Among those with the keenest interest in the emergence of small nations was Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. By training a professor of philosophy, Masaryk had been a member of the Reichsrat (the Austrian parliament) until he chose to leave following the outbreak of the Great War. His firm agenda was the creation of an independent Czech nation following an Allied war victory and the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In collaboration with a small group which included his former student Edward Beneš, Masaryk set out to influence policymakers towards this end. Beneš also chose exile and established a base in Paris as part of this strategy. Although they represented a tiny minority among Czech politicians, they were to realise their goal, and Masaryk became the first President of an independent Czechoslovakia in 1918, with Beneš as his Foreign Minister. Masaryk achieved this from his base in London with the help of Robert William Seton-Watson, the historian and dedicated supporter of the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It suggests an interesting genealogy to note that Seton-Watson was the father of Hugh Seton-Watson, author of Nations and States (1977), described by Benedict Anderson, in his seminal study Imagined Communities (1983), as the ‘best and most comprehensive English-language text on nationalism’. Masaryk was in London in April 1915 and then based there from September 1915 to May 1917, with long visits to Paris. With the support of Seton-Watson, who himself published extensively in these years on the national question in Hungary, Romania, the Balkans and Poland, Masaryk joined the newly founded School for Slavonic Studies at Kings College London, in 1915, as its first lecturer. From that base, he advocated the rights of small nations and led a network of agents. He travelled to Russia in May 1917 to found the Czecho-Slovak Legion which fought first against the Central Powers, with the support of the Provisional Government, and subsequently against the Bolsheviks in the Civil War. Masaryk's stay in London is of interest because it contributed so much to the shaping of discourse about nationalism, and this intervention, cultural as well as political, was of course the basis for his influence on the creation of what he called the ‘New Europe’ – the title both of the journal he helped to found in London under Seton-Watson's editorship, and of a key treatise.