"Small Nations" and the Birth of the Slavonic School

Jim Bjork is a Professor of Modern European History in the Department of History

On October 19th, 1915, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk delivered his inaugural lecture at King’s College London. Beyond initiating Masaryk’s own appointment as lecturer in Czech literature and history, the address marked the foundation of a new Slavonic School at King’s, the first centre in the United Kingdom devoted to the study of the Slavic languages and their speakers. The school was the predecessor of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, which later became part of University College London. The timing and the theme of the lecture made it an even more significant moment, not only in the history of Slavic Studies or King’s or the British university system but in the history of Europe and the world.

Delivered just over a year after the outbreak of the First World War, Masaryk’s lecture on ‘The Problem of Small Nations in the Crisis of Europe’ offered a systematic vision of what that war was all about. In this vision, the conflict had revealed both the aggressive and the ultimately unsustainable nature of Europe’s multinational empires, in particular Austria-Hungary, and the need to reorganize the continent in a way that would satisfy the aspirations of ‘small nations.’ Signalling the centrality of this issue to Britain’s war aims, the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, had been scheduled to introduce the lecture (illness prevented him from doing so).¹ Masaryk’s vision of a new Europe would come to be associated with the name of Woodrow Wilson after the United States entered the war and the US President threw his support behind it, in part as a result of the two men’s increasingly close personal relationship.² This Wilsonian programme would, in turn, shape the Paris peace conference, resulting in a radical redrawing of the map of Europe. When Masaryk made a return visit to King’s after the war, in 1923, it was as the president of Czechoslovakia, one of the ‘small nations’ whose emergence he had championed.

The idea of founding a Slavonic school at King’s College arose from conversations between William Burrows, the principal, and his colleague Robert Seton-Watson, a Scottish historian and publicist. The two men shared a sympathy for the southern Slavic nations, in particular the Serbs. For Burrows, a Professor of Greek, this was an extension of his sympathy for neighbouring Greece, intermittently allied with the southern Slavs against common foes in the early twentieth century. For Seton-Watson, it was the fruit of disillusionment with what he saw as ruthless domination of both southern Slavs and western Slavs (Czechs, Slovaks, Poles) by German and Hungarian elites within Austria-Hungary. The outbreak of a general European war in 1914, in which Britain was now fighting alongside Serbia and Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary, seemed an auspicious moment for such plans.³ As Burrows and Seton-Watson discussed recruitment of academic staff for the new school, T.G. Masaryk quickly emerged as a leading candidate. The sixty-five-year-old Masaryk had long served as a professor of philosophy at Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague. A passionate Czech patriot and for a time a representative of a Czech national party in the Austrian parliament, he was, following the outbreak of the war, deemed a traitor to the empire and forced into exile. Burrows described Masaryk as ‘perhaps the greatest Slav thinker of the day’ as well as ‘the greatest enemy of Austrian domination’.⁴ This combination of broad thinking and targeted animosity toward one of Britain’s main wartime foes made him the perfect public face of the new Slavonic school.

Both qualities were on full display in ‘The Problem of Small Nations’ lecture. As the title suggests, Masaryk aimed at offering a big-picture account of new European order, one that would address the all-too-often suppressed aspirations of the continent’s smaller nations. He started by clarifying what he meant by ‘nations’: unlike most anglophone commentators, he did not use it as a synonym for ‘state’, a sovereign political community. Instead, following standard usage in East-Central Europe, ‘nation’ referred to cultural communities, most often defined by language, which often nested within and/or spilled across multinational states.⁵ His central argument, drawing on examples from across the continent, was that small nations could be entirely viable foundations for small states. In practice, this was a plea for dismantlement of the Habsburg empire (Austria-Hungary), which Masaryk described as a front for German domination of smaller Slavic nations. Among those who were now to receive independence were his own native Czechoslovak nation, the Serbo-Croats (Yugoslavs), and the Poles. For a London audience in 1915, it was a straightforward, crowd-pleasing message: the Allies’ military victory over the Central Powers would mean the liberation of small, oppressed peoples.

On closer scrutiny, however, Masaryk’s inaugural address exhibited some uncomfortable tensions, if not outright contradictions. Even as he insisted on the equal value of larger and smaller nations, the new King’s lecturer was also strikingly preoccupied with ranking nations according to size. He carefully grouped nations into large, medium, and small categories, and he repeatedly referred to very small national groups as ‘fragments’, ‘splinters’, and ‘remnants’. ⁶ Although he did not say so explicitly, the unavoidable implication of such language was that such groups had slipped below the definitional threshold of even a ‘small’ nation and had thus lost any plausible claim to statehood. Masaryk also acknowledged that ‘small nations can be very intolerant’ and can themselves be ‘decoyed by imperialist ideas.’ This potential was, indeed, implicit in his case against the Central Powers, which included two small nations (the Hungarian ‘half’ of Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria) that Masaryk viewed as co-conspirators in a German imperialist agenda.

Among the most awkward aspects of ‘The Problem of Small Nations’, especially in the context of the founding of the Slavonic School, was its approach to Russia. As by far largest Slavic linguistic group, Russians would inevitably play a central role in the study of the Slavic world. But that massive scale, as well as a dominant role in Europe’s largest continental empire, also meant that Russians could hardly count among Masaryk’s small nations yearning for emancipation. Russia was instead the primary oppressor of many nations, including the largest of the Slavic ‘small’ nations (Poles, Ukrainians). Masaryk duly noted that the Czarist empire contained ‘many’ nations with ‘their own cultures and traditions’.⁷ But in contrast to his sharp condemnation of German ‘jingoes’ and ‘extreme nationalists’, he had nothing to say about their Russian equivalents.⁸ If those listening to the lecture sensed any contradiction between the championship of small nations in Europe and military alliance with the Russian empire, it was not apparent in their comments at the time. Lord Robert Cecil, the Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, who introduced Masaryk’s talk, referred to the new lecturer’s arrival in London as ‘a link to strengthen the sympathy which unites the people of Russia and Great Britain’.⁹ It would only be two years later, as first the overthrow of the Czar and then the Bolshevik regime’s seizure of power led to the collapse of the Russian imperial system, that the broader implications of championing a Europe of small nations became impossible to ignore.

The potential implications of Masaryk’s lecture for the British empire and other Western European colonial empires emerged even more slowly but just as surely. The Czech professor had scrupulously limited his discussion of small nations to the European continent. He did, however note in passing that the British overseas empire also included many nations, and he did not make any argument for excluding non-Europeans from the right to national self-determination that he promoted on the European continent. As Woodrow Wilson’s embrace of the cause of ‘small nations’ made self-determination a global talking point, more radical critics were quick to point out the hypocrisy of its selective application. At the end of 1917, Leon Trotsky asked rhetorically whether the Western powers were ‘willing on their part to give the right of self-determination to the peoples of Ireland, Egypt, India, Madagascar, Indochina, etc’. ¹⁰ Over the remaining months of the war, and through the negotiation of a postwar settlement in Paris in 1919, national activists from Egypt, India, China, and Korea would also invoke the Allies’ ostensible commitment to the plight of ‘small nations’ in demanding their own right to national self-determination.¹¹

Few of those in the audience for Masaryk’s 1915 lecture would have imagined that they were listening to a call for the dissolution not only of the empires against which Britain was fighting but also of the empires with which Britain was allied and perhaps of the British empire itself. The Czech professor was, as we have seen, very careful not to suggest any such implications at the time. But big ideas have unruly lives of their own. The notion that ‘small’ nations have a right to self-determination would reverberate in locations far from King’s College London through the next century.

Sources

Anon., ‘Prof. Masaryk on Small Nations’, The Times, (20 October 1915), 10.

King’s College London Archive, KAP/BUR/67 (Slavonic School, Raising of Funds), Burrows to Chamberlain (2 October 1915).

Manela, Erez, ‘Address of the Bolsheviks ‘To Peoples and Governments of Allied Countries,’ 31 December 1917’, in The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford, 2000).

Masaryk, T.G., ‘The Problem of Small Nations in the Crisis of Europe’, The New York Times Current History of the European War, 3.3 (December 1915).

Roberts, I.W., History of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (London,1991).

Wolff, Larry, Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe (Palo Alto, CA, 2020).

Jim Bjork is Professor of Modern European History at King’s College London. His research is focused on the relationships between religious and national belonging in East-Central Europe. He is the author of Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor, MI, 2008) and co-editor of Creating Nationality in Central Europe, 1880-1950 (London, 2016).