The Czechoslovak Review/Volume 1/Vain Dreams of Federalized Austria

Vain Dreams of Federalized Austria.

The military aim of the Allies is the destruction of the armies of Germany. When once the western front is broken through and the German hordes are driven across the Rhine, not only Germany, but Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey will have to accept whatever terms the democracies of the west may lay down. To gain such a complete military triumph Britain, France and Italy are straining all their strength, and the United States is organizing its tremendous resources of men and material to give Germany the finishing blow.

But the defeat of German armies is not in itself the end for which the world is making all these sacrifices. It is but the means to an end, an end which might be expressed in various formulas, but of which the best definition is that given by President Wilson—to make the world safe for democracy. A new Europe, a new world, must arise out of the blood-soaked ruins of the old order of things; no emperor shall ever again throw millions of obedient subects at unoffending neighbors to commit murder and destruction; no nation shall in the future set itself up as a lordly race to impose its kultur and its dominion over other nations. Democracy within the state and democracy between states is to be the ruling principle of the new order which will be set up after Germany is defeated.

The exact manner in which the democratic reconstruction shall be maintained and guaranteed is not within the scope of this article. But everyone realizes that the death of millions of brave men would be in vain, if Germany, having suffered a total defeat in the present war should still have the strength or the inclination to challenge civilization once more, after a shorter or longer breathing spell. It is, indeed, very likely that a decisive defeat will bring the German people to their senses, that they will give up the idolatrous worship of the state and of the emperor, that they will be cured by the blood letting of their colossal conceit and their dreams of conquest. But the issues are too tremendous to be trusted entirely to the probability of a change of heart of the German people. Peace based upon Germany’s complete defeat must leave the aggressor in such a condition that he will not be powerful enough to make an other throw at world domination.

This is not a plea for the destruction or dismemberment of the German nation. No sane man suggests anything of the sort. However great may be the hatred which Germany’s cruelties, barbarities and treacheries have aroused against her, all thinking men in the great coalition of nations know that the very principles for which they might demand the survival of Germany substantially within her present boundaries and with her present population. Small slices will be cut off from her territory in the east and in the west: Poland will be reunited and France will regain her lost provinces, but the Germany of the Germans will remain.

How then shall Germany be weakened so as to be impotent for aggression? Not by garrisoning her cities permanently by foreign soldiers, not by extorting from her a crushing indemnity, but by taking away from her the allies whose resources have enabled her to keep up the fight against the greater part of the world. Do the people in this country realize clearly that the kaiser controls in addition to sixty-eight millions of his own subjects also the subjects of his so-called allies numbering eighty millions? Germany has grown tremendously in area since the declaration of war. Disregarding for the present her great conquests she has increased in size from a country occupying 208,000 square miles into an empire of 1,200,000 square miles. André Cheradame, a great authority on the subject of Central Europe, describes the relations of Germany and her allies in this manner:

“In the Allied nations people continue to speak of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey, as though these states remained just as they were before the war. Now these terms have no longer any relation to reality. The Quadruple Alliance of Central Europe is simply a great illusion, studiously fostered by William II, for by its means his plans are vastly facilitated. As a matter of fact, Turkey, Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary are not the allies, but the vassals of Berlin, and their influence with her is less than that of Saxony or Bavaria. The rulers at Constantinople, Sofia, Vienna, and Budapest are simply marionettes moved by threads which are pulled by Berlin according to her strategic needs.”

Of the vassals of Germany by far the most important one is the empire of the Hapsburgs. The fate of Turkey is sealed. There is no difference of opinion in the councils of the Allies as to the necessity of driving the Turk from Europe and giving freedom to the Christian and Arab subjects of the Osmanli. Bulgaria is important only as a link connecting the Central Empires with Constantinople. When Germany loses control of the Austrian territories, Bulgaria loses its value as a pawn in German plans of expansion. The crux of the problem of making Germany incapable of further aggression is the disposition to be made of the fifty million unwilling subjects of the Hapsburg throne.

The obvious solution is to dissolve Austria-Hungary into its component elements. It cannot be repeated too often that the Dual Monarchy is not a national state, like France or Italy or England or Germany, but a conglomeration of nations and fragments of nations, bound together solely by common subjection to a dynasty. Dismemberment of Austria-Hungary would not be a crime; it would be a logical execution of the principle for which the Allies are fighting—the right of each adult nation, great and small, to self-determination. That was the solution adopted by the Allies, when they made known their peace terms in January of this year. And that, no doubt, will be the solution favored by America, when this country is ready to state in concrete form its own peace terms. When the President declared in favor of an independent Poland, when he stated over and over again that no nation shall live under a sovereignty under which it does not want to live, he added his weighty judgment to the decisions of the statesmen of the Entente that Austria-Hungary shall not survive this war.

The disappearance of the Hapsburg empire from the roll of Great Powers will be the biggest change, at any rate as far as maps are concerned, worked by the cataclysm of the great war. It is not strange, herefore, that men of a conservative turn of mind, men who do not realize the tremendous changes bound to come as the result of the war, as well as men who have axes to grind, hesitate to approve such a radical transformation of political boundaries. They minimize the evils and the dangers of the present situation; they are afraid of the unknown quantities, the national states which would take the place of the Dual Monarchy. And they suggest a less startling alternative, a plan which in their opinion will effect all that the dismemberment of Austria would accomplish. They want Austria federalized; they want the races of Austria now clamoring for independence to be constituted into self-governing units of a federal empire would would not be under the thumb of Berlin.

The defenders of Austrian integrity are many and their motives are most diverse. Says Henry Wickham Steed in the Edinburgh Review: “The cry ‘no dismemberment of Austria’ has been echoed in the strangest quarters. Roman Catholic ‘Clericals’ and the Russian Soviet, the Italian ‘official’ (or Germanophile) Socialists and British and French Conservatives have vied with British Pacifists, sundry Radicals and the organs of international finance in repeating it.” The objections and obstacles to their alternative of a federal Austria are most weighty. The sole reliance of the champions of Austria in the feasibility of the plan is the new emperor. There was reason to believe that Charles would look with favor upon a remodelling of the constitutional frame of his dual monarchy. Although he took the oath to observe the constitution of Hungary, in Austria he postponed taking the oath so as to leave himself some freedom of action. And he did make overtures to his discontented and disloyal Slav and Latin subjects, holding out the hope that they would be placed on an equality with the privileged German and Magyar minorities and that concessions would be made to their national aspirations. But his offers were spurned by the Bohemians and Slovaks, by the Jugoslavs, by the Poles, and the only result of his efforts at concilating the desires of the oppressed majority was a great outcry by the two ruling races, Germans in Austria and Magyars in Hungary.

On November 22d the Associated Press had this dispatch from Amsterdam: “Replying to an interpellation in the Hungarian lower house regarding the Czech attacks on Hungary in the Austrian Reichsrat, Dr. Wekerle, the premier, is quoted in a Budapest message as saying he was authorized to announce that the king would frustrate all efforts directed against the lawful independence or territorial integrity of the Hungarian state. Hungary, said Dr. Wekerle, could never consent to a division of the country into separate nationality areas.” There does not seem to have been much editorial comment in American papers on this important announcement. It is virtually the end of all dreams of a federalized Austria-Hungary. The young emperor who was expected to emancipate his realm from William’s control by giving a share in the government to elements hostile to Germany has publicly abandoned all plans for a thorough reform. He pledged himself not to permit interference with the dualistic structure of his inheritance, not to tolerate efforts to give equal rights to the majority of the people of Hungary. Federalization of Austria alone, even if it were not vetoed by the Germans of Austria, would be a farce, if the process cannot be applied to Hungary. The artificial splitting of the Slavs to enable Germans and Magyars to rule would continue. The Czechs in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia would remain separated from the Slovaks of northwestern Hungary; the Slovenians, Croatians and Serbians would be still divided between Austria, Hungary and the annexed provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, not to speak of the Serbians of Serbia. The Little Russians of northeastern Hungary would still be cut off from their brothers in Galicia, as they in their turn would be kept separated from the people of Ukraine, and the Roumanian subjects of Charles would be still Germanized in Bukovina and Magyarized in Transylvania. The plan of a federalized Austria was nothing but a dream from the very beginning; the authoritative pronouncement just made in the parliament of Budapest should make that much plain to all who do not defend Austria from ulterior motives.

It is too late in the day to save the empire of Charles and Zita. It is not worth saving. Americans, especially, who are democrats and believe in the rights of peoples, not in the inherited rights of monarchs, have no reason to lift a finger to prolong the life in an artificial state, the very existence of which violates the principles of the found ers of the American nation. A Frenchman, Louis Eisenmann, whose standard work “Le Compromis Austro-Hongrois”, entitles him to speak with authority on the subject of the Hapsburg monarchy, wrote recently in La Nation Tchèque:

“The Austria-Hungary which people want to save is the dynastic Austria-Hungary. It is a question of preserving an empire for the House of Hapsburg. It is to the interest of a reigning family that people would sacrifice—unwittingly and certainly without wishing it—thirty million souls whose ardent sympathy goes to the Entente; and would sacrifice with them the whole fruit of this terrible war, the future of Europe and of the world. . . .

“There is a young couple, without great intelligence, without merit, who have not made great mistakes or committed great crimes, but who are overwhelmed by a heavy inheritance of crime and error. Around them stand twenty, fifty or a hundred families without nationality, without a real fatherland, cosmopolitan as people were two or three centuries ago, a last refuge of a tradition which elsewhere has yielded to the new spirit of the modern world. It is this group, this group alone, dynasty and aristocracy, that makes up Austria-Hungary. And we are asked to make peace with that, and for its sake to give up our ideals, sacrifice our friends and prepare our own undoing.”

You cannot reform the empire of the Hapsburgs. As long as Austria-Hungary continues to exist, it will stand for the rule of a dynasty based on the privileged position of two minority races, and Germany will command the resources of another enmpire larger in area and almost as populous as the Hohenzollern empire. If you want to draw Germany’s fangs and smash her Central Europe schemes, replace the dynastic state on the Danube with national states and erect instead of the present government by bayonets governments based on consent of the governed.

 

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