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)

Balkan perceptions

I’ve been quiet this past week simply because I’ve been wrapped up in what I hoped would be the final stages of completing the new book on Bulgaria – now running at 222 pages (compared with the 56 of Introducing the Bulgarian Realists)

Trouble is that I keep finding new names for my annotated list – 15 or so in the past week thanks to several finds and a visit to Pazardzhik and to a new graphics exhibition at Sofia’s City Gallery

These, however, are of minority interest and are therefore relegated to the last section of this post - which tries to confront the fact that potential readers may be disinclined to read a book which has “Bulgaria” in the title…
I’ m starting to wonder whether I would be better advised to use Balkan imagery in the title…. 

After all, tales of travels and exploits in these parts have apparently been part of the staple diet for British readers for several centuries…..as we now know thanks to the publications in the past 15 years of literary scholars  such as Maria Todorova, Andrew Hammond and Vesna Goldsworthy who have carefully itemised and summarised the writings of foreign visitors to the area - and identified various phases of the “West’s encounter with the near East”…Hammond’s The Debated Lands – British and American Representation of the Balkans, for example, suggests that - 

balkanist discourse has passed through three distinct paradigms. These are denigration before 1914; romanticisation in the inter-war years; and, after an ambivalent mixture of sympathy and disappointment during the Cold War, a return to denigration in the 1990s.

He then goes on to argue that –

pre-1914 denigration reveals close similarities to colonial discourse, how inter-war romanticism reflects the modernist quest for exoticism and psychological escape and how the reappearance of denigration coincides with the advent of postmodern scepticism.

Todorova has a fascinating chapter exploring how the region came to be called the Balkans (it was previously known as Haemus……  

The earliest mention of the name Balkan known to me comes from a fifteenth century memorandum of the Italian humanist writer and diplomat Philippus Callimachus (1437–1496). Persecuted by Pope Paul II, Callimaco settled in Poland and became a close adviser to the Polish king. He was the author of a history of the deeds of Wladyslav III Warnenczyk, in which he left a short description of the Haemus, which he saw when he visited the Constantinople on diplomatic missions. In his 1490 memorandum to Pope Innocent VIII, Callimaco wrote that the local people used the name Balkan for the mountain: “quem incolae Bolchanum vocant.”

Misha Glenny is one of the foremost commentators on the Balkans with a massive book The Balkans 1804-1912 - Nationalism, War and the Great Powers to his credit. He does not mince words when it comes with dealing with the negative reputation the area has    

To help set the record straight here are a few lesser-known facts about the Balkan peninsula that never make it into the newspapers. For those who would defend the Balkans but don’t know how, they will be useful for dropping into conversations about how hopeless the situation there is.

 1. The only country allied to the Axis that refused to allow any of its Jewish citizens to be deported to Nazi death camps was Bulgaria.

2. The single most violent period in Balkan history in terms of casualties sustained and the territorial extent of the warfare was a direct consequence of Hitler’s decision to occupy Greece, a decision prompted by Mussolini’s failed attempt to invade Greece in 1940. The Nazi resolve in March 1941 to dismember Yugoslavia was accompanied by the installation of a brutal Fascist administration in Croatia that was entirely unrepresentative of the political aspirations of the Croat people. Until Pavelic was installed in Croatia, there had been no history of mass violence between Serbs and Croats.

3. The Stalinist dictatorships that took root in Romania and Bulgaria were imposed by an agreement reached by Stalin and Churchill. In exchange for handing over these territories to Soviet influence, Churchill, and later Truman, were given a free hand by Stalin to smash a Communist insurgency in Greece that was on the verge of taking power with minimal foreign support.

4. Since 1989, the governments and people of Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania and Greece have all resisted attempts by nationalists to destabilise the local or regional polity.

5. The main victims of the sanctions imposed by the UN on Serbia have been the surrounding states, a number of which are attempting to steer their economies through the transition from Communism to capitalism. Bulgaria, for example, has been losing an estimated $2 billion a year. The impact on the economies of Western Europe and America has been negligible. The UN refuses to give Bulgaria any compensation.

Sadly the visibility of gypsies and criminals amongst those who have taken advantage since 2007 of Europe’s open borders has added yet another negative element to European perceptions of the area – so I have rejected the idea of a Balkan element to the book’s title a draft version of which can be accessed at The Bulgarian Realists – updated edition

But places with traces of older ways of behaviour - let alone the feel of antiquity - are increasingly impossible to find in this homogenised world. When found, of course, they need nurture - not hordes of people tramping the grounds and polluting the atmosphere. So, despite the many attractions of the country, this will not be a book which tries to encourage foreigners to visit special sites – it is rather a book which celebrates people long dead who have, however, left a bit of themselves in the attitudes and tastes of those who now inhabit its country.    

Finds I have to report are -

Contemporary Bulgarian Art – Paintings, Graphics and Sculpture ed Svetlin Rusev (Sofia 1982) was a large book I had seen a few years back but was discouraged from buying by the obviously political nature of the selection process. Seeing it again in the little second-hand place on Vasil Levsky corner at Sofia University made me realise that it was a real historical piece which warranted a place in my library – not least for its glorious reproductions. Its introduction is a stunning paean to the communist party - by the Chairman of the Bulgarian Union of Artists (7 pages which say absolutely nothing).

Rusev still bestrides the art scene these days but must regret the opening page’s hymn to September 9th 1944 as well as the obvious omissions eg no mention of the country’s most famous  aquarellist Konstantin Shtarkelov (banned and disgraced for his royalism) or the caricaturist Raiko Aleksiev, murdered in prison. The illustrations are still magnificent 33 years later and the whole book is an incredible bit of history (c 400 pages – not numbered)

A new auction house started in Sofia this year and has apparently held 3 auctions - each offering a superb 70 page catalogue. This is the November one I missed just by a day

Then a visit to Pazardzhik – a small town close to Plovdiv, a gallery I had just become aware of – which is supposed to house more than 2000 paintings donated by one of Pazardzhik’s most famous sons, the painter Stoian Vasilev. I could find no sign of them however! The first of the gallery’s 2 rooms – with still lives – was bitterly disappointing but things were made up with the portrait room which had a wonderful display of the works of one of Bulgaria’s best women artists - Elisabeth Konsulova-Vaseva as well as delightful examples of many others, including two I had not heard of – local painters Georgi  Mashev (1887-1946) and graphic artist Georgi Gerasimov (1905-1977). Although the curator spoke only Bulgarian, she was friendly and pressed several little booklets of these two artists and also about Stoian Vasilev into my hands and wouldn’t take any money for them….

My final find was Catalogue of Graphic Art (Sofia City Art Gallery 2015) a glorious record of the gallery’s graphic collection with a small reproduction of each item - 770 pages bilingual. That’s almost 4000 reproductions!!

Balkan mistrust

Summer seems to have dawned at last – with 40 expected in the plains of Bucharest and 31 here in Sofia rising to 33 Monday. I should then be in the rarely explored North-Western mountain area – first of Varshets then, from Tuesday evening, in the old fortress area of Belogradchik. In the meantime, I have my spreading fig tree to protect me from the sun in the garden.
Amos Oz has been keeping me company these last few days – first with Black Box mapping ruthlessly the relations a woman has with her present (faithful and loving if rather eccentric) husband; her tight-arsed and rich ex; and their delinquent boy. Great stuff – with the powerful outporings of emotion I have now come to expect of this writer who should have got the Nobel prize a decade ago. Now I’ve started on his story of the strained relations between a 60 year old nomadic planning/engineering consultant back home and living with a younger woman with a mission – Don’t Call it Night. Oz seems to have a happy 40 year old marriage himself but he really gets into the painful crevices of relationships! Here's a long interview with him from Paris Review.
During the night I was reminded what an insightful writer Michael Lewis (of Vanity fair) is on current financial matters – the best things I have ever read on the Irish meltdown (his story reads like a modern version of The Emperor's New Clothesand the Greek crisis.In the classic journalistic (if not Detective Colombo) tradition, he approaches the issues from a common-sense point of view.
And here is an interesting article which was inspired by Lewis's exposure of Greek corruption to dig deeper and to try to explain why the Greeks have the political and ethical problems they do.
He reimnds us that, until the late 19th century, Greece was part of the Ottoman system (as were BUlgaria and Romania) - with all this means about clientilism and antipathy to authority. "Greeks are naturally distrustful of their leaders, and extremely quarrelsome among themselves" - as one can certainly say also about the Romanians. Here it's worth going back to the Ionitsa article I excerpted from on June 13. There is little doubt that officials have major difficulties talking and cooperating with one another (let alone with citizens!)in this part of the world (an ex-Deputy Minister here who is one of the trainers on our programme was talking to me recently about this). And yet this is never really picked up in the needs assessment which supposedly precedes all the training which EC programmes fund here. All the emphasis is on transferring knowledge - not altering attitudes and behaviour.
Finally an excerpt from a longer piece -

The present financial conundrum is a result and not a cause. It is the result of decades of rule by incompetent politicians, certainly in the case of Greece.( It doesn't need a Marshall plan it needs a regime change. Count on the evil undemocratic EU to take over much of the decision making behind the scenes, and a good thing too.)
The problem with present-day politicians in general is that they aspire to power and once they have it they don't know what to do with it. Consequently they're easily influenced by lobbyists and public opinion. The result is - predictably - indecision and procrastination or hysteria and panic. Being so unfocused our dear leaders get lost in petty detail, always a sign of people not getting the big picture. The founding fathers of the EU had a clear concept: no more war in Europe. The present lot just looks after the shop, and not very well

Two musical bonuses – first, from Romania (but only for the next few days), the pianist and composer Dinu Lapatti (1917-1950)
and from the English mining community The aquarelle is a Stamatov

Telling it as it is

To my shame, I first heard of Eduardo Galeano only two years ago when he presented his Open Veins of Latin America – five centuries of the pillage of a Continent to President Obama – and noted that it attracted great ire from commentators. It was my well-read Romanian friend who had read this South American writer years ago (in Ceaucescu's Romania which had an extensive translation of world literature) who has exposed ruthlessly the devastation the USA has wrought on Latin America. Although I now have the book (and 2 others), it seems I am probably missing his most important - Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-glass WorldI say this from a reading of a powerful essay written to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the publication of its official English translation. Four sketches deal with different aspects of the current economic crisis, each from a different perspective of analysis, and attempts to make use of the vibrant and creative sylistic devices characterising Galeano's works, particularly Upside Down.

Historians of the future, if there shall be any and if they will be honest, are going to wonder and ponder upon how such intelligent and highly educated “knowledge economies”, capable of the finest mathematical-financial wizardry via the fanciest computer technologies, could bestow upon themselves so much avoidable pain, destroying in the process not solely further scores of planetary life support systems, but also man-made social infrastructures that have generated, depending on the country, genuine welfare for up to three or four generations. These future historians will be at pains to conceive of powerful, well-off, democratically elected representatives who listened to foreign bankers, and not to their own citizens, rushing to implement, whenever they could, multilateral agreements on investment robbing their own cabinets of much of their power.
These future historians will probably fail to empathise with and understand such bizarre people, very much like Voltaire, who could not really explain why and how our forefathers were willing to slaughter one another over the correct interpretation of the Holy Trinity. After all, they had never seen it (or them?) and Jesus himself had never said anything clear, if anything, about it (or them?). Not to mention the centuries that humankind spent warring, raping, disemboweling, burning, maiming, chaining, flogging and excommunicating one another because of errors of interpretation.
Yes, the wisdom arising from the ashes of the current crisis is astoundingly similar to the one that caused the crisis. Are you indebted? Take on another loan. The private banking sector has betrayed you? Restore it with public money and run it as before. People are suffering, jobless, and with their tax money siphoned to the creditors that inflated the bubble? Show them tough love and deprive them of further healthcare, education, culture, wages, pensions, childcare, subsidised water and power. The environment is running amok in the free-market environment? The market will fix it; in the meantime, profit will keep being extracted from increased prices in oil, gas, polluting consumer goods, and cancer treatments due to the ecological collapse of the planet.When the global crisis first hit three years ago, a lot of us thought that the scales would at last fall from people's eyes; and that the incompetences as well as injustices of neo-liberalism were now exposed. In fact such a powerful counter-narrative has been put in place by the global elites and their media to justify the intensification of the neo-liberal agenda that people are utterly confused. We therefore desperately need the style of narrative (and scope of analysis) which Baruchelli gives us in this essay.

My first scything of the long grass around the house this morning - at 07.30 before the sun became too strong. Such satisfying work! And how privileged I am that any mechanical noises I hear (which would be lawnmowers anywhere else) are power saws dealing with wood! Everyone uses the scythe here - and, slowly, I become more adept with it! The morning was spent finding a toilet to replace the 10-year old one which cracked during the winter. Visiting the various shops which cater for the do-it-yourself construction which goes on here reminded me of how utterly useless are the European statistics which don't pick up these transactions. And also draws the contrast with Bulgaria - where so many villages are almost dead. Why is it that Romanians (despite their apparent disrespect for tradition) are actually keeping their villages alive???? The Brits and Russians have been in the Bulgarian property market for the past decade (no foreigners buy here) but their money has not been able to save the Bulgarian villages.

more Transylvanian and Balkan flavour?

The title of this blog is Carpathian Musings since I am now based here in this marvellous mountain range – in its southern sweep in Romania – but a recent incident has made me realise how little about the immediate area or country I mention in the blog. The other blog I started a couple of years ago but which transmogrified into this one contained much more about life in the mountains.
The starting point for today’s story is one of my many book blogs. At one level it is hardly surprising that those who read should also want to share their pleasure – and write about their recent reads in a blog. For me, the discipline of summarising key points in a book fixes them more solidly in my mind – and may actually create a few questions which send me back to a reread or search in another book. But that is for the non-fiction which tends still to be my fare. What I find amazing is the care and love book bloggers devote to the sentences and characters in fiction. I am deeply grateful to those bloggers who reproduce whole chunks of text to give the reader their own sense of a book and of its style – rather than leaving us to rely on an opinion. One of the best such bloggers is Pechorin – who asked recently about central European literature. As someone with a base in the Carpathians I was happy to share a couple of recent overviews I had come across on the subject – but I then decided to add my own blog address to the second comment. But immediately Max (such is his name) graciously acknowledged and promised to look at my blog, I could anticipate his shocked response – “this guy doesn’t really read novels – and where are his musings about the Carpathians?”
Technically the Carpathians sweep from the plains 150 or so kilometres north of the Danube (in which Bucharest is the largest city) to north Romania, up into Ukraine and then across most of Slovakia – and I did blog (however briefly) in June about my latest trip to superb Slovakia.
But the content of this blog belies its title. The focus here is, of course, on issues of public management - since it takes over from the blog I wrote under the “publicadmin reform” rubric. Ideally I should retitle the blog Carpathian Musings about Good Government! But that would make it more difficult for me to celebrate the wines, paintings and mores in an area which extends for me to the other side of the Balkans mountain range which runs across central Bulgaria.
It’s almost exactly twenty years ago that I started my work and nomadic existence in what was then called countries of central and eastern Europe (CCEE). It started with a personal invitation from the Head of WHO’s Public Health Office in Copenhagen (on the basis of my role then in the Healthy Cities network) to identify the scope in the new central europe for developing networks of preventive health. WHO had long had small offices in all these countries and my job was to fly in and spend a week or so talking not only with Ministers and party leaders but with representatives of the new NGOs. One of my most vivid memories is driving in an ambulance to Brasov (just down the road from where I am now) with the young doctor who had been assigned to me in Romania, hearing German being spoken in the streets; talking with both the University Rector and an episcopalian Bishop; and then being driven on to Alba Iulia to talk with the Archbishop of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. I also had a moving hour long discussion in Bucharest with the old, frail and highly respected Leader of the Peasant party who had recently been released from 20 years’ imprisonment. My WHO tour included a stunning visit to a snowy and blue skied St Petersburg in mid-January - where I remember being shocked by the completely different value system eg that a life had no value (from a bright young woman) or that food should be subsidised and controlled by the municipality. The one capital I was not allowed to visit in this busy 6 month spell in 1991 was Belgrade. Copenhagen knew something the rest of us didn’t about the coming conflict in the Balkans.
And, since that dreadful conflagration, the Balkans have (once more) being marked apart. Indeed those of us in the Technical Assistance business since then have used a threefold classification - central Europe (for countries such as Poland; Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia with their borders with EU countries); CIS or Commonwealth of Independent States (for those to the East which had never experienced capitalism or democracy); and the troublesome Balkans (the countries of ex Federal Yugoslavia and Bulgaria and Romania) where the Ottoman influence was still evident. Not so, of course, here in Transylvania which was not only Austro-Hungarian until the Trianon Treaty but had Saxon immigrants in medieval times. The old border with Ottoman-controlled Wallachia is just at the back of my house!

Anyway, the point of all this is to promise that I will try to give more of a Balkan flavour to this blog – or rather Transylvanian and Bulgarian flavour – not least to counter the impression that I am leading a vicarious life and missing home. Of course, on fine days here, I have a certain hankering for the Clyde and the Argyll hills and a sight of the Hebrideans – but I have no wish to return to the dreary weather! And I follow the politics simply because it’s an easy case-study for me.
As I’ve mentioned the Ottoman influence, let me finish by pointing you to a provocative article on Turkish styles of argument.

In Turkey, it is normal and expected to say that you will do something, have done something, or agree with something when, in fact, you won’t, haven’t, or don’t.Not only is truth here derived from emotion, but the emotions themselves are more intense and more transitory. Arguing a mild difference of opinion by screaming and threatening would come across to Westerners as weak at best, lunatic at worst. Not here. No shame attaches to displays of anger that in the West would result in the issuance of restraining orders. The fights dissipate as quickly as they start; everyone proceeds to drink tea and moistly proclaim their mutual love. The entire incident is then forgotten, except by the American, who is still shaking with rage and nurtures her resentment forever

Thanks to Marian for the photograph of my neighbourhood. Her stunning collection is worth a look.