What is Austria? A land that has a German head and a Slavonic body, in
which minorities rule and majorities are made to obey, the homeland of
a dozen races, every one of which is dissatisfied or jealous of some
other race.
There was a time when Austria had a mission to perform. That mission
was to serve as the advance guard of Germandom and as a Catholic
power. The first came to an end at Sedan when the Prussians assumed
leadership among Germans; the second terminated when Prussia gave
up its Kulturkampf against Rome. Now Austria is a country without a
mission, unless it be a mission to thwart the legitimate aspirations of
the Slavic races to national freedom.
For Austria to pursue further its policy of Teutonism is madness. If
the monarchy wishes to live it must be neither German, for there is
no room in Europe for two Germanic Empires side by side, nor wholly
Slavonic, like Russia. Her manifest destiny is, or rather has been,
to form a bridge between Germany and Russia, between the Slavs and
Teutons, between the west and the east. For Germany to go to war to
fight the Slavic peril is conceivable, even justifiable; but for
Austria, more than 60 per cent. Slavonic, to draw her sword to combat
Slavism sounds very much like the familiar story attributed by Plutarch
to Menenius Agrippa, according to which various members of one’s body
determined to down the stomach as the source of all their troubles. To
fight the Slavs Austria must fight herself.
Plainly the destinies of Austria and Germany are as unlike as are
divergent their ambitions. Germany aspired to be a world power, a
Weltmacht, and in pursuance of this dream she began to build up a
colonial empire. Austria possesses no colonies. The plan of her
statesmen (Aehrenthal) has been to establish a predominating Austrian
influence in the Balkans, where Germany’s interests, to quote the
well-known words of Bismarck, were not worth the bones of one
Pomeranian grenadier. Germany is a homogeneous country or nearly so;
Austria, on the contrary, is the most heterogeneous empire in Central
Europe.
Quite naturally the question suggests itself: what would arise on the
splendid ruins on the Danube should the proverbial ill-luck overtake
the Hapsburgs in the present war? With Galicia and Bukovina lost to
Russia, with Transylvania annexed to Rumania, with Trentino and Trieste
restored to Italy, and Bosnia and Herzegovina incorporated in Greater
Serbia--provided the partition went no further--what would be left of
the Hapsburg inheritance? Instead of a Greater Austria, that should
have included conquered Serbia, it is not improbable that the Hapsburgs
will return home from the Great War with a Small Austria--an Austria as
it began in 1527, when the Austrians, Bohemians, and Hungarians formed
a confederacy and elected a Hapsburg as their ruler.
Rieger, a Bohemian statesman, once declared in the Vienna Parliament,
that Austria will only live as long as the Slavs wish her to live and
no longer. Rieger’s famous utterance has acquired a new meaning in view
of the passing events in the Hapsburg Empire.