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.