proclaimed the chief purport and meaning of Czech history to be the struggle between the Germans and Slavs. The ideological form of this conflict had been expressed in the struggle of Slavic principles of democracy, equality, and liberty with the principle of German feudalism, based on the distinction between the lord and his subject. During the revolution of 1848, Palacký introduced a program for a national federation in Austria. The modern function or “idea” of the Habsburg commonwealth as a protector of small Central European nations, and the notion of so-called Austro-Slavism, based on political cooperation between the Slavic nations in Austria, were the core of this scheme. A significant political essay, “The Idea of the Austrian State,” in 1865, explains his plan. The program was at times accepted, at times criticized and refused. The outline advocated such decisive and even revolutionary changes in the Central European political structure that it is hard to conceive the political, constitutional, social, and cultural consequences to which its realization would have led and the effect it would have had on all of Europe.
Without an understanding of Palacký’s conception of the developing trends of the past and present, it is impossible to understand his concept of the historical significance of the Czech nation and his program of Austrian federation. On the grounds of Hegel’s idealistic dialectics and Schelling’s principle of polarity, Palacký accepted the “eternal law of nature” and the notion that developments in nature and in society always assume the form of a polarity of forces. The idea that the world tends toward centralization, toward the formation of huge political and economic units, is confronted by its negation, the tendency toward the decentralization of the world. This decentralization is manifested by differentiation and evolution, by the individualization and liberation of nations, or as Palacký said, in the principle of nationality. The advancement of world centralization had been expressed, in Palacký’s view, in the formation of the English political center in the West and the Russian center in the East. Considering the spheres of influence and the pressure of the two political centers, the continued existence of small nations seemed doubtful. Therefore, Palacký came to the conclusion that their integrity had to be insured in a Central European federation of small, independent, and equal nations. Federalization was the principle equalizing the contradictions of world centralization and decentralization.
Many of the propositions on which Palacký built his political construction were faulty, and his program was not realized. Palacký, taking into consideration European political developments, maintained that Austria, if transformed into a federation of small nations, was to be defended in
