§5. The Renaissance of Serbia.—From this diplomatic defeat dates the renaissance of Serbia. It restored her to a sense of hard realities, and taught her to substitute hard work for loud talk. So rough a challenge put the national spirit on its mettle. The brief period between 1908 and 1912 worked a real transformation in Belgrade, which could not fail to impress those who took the trouble to look beneath the surface. Nowhere was the change more marked than in the Serbian army, from which the regicide elements had been slowly but steadily eliminated. The two Balkan wars of 1912-1913 revealed Serbia to the outside world as a military power, notable alike for the élan of its infantry, the high efficiency of its artillery, the close camaraderie of officers and men. The first use made of her victories over the Turks was the occupation of northern Albania, her only possible outlet to the sea so long as Dalmatia remains in Austrian hands. Austria-Hungary, who had only remained inactive because she had taken a Turkish victory for granted, now intervened, and by the creation of an artificial Albanian State vetoed Serbia's expansion to the Adriatic. The Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Berchtold, short-sighted and indolent then as now, failed to realise that the North Albanian harbours, for obvious reasons of physical geography, could never be converted into naval bases, save at a prohibitive cost, and that their possession by Serbia, so far from being a menace to Austria, would involve the policing of a mountainous tract of country, inhabited by a turbulent and hostile population. It ought to have been obvious to him that the moment had arrived for tempting the Serbs into the Austrian sphere of influence by the bait of generous commercial concessions through Bosnia and Dalmatia. Several far-sighted politicians in Austria urged this course upon him, and the Serbian Premier actually approached Vienna with far-reaching proposals in this very sense. Their contemptuous rejection by Berchtold and the little clique of Foreign Office officials who controlled his puppet figure, naturally strengthened still further the bonds which united Belgrade and Petrograd. Serbia, shut out from the Adriatic, had no alternative save to seek her economic outlet down the valley of the Vardar towards the Aegean, and in so doing she came into violent conflict with Bulgarian aspirations in Macedonia. These facts alone would justify the assertion that the war between the Balkan allies was directly due to Austro-Hungarian initiative; but it has also transpired that the dissensions between Sofia and Belgrade were actively encouraged from Vienna, that Magyar influences were brought to bear upon King Ferdinand, and that war material was sent down the Danube from Hungary to Bulgaria. The outward and visible sign of these intrigues was a speech of the Hungarian Premier, Count Tisza, opposing the Tsar's intervention in favour of peace and virtually inciting Bulgaria to fight it out. The break-up of the Balkan League was the first condition to that Austrian advance on Salonica which has always remained the ideal of the advocates of a forward policy in Vienna and Budapest, and which lies at the root of Austria-Hungary's action in provoking the present war.
Serbia and Montenegro, however, are but one half of the problem. The issues involved are wider and deeper than the quarrels of Vienna and Budapest with Belgrade. Even if every man in Serbia were willingly prostrate before the Habsburg throne, there could be no real peace until the internal problem of Austria-Hungary's Southern Slav provinces is solved. What is at stake is the future of eleven million people, inhabiting the whole tract of country from sixty miles north of Trieste to the centre of Macedonia, from the southern plains of Hungary to the North Albanian frontier. Of these, roughly four millions are in the two independent kingdoms; the remaining seven millions are divided between Austria (the provinces of Dalmatia, Istria, and Carniola) and Hungary (the autonomous kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia), while Bosnia-Herzegovina are governed jointly by Austria and Hungary. The history of these provinces during the past generation is one of neglect and misgovernment. Croatia has been exploited economically by the Magyars, and the narrow interests of Budapest have prevented railway development and hampered local industries by skilful manipulation of tariffs and taxation. A further result is that even to-day Dalmatia (with the exception of Ragusa) has no railway connections with the rest of Europe, and those of Bosnia are artificially directed towards Budapest rather than towards Agram, Vienna, and Western Europe. It is not too much to say that the situation of those provinces had become less favourable (if compared with surrounding standards) than it was at earlier periods of their history; for the old system of trade-routes had broken down there as elsewhere in Europe, but had not been replaced by modern communications.
§6. Serbo-Croat Unity.—Parallel with the new era instituted in Serbia since 1903, a strong movement in favour of national unity took root among her kinsmen across the Austro-Hungarian frontier. The disruptive tendencies which had hitherto been so marked in Croatian politics began to weaken. The so-called Serbo-Croat Coalition round which all the younger elements speedily rallied, put forward an ambitious programme of constructive democratic reform as the basis of joint political action on the part of both races, and held stubbornly together when the inevitable breach with the Magyar oligarchy occurred. The Magyar Government felt that every effort must be made to restore that discord between Croat and Serb which had been for a generation one of the main pillars of their racial hegemony. These designs happened to coincide with the aims of the Foreign Office in Vienna in connection with the annexation of Bosnia, and Budapest and Vienna combined in a systematic campaign of persecution against the Serbs of Croatia. "Wholesale arrests and charges of treason led up to the monster trial at Agram, which dragged on for seven months amid scandals worthy of the days of Judge Jeffreys. The Diet ceased to meet, the constitution of Croatia was in abeyance, the elections were characterised by corruption and violence such as eclipsed even the infamous Hungarian elections of 1910; the Press and the political leaders were singled out for special acts of persecution and intimidation." These tactics were revealed to the outside world in the notorious Friedjung Trial (December 1909), resulting out of a libel action brought by the Serbo-Croat Coalition leaders against Dr. Friedjung, the distinguished Austrian historian. The documents, on the basis of which he had publicly accused them of being paid agents of the Serbian Government, had been supplied to him by the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office, and the trial revealed them as impudent forgeries, concocted in the Austro-Hungarian Legation in Belgrade! The moral responsibility for these forgeries was subsequently brought home to Count Forgách, the Minister in Belgrade, and indirectly, of course, to Count Aehrenthal himself as Foreign Minister. But Forgách, though publicly denounced as "Count Azev,"[1] was not allowed to fall into disgrace; on the contrary, he had become within two years of his exposure permanent Under-Secretary at the Ballplatz, and inspirer of new plots to discredit and ruin Serbia.
[Footnote 1: An allusion to the notorious Russian _agent provocateur _who was at one and the same time a member of the secret police and of the revolutionary organisation.]
The scandals of the Friedjung Trial led to the fall of the Governor of Croatia, but there was no change of system. After a temporary truce the old conflict revived, and within eighteen months the friction between Magyars and Croats was as acute as ever. The Magyar Government employed every possible device of administrative pressure in order to create dissensions between the Croat and Serb parties—repeated elections, wholesale corruption and violence, persecution of the Press and of the political leaders. Yet so far from languishing under such a system, the movement for unity gained fresh strength and extended to the kindred Slovenes, striking root even among the extreme Clericals, who had hitherto regarded the Orthodox Serbs with distrust and suspicion.
In the spring of 1912 the conflict culminated in the abolition of the Croatian constitution by the arbitrary decree of the Hungarian Premier, in the appointment of a reactionary official as dictator, and a few months later in the suspension of the charter of the Serb Orthodox Church.
§7. The Balkan Wars.—Never in history had a more inopportune moment been chosen for such crying illegalities. For close upon the heels of the demonstrations and unrest which they evoked, came the dramatic events of the Balkan War, the crushing victories of the allies, the resurrection of the lost Serb Empire, the long-deferred revenge for the defeat of Kosovo. The whole Southern Slav provinces of Austria-Hungary were carried off their feet by a wave of enthusiasm for the allies, and an impossibly strained situation was reached when the Government of Vienna placed itself in violent conflict with Serbia, vetoed her expansion to the sea, insisted upon creating a phantom Albanian State, egged on Bulgaria against her allies, and finally mobilised in order to impose its will upon the Serbs. Every peasant in the Slavonic South naturally contrasted Magyar misrule in Croatia with the splendid achievements of his Serb kinsmen across the frontier. I know of poor villagers in the mountainous hinterland of Dalmatia who, having no money to give to the cause of the Balkan Red Cross, offered casks of country wine or even such clothes and shoes as they could spare from their scanty belongings. The total subscriptions raised among the Southern Slavs of the Monarchy in aid of the allies far exceeded any sums previously raised for charitable purposes among so poor a population. "In the Balkan sun," said a prominent Croat Clerical, "we see the dawn of our day."
The national rejoicings which "the avenging of Kosovo" evoked among the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes of Austria-Hungary were accompanied by lively protests against the bare idea of an Austro-Serbian war, which, so far as the Southern Slavs on both sides of the frontier were concerned, would have been a civil war in the most literal sense of the word (and this civil war, it must be remembered, is now actually being waged). The politicians, however, though well-nigh unanimous in their enthusiasm for the cause of the Balkan allies, could not at one breath throw off the habits of a lifetime. Petty jealousies still divided them and were skilfully played upon by the Magyar Government. The strain of five years of opposition and persecution had produced its effect upon the Coalition leaders and rendered them all too prone to further concessions. But the younger generation had been profoundly affected by the Croatian dictatorship and the Balkan wars; at an age when our youth think of nothing but cricket and football, the students and even the schoolboys of Croatia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia became engrossed in political speculation, brooded over the wrongs of their disunited race, and dreamt of Serbia as the new Piedmont of the Balkans. To all alike even the most advanced politician seemed no better than an old fogey, and it is no exaggeration to assert that the existing parties had lost all hold upon the overwhelming majority of those who in ten years' time will represent the manhood and the intellect of the race. The widespread nature of the movement may be illustrated by the school strike of the spring of 1912, during which every boy and girl above the age of fourteen in most of the primary and secondary schools of Croatia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia played truant as a protest against the misgovernment of Croatia. On that occasion a crowd of 5000 school children paraded the streets of Agram shouting "Down with Cuvaj" (the Ban or Governor of Croatia), and cheering the police when they tried to intervene!
As in all such movements, the views of individuals varied in intensity: some merely gave a theoretical adherence to the ideals of Mazzini or of Mill, others swallowed the Nihilist doctrine of Bakunin and dreamt of revolution, ushered in by terrorist propaganda. Out of this milieu came the two young assassins who murdered the Archduke Francis Ferdinand.
§8. The Murder of the Archduke.—By a hideous irony of fate Francis Ferdinand was the one man capable of restoring order to an already desperate internal situation. His very person was a programme and a watchword, and it had long been an open secret that his accession would be the signal for drastic reforms. It was his ambition to supersede the effete Dual system by a blend of centralism and federalism such as would reconcile the national sentiment of individual races with the consciousness of a common citizenship and would at the same time restore to foreign policy the possibility of initiative. This programme involved the emancipation of the non-Magyar races of Hungary from the intolerable racial tyranny of the Magyars, and at the same time a serious attempt to solve the Southern Slav question by unifying the race under Habsburg rule. As his Imperial uncle grew older and feebler, Francis Ferdinand is known to have elaborated his designs, and a regular staff of able lieutenants had grouped themselves round him. But on the very eve of action the strong man was removed, to the scarcely veiled relief of all those elements in the State whose political and racial monopoly was threatened by such far-reaching and beneficial changes.