Page:The New Europe - Volume 3.djvu/280

 bound to work for a fundamental reconstruction which might secure for them their historic rights within the Monarchy, the Poles could desire nothing more than a profitable, temporary compromise. The final settlement of their national claims lay beyond the frontiers of Austria. Whilst the most vital national interests of the Czecho-Slovaks and the Jugoslavs clash with those of the Austrian Germans or of the Magyars, those of the Poles nowhere are in conflict with them. On the contrary, the Austrian Poles have their own imperialist status possidendi to maintain in Eastern Galicia, and if their merely provisional connection with Austria rendered a compromise tolerable for them, if the absence of interests clashing with those of the Germans and Magyars rendered it possible, the imperialist and class interests of the Polish gentry in Galicia rendered it necessary. In consequence, a silent agreement was established between the Poles and the Austrian Germans, which still further estranged the Czechs and Jugoslavs from the Poles.

It is only on a wider European plan that the Poles share the anti-German interest of the Czechs and Jugoslavs; their lands, taken together, extend between the Baltic and the Adriatic—they close the road to the German advance to the east and form a barrier against which the waves of German aggression had broken in the formative centuries of the Middle Ages. These waves have been returning with increased force in our own days, surging against the barrier and undermining its foundations; yet the anti-German interest has failed to unite the three Western Slav nations on one common issue. Each of them has had to fight on two fronts, both west and east; but whilst the eastern neighbour and oppressor of the Czecho-Slovaks and Jugoslavs was the Magyar régime at Budapest, to the Poles it was the double-faced reactionary Government of St. Petersburg. “A German in disguise,” as the Russian revolutionary leader, Michael Bakunin described it, it shared with Berlin the autocratic and anti-Polish interest. But, at the same time, it professed Panslavism in the Balkans, often not without sincerity, though in a narrow, Greek-Orthodox spirit; it worked for the liberation of the Balkan nationalities from Turkish rule, and opposed Austria’s plans for aggrandisement in the Peninsula. Lastly, in the name of nationality, Russia raised a claim against the Habsburg Monarchy for the un-