Robert William Seton-Watson - The First World War and Aftermath

The First World War and Aftermath

After the outbreak of the First World War, Seton-Watson took practical steps to support the causes that he had formerly supported in print. He served as honorary secretary of the Serbian Relief Fund from 1914, and after his friend Masaryk fled to England to escape arrest, supported him and found him employment, and together with him founded and published The New Europe (1916), a weekly periodical which promoted the cause of the Czechs and other subject peoples. Seton-Watson financed this periodical himself.

Seton-Watson's private political activity was not appreciated in all quarters, and his critics within the British Government finally succeeded in temporarily silencing him in 1917 by drafting him into the Royal Army Medical Corps, where he was given the job of scrubbing hospital floors. Others, however, rescued him, and from 1917-1918 he served on the Intelligence Bureau of the War Cabinet in the Enemy Propaganda Department, where he was responsible for British propaganda to the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He assisted in the preparations for the Rome Congress of subject Habsburg peoples, held in April 1918.

Following the end of the War, Seton-Watson attended the Paris Peace Conference in a private capacity, advising the representatives there of formerly subject peoples. Although on bad terms with the governments of the major powers--to whom he famously referred as "the pygmies of Paris"--he contributed to discussions of where the new frontiers of Europe should be, and was especially influential in setting the postwar frontiers between Italy and the new state of Yugoslavia.

Although the British Government was unenthusiastic about Seton-Watson, other governments were not, and showed their gratitude after the Conference. Seton-Watson's friend Masaryk became the first president of the new state of Czechoslovakia, to which he welcomed him. His friendship with Edvard Beneš, now Czechoslovakia's foreign minister, was consolidated. Seton-Watson was made an honorary citizen of Cluj in Transylvania, which had been incorporated into Romania despite the claims of Hungary, and in 1920 was formally acclaimed by the Romanian parliament. Yugoslavia rewarded him with an honorary degree from the University of Zagreb.