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.