Scotus Viator

Robert Seton-Watson was a Scot who, in the early part of the 20th century, helped shape central Europe – in the very literal sense that his active journalism contributed to the boundary changes which took place as the Ottoman Empire fell apart. Serbia, Czechoslovakia and Romania were the countries whose struggles for removal of the Hungarian yoke received his warm support.

His articles were penned under the pseudonym Scotus Viator – “the travelling Scot”. I remember coming across an old book (with his writings about Romania) in the British Council library here in Bucharest in the early 90s and would love to find it again

As a Scot who has been living for the past decade in this part of the world, I think he really does deserve to be better remembered. In these days of faceless bureaucrats, he was a wonderful example of what individual effort could achieve. His life would make a fascinating film. I am indebted to Wikipedia for the following info.

Seton-Watson was born in London in 1879 to well-off Scottish parents. His father had been a tea-merchant in Calcutta, and his mother, Elizabeth Lindsay Seton, was the daughter of a genealogist and historian who had been the son of George Seton of the East India Company. His inherited wealth, of Indian origin, later assisted his activities on behalf of Europe's subject peoples.
Robert was educated at Winchester public school and New College, Oxford, where he read modern history, graduating with a first-class degree in 1901 and then studied at the Universities of Berlin, Sorbonne and Vienna from where he wrote a number of articles on Hungary for The Spectator.

His research for these articles took him to Hungary in 1906, and his discoveries there turned his sympathies against Hungary and in favour of then subjected Slovaks, Romanians and southern Slavs. In 1908, he published his first major work - ”Racial Problems in Hungary”

Seton-Watson became friends with the Vienna correspondent of The Times, Henry Wickham Steed and the Czech philosopher and politician Tomáš Masaryk. He argued in books and articles for a federal solution to the problems of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then riven by the tensions between its ancient dynastic model and the forces of ethnic nationalism. 
After the outbreak of the First WW, Seton-Watson took practical steps to support the causes that he had formerly supported merely in print.
He served as honorary secretary of the Serbian Relief Fund from 1914 and supported and found employment for his friend Masaryk after the latter fled to England to escape arrest.
Both founded and published “The New Europe” (1916), a weekly periodical to promote 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 to 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, 1919 in a private capacity, advising the representatives there of formerly subject peoples. Although on bad terms with the governments of the major powers, whom he famously referred to 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, showing their gratitude after the conference. Masaryk became the first president of the new state of Czechoslovakia and welcomed him there. 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, it was formally acclaimed by the Romanian parliament. Yugoslavia rewarded him with an honorary degree from the University of Zagreb.

He died at the age of 72 in Nov 1951 on the island of Skye. His 2 sons also became well-known historians - Hugh and Christopher – and wrote, in tribute to their father’s memory, “The Making of a new Europe – RSW and the last years of Austro Hungary” (1981)

A Seton Watson resource

Seton-Watson and Nation-Building – clashes in late Habsburg space;

British radicals and Hungary in late 19th century;

Hungarian responses to RWS;

Beyond Balkanism – the scholarly politics of region-making Diana Mishkova (2018)

RW Seton-Watson and the Romanians 1906-1920; Cornelia Bodea and Hugh Seton-Watson (Editura Sciintifica and Encycilopeca 1988)

https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/86/5/1118/121726?redirectedFrom=fulltext

British liberals and the Balkans;

articles and books written by Seton-Watson

This site actually contains quite a few examples of his original journalism

The Southern Slav Question; RWS (1911)

The Rise of nationality in the Balkans; RWS (1918)

A History of the Roumanians (1934)