Britain recognises the Czechoslovaks

On 13 August 1918 the Reuters agency circulated from London the text of the British government’s declaration on the Czechoslovaks, and the next morning all the London newspapers printed it. The document was dated 9 August and signed by the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour. On that day it had been handed at the Foreign Office to the secretary-general of the Czechoslovak National Council, Edvard Beneš. For this reason most accounts date British recognition to 9 August, while the British chronology of the war, which kept to the day of publication, dates it to 13 August. The declaration read:

Since the beginning of the war the Czechoslovak nation has resisted the common enemy by every means in its power. The Czechoslovaks have constituted a considerable army, fighting on three different battlefields and attempting, in Russia and Siberia, to arrest the Germanic invasion. In consideration of its efforts to achieve independence, Great Britain regards the Czechoslovaks as an Allied nation and recognises the unity of the three Czechoslovak armies as an Allied and belligerent army waging regular warfare against Austria-Hungary and Germany. Great Britain also recognises the right of the Czechoslovak National Council, as the supreme organ of the Czechoslovak national interests and as the present trustee of the future Czechoslovak Government, to exercise supreme authority over this Allied and belligerent army.

Beneš had come to London at the end of June, immediately after France, on the occasion of the ceremony at Darney, recognised the National Council as the supreme organ of the Czechoslovak movement. He held talks with Balfour and with the Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Lord Robert Cecil. According to Beneš’s memoirs, the first British draft disappointed him, because it was more modest even than the French letter and did not contain the words “state”, “sovereignty” or “Czechoslovak government”. Beneš put forward a counter-proposal, and the British accepted it with minor changes. They refused only to recognise the Council outright as a provisional government. The compromise turned out to be the phrase “trustee of the future government”, suggested by the foreign editor of The Times, Henry Wickham Steed. It was also agreed that the detailed legal consequences of the declaration would be set out in a separate British-Czechoslovak agreement, which was signed on 3 September.

Publication was somewhat delayed. The text telegraphed to the Havas agency in Paris was held back until Beneš returned, because the French did not understand what the reference to the unity of the three armies meant and feared new arrangements concerning the Czechoslovak troops in Siberia, which were formally under French command. When Beneš arrived in Paris on 12 August, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and officials of the French foreign ministry questioned him about the course of the London talks and then agreed to the declaration being published.

The London press received the declaration as a sign of the coming break-up of the Habsburg monarchy. According to Dutch newspapers, the Daily Graphic wrote that the creation of an independent Czechoslovak state had become one of the war aims, and The Times that the Czechoslovaks had earned recognition by their deeds in Siberia. Beneš cites in his memoirs an account according to which the Italian ambassador asked Balfour whether the British government understood the consequences of this step. Balfour is said to have replied that it had been considered for a very long time, but that there was no other way and that it meant the destruction of Austria-Hungary. In Vienna the news became known on 14 August. It was passed to the Foreign Minister, István Burián, who was then at the conference in Spa. A few days later the Austro-Hungarian government declared that the National Council was a committee of private individuals without any mandate, and that its soldiers would remain traitors in the eyes of the monarchy.

Beneš regarded the London negotiations as the most important diplomatic achievement of the National Council during the war. The British declaration was the first to call the Czechoslovaks a party to the war against Germany as well and granted the Council the authority normally held by a government. Masaryk, who was then in the United States, invoked it in his talks with Secretary of State Robert Lansing. On 3 September Washington recognised the National Council as a de facto belligerent government.