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Social Democrats play a conspicuous rôle in Austrian Pangermanism. Like their brethren in Germany, they have approved and championed the policy of Berlin and Vienna. It was not for nothing that the founders of the Austrian Social Democracy were Pangerman before they started their new party, and the war has revived their German nationalist instinct in all its original force. Both Herr Pernerstorfer and Dr. Victor Adler have advocated a Pangerman policy during the war, and their concessions to the non-German nationalities are of no real value. Another deputy, Dr. Carl Renner, the theorist of the German Social Democrats in Austria, whose books on Austria are well known, has published a series of essays under the name, "Oesterreichs Erneuerung" ("Austria's Renewal") (1916), in which he entirely accepts the policy of a Pangerman "Central Europe," and shows himself to be of one mind with Naumann. He affords an instructive example of the way in which political and moral materialism have brought the majority of the German Social Democrats on to the platform of the Prussian Pangerman imperialists.

The question of a Customs' Union with Germany is diligently and repeatedly discussed in Austria. The well-known Austrian economist, Professor E. von Philippovich, in his pamphlet, "Ein Wirtschafts- und Zollverband zwischen Deutschland und Oesterreich-Ungarn" ("An Economic and Customs League between Germany and Austria-Hungary") (1915), was the first to outline a practical plan for such a union. The pamphlet contains an interesting history of the different attempts made in Austria to reconcile the Austrian and German economic systems. Philippovich accepts in its entirety the rôle of Austria-Hungary as the vanguard of Germany in the Balkans and Asia.