TOWARDS A NEW CENTRAL EUROPE
Glos Narodu still advocate the Realpolitik of neutrality. Yet there is no doubt that the bulk of Polish public opinion is against any further compromise with either of the Central Powers and sincerely desires co-operation with the other Slavs. So, for instance, the Lemberg Courier wrote on 4 March:
“There is an urgent need of a close union with Bohemia. This union with the Czechs must be concluded as soon as possible by our Parliamentary representatives at the price of our formal recognition of the Czecho-Slovak demand for sovereignty. By a common and solid action the Poles and Czechs will create a force which no Power will be able to crush.”
The greatest Czech journal, Narodni Listy, discussed the necessity of co-operation among Slavs in its issue of 6 March as follows:—
“The Czecho-Slovak nation would greet with joy the victory of the Slav idea in Polish politics, and the united front of the three Western Slav nations. We would greet it as a guarantee of a better future if the ‘Union of the Western Slav nations’ proposed by the Polish National Democrats were accepted by the Polish Club. For the Western Slavs, the Poles, Czechs, and Jugoslavs, the only real policy is to form a united opposition bloc against Vienna. All these three nations have the same ideal: national unity and independence on the basis of self-determination. And as we have a common aim, we ought to have a common way to it; all nations longing for liberty will obtain it if they will support each other.”
This movement towards co-operation among the subject peoples of the Germanic Alliance may prove a formidable menace to the Central Powers. It is clear that it has the same aim in view as the League of Subject Peoples of Austria-Hungary, which is being formed in the Western countries, namely, the replacement of Pangerman Central Europe by a new international order, based upon the complete freedom, national unity, and alliance of Poland, Bohemia, Greater Roumania, Jugoslavia, and Italy, by which the Allied principles of justice and national self-determination would be vindicated and Germany prevented from repeating her present exploits.
The first condition of the proposed solution is the disappearance of the present Dual Monarchy. The realisation of the national unity and independence of the Poles, Czecho-Slovaks, Roumanians, Jugoslavs, and Italians, would reduce Austria and Hungary to their proper racial boundaries. Austria and Hungary would then be States of not more than
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