Early in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the cynical Lord Henry Wotton visits his uncle, a world-weary retired diplomat, to learn more of the novel’s beguiling title character. Among the uncle’s complaints about the decaying fin-de–siècle universe he inhabits is the new meritocratic procedure of hiring British diplomats. “But I hear they let them in now by examination,” he mourns in disgust, adding “if a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.”
The First World War somberly ended this transitional world—which Wilde chronicled with such devastating wit—and spelled doom for continental Europe’s traditional elites, who had resisted the professionalization of diplomacy. Ever since, historians have wrestled with the question of who was responsible and why. Blame has often fallen on the last generation of Old Regime diplomats, whom most standard interpretations dismiss as aristocratic amateurs dangerously entrusted with the management of complex “modern” problems they could neither solve nor even understand. Benefitting from undisguised patronage, outrageous nepotism, and inexcusable hereditary privilege, they held positions far above their levels of talent and intelligence and made a mess of the whole world.
Blame has often fallen on the last generation of Old Regime diplomats.
Dominic Lieven, or, if he will pardon the indiscretion, His Serene Highness Prince Dominic Lieven, has greeted the conflict’s centennial with a contradictory explanation. In short, it turns out that the
