already indicated. At any rate, the Polish armies are now occupying
a very wide area in the east. A year ago the Bolshevik forces had
advanced almost to the borders of Congress Poland: today, after a
certain amount of fighting, the Poles have thrust them back almost to
the Dnieper. The Poles are now in possession of most of the old Russian
provinces of Grodno, Wilno, Minsk, and Volhynia: i. e., of a very large
part of those eastern territories which belonged to the old Polish
republic and which have been the object of an age-long dispute between
Poland and Russia.
What the ultimate fate of these regions will be, it would be difficult
to forecast. The various nationalist movements which have sprung up in
this area are of such recent date and such uncertain strength, that it
would require much boldness to prophesy the outcome. Will Lithuania,
for instance, consolidate itself as an independent state, or renew its
old federal union with Poland, or return to Russia? Will the Ukrainians
unite once more with Russia or establish themselves as a new state
of 40,000,000 people? What will become of the White Russians, of all
the peoples in this region the most enigmatic? The western section of
them, being Catholic, may perhaps gravitate towards Poland; the eastern
section, being Orthodox, may perhaps cleave to the side of Russia.
Or will they develop a national movement of their own? When and in
what fashion will a reorganized Russia be able to reassert her voice
effectively in these questions? Such are some of the uncertainties in
the case.
At all events, for the time being the Poles are again in possession of
a larger part of their ancient heritage, of the Poland that existed
before the Partitions. They are in possession of territories which,
taken together, must contain a population of over thirty millions. And
whatever fluctuations may still take place in her frontiers, Poland is
likely to remain the largest and in many respects the most important of
the new states produced by the war, the sixth most populous state in
Europe.
While it would doubtless be premature to hail in this state, restored
only yesterday and still in process of construction, a new Great Power,
it is not impossible that Poland may in time become one. For, assuming
that Upper Silesia comes to her by plebiscite, her economic resources
are magnificent. The richest coal reserves on the Continent; zinc,
lead, iron, petroleum in abundance; highly developed industries in the
Congress Kingdom, which was the Lancashire of the Russian empire, and
in Upper Silesia, which was the Black Country of eastern Germany--such
are some of the assets with which Poland resumes her national life.
The greatest problem lies in the people themselves. Of them a writer by
no means prejudiced in their favor has recently declared:
“In all Europe there is no other people, with the possible exception
of the French, which is naturally so gifted. No one can study Eastern
Europe without feeling that they are infinitely the most attractive of
the peoples with which he has to do. They are the only ones in whose
composition there is included that subtle _differentia_ which marks
off the ‘big nation’ from the ‘small.’”[49]
On the other hand, it must be admitted that in the past the Poles have
shown themselves deficient in organizing and administrative ability, in
economic enterprise, in cohesion, solidarity, and discipline. A century
and more of servitude to foreigners has not been the best of schooling
for orderly and efficient self-government, nor has it permitted the
nation to keep altogether abreast of the West in intellectual and
economic progress. And Poland, wedged in between a vindictive Germany
and a presumably none too friendly Russia, occupies what may fairly be
called the most exposed and dangerous position in Europe.
Nevertheless, the brilliant and original genius of the Polish people;
their ardent and unsurpassed spirit of patriotism; the lessons which
they may be presumed to have learned from their misfortunes; the
reassuring evidence supplied by their conduct during these last two
critical years--all this affords ground for hope, not only that Poland
has permanently recovered her independence, but that she is capable
of becoming again what she was for so many centuries in the past: a
bulwark of liberty, republicanism, and Western civilization in the
troubled East of Europe.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
One of the most useful aids to the study of questions relating to
Poland is Professor E. Romer’s admirable _Geographic and Statistical
Atlas of Poland_, published in Polish, French, and German: Warsaw and
Cracow, 1916. An English edition is soon to be issued.
Almost all sides of Polish life today, political, economic,
intellectual, and artistic, are described in compendious and scholarly
fashion, and with an abundance of maps, statistics, and historical
information, in the works published during the War by the Committee
for Encyclopaedic Publications on Poland. This Committee has published
_La petite Encyclopédie polonaise_, Paris-Lausanne, 1916 (translated
into English under the title: Poland, her People, History, Industries,
Finance, Science, Literature, Art, and Social Development); and the
larger _Encyclopédie polonaise_, Fribourg-Lausanne, 1917-19, of
which vols. i (geography and ethnography), ii, pt. 3 (territorial
development of Polish nationality--in four volumes), iii (economic
life), and iv (political and administrative regime) have hitherto
appeared.
A very convenient handbook of statistical data about Poland is the
_Annuaire statistique polonais_ by E. Romer and I. Weinfeld, Cracow,
1917.
E. H. Lewinski-Corwin’s _Political History of Poland_, New York, 1917,
is perhaps the best account of the subject available in English,
although marred by a certain amount of patriotic exaggeration and
party prejudice.
Among works dealing with the several territories which have been in
dispute, the following are notable:
On Prussian Poland: Ludwig Bernhard, _Die Polenfrage_. Leipzig,
1910. (A moderate German view.) Joseph Partsch, _Schlesien_, pts.
1-2. Breslau, 1896-1911. “Liber” (C. Andrzejewski), _Das Deutschtum
in Westpolen (Preussisch-Polen), seine Zahl, seine Gliederung, sein
Stärkeverhältniss gegenüber den Polen_. Posen, 1919.
On the Galician question: W. Lutoslawski and E. Romer, _The Ruthenian
Question in Galicia_. Paris, 1919. H. Grappin, _Polonais et ruthènes.
La question de Galicie_. Paris, 1919. Both these works are partisan
statements from the Polish side. M. Lozynsky, _Les “Droits” de la
Pologne sur la Galicie_. Lausanne, 1917. E. Levitsky, _La Guerre
polono-ukrainienne en Galicie_. Berne, 1919. This and the preceding
represent the Ukrainian point of view.
On the question of Poland’s eastern frontier: L. Wasilewski, _Die
Ostprovinzen des alten Polenreichs_. Cracow, 1916. By all means the
most complete and illuminating survey of Poland’s past relations with
Lithuania, White Russia, and the Ukraine, and of the recent growth
of nationalist movements in those regions. K. Verbelis, _La Lituanie
russe_. Geneva, 1918. (Lithuanian views and claims.) T. Savtchenko,
_L’Ukraine et la question ukrainienne_. Paris, 1918. (Views of a
Ukrainian nationalist.)
[Illustration: POLAND]
FOOTNOTES:
[43] Here and in the ensuing chapters the word ‘race’ is used in its
popular sense, as virtually equivalent to ‘people’ or ‘nation,’ rather
than in the strict sense in which the word is employed by ethnologists.
R. H. L.
[44] The Peace Conference appears to have adopted last autumn some
sort of a provisional boundary for Poland on the east. As far as
I understand the matter, however, this boundary represents only
a minimum line. Whatever lies to the west of it is indisputably
Polish, and henceforth in the opinion of the Conference should belong
unconditionally to Poland. It is not implied, however, that Poland may
not have valid claims to additional territories farther east--claims
which can only be settled by negotiations between Poland and Russia.
[45] If the territory of the Free City of Danzig be included in this
reckoning, the number of Germans that may be separated from the Empire
would rise to 2,400,000 in round numbers.
[46] This figure refers to that part of East Prussia which will
unquestionably remain to Germany. If the Mazurian and Marienwerder
plebiscite areas vote to remain with Germany, the number of Germans
cut off from the _Reich_ by the Polish couloir will be a little over
2,000,000.
[47] The total population of the city and its district in 1910 was
324,000, of which number only 16,000 were entered in the census as
having Polish as their ‘mother tongue.’
[48] I owe the comparison to Mr. L. B. Namier’s excellent article on
“Poland’s Outlet to the Sea,” in _The Nineteenth Century_, Vol. 81 (1),
Feb. 1917.
[49] Ralph Butler, _The New Eastern Europe_, p. 4.
VI
AUSTRIA
The Prince de Ligne, dying in the midst of the carnival of revelry that
marked the Congress of Vienna, declared that he was preparing a new
amusement for the jaded appetite of that assembly: the obsequies of a
Field Marshal, a Knight of the Golden Fleece. A no less unique, but far
graver, spectacle was provided for the Peace Conference of Paris: the
obsequies of a great empire, the oldest and proudest in Europe.
Even without deploring that event, one cannot be altogether untouched
by the spectacle of the collapse of the Hapsburg monarchy, with its
stirring historic past and its illustrious traditions, the state which
in one sense could trace its genealogy back to Charlemagne and Augustus
Caesar, the realm of Charles V, the Ferdinands, Maria Theresia, Joseph
II; the old indomitable
“Oesterreich,
An Ehren und an Siegen reich,”
of Wallenstein and Prince Eugene.
Austria had a raison d’être, had she only known how to live up to it.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, she rendered a real service
to the peoples of Central Europe in uniting them into one realm capable
of checking and repelling the Turkish flood. And later on, when the
Turks had ceased to threaten, she might have acquired a new right to
existence by educating her various races to self-government, offering
them the advantages of membership in a large political and economic
union combined with local autonomy and due respect for the rights and
individuality of each race, anticipating in this realm, which, with its
medley of nationalities, was a kind of miniature Europe, the solutions
which the League of Nations will have to seek. After all, it was a
Czech patriot who declared that if the Austrian monarchy did not exist,
it would be necessary to invent it.
But Austria has seldom risen to her opportunities. According to
Napoleon’s well known saying, she was always just behindhand with an
army or an idea. There was always something strangely inefficient,
ill-adjusted, factitious, unhealthy, or fundamentally dishonest about
her. As has often been remarked, Austria was not a nation, it was
only a government--a dynasty, an aristocracy, a bureaucracy, and an
army. A dynasty, which had an extraordinary passion and talent for
acquiring land--“the most successful race of matrimonial and land
speculators known to history,” someone has called them[50]--but
which has shown very little constructive or executive ability in the
tasks of internal government, and whose policy has been defined as
simply one of “exalted opportunism in the pursuit of the unchanging
dynastic idea”;[51] a kind of permanent camarilla about the throne,
made up of sixty or seventy archdukes and archduchesses and a group
of great aristocratic houses, so influential and exclusive that
Mickiewicz described Austria as “an East India Company exploited by
two hundred families”; a bureaucracy, dull, pedantic, arbitrary, and
inefficient, whose ideal of government seldom rose above the typical
Austrian motto “fortwursteln”--muddle along someway--; an army whose
degree of internal cohesion is shown by the fact that its recruits
swore allegiance to the emperor in nine languages, and which had an
unequalled record for the number of its defeats; such were the chief
forces that held this “ramshackle empire” together.
The task of maintaining and consolidating so motley a realm was, after
the rise of the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century,
increasingly and desperately difficult; but perhaps it would not have
been an impossible undertaking, if the dynasty had only honestly
carried out the principle of the equality of all the Austrian races,
and if it had gone over, while still there was time, to a genuine
federal state organization. But the Hapsburgs did neither. Instead they
repudiated both ideas by adopting and for fifty years maintaining the
Dualist system of 1867, which meant the division of the monarchy into
two halves, each of which was to be ruled by a minority--the Germans in
the one case, the Magyars in the other--at the expense, and in defiance
of the wishes, of the Slavic and Latin majorities. That system has
been called “the ruin of modern Austria.”
Of the workings of the system in Hungary something will be said in
the next chapter. In the Austrian or Cisleithan part of the monarchy,
Dualism led to incessant struggles, immense embitterment, and finally
the virtual breakdown of constitutional government, and a return to a
but slightly disguised absolutism.
The one thing that saved the system from total shipwreck was the
antagonisms that existed, not only between the Germans and the majority
opposed to them, but also between the various races of which that
majority was composed. These antagonisms were sedulously fomented by
the government itself. It is one of the worst sins of the Hapsburgs
that, far from acting as peacemakers or even as impartial arbiters
between their discordant races, they deliberately and systematically
strove to aggravate national animosities and to fan the flames of
discord, hoping to be able to play off one race against another in the
authentic Turkish fashion, and seeming to imagine that Austria could
subsist through internal dissensions, just as Poland was once thought
to subsist through her anarchy. The Emperor Francis I congratulated
himself that his peoples were aliens to each other and detested one
another: each race could therefore be used as a jailer for some other
race. “From their antipathies springs order,” he declared, “and from
their mutual hatred the general peace.”[52] Francis Joseph might
adopt as an official slogan _Viribus unitis_, but his practice was
based much more upon the traditional maxim, _Divide et impera_. He
and his agents are very largely responsible for that violent series
of nationality conflicts which have raged in almost every province of
the monarchy--that _bellum omnium contra omnes_, which has disgraced
and poisoned the political life of Austria and paved the way for her
complete disruption.
Out of these discords grew the World War, as a result of Austria’s
effort to crush the most dangerous of the nationalist movements
threatening her from within by striking at its outside source. But
this War, which was to have saved her, turned out to be her ruin, not
only by involving her in military disasters, but even more, perhaps,
by accelerating her internal decomposition. Far from reinvigorating
the monarchy by drawing all its races together in a great outburst of
patriotism and a great common effort--as Teuton propagandists used
to tell us that it had done--the War had just the contrary effect.
The indignation of so many Hapsburg races at being forced to fight
for a cause of which they disapproved; the attempt of the authorities
to stifle this discontent by imprisoning, shooting, or hanging tens
of thousands of people; the many signs that the Austrian Germans,
intoxicated with enthusiasm for Prussia, were yearning to apply
Prussian methods to their old domestic enemies and to make _tabula
rasa_ of those inferior peoples who, as a German writer put it, were
“only a burden upon history,” and could “serve only as mortar for a
nobler race”; the consciousness that in case of a victory for the
Central Powers Austria would emerge bound hand and foot to the chariot
of Germany and the anti-German races were doomed; finally, and not
least, the psychological effects of war-weariness and economic misery,
which have more or less shattered empires better knit together than
this one--all these things combined to raise to a white heat the
discontent of the majority of the Hapsburg races and to make them
resolve that they would stand this Austrian nightmare no longer, if the
Allies would only hold out to them a helping hand.
The Allies had certainly had little serious intention of disrupting
Austria, at the beginning or throughout the greater part of the War.
The traditional belief that Austria was a “European necessity,” the
illusion that she could serve as a bulwark against the expansion of
Germany towards the southeast or of Russia towards the Adriatic, the
hope that she might be detached from Germany and persuaded to make a
separate peace, the fear that the disappearance of the monarchy would
lead only to the ‘Balkanization’ of Central Europe and to chaos worse
confounded--such ideas seem to have predominated at London, Paris, and
perhaps Washington, even down to the last year of the War. As late as
January 8, 1918, President Wilson, in formulating the Fourteen Points,
still disclaimed the thought of impairing the integrity of Austria, and
asked for her subject races nothing more than autonomy.
But in the spring and summer of 1918 a great change came over Allied
policy with respect to the Austrian question. It would be difficult
to say how far this change was due to a growing realization on the
part of the Allies of the essential justice of the claims of the
Austrian subject races; or to the failure of all hopes of inducing
Austria to make a separate peace; or to the very clever diplomacy
of the Czecho-Slovaks and the obligations under which the latter
had placed the Allies by their services in Siberia and Russia. I am
inclined to think, however, that the change was caused in very large
part by the gradually maturing conviction that, to use Mr. Henderson’s
phrase, ‘Germany, if she had not yet conquered her enemies, had
at least conquered her allies’;[53] that Austria’s independence,
gravely and progressively impaired ever since the formation of her
alliance with Berlin in 1879, had now become definitely a thing of
the past, so that if she continued to exist at all, it would be only
as a satellite and tool of Germany, a German bridge towards the Near
East, the gangway of Mitteleuropa. Certain declarations made from the
highest quarters in Austria in July, 1918, after a meeting of the
two Kaisers--declarations announcing the intention ‘to tighten the
bonds between the two empires in the sense of a durable fellowship
in time of peace,’ confirmed the fear of the formation of a Central
European _bloc_ with a population of 120,000,000 and an active army
of 12,000,000 men. If this scheme were realized, Germany would have
doubled her power and won the War, even though she restored all the
territory she had occupied. From all this the conclusion seemed plain
that the only way for the Allies to defeat the Pan-Germanist plan
and place a permanent check upon Prussian militarism was to disrupt
Austria-Hungary and to form a series of national states along the
eastern frontier of Germany. It was now the destruction of Austria that
was a European necessity. Hence, in the summer of 1918, the Allied
governments, one after the other, formally approved the claims of
the two chief malcontent Hapsburg races, the Czecho-Slovaks and the
Yugo-Slavs, to unity and independence, and the Czecho-Slovaks were even
recognized as an allied and belligerent nation. These declarations,
accompanied or soon followed as they were by the sudden change in the
military situation, the rapid and unbroken series of Allied victories
on every front, and the collapse of Bulgaria, sealed the fate of
Austria-Hungary.
The dynasty did, indeed, experience a deathbed repentance. In that
black month of October, when he was daily throwing himself on President
Wilson’s doorstep, pleading his zeal for peace and his love for the
Fourteen Points, Kaiser Karl was also promising mountains and marvels
to his own subjects--the complete transformation of the monarchy into
a federation of national states. Such a system adopted even a few
years earlier might have saved Austria; but, as some one has remarked,
at the point at which matters had arrived, ‘one might as well have
talked of federating the Kilkenny cats.’[54] As the Czecho-Slovak
National Council declared, the Austrian races were no longer to be
duped by promises from Vienna, as to the value of which they had had a
sufficiently long experience. “What we demand the government at Vienna
will never give us, and couldn’t, if it wanted to.”[55]
In the course of thirty days the monarchy spontaneously split into
fragments. Almost without opposition from the authorities, almost
without a hand being raised in defence of the secular throne of
the Hapsburgs, power passed to the National Councils improvised by
the Czecho-Slovaks, the Yugo-Slavs, the Poles, the Ukrainians, the
Roumanians, the Magyars, and even the German Austrians. November 12-13
the last of the Hapsburgs abdicated. It was a dissolution without a
parallel, with the elemental force of a tidal wave.
When the Peace Conference met at Paris, it did not have to concern
itself with the old question whether the maintenance of Austria was
a European necessity. The Austrian peoples themselves had settled
that question, with irrefragable logic and unmistakable finality.
The territories of the defunct empire had already been partitioned,
in rough, provisional fashion and not without a few miniature wars,
among eight states corresponding to the eight principal nationalities
of that Empire. Five of these states were reckoned at Paris as
Allies--Italy, Roumania, Yugo-Slavia, Czecho-Slovakia, and Poland; two
of them--Hungary and German Austria--ranked as enemies; while as to the
Galician Ukrainians, Paris could never quite make up its mind whether
to count them as friends, enemies, or neutrals. The main problem before
the Conference, therefore, was, while making peace with the two enemy
states mentioned, to effect a definitive division of the Hapsburg
inheritance that would be just, practical, and conducive to the peace
and security of Europe.