Refugee return and state legitimization: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1875–1878

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, refugee generation and other forms of ethnic cleansing were a new and central feature in the dismantling of European empires and nationalists’ efforts to territorialize popular sovereignty based on demographic homogeneity. With the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, Europe’s Great Powers sanctioned the territorial principle, but included minority protection clauses intended to maintain mixed populations. This article argues that these protection clauses enabled states to make sovereign claims based not only on population distribution as such, but on the ability to control population movement itself. In its effort to win international sanction—and even Ottoman support—to occupy and administer the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Habsburg government based its arguments almost exclusively on its promised ability to repatriate refugees and manage long-term migration in the provinces. The article shows that states’ claims of power over refugee movement were an essential element of nineteenth-century European diplomacy and an indispensable tool of domestic policy. In the face of nation-state formation and an emerging ideal of demographic homogeneity, the ability to re-establish mixed populations asserted not only state power, but the legitimacy of an ‘imperial’ model of demographic heterogeneity.

Two Sides of the Same Coin? Contrasting Narratives of Bosnian-Muslims Migration to Turkey in Late 19th and Early 20th Century

“…This uprising happened in 1875 and it marked the de facto end of Ottoman rule in Bosnia. The uprising ended in 1878 and was finalised by the Berlin Congress in which the Austro-Hungarian Empire was given a mandate to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina (Manasek, 2021). These events were seen by the domestic Muslim populace as a great blow to them which they did not know how to overcome.…”