And yet the Austrians were only one of several peoples in the Hapsburg Empire who had made common cause with Germany. Statesmen and generals in highest places throughout the war had been Czechs, Poles, and Jugoslavs. With the exception of the Czechs, all the peoples of the Dual Monarchy had fought well throughout the war. It is patent that Austria-Hungary could never have gone through four years of war had not the landed aristocracy, the bankers, and the manufacturers of all the peoples of the empire supported and coöperated with the Vienna Government until the game was clearly up. But, as soon as the armistice was signed, the liberated peoples received immunity, doffed their uniforms and decorations, and asserted that they had been forced to fight against their liberators. This was not true of the great majority of them. The Jugoslavs were always bitter against the Italians. Until the latter part of 1917 the Poles had no kindly feeling for the allies of Russia, while the Austrians were their best friends. The Rumanians, like the Italians, had hesitated about abandoning their neutrality until the bribe had been made sufficiently attractive. At Vienna and Budapest throughout the war the upper classes of subject peoples were heart and soul (or at least acted as if they were!) with the cause of the Central Empires. Only the Czechs—and not the majority of them—had shown themselves disloyal.
This was natural. The Dual Monarchy was a system, a complicated system; and the picture painted for us of Germans and Magyars, less than twenty millions; lording it brutally over more than thirty millions of other races is hardly half true. The national antagonism between German and Czech was largely local, and was not remedied by the Treaty of St.-Germain. The Poles were very well off under Austrian rule. Jugoslavs preferred the Germans to the Italians. The great mass of Rumanians in Hungary were better educated, further advanced in self-government, and much more independent economically than the Rumanians in Rumania. The truth is that, with the exception of the Czechs, the various peoples of the Hapsburg Empire were aware of their common economic interests, and saw the advantages of belonging to a great country. Worked upon by irredentist propaganda from the outside, there had been the struggle between culture and pocketbook, with a victory for the latter up to the time of the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire.
If the Paris Conference had had at heart the best interests of the peoples of Austria-Hungary, they would have maintained the organism that united these peoples with common interests under some new program of federation. The Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon are inspired by British, French, and Italian interests, and not by a desire to make a better world to live in along the Danube. Under the nose of President Wilson, these interests were amicably adjusted by compromises and bargains. The question was never debated as to whether it would not be best for the peoples concerned to keep some form of a union, in which Austrian and Hungarian domination would no longer prevail.
The Entente Powers had their reasons for wanting to break up the Hapsburg dominions. Italy entered the war for this purpose. If the old political organism had been readjusted, Slavic predominance would have appeared to the Italians as a greater menace to their security than the old arrangement of Austrian and Hungarian joint hegemony. Great Britain and France were determined that Germany should never again have the Danubian countries as a reservoir from which to draw for armies to support her schemes. The dissolution of the empire blocked forever Germany’s Drang nach Osten. The Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon cut Germany off from the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. France had in mind a cordon of allies, separating Russia from Germany, and opening up the path to France from the North Sea to the Black Sea. Most important of all, the disappearance of Austria-Hungary removed the formidable commercial rivalry possible when fifty million people lived under a united government in a common customs area.
The only danger foreseen was the possibility of Austria joining Germany. This the Entente Powers thought they had taken care of by denying to the Germans the political unity achieved by all the other peoples of Europe.
The logical alternatives confronting the peacemakers were either establishing a new Danubian federation or allowing free rein to the national instinct as opposed to economic expediency. Blinded by the extent of their victory, and betrayed into the fallacy of believing that some national movements could be encouraged and approved and others discouraged and stamped out, the Entente Powers forgot economic and political laws. They chose neither alternative. They believed that they could use the power the victory gave them for the furtherance of their own selfish interests. But they forgot that this power was theirs because they were united, and that treaties inspired by their own interests and imposed by force would remain in vigor only so long as they remained united.
In the Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon the Entente Powers departed farther than in the Treaty of Versailles from the ideals so nobly proclaimed during the war. In his speech of January 5, 1917, Mr. Lloyd George had anticipated Mr. Wilson when he told the House of Commons:
Equality of right among nations, small as well as great, is one of the fundamental issues that this country and her allies are fighting to establish in this war.... We feel that government by consent of the governed must be the basis of any territorial settlement.... A territorial settlement must be secured, based on the right of self-determination or the consent of the governed.