Modernism: The Creation of Nation-States

Tomáš G. Masaryk: The New Europe

TOMÁŠ G. MASARYK: THE NEW EUROPE Title: The New Europe. The Slav Standpoint Originally published: London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1918 (Nová Evropa, longer Czech version, Prague, Gustav Dubský, 1920) Language: English – Czech The excerpts used are from Thomas G. Masaryk, The New Europe. The Slav Standpoint (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1972), pp. 75–80, 128–129, 138–141, 152–154. About the author see Tomáš G. Masaryk, The Czech question Context Masaryk, a well-known scholar and public intellectual, but a politician on the margins, was sixty-four when he left Prague in December 1914. In the summer of the next year he launched his campaign for an independent Czechoslovak state by giving a public lecture in Geneva on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the death of Jan Hus. Up to that point in his life, he had accepted that existence within the Austrian state was the only option for small nations such as the Czechs, though he always stressed the necessity of serious reform in the Empire. At the beginning of the First World War, basically three main options appeared in Czech politics. The most common among these three at that time, attracting social democratic, clerical as well as agrarian political streams, was a stance loyal to the Habsburgs, although critical of the military plans of the Central Powers and the Germanizing tendencies within the Monarchy. The second, less common and more daring option, was the neo-Slavism of some ‘Young Czechs’ and national socialists TOMÁŠ G. MASARYK: THE NEW EUROPE 345 who invested politically in the victory of the Russian Empire. The third option , a pro-Western, pro-independence stance, was formulated by Masaryk, because, shortly after the war broke out, he came to the conclusion that the Empire was not able to reform itself. At the same time, his democratic persuasion made him an opponent of tsarism, as his major treatise from 1913, Russland und Europa, demonstrates. The idea of an independent Czechoslovakia was considered much more radical and less comprehensible in international circles than, for instance, the restoration of the Polish state or the unification of the Southern Slavs. Masaryk therefore began a concerted propaganda campaign among the Allies. ‘The new Europe’ was the most important of a number of writings in which Masaryk defended the Allies’ cause and simultaneously argued for the independence of Czechs and Slovaks. He also intended the book as a kind of ideological manual for the soldiers of the newly formed Czechoslovak legions in the West and in Russia. He wrote the book in the winter of 1917–18, when the fate of Austria-Hungary was still unclear. It was not before the spring of 1918 that the situation changed as the Allies broke off their clandestine negotiations with Austria and the total surrender of both Germany and Austria-Hungary was declared the basic condition for an armistice. In this context, Masaryk found a more receptive audience and gradually gained recognition from the Entente’s governments for his political and military leadership. In the fall of 1918, he delivered the final version of The New Europe and it was published in English and French. Whereas Masaryk’s initial interpretations of the war conflict was based on economic and geopolitical concerns, in The New Europe he anchored the conflagration in his historiosophical conception and sought to convince the readers that the Allies represented morality, democracy and liberty. He understood the war as a kind of ‘world revolution,’ a conflict between traditional “medieval theocracies,” with their undemocratic and anti-national manners, on the one hand, and constitutional, democratic powers on the other. The key question for Masaryk was the postwar reorganization of the intermediate zone of small nations in Central Europe that would serve in the future as a barrier against German expansionism. In basic agreement with Herder, Masaryk understood the nation as a natural organ of humanity and supported acceptance of the principle of nationality in the new organization of Europe on the assumption that the multi-national empires had lost their reason for being. In contrast to his previous political stance, however, he supplemented his self-determination argument with historical state right reasoning that justified the continuity and integrity of the Bohemian Crown 346 FEDERALISM AND THE DECLINE OF THE EMPIRES lands in the future Czechoslovakia. This led to the inclusion of more than three million German inhabitants in the new state. In this work Masaryk distinguished...