Making minorities and majorities : national indifference and national self determination in Habsburg central Europe

Abstract

In December of 1918, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, first president of the Czechoslovak Republic and former deputy to the Austrian imperial parliament, published an essay titled “The Problem of Small Nations and States.” The essay sought to explain the world-historical import of the very recent collapse of Austria-Hungary and its territorial division among several self-styled nation-states. In so doing, the essay also cited recent history both to justify and to legitimize an emerging new territorial order from which the new Czechoslovak state had greatly benefited. Masaryk’s historical argument placed Czechoslovakia at the forefront of an inexorable historical process.