The New Europe/Volume 6/Number 70/The Czechs and Austria

by Robert William Seton-Watson

The Czechs and Austria

The principle of self-determination-which is simply the old Mazzinian doctrine of last century revived under a new name—has figured prominently during the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. But from the first it has been interpreted in two sharply divergent senses. While the Russians are ready to apply it to every national unit in Europe, irrespective of the artificial political frontiers of the old régime, the Central Powers insist upon restricting its application to states, not nations, and leaving existing frontiers unimpaired. Austria-Hungary in particular has the most obvious reasons for adopting such tactics, since self-determination, if applied within the Habsburg dominions, would automatically put an end to the present Dual System-resting, as it does, upon the enforced hegemony of two nations over six others. The official representatives of Vienna and Budapest, being invariably and exclusively drawn from the two ruling nations, are hardly likely to submit to a change which would undermine their own position. Their point of view is briefly summed up in the phrase which they incorporated in the Speech from the Throne last December—“We want to remain masters in our own house.”

This phrase is, in itself, a proof that the household is not composed on a basis of equality, that among its members are servants as well as masters. The subject-races have voiced in recent years with ever-growing emphasis their dissatisfaction with the place which they occupy in the domestic economy of the Monarchy: and since the Russian Revolution they have openly claimed the same right of self-determination for themselves as was so freely conceded by the new régime in Petrograd to the non-Russian races of Russia. It was this claim which led the Czech, Southern Slav and Ukrainian deputies of the Austrian Parliament to demand that elected representatives of the various nationalities of the Monarchy should attend Count Czernin in a consultative capacity during the peace negotiations. This demand was, of course, refused by the Austrian premier, on the plausible ground that such a course would run counter “to the spirit of the constitution in all constitutional states.” But the Slav deputies were strong enough to secure urgency for a discussion of the whole question; and the uncompromising spirit in which they have been met by the authorities only serves to strengthen the general discontent at a system which renders whole nations and their spokesmen powerless to control the most vital questions of policy upon which their very existence depends. The conflict between the German and Slav points of view in Austria has never been more acute, and the Czechs in particular are the subject of systematic attacks in the press and in Parliament for their whole attitude towards the war. The exploits of the Czecho-Slovak brigade under Brusilov, and, more recently, the official recognition of a Bohemian army on the Western front and the permission granted by the Consulta to raise a Czech legion among the prisoners in Italy, have made it impossible to overlook any longer the openly Austrophobe sentiments of the Czech masses. A whole series of interpellations in the Reichsrat—one signed by 90 German deputies and forming quite a bulky volume—deals with the “treasonable” practices of the Czechs, their propaganda in Russia, America and Western Europe, the wholesale surrenders of their troops and their repeated refusal to fight against the Entente, the passive resistance of the home population and its indifference to Austrian war-loans and “patriotic” appeals. Nothing, however, has availed to intimidate the Czechs, in whose eyes the virtue of patriotism and the crime of treason alike have no meaning save in respect to Bohemia, not Austria. The Slovene leader, Dr. Korošec, was speaking no less for the Czechs than for the Southern Slavs when he declared that “if our demand constitutes the crime of treason, there will never be enough scaffolds to hang all the criminals.”

Perhaps the most remarkable feature in Austrian politics during the past six months has been the way in which the consolidation of the Czech parties has kept pace with the disintegration of the German parties. While the German National Union has dissolved into its component parts, the Czechs, whose tendency to split into rival factions was so marked before the war, have been steadily closing their ranks, until Clerical and Socialist, agrarian and townsman, stand united upon a common national platform. While the authorities, for purposes of foreign consumption, dilated in pathetic accents upon what an outspoken German newspaper calls “the legend of loyalty and love to Austria,” Mr. Stanek, the leader of the Czech Parliamentary Club, was able to speak with the entire nation behind him. Even our inveterate Austrophils, who would fain throw doubt on the unanimity of a movement which does not fit into their calculations, must find it difficult to ignore the well-nigh unanimous testimony of German observers on the spot, that the whole Czech nation, without distinction of class or party, stands behind its present leaders. “Despite the censorship,” writes the Zeit, “the whole world knows what the Czechs want.”

For the Czechs the first two-and-a-half years of war were a period of unalloyed repression such as they had not known since the fifties of last century. Their leaders imprisoned or condemned for treason, their press muzzled, their institutions suppressed, parliamentary life at a standstill, denunciation and espionage rampant, their country garrisoned by hostile nationalities, the Czechs none the less maintained an attitude of stubborn defiance, and no amount of pressure could wrest from them any public profession of loyalty to a régime which had plunged them into war with their dearest kinsmen, in a quarrel not their own and by a decision over which they had no control, and on which they were not consulted. Nowhere did the Russian Revolution have a stronger repercussion than in Prague, and the effects were seen in the series of remarkable manifestoes issued during April and May by the leaders of Czech political and intellectual life. These culminated in the programme put forward at the meeting of the Reichsrat on 30 May by the Czech deputies, who declared their resolve to work, on the basis of self-determination, for the union of all Czechs and Slovaks in a single democratic state. Since that date the Czech leaders have again and again reaffirmed the nation’s claim to unity and independence, and have denounced the Dual System and Magyar oppression of the Slovaks with a frankness which has roused the Magyar jingoes to frenzy, and has been officially repudiated by the Governments of Budapest and Vienna and even by the Crown itself. The political amnesty of last July was a belated attempt to revive for the young Emperor the sympathies which his granduncle's reactionary policy had effectually destroyed among the Czechs. But so far from winning them to a more moderate attitude, it merely served as an encouragement to further efforts in the national cause; and though Dr. Kramař and the other pardoned deputies lost their seats in Parliament, they were received in veritable triumph on their return from prison, and have ever since directed the inner counsels of the Parliamentary Club. Since the restoration of Parliament the Czechs have acted in the very closest accord with the Southern Slavs and Ukrainians, whose claims to unity and independence are of a similar character to their own, and who are no less uncompromising opponents of the Dual System. Like them, they have steadily resisted the blandishments of the Government, which has made more than one overture for their political support.

Last November the Austrian Government, which throughout the summer had played with the idea of constitutional reform, definitely declared its intention to uphold not only the Dual System, but also the artificial boundaries between the seventeen provinces of Austria, without the abolition of which there can, of course, be no reconstruction on a racial basis. The Czechs, realising that nothing more was to be gained in Vienna, and indignant at the possibility of their being ignored as completely at the conclusion of peace as they had been at the declaration of war, resorted to a new expedient for forcing their national claims upon the attention of the world. On 6 January, 1918, a meeting was convoked at Prague, which might fairly claim to be regarded as a Constituent Assembly of the Czech nation. It was attended by all the Czech deputies in the Reichsrat and in the Diets of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, by Dr. Kramař and the other deprived deputies, and by a number of the most prominent figures in the literary and commercial life of Bohemia. The resolutions passed by this representative assembly have been suppressed in their entirety by the Austrian Censor, but they are known to have reaffirmed in a much more outspoken form the programme of Czecho-Slovak independence proclaimed on 30 May, and to have expressed open disapproval of the principles upon which Count Czernin was conducting the peace negotiations. Not content with this, the Assembly appears to have declared that it no longer recognised the Reichsrat as the supreme political authority, but that until a general Czecho-Slovak parliament should be free to meet, only the Czech deputies as a whole were qualified to speak for the nation. The inaugural speech of Mr. Stanek protested against the very idea that “a civilised nation of ten millions, living in the heart of Europe” should be ignored at the future conference of peace, denied Count Czernin’s authority to speak in the name of the nations of Austria, denounced the sham constitutions of Austria and Hungary, and culminated in the phrase “Our Czecho-Slovak nation does not ask for anything save what every educated and civilised nation claims and defends with its blood. We ask for the union of the Czech nation with the Slovaks, in a state enjoying complete political, economic, and cultural independence, and possessing all the attributes of sovereignty. What is not a crime for others cannot be a crime for us.”

The great Austrian strike diverted attention for the moment from events in Prague, but on 22 January Dr. von Seidler, whose Cabinet has been criticised with almost equal severity for its weak attitude towards the Czechs and towards the strikers, sought to regain the favour of the German parties by a violent denunciation of the Czechs and their whole policy. The Declaration of 30 May, he argued, though objectionable from a constitutional point of view, did none the less show some regard for the interests of the Empire as a whole, and was still reconcilable with “the dynastic and patriotic fundamental ideas of an Austrian.” Hence much as he disagreed with its tendencies, he felt that there was still some common ground on which its supporters and the Government could work together.

 

“The Prague Resolution,” he continued, “shows another face. One looks in vain in it for even a distant note of attachment to the dynasty and the State as a whole. The political thought which it expresses seems subject to the suggestion of a world of ideas which we are most successfully combating in a hitherto unparalleled struggle for existence. Our enemies may read in it an encouragement to persevere in the pursuit of principles which conflict with the existence of our State. It seeks to hamper the attitude of our negotiators, and is opposed to peace in so far as that does not bring self-determination of the nations, in a special sense forcibly interpreted for their own aims. For this right is to be invoked, in the teeth of the equal right of the German people, to dissolve the existing State and to secure the full independence and sovereignty of the Sudetian lands,^[1] whether in Austria or not. Thus the Resolution takes stock of eventualities which have nothing in common with the Austrian idea. Thus it clearly enters upon an extremely dangerous sphere and is to be interpreted in a sense positively hostile to the State, such as must be rejected with indignation by every Austrian and resisted by every Austrian Government with all the means at its disposal.”

 

After announcing that he was speaking with the express authorisation of the Crown, he concluded, amid prolonged interruption, with the assumption “that the noble and healthy kernel of the nation has not been infected by the poisonous seeds of a suicidal policy which ignores the clear course of historical development.” Such tendencies he affected to regard as “a mere aberration, only explicable as a kind of war-psychosis,” and as bound to yield to “a confession of faith which, however national, will still be Austrian.”

Simultaneously with this uncompromising official pronouncement, the German parties of Bohemia issued a declaration denouncing the Czech national programme and demanding the erection of “Deutsch-Böhmen” into an autonomous Austrian province with its own Diet, and with German as the exclusive language of schools and administration. It is obvious that in the event of the Czechs attaining their dream of a restored Bohemian Kingdom, the German minority would be fully entitled to such an autonomy. But the manifesto ends with an ominous phrase which reveals the mind of its framers. “A state in whose preservation we are to collaborate must offer guarantees for the national existence and freedom of the German people.” In the words of an acute German observer, “The burning question is, under what conditions Austria is still in any way possible as a state.” Is the moment at hand when the Germans of Austria, realising that they can never again hope to assume the offensive against the Slavs, will prefer to abandon the rôle as outpost of Germany which Bismarck assigned to them, and to merge their identity in that of their kinsmen of the Empire? In any case it is abundantly clear that the Germans of Austria, on the day when their political hegemony over the other races can no longer be maintained, lose all real inducement to remain subjects of the Dual Monarchy. That it is increasingly difficult for them to do more than ward off the blows of their adversaries is apparent from the utter disintegration and paralysis of political and parliamentary life in Austria. The Government cannot secure a working majority without the Slavs, yet open political warfare prevails between it and the Slavs. The Emperor is quite unequal to the situation, and there is no sign of any statesman who could end the deadlock save by a radical change of policy such as would arouse the enmity of the Magyars and shake the whole Monarchy to its base. And meanwhile, in the words of the Socialist Naše Doba, “the whole Czech nation stands behind its deputies; and it must conquer, because it rests alike upon historic and upon natural right.”

Rubicon.

 

1. i.e., Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia.