FOOTNOTES:
[43] Here and in the ensuing chapters the word ‘race’ is used in its popular sense, as virtually equivalent to ‘people’ or ‘nation,’ rather than in the strict sense in which the word is employed by ethnologists. R. H. L.
[44] The Peace Conference appears to have adopted last autumn some sort of a provisional boundary for Poland on the east. As far as I understand the matter, however, this boundary represents only a minimum line. Whatever lies to the west of it is indisputably Polish, and henceforth in the opinion of the Conference should belong unconditionally to Poland. It is not implied, however, that Poland may not have valid claims to additional territories farther east—claims which can only be settled by negotiations between Poland and Russia.
[45] If the territory of the Free City of Danzig be included in this reckoning, the number of Germans that may be separated from the Empire would rise to 2,400,000 in round numbers.
[46] This figure refers to that part of East Prussia which will unquestionably remain to Germany. If the Mazurian and Marienwerder plebiscite areas vote to remain with Germany, the number of Germans cut off from the Reich by the Polish couloir will be a little over 2,000,000.
[47] The total population of the city and its district in 1910 was 324,000, of which number only 16,000 were entered in the census as having Polish as their ‘mother tongue.’
[48] I owe the comparison to Mr. L. B. Namier’s excellent article on “Poland’s Outlet to the Sea,” in The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 81 (1), Feb. 1917.
[49] Ralph Butler, The New Eastern Europe, p. 4.
VI
AUSTRIA
The Prince de Ligne, dying in the midst of the carnival of revelry that marked the Congress of Vienna, declared that he was preparing a new amusement for the jaded appetite of that assembly: the obsequies of a Field Marshal, a Knight of the Golden Fleece. A no less unique, but far graver, spectacle was provided for the Peace Conference of Paris: the obsequies of a great empire, the oldest and proudest in Europe.
Even without deploring that event, one cannot be altogether untouched by the spectacle of the collapse of the Hapsburg monarchy, with its stirring historic past and its illustrious traditions, the state which in one sense could trace its genealogy back to Charlemagne and Augustus Caesar, the realm of Charles V, the Ferdinands, Maria Theresia, Joseph II; the old indomitable
“Oesterreich,
An Ehren und an Siegen reich,”
of Wallenstein and Prince Eugene.
Austria had a raison d’être, had she only known how to live up to it. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, she rendered a real service to the peoples of Central Europe in uniting them into one realm capable of checking and repelling the Turkish flood. And later on, when the Turks had ceased to threaten, she might have acquired a new right to existence by educating her various races to self-government, offering them the advantages of membership in a large political and economic union combined with local autonomy and due respect for the rights and individuality of each race, anticipating in this realm, which, with its medley of nationalities, was a kind of miniature Europe, the solutions which the League of Nations will have to seek. After all, it was a Czech patriot who declared that if the Austrian monarchy did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.
But Austria has seldom risen to her opportunities. According to Napoleon’s well known saying, she was always just behindhand with an army or an idea. There was always something strangely inefficient, ill-adjusted, factitious, unhealthy, or fundamentally dishonest about her. As has often been remarked, Austria was not a nation, it was only a government—a dynasty, an aristocracy, a bureaucracy, and an army. A dynasty, which had an extraordinary passion and talent for acquiring land—“the most successful race of matrimonial and land speculators known to history,” someone has called them[50]—but which has shown very little constructive or executive ability in the tasks of internal government, and whose policy has been defined as simply one of “exalted opportunism in the pursuit of the unchanging dynastic idea”;[51] a kind of permanent camarilla about the throne, made up of sixty or seventy archdukes and archduchesses and a group of great aristocratic houses, so influential and exclusive that Mickiewicz described Austria as “an East India Company exploited by two hundred families”; a bureaucracy, dull, pedantic, arbitrary, and inefficient, whose ideal of government seldom rose above the typical Austrian motto “fortwursteln”—muddle along someway—; an army whose degree of internal cohesion is shown by the fact that its recruits swore allegiance to the emperor in nine languages, and which had an unequalled record for the number of its defeats; such were the chief forces that held this “ramshackle empire” together.
The task of maintaining and consolidating so motley a realm was, after the rise of the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century, increasingly and desperately difficult; but perhaps it would not have been an impossible undertaking, if the dynasty had only honestly carried out the principle of the equality of all the Austrian races, and if it had gone over, while still there was time, to a genuine federal state organization. But the Hapsburgs did neither. Instead they repudiated both ideas by adopting and for fifty years maintaining the Dualist system of 1867, which meant the division of the monarchy into two halves, each of which was to be ruled by a minority—the Germans in the one case, the Magyars in the other—at the expense, and in defiance of the wishes, of the Slavic and Latin majorities. That system has been called “the ruin of modern Austria.”
Of the workings of the system in Hungary something will be said in the next chapter. In the Austrian or Cisleithan part of the monarchy, Dualism led to incessant struggles, immense embitterment, and finally the virtual breakdown of constitutional government, and a return to a but slightly disguised absolutism.
The one thing that saved the system from total shipwreck was the antagonisms that existed, not only between the Germans and the majority opposed to them, but also between the various races of which that majority was composed. These antagonisms were sedulously fomented by the government itself. It is one of the worst sins of the Hapsburgs that, far from acting as peacemakers or even as impartial arbiters between their discordant races, they deliberately and systematically strove to aggravate national animosities and to fan the flames of discord, hoping to be able to play off one race against another in the authentic Turkish fashion, and seeming to imagine that Austria could subsist through internal dissensions, just as Poland was once thought to subsist through her anarchy. The Emperor Francis I congratulated himself that his peoples were aliens to each other and detested one another: each race could therefore be used as a jailer for some other race. “From their antipathies springs order,” he declared, “and from their mutual hatred the general peace.”[52] Francis Joseph might adopt as an official slogan Viribus unitis, but his practice was based much more upon the traditional maxim, Divide et impera. He and his agents are very largely responsible for that violent series of nationality conflicts which have raged in almost every province of the monarchy—that bellum omnium contra omnes, which has disgraced and poisoned the political life of Austria and paved the way for her complete disruption.
Out of these discords grew the World War, as a result of Austria’s effort to crush the most dangerous of the nationalist movements threatening her from within by striking at its outside source. But this War, which was to have saved her, turned out to be her ruin, not only by involving her in military disasters, but even more, perhaps, by accelerating her internal decomposition. Far from reinvigorating the monarchy by drawing all its races together in a great outburst of patriotism and a great common effort—as Teuton propagandists used to tell us that it had done—the War had just the contrary effect. The indignation of so many Hapsburg races at being forced to fight for a cause of which they disapproved; the attempt of the authorities to stifle this discontent by imprisoning, shooting, or hanging tens of thousands of people; the many signs that the Austrian Germans, intoxicated with enthusiasm for Prussia, were yearning to apply Prussian methods to their old domestic enemies and to make tabula rasa of those inferior peoples who, as a German writer put it, were “only a burden upon history,” and could “serve only as mortar for a nobler race”; the consciousness that in case of a victory for the Central Powers Austria would emerge bound hand and foot to the chariot of Germany and the anti-German races were doomed; finally, and not least, the psychological effects of war-weariness and economic misery, which have more or less shattered empires better knit together than this one—all these things combined to raise to a white heat the discontent of the majority of the Hapsburg races and to make them resolve that they would stand this Austrian nightmare no longer, if the Allies would only hold out to them a helping hand.
The Allies had certainly had little serious intention of disrupting Austria, at the beginning or throughout the greater part of the War. The traditional belief that Austria was a “European necessity,” the illusion that she could serve as a bulwark against the expansion of Germany towards the southeast or of Russia towards the Adriatic, the hope that she might be detached from Germany and persuaded to make a separate peace, the fear that the disappearance of the monarchy would lead only to the ‘Balkanization’ of Central Europe and to chaos worse confounded—such ideas seem to have predominated at London, Paris, and perhaps Washington, even down to the last year of the War. As late as January 8, 1918, President Wilson, in formulating the Fourteen Points, still disclaimed the thought of impairing the integrity of Austria, and asked for her subject races nothing more than autonomy.
But in the spring and summer of 1918 a great change came over Allied policy with respect to the Austrian question. It would be difficult to say how far this change was due to a growing realization on the part of the Allies of the essential justice of the claims of the Austrian subject races; or to the failure of all hopes of inducing Austria to make a separate peace; or to the very clever diplomacy of the Czecho-Slovaks and the obligations under which the latter had placed the Allies by their services in Siberia and Russia. I am inclined to think, however, that the change was caused in very large part by the gradually maturing conviction that, to use Mr. Henderson’s phrase, ‘Germany, if she had not yet conquered her enemies, had at least conquered her allies’;[53] that Austria’s independence, gravely and progressively impaired ever since the formation of her alliance with Berlin in 1879, had now become definitely a thing of the past, so that if she continued to exist at all, it would be only as a satellite and tool of Germany, a German bridge towards the Near East, the gangway of Mitteleuropa. Certain declarations made from the highest quarters in Austria in July, 1918, after a meeting of the two Kaisers—declarations announcing the intention ‘to tighten the bonds between the two empires in the sense of a durable fellowship in time of peace,’ confirmed the fear of the formation of a Central European bloc with a population of 120,000,000 and an active army of 12,000,000 men. If this scheme were realized, Germany would have doubled her power and won the War, even though she restored all the territory she had occupied. From all this the conclusion seemed plain that the only way for the Allies to defeat the Pan-Germanist plan and place a permanent check upon Prussian militarism was to disrupt Austria-Hungary and to form a series of national states along the eastern frontier of Germany. It was now the destruction of Austria that was a European necessity. Hence, in the summer of 1918, the Allied governments, one after the other, formally approved the claims of the two chief malcontent Hapsburg races, the Czecho-Slovaks and the Yugo-Slavs, to unity and independence, and the Czecho-Slovaks were even recognized as an allied and belligerent nation. These declarations, accompanied or soon followed as they were by the sudden change in the military situation, the rapid and unbroken series of Allied victories on every front, and the collapse of Bulgaria, sealed the fate of Austria-Hungary.
The dynasty did, indeed, experience a deathbed repentance. In that black month of October, when he was daily throwing himself on President Wilson’s doorstep, pleading his zeal for peace and his love for the Fourteen Points, Kaiser Karl was also promising mountains and marvels to his own subjects—the complete transformation of the monarchy into a federation of national states. Such a system adopted even a few years earlier might have saved Austria; but, as some one has remarked, at the point at which matters had arrived, ‘one might as well have talked of federating the Kilkenny cats.’[54] As the Czecho-Slovak National Council declared, the Austrian races were no longer to be duped by promises from Vienna, as to the value of which they had had a sufficiently long experience. “What we demand the government at Vienna will never give us, and couldn’t, if it wanted to.”[55]
In the course of thirty days the monarchy spontaneously split into fragments. Almost without opposition from the authorities, almost without a hand being raised in defence of the secular throne of the Hapsburgs, power passed to the National Councils improvised by the Czecho-Slovaks, the Yugo-Slavs, the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Roumanians, the Magyars, and even the German Austrians. November 12-13 the last of the Hapsburgs abdicated. It was a dissolution without a parallel, with the elemental force of a tidal wave.
When the Peace Conference met at Paris, it did not have to concern itself with the old question whether the maintenance of Austria was a European necessity. The Austrian peoples themselves had settled that question, with irrefragable logic and unmistakable finality. The territories of the defunct empire had already been partitioned, in rough, provisional fashion and not without a few miniature wars, among eight states corresponding to the eight principal nationalities of that Empire. Five of these states were reckoned at Paris as Allies—Italy, Roumania, Yugo-Slavia, Czecho-Slovakia, and Poland; two of them—Hungary and German Austria—ranked as enemies; while as to the Galician Ukrainians, Paris could never quite make up its mind whether to count them as friends, enemies, or neutrals. The main problem before the Conference, therefore, was, while making peace with the two enemy states mentioned, to effect a definitive division of the Hapsburg inheritance that would be just, practical, and conducive to the peace and security of Europe.
The difficulties of such a task are obvious enough, and will appear more fully in the discussion of the individual problems that follows. It is well known that Austria has been from the earliest times an open inn to half the travelling nations of Europe and Asia; that her rich plains are covered with ethnographic sediment deposited by a score of successive invasions; that her mountains, which are generally not too high and are pierced by plenty of easy passes, have served, not so much as barriers separating races, but rather as rallying places for weak or fugitive peoples seeking a refuge. Neither the Austrian Alps, nor the Carpathians, nor the mountains of Bohemia form an ethnographic frontier. Not one of the Austrian races is separated from its neighbors by really clearly marked natural boundaries. The historic political or administrative divisions are usually equally unsatisfactory as a basis for marking off the several nationalities from each other. In Hungary the county divisions are largely of very recent date, and really represent gerrymanders, intended, not to separate races, but to mingle them in such a way as to produce wherever possible a Magyar majority. In Austria almost all the political divisions were very old, and represented simply the débris of feudalism—the duchies, counties, and margraviates that took shape in the Middle Ages, when political formations had nothing to do with the principle of nationality. Of the seventeen crownlands or provinces of Austria, fourteen contained two or more races jumbled together. But however artificial and incongruous these provincial divisions might seem when judged from the standpoint of nationality, their very age or long continuance added another element of difficulty: it opened the door to claims based on ‘historic rights.’ Almost every one of the Hapsburg races had once had an independent state of its own; and where was the race so forgetful of its glorious past as not to claim the whole of every province which had once belonged to it, no matter what the present ethnographic situation might be? Indeed, since ‘ethnographic rights’ and ‘historic rights’ were so frequently in conflict, it was a common phenomenon that each race should use the one argument or the other alternately, as suited its purposes in each particular case, without much regard for that consistency which Bismarck called “the virtue of small minds.” The Czecho-Slovaks, for instance, claimed the whole of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia by virtue of historic rights, regardless of the strong German and Polish majorities in various parts of those provinces. But when it came to the northwestern parts of Hungary, where they had no historic claim, and the Magyars a very good one, they shifted their argument completely to the basis of ethnographic statistics. One need not, however, be very severe on our allies for such inconsequences. There was “a deal of human nature” about most of them; and they can scarcely be called more illogical than those critics of the Peace settlement, whose hearts bleed for Ireland, Egypt, and India, but who are inconsolable over the destruction of “venerable, old Austria,” and who would much have preferred that the large Polish majority in Upper Silesia, made up mainly of oppressed peasants and workingmen, should have remained in the grip of the German minority of feudal magnates and capitalists.
The decisions of the Paris Conference with regard to the liquidation of Austria-Hungary are embodied in the Versailles treaty with Germany of June 28, and the treaty with German Austria signed at Saint-Germain-en-Laye on September 10. Untoward events have delayed down to the present the conclusion of peace with Hungary. The settlements hitherto made have not decided the fate of certain extremely contentious territories, which have been placed at the disposal of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers. Such is the case with nearly all the Adriatic territories in dispute between Italy and the Yugo-Slavs; and with various districts where plebiscites are to be held: i. e., Teschen, Zips (Szepes), Arva, and Klagenfurt. At any rate, with these exceptions, one can now discern pretty clearly the new territorial settlement in the lands of the former Hapsburg monarchy.
The northwestern portions of the monarchy have organized themselves, with the sanction of the Conference, as the republic of Czecho-Slovakia. The Czechs and Slovaks are two brother races, established, the one in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, the other in the northwestern parts of Hungary. According to the census of 1910, the Czechs numbered about six and one half millions; the Slovaks about two millions. Allowing for the peculiar methods of Austrian and Hungarian census-takers, one will hardly go far wrong in raising the total for the two peoples combined to about ten millions. This would make them the third, and perhaps even the second, largest nationality within the borders of the late empire.[56]
The degree of relationship between the Czechs and Slovaks is one not easy to define. According to the one view, which is popular especially among the Czechs, the two peoples represent an original ethnic and linguistic unit—a single race, which through historic accidents came to be separated for centuries and to be considerably differentiated in speech, customs, and character, although always preserving such close linguistic and moral ties that they deserve to be considered as one nation. According to the other view, which is advanced especially by certain Slovak scholars and politicians, the Czechs and Slovaks, in spite of all similarities and affinities, are, and always have been, two distinct and independent branches of the Slavic family, two nations, which have been drawn together chiefly by common misfortunes and common dangers and which may therefore, perhaps, find it expedient to contract a political union. At any rate, the following facts are clear. For many centuries the two peoples have had a common literary language; their writers and scholars long maintained that they were a single nation; and if in the last century an effort has been made to develop a distinct Slovak literary language, it has made no great progress. The two idioms today are so closely alike that the two peoples understand each other without difficulty. Politically, the Czechs and Slovaks have been separated throughout most of their history. After a brief period of union in the ninth and tenth centuries, they fell apart definitively in 1031. The Czechs continued to have a state of their own, the kingdom of Bohemia, while the Slovaks fell under the sway of the Magyars for the next nine hundred years. Nevertheless, geographic propinquity and linguistic, religious, and intellectual ties sufficed to keep up a strong sense of fellowship and interdependence between the two peoples. These feelings have been strengthened in recent years by the conviction that in their struggles against their respective tyrants—the Germans in the one case, the Magyars in the other—they were fighting a common battle and had better stand shoulder to shoulder. And when the World War brought an almost undreamed-of chance for complete liberation, Czechs and Slovaks were wise enough to see that the two peoples, so weak numerically and placed in so exposed and dangerous a position, had little chance of maintaining their independence unless they united. It is true that there has been a certain amount of friction, and that a section of the Slovaks have been protesting against what they call the absorption of their people by the Czech intruders. But this was inevitable. As far as one can learn, the majority of the Slovaks have accepted the union, whether as a marriage of reason or of affection; and the combination is so necessary, if both peoples are to escape being swallowed up again by the Magyars and Germans, that one can only hope that it will last. In sanctioning the idea for which the rather new name of Czecho-Slovakia was adopted, the Peace Conference assuredly believed that it was satisfying the wishes of both peoples, and confirming the only arrangement capable of insuring peace in this peculiarly important danger zone.
The main territorial problem that presented itself with respect to Czecho-Slovakia was whether the new state should, in its western, Cisleithan half, receive boundaries drawn to fit the ethnographic frontier, or whether it should obtain its historic boundaries—the boundaries of the old Czech kingdom, which included the whole of the provinces of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia.
The problem was a grave one. The Germans formed 37% of the population of Bohemia; 28% in Moravia; 44% in Silesia. The three provinces contained a total of three and one half million Germans according to the last census. What was worse, these Germans are very largely gathered in compact masses, in a zone which wellnigh encircles the Czech-speaking territory, and which, on its outer side, was everywhere contiguous with Germany or German Austria. It would have been difficult to form this rather narrow ring of territory into an independent republic of German Bohemia, as some of its leading politicians demanded. Such a state would have been a politico-geographical monstrosity. But the peripheral territories might have been lopped off and handed over, in part to Germany, in part to German Austria, as the principle of nationality might seem to require. Moreover, it could not be forgotten that the Czechs and Germans of Bohemia were separated by centuries of struggles and animosities. Nowhere else in Austria had there been so bitter a conflict of nationalities in recent decades. In the mixed districts every village, one might almost say every house and every yard of ground, had been fought over. It had come to the point where Czechs and Germans could scarcely be brought to work in the same factory; where a small town might have to have two railroad stations—one for each race; where the propagandists of the rival nationalities competed in proselytizing even the inmates of the insane asylums. For the past ten years the Provincial Diet of Bohemia had been practically closed because of the violence of the race feud. Under such circumstances, could one think of including three and one half million Germans in the new Czech state?
Not without hesitation, the Peace Conference decided to preserve the historic frontiers of the old kingdom of Bohemia. That decision has occasioned much criticism; and indeed, among the decisions of the Conference, there is scarcely any other instance where so large a number of people have been placed under the sovereignty of another race. Nevertheless, I think that there is much justification for this settlement.
First and foremost, it should be observed that a strictly ethnographic frontier would have given an almost impossible and fatal configuration to Czecho-Slovakia. Even as it is now constructed, this state presents a somewhat fantastic appearance on the map. It looks like a tadpole. It is a narrow couloir about 600 miles in length, but in its eastern districts hardly 60 miles wide; and in Moravia, the province which forms the link between Bohemia and Slovakia, it is only 100 miles across. Now, if the frontier had been drawn on the ethnographic basis, these defects would have been aggravated in very dangerous fashion. Prague, the capital, would have been brought within about 30 miles of the German frontier. The Moravian link would have been little more than 50 miles wide. The state would have been constricted in the middle until it had much the shape of an hour glass. Czecho-Slovakia occupies a very perilous position. It is a wedge thrust into the side of Germany. For a thousand years the Czechs have been engaged chiefly in beating off the German onslaughts, and it is to be feared that in the future they will not be free from the same danger. Surrounded as they are on three sides by Germany and German Austria, they would, indeed, be in the gravest peril if, in case of a conflict, their enemies needed only to join hands across a gap 50 miles wide in order to cut the Czecho-Slovak state in two. If this state was to be created at all, it had to be created in a shape that would give it some guarantees of viability.
In the second place, if there are any cases where ‘historic rights’ deserve to be respected, this is probably one. The Czechs were the first of the two races to settle the country. It was they who founded and maintained the kingdom of Bohemia, which had so glorious a history in the Middle Ages and down to the time when it succumbed to Hapsburg despotism in the seventeenth century. Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia were the three constituent parts of this realm; together they made up ‘the lands of the Crown of St. Wenceslaus’; and down to the beginning of the nineteenth century even the Hapsburgs admitted that they owed their sovereign rights over these lands solely to their position as kings of Bohemia. If in the nineteenth century the effort was made to sweep away all vestiges of that kingdom and to merge it in the Austrian empire, the Czechs steadily refused to recognize these changes. They insisted that the kingdom of Bohemia still existed as a distinct entity, legally bound to the other Hapsburg lands only by the person of the common ruler; and they have fought for this principle and for that of the integrity and indissolubility of their realm with such tenacity that these ideas have become veritable dogmas in their minds. In sanctioning a Czech state including the whole of Bohemia and Moravia and most of Austrian Silesia, the Conference is not setting up a new and artificial creation: it is merely renewing and confirming in its old territorial limits a state which existed for centuries and which de jure, perhaps, has never ceased to exist.
The German populations in this state are in the main descended from settlers who were brought in by the kings of Bohemia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to clear and colonize the forests and waste lands, which then formed a girdle around the borders of the kingdom. These people voluntarily established themselves in a Czech land, and their descendants have always been subjects of the Czech state, save possibly during the last century or so when it is a contentious question whether a Czech state existed. At any rate, these Germans have never, since their immigration, belonged to Germany. And it may perhaps be doubted whether the presence of this German fringe is a sufficient reason for dismembering so ancient a state or a country so clearly marked out by nature to be a unit.
For Bohemia (the territory chiefly in question) has an extraordinary physical unity—greater than is possessed by any other country in Central Europe. This appears in its unusual river system, with its radial convergence of all the water courses towards the centre of the country; and not less in the mountain walls which guard the four sides of this natural citadel, especially the sides turned towards Germany. Were the political boundary to be removed from these mountains and carried down into the plain where the ethnographic frontier lies, this would mean exchanging a boundary that is excellent alike from the geographic, the economic, and the strategic standpoint for one that is quite the reverse.
Finally, it may be said that German-speaking Bohemia would suffer if cut off from the rest of the country. It is one of the most highly industrialized territories of Central Europe, the chief manufacturing centre of the old Austrian empire; and as such it has always been dependent upon the Czech agricultural region for its food supply and, in large part, its laborers. Moreover, it needs the markets which Czecho-Slovakia can furnish it at home or can open up to it in the southeast. The natural economic ties are so strong that not a few German Bohemians have, since the Armistice, publicly declared that their future can lie only in union with the Czecho-Slovak state, and that union with Germany would mean ruin for them. And from the Czech point of view, it is clear that the new state would have entered on its career with an almost fatal handicap, had it been deprived of its chief industrial districts and its main supplies of coal and other minerals.
Such were the reasons that led the Conference to depart rather widely in this case from its usual principles of boundary-making. The settlement seems to have been accepted by the parties most concerned without serious trouble and with far less friction than might have been expected. While some mistakes may have been made at the start, the Czechs have in general facilitated the transition by treating their old enemies in that generous, tactful, and sensible spirit which they have shown in most other matters, and which enables one to form very favorable auguries as to the future of their young republic.
Leaving the boundary questions of Slovakia to be considered in connection with Hungarian problems, we now pass on to German Austria.
It was the German-speaking provinces of the Eastern Alps, with their centre at Vienna, which formed the cradle or nucleus of the Austrian monarchy. It was there that the house of Hapsburg began its rise in 1276. And it is to this small mountain territory that the once proud name of Austria is again restricted. The new republic inherits only about one-fourth of the area of the old Austrian or Cisleithan half of the late empire. It is supposed to have a population of about six and a half millions, whereas Austria had twenty-eight and a half millions in 1910. In shape it is almost as elongated, as thin about the waist, as Czecho-Slovakia. It looks like an inverted pistol with the point aimed at Switzerland.
The making of the new Austrian frontiers involved several vexatious problems. On the north, indeed, it was resolved without much controversy to accept as the frontier between Austria and Czecho-Slovakia the historic boundary between Bohemia and Moravia on the one side, and the provinces of Upper and Lower Austria on the other. Only two slight deviations were made, both at the expense of Austria, in order to avoid cutting important railway connections.
It was the southern boundary that occasioned difficulties. As between the Austro-Germans and the Slovenes, who were to be united to the Yugoslav state, the effort was made to keep strictly to the ethnographic frontier. But this was not easy in so mountainous a region, where racial frontiers may take no account of geography, but political boundary makers cannot afford to do so.
The worst problem was the basin of Klagenfurt. Here the narrow, encased valley of the Drave widens out into a long, fertile corridor, which is again closed at the lower end and which obviously ought to be treated as a political unit. Unfortunately the southern side of the valley is Slovene in population and the northern side German, and in between lies the city of Klagenfurt—with its 29,000 people a great metropolis for that region—which is hotly disputed. The Austrian census shows this city to have a German majority; but the Yugo-Slavs claim that it was Slovene fifty years ago and would be now, were it not for certain tricks played upon them by the Austrian government. Klagenfurt last year enjoyed much the same painful notoriety as Fiume, Danzig, or the Saar. I know not how many unhappy Allied Commissioners were sent down there to investigate, report, delimit provisional boundaries, or to restrain the German or Yugo-Slav rifles, which kept going off of themselves. Finally, the Conference decided to refer the matter to a plebiscite. By an arrangement which may, perhaps, be said to favor the Yugo-Slavs, the Klagenfurt basin is divided into two zones. In the first and larger zone, the more contested one, and indeed the only one in which there may be a Slovene majority, the vote is to be taken within three months after the Peace Treaty with Austria goes into force. If the outcome in this zone favors Austria, she will keep both zones without further formalities. If the vote favors Yugo-Slavia, the plebiscite will then be held in three weeks in the second zone, which is pretty purely German, but which is geographically so situated that it could not easily be separated from the first zone.
If this arrangement has provoked much dissatisfaction in Austria, that has been even more the case over the drawing of the new Austro-Italian frontier in the Tyrol.
The facts here are sufficiently simple and well known. Italy was concerned, in the first place, to liberate the 400,000 Italians in the Trentino, to which she had every right; and secondly, to secure a strong natural frontier on her most exposed side, on the side looking towards Germany. The frontier which she asked for, and which the Conference accorded her, was the crest of the highest east-to-west ranges in the Tyrol—the line of the Oetzthaler and Zillerthaler Alps and the Hohe Tauern—a line which cuts the great historic north-to-south corridor through the Tyrol, not in its wider southern section, but at its highest and narrowest point, the Brenner Pass. The new frontier is about the best one that could be drawn from the geographic standpoint, since it follows the natural line of division, the watershed between the rivers that flow south to the Adriatic, and those that flow north and east to the Danube. It also affords the strongest strategic barrier that Italy could find. It has, however, the drawback of including in Italy a compact German-speaking population of about 250,000; old German towns like Botzen, Meran, Brixen, and various localities famous in German song and story, the homes of Andreas Hofer, the Tyrolese hero of 1809, and of Walther von der Vogelweide. Whether among the several parallel ranges farther south than the Brenner a frontier might not have been found which would have afforded Italy tolerable guarantees of security without involving the necessity of her absorbing so many Germans, is a question on which a great deal might be said. Among the experts at Paris opinions were divided on that subject, but in the Supreme Council, already somewhat embarrassed, perhaps, by the Adriatic question, the Italian view prevailed.
If the national principle has been somewhat violated to Austria’s detriment in the south, it has been applied in her favor in the east. The adjacent border zone of Hungary had a solid German-speaking population; and, at a time when Hungary was being broken up along ethnographic lines, it seemed only fair to unite these Germans to Austria. Alone among the states of the defeated Alliance, Austria has thus emerged from the War with at least one territorial acquisition.
At any rate, under the new conditions one can no longer speak of ‘happy Austria’ or of the ‘gay Viennese.’ Almost ruined by the War and its aftermath, weighed down by the financial charges imposed by the Peace Treaty, prostrated by the separation of the heart of the old monarchy from most of the provinces which had nourished and sustained it, suffering terribly at present and utterly despondent about her future, Austria has become the Niobe of nations. Today she is forced to compete with Armenia as a supplicant for the charity of the world.
It has been commonly said in Vienna this past year that German Austria cannot exist alone, if only for economic reasons, and that there remain to it only two possibilities: either union with Germany, or some kind of a customs union with the new states that have grown out of the Hapsburg empire.
Union with Germany was very much in the air a year ago; indeed, one of the first acts of the Austrian National Assembly on November 11, 1918, was a vote in favor of such a union. But the Peace Conference vetoed the project. This was done by the rather indirect method of inserting in the Peace Treaty with Germany an article by which the latter had to bind herself to “respect strictly the independence of Austria” within the frontiers to be fixed by the Allied and Associated Powers, and to agree that “this independence shall be inalienable except with the consent of the Council of the League of Nations.”
This act of the Conference has been defended on the ground that, at the close of a war in which Germany has shown herself such a menace to the world, it is scarcely expedient or even safe to gratify her with the acquisition of over six million new subjects. It is only after she has successfully passed a period of probation and has shown that she has fundamentally changed her methods and her point of view, that the rest of the world can accord her such an aggrandizement, if the Austrians at that time still desire the union. I confess, however, that I cannot help feeling that in this case the more generous attitude would have been the wiser one. As long as the Allies insist on keeping Austria in a cell by herself, they are likely to have a chronic invalid on their hands. The effort to hold asunder even provisionally two branches of a people like the Germans may easily involve embarrassments greater than any advantages that are to be derived from it. And what is most important is the essential justice of the thing. It is the great merit of the Peace Conference that it endeavored, on the whole honestly and in such sweeping fashion as was never seen before, to apply the principle of nationality to the resettlement of Europe. One cannot but regret that this work should be tarnished by denying even temporarily to the German and German-Austrian peoples the right to work out their national unity.