The 1990’s was one of the most tumultuous periods in European history, popularly described as the second autumn of nations, in reference to the springtime of nations during the revolutions of 1848. This revolutionary wave caused the collapse of the eastern bloc, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the fall of communism in its eastern European client states. But two states also disintegrated, the Yugoslav Socialist Republic and the newly federalized Czechoslovakia, in almost opposite ways, Yugoslavia descended into a decade of inter-ethnic violence and genocide while Czechoslovakia peacefully dissolved into its two constituent parts. The Swedish foreign ministry had been active in both Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia since the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire, with an embassy each in Prague and Belgrade, in addition to several consulates in other Yugoslav republics. After the dissolution of both states, what happened to the embassy archives? Did they get transferred to the new states, get returned to the Swedish foreign ministry or were they simply destroyed? This essay examines this process through the lens of both the traditional aspects of archival science such as Provienzprincip, respect des fonds, as well as the Weberian lens of Ideal types, do they follow the established regulations? The standard procedure of transferring documents from one embassy to another was first established in 2009, hence any transfer of documents between embassies prior to this were not regulated by any specific law.

When comparing the two embassies and their transferals of documentation there are some surprising findings. The transfer of documents from Belgrad to the new embassy in Zagreb was much more well documented than the transfer from Prague to Bratislava, and the reasons for this are many. One of these reasons being that the embassy in Belgrade had an archival storage almost 5 times the size of the one in Prague, and the consulates in Zagreb, Rijeka and Ljublanja were established earlier than the one in Bratislava. Meaning, they had more documentation stored, requiring more documentation of the transferal, and the original documentation was then transferred to the Swedish embassy in Vienna and Budapest, thus requiring even more documentation of a transferal. Thus, it can be concluded that despite being in the death throes of a state, the Swedish Embassy in Belgrade lived up to the ideals of the regulations that were in place from the Swedish Archival institution, though neither embassy seems to have cared much for archival principles, which considering the circumstances, seems rather natural.