Page:Diplomacy and the War (Andrassy 1921).djvu/171

 the view that the Serbian danger could only be removed if the whole of the domain of Serbia was united under the sceptre of the Habsburgs. It was my opinion that the Serbs, who were accustomed to independence, would never content themselves with a new situation created in this manner. To bring them the unity of the Southern Slavs would have been quite useless, and they would only have used it in order to secede and acquire their freedom in the process. I am convinced that the real motive in the South Slav problem is not to be found in the desire for union in the nation, as was the case in the really homogeneous Polish people, but that the main stimulus was given by the desire for independence. Internal unity does not exist among the Southern Slavs. The history of centuries, the fight between East and West and between Rome and Byzantium, and between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, have torn the internal unity of feeling to pieces in spite of the ethnographical cohesion. The various elements of the Southern Slavs are also influenced by their topography to pursue an autonomous and independent existence. Their local patriotism has always been stronger than their national feeling. All that is happening now after the war in Croatia and Bosnia, i.e., the great opposition to a centralized Serbia, speaks in favour of the correctness of my point of view. One can see already that the Jugo-Slavs do not form a political unit. And anyone can see that it is difficult to rule Zagreb, Serajevo and Ragusa from Belgrade, and it would be even more difficult to rule Belgrade from any one of these towns.