Robert William Seton-Watson - in Austro-Hungary

In Austro-Hungary

After graduation, Seton-Watson traveled to Berlin University, the Sorbonne and Vienna University, from where he wrote a number of articles on Hungary for The Spectator. His research for these articles took him to Hungary in 1906, and his discoveries there turned his sympathies against Hungary and in favor of then-subject peoples, the Slovaks, Romanians, and "Southern Slavs" (Yugoslavs). He learned Hungarian, Serbocroat and Czech, and in 1908 published his first major work, Racial Problems in Hungary.

Seton-Watson became friends with the Vienna correspondent of The Times, Henry Wickham Steed, and of the Czech philosopher and politician Tomáš Masaryk. He argued in books and articles for a federal solution to the problems of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then riven by the tensions between its ancient dynastic model and the forces of ethnic nationalism.