The Paradoxes of the Birth of the Republic from the Perspective of the Czech Political Thought

Abstract

The birth of the Czechoslovak Republic in the year 1918 was fundamentally in contradiction with the determining conception of Czech realist politics, which was formulated before the outbreak of war, in harmony with the ideal of proper national growth.Using the examples of the conception of the "reform" of a "modestly populated nation" and the "small man", put into contrast with the ideal of the times identified with dynamism an the concentration of power and size, this study analyses the transformation of the approaches of Czech political thought, especially of T. G.

Masaryk, on the way to the realization of the programme of independence.

Keywords

• T. G. Masaryk
• Czech political thought
• group mentalities
• the birth of the Czechoslovak Republic
• nationalism