I have put forward elsewhere my views on the creation of Czechoslovakia.¹ I would not say tha:t it was inevitable; and certainly in 1914 it did not seem so. On the other hand, there were important developments that seemed to point towards the possible separation of at least the Czech Lands from a disintegrating Austria-Hungary. As the historian Jiří Kořalka put it, by 1914 "the Czechs were a nation without a state" .²