Page:The New Europe (The Slav standpoint), 1918.pdf/46

 real control on the part of the West enable the Magyars to practise oligarchy, absolutism, and a Magyarizing imperialism.

They clothe this absolutism with a pretended respectability by terming it “the idea of the Hungarian State”; in this the Magyars are at one with the German Junkers, upholding the idea of the Prussian State. Even the founder of the Hungarian State, St. Stephen, declared that a state like Hungary would be imperfect if resting only on one nation. The political views of nations which practice oppression are everywhere and always the same; among the Prussians, Austrians, Magyars, and Turks, there is indeed harmony in spirit.

The Magyars turn all their energies against the Slovaks, Ruthenians, Jugoslavs and Rumanians; their anti-Slavic baiting, which always found willing champions, especially in the Viennese press, is largely responsible for this war.

34. Prussia, as we have pointed out, has much in common with Austria in its origin, in the eastern aims of its policy and of tactics, even though there are considerable differences of temperament and character between the Germans of Prussia (Northern Germans) and those of Austria, who are, to a considerable extent, under the influence of the other nations of Austria-Hungary and who also differ racially.

Prussia to-day is more nationally unified; to maintain by all means national unity is the principal point of the Pangerman program, and the weakness of Austria and Russia, due to their national diversity, is pointed out. For that reason the Pangermans demand forcible Germanization, colonization, and wholesale emigration of non-German elements. Prussia is, after Austria and Russia, the most nationally mixed country; thus ethnography bears testimony to the fact that Prussia was built up by violence. The Prussians themselves are a Germanized nation, related to the Lithuanians; there are also many Germanized Slavs in present Prussia; according to Bismarck, it is a crossing of a female race (Slavs) and a male race (Prussian-German).

From the Pangerman plans, from political maxims enunciated by men like Bismarck, and now from the whole war and peace manœuvres of Germany and Austria, it is evident that the object of the German aggression is the East (“Drang nach Osten”). The first and principal point of the German eastern policy is to hold Austria-Hungary; Austria is to Germany a bridge, as the title of a Pangerman pamphlet has it—the bridge to the Balkans and Turkey, and therefore to Asia and Africa. Germany in union with Austria presses into Russia; the nominal freedom of the Baltic provinces, of Russian Poland and the Ukraine, is a temporary expedient. Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, and the West in general, have, as the world situation stands to-day, a much smaller importance for the Germans, if they succeed in winning the East; if they rule the East they will easily settle the bill against France and England, and later even against the United States.

35. In the course of the war the French, English and Americans, have realised the true condition of affairs. The Italians have for a long time been against Austria, and for that reason they take such an emphatic stand against Prussian militarism.

Prussian militarism leads us to the analysis of the whole Prussian question. In Germany this question is looked upon as meaning that the Prussian diet must be made more democratic, and the existence of political differences between Eastern and Western Germany (Prussian Junkers) is admitted; but there is a wider and deeper Prussian problem—the problem formulated by Pangermanism and its philosophers, Lagarde, von Hartmann, and others, the problem of the difference between the