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.
Bibliographical Note
Joseph Chavannes’ Physikalisch-statistischer Hand-Atlas von Oesterreich-Ungarn, Vienna, 1887, is still the best cartographic introduction to Austrian problems.
Among the best general works dealing with the late Hapsburg monarchy, one would name: A. Chéradame, L’Europe et la question d’Autriche au seuil du XXᵉ siècle. 4th ed. Paris, 1906. B. Auerbach, Les Races et les nationalités en Autriche-Hongrie. 2d ed. Paris, 1917. H. Wickham Steed, The Habsburg Monarchy. 2d ed. London, 1914. V. Gayda, Modern Austria: her racial and social problems. New York, 1915. R. W. Seton-Watson, German, Slav, and Magyar. London, 1916.
The British Foreign Office Handbooks are a particularly convenient source of information about the former Hapsburg monarchy and its several constituent territories.