one would name: A. Chéradame, _L’Europe et la question d’Autriche au
seuil du XXᵉ siècle_. 4th ed. Paris, 1906. B. Auerbach, _Les Races et
les nationalités en Autriche-Hongrie_. 2d ed. Paris, 1917. H. Wickham
Steed, _The Habsburg Monarchy_. 2d ed. London, 1914. V. Gayda, _Modern
Austria: her racial and social problems_. New York, 1915. R. W.
Seton-Watson, _German, Slav, and Magyar_. London, 1916.
The British Foreign Office _Handbooks_ are a particularly convenient
source of information about the former Hapsburg monarchy and its
several constituent territories.
The history of the Czecho-Slovaks has been set forth for Western
readers principally in the masterly works of Professor Ernest Denis:
_La Fin de l’indépendance bohème_. 2 vols. Paris, 1890. _La Bohème
depuis la Montagne-Blanche._ 2 vols. Paris, 1903. _Les Slovaques._
Paris, 1917.
Valuable descriptions of the progress and situation of the
Czecho-Slovaks before the War are to be found in: W. S. Monroe,
_Bohemia and the Čechs_. Boston, 1910. T. Čapek (ed.), _Bohemia under
Hapsburg Misrule_. New York, 1915. Z. V. Tobolka (ed.), _Das böhmische
Volk_. Prague, 1916. H. Rauchberg, _Der nationale Besitzstand in
Böhmen_. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1905. (The most detailed and comprehensive
study of the nationality situation in Bohemia.)
Czecho-Slovak claims and aspirations are well formulated by Dr.
Edouard Beneš in _Bohemia’s Case for Independence_, London, 1917.
A detailed discussion of the new frontiers of German Austria (with a
map) is contained in the article by Dr. E. de Martonne, “Le traité
de St.-Germain et le démembrement de l’Autriche,” in _Annales
de géographie_, Jan. 15, 1920. See also the article on “The New
Boundaries of Austria” in _The Geographical Journal_, Nov., 1919, and
N. Krebs, “Deutsch-Oesterreich,” in _Geographische Zeitschrift_, vol.
xxv, 2-4 Hft.
The nationality situation in the regions most in dispute along
Austria’s new frontiers is best described, perhaps, in: A. Brunialti,
_Le nuove Provincie italiane, i: Il Trentino_. Turin, 1919. Montanus,
_Die nationale Entwicklung Tirols in den letzten Jahrzehnten_. Vienna,
1918. M. Pirker, “Die Zukunft Kärntens,” in the _Oesterreichische
Rundschau_, Dec. 1, 1918. J. Bunzel, “Das deutsche Westungarn,” in the
same number of the review just cited.
FOOTNOTES:
[50] J. Ellis Barker, “The Ultimate Fate of Austria-Hungary,” in _The
Nineteenth Century_, vol. 76 (2), p. 1006.
[51] H. Wickham Steed, _The Habsburg Monarchy_, p. 8.
[52] Cited in Chéradame, _L’Europe et la question d’Autriche_, p. 3.
[53] Cited in _The New Europe_, ii, pp. 30, 227.
[54] Francis Gribble in _The Nineteenth Century_, vol. 82 (2), pp.
883-884.
[55] Declaration of the Czecho-Slovak National Council, Sept. 19, 1918,
cited from the _Journal des Débats_, weekly edition, Oct. 25, 1918.
[56] The Hungarian census of 1910 claimed that the Magyars in the
lands of the Crown of St. Stephen numbered 10,050,575.
VII
HUNGARY AND THE ADRIATIC
Among all the states of Europe there are few which, from the
historical, the geographic, or the economic point of view, might
appear to have a better claim to existence than the thousand-year-old
kingdom of Hungary. Nature would seem to have marked out for political
unity this Pannonian basin, with its marvellously fertile plain of
the Alföld in the centre, surrounded on almost every side by mountain
walls and mineral-bearing highlands, with its roads and rivers all
converging towards the great Danube waterway, and its various parts
supplementing each other economically in so admirable a fashion. And
here, for once, history and geography did not seem to be working at
cross-purposes. Ever since the appearance of those gifted and valiant
Asiatics, the Magyars, in the Danubian plain in the ninth century,
the Pannonian basin has been united into a state which has shown a
remarkable vitality and durability, and whose frontiers, in spite of
some temporary fluctuations, have on the whole remained singularly
unchanged. If ancient status of possession, economic cohesion, and
what may be called the geographic fitness of things, were all the
factors that need be taken into account, the Hungarian state, in spite
of all its misdeeds, ought to have come through the World War intact.
Unfortunately for it, however, there is another factor which counts
for even more nowadays: the rights and aspirations of peoples.
Hungary has always been a polyglot state. The ruling race, the Magyars,
a nation of mixed Finno-Ugrian and Turko-Tartar stock, are a people of
the plains like their nomad ancestors. They are said to have a positive
aversion for living more than 600 feet above sea level. Hence, except
for a few scattered colonies, they have always remained quartered in
the plain of the Alföld, leaving the peripheral highlands and the once
swampy regions of the south to other races, whom they probably found
in the country at the time of their arrival and whose numbers have
certainly been increased by subsequent immigration. The Magyars are an
island of Asiatics surrounded by a sea of Latins and Slavs.
This ruling race is probably only a minority of the total population.
The earliest census of nationalities that we have and the only one that
was taken by relatively impartial officials, the census of 1851, makes
out the Magyars to be only 37% of the total population. It is true that
since the Magyars have taken the census into their own hands, their
percentage has risen steadily with each successive decade, until by
1900 they could claim a slight majority, and in 1910 they could boast
of 54%. In this latter year they were reckoned at just ten millions,
out of a population of eighteen millions for Hungary proper. Their
astonishing gains at the expense of the other races were officially
explained as due to “the peaceful propagation of Hungarian culture.”
Of that “peaceful propagation” I shall speak in a moment; but it
should be said here that scarcely any unprejudiced observer accepts
Hungarian racial statistics at their face value, and that a more
probable estimate would reduce the number of the Magyars to about eight
millions. This would make them a minority even in Hungary proper, and
much more so in the whole kingdom--i. e., with Croatia included--which
had a population of twenty-one millions in 1910.
Among the subject races, the Roumanians probably numbered three to
three and a half millions; the Slovaks two to three millions; the
Ruthenians half a million; the Serbs and Croats three millions; the
Germans two millions.
Like every other racially composite state, Hungary was placed
before the gravest of problems by the nineteenth century revival of
the submerged or long dormant nationalities. During the early and
middle part of that century, this problem could seldom be seriously
faced by the Magyars, for they were engaged in their own battle for
constitutional rights against the despotic and centralizing policy of
Vienna. In this struggle they displayed a vigor and a tenacity which
won for them both the sympathy and admiration of the world and a
reputation as liberals and democrats which they have since singularly
belied. As soon as their victory over the imperial government was
sealed by the Compromise of 1867, as soon as they found themselves
masters in Transleithania, the Magyars set to work to deny to the other
races of the kingdom all those liberties for which they themselves
had been fighting. The programme, henceforth pursued with the most
relentless rigor and the most unscrupulous methods, was to ‘assure the
unity of the Hungarian State’ by Magyarizing the subject races.
One must not be taken in by such mere stage decorations as the
Hungarian law of nationalities of 1868--in appearance the most generous
measure that could be devised, but never put into practice; nor by the
glib phrases of Magyar propagandists about the unparallelled freedom
that existed in Hungary, and the zeal with which the government
fostered the languages and culture of the non-Magyar races. Anything
more insolently defiant of the truth could scarcely be imagined. What
has really gone on in Hungary in the past fifty years--what “the
peaceful propagation of Magyar culture” meant--is something not easy
to condense into a few words. In the briefest summary, however, it
includes:
The exclusion of the non-Magyar languages from all state schools, the
courts of law, administrative intercourse, and every other kind of
official use;
Scandalous violation of the rights of freedom of person, speech,
meeting, and association;
Systematic and merciless persecution of every manifestation of
non-Magyar national sentiment;
An exaggerated irritability or arrogance of power, which has led
Magyar authorities to impose sentences totalling twenty-nine years
of imprisonment on a few petitioners who ventured to complain to the
Emperor-King; to expel schoolboys or seminarians merely for speaking
Roumanian or Slovak in the streets; or to imprison a nursemaid for
“conspiring against the state” by allowing a three-year-old child to
wear a bow with the Roumanian colors;
The virtual exclusion of non-Magyars from public office;
A parliamentary franchise narrow and complicated beyond description,
and so administered as regularly to assure to the Magyar minority all
but about 10 of the 413 seats in Parliament, so that the other races
were virtually disfranchised;
An unrivalled system of gerrymandering;
Parliamentary elections stained with every form of outrage, fraud, and
illegality, with coercion so freely employed that the government itself
boasted that at the last elections it had used _only_ 194 battalions of
infantry and 114 squadrons of cavalry, and it has often been said that
Hungarian elections resembled nothing so much as a civil war.
Such are some of the features of what may fairly be called the most
odious system of racial oppression known to modern Europe.
It is, of course, true that this system was the work of the ruling
oligarchy--a class which showed itself averse to democratic progress in
any form, and which also chastised the Magyar proletariat with whips,
even if it reserved its scorpions for the non-Magyars. But that made
little practical difference. The cardinal fact was that after standing
this sort of thing for fifty years, the subject peoples had come to
execrate the very name of Magyar. If a chance for liberation presented
itself, then, as some one has said, not even an angel from heaven could
have dissuaded them from seizing it.
Hence, during the general débâcle of the Quadruple Alliance in
October-November, 1918, Hungary disintegrated almost as spontaneously
and easily as Austria. It was in vain that the new republican
government of Count Károlyi fought frantically to save the territorial
integrity of the state by offering the non-Magyar peoples the widest
and most sweeping concessions, going even so far as to propose the
transformation of Hungary into a federation of national cantons on the
Swiss model. Nothing could make the seceders believe that the Magyar
could change his spots, or tempt them back into the cage.
Equally fruitless were the diplomatic or propagandist efforts to
persuade the Allied Powers that Hungary had suddenly become a new
creation, which could not be held responsible for the acknowledged sins
of its former rulers, and ought to be let off intact and scot-free. It
is scarcely necessary to enter here into the tangled and not quite
edifying relations between the Allies and the various governments
that have succeeded each other at Budapest: the genuinely democratic
and reforming government of Count Károlyi (October 1918--March 1919);
the Bolshevist interlude under Bela Kun (March--August); and the more
recent cabinets made up of more or less unsmirched remnants of the
old regime. These many changes of government have long delayed the
conclusion of peace with Hungary.[57] At all events, the treaty is now
apparently about to be signed; and it seems safe to assume that this
treaty will embody the territorial arrangements which were decided upon
at Paris in the spring of 1919 and which I shall now try briefly to
describe.
The northwestern highlands of Hungary, which are inhabited mainly
by Slovaks, are to be incorporated into Czecho-Slovakia. This state
touches the Danube at one point through the acquisition of Presburg,
the one-time capital of Hungary. Regrettable as it may be that so
historic a city should be lost to its old owners, it must be said that
Presburg was always rather German than Magyar in population; and that
it will furnish the land-locked republic of Czechoslovakia with a
much-needed port on the Danube and a means of commercial access to the
Balkans and the Black Sea.
The half-million Ruthenians who inhabit the mountains of northeastern
Hungary form a secluded and backward population which has hitherto
been supremely indifferent to the affairs of the outside world.
Alone among the races of Hungary, they had no national movement and
probably very little consciousness of nationality. Before the War
they had not a single school in which their language was taught, no
political newspaper of any kind, and scarcely any educated class.
What went on in these primitive and illiterate heads when the
gospel of self-determination penetrated to them, it is difficult
to guess. There are tales that within a very few weeks three
so-called National Assemblies were held, each claiming to represent
the ‘Carpatho-Ruthenian nation,’ and that these rival gatherings
‘self-determined’ their people, the one for union with Czecho-Slovakia,
the second for union with Hungary, and the third for union with their
kinsmen over the mountains in Galicia. At any rate, the Czechophile
tendency appears to have been the strongest. Going on the best evidence
it could get as to the preferences of this enigmatic population, the
Peace Conference has decided to attach them to Czecho-Slovakia, though
under the form of an autonomous province with generous rights of
self-government.
An ideal which has haunted the minds of Roumanian patriots for a
century, but which long seemed only an iridescent dream, has been
realized by the annexation to Roumania of Transylvania and the adjacent
zone of territory on the west. This aspiring kingdom has now very
nearly attained the frontiers of Trajan’s province of Dacia; and
everyone knows with what ardor the modern Roumanians claim that they
are descended from the Roman colonists sent out to Dacia in Trajan’s
time.
Contrary to what appears to be widely believed in this country,
Roumania’s acquisitions, with the possible exception of some small
contentious border districts, are based strictly upon the principle of
nationality. They serve to liberate over three millions of Roumanians,
who, among all the subject peoples of Hungary, were the race most hated
and oppressed by the Magyars, because of their numbers and the tenacity
of their patriotism. It is true that in eastern Transylvania several
large compact bodies of Magyars and Germans (900,000 of the former,
200,000 of the latter) are now transferred to Roumanian rule. But this
is unavoidable in the case of such isolated enclaves. The Germans
apparently do not object seriously; and as for the Magyars, it would be
impossible to leave them to Hungary without cutting off a far larger
number of Roumanians from their mother country. But of all the dramatic
changes of fortune in Eastern Europe, there is none more striking than
this one, which has put down the mighty Magyars from their seats, and
exalted the humble Roumanian, for eight hundred years a slave and an
outcast in his own country.
Roumania and Serbia have had an unpleasant controversy over the former
Hungarian territory called the Banat of Temesvár. Although this dispute
had very nearly brought those two Allied nations to blows, when it was
laid before the Peace Conference one distinguished prime minister burst
out in an audible whisper, “Where on earth is the Banat?” The Banat
lies just southwest of Transylvania. It is the quadrangle enclosed by
the Danube, the Theiss, the Máros, and the Transylvanian mountains.
It would take over-long to set forth the arguments, historical,
economic, geographic, ethnographic, and miscellaneous, with which the
two rivals regaled the Peace Conference. The Conference gave what was,
I think, a proof of its wisdom by repeating the judgment of Solomon
and dividing the disputed object between the litigants. Roumania
will receive the larger portion, most of which is overwhelmingly
Roumanian in population. Serbia acquires the very motley western
section, in which Serbs, Roumanians, Germans, and Magyars are terribly
intermingled, but in which the Serbs are at least a plurality: she
acquires a much-needed zone to protect Belgrade on the north and east,
and a number of towns which have played so great a rôle in Serbian
intellectual movements that they are considered the cradle of the Serb
national revival.
Farther to the westward lies the historic kingdom of Croatia, which
has for eight hundred years been bound to Hungary by ties which no
one could ever quite satisfactorily define, but which have often been
compared to the connection between England and Ireland. In the last
half century at least, Magyar-Croat relations have been even less
serene and amicable than Anglo-Irish ones. It goes almost without
saying that Croatia has now, of her own choice, united with Serbia and
the Slovene lands of Austria to form the new state popularly called
Yugo-Slavia.
That state has also received Bosnia and the Herzegovina, two provinces
which have been the Alsace-Lorraine of southeastern Europe ever since
their ill-fated occupation by Austria-Hungary in 1878. Thus the unity
of the Southern Slav race is very nearly completed.
Here again one is in the presence of another seemingly impossible dream
realized. Only ten years ago the Yugo-Slavs were living under six
different governments; and their deputies sat in fourteen different
parliaments, national or provincial. To attain their unity they have
had to disrupt two such empires as Austria-Hungary and Turkey.
Their present union into one state appears to be in every sense natural
and desirable. For Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes are blood-brothers,
three closely related branches of one family. Serbian and Croatian are
virtually the same language, although written, the one in Cyrillic, the
other in Latin, characters. If Slovene forms a rather different idiom
or even language, it is quite intelligible to the other two peoples.
The Southern Slavs, moreover, need to stand together. They occupy an
extremely important and a dangerous position; they are the guardians of
the gate that leads from Central Europe to Constantinople and Bagdad.
For three small peoples, placed in such a position, the motto that “in
union there is strength” cannot be too much emphasized.
It is, of course, true that the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes have
been politically separated throughout their history, as a result
of geography and such accidents as the Turkish, Magyar, and German
conquests. It is also true that they have developed considerable
differences in customs, grade of culture, and above all in religion.
The Serbs are Orthodox; the Croats and Slovenes Catholics; and there
are in Bosnia about 600,000 people who, though Serbs in race, are
Mohammedans. In this new ménage, made up indeed of brothers, but of
brothers who have all their lives been separated, it is only to be
expected that there will be a certain amount of domestic friction.
Nevertheless, I think the reunion of the family, which the Peace
Conference sanctioned and indeed worked for, is to be considered one of
the greatest gains effected by the World War.
To sum up, Hungary has lost more than half of her area and population.
She is reduced to the lowland region around Budapest, which has
always been the real home of the Magyar; she now has a population of
only eight to nine millions. It is to be regretted that she has lost
almost all her forests, her mineral wealth, her mountain sources of
water-power, her access to the sea.
[Illustration: TERRITORIES OF FORMER AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE]
Grievous as her fate may be, it can scarcely be called unmerited. Louis
Kossuth, the idol of the modern Magyars, answering a deputation sent
by the subject peoples in 1848 to plead for their national rights,
retorted, “No, let the sword decide between us.” And that remained the
attitude of this race, whose greatest patriot declared that ‘pride
would be their ruin.’ One cannot forget that this was a Magyar, as well
as a German, war; and that, as some one has said, ‘it was provoked by
a ring of Magyar politicians who had mortgaged their very souls to the
German cause in order to purchase a free hand for the oppression of the
non-Magyars.’[58]
But one would prefer to regard the settlement of the Hungarian problem
made at Paris not as a matter of retributive justice, but rather as
a sweeping application of the principle of nationality in the region
where that principle had been most trampled upon; as the only kind
of settlement in any way acceptable to those peoples who were in the
majority in the old Hungarian state; and therefore as the only plan
that could restore peace to this sorely distracted part of Europe.
I now pass to the questions concerning the territories on the Adriatic
coast, part of which formerly belonged to Austria and part to Hungary.
All of these territories are in dispute between Italy and Yugo-Slavia;
and their problems taken together make up the so-called Adriatic
question, which among all the problems that the Peace Conference
has had to face has shown itself the most delicate, difficult, and
interminable.
The Adriatic question relates mainly to the following five territories:
(1) The province or ‘crownland’ of Gorizia and Gradisca; (2) Trieste;
(3) Istria; (4) Dalmatia--these four all formerly parts of Austria;
and (5) Fiume, which belonged to Hungary. In addition some small bits
of the provinces of Carinthia and Carniola have been involved in the
dispute.
All these territories have a certain geographic unity. They form a
long, narrow fringe of coastland and islands, rigidly separated from
the Yugo-Slav hinterland by the successive chains of the Julian Alps,
the Karst, the Velebite Mountains, and the Dinaric Alps. These ranges,
which are the continuation of the Italian Alps, seem to detach the
eastern coast of the Adriatic from the world beyond the mountains and
to orient it towards the opposite western shore, of which it appears
to be, in many respects, only an extension. Indeed, in its climate,
its physical aspect, its vegetation; in the customs and mode of life
of its inhabitants; its seafaring and commercial activities, and its
age-long reliance upon communications by water rather than by land,
this littoral region resembles Italy much more than the Balkans.