[citation needed] Seton-Watson became friends with the Vienna correspondent of The Times, Henry Wickham Steed, and the Czechoslovak philosopher and politician Tomáš Masaryk.

He argued in books and articles for a federal solution [3] to the problems of the Austria-Hungary, then riven by the tensions between its ancient dynastic model and the forces of ethnic nationalism.

He served as honorary secretary of the Serbian Relief Fund from 1914 and supported and found employment for his friend Masaryk after the latter fled to England to escape arrest.

[4] Seton-Watson's private political activity was not appreciated in all quarters, and his critics within the British government finally succeeded in temporarily silencing him in 1917 by drafting him into the Royal Army Medical Corps, where he was given the job of scrubbing hospital floors.

Seton-Watson was made an honorary citizen of Cluj in Transylvania, which had been incorporated into Romania despite the claims of Hungary and in 1920 was formally acclaimed by the Romanian Parliament.

He concentrated on his academic duties especially after 1931, when stock market losses removed much of his personal fortune, and he was appreciated by his students despite being somewhat impractical: according to Steed, he was "unpunctual, untidy, and too preoccupied with other matters.

In 1949, saddened by the new Soviet control of countries to whose independence he had devoted much of his life and by the death of his friend Edvard Beneš, Czechoslovakia's last noncommunist leader before the end of the Cold War, Seton-Watson retired to Kyle House on the Isle of Skye, where he died in 1951.