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OPEN DIPLOMACY, 1914-1939
tUnder 1'IIIX1em conditions, an offia sru:Ja as tile Foreign 0jJice cannot /wid its own unless in some wqy or another it IiIkes tI&e Jw.hlic inID its eotifUJmte more tJum it Iw done in IN pflSL ' James Headlam-Morley, 1918
Access and Acadesnics
As custodians of the archives the Hertslets and their successors occupied a particularly sensitive position where relations between the Office and the general public were concerned. Throughout the nineteenth century the Librarians assisted in the preparation of Blue Books; they alerted the Secretaries and Under-Secretaries of State to impending parliamentary questions; published state papers and responded to outside queries; 路and acted through the courts to prevent the sale and sometimes examination of documents belonging to the Crown. They were paradoxically both publicists and censors. In these respects their duties were very similar to those of the archivists and librarians of other foreign ministries. But in one important respect the British lagged behind their continental neighbours. Both the French and Prussian governments had, very largely with a view to promoting patriotic histories and creating an informed public opinion, embarked upon ambitious programmes of publishing diplomatic documents whose scope was far broader than the volumes of State Papers initiated by Lewis Hertslet. German historians, in co-operation with Prussian archivists, emerged as pacesetters in analysing the recent past, while in 1907 the Quai d'Orsay, whose Commission des Archives Diplmnatiques had long since begun to foster close ties between academics and diplomats, decided to sponsor the publication of a series of documents relating to the origins of the Franco-Prussian war. Comparable British initiatives date from the outbreak of the First World War. There can be few other events that have stimulated a greater public interest in the history and methods of diplomacy and it was in response to the propaganda battle over the origins of the war that the Library opened its doors to outside historians. Early in 1915 John Holland Rose of Christ's College, Cambridge, was provided with papers and a desk on the second floor of the Library so that he might start work on a monograph which the former Prime Minister, AJ Balfour, hoped would offer the public a 'general conception of the German policy which has led up to the present catastrophe.' Then, in July 1916, Professor James Headlam, who had been recruited by the Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House and who, with the assistance of the Library, had already written and published a history of the war crisis of 1914, was requested by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Grey, to prepare a specimen volume of pre-war diplomatic documents on the Bosnian crisis of 1908-9. Headlam or Headlam-Morley, as he was known from 1918 onwards, was subsequently to become a key figure in persuading the Office to adopt a new approach towards the release and pUblication of documents. In the spring of 1918 he became deputy director of the newly-formed Political Intelligence Department, a body which later included such scholarly figures as Arnold Toynbee, Lewis N amier and Alfred Zimmem. At a time when David Uoyd George was expounding British war aims along radical-populist lines and when President Woodrow Wilson was appealing for 'Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at', Headlam-Morley urged on his colleagues the need for the Office to do all that it could to educate the public o.n. fore~gn policy. The so:caIled 'New Diplomacy' required new responses from Bn~sh diplomats. The public, Heacllam-Morley insisted, had come to regard the FOrelgn Office as aloof, and that aloofness 'must tend to diminish the weight
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