3.2. in the Country of Beauties and Heroes: the British Medical Mission and the Reassessment of the Serbian Image
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
2 Contents Contents .................................................................................................................................................................. 3 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................ 5 The Southern Slav Question in the Last Decades of Peace ................................................................................ 12 1.1. The Land of Regicides: Great Britain and the Beginning of the Karađorđević Era ......................... 14 1.2. The Habsburg Empire and the Evolution of the Yugoslav Idea ......................................................... 23 1.2.1. The Constitutional Question and the Case of the Sub-Compromise .................................................. 26 1.2.2. The Third Wave of Yugoslavism: The Birth of the Croato-Serb Coalition ....................................... 31 1.2.3. Towards the Concept of Yugoslav Piedmont: Misrule, Absolutism and Disillusions in Croatia ...... 42 1.3. The Southern Slav Question and the Balance of Power ....................................................................... 49 1.3.1. Hungary’s Role in Maintaining the European Order ......................................................................... 50 1.3.2. The Revelations of the Southern Slav Question ................................................................................ 59 1.3.3. The Balkan Wars and the Future of the Habsburg Empire ................................................................ 66 1.4. Overview .................................................................................................................................................. 74 Secret Diplomacy and the Case of Yugoslav Unification in the First Years of the Great War ......................... 77 2.1. A Balkan Pilgrimage ............................................................................................................................... 78 2.2. Altering Views in the Course of the Great War .................................................................................... 86 2.3. Secret Diplomacy and the Fall of Serbia ............................................................................................... 96 2.4. Overview ................................................................................................................................................ 106 The Guardians of the Gate: The Transformation of the Serbian Image ......................................................... 109 3.1. ‘Our Gallant Little Ally’: Relief and Propaganda .............................................................................. 111 3.2. In the Country of Beauties and Heroes: The British Medical Mission and the Reassessment of the Serbian Image ............................................................................................................................................... 123 3.3. Kosovo, the Flodden of the Balkans ..................................................................................................... 135 3.4. Overview ................................................................................................................................................ 148 Fragile Alliances ................................................................................................................................................ 150 4.1. From Niš to Corfu: Patrons, Protégés and Pašić ................................................................................ 152 4.2. Parallel Schemes .................................................................................................................................... 171 4.3. Separate Peace and the Questions of Italian-Yugoslav Rapprochement .......................................... 185 4.4. Overview ................................................................................................................................................ 197 Ambiguous Achievements .................................................................................................................................. 199 5.1. The Allied Powers and the Genesis of Yugoslavia .............................................................................. 202 5.2. The Southern Slav Question and the Paris Peace Conference .......................................................... 224 5.3. Overview ................................................................................................................................................ 247 Conclusions ........................................................................................................................................................ 251 Documents .......................................................................................................................................................... 263 Maps ................................................................................................................................................................... 272 Images................................................................................................................................................................. 285 References .......................................................................................................................................................... 307 3 Acknowledgments For their support, help and patience, I would like to offer my gratitude for my friends, colleagues and family members – Adrián Alispahić, Viktória Baráth, Dóra Salamon, Miklós Kónya, Attila Szeghő, Nándor Virovecz and Péter Hevő – who assisted me with proof-reading, translations, design or with the administrative aspects of completing this doctoral programme and thesis. For their miscellaneous and numerous help, I am greatly indebted to the members of the Dózsa family living in Budapest, Zagreb and Belgrade. I am also grateful for the recommendations and intellectual guidance of Géza Jeszenszky, Andrea Pető, Wendy Bracewell and Alexander Maxwell. And last but not least, I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation to Ágnes Beretzky, who not only had attracted my attention to the topic of this dissertation, but also set an inspiring example with her dedication, brilliance and genius as a scholar, a researcher, and most importantly as a human being. Thank you all! 4 Introduction 5 obert William Seton-Watson, an internationally acclaimed historian and expert in R Central European affairs chose the above quotation1 in 1920 as the cover motto for the last issue of the political weekly called the New Europe, indicating that the ends of its founders had been met by the fundamental reorganization of Central Europe into independent nation-states. In the same year, the conclusion of the Treaty of Rapallo also marked the end of an enduring political crusade of a small but influential and well-connected group of British intellectuals who at the outbreak of the Great War had undertaken the agenda to promote the unification of the Southern Slavs in a single, independent state. Due to the lack of British economic, territorial and strategic interests in the Balkans, the peninsula had remained an unknown and uninteresting region for the British public for a long time. In the turn of the 19th century, the territory was eventually discovered by a few professionals and intellectuals who would patronize miscellaneous Balkan nations, and act as self-appointed regional experts with the intention to influence Allied policy-making in the course of the Great War. In effect, the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was the outcome of a successful pro-Yugoslav British lobby whose proponents believed that the unification of all Southern Slavs would have been vital for the stability and peace of Europe.2 With the outbreak of the Great War, Serbia evolved into the ally of Great Britain, and suddenly found such influential, well-informed and devoted patrons as Henry Wickham Steed (1871–1956), an English political journalist and the Foreign Editor of the Times during the war, and Robert William Seton-Watson (1879–1951), a Scottish historian and journalist, who was among the first Western European intellectuals to write on the Southern Slavs. Their life- long friendship and political alliance dated back to the years spent in Vienna as the 1 Black caviar became available in England in the early 17th century. Nonetheless, with the exception of gourmands, the general public disliked it. 2 It should be noted that the contemporaries had used both the terms ‘Yugoslav’ and ‘Yugoslavia’ before the unification of the Southern Slav lands commenced. Therefore, I take the liberty to use both as an alternative for ‘Southern Slav’ or ‘united Southern Slav state.’ 6 correspondents of the Times and the Morning Post.3 Disillusioned with the Hungarian political elite and the Habsburg Empire, they would become the inseparable vanguards of the political movement advocating for the general reconstruction of European frontiers during the Great War. Becoming the ardent proponents of Southern Slav unity, Seton-Watson and Steed made the dissolution of Austria–Hungary their self-appointed task (MacMillan 123; Masaryk 125), and introduced the idea of national self-determination as the principle of peace settlement and an alternative for the preservation of the Habsburg Empire.4 Their war-time articles, pamphlets, memoranda,