T.G. Masaryk’s Nová Evropa: A Reinterpretation

Is Tomas Garrigue Masaryk’s Nova Evropa. Stanovisko slovanske (The New Europe: A Slavic Point of View), published in 1920, still relevant today?1 It is a work where he not only justified the need to destroy the Austro-Hungarian Empire because it had proved incapable of transforming itself into a federation of equal nations, but where he also predicted a Europe united by liberalism and democracy, founded on the right of selfdetermination for all nations and on minority rights, freed from German and Tsarist domination, and organised in a supranational community. It was to be a Europe in which newly created states, like Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia, played a fundamental role, joined together in an anti-German front, but also pursuing their own independent policies.