World War One and the Nationalities Question in Central Europe: two Proposals for a Solution

The question of nationalities aspiring to their full self-determination was a very complex knot to untie, before the outbreak of the First World War, for the governments of the multinational Empires and for the European diplomacies. The problem was particularly serious in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the Ausgleich of 1867 ended up becoming a summit agreement between the two dominant nations. This provided a basis for the birth and development of nationalist movements that radicalized their positions over the years, until the time when the beginning of the war brought these movements, and individuals too, faced with a choice of sides which, in most cases, turned into a sharp separation of these "silent" alien nationalities from their ancient loyalism. In this context not a small number of intellectuals and politicians, critical consciences of the anachronistic structures of a State power linked to the supremacy of a dominant nation, played in the early years of the 20th century a peaceful but strongly critical action against the persistence of that ideology. An important intellectual contribution, among them, was offered by two thinkers belonging to this Austro-Hungarian world in crisis: the Jewish-Hungarian radical sociologist Oszkár Jászi, and the Czech philosopher and politician Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the future founder of the Czechoslovak State in October 1918.