XX
FINAL REFLECTIONS
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International public opinion to a preponderating extent considers that the responsibility for causing the outbreak of the war rests mainly with Austria-Hungary and Germany. The underlying motives of their war policy were of a twofold character. Austria-Hungary aimed at checking the Serbo-Croatian process of unification and the struggle of Serbia to gain further national territories from the Turkish heritage. Austria-Hungary, moreover, desired to preserve a free path to Salonika, and thus prevent the Jugoslavs from achieving their idea of national unification and liberation. This was because the influence of a Serbian success on the other nations within the Empire in their struggle for liberation would have been a menace to the continued existence of the Empire, and in any case to the supremacy of the Germans and Magyars. This was feared by Budapest, just as much as by Vienna. The humiliation of Serbia was accordingly to act as a means for arresting the progressive inner decay of the Habsburg Empire, or at least its transformation on the lines of the demands made by the various races inhabiting it.
In the last twenty years immediately preceding the war the principle that the Habsburg Empire could maintain itself only by dualism denoting the complete supremacy of the Germans in Cis-Leithania and the absolutist dictatorship of the Magyar nobility in Hungary, had become an axiom among the most powerful circle who controlled the pre-war policy of Austria-Hungary. The foreign policy of the Empire was also in accordance with this idea, which resulted, too, in the dependence of Austria-Hungary upon Berlin. Altogether, the internal policy of Austria-Hungary was decided mainly by the plans and general course of its foreign policy. These political principles were adhered to by the authoritative circles in Vienna and Budapest when the war broke out. A few divergent views of the heir apparent, Franz Ferdinand, although they were of considerable importance, produced no change in the line of foreign policy
