.
 

Valentinian

Arkenfolm said:
Wouldn't they just arrange a population exchange since that was the vogue thing to do at this point? Based on those borders, there's still 100-200K Bulgarians in Ottoman lands--most of these would be massacred or forced to flee in the 1900-1913 period.
Click to expand...
World leaders at the time did not see the nation-state as inevitable. Assimilation was the preference. Violence if necessary.
 

Hastings

Um, there were big exchanges. Roughly a million Muslims were turned into refugees, half of those just Bulgaria/Eastern Rumelia. It is estimated that roughly 200,000 Bulgarian/Eastern Rumelian Muslims died, and 500,000 more fled. 350,000 more would leave over the next 30 years. By 1911 the Christian population had nearly doubled and the Muslim dropped 60%. Incidentally this is almost identical to the pattern in the areas gained in the Balkan wars where the Muslim population dropped 62% by 1926. This Bulgaria's borders would realistically involve a half million refugees or so more refugees from Macedonia and Eastern Rumelia.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top
Top