AUSTRIA-HUNGARY AND THE SOUTHERN SLAVS
"For a century past attempts have been made to solve the Eastern Question.
On the day when it appears to have been solved Europe will inevitably be
confronted by the Austrian Question."--ALBERT SOREL (1902).
In April 1909, a week after the international crisis evoked by Austria's
annexation of Bosnia had come to an end, I paid my first visit to Cetinje,
the tiny mountain-capital of Montenegro, and was assured by the Premier,
Dr. Tomanovi, that the conflict had merely been postponed, not averted--a
fact which even then was obvious enough. "But remember," he said, "it is
a question of _Aut aut_ (either, or)--either Serbia and Montenegro or
Austria-Hungary. One or other has got to go, and you may rest assured that
in four, or at most five, years from now there will be a European war over
this very question." At the time I merely regarded his prophecy as a proof
of Serb megalomania, but it has been literally fulfilled.
In 1908-1909 Austria-Hungary, with the aid of her German ally, enforced
her wishes in respect of Bosnia upon a reluctant Europe; but instead of
following up this success by a determined effort to solve the Southern Slav
question on an Austrian basis, she allowed the confusion to grow yearly
worse confounded, and gradually created an intolerable situation from
which a peaceful exit was well-nigh impossible. The actual event which
precipitated the struggle, the event from which the diplomatic contest of
last July, and thus the great war, first proceeded, was the assassination
of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo on June 28 and
the consequent acute friction between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. But the
murder, as will be shown later, was merely made the pretext for Austria's
declaration of war. The real causes lie far deeper, and can only be
properly understood on the basis of an historical survey.
My apology for inflicting so many unfamiliar details upon the reader is
that the key to the whole situation lies in Austria-Hungary, and that upon
the fate of its provinces and races in this war depends to a very great
extent the question whether the new Europe which is to issue from this
fiery ordeal is to be better than the old Europe which is crumbling in
ruins before our eyes. For the moment a thick fog of war obscures this
point of view; but the time will assuredly come when it will emerge in its
true perspective.
In recent years it had become a cheap journalistic commonplace to refer to
the coming "inevitable" struggle between Teuton and Slav, and the present
war is no doubt widely regarded as proving the correctness of this theory,
despite the fact that the two chief groups of Teutons are ranged on
opposite sides, and that the Slavs enjoy the active support of Celts and
Latins also. That such a struggle has come, is in the last resort due to
the false conceptions of Nationality which underly the policy of the two
central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. The freedom from foreign
oppression which the Germans so nobly vindicated against Napoleon has not
been extended to their own subject races, the Poles, Danes, and Lorrainers;
and recent years have seen the accentuation of a conflict the germs
of which may be detected as far back as the fatal crime of the Polish
Partition in the eighteenth century. The policy of Germanisation in Austria
has been gradually undermined by causes which it would take too long to
enumerate, but its sting has survived in the maintenance of a foreign
policy which treats 26,000,000 Slavs as a mere _annexe_ of militant
Germanism and as "gun-fodder" for the designs of Berlin; while in Hungary
the parallel policy of Magyarisation has increased in violence from year
to year, poisoning the wells of public opinion, creating a gulf of hatred
between the Magyars and their subject races (the Slovaks, Roumanians,
Croats, Serbs, etc.), and rendering cordial relations with the neighbouring
Balkan States impossible. Nor is it a mere accident that official Germany
and official Hungary should have pursued an actively Turcophil policy; for
the same tendencies have been noticeable in Turkey, though naturally in a
somewhat cruder form than farther west. Just as the Young Turk policy
of Turkification rendered a war between Turkey and the Balkan States
inevitable, so the policy of Magyarisation pursued by two generations of
Hungarian statesmen sowed the seeds of war between Austria and the Southern
Slavs. In the former case it was possible to isolate the conflict, in the
latter it has involved the greater part of Europe in a common disaster.
The struggle centres round the Austro-Serbian dispute. Let us then attempt
a brief survey of the two countries.
§1. _Austria and the Habsburgs_.--Let us begin with Austria-Hungary. In
this country many misconceptions prevail regarding Austria-Hungary; nor is
this surprising, for it is unique among States, and whether we regard it
from a political, a constitutional, a racial, or a social point of view,
the issues are equally complicated and difficult to sum up. With the aid
of a good gazetteer it is easy enough to elicit the facts that the
Austria-Hungary of to-day is a state of fifty-two million inhabitants,
divided into three component parts: _(a)_ the Empire of Austria, _(b)_ the
Kingdom of Hungary, each with subdivisions which will be referred to later,
and _(c)_ the annexed provinces of Bosnia-Herzegovina, jointly administered
by the two Governments. But this bald fact is meaningless except in
connection with the historical genesis of the Habsburg State.
[Illustration: AUSTRIA-HUNGARY; PHYSICAL]
Austria--_Oesterreich_--is the ancient Eastmark or frontier province, the
outpost of Carlovingian power against the tribes of the east, then of
the mediaeval German Empire against Slav and Magyar. Under the House of
Habsburg, which first rose to greatness on the ruins of a Greater Bohemia,
Austria grew steadily stronger as a distinct unit. Two famous mottoes sum
up the policy of that dynasty in the earlier centuries of its existence.
_Austriae est Imperare Orbi Universo_ (Austria's it is to Rule the
Universe) ran the device of that canny Frederick III., who, amid much
adversity, laid the plans which prompted an equally striking epigram about
his son and successor Maximilian, the "Last of the Knights"--_Bella gerant
alii, tu, felix Austria, nube_ (Let others wage war; do thou marry, O
fortunate Austria!). There were three great stages in Habsburg marriage
policy. In 1479 Maximilian married the heiress of Charles the Bold, thus
acquiring the priceless dowry of the Low Countries (what are now Belgium
and Holland). In 1506 his son Philip added the crown of Spain and the
Indies by his marriage with the heiress of Ferdinand and Isabella. In
1526, when the battle of Mohács placed Hungary at the mercy of the Turks,
Maximilian's grandson Ferdinand, in his wife's name, united Bohemia,
Hungary, and Croatia with the Austrian duchies.
Henceforth for over two centuries Austria and Habsburg became the bulwark
of Christendom against the Turks; though delayed by wars of religion and by
the excesses of religious bigotry, they yet never lost sight of the final
goal. Twice--at the beginning and at the end of this period, in 1527 and
1683--the Turks were before the very walls of Vienna, but the second of
these occasions represents their final effort. In the closing years of the
seventeenth and the first two decades of the eighteenth centuries the tide
finally rolled back against them. Foremost among the victors stands out the
great name of Prince Eugene, comrade-in-arms of our own Marlborough, whose
song, "Prinz Eugen, der edle Ritter" (Prince Eugene, the noble Knight),
has been sung in July and August 1914 on the streets of Vienna, just as
"Marlbrook s'en va-t-en guerre" might be sung by our Belgian allies. The
peace of 1718 represents Habsburg's farthest advance southwards; Belgrade
and half of present-day Serbia owned allegiance to Vienna. Then came the
check of 1739, when these conquests were restored to the Sultan. Due merely
to incompetent generals, it need not have been permanent, had not Frederick
the Great created a diversion from the north. By the time that the War of
Austrian Succession and the Seven Years' War were over, that expansion
southwards which had seemed so certain was irrevocably postponed. The
organisation of fresh "Military Frontiers," the colonisation of waste lands
in South Hungary--all was admirable so far as it went, but was already a
defensive rather than an offensive measure. Meanwhile a formidable rival
appeared in the shape of the Russian colossus, and the history of two
centuries is dominated by Austro-Russian rivalry in the Balkans. Here
we are confronted by the first of those lost opportunities in which the
history of modern Austria is unhappily so rich.
During the eighteenth century Austria became, as it were, the chief home
of bureaucratic government, first under Maria Theresa, one of the greatest
women-sovereigns, then under her son Joseph II. A series of "enlightened
experiments" in government, typical of the age of Voltaire and of
Frederick, and honestly conducted _for_ the people, though never _by_ the
people, ended as such experiments are apt to end, in failure. The most that
can be said is that the bureaucratic machine had become more firmly fixed
in the groove which it was henceforth to occupy.
The failure of Joseph II. was above all due to his inability to recognise
the meaning of Nationality, to his attempt to apply Germanisation as the
one infallible remedy for all internal difficulties in his dominions. The
idea of Nationality, already gaining strength, obtained a fresh impetus
from the French Revolution. While in the west it sowed the seeds of United
Italy and United Germany, which the nineteenth century was to bring to
fruition, in the Balkans it stirred waters which had seemed dead for
centuries, and led to the uprising of the Serbs and Greeks, then of the
Roumanians, and finally a generation later of the Bulgarians. In the
Habsburg dominions the same movement revealed itself in the revival of
national feeling in Hungary, Bohemia, and Croatia, but nowhere more
strongly than in Hungary, where it was accompanied by a remarkable literary
revival and the appearance of a group of Magyar poets of real genius.
The Kingdom of Hungary, which from 1526 to 1687 had been partially under
Turkish rule, led a vegetable existence during the eighteenth century. This
lull was a necessary period of recuperation after exhausting wars.
The ancient Hungarian constitution, dating in its essentials from the
thirteenth century, but fallen on evil days during the Turkish era, now
came more and more out of abeyance. Its fundamental principles were
reaffirmed by the famous laws of Leopold II. (1790-92), and after a further
relapse due to the Napoleonic wars, a long series of constitutional and
linguistic reforms were introduced by successive parliaments between 1825
and 1848.
Without entering into a discussion of the Hungarian constitution, it is
well to point out one factor which lies at the root of all political and
constitutional development in Hungary and explains the Magyar outlook
for centuries past, even up to the present day. Till 1840 Latin was the
official language of the country, and in that Latin the term for the
political nation was _Populus_, which we would naturally translate as
people. But populus contrasted in Hungarian law with plebs, the _misera
plebs contribuens,_ that phrase of ominous meaning to describe the mass of
the oppressed and unenfranchised people, the populus being the nobles, a
caste which was relatively very wide, but none the less a caste, and which
enjoyed a monopoly of all political power. Till 1848 only the populus could
vote, only the plebs could pay taxes--a delightful application of the
principle, "Heads I win, tails you lose!" In 1848 the distinction was
broken down in theory, the franchise being extended beyond the privileged
class by the initiative of that class itself. But in effect the distinction
has survived to the present day in a veiled form. Political power, and,
above all, the parliamentary franchise and the county elective bodies,
continued to be a monopoly--henceforth a monopoly of the Magyar nobility,
_plus_ those classes whom they had assimilated and attached to their
cause, _against_ the other races, forming more than half the population of
Hungary. This point of populus and plebs may seem at first sight somewhat
pedantic and technical; but in reality it is the key which explains the
whole social structure of Hungary, even its economic and agrarian problems.
The period from the death of Joseph II. to the great revolutionary movement
of 1848 may be regarded, so far as eastern Europe is concerned, as a period
when nationality is simmering everywhere. It is a period of preparation for
the rise of national States--ushered in by the great crime of the Polish
Partition, to which so many modern evils may be traced, and closed by a
sudden explosion which shook Europe from Paris to Budapest, from Palermo to
Berlin. The first stage was of course the long Napoleonic war, during which
the seed was sown broadcast; the second, the era of reaction and political
exhaustion (1815-1848), when all that was best in Europe concentrated in
the Romantic movement in literature, art, and music.
For Austria this period was bound up with the name of Metternich, who
personified the old hide-bound methods of the bureaucracy, the diplomacy of
a past age, to which the nations were mere pawns on a chessboard. Under him
the "Police-State" assumed its most perfect form, a form not even surpassed
by Russia from 1881 to 1905.
Then came the year 1848, when the dams burst. The Hungarian constitution,
restored in its entirety, became for a time the watchword and inspirer
of the movement, while Austria for the first time received a serious
constitution. Unhappily the issue between Reaction and Progress was not
a clear one. The Magyars in Hungary unquestionably stood for historic
development and constitutional rights, but they also stood for racial
hegemony, for the forcible assimilation of all the other races, for a
unitary Magyar State instead of the old polyglot Hungary. They thus
drove all the other races to coalesce with the dynasty and the forces of
reaction. The result was a violent racial war, with all kinds of excesses.
Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Roumanians, Saxons, all fought against the Magyars,
and finally the scale was turned by the Russian troops who poured across
the Carpathians in the name of outraged autocracy.
There followed the inevitable reaction, which again can be best summed up
in two phrases--that of Prince Felix Schwarzenberg, "Austria will astonish
the world by her ingratitude," so strikingly fulfilled in the Crimean War,
when Austria left Russia in the lurch; and that of a Hungarian patriot,
"The other races have received as reward what we Magyars receive as
punishment." In short, the statesmen of Vienna, untaught by experience,
reverted to the old bureaucratic and absolutist _régime_.
For ten years (1849-1859) this endured--Clericalism rampant, financial
ruin, stagnation everywhere. Then Nationality burst its bonds once more.
The war with Napoleon III. ended in Austria's loss of Lombardy and the
creation of the Italian kingdom. Faced by the bankruptcy of the whole
political and financial system, Francis Joseph launched into a period of
constitutional experiment. Following the line of least resistance,
as throughout his long reign, he inclined now to federalism, now to
centralism, and he was still experimenting when the war of 1866 broke out.
For Austria this war was decisive, for its results were her final expulsion
both from Germany and from Italy, and the creation of that fatal Dual
System which has distorted her whole subsequent development.
Under the Ausgleich or Compromise of 1867 the Dual Monarchy is composed of
two equal and separate States, the Empire of Austria and the Kingdom of
Hungary, each possessing a distinct parliament and cabinet of its own, but
both sharing between them the three Joint Ministries of Foreign Affairs,
War, and Finance. The chiefs of these three offices are equally responsible
to both Delegations, which are committees of the two Parliaments, sitting
alternately in Vienna and Budapest, but acting quite independently of each
other.
This system really secured the political power in Austria and Hungary to
two races--the Germans and the Magyars, and they, as the strongest in each
country, bought off the two next strongest, the Poles and the Croats, by
the grant of autonomy to Galicia and Croatia. The remaining eight were not
considered at all. At first this ingenious device seemed to offer fair
prospects of success. But ere long--for reasons which would lead us too
far--the German hegemony broke down in Austria, and the whole balance was
disturbed. It gradually became clear that the system was only workable when
one scale was high in the air. The history of the past forty-seven years is
the history of the gradual decay of the Dual System. Austria has progressed
in many ways; her institutions have steadily grown freer, her political
sense has developed, universal suffrage has been introduced, racial
inequalities have been reduced though not abolished, industry, art, and
general culture have advanced steadily. But she has been continually
hampered by Hungary, where racial monopoly has grown worse and worse. The
Magyar Chauvinists attempted the impossible--the assimilation by seven
million people of twelve million others. Yet in spite of every imaginable
trick--a corrupt and oppressive administration, gross manipulation of the
franchise, press persecution, the suppression of schools and ruthless
restriction of every form of culture--the non-Magyar races are stronger
to-day than in 1867. And the result of the struggle has been in Hungary a
decay of political standards, a corruption of public life, such as fills
even the greatest optimists with despair.
§2. _Hungary and Magyar Misrule_.--Such an assertion may seem to run
counter to the common idea of Hungary as the home of liberty and the
vanguard of popular uprisings against despotism, and it is certainly
incompatible with the arrogant claim of Magyar Statesmen that "nowhere
in the world is there so much freedom as in Hungary." At the risk of
disturbing the proportion of this chapter, I propose to give a few classic
illustrations of Magyar methods, selected almost at random from an
overwhelming mass of damning evidence.
On paper Hungary possesses a most admirable and enlightened law
guaranteeing "the Equal Rights of Nationalities" (1868); in practice, it
has remained almost from the very first a dead letter. Let us take the
field of education. Every effort, legal and illegal, has been made to
Magyarise the educational system, with the result that in all the primary
and secondary schools under State control Magyar is the exclusive language
of instruction, while the number of denominational schools has been
steadily diminished and their sphere of action, as more favourable to the
non-Magyar races, materially restricted. Fifty years ago the Slovaks, who
even then numbered over two millions, possessed three gymnasia (middle
schools) which they had founded and maintained by their own exertions.
In 1875 all three were arbitrarily closed by orders of the Hungarian
Government, and since that date the unhappy Slovaks have not been allowed
a single secondary school in which their own language is taught, while the
number of their primary schools has been reduced from 1821 in 1869 to 440
in 1911. The deliberate aim is, of course, to prevent the growth of a
Slovak middle class. It is quite a common thing for schoolboys to be
persecuted or even dismissed for showing Slovak proclivities or even
talking their mother--tongue "ostentatiously" on the street. Only last year
a brilliant young Slovak student, known to me personally, was deprived by
the Magyar authorities of a scholarship in Oriental languages, for no
other reason than that he was "untrustworthy in a national sense"![1]
Such instances are even more frequent among the Roumanians of Hungary.
A specially notorious case occurred in March 1912 at Grosswardein, when
sixteen Roumanian theological students were expelled from the Catholic
seminary for the "demonstrative use" of their language, which was regarded
as offensive by their fellow-students and professors!
[Footnote 1: This document is in my possession.]
Linguistic restrictions are carried to outrageous lengths. There is not
a single inscription in any language save Magyar in any post office or
railway station throughout Hungary. Slovak medals and stamps, produced
in America and bearing such treasonable inscriptions as "For our Slovak
language" and "I am proud to be a Slovak," have been confiscated in
Hungary. Only Magyar inscriptions are tolerated on the tombstones of the
Budapest cemeteries. The erection of monuments to Roumanian or Slovak
patriots has more than once been prohibited, and the funds collected have
been arbitrarily seized and applied to Magyar purposes. National colours,
other than the Magyar, are strictly forbidden. Two years ago, at the
funeral of a Roumanian poet at Kronstadt (Transylvania) gendarmes pressed
up to the hearse and clipped off the colours from a wreath which had been
sent by the Society of Journalists in Bucarest. About the same time a nurse
was sent to prison because a child of three was found wearing a Roumanian
tricolor bow, and its parents were reprimanded and fined. Last July on the
very eve of war, fifteen theological students, returning to Bucarest from
an excursion into Transylvania, were arrested at the frontier by Hungarian
gendarmes, hauled by main force out of the train, sent back to Hermannstadt
and kept for days in gaol; their offence consisted in waving some Roumanian
tricolors from the train windows as they steamed out of the last station in
Hungary!
No law of association exists in Hungary, and the government uses its
arbitrary powers to prohibit or suppress even such harmless organisations
as temperance societies, choral unions, or women's leagues. Perhaps the
most notorious examples are the dissolution of the Slovak Academy in
1875 and of the Roumanian National Party's organisation in 1894; but the
treatment meted out to trades unions and working-class organisations, both
Magyar and non-Magyar, for years past, has been equally scandalous. The
right of assembly is no less precarious in a country where parliamentary
candidates are arrested or expelled from their constituencies, where
deputies are prevented from addressing their constituents, where an
electoral address is often treated as a penal offence.
As for Hungary's electoral system, the less said the better.
Gerrymandering, a narrow and complicated franchise, bribery and corruption
on a gigantic scale, the wholesale use of troops and gendarmes to prevent
opposition voters from reaching the polls, the cooking of electoral rolls,
illegal disqualifications, sham counts, official terrorism, and in many
cases actual bloodshed--such are but a few of the methods which preserve a
political monopoly in the hands of a corrupt and increasingly inefficient
racial oligarchy, in a country where the absence of the ballot places the
peasant peculiarly at the mercy of the authorities. Small wonder, then, if
the non-Magyar races of Hungary, who on a basis of population would have
had 198 deputies, never were allowed to elect more than 25, and if even
this scanty number was at the infamous elections of 1910 reduced by
terrorism and corruption to eight!
In judicial matters the situation is no less galling. Petitions are
not accepted in the courts, unless drawn up in Magyar, and the whole
proceedings are invariably conducted in the same language. The non-Magyar
"stands like an ox" before the courts of his native land, and a whole
series of provisions exists for his repression, notably the monstrous
paragraphs dealing with "action hostile to the State," with the "incitement
of one nationality against another" and with the "glorification of a
criminal action"--applied with rigorous severity to all political opponents
of Magyarisation but never to its advocates. Let me cite one classic
example of the latter. In 1898 a well-known Slovak editor was sentenced
to eight months' imprisonment for two articles severely criticising the
Magyarisation of place-names in Hungary. On his return from prison he
was met at the railway station of the little county town by a crowd of
admirers: songs were sung, a short speech of welcome was delivered and a
bouquet of flowers was presented. The sequel of this perfectly orderly
incident was that no fewer than twenty-four persons, including Mr. Hurban
the leading Slovak poet, were sentenced to terms of imprisonment varying
from fourteen days to six months. The three girls who had presented the
flowers were let off with a fine of £16.
Perhaps the reader will regard me as a very dangerous conspirator, when I
tell him that in June 1910 an old lady of seventy-three, the widow of a
high-school headmaster, was fined £4 because I had called at her house for
twenty minutes on election day without its being notified to the police,
and that in June 1914 an enquiry was instituted by the local authorities
against some Slovak friends who had entertained me to luncheon! And yet I
can honestly assert that I have never been guilty of any worse crime than
Captain Grose, of whom Burns warned my countrymen a hundred years ago in
the famous line:
A chiel's amang ye takin' notes!
The fabric of Magyar rule is far too rotten and corrupt to regard with
equanimity any extensive note-taking on the part of the outer world.
Whole books might be written to illustrate the contention that in matters
of education, administration, and justice, of association and assembly, of
the franchise and the press, the non-Magyar nationalities of Hungary have
long been the victims of a policy of repression which is without any
parallel in civilised Europe. It is this Magyar system, from which I have
lifted but a corner of the veil, that is one of the mainsprings of the
present war, and if there is to be a new and healthy Europe in the future,
this system must be swept away root, branch and stock. To such lengths has
national fanaticism driven the Magyars that in 1906 it was possible for an
ex-Premier of Hungary, speaking in open Parliament amid the applause of the
majority, to lay down the following axiom: "The legal State is the aim:
but with this question we can only concern ourselves when we have already
assured the national State.... Hungary's interests demand its erection on
the most extreme Chauvinist lines." Men who applaud such a sentiment
are worthy allies of those so-called statesmen who regard international
treaties as "a mere scrap of paper."
§3. _The Decay of the Dual System_.--The radical divergence of political
development in Austria and in Hungary, its paralysing effect upon the
foreign policy of the Monarchy as a whole, coupled with the growth
of national feeling among the minor nationalities and their steady
emancipation from the economic thraldom of the German and the Jew--all this
has slowly but surely undermined the Dual System and rendered its final
collapse inevitable. Indeed for some time past it has merely owed its
survival to the old age of the Emperor, who has a natural reluctance to
destroy his own creation. For some years it has been known that his heir,
Francis Ferdinand, was the advocate of far-reaching changes, which would
have taken the form of a compromise between a federalist and a centralist
system. His abrupt removal from the scene was secretly welcomed by all
those whose political and racial monopoly was bound up with the existing
_régime_.
German dominance in Austria, it should be added, meant a close alliance
with the German Empire; and every fresh effort of the subject races to
emancipate themselves from Germanising or Magyarising tendencies forged the
chains of the alliance closer and increased the dependence of the Magyar
oligarchy upon Berlin. As in mediaeval times, so in the twentieth century
Habsburg policy is explained by two famous Latin mottoes--_Viribus unitis_
("Union is strength") and _Divide et impera_ ("Divide and rule"). Between
these two watchwords Francis Joseph and his advisers have wavered for
sixty-five years.
What then are the forces which have held Austria-Hungary together under
Francis Joseph? First unquestionably comes the dynasty; for it would be
difficult to over-estimate the power exercised by the dynastic tradition on
the many races under Habsburg sway. Next comes the Joint Army; for there is
no finer body of men in Europe than the Austrian officers' corps, poorly
paid, hard-worked, but inspired to the last man with unbounded devotion to
the Imperial house, and to a large extent immune from that spirit of caste
which is the most offensive feature of the allied German army.[1] Hardly
less important are the Catholic Church, with its vast material resources
and its powerful influence on peasant, small tradesman and court alike,
and the bureaucracy, with its traditions of red tape, small-mindedness,
slowness of movement and genial _Gemütlichkeit_ ("easy-goingness"). It is
only _after_ these forces that we can fairly count the parliaments and
representative government. And yet there are no fewer than twenty-three
legislative bodies in the Monarchy--the two central parliaments of Vienna
and Budapest, entirely distinct from each other; the two Delegations; the
provincial Diets, seventeen in Austria, one in Croatia; and the Diet of
Bosnia, whose every legislative act requires the ratification of the Joint
Minister of Finance and of the Austrian and Hungarian Governments.
[Footnote 1: It is in no way a "preserve" of the aristocracy, being largely
recruited from the middle and even lower-middle class.]
Against all this there is one supremely disintegrating force--the principle
of Nationality. Only a map can make clear the racial complications of
the Dual Monarchy, and even the largest scale map fails to show how
inextricably the various races are interwoven in many districts of Hungary
or Bohemia. The following table offers at least a statistical survey:
(1) Racial-- Austria. Hungary. Bosnia.
Germans 9,950,266 2,037,435 ..
Czechs {6,435,983 .. ..
Slovaks { 1,967,970 ..
Poles 4,967,984 .. ..
Ruthenes 3,518,854 472,587 ..
Magyars (including
900,000 Jews) .. 10,050,575 ..
Croats } 783,334 1,833,162 {1,875,000
Serbs } 1,106,471 {
Slovenes 1,252,940 .. ..
Roumanians 275,422 2,949,032 ..
Italians 768,422 27,307 ..
Others .. 374,105 ..
(2) Religious--
Roman Catholic 22,530,000 10,888,138 451,686
Uniate Catholic 3,417,000 2,025,508 ..
Orthodox 660,000 2,987,163 856,158
Calvinist } 589,000 2,621,329 ..
Lutheran } 1,340,143 ..
Mohammedan .. .. 626,649
Jewish 1,314,000 932,458 ..
Minor Sects 56,000 91,748 ..
Total population 28,324,940 20,886,487 1,898,044
§4. _The Genesis of the Southern Slavs._--The foregoing survey of
tendencies in Austria-Hungary is utterly incomplete and inadequate, but it
may perhaps serve as a basis for further study. Let us now consider her
rival in the dispute which has led to the great war--Serbia.
Here, at the outset, it cannot be emphasised too strongly that those who
regard the problem merely as a dispute between the government of Vienna and
the government of Belgrade have not grasped even its elements. The Southern
Slav question goes far deeper and wider than that; it must be treated as a
whole, and of it Serbia is only a part. In any study of the Slavonic races
the first fact which emerges is that they fall naturally into two main
groups--the northern and the southern--divided by a solid wedge of three
non-Slavonic races, the German, the Magyar, and the Roumanian, stretching
from the Kiel Canal to the Black Sea. It is with the southern group that we
are concerned.
The Southern Slavs fall into four sections--the Slovenes, Croats, Serbs,
and Bulgars, who between them occupy the whole country from southern
Carinthia to central Thrace. The significance of the Bulgars will be dealt
with elsewhere, and of the Slovenes it will suffice for our present purpose
to say that they are a small and ancient race, of vigorous stock and
clerical leanings, whose true importance lies in their geographical
position and its latent possibilities for the future. The Croats and Serbs
occupy the border-line between West and East, between Rome and Byzantium,
between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Broadly speaking, every Croat is a
Catholic, every Serb an Orthodox. Broadly speaking again, the Croat
language is Serb written with Latin characters, the Serb language Croat
written in the Cyrilline alphabet.
Despite their common language, the two kindred races have never all been
united under a single ruler. From the ninth to the end of the eleventh
century the Duchy, then Kingdom, of Croatia was governed by native princes,
upon whose extinction it was conquered by Hungary. For eight centuries
Croatia has enjoyed an autonomous position under the Holy Crown of St.
Stephen; its scope has varied according to the political constellation,
but till 1912 its constant tradition had remained unbroken. Meanwhile the
Dalmatian coast towns remained a bone of contention between Venice and
Hungary; but the marble Lions on their battered walls are still the best
proof of the triumph of Italian culture within them. Ragusa alone resisted
both Venetians and Turks, and preserved herself inviolate as the home of
commerce and the muses, until her tiny Republic was destroyed by Napoleon
in 1808. The Kingdom of Serbia developed on more distinctively Slavonic
lines. During its great days in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
under the Nemanja dynasty it dominated the Balkan Peninsula, produced a
code of law which is unique in mediaeval records, developed a prosperous
commerce and mining industries, and seemed on the point of striking a new
note in architecture. Her greatest Tsar, Stephen Dushan, died mysteriously
of poison, when his hosts were already thundering at the gates of
Constantinople (1356). But the greatness of his empire did not survive him,
and only a generation later Serbian independence received its death-blow
on the fatal field of Kosovo--the Flodden of the Balkans, but an event
far direr in its consequences than Flodden was to Scotland. Bosnia and a
fragment of Serbia lingered on under more or less independent rulers till
the middle of the fifteenth century. Then the Turkish night replaced the
Turkish twilight. From 1463 to 1804 the national life of the Serbs lay
utterly crushed. In Serbia their nobility was literally wiped out, in
Bosnia it accepted Islam in order to save its lands. The relations of
conqueror and conquered are best characterised by the single fact that
a Christian who failed to dismount from his horse on meeting a Turk was
liable to be killed on the spot.
Throughout this period of utter gloom only two things served to keep alive
the Serb tradition--their splendid popular ballads, unequalled in Europe
for directness and imagination, save, perhaps, by the ballads of the
Anglo-Scottish Border; and the clergy of the Orthodox Church, poor ignorant
despised peasants like their flock, yet bravely keeping the national flame
burning. The one bright spot was the tiny mountain eyrie of Montenegro,
which stubbornly maintained its freedom under a long succession of
warrior-priests.
The Serb Patriarchate, which had long had its seat in Ipek, migrated to
Austria in 1690, at the special invitation of the Emperor Leopold I., and
has ever since been established (though the title of patriarch lapsed for a
time) at Karlowitz on the Danube. Large settlements of refugee Serbs from
Turkey followed their spiritual chief to Croatia, Slavonia and the southern
plains of Hungary between 1690 and 1740. The special privileges granted to
them by the emperor were, however, gradually undermined and revoked by the
Hungarian Estates. Meanwhile the "Military Frontiers" were extended on
essentially democratic lines: a land-tenure subject to military service
bred a hereditary race of soldiers and officers devoted to the Imperial
idea, and it has taken many long long years of bungling on the part of
Viennese and Magyar diplomacy to efface that devotion.
Thus the Habsburg dominions became the centre of culture for the Serbs,
whose literary revival came from Neusatz, Karlowitz and even Buda. It was
not only under Prince Eugene that they looked to the Habsburgs for aid.
Kara George, who led their first serious rising in 1804 more than once
offered himself to Vienna.
In the Balkans the Serbs were the first to revolt, and won their own
freedom, with less help than Greeks, Roumanians or Bulgarians, and under
far less favourable circumstances. Thus Serbia is essentially a self-made
man among States, built from the foundations upwards, and possessing no
aristocracy and hardly even a middle class. Her curse has been the rivalry
of two, or rather three native dynasties, the Karageorgevitch, the
Obrenovitch and the Petrovitch; and this rivalry has borne fruit in three
dastardly political crimes--the murder of the heroic Black George in 1817,
by order of his rival Milosh Obrenovitch; of Prince Michael, Serbia's
wisest ruler, by the adherents of George's son; and finally of King
Alexander and his wife in June 1903. The history of the Southern Slavs
for the last century has been a slow movement towards national unity,
overshadowed, sometimes hastened, sometimes paralysed, by the rivalry of
Austria and Russia for the hegemony of the Balkan Peninsula. Till 1875 the
influence of the two Powers alternated in Belgrade, and there was nothing
definite to suggest which influence would win, though of course Russia may
be said to have possessed an advantage in her position as the foremost
Orthodox power and as the greatest among the Slavonic brotherhood of races.
That year, however, brought a fresh rising of Bosnia and Herzegovina
against Turkish rule, and in defence of this purely Serbo-Croat province
public opinion in Serbia and Montenegro rose. Side by side the two little
principalities fought the Turks and risked their all upon the issue. The
provinces were to the last man friendly and welcomed their action. Then,
when the battle seemed won, Austria-Hungary at the Congress of Berlin
stepped in and occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina--with the active approval
of Disraeli and Salisbury. The inhabitants resisted stoutly, but were
overcome. Thus was realised the first stage upon the road of the Austrian
advance towards Salonica. Serbia received compensation at Nia, Pirot, and
Vranja; Montenegro acquired the open roadstead of Antivari and a scrap of
barren coast-line; but the hearts of both still clung to Bosnia.
Henceforth the friction between Vienna and Belgrade has been permanent,
though often latent. It was accentuated by the fact that King Milan was
little better than an Austrian agent, the most notorious example of this
being the ill-considered and ill-managed war with Bulgaria into which he
plunged Serbia at the instigation of the Ballplatz[1](1885). Afterwards, it
is true, Vienna intervened to rob the Bulgarians of the fruits of victory
and argued that Serbia was thus under her debt; but this crass application
of the principle of _divide et impera_ could not deceive any one. Milan was
a man of great ability, but vicious and corrupt. The ceaseless scandals
of his private life, the frequent political _coups d'etat_ in which
he indulged, tended to confirm the dislike of his subjects for the
Austrophilism with which he was identified. Alexander, his son and
successor, was even worse; indeed, it is not too much to say that he was
the most "impossible" monarch whom Europe has known since the days of the
Tsar Paul. His court was characterised by gross favouritism and arbitrary
revisions of the constitution; and his position became finally untenable
when he committed the fatal error of marrying Draga Mashin, a woman of no
position and notorious private character. Two incidents in her tragic story
remind us of similar scandals in English history--the fond delusion of Mary
Tudor and the legend of Mary of Modena's warming-pan. The last straw was
the design, widely attributed to her and the infatuated king, for securing
the succession to her brother, who had as little claim to the throne as
any other Serbian subject. On June 10, 1903, Alexander and Draga were
assassinated by a gang of Serbian officers, under circumstances of the
utmost brutality such as nothing can excuse. In the light of recent events,
however, it is important to note that both Austria and Russia knew of the
plot at least ten days before the murder and did nothing to stop it.[2]
On the day after the crime the _Fremdenblatt_, the organ of the
Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office, published a leading article couched in
terms of the utmost cynicism, and declaring that it mattered little to
Austria-Hungary which dynasty reigned in Serbia. The Serbian Government
might have been excused for enclosing a copy of this article in its reply
to the Austrian Note of July 23, 1914!
[Footnote 1: The Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office.]
[Footnote 2: In 1908 this was confirmed to me by a distinguished member of
the then Austrian Cabinet, since dead, who was certainly in a position to
know.]
The Obrenovitch dynasty was thus at an end. Its rival, the Karageorgevitch
dynasty, returned to power--naturally under a black cloud of European
disgust and suspicion. King Peter is not, however, as black as he has
sometimes been painted. He fought gallantly in 1870 as a French officer; as
a young man he translated Stuart Mill's _Essay on Liberty_ into Serb, and
for a generation he lived by preference in democratic Geneva and in Paris.
Under him Serbia has for the first time enjoyed real constitutional
government. Quietly, as occasion arose, the regicides were removed to the
background, the old methods of favouritism were steadily discouraged, and
it is not too much to say that an entirely new atmosphere has been created
in Belgrade since 1903. Among the younger politicians in Serbia, as in
other Slavonic countries, the moral influence of Professor Masaryk, the
great Czech philosopher and politician, has grown more and more marked.
The depth of Serb aspirations in Bosnia has two obvious grounds--on the one
hand, pure national sentiment of the best kind; on the other, the urgent
economic need for a seaboard, Serbia being the only inland country in
Europe save Switzerland, and not enjoying the latter's favoured position
in the immediate vicinity of great world-markets. Austria-Hungary, on her
part, set herself deliberately not merely to block this access to the sea,
but also to keep Serbia in complete economic dependence. Under the new
dynasty the little kingdom showed a keener desire to shake off its
vassalage and find new markets. The so-called "Pig War"--the breeding
of swine is Serbia's staple industry, and the founders of her two rival
dynasties were wealthy pig-breeders--proved an unexpected success, for new
trade outlets were found in Egypt and elsewhere. But the initial strain
hit every peasant in his pocket and thus greatly accentuated the feeling
against Austria-Hungary. At this stage came the Young Turk revolution and
its sequel, the annexation of Bosnia. To any impartial observer it had been
obvious from the first that those who dreamt of Austria-Hungary's voluntary
withdrawal from the two provinces were living in a fool's paradise. The
formal act of annexation merely set a seal to thirty years of effective
Austrian administration, during which the Sultan's rule had been confined
to the official celebration of his birthday. Educational and agrarian
problems had been neglected, popular discontent had smouldered, but at
least great material progress had been made. Roads, railways, public
buildings had been created out of nothing, capital had been sunk, a new
machine of government had been constructed. Austria had come to stay, and
Aehrenthal, in annexing the provinces, felt himself to be merely setting
the seal to a document which had been signed a generation earlier. He
had failed to reckon with the outcry which this technical breach of
international law evoked: like Bethmann-Hollweg, he had no blind faith in
"scraps of paper," and had no scruple in tearing up the Treaty of Berlin on
which the whole Balkan settlement had rested. Nowhere was the outburst of
feeling so violent as in Serbia and Montenegro, who had never ceased to
dream of the lost Serb provinces. For some months the two little States
challenged the accomplished fact, and seemed bent on staking their very
existence upon war with the great neighbouring Monarchy. Aehrenthal
remained unmoved by their cries of impotent fury and settled down to a
trial of strength with his rival Izvolsky, the Russian Foreign Minister,
who encouraged the sister Slavonic States in their resistance. At length
in March 1909 Germany stepped forward in "shining armour" to support her
Austrian ally, and Russia, to avoid European war, gave way and abandoned
the Serbs to their fate. Nothing was left but a humiliating submission:
the Serbian Government was obliged to address a Note to the Great Powers,
declaring that the annexation and internal condition of Bosnia did not in
any way concern her.[1]
[Footnote 1: This declaration was made the basis of the Austrian Note to
Serbia in July 1914.]
§5. _The Renaissance of Serbia._--From this diplomatic defeat dates the
renaissance of Serbia. It restored her to a sense of hard realities, and
taught her to substitute hard work for loud talk. So rough a challenge put
the national spirit on its mettle. The brief period between 1908 and 1912
worked a real transformation in Belgrade, which could not fail to impress
those who took the trouble to look beneath the surface. Nowhere was the
change more marked than in the Serbian army, from which the regicide
elements had been slowly but steadily eliminated. The two Balkan wars of
1912-1913 revealed Serbia to the outside world as a military power, notable
alike for the élan of its infantry, the high efficiency of its artillery,
the close camaraderie of officers and men. The first use made of her
victories over the Turks was the occupation of northern Albania, her only
possible outlet to the sea so long as Dalmatia remains in Austrian hands.
Austria-Hungary, who had only remained inactive because she had taken a
Turkish victory for granted, now intervened, and by the creation of an
artificial Albanian State vetoed Serbia's expansion to the Adriatic. The
Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Berchtold, short-sighted and indolent then
as now, failed to realise that the North Albanian harbours, for obvious
reasons of physical geography, could never be converted into naval bases,
save at a prohibitive cost, and that their possession by Serbia, so far
from being a menace to Austria, would involve the policing of a mountainous
tract of country, inhabited by a turbulent and hostile population. It ought
to have been obvious to him that the moment had arrived for tempting
the Serbs into the Austrian sphere of influence by the bait of generous
commercial concessions through Bosnia and Dalmatia. Several far-sighted
politicians in Austria urged this course upon him, and the Serbian Premier
actually approached Vienna with far-reaching proposals in this very sense.
Their contemptuous rejection by Berchtold and the little clique of Foreign
Office officials who controlled his puppet figure, naturally strengthened
still further the bonds which united Belgrade and Petrograd. Serbia, shut
out from the Adriatic, had no alternative save to seek her economic outlet
down the valley of the Vardar towards the Aegean, and in so doing she came
into violent conflict with Bulgarian aspirations in Macedonia. These facts
alone would justify the assertion that the war between the Balkan allies
was directly due to Austro-Hungarian initiative; but it has also transpired
that the dissensions between Sofia and Belgrade were actively encouraged
from Vienna, that Magyar influences were brought to bear upon King
Ferdinand, and that war material was sent down the Danube from Hungary to
Bulgaria. The outward and visible sign of these intrigues was a speech of
the Hungarian Premier, Count Tisza, opposing the Tsar's intervention in
favour of peace and virtually inciting Bulgaria to fight it out. The
break-up of the Balkan League was the first condition to that Austrian
advance on Salonica which has always remained the ideal of the advocates
of a forward policy in Vienna and Budapest, and which lies at the root of
Austria-Hungary's action in provoking the present war.
Serbia and Montenegro, however, are but one half of the problem. The issues
involved are wider and deeper than the quarrels of Vienna and Budapest with
Belgrade. Even if every man in Serbia were willingly prostrate before the
Habsburg throne, there could be no real peace until the internal problem of
Austria-Hungary's Southern Slav provinces is solved. What is at stake is
the future of eleven million people, inhabiting the whole tract of country
from sixty miles north of Trieste to the centre of Macedonia, from the
southern plains of Hungary to the North Albanian frontier. Of these,
roughly four millions are in the two independent kingdoms; the remaining
seven millions are divided between Austria (the provinces of Dalmatia,
Istria, and Carniola) and Hungary (the autonomous kingdom of
Croatia-Slavonia), while Bosnia-Herzegovina are governed jointly by Austria
and Hungary. The history of these provinces during the past generation is
one of neglect and misgovernment. Croatia has been exploited economically
by the Magyars, and the narrow interests of Budapest have prevented railway
development and hampered local industries by skilful manipulation of
tariffs and taxation. A further result is that even to-day Dalmatia (with
the exception of Ragusa) has no railway connections with the rest of
Europe, and those of Bosnia are artificially directed towards Budapest
rather than towards Agram, Vienna, and Western Europe. It is not too much
to say that the situation of those provinces had become less favourable
(if compared with surrounding standards) than it was at earlier periods of
their history; for the old system of trade-routes had broken down there as
elsewhere in Europe, but had not been replaced by modern communications.
§6. _Serbo-Croat Unity._--Parallel with the new era instituted in Serbia
since 1903, a strong movement in favour of national unity took root among
her kinsmen across the Austro-Hungarian frontier. The disruptive tendencies
which had hitherto been so marked in Croatian politics began to weaken.
The so-called Serbo-Croat Coalition round which all the younger elements
speedily rallied, put forward an ambitious programme of constructive
democratic reform as the basis of joint political action on the part of
both races, and held stubbornly together when the inevitable breach with
the Magyar oligarchy occurred. The Magyar Government felt that every effort
must be made to restore that discord between Croat and Serb which had been
for a generation one of the main pillars of their racial hegemony. These
designs happened to coincide with the aims of the Foreign Office in Vienna
in connection with the annexation of Bosnia, and Budapest and Vienna
combined in a systematic campaign of persecution against the Serbs of
Croatia. "Wholesale arrests and charges of treason led up to the monster
trial at Agram, which dragged on for seven months amid scandals worthy of
the days of Judge Jeffreys. The Diet ceased to meet, the constitution of
Croatia was in abeyance, the elections were characterised by corruption and
violence such as eclipsed even the infamous Hungarian elections of 1910;
the Press and the political leaders were singled out for special acts of
persecution and intimidation." These tactics were revealed to the outside
world in the notorious Friedjung Trial (December 1909), resulting out of
a libel action brought by the Serbo-Croat Coalition leaders against Dr.
Friedjung, the distinguished Austrian historian. The documents, on the
basis of which he had publicly accused them of being paid agents of the
Serbian Government, had been supplied to him by the Austro-Hungarian
Foreign Office, and the trial revealed them as impudent forgeries,
concocted in the Austro-Hungarian Legation in Belgrade! The moral
responsibility for these forgeries was subsequently brought home to Count
Forgách, the Minister in Belgrade, and indirectly, of course, to Count
Aehrenthal himself as Foreign Minister. But Forgách, though publicly
denounced as "Count Azev,"[1] was not allowed to fall into disgrace; on
the contrary, he had become within two years of his exposure permanent
Under-Secretary at the Ballplatz, and inspirer of new plots to discredit
and ruin Serbia.
[Footnote 1: An allusion to the notorious Russian _agent provocateur _who
was at one and the same time a member of the secret police and of the
revolutionary organisation.]
The scandals of the Friedjung Trial led to the fall of the Governor of
Croatia, but there was no change of system. After a temporary truce the old
conflict revived, and within eighteen months the friction between Magyars
and Croats was as acute as ever. The Magyar Government employed every
possible device of administrative pressure in order to create dissensions
between the Croat and Serb parties--repeated elections, wholesale
corruption and violence, persecution of the Press and of the political
leaders. Yet so far from languishing under such a system, the movement for
unity gained fresh strength and extended to the kindred Slovenes, striking
root even among the extreme Clericals, who had hitherto regarded the
Orthodox Serbs with distrust and suspicion.
In the spring of 1912 the conflict culminated in the abolition of the
Croatian constitution by the arbitrary decree of the Hungarian Premier, in
the appointment of a reactionary official as dictator, and a few months
later in the suspension of the charter of the Serb Orthodox Church.
§7. _The Balkan Wars._--Never in history had a more inopportune moment
been chosen for such crying illegalities. For close upon the heels of the
demonstrations and unrest which they evoked, came the dramatic events of
the Balkan War, the crushing victories of the allies, the resurrection of
the lost Serb Empire, the long-deferred revenge for the defeat of Kosovo.
The whole Southern Slav provinces of Austria-Hungary were carried off their
feet by a wave of enthusiasm for the allies, and an impossibly strained
situation was reached when the Government of Vienna placed itself in
violent conflict with Serbia, vetoed her expansion to the sea, insisted
upon creating a phantom Albanian State, egged on Bulgaria against her
allies, and finally mobilised in order to impose its will upon the Serbs.
Every peasant in the Slavonic South naturally contrasted Magyar misrule
in Croatia with the splendid achievements of his Serb kinsmen across
the frontier. I know of poor villagers in the mountainous hinterland of
Dalmatia who, having no money to give to the cause of the Balkan Red Cross,
offered casks of country wine or even such clothes and shoes as they could
spare from their scanty belongings. The total subscriptions raised among
the Southern Slavs of the Monarchy in aid of the allies far exceeded any
sums previously raised for charitable purposes among so poor a population.
"In the Balkan sun," said a prominent Croat Clerical, "we see the dawn of
our day."
The national rejoicings which "the avenging of Kosovo" evoked among the
Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes of Austria-Hungary were accompanied by lively
protests against the bare idea of an Austro-Serbian war, which, so far as
the Southern Slavs on both sides of the frontier were concerned, would have
been a civil war in the most literal sense of the word (and this civil
war, it must be remembered, is now actually being waged). The politicians,
however, though well-nigh unanimous in their enthusiasm for the cause
of the Balkan allies, could not at one breath throw off the habits of a
lifetime. Petty jealousies still divided them and were skilfully played
upon by the Magyar Government. The strain of five years of opposition and
persecution had produced its effect upon the Coalition leaders and rendered
them all too prone to further concessions. But the younger generation had
been profoundly affected by the Croatian dictatorship and the Balkan wars;
at an age when our youth think of nothing but cricket and football, the
students and even the schoolboys of Croatia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia became
engrossed in political speculation, brooded over the wrongs of their
disunited race, and dreamt of Serbia as the new Piedmont of the Balkans. To
all alike even the most advanced politician seemed no better than an old
fogey, and it is no exaggeration to assert that the existing parties had
lost all hold upon the overwhelming majority of those who in ten years'
time will represent the manhood and the intellect of the race. The
widespread nature of the movement may be illustrated by the school strike
of the spring of 1912, during which every boy and girl above the age of
fourteen in most of the primary and secondary schools of Croatia, Dalmatia,
and Bosnia played truant as a protest against the misgovernment of Croatia.
On that occasion a crowd of 5000 school children paraded the streets of
Agram shouting "Down with Cuvaj" (the Ban or Governor of Croatia), and
cheering the police when they tried to intervene!
As in all such movements, the views of individuals varied in intensity:
some merely gave a theoretical adherence to the ideals of Mazzini or of
Mill, others swallowed the Nihilist doctrine of Bakunin and dreamt of
revolution, ushered in by terrorist propaganda. Out of this milieu came the
two young assassins who murdered the Archduke Francis Ferdinand.
§8. _The Murder of the Archduke_.--By a hideous irony of fate Francis
Ferdinand was the one man capable of restoring order to an already
desperate internal situation. His very person was a programme and a
watchword, and it had long been an open secret that his accession would be
the signal for drastic reforms. It was his ambition to supersede the effete
Dual system by a blend of centralism and federalism such as would reconcile
the national sentiment of individual races with the consciousness of a
common citizenship and would at the same time restore to foreign policy the
possibility of initiative. This programme involved the emancipation of the
non-Magyar races of Hungary from the intolerable racial tyranny of the
Magyars, and at the same time a serious attempt to solve the Southern Slav
question by unifying the race under Habsburg rule. As his Imperial uncle
grew older and feebler, Francis Ferdinand is known to have elaborated his
designs, and a regular staff of able lieutenants had grouped themselves
round him. But on the very eve of action the strong man was removed, to the
scarcely veiled relief of all those elements in the State whose political
and racial monopoly was threatened by such far-reaching and beneficial
changes.
The circumstances of the murder are still shrouded in mystery. It is known
that no proper measures were taken for the protection of the Archduke
and his wife in Bosnia, though it is still impossible to assign the
responsibility for such criminal negligence. It is notorious that in a
country like Bosnia, which has for years been infested with police spies
and informers, and where every movement of every stranger is strictly under
control, so elaborate and ramified a plot could hardly hope to escape the
notice of the authorities. It has even been asserted that Princip and
Cabrinovic, the two assassins, were _agents provocateurs_ in the pay of
the police, and though no proof is as yet forthcoming, there is nothing
inherently improbable in the idea.[1] Certain it is that the gravest
suspicion rests upon those who connived at the disgraceful anti-Serb riots
of which Sarajevo was the scene for nearly forty-eight hours after the
murder.
[Footnote 1: The fact that they have only been sentenced to terms of
imprisonment, while some of their accomplices have been condemned to death,
has a much simpler explanation. Both men are under the age of twenty, and
therefore by Austrian law immune from the death penalty.]
The murder provided an admirable pretext for aggression against Serbia, and
at the same time tended to revive all the latent prejudice with which the
country of the regicides was still regarded in the West. Yet those who seek
to establish a connection between the crime of Sarajevo and the Serbian
Government are on an utterly false scent. I have tried to describe
the atmosphere of universal and growing discontent which produced the
explosion. Those who know the Slavonic South are well aware that Bosnia,
Dalmatia, and Croatia are a seething pot which needs no stirring from the
outside, and that the assassins are but the natural successors of the wild
young students who during the last five years fired upon the Governors
of Croatia and Bosnia.[1] But quite apart from this, the complicity of
official Belgrade is rendered incredible by urgent considerations of
internal Serbian politics. After a long and delicate negotiation the
Concordat with the Vatican had just been concluded: the Orient railway
question had reached the critical stage: above all, a customs and military
union between Serbia and Montenegro was on the point of being concluded.
But, of course, quite apart from such considerations, Serbia was suffering
from the extreme exhaustion consequent upon waging two wars within a year,
and her statesmen, despite the rebuffs administered by Count Berchtold,
were genuinely anxious for a _modus vivendi_ with the neighbouring
Monarchy, as an essential condition to a period of quiet internal
consolidation. But this was the very thing which the controllers of
Austrian foreign policy--the phantom Minister Berchtold, the sinister
clique in the Foreign Office, and the Magyar oligarchy, led by that
masterful reactionary, Count Tisza, the Hungarian Premier--were anxious to
avoid. They had never reconciled themselves to the new situation in the
Balkans; and having twice backed the wrong horse (Turkey in the first
war, Bulgaria in the second) still continued to plot against the Bucarest
settlement of August 1913. Salonica still remained the secret Austrian
objective, and Serbia the main obstacle to the realisation of this dream.
Not for the first time, the interests of Vienna and Constantinople
coincided, and the occult interests which link Budapest with Salonica
played their part in the game.
[Footnote 1: June 1910, June and November 1912, June 1913.]
The crime of Sarajevo removed the chief restraining force in the councils
of the Monarchy and placed the fate of Europe at the mercy of a group of
gamblers in Vienna, Budapest, and Berlin. The military party, under Konrad
von Hoetzendorf, chief of the Austrian General Staff (who a year ago was
seriously speculating as to the collapse of Austria-Hungary), joined hands
with the Magyar extremists, whose political monopoly was threatened by the
advancing Slavonic tide, and with the inner ring of Prussian diplomacy,
which believed the psychological moment to have arrived for measuring
swords with Russia. The murder served as an admirable pretext to veil
grossly aggressive tactics. It was hoped that Russia might be manoeuvred
into a position where autocracy would rather abandon the Slav cause than
seem to condone assassination; and it was confidently believed that Britain
would hold aloof from a quarrel whose origin was so questionable. Stripped
of all outward seeming, the true issues of the conflict were very
different. Just as the policy of violent Turkification adopted by the Young
Turks inevitably provoked the Balkan War, so the policy of Magyarisation,
which has dominated Hungarian affairs for forty-five years and poisoned the
relations of Austria-Hungary with her southern neighbours, has led directly
to the present conflagration.
§9. _The Future of the Southern Slavs_.--There have always been two fatal
obstacles to an Austrian solution of the Southern Slav problem,--Magyar
hegemony and the Dual System, to which alone that hegemony owed its
survival; and it is these two worn-out and reactionary ideas (if they can
be described as "ideas") that are at present fighting their death-struggle.
It was the ambition of Francis Ferdinand to achieve Serbo-Croat unity
within the Monarchy, and thus simultaneously to counteract the attractions
of Pan-Serb propaganda and to remove the most fertile source of friction
between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. His death destroyed the last chance of
such a solution; for the statesmen of Vienna and Budapest were not merely
incapable but openly hostile. An appeal was to be made to the arbitrament
of the sword.
Long before war broke out it had become a commonplace of political theory
that the Southern Slav question could be solved in one of two ways--either
inside the Habsburg Monarchy or outside it--either with its help and under
its aegis, or against it and despite its resistance. With the outbreak of
war the problem assumed a new form; the alternatives are the absorption
of the two independent Serb States in the neighbouring Monarchy--in other
words, the union of the entire Southern Slav race under Habsburg rule--or
the liberation of her kinsmen in the Monarchy by Serbia as the Southern
Slav Piedmont. This latter ideal, it has always been obvious, could only be
achieved through the medium of a general European war, and it is in this
manner that it is actually in process of achievement.
The Austrian Note to Serbia was deliberately framed in such a manner as to
be unacceptable by any State which valued its self-respect or prestige. The
military leaders desired war, while the Foreign Office, already committed
for years to a violently Serbophobe policy, was working hand in glove with
the German Ambassador Tschirschky, and with the very highest quarters in
Berlin. The German Government in its official case admits having given
Austria "a free hand against Serbia," while there are good grounds for
believing that the text of the Note was submitted to the German Emperor
and that the latter fully approved of (if he did not actually suggest) the
fatal time-limit of forty-eight hours, which rendered all efforts towards
peace hopeless from the outset.
The Austrian case against Serbia, as embodied in this Note, rested upon a
secret investigation in the prison of Sarajevo. The persistent rumours that
the assassins are _agents-provocateurs_, and that pressure of a somewhat
drastic kind was brought to bear upon them after their arrest, cannot of
course be accepted as proved. But the essential point to bear in mind
is the fact that the details of the Austrian "case," as embodied in the
notorious Note of July 23, originated in the same quarter as the previous
attempts to slander and discredit Serbia. Count Forgách, the arch-forger
of the Austrian Legation in Belgrade, was permanent Under-secretary in the
Foreign Office, and as Count Berchtold's right hand and prompter in Balkan
affairs, was directly responsible for the pronounced anti-Serb tendencies
which have dominated the foreign policy of the Dual Monarchy since the
rise of the Balkan League. As a Magyar nobleman with intimate Jewish
connections, Forgách was an invaluable link between Magyar extremist policy
and Berlin on the one hand and Salonica and Constantinople on the other.
In view of his record as the inspirer of the Vasic forgeries, we are amply
justified in declining to accept any "evidence" prepared by him and his
subordinates, and insisting upon a full and open trial of the murderers as
the only conceivable foundation for charges of complicity.
When all is said and done, however, the murder of the Archduke, though an
event of world-importance so far as the internal development and future
of the Dual Monarchy is concerned, is none the less a side-issue in the
Southern Slav question. This seeming paradox will not surprise those who
consider the currents of national life among the Southern Slavs. The
diplomatic conflict between Belgrade and Vienna or Budapest is but
the outcome of a far deeper and wider movement. We are witnessing the
birth-throes of a new nation, the rise of a new national consciousness,
the triumph of the idea of National Unity among the three Southern Slav
sisters--the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes. Fate has assigned to Britain and
to France an important share in the solution of the problem, and it is our
duty to insist that this solution shall be radical and permanent, based
upon the principle of Nationality and the wishes of the Southern Slav race.
Only by treating the problem as an organic whole, by avoiding patchwork
remedies and by building for a distant future, can we hope to remove one of
the chief danger-centres in Europe.
BOOKS
Unfortunately some of the indispensable books are in German or French, but
the following list offers a very considerable choice:--
(A) AUSTRIA-HUNGARY
_Austria-Hungary and Poland_, by H.W. Steed, W. Alison Phillips, and D.
Hannay. (Britannica War Books.) 2s. 6d. net. Uncritical reprint of very
valuable articles from the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_.
LOUIS LEGER. _History of Austria-Hungary_. 1889 (from French) (out of
print).
GEOFFREY DRAGE. _Austria-Hungary_. 21s. net. 1909. A mine of economic
facts.
H.W. STEED. _The Habsburg Monarchy_. 1914. (3rd ed.) 7s. 6d. net. Far the
best summary of tendencies, on the lines of Bodley's _France_ and Bryce's
_American Commonwealth_.
R.W. SETON-WATSON (SCOTUS VIATOR). _Racial Problems in Hungary_. 1908. 16s.
net.
R.W. SETON-WATSON. _Corruption and Reform in Hungary_. 1911. 4s. 6d. net.
HON.C.N. KNATCHRULL-HUGESSON. _The Political Development of the Hungarian
Nation_. 1910. 2 vols. 14s. net. A good exposition of the extreme Magyar
Chauvinist point of view.
R. MAHAFFY. _The Emperor Francis Joseph_. 1910. 2s. 6d. A useful
character-sketch.
C.E. MAURICE. _Bohemia_. (Story of the Nations.) 1896. 5s. An admirable
text-book.
C.E. MAURICE. _The Revolutionary Movement of_ 1848-49. 1887. 16s. The best
epitome in English.
COUNT FRANCIS LUTZOW. _Bohemia_. 1896. (Everyman Library.) 1s.
EMILY G. BALCH. _Our Slavic Fellow Citizens_. New York. 1910. The best book
on emigration. 10s. 6d. net.
(B) SERBIA AND THE SOUTHERN SLAVS
W. MILLER. _The Balkans_. 1896. (Story of the Nations.) The best general
text-book. 5s.
W. MILLER. _The Ottoman Empire, 1801-1913_. 1913. (Cambridge Historical
Series.) An excellent book, with a misleading title; it is really a history
of the Balkan Christians, with special reference to the Greeks. Turkish
history is only introduced incidentally. 7s. 6d. net.
EMILE DE LAVELEYE. _The Balkan Peninsula_. 1887. (Out of print,) By a
distinguished Belgian professor, who was in his day recognised as an
authority on Balkan questions.
LEOPOLD VON RANKE. _History of Servia_. 3s. 6d. (Bohn's Library.) This
brilliant and sympathetic study by the greatest of German historians is of
permanent value.
SIR ARTHUR J. EVANS. _Through Bosnia on Foot_. 1877. (Out of print.) The
distinguished archaeologist took part, as a young man, in the Bosnian
rising against the Turks.
R.W. SETON-WATSON. _The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy._
1911. 12s. 0d. net. (Greatly modified and extended in a German edition
published in 1913.)
R.W. SETON-WATSON. _Absolutism in Croatia_. 1912. 2s. net.
CEDO MIJATOVIC. _Servia of the Servians_. 1911. 16s. net.
ELODIE MIJATOVIC. _Serbian Folklore._. 1874.
(C) THREE OTHER BOOKS DEALING WITH THE BALKANS ARE STRONGLY RECOMMENDED
SIR CHARLES ELIOT (ODYSSEUS). _Turkey in Europe_. 2nd ed. 7s. 6d. net.
H.N. BRAILSFORD. _Macedonia_. 1906. 12s. 6d. net.
LUIGI VILLARI AND OTHERS. _The Balkan Question_. 1905. 10s. 6d. net.