Balkan Entente

The countries that formed the Entente de los Balcanes in 1934 and its main adversary, Bulgaria.

The Balkan entente, Balkan Pact or Balkan Pact, was a pact signed on February 9, 1934 by the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Kingdom of Romania, Turkey and the Kingdom of Greece to protect territorial integrity against annexation claims of the Kingdom of Bulgaria and the Kingdom of Hungary. World War II left it without effect.

Background

Bulgarian territorial losses in the conflicts of the beginning of the century XX..

After the First World War, the peace treaties that put an end to it involved territorial changes in Eastern Europe that in practice divided the countries into two groups: those that had benefited from said changes, favorable to the maintenance of the borders, and those who, for having lost territories, demanded the revision of those treaties, called revisionists. Bulgaria, which had been one of the defeated nations in the war, had lost important territories for its size, both in the World War and in the previous Second Balkan War, it belonged to the second group, unlike most of its neighbors.

In 1933, Yugoslav King Alexander I began to try to improve his country's relations with neighboring Bulgaria, with which it disputed control of part of Macedonia, assigned to Yugoslavia after the World War. This rapprochement worried Greece and Turkey, also neighbors and Bulgaria and with which they also had territorial disputes. They also feared the possible creation of a great Slavic state that would control the Balkans. To try to distance Bulgaria from Yugoslavia, they decided to offer it a border guarantee in May 1933, which Bulgaria, opposed to the borders drawn after World War I that had been deprived of certain territories and access to the Aegean Sea, he refused.

After the Bulgarian rejection, the Romanian Foreign Minister, Nicolae Titulescu, proposed as an alternative the signing of non-aggression treaties between all the Balkan countries, topped by a large mutual guarantee agreement between all of them.

Target

On October 17, 1933, the first non-aggression treaty was signed, between the Kingdom of Romania and Turkey. On November 17, another was signed between Turkey and Yugoslavia. Bulgaria was willing to sign non-aggression treaties with its neighbours, but not to recognize the borders drawn at Versailles.

The pact, signed on February 9, 1934, established the guarantee of the borders between the signatories against attacks by third parties, although it excluded the case of attack by great powers, apparently due to the Greek refusal to come to the aid of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in case of Italian aggression. The Greek position received Turkish support, the government of this country worried that it would have to come to the aid of Romania in the event of a Soviet attack. In practice, it added Greece and Turkey to the Little Entente bloc, formed to prevent Hungarian revisionism and neutralized possible Bulgarian claims by uniting all its neighbors against them.

History

After the signing of the pact, he found the maneuver against him by Mussolini who, on March 17, 1934, signed the Protocols of Rome with Hungary and Austria, with the intention of avoiding a union of the Danubian States that would did not suit Italian interests.

The pact was ineffective in curbing the influence of the great powers in the Balkans, as Czechoslovakia wanted to use it, due to the Greek and Turkish reserves to expand the alliance in the event of an attack by them, and due to the tendency Yugoslav Republic to try to improve its relations with the only feasible target of the alliance, Bulgaria.

On January 24, 1937, Yugoslavia again took the initiative in normalizing relations with Bulgaria by signing a friendship treaty with Bulgaria. This was followed by an agreement between Bulgaria and the Entente countries in which they renounced the The use of force to resolve their disagreements allowed the growth of the Bulgarian Army and established the need to begin negotiations on possible rectifications of the border in Thrace. The Bulgarian government was not satisfied with the agreement and demanded tangible territorial changes, especially regarding to the southern Dobruya, to which he attached such importance as to offer a political and military alliance to Germany in exchange for its support on this issue. In early July, at a meeting of the Yugoslav and Bulgarian foreign ministers, he appeared that an agreement was reached between the two countries, but the Yugoslav refusal to leave the Entente or to support the Bulgarians in the event of a Turkish attack ended with this ephemeral illusion.

In the winter of 1939, after the outbreak of World War II, the Romanian Foreign Minister, Grigore Gafencu, tried to use the Entente as a base to form a bloc of neutral countries that would limit German influence in the area and be strong enough to dissuade the Soviet Union from intervening, a great fear of the Romanian government. The bloc was to include the Kingdom of Bulgaria and be headed by the Kingdom of Italy, still neutral in the conflict. The idea received the support of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but Greece was opposed to ceding territory to Bulgaria in order to gain entry into the alliance. The Soviets also did not take kindly to the Romanian attempt and tried to isolate the Kingdom of Romania in order to recover disputed Bessarabia and unsuccessfully tried to achieve Turkish neutrality in the face of a possible Bulgarian attack on Romania with the intention of recovering Dobruya., for which the two countries competed. The Italian refusal to lead the new alliance and the Hungarian and Bulgarian refusal to join it sealed the failure of the proposal.

The last meeting of the Entente was held in February 1940, when the issue of Bulgaria's entry into the alliance was discussed again, but the Greek refusal to cede territory, to which Yugoslavia suddenly joined, made it fail the attempt. The same month the new Bulgarian government headed by Bogdan Filov, much more favorable to the Axis, took office and declared that any possible agreement with the Entente required the cession of southern Dobruya to Bulgaria, thus ending its side with any possibility of consensus in the face of the refusal of the Entente countries to cede territory to the Bulgarians.

Consequences

The treaty was the last multinational anti-revisionist alliance of the interwar period and the weakest. In practice it was an agreement to neutralize Bulgarian revisionist whims, unnecessary due to Bulgaria's military and diplomatic weakness, as well as failing to maintain peace in the Balkans when it tried to be used in the winter of 1939 as the base for a new bloc of neutral nations in World War II.