information:classification
Background

In the decades leading up to the congress, Russia and the Balkans had been gripped by Pan-Slavism, a movement to unite all the Balkan Slavs under one rule. The Treaty of San Stefano, which had created a " Greater Bulgaria ", was opposed as a display of Pan-Slavic hegemonic ambition in southeastern Europe. In Imperial Russia, Pan-Slavism meant the creation of a unified Slavic state, under Russian direction, and was essentially a byword for Russian conquest of the Balkan peninsula. The realisation of the goal would have given Russia control of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, thus economic control of the Black Sea and substantially greater geopolitical power. That desire evolved similarly to the Pan-Germanism and Pan-Italianism, which had resulted in two unifications, took different forms in the various Slavic nations.

Balkan Slavs felt they needed both an equivalent to Piedmont to serve as a base and an outside sponsor corresponding to France. The state that was meant to serve as the locus for unification of the Balkans under a "Slavic" rule was not always clear, as initiative wafted between Serbia and Bulgaria. Italian rhetoric by contrast cast Romania as Latin, a "second Piedmont".

The recognition of the Bulgarian Exarchate by the Ottomans in 1870 had been intended to separate the Bulgarians, religiously from the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, and politically from Serbia. Pan-Slavism required the end of Ottoman rule in the Balkans. How and whether that goal would be realised was the major question to be answered at the Congress of Berlin.