The statesman's burden: French diplomats and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, 1918-1929

This study focuses on the reports to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs from their diplomatic and consular agents in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes from 1919 to 1929. This work has a two-fold purpose. First, it uses the rich resources of the diplomatic archives to illuminate new perspectives on the events and issues that faced the Kingdom and French policy- and decision makers; and second, it re-evaluates policy trends and decisions in light of the informational restrictions and parameters imposed and perpetuated by the diplomatic operational code. This code, or cognitive framework is largely implicit in most historical studies, and rendered explicit only in studies of leadership elites. Political scientists and international relations theorists rarely look beyond a state's perceptions of its interests, or those of its enemies. Such self-imposed restrictions slight the importance of professional norms, standards and belief systems, and the impact of those factors on the information-gathering and analysis process.; The French diplomatic operational code was profoundly influenced by the Old Diplomacy that assumed the primacy and dominance of the Great Powers. A functional arrogance permeated the diplomatic corps, and was perpetuated by a system that rewarded socially conservative but economically and politically liberal attitudes. Hostile to labor and leftist politics and rhetoric, the paternalism that French elites felt towards their own working class was, for the diplomats and bureaucrats of the Quai d'Orsay, translated into a similar paternalistic view of the smaller powers, such as the successor states in Central and Eastern Europe after the First World War. The analytical parameters thus tended to perpetuate the elite-bound and paternalistic Old Diplomacy framework by dismissing political dissent as misguided and naive opposition to the traditional order. Such analyses thus encouraged French policy-elites in Paris to underestimate the very real causes and forces of political instability within the Yugoslav kingdom, and by denying the legitimacy of such dissent, effectively reduced French influence within the competing factions.