Page:The Bohemian Review, vol1, 1917.djvu/191

 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