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 affairs should be left to the vote of a European conference or of a plebiscite.

“But the right of self-determination—according to recent definitions by which popular meetings, party resolutions and even individual press utterances have had international importance assigned to them—leads to pure anarchy, to Mazerierung des Staatsbegriffes, to a recognition of regionalism extending almost to the individual.

“All this is the ‘right of self-determination,’ and is it with this idea, or rather catch-word, that we are to work and make serious politics? Besides, the Entente only allows self-determination in all these versions for its opponents, but always finds an excuse for excluding its effect from their own conditions. Where the Entente feels the need for annexations or disannexations, it naturally does not recognise the right of the State which is to be cut down to make its own decision, and indeed not even the right of the populations which are to be annexed to have a say as to this amputation. When the Freemasons in Paris let it appear that the fate of the territories claimed by Italy was to be decided by a plebiscite of their inhabitants, there was a storm of indignation in Italy, and in the same way the idea of a plebiscite in Alsace-Lorraine was rejected in France on the ground that in that case it was only an old wrong which had to be righted. The Entente has never run short of pretexts for not allowing the right of self-determination to be applied to itself.

“If, then, I am to state the extent to which I recognise a right of the peoples to decide their own fate, I naturally prefer to express myself only in so far as the question bears an international character. The right of the State to decide upon its territorial existence is beyond all question and equally beyond all question is it that one foreign State cannot claim the right to interfere in the internal conditions of another. Such are the boundaries of the self-determination of States from the international point of view.

“As regards the question of nationalities inside the various States regulating their relations to one another and to the State, this is not an international but an internal question. I only have a right to express myself with regard to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in so far as these questions might influence foreign policy. I do not scruple to declare that I repudiate most emphatically any interference with the shaping of our domestic affairs, and must on the other hand repudiate the idea, if it should crop up, that certain internal questions are to be settled internationally. The relation of the two States of the Monarchy to each other rests on legal foundations: and the possibility of alterations in it is provided for. by constitutional institutions. Where the desire for such changes arises, they must be solved constitutionally through the legislature, which guarantees the self-determination of the nations within the framework of the State. Inside the two States of the Monarchy the individual nationalities possess every constitutional possibility of regulating their relations; and I am not in a position to recognise the possibility of other solutions.”