Alexander Wigram Allen Leeper

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Alexander Wigram Allen Leeper (born January 4, 1887 in Melbourne , Australia , † January 24, 1935 ) was an Australian official in the British diplomatic service, member of the Territorial Committee in the negotiations on the Paris suburb agreements and instrumental in the territorial division of Austria -Hungary involved.

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He came from a distinguished family of Irish descent. His father Alexander Leeper emigrated to Australia in 1875 and later became rector of Trinity College (today: University of Melbourne ). His eldest son Alexander first attended Melbourne Grammar School and then studied at the University of Melbourne and later at Balliol College , Oxford .

During the First World War he wrote The Justice of Rumania's Cause in 1917 , in which he defended the Romanians' right to self-determination and their territorial claims against Hungary . He was then accepted into the service of the British Foreign Office in 1918 .

In 1919 he was together with James Headlam-Morley British member of the Territorial Committee in the negotiations on the Paris suburb agreements. He represented the British interests in the division of Austria-Hungary and initially represented a strict policy towards the defeated successor states Austria and Hungary . Politically, he was close friends with Robert William Seton-Watson . Leeper described the Treaty of Saint-Germain , signed on September 10, 1919, as tough but not too unfair.James Headlam-Morley later noted that when drafting the Austrian peace treaty, the individual committees would for the most part simply use the text of the peace treaty without much discussion Versailles and simply replaced the word Germany with the word Austria .

The British policy towards Hungary was, however, even tougher than towards Austria and so Leeper, along with Charles Hardinge , Arthur Balfour and Robert Cecil, belonged to the group that prevented British support for the first Hungarian government under Mihály Károlyi . Leeper was of the opinion that despite drastic supply bottlenecks and the risk of a Bolshevik takeover of power , aid should first be given to the former allies, such as Romania and Czechoslovakia , where the humanitarian situation was similarly bad. The negotiations for the later Treaty of Trianon dragged on, the Károlyi government was overthrown and in Hungary the communists under Béla Kun did indeed come to power at the end of March 1919 . Because of the fear that this communist Hungarian government could ally itself with the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia and thus prevent the territorial division, now Romania and Czechoslovakia prompted to attack Hungary. In April 1919 the Hungarian-Romanian War broke out, which ended with the occupation of Budapest by Romanian troops and the overthrow of Béla Kun. Only then could the Allied division plan be implemented.

Leeper later served as First Secretary Advisor to the Australian Prime Minister Bruce in coordinating Australian and British foreign policy. The position of a liaison officer in London was created, which was filled with Richard Casey .

Then Leeper tried to be transferred to Vienna, which at that time was increasingly being developed into the diplomatic center of the British in Central Europe. Thereupon he was the first secretary of the British legation in Vienna from 1924 to 1928. During this time, the British policy towards the Austrian Republic had largely changed, because the original fear that Austria could remain a regional hegemonic power in Central Europe even after the dissolution of the monarchy had turned out to be a misjudgment. In 1924, with British support, the new shilling currency was introduced, thus stopping hyperinflation .

At the time, Leeper was a passionate advocate of Austrian independence and was of the opinion that to prevent annexation to Germany, the British government should pursue a policy of minimum interference in order not to endanger the delicate plant of Austrian patriotism. As early as 1927, however, he noted in frustration that the idea of ​​the Anschluss was increasingly viewed by the Austrians as inevitable and that Great Britain could only delay the impending political disaster. For example, he did not support a French initiative to create an anti-Germany customs union in the Danube region, in which the Western Allies would grant the countries involved most-favored nation status.

During this time Leeper began to work on his work on Austrian history in the early Middle Ages, in which he examined the time from the beginnings of the Bavarian settlement to the Iro-Scottish mission , the politics of the Agilolfingers to the Babenbergers . This work, published posthumously in 1941 under the title A History of Medieval Austria in Oxford, influenced the Anglo-American view of the national identity of Austria during and after the Second World War.

From 1933 he was an advisor in the Foreign Office and in 1934 as Undersecretary of State in the Colonial Office involved in the negotiations between Great Britain and the Netherlands over the land border between British Guyana and Dutch Guiana (now Suriname ).

His younger brother, Reginald Wildig Allen Leeper, called Rex, also entered the service of the British Foreign Office as a civil servant and was involved in the reorganization of the borders in Eastern Europe, especially Poland, after the Second World War.

literature

Monographs

  • AWA Leeper: The Justice of Rumania's Cause ; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1917, 24 pages, with fold-out maps
  • AWA Leeper: A History of Medieval Austria ; Oxford university press, 1941, 429 pages (published posthumously by Robert William Seton-Watson and Carlile Aylmer Macartney); Reprinted 1978, New York: AMS Press, 420 pp., ISBN 040415347X

Secondary literature

  • Erik Goldstein: The First World War peace settlements, 1919-1925 ; Harlow: Longman 2003 (2nd edition), ISBN 0-582-31145-4
  • Erik Goldstein: New Diplomacy and the New Europe at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919: The AWA Leeper Papers ; Article in: East European Quarterly 21: 4 (1988): pages 393-400
  • Keith Neilson: Britain, Soviet Russia and the Collapse of the Versailles Order, 1919-1939 ; Royal Military College of Canada, Ontario / Cambridge University Press, 2006, 390 pp., ISBN 978-0-521-85713-0

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The thing is not at all perfect as it stands ... It is very severe but not I think too unfair so. AWA Leeper to Seton-Watson, Paris, August 21, 1919, Seton-Watson Papers, SSEES Personal Correspondance files, Box 14; quoted from: Gábor Bátonyi: Britain and Central Europe, 1918-1933 ; Oxford: Clarendon Pr., 1999, 240 pp., ISBN 0-19-820748-4 , online at Google Books page 34
  2. ^ Notes on the Austrian Treaty by Headlam-Morley, undated Headlam-Morley Papers HDLM ACC 727/1; quoted from: Gábor Bátonyi: Britain and Central Europe, 1918-1933 ; Oxford: Clarendon Pr., 1999, 240 pp., ISBN 0-19-820748-4 , online at Google Books page 34
  3. ↑ Gábor Bátonyi: Britain and Central Europe, 1918-1933 ; Oxford: Clarendon Pr., 1999, 240 pp., ISBN 0-19-820748-4 , online at Google Books page 82
  4. ↑ Gábor Bátonyi: Britain and Central Europe, 1918-1933 ; Oxford: Clarendon Pr., 1999, 240 pp., ISBN 0-19-820748-4 , online at Google Books page 63
personal data
SURNAME Leeper, Alexander Wigram Allen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian diplomat in British service
DATE OF BIRTH January 4, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Melbourne , Australia
DATE OF DEATH January 24, 1935