Part 15

Such were the reasons that led the Conference to depart rather widely in this case from its usual principles of boundary-making. The settlement seems to have been accepted by the parties most concerned without serious trouble and with far less friction than might have been expected. While some mistakes may have been made at the start, the Czechs have in general facilitated the transition by treating their old enemies in that generous, tactful, and sensible spirit which they have shown in most other matters, and which enables one to form very favorable auguries as to the future of their young republic.

Leaving the boundary questions of Slovakia to be considered in connection with Hungarian problems, we now pass on to German Austria.

* * * * *

It was the German-speaking provinces of the Eastern Alps, with their centre at Vienna, which formed the cradle or nucleus of the Austrian monarchy. It was there that the house of Hapsburg began its rise in 1276. And it is to this small mountain territory that the once proud name of Austria is again restricted. The new republic inherits only about one-fourth of the area of the old Austrian or Cisleithan half of the late empire. It is supposed to have a population of about six and a half millions, whereas Austria had twenty-eight and a half millions in 1910. In shape it is almost as elongated, as thin about the waist, as Czecho-Slovakia. It looks like an inverted pistol with the point aimed at Switzerland.

The making of the new Austrian frontiers involved several vexatious problems. On the north, indeed, it was resolved without much controversy to accept as the frontier between Austria and Czecho-Slovakia the historic boundary between Bohemia and Moravia on the one side, and the provinces of Upper and Lower Austria on the other. Only two slight deviations were made, both at the expense of Austria, in order to avoid cutting important railway connections.

It was the southern boundary that occasioned difficulties. As between the Austro-Germans and the Slovenes, who were to be united to the Yugoslav state, the effort was made to keep strictly to the ethnographic frontier. But this was not easy in so mountainous a region, where racial frontiers may take no account of geography, but political boundary makers cannot afford to do so.

The worst problem was the basin of Klagenfurt. Here the narrow, encased valley of the Drave widens out into a long, fertile corridor, which is again closed at the lower end and which obviously ought to be treated as a political unit. Unfortunately the southern side of the valley is Slovene in population and the northern side German, and in between lies the city of Klagenfurt--with its 29,000 people a great metropolis for that region--which is hotly disputed. The Austrian census shows this city to have a German majority; but the Yugo-Slavs claim that it was Slovene fifty years ago and would be now, were it not for certain tricks played upon them by the Austrian government. Klagenfurt last year enjoyed much the same painful notoriety as Fiume, Danzig, or the Saar. I know not how many unhappy Allied Commissioners were sent down there to investigate, report, delimit provisional boundaries, or to restrain the German or Yugo-Slav rifles, which kept going off of themselves. Finally, the Conference decided to refer the matter to a plebiscite. By an arrangement which may, perhaps, be said to favor the Yugo-Slavs, the Klagenfurt basin is divided into two zones. In the first and larger zone, the more contested one, and indeed the only one in which there may be a Slovene majority, the vote is to be taken within three months after the Peace Treaty with Austria goes into force. If the outcome in this zone favors Austria, she will keep both zones without further formalities. If the vote favors Yugo-Slavia, the plebiscite will then be held in three weeks in the second zone, which is pretty purely German, but which is geographically so situated that it could not easily be separated from the first zone.

If this arrangement has provoked much dissatisfaction in Austria, that has been even more the case over the drawing of the new Austro-Italian frontier in the Tyrol.

The facts here are sufficiently simple and well known. Italy was concerned, in the first place, to liberate the 400,000 Italians in the Trentino, to which she had every right; and secondly, to secure a strong natural frontier on her most exposed side, on the side looking towards Germany. The frontier which she asked for, and which the Conference accorded her, was the crest of the highest east-to-west ranges in the Tyrol--the line of the Oetzthaler and Zillerthaler Alps and the Hohe Tauern--a line which cuts the great historic north-to-south corridor through the Tyrol, not in its wider southern section, but at its highest and narrowest point, the Brenner Pass. The new frontier is about the best one that could be drawn from the geographic standpoint, since it follows the natural line of division, the watershed between the rivers that flow south to the Adriatic, and those that flow north and east to the Danube. It also affords the strongest strategic barrier that Italy could find. It has, however, the drawback of including in Italy a compact German-speaking population of about 250,000; old German towns like Botzen, Meran, Brixen, and various localities famous in German song and story, the homes of Andreas Hofer, the Tyrolese hero of 1809, and of Walther von der Vogelweide. Whether among the several parallel ranges farther south than the Brenner a frontier might not have been found which would have afforded Italy tolerable guarantees of security without involving the necessity of her absorbing so many Germans, is a question on which a great deal might be said. Among the experts at Paris opinions were divided on that subject, but in the Supreme Council, already somewhat embarrassed, perhaps, by the Adriatic question, the Italian view prevailed.

If the national principle has been somewhat violated to Austria’s detriment in the south, it has been applied in her favor in the east. The adjacent border zone of Hungary had a solid German-speaking population; and, at a time when Hungary was being broken up along ethnographic lines, it seemed only fair to unite these Germans to Austria. Alone among the states of the defeated Alliance, Austria has thus emerged from the War with at least one territorial acquisition.

At any rate, under the new conditions one can no longer speak of ‘happy Austria’ or of the ‘gay Viennese.’ Almost ruined by the War and its aftermath, weighed down by the financial charges imposed by the Peace Treaty, prostrated by the separation of the heart of the old monarchy from most of the provinces which had nourished and sustained it, suffering terribly at present and utterly despondent about her future, Austria has become the Niobe of nations. Today she is forced to compete with Armenia as a supplicant for the charity of the world.

It has been commonly said in Vienna this past year that German Austria cannot exist alone, if only for economic reasons, and that there remain to it only two possibilities: either union with Germany, or some kind of a customs union with the new states that have grown out of the Hapsburg empire.

Union with Germany was very much in the air a year ago; indeed, one of the first acts of the Austrian National Assembly on November 11, 1918, was a vote in favor of such a union. But the Peace Conference vetoed the project. This was done by the rather indirect method of inserting in the Peace Treaty with Germany an article by which the latter had to bind herself to “respect strictly the independence of Austria” within the frontiers to be fixed by the Allied and Associated Powers, and to agree that “this independence shall be inalienable except with the consent of the Council of the League of Nations.”

This act of the Conference has been defended on the ground that, at the close of a war in which Germany has shown herself such a menace to the world, it is scarcely expedient or even safe to gratify her with the acquisition of over six million new subjects. It is only after she has successfully passed a period of probation and has shown that she has fundamentally changed her methods and her point of view, that the rest of the world can accord her such an aggrandizement, if the Austrians at that time still desire the union. I confess, however, that I cannot help feeling that in this case the more generous attitude would have been the wiser one. As long as the Allies insist on keeping Austria in a cell by herself, they are likely to have a chronic invalid on their hands. The effort to hold asunder even provisionally two branches of a people like the Germans may easily involve embarrassments greater than any advantages that are to be derived from it. And what is most important is the essential justice of the thing. It is the great merit of the Peace Conference that it endeavored, on the whole honestly and in such sweeping fashion as was never seen before, to apply the principle of nationality to the resettlement of Europe. One cannot but regret that this work should be tarnished by denying even temporarily to the German and German-Austrian peoples the right to work out their national unity.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Joseph Chavannes’ _Physikalisch-statistischer Hand-Atlas von Oesterreich-Ungarn_, Vienna, 1887, is still the best cartographic introduction to Austrian problems.

Among the best general works dealing with the late Hapsburg monarchy, one would name: A. Chéradame, _L’Europe et la question d’Autriche au seuil du XXᵉ siècle_. 4th ed. Paris, 1906. B. Auerbach, _Les Races et les nationalités en Autriche-Hongrie_. 2d ed. Paris, 1917. H. Wickham Steed, _The Habsburg Monarchy_. 2d ed. London, 1914. V. Gayda, _Modern Austria: her racial and social problems_. New York, 1915. R. W. Seton-Watson, _German, Slav, and Magyar_. London, 1916.

The British Foreign Office _Handbooks_ are a particularly convenient source of information about the former Hapsburg monarchy and its several constituent territories.

The history of the Czecho-Slovaks has been set forth for Western readers principally in the masterly works of Professor Ernest Denis: _La Fin de l’indépendance bohème_. 2 vols. Paris, 1890. _La Bohème depuis la Montagne-Blanche._ 2 vols. Paris, 1903. _Les Slovaques._ Paris, 1917.

Valuable descriptions of the progress and situation of the Czecho-Slovaks before the War are to be found in: W. S. Monroe, _Bohemia and the Čechs_. Boston, 1910. T. Čapek (ed.), _Bohemia under Hapsburg Misrule_. New York, 1915. Z. V. Tobolka (ed.), _Das böhmische Volk_. Prague, 1916. H. Rauchberg, _Der nationale Besitzstand in Böhmen_. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1905. (The most detailed and comprehensive study of the nationality situation in Bohemia.)

Czecho-Slovak claims and aspirations are well formulated by Dr. Edouard Beneš in _Bohemia’s Case for Independence_, London, 1917.

A detailed discussion of the new frontiers of German Austria (with a map) is contained in the article by Dr. E. de Martonne, “Le traité de St.-Germain et le démembrement de l’Autriche,” in _Annales de géographie_, Jan. 15, 1920. See also the article on “The New Boundaries of Austria” in _The Geographical Journal_, Nov., 1919, and N. Krebs, “Deutsch-Oesterreich,” in _Geographische Zeitschrift_, vol. xxv, 2-4 Hft.

The nationality situation in the regions most in dispute along Austria’s new frontiers is best described, perhaps, in: A. Brunialti, _Le nuove Provincie italiane, i: Il Trentino_. Turin, 1919. Montanus, _Die nationale Entwicklung Tirols in den letzten Jahrzehnten_. Vienna, 1918. M. Pirker, “Die Zukunft Kärntens,” in the _Oesterreichische Rundschau_, Dec. 1, 1918. J. Bunzel, “Das deutsche Westungarn,” in the same number of the review just cited.

FOOTNOTES:

[50] J. Ellis Barker, “The Ultimate Fate of Austria-Hungary,” in _The Nineteenth Century_, vol. 76 (2), p. 1006.

[51] H. Wickham Steed, _The Habsburg Monarchy_, p. 8.

[52] Cited in Chéradame, _L’Europe et la question d’Autriche_, p. 3.

[53] Cited in _The New Europe_, ii, pp. 30, 227.

[54] Francis Gribble in _The Nineteenth Century_, vol. 82 (2), pp. 883-884.

[55] Declaration of the Czecho-Slovak National Council, Sept. 19, 1918, cited from the _Journal des Débats_, weekly edition, Oct. 25, 1918.

[56] The Hungarian census of 1910 claimed that the Magyars in the lands of the Crown of St. Stephen numbered 10,050,575.

VII

HUNGARY AND THE ADRIATIC

Among all the states of Europe there are few which, from the historical, the geographic, or the economic point of view, might appear to have a better claim to existence than the thousand-year-old kingdom of Hungary. Nature would seem to have marked out for political unity this Pannonian basin, with its marvellously fertile plain of the Alföld in the centre, surrounded on almost every side by mountain walls and mineral-bearing highlands, with its roads and rivers all converging towards the great Danube waterway, and its various parts supplementing each other economically in so admirable a fashion. And here, for once, history and geography did not seem to be working at cross-purposes. Ever since the appearance of those gifted and valiant Asiatics, the Magyars, in the Danubian plain in the ninth century, the Pannonian basin has been united into a state which has shown a remarkable vitality and durability, and whose frontiers, in spite of some temporary fluctuations, have on the whole remained singularly unchanged. If ancient status of possession, economic cohesion, and what may be called the geographic fitness of things, were all the factors that need be taken into account, the Hungarian state, in spite of all its misdeeds, ought to have come through the World War intact. Unfortunately for it, however, there is another factor which counts for even more nowadays: the rights and aspirations of peoples.

Hungary has always been a polyglot state. The ruling race, the Magyars, a nation of mixed Finno-Ugrian and Turko-Tartar stock, are a people of the plains like their nomad ancestors. They are said to have a positive aversion for living more than 600 feet above sea level. Hence, except for a few scattered colonies, they have always remained quartered in the plain of the Alföld, leaving the peripheral highlands and the once swampy regions of the south to other races, whom they probably found in the country at the time of their arrival and whose numbers have certainly been increased by subsequent immigration. The Magyars are an island of Asiatics surrounded by a sea of Latins and Slavs.

This ruling race is probably only a minority of the total population. The earliest census of nationalities that we have and the only one that was taken by relatively impartial officials, the census of 1851, makes out the Magyars to be only 37% of the total population. It is true that since the Magyars have taken the census into their own hands, their percentage has risen steadily with each successive decade, until by 1900 they could claim a slight majority, and in 1910 they could boast of 54%. In this latter year they were reckoned at just ten millions, out of a population of eighteen millions for Hungary proper. Their astonishing gains at the expense of the other races were officially explained as due to “the peaceful propagation of Hungarian culture.” Of that “peaceful propagation” I shall speak in a moment; but it should be said here that scarcely any unprejudiced observer accepts Hungarian racial statistics at their face value, and that a more probable estimate would reduce the number of the Magyars to about eight millions. This would make them a minority even in Hungary proper, and much more so in the whole kingdom--i. e., with Croatia included--which had a population of twenty-one millions in 1910.

Among the subject races, the Roumanians probably numbered three to three and a half millions; the Slovaks two to three millions; the Ruthenians half a million; the Serbs and Croats three millions; the Germans two millions.

Like every other racially composite state, Hungary was placed before the gravest of problems by the nineteenth century revival of the submerged or long dormant nationalities. During the early and middle part of that century, this problem could seldom be seriously faced by the Magyars, for they were engaged in their own battle for constitutional rights against the despotic and centralizing policy of Vienna. In this struggle they displayed a vigor and a tenacity which won for them both the sympathy and admiration of the world and a reputation as liberals and democrats which they have since singularly belied. As soon as their victory over the imperial government was sealed by the Compromise of 1867, as soon as they found themselves masters in Transleithania, the Magyars set to work to deny to the other races of the kingdom all those liberties for which they themselves had been fighting. The programme, henceforth pursued with the most relentless rigor and the most unscrupulous methods, was to ‘assure the unity of the Hungarian State’ by Magyarizing the subject races.

One must not be taken in by such mere stage decorations as the Hungarian law of nationalities of 1868--in appearance the most generous measure that could be devised, but never put into practice; nor by the glib phrases of Magyar propagandists about the unparallelled freedom that existed in Hungary, and the zeal with which the government fostered the languages and culture of the non-Magyar races. Anything more insolently defiant of the truth could scarcely be imagined. What has really gone on in Hungary in the past fifty years--what “the peaceful propagation of Magyar culture” meant--is something not easy to condense into a few words. In the briefest summary, however, it includes:

The exclusion of the non-Magyar languages from all state schools, the courts of law, administrative intercourse, and every other kind of official use;

Scandalous violation of the rights of freedom of person, speech, meeting, and association;

Systematic and merciless persecution of every manifestation of non-Magyar national sentiment;

An exaggerated irritability or arrogance of power, which has led Magyar authorities to impose sentences totalling twenty-nine years of imprisonment on a few petitioners who ventured to complain to the Emperor-King; to expel schoolboys or seminarians merely for speaking Roumanian or Slovak in the streets; or to imprison a nursemaid for “conspiring against the state” by allowing a three-year-old child to wear a bow with the Roumanian colors;

The virtual exclusion of non-Magyars from public office;

A parliamentary franchise narrow and complicated beyond description, and so administered as regularly to assure to the Magyar minority all but about 10 of the 413 seats in Parliament, so that the other races were virtually disfranchised;

An unrivalled system of gerrymandering;

Parliamentary elections stained with every form of outrage, fraud, and illegality, with coercion so freely employed that the government itself boasted that at the last elections it had used _only_ 194 battalions of infantry and 114 squadrons of cavalry, and it has often been said that Hungarian elections resembled nothing so much as a civil war.

Such are some of the features of what may fairly be called the most odious system of racial oppression known to modern Europe.

It is, of course, true that this system was the work of the ruling oligarchy--a class which showed itself averse to democratic progress in any form, and which also chastised the Magyar proletariat with whips, even if it reserved its scorpions for the non-Magyars. But that made little practical difference. The cardinal fact was that after standing this sort of thing for fifty years, the subject peoples had come to execrate the very name of Magyar. If a chance for liberation presented itself, then, as some one has said, not even an angel from heaven could have dissuaded them from seizing it.

Hence, during the general débâcle of the Quadruple Alliance in October-November, 1918, Hungary disintegrated almost as spontaneously and easily as Austria. It was in vain that the new republican government of Count Károlyi fought frantically to save the territorial integrity of the state by offering the non-Magyar peoples the widest and most sweeping concessions, going even so far as to propose the transformation of Hungary into a federation of national cantons on the Swiss model. Nothing could make the seceders believe that the Magyar could change his spots, or tempt them back into the cage.

Equally fruitless were the diplomatic or propagandist efforts to persuade the Allied Powers that Hungary had suddenly become a new creation, which could not be held responsible for the acknowledged sins of its former rulers, and ought to be let off intact and scot-free. It is scarcely necessary to enter here into the tangled and not quite edifying relations between the Allies and the various governments that have succeeded each other at Budapest: the genuinely democratic and reforming government of Count Károlyi (October 1918--March 1919); the Bolshevist interlude under Bela Kun (March--August); and the more recent cabinets made up of more or less unsmirched remnants of the old regime. These many changes of government have long delayed the conclusion of peace with Hungary.[57] At all events, the treaty is now apparently about to be signed; and it seems safe to assume that this treaty will embody the territorial arrangements which were decided upon at Paris in the spring of 1919 and which I shall now try briefly to describe.

The northwestern highlands of Hungary, which are inhabited mainly by Slovaks, are to be incorporated into Czecho-Slovakia. This state touches the Danube at one point through the acquisition of Presburg, the one-time capital of Hungary. Regrettable as it may be that so historic a city should be lost to its old owners, it must be said that Presburg was always rather German than Magyar in population; and that it will furnish the land-locked republic of Czechoslovakia with a much-needed port on the Danube and a means of commercial access to the Balkans and the Black Sea.

The half-million Ruthenians who inhabit the mountains of northeastern Hungary form a secluded and backward population which has hitherto been supremely indifferent to the affairs of the outside world. Alone among the races of Hungary, they had no national movement and probably very little consciousness of nationality. Before the War they had not a single school in which their language was taught, no political newspaper of any kind, and scarcely any educated class. What went on in these primitive and illiterate heads when the gospel of self-determination penetrated to them, it is difficult to guess. There are tales that within a very few weeks three so-called National Assemblies were held, each claiming to represent the ‘Carpatho-Ruthenian nation,’ and that these rival gatherings ‘self-determined’ their people, the one for union with Czecho-Slovakia, the second for union with Hungary, and the third for union with their kinsmen over the mountains in Galicia. At any rate, the Czechophile tendency appears to have been the strongest. Going on the best evidence it could get as to the preferences of this enigmatic population, the Peace Conference has decided to attach them to Czecho-Slovakia, though under the form of an autonomous province with generous rights of self-government.