more fully in the discussion of the individual problems that follows.
It is well known that Austria has been from the earliest times an open
inn to half the travelling nations of Europe and Asia; that her rich
plains are covered with ethnographic sediment deposited by a score of
successive invasions; that her mountains, which are generally not too
high and are pierced by plenty of easy passes, have served, not so
much as barriers separating races, but rather as rallying places for
weak or fugitive peoples seeking a refuge. Neither the Austrian Alps,
nor the Carpathians, nor the mountains of Bohemia form an ethnographic
frontier. Not one of the Austrian races is separated from its neighbors
by really clearly marked natural boundaries. The historic political
or administrative divisions are usually equally unsatisfactory as a
basis for marking off the several nationalities from each other. In
Hungary the county divisions are largely of very recent date, and
really represent gerrymanders, intended, not to separate races, but
to mingle them in such a way as to produce wherever possible a Magyar
majority. In Austria almost all the political divisions were very old,
and represented simply the débris of feudalism--the duchies, counties,
and margraviates that took shape in the Middle Ages, when political
formations had nothing to do with the principle of nationality. Of the
seventeen crownlands or provinces of Austria, fourteen contained two
or more races jumbled together. But however artificial and incongruous
these provincial divisions might seem when judged from the standpoint
of nationality, their very age or long continuance added another
element of difficulty: it opened the door to claims based on ‘historic
rights.’ Almost every one of the Hapsburg races had once had an
independent state of its own; and where was the race so forgetful of
its glorious past as not to claim the whole of every province which had
once belonged to it, no matter what the present ethnographic situation
might be? Indeed, since ‘ethnographic rights’ and ‘historic rights’
were so frequently in conflict, it was a common phenomenon that each
race should use the one argument or the other alternately, as suited
its purposes in each particular case, without much regard for that
consistency which Bismarck called “the virtue of small minds.” The
Czecho-Slovaks, for instance, claimed the whole of Bohemia, Moravia,
and Austrian Silesia by virtue of historic rights, regardless of
the strong German and Polish majorities in various parts of those
provinces. But when it came to the northwestern parts of Hungary,
where they had no historic claim, and the Magyars a very good one,
they shifted their argument completely to the basis of ethnographic
statistics. One need not, however, be very severe on our allies for
such inconsequences. There was “a deal of human nature” about most of
them; and they can scarcely be called more illogical than those critics
of the Peace settlement, whose hearts bleed for Ireland, Egypt, and
India, but who are inconsolable over the destruction of “venerable,
old Austria,” and who would much have preferred that the large Polish
majority in Upper Silesia, made up mainly of oppressed peasants and
workingmen, should have remained in the grip of the German minority of
feudal magnates and capitalists.
The decisions of the Paris Conference with regard to the liquidation
of Austria-Hungary are embodied in the Versailles treaty with
Germany of June 28, and the treaty with German Austria signed
at Saint-Germain-en-Laye on September 10. Untoward events have
delayed down to the present the conclusion of peace with Hungary.
The settlements hitherto made have not decided the fate of certain
extremely contentious territories, which have been placed at the
disposal of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers. Such is the
case with nearly all the Adriatic territories in dispute between Italy
and the Yugo-Slavs; and with various districts where plebiscites are to
be held: i. e., Teschen, Zips (Szepes), Arva, and Klagenfurt. At any
rate, with these exceptions, one can now discern pretty clearly the new
territorial settlement in the lands of the former Hapsburg monarchy.
The northwestern portions of the monarchy have organized
themselves, with the sanction of the Conference, as the republic
of Czecho-Slovakia. The Czechs and Slovaks are two brother races,
established, the one in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, the other in the
northwestern parts of Hungary. According to the census of 1910, the
Czechs numbered about six and one half millions; the Slovaks about two
millions. Allowing for the peculiar methods of Austrian and Hungarian
census-takers, one will hardly go far wrong in raising the total for
the two peoples combined to about ten millions. This would make them
the third, and perhaps even the second, largest nationality within the
borders of the late empire.[56]
The degree of relationship between the Czechs and Slovaks is one not
easy to define. According to the one view, which is popular especially
among the Czechs, the two peoples represent an original ethnic and
linguistic unit--a single race, which through historic accidents came
to be separated for centuries and to be considerably differentiated
in speech, customs, and character, although always preserving such
close linguistic and moral ties that they deserve to be considered as
one nation. According to the other view, which is advanced especially
by certain Slovak scholars and politicians, the Czechs and Slovaks,
in spite of all similarities and affinities, are, and always have
been, two distinct and independent branches of the Slavic family, two
nations, which have been drawn together chiefly by common misfortunes
and common dangers and which may therefore, perhaps, find it expedient
to contract a political union. At any rate, the following facts are
clear. For many centuries the two peoples have had a common literary
language; their writers and scholars long maintained that they were
a single nation; and if in the last century an effort has been made
to develop a distinct Slovak literary language, it has made no great
progress. The two idioms today are so closely alike that the two
peoples understand each other without difficulty. Politically, the
Czechs and Slovaks have been separated throughout most of their
history. After a brief period of union in the ninth and tenth
centuries, they fell apart definitively in 1031. The Czechs continued
to have a state of their own, the kingdom of Bohemia, while the Slovaks
fell under the sway of the Magyars for the next nine hundred years.
Nevertheless, geographic propinquity and linguistic, religious, and
intellectual ties sufficed to keep up a strong sense of fellowship
and interdependence between the two peoples. These feelings have been
strengthened in recent years by the conviction that in their struggles
against their respective tyrants--the Germans in the one case, the
Magyars in the other--they were fighting a common battle and had
better stand shoulder to shoulder. And when the World War brought an
almost undreamed-of chance for complete liberation, Czechs and Slovaks
were wise enough to see that the two peoples, so weak numerically and
placed in so exposed and dangerous a position, had little chance of
maintaining their independence unless they united. It is true that
there has been a certain amount of friction, and that a section of the
Slovaks have been protesting against what they call the absorption of
their people by the Czech intruders. But this was inevitable. As far
as one can learn, the majority of the Slovaks have accepted the union,
whether as a marriage of reason or of affection; and the combination
is so necessary, if both peoples are to escape being swallowed up
again by the Magyars and Germans, that one can only hope that it
will last. In sanctioning the idea for which the rather new name of
Czecho-Slovakia was adopted, the Peace Conference assuredly believed
that it was satisfying the wishes of both peoples, and confirming the
only arrangement capable of insuring peace in this peculiarly important
danger zone.
The main territorial problem that presented itself with respect to
Czecho-Slovakia was whether the new state should, in its western,
Cisleithan half, receive boundaries drawn to fit the ethnographic
frontier, or whether it should obtain its historic boundaries--the
boundaries of the old Czech kingdom, which included the whole of the
provinces of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia.
The problem was a grave one. The Germans formed 37% of the population
of Bohemia; 28% in Moravia; 44% in Silesia. The three provinces
contained a total of three and one half million Germans according
to the last census. What was worse, these Germans are very largely
gathered in compact masses, in a zone which wellnigh encircles the
Czech-speaking territory, and which, on its outer side, was everywhere
contiguous with Germany or German Austria. It would have been difficult
to form this rather narrow ring of territory into an independent
republic of German Bohemia, as some of its leading politicians
demanded. Such a state would have been a politico-geographical
monstrosity. But the peripheral territories might have been lopped off
and handed over, in part to Germany, in part to German Austria, as the
principle of nationality might seem to require. Moreover, it could not
be forgotten that the Czechs and Germans of Bohemia were separated by
centuries of struggles and animosities. Nowhere else in Austria had
there been so bitter a conflict of nationalities in recent decades. In
the mixed districts every village, one might almost say every house
and every yard of ground, had been fought over. It had come to the
point where Czechs and Germans could scarcely be brought to work in
the same factory; where a small town might have to have two railroad
stations--one for each race; where the propagandists of the rival
nationalities competed in proselytizing even the inmates of the insane
asylums. For the past ten years the Provincial Diet of Bohemia had been
practically closed because of the violence of the race feud. Under such
circumstances, could one think of including three and one half million
Germans in the new Czech state?
Not without hesitation, the Peace Conference decided to preserve the
historic frontiers of the old kingdom of Bohemia. That decision has
occasioned much criticism; and indeed, among the decisions of the
Conference, there is scarcely any other instance where so large a
number of people have been placed under the sovereignty of another
race. Nevertheless, I think that there is much justification for this
settlement.
First and foremost, it should be observed that a strictly ethnographic
frontier would have given an almost impossible and fatal configuration
to Czecho-Slovakia. Even as it is now constructed, this state presents
a somewhat fantastic appearance on the map. It looks like a tadpole.
It is a narrow couloir about 600 miles in length, but in its eastern
districts hardly 60 miles wide; and in Moravia, the province which
forms the link between Bohemia and Slovakia, it is only 100 miles
across. Now, if the frontier had been drawn on the ethnographic basis,
these defects would have been aggravated in very dangerous fashion.
Prague, the capital, would have been brought within about 30 miles of
the German frontier. The Moravian link would have been little more than
50 miles wide. The state would have been constricted in the middle
until it had much the shape of an hour glass. Czecho-Slovakia occupies
a very perilous position. It is a wedge thrust into the side of
Germany. For a thousand years the Czechs have been engaged chiefly in
beating off the German onslaughts, and it is to be feared that in the
future they will not be free from the same danger. Surrounded as they
are on three sides by Germany and German Austria, they would, indeed,
be in the gravest peril if, in case of a conflict, their enemies needed
only to join hands across a gap 50 miles wide in order to cut the
Czecho-Slovak state in two. If this state was to be created at all,
it had to be created in a shape that would give it some guarantees of
viability.
In the second place, if there are any cases where ‘historic rights’
deserve to be respected, this is probably one. The Czechs were the
first of the two races to settle the country. It was they who founded
and maintained the kingdom of Bohemia, which had so glorious a history
in the Middle Ages and down to the time when it succumbed to Hapsburg
despotism in the seventeenth century. Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia
were the three constituent parts of this realm; together they made up
‘the lands of the Crown of St. Wenceslaus’; and down to the beginning
of the nineteenth century even the Hapsburgs admitted that they owed
their sovereign rights over these lands solely to their position as
kings of Bohemia. If in the nineteenth century the effort was made to
sweep away all vestiges of that kingdom and to merge it in the Austrian
empire, the Czechs steadily refused to recognize these changes. They
insisted that the kingdom of Bohemia still existed as a distinct
entity, legally bound to the other Hapsburg lands only by the person
of the common ruler; and they have fought for this principle and for
that of the integrity and indissolubility of their realm with such
tenacity that these ideas have become veritable dogmas in their minds.
In sanctioning a Czech state including the whole of Bohemia and Moravia
and most of Austrian Silesia, the Conference is not setting up a new
and artificial creation: it is merely renewing and confirming in its
old territorial limits a state which existed for centuries and which
_de jure_, perhaps, has never ceased to exist.
The German populations in this state are in the main descended from
settlers who were brought in by the kings of Bohemia in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries to clear and colonize the forests and waste
lands, which then formed a girdle around the borders of the kingdom.
These people voluntarily established themselves in a Czech land,
and their descendants have always been subjects of the Czech state,
save possibly during the last century or so when it is a contentious
question whether a Czech state existed. At any rate, these Germans have
never, since their immigration, belonged to Germany. And it may perhaps
be doubted whether the presence of this German fringe is a sufficient
reason for dismembering so ancient a state or a country so clearly
marked out by nature to be a unit.
For Bohemia (the territory chiefly in question) has an extraordinary
physical unity--greater than is possessed by any other country in
Central Europe. This appears in its unusual river system, with its
radial convergence of all the water courses towards the centre of the
country; and not less in the mountain walls which guard the four sides
of this natural citadel, especially the sides turned towards Germany.
Were the political boundary to be removed from these mountains and
carried down into the plain where the ethnographic frontier lies,
this would mean exchanging a boundary that is excellent alike from the
geographic, the economic, and the strategic standpoint for one that is
quite the reverse.
Finally, it may be said that German-speaking Bohemia would suffer if
cut off from the rest of the country. It is one of the most highly
industrialized territories of Central Europe, the chief manufacturing
centre of the old Austrian empire; and as such it has always been
dependent upon the Czech agricultural region for its food supply and,
in large part, its laborers. Moreover, it needs the markets which
Czecho-Slovakia can furnish it at home or can open up to it in the
southeast. The natural economic ties are so strong that not a few
German Bohemians have, since the Armistice, publicly declared that
their future can lie only in union with the Czecho-Slovak state, and
that union with Germany would mean ruin for them. And from the Czech
point of view, it is clear that the new state would have entered on its
career with an almost fatal handicap, had it been deprived of its chief
industrial districts and its main supplies of coal and other minerals.
Such were the reasons that led the Conference to depart rather widely
in this case from its usual principles of boundary-making. The
settlement seems to have been accepted by the parties most concerned
without serious trouble and with far less friction than might have been
expected. While some mistakes may have been made at the start, the
Czechs have in general facilitated the transition by treating their
old enemies in that generous, tactful, and sensible spirit which they
have shown in most other matters, and which enables one to form very
favorable auguries as to the future of their young republic.
Leaving the boundary questions of Slovakia to be considered in
connection with Hungarian problems, we now pass on to German Austria.
* * * * *
It was the German-speaking provinces of the Eastern Alps, with their
centre at Vienna, which formed the cradle or nucleus of the Austrian
monarchy. It was there that the house of Hapsburg began its rise in
1276. And it is to this small mountain territory that the once proud
name of Austria is again restricted. The new republic inherits only
about one-fourth of the area of the old Austrian or Cisleithan half of
the late empire. It is supposed to have a population of about six and a
half millions, whereas Austria had twenty-eight and a half millions in
1910. In shape it is almost as elongated, as thin about the waist, as
Czecho-Slovakia. It looks like an inverted pistol with the point aimed
at Switzerland.
The making of the new Austrian frontiers involved several
vexatious problems. On the north, indeed, it was resolved without
much controversy to accept as the frontier between Austria and
Czecho-Slovakia the historic boundary between Bohemia and Moravia
on the one side, and the provinces of Upper and Lower Austria on the
other. Only two slight deviations were made, both at the expense of
Austria, in order to avoid cutting important railway connections.
It was the southern boundary that occasioned difficulties. As
between the Austro-Germans and the Slovenes, who were to be united
to the Yugoslav state, the effort was made to keep strictly to the
ethnographic frontier. But this was not easy in so mountainous a
region, where racial frontiers may take no account of geography, but
political boundary makers cannot afford to do so.
The worst problem was the basin of Klagenfurt. Here the narrow, encased
valley of the Drave widens out into a long, fertile corridor, which is
again closed at the lower end and which obviously ought to be treated
as a political unit. Unfortunately the southern side of the valley is
Slovene in population and the northern side German, and in between
lies the city of Klagenfurt--with its 29,000 people a great metropolis
for that region--which is hotly disputed. The Austrian census shows
this city to have a German majority; but the Yugo-Slavs claim that it
was Slovene fifty years ago and would be now, were it not for certain
tricks played upon them by the Austrian government. Klagenfurt last
year enjoyed much the same painful notoriety as Fiume, Danzig, or
the Saar. I know not how many unhappy Allied Commissioners were sent
down there to investigate, report, delimit provisional boundaries,
or to restrain the German or Yugo-Slav rifles, which kept going off
of themselves. Finally, the Conference decided to refer the matter to
a plebiscite. By an arrangement which may, perhaps, be said to favor
the Yugo-Slavs, the Klagenfurt basin is divided into two zones. In the
first and larger zone, the more contested one, and indeed the only
one in which there may be a Slovene majority, the vote is to be taken
within three months after the Peace Treaty with Austria goes into
force. If the outcome in this zone favors Austria, she will keep both
zones without further formalities. If the vote favors Yugo-Slavia, the
plebiscite will then be held in three weeks in the second zone, which
is pretty purely German, but which is geographically so situated that
it could not easily be separated from the first zone.
If this arrangement has provoked much dissatisfaction in Austria, that
has been even more the case over the drawing of the new Austro-Italian
frontier in the Tyrol.
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.