[1] Kramář was educated at the universities of Prague, Strasbourg and Berlin, and also at the École libre des sciences politiques in Paris, completing his studies with a doctorate in law.

[3] Like many other Young Czechs, Kramář was a Russophile, seeing Russia as the world's only Slavic great power that counterbalanced the dominant ethnic Germans of the Habsburg monarchy.

[5] Tomáš Masaryk often criticized Kramář for the contradiction between his push for universal suffrage and democracy in the Austrian Empire and his support of closer ties with the autocracy of Imperial Russia.

[4] His aim of transforming Austria, coupled with his belief that Russia had turned towards democracy, led Kramář to launch a movement for Slav unity.

Disagreements amongst the Slav nations proved insurmountable and Neo-Slavism faded away in the atmosphere of increasing international tension prior to the outbreak of the First World War.

[9] When the First World War began in 1914, Kramář concluded that a victory for Germany and Austria would mark the end of the possibility of reform in the Austrian Empire and to work against the Habsburg monarchy.

The way in Austria-Hungary started to function more and more as a satellite state of Germany led to increasing Czech support for independence during the war as it became clear that if the Central Powers won then there would be no possibility of the Slavic peoples of the Austrian Empire ever becoming the equals of the ethnic Germans and the Magyars.

[11] In March 1915, Kramář was together with Přemysl Šámal, Alois Rašín, Josef Scheiner and Edvard Beneš a founding member of an underground group called the Maffie which was dedicated to winning Czech independence from the Austrian empire.

[13] On 3 April 1915, Kramář learned that the entire 28th Infantry Regiment of the Imperial Austrian and Royal Hungarian Army, which had been recruited from the working class districts of Prague, had surrendered en masse to the Russians in Galicia.

Kramář's imprisonment sidelined him for much of World War I, and allowed his rival Masaryk who was in London at the time to become the public face of the Czech independence movement.

[17] In March 1917, when waiting on death row in prison, Kramář heard of the February Revolution in Russia, which marked the end of his dream that after the war a Romanov would sit on the throne of a restored Bohemian kingdom.

[20] On 13 July 1918 Kramář founded the Czechoslovak National Committee in Prague, in which all the Czech political parties were represented to work for independence from Austria.

[18] On 28 October 1918, Kramář had the National Committee issue a declaration in Prague announcing "The independent Czechoslovak state has come into being" and the long centuries of rule by the House of Habsburg over the Czechs had now ended.

[21] The soldiers had little desire to fight for the collapsing Austrian empire and many of the troops from Transylvania allowed themselves to be draped in the new Czechoslovak flag as they fraternized with the people of Prague.

[25] In an attempt to ward off the appeal of the left, another degree established 8 hours as the maximum that could be worked on a single day, thus giving to one of the key demands of the trade union movement.

[28] The conservative Kramář was out of touch with the left-leaning mood of the voters, and because he was in Paris for the first months of 1919, credit for his reforms went to his finance minister, Alois Rašin, and Antonín Švehla.

[28] Kramář, a strong Russophile who was married to a Russian, represented Czechoslovakia at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 but resigned over Foreign Minister Beneš's failure to support anti-communist forces in Russia.

[29] Both Masaryk and his protégée Beneš saw Kramář as the main danger to Czechoslovak democracy, regarding him as a "reactionary" Czech chauvinist who was opposed to their plans for Czechoslovakia as a multicultural, multiethnic state.

[32] In what became known as the Boj legendistů ("the battle of the legend makers"), until the 1920s Kramář and his allies fought Masaryk and Beneš in a war of words in the press over who was the "true" founders of Czechoslovakia.

[30] An extremely hostile book review of Five Lectures on Foreign Affairs was published in the newspaper Čas under the initials V.S., but it was quickly realised the author was Masaryk.