‘The Tragedy of a Small Nation’: Alexander Devine and British Perspectives on the Montenegrin Question, 1918–24

Abstract This article examines the pro‐Montenegrin political campaigns of Alexander Devine, a schoolmaster and journalist who became Montenegro's leading British advocate following its incorporation into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes after the First World War. Through Devine's prolific pamphlets, correspondence and press interventions between 1918 and 1924, the article traces how impassioned amateur advocacy – the dominant mode of British engagement with the Balkans since Gladstone's Bulgarian agitation – lost authority in a diplomatic culture that increasingly valued academic expertise. Drawing on archival sources, it argues that Devine's failure to influence international politics reflected not merely strategic and ideological opposition to Montenegrin independence but a transformation in British political culture that privileged credentialed expertise over personal conviction. Situating Devine within traditions of ‘balkanism’, this article traces the changing nature of expertise and the contested struggle to shape British public opinion on the making of a new Europe in the era of the First World War.