THE TREATIES OF ST.-GERMAIN AND TRIANON
Seeking a mitigation of the peace terms, the Germans at Versailles
reminded their victors of the repeated assurance given the German
people that the Allied and Associated Powers were making war against
the Imperial German Government. The distinction had been clearly
drawn by President Wilson on several occasions. The pre-armistice
correspondence reiterated the difference between a government of the
people and a government of the Kaiser. Had not the Germans, by a
revolution, rid themselves of their discredited rulers, down to the
most insignificant princeling? M. Clemenceau answered, in the name
of the victors, that the German people had willed the war and had
sustained it; therefore, they could not escape the responsibility for
it. And, if the terms of peace were severe, it was not only because
justice must be satisfied, but also because reasonable precautions must
be taken against an outlaw people, still over sixty million strong.
There was much force in M. Clemenceau’s contention, applied to
powerful Germany, with her industrial machinery intact, and enjoying
a peculiarly advantageous strategic position in central Europe. But
this same explanation cannot be given to excuse similar terms imposed
upon six million Austrians and seven million Hungarians. As peoples,
their responsibility certainly was much less. As new nations, shorn of
much of their territory, heavy indemnities were absurd; and refusing
the right to ethnographic frontiers on the plea of guarantees for the
future was without justification. The Treaty of Versailles, had it only
been practicable, was a punishment fitting a crime. The Treaties of
St.-Germain and Trianon are indefensible from every point of view.
“We have Balkanized all that part of Europe,” said Mr. Lloyd George
ruefully. He was right. But ineptitude is none the less blameworthy
because it is admitted!
“If the Hapsburg Empire did not exist, it would have to be invented,” a
Russian diplomat once said. He was a political realist. His statement
was a wise one from the political point of view. The developments
of the last half-century have proved that it is wiser still from
the economic point of view. But there was no broad statesmanship at
the Paris Conference, looking to the future, and no sound economic
generalship, setting limits to the greed and fantasies of those
who divided the spoils. Fools rushed in where angels would have
feared to tread. The economic evolution of the nineteenth century
was disregarded. The Hapsburg Empire was partitioned in such a way
as to do more violence to the will of its inhabitants than had been
done under the old scheme of the Dual Monarchy, with none of the
economic compensations of the destroyed political organism. New
irredentisms were created, much more dangerous than the old ones. In
1914, Alsace-Lorraine was unique among European problems: it was the
only instance of a people forcibly detached against their will from
a country in which they had enjoyed the privilege of taking a full
and conscious part in the national life. The Treaties of St.-Germain
and Trianon did violence on a far greater scale than the Treaty of
Frankfort had done to the national sentiments of peoples. Half a dozen
new Alsaces were brought to life and half a dozen new danger-zones
established in Europe. When the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were
made known, students of international affairs had their misgivings.
When the terms of the Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon were
published, we realized that “the war to end war” was resulting in the
creation of causes for new wars.
Of course the problem before the peacemakers was exceedingly difficult
from many angles. The Hapsburg spoils were enormous. There were claims
and counter-claims. There were promises already made. There were _faits
accomplis_ to take into consideration.
The peril of insisting upon a reasonable decision as to frontiers, a
decision in accordance with principles, was demonstrated by the storm
Mr. Wilson caused when he tried to defend the South Slavs against
Italy. Italy had her secret treaty with the other Entente Powers. The
Treaty of London, signed in 1915, had been the price paid for Italian
intervention. In their desperate need the Entente Powers secretly sold
out Serbia, the nation in whose defense they had begun the war, to
Italy; and Italy had taken the precaution of occupying militarily what
she had been promised more than three years earlier, when the armistice
with Vienna was signed. In addition Italy claimed Fiume, which had been
outside of the 1915 agreement. But this seemed reasonable to her, in
view of modifications of that agreement elsewhere. President Wilson was
given clearly to understand that his principles had nothing whatever
to do with the Austrian treaty. Similarly, Rumania had her secret
intervention bargain, made with the Entente Powers in 1916. And France
sponsored the most extreme claims of Poles, Czechs, and Rumanians,
because she intended to form of these peoples a _bloc_ to take the
place of Russia in the new alliance against Germany. In making the
Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon, therefore, border districts were
bartered with no regard whatever either for the wishes or economic
necessities of their inhabitants.
By these treaties Czechoslovakia was created; Poland, Rumania, and
Serbia were made as large as possible and given contiguous frontiers
and direct railway communications; and Italy did unto the Austrians and
South Slavs what she had for half a century been complaining of the
Austrians doing unto her. The result is a patchwork of states, none
satisfied, and all reduced to political unrest and economic chaos. The
two formerly dominant peoples of the Hapsburg Empire, the Austrians and
the Hungarians, were given a large dose of the medicine they had long
been prescribing to their subject peoples.
Invoking the sacred principle of nationality, Italy triumphantly
completed her unification by adding the “unredeemed Italians” of
the Hapsburg Empire. But with them she insisted on incorporating in
Greater Italy hundreds of thousands of Austrians and South Slavs. The
principles invoked here were historical and strategical. The Adriatic
must become an Italian lake. To accomplish this and to have a strategic
frontier, nearly 300,000 Austrians of the Tyrol were separated
from their compatriots, and a like number of Slovenes, Croats, and
Dalmatians were prevented from joining the Greater Serbia of their
dreams.
To make a strong Czechoslovakia the Paris conference asserted the
validity of the historical argument against Germany and Austria, and
chose a boundary-line for the new state which left nearly three million
Germans subject to less than twice as many Czechs. When a delegation of
Germans from Bohemia protested against this decision, Mr. Lloyd George
reminded them that their ancestors had followed conquering armies
to settle in Bohemia, and that they had the privilege of going back
where they came from if they wanted to. The Peace Conference, he said,
was righting historical wrongs. They answered that they were three
times as numerous as the Scotch who had gone to Ireland, and had been
in Bohemia two centuries longer than the inhabitants of the Belfast
region. If this solution was a just one, why was not the Ulster problem
to be solved in the same way by a return of the North Irelanders to
Scotland? But that was different! It all came back to the old principle
of _vae victis_--woe to the conquered. The Czechs were given also
a bit of Upper Silesia; the Hungarian town of Poszony or Pressburg
(renamed Bratislava), for an outlet on the Danube, with half a million
Hungarians along the Danube, so that the frontier of the new states
would separate Vienna from Budapest and come within thirty-five miles
of Budapest; and half a million Ruthenians, so that Czechoslovakia
would dominate Hungary from the Carpathians.
To Poland was allotted Galicia. The eastern part of this province
contains more than three million Ruthenians, in territory contiguous
to Ukrainia, which is inhabited by a people of the same blood and
language. This manifest injustice was covered in the Treaty of
St.-Germain by making Eastern Galicia a separate territory, under
Polish mandate, with a plebiscite after twenty years. But the Poles
have already managed to remove the flaw in their title.
The additions to Rumania freed several million Rumanians from Hungarian
rule, but put about an equal number of Hungarians, Germans, Serbs, and
people of other races in Greater Rumania. Hungary was deprived of her
iron and coal. Greater Serbia was allotted one of the finest towns of
Hungary, Szabadka (Maria-theresiopel), an overwhelmingly Hungarian
city, now cut off by the Serbian boundary from the farming country it
had prospered in serving. The excuse for this glaring injustice was
that Serbia needed to control the railway line passing from Croatia to
the territories detached from Hungary for the benefit of Rumania. There
are several instances of this sort of thing in the treaties.
But while the treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon limited Austria and
Hungary to frontiers well within what the application of the principle
of self-determination would have given them, even the non-German
and non-Magyar elements in border regions felt that they, too, were
sacrificed to the exigencies of international politics. Poles and
Czechs were dissatisfied with the Silesian frontier and came to blows
over it; Ruthenians received no recognition whatever of their right to
nationhood; Slovaks suffered on economic grounds through separation
from Hungary; Rumania and Serbia both claimed the Banat of Temesvár;
and Jugoslavs had to be content with partial liberation, because in
many regions the Jugoslavs simply changed masters, being turned over by
the peace conference to Italy.
Plebiscites were provided for in two border regions only; and in these
instances the motive was not that of vindicating the principle of
self-determination. The district of Klagenfurt remained with Austria
after its inhabitants had voted against Serbia. This was done because
its possession by the Jugoslavs would have embarrassed Italy. A slice
of West Hungary was awarded to Austria for the obvious purpose of
making bad blood between the two enemy peoples.
Hungary, because of the richness of her soil, was able to live in the
limits imposed by the Treaty of Trianon. But the Treaty of St.-Germain
reduced Austria to a little state of six million souls, more than a
third of whom lived in the city of Vienna. Upon the Austrians was
saddled a huge indemnity. Not only was the indemnity impossible to
maintain, but the existence even of such a country as was provided for
the Austrians to live in was questioned by economists. The Austrians
were reduced to dire poverty in the city of Vienna, and condemned to a
hopeless future by the provision of the treaty forbidding them to unite
with Germany. The Treaty of St.-Germain is the most striking example
in history of vengeance wreaked upon defenseless people. Never had the
tables been so suddenly and completely turned.
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.