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.