PARIS 1919 (44 page)

The commission managed to get a cease-fire of sorts, but finding a solution was more difficult. Lloyd George confessed that he rather sympathized with the Poles. So, said Wilson, did he. He had been touched when a group of Polish peasants appeared in his office to implore him not to make them part of Czechoslovakia. They had walked, they told him, sixty miles to the nearest railway station to get to Paris. The French, who generally backed Poland, on this occasion supported the Czechs, reasoning that Poland could survive easily without Teschen but Czechoslovakia, a crucial part of the cordon sanitaire against Bolshevism, could not. Bene
did his best to raise the Bolshevik specter; he warned that the cease-fire was only encouraging dark anti-Czechoslovak forces in Berlin, Vienna and Budapest. The Czech authorities had already unmasked their spies and agitators and discovered their leaflets and maps.
²⁹

The inter-Allied commission gave little useful advice to the peacemakers. An ethnic division of Teschen, it pointed out, would leave the border going right through the middle of the coalfields. It suggested alternatives that were bound to upset the Poles or the Czechs or both. In April the peacemakers encouraged Paderewski and Bene
to talk directly to each other. When those discussions failed to produce anything, the peacemakers fell back on a plebiscite. In the summer of 1919 the Polish government, thinking it would win, agreed; the Czechoslovak, for the opposite reason, did not. A year later the Czechs, who had been busy making propaganda in their part of Teschen, were all for consulting the inhabitants, but the Poles had changed their minds. Riots and strikes made a vote impossible and in July 1920 the powers finally made their decision. Czechoslovakia got the coal mines. The little city of Teschen was cut in two; the old part went to Poland and the suburbs with the railway station to Czechoslovakia. One state got the electric power plant, the other the gasworks. It was the sort of settlement being made all over Central Europe as modern ethnic nationalism superimposed itself on an older, different world. And two nations who should have been friends now resented each other.
³⁰

Poland thought briefly of seizing Teschen but all its resources were being poured into the war with Russia. It never forgave Czechoslovakia for taking advantage of that desperate struggle and for a conspicuous lack of sympathy—for example, the Czechs held up badly needed weapons being shipped from Austria. On October 1, 1938, the day after the Munich agreement dismembered Czechoslovakia, the Polish government demanded the return of Teschen. It was followed by Hungary with a demand for Slovakia and the Ruthenian territories on the south slopes of the Carpathians.
³¹

The newborn democratic Czechoslovakia was based on shaky foundations. The Allies had created a state, according to the leader of the Austrian socialists, out of several nations, “all filled with hatred one against the other, arrested in their whole economic and social development and in the progress of their civilisation by hate and national strife, nourished by tyranny and poisoning their whole public life.” There was some truth in what he said. Out of Czechoslovakia's population of some 14 million, 3 million were German, 700,000 Hungarian and 550,000 Ruthenian, with a sprinkling of Poles and Gypsies. Czechs and Slovaks together made up the other two thirds, but they had much to divide them. The Czech lands were indelibly marked by Austrian rule, as was Slovakia by Hungarian. The Czechs felt that they were bringing progress and civilization to a backwater, and the Slovaks resented this. The Czechs, who dominated the national government, resisted giving Slovakia the autonomy Masaryk had promised so freely in Pittsburgh, on the grounds that there were not enough educated Slovaks to run their own government; more important, they did not want to encourage the Germans, or the Ruthenians or the Hungarians, to ask for similar rights.
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Early in 1919 there was a warning of what was to come when Slovakia's economy took a sudden turn for the worse. It was now cut off from Hungarian markets and Hungarian coal. Sugar beets lay rotting in the fields; refineries closed down. Slovak farmers and workers were rioting, reported an American observer, saying, in effect, to their new government in Prague, “We thank you for nothing. You say you have rescued us from the political oppression of the Hungarians which was in fact pretty bad but now we are under martial law, we have no work, little food, we suffer from cold and our future is black.” Local priests spoke of their fears for Catholicism at the hands of the Protestant Czechs. That summer, when Czechoslovakia and Hungary clashed, advancing Czech troops were attacked in the rear by Slovaks.
³³

In September, House's confidential aide Stephen Bonsal received a visit from two Slovaks, who complained that they had been prevented from leaving Czechoslovakia and had reached Paris only after an arduous journey through Yugoslavia, Italy and Switzerland. They begged him to see their leader, an ailing priest named Father Andrej Hlinka. The American and his Slovak escort rushed through Paris, doubling back on themselves to throw off pursuers, until they reached the secluded gate of a monastery. Inside, Bonsal found a wan Hlinka, lying in a monk's cell reading his prayer book. The priest talked of his disillusionment with Czechoslovakia. The Hungarians had not been so bad after all. “We have lived alongside the Magyars for a thousand years,” he said. “All the Slovak rivers flow towards the Hungarian plain, and all our roads lead to Budapest, their great city, while from Prague we are separated by the barrier of the Carpathians.” Slovaks were true Catholics; Czechs, whatever they said, were infidels. Bonsal could not offer much hope that the peacemakers would undo what they had just done. “God has punished me,” said Hlinka sadly, “but I shall continue to plead before God and man for my people who are innocent and without stain.”
³⁴

In the 1920s, Father Hlinka built up a party, the Slovak Populists, which became the most important political force in Slovakia. In May 1938 a group of American Slovaks triumphantly bore back to Europe the original of the Pittsburgh agreement of 1918 and, at a huge meeting in Bratislava, Hlinka demanded that the government fulfill the promises Masaryk had made. Masaryk had died the year before and Hlinka was dead by the autumn, when the Munich agreement opened the door so long closed. Czechoslovakia, abandoned by its allies, harassed on all sides by enemies, capitulated to the demands of Hlinka's successor, Father Josef Tiso, and gave Slovakia full autonomy within what was left of the Czechoslovak state. Hitler, scenting blood, urged Tiso into claiming full independence. In March 1939, as Nazi armies marched into the Czech lands, a new state of Slovakia was born. Not all Slovaks welcomed the way this happened or the Nazi godfather who blessed it.
³⁵

Tiso barely outlived his creation. In 1946 he was executed for treason in a reconstituted Czechoslovakia, which, this time, had Stalin as a patron. The new country was smaller than, and different from, the one the peacemakers had approved in 1919; the Ruthenian parts had gone, swallowed up into the Soviet Union, and the Germans had fled, with considerable encouragement from the Czechs. As president, an old and sick Bene
struggled, and failed, to keep his country out of the Soviet web that was being constructed across the center of Europe. He died in September 1948, after the coup that carried the communists to power, but too early to witness the full misery to come. Masaryk's son Jan, who was foreign minister, died in that coup, probably pushed out a window by communist agents. On January 1, 1993, the rest of the construction of 1919 came to pieces as Slovakia and the Czech Republic announced their divorce.

19

Austria

ON JUNE 2, 1919, a brief ceremony took place in the great hall of the old royal château at St.-Germain-en-Laye on the outskirts of Paris. Delegates from Austria, representing a morsel of what had once been a great empire, received their peace terms at a table covered with a red carpet, as the rows of allied delegates stared at them. The Czech prime minister, who knew several of the Austrians from the time they had all been colleagues, ostentatiously turned his back. The walls were decorated with pictures of animals, now extinct, from the Stone Age. “Several among us,” remarked Mordacq, Clemenceau's aide, “could not help but notice that.”
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Austria-Hungary, the vast collection of territories painstakingly assembled since the thirteenth century by the Habsburgs, was already disintegrating before 1914. At its heart the link between the Austrian territories (which included Slovenia, Bohemia and Moravia as well as the German lands) and the kingdom of Hungary (which ruled over Slovakia and Croatia) had become as tenuous as the hyphen which joined their two names. The Habsburgs had always found it wise to compromise with Hungary. In 1867, weakened by defeat at the hands of Prussia, they made the greatest compromise of all: the empire was now the Dual Monarchy, a partnership between two states, each with its own parliament. They still had the same ruler in Franz Joseph but he was emperor in the Austrian territories and king in Hungary. They used the same postage stamps and coins, negotiated a common foreign policy and, with much wrangling between delegations from each parliament, they shared expenses. Otherwise, each ran its own affairs.

Hungarian nationalism was not the only nationalism buffeting the empire in the decades before 1914. In the north, the Poles and the Czechs were stirring and in the south Italians were agitating to join the newly unified Italy. Serbs, Slovenes and Croats talked of greater autonomy, perhaps even a South Slav state of their own. If Hungarians had autonomy, why shouldn't others? Franz Joseph, driven by the great but simple object of handing on what he had inherited to his successors, step-by-step gave way on nationalist demands to preserve the façade of imperial unity. In both his parliaments, the one in Vienna and the one in Budapest, the deputies increasingly organized themselves along national lines.

By the 1890s, the old emperor faced yet another challenge, from the new Austrian Social Democratic Party. Inspired by Karl Marx and drawing on the growing industrial working class as well as middle-class liberals in the great cities, it demanded universal revolution inside a reformed empire. Dr. Karl Renner, the affable and clever son of a Moravian peasant, who was the leading Socialist thinker on the national issue and a prominent Socialist deputy from 1907, downplayed the destructive threat of nationalism. He proposed an ingenious solution: each individual would be assigned to a nationality and each nationality would have an empire-wide body which would look after matters dear to nationalists such as culture and education. He was behind the times—or perhaps too far ahead of them. Nationalists in Austria-Hungary, as elsewhere, increasingly wanted their own states. Even his own party, the Social Democrats, for all its talk of working-class solidarity, was affected by nationalist rivalries.

In the last years of the peace, Austria-Hungary went from one political and constitutional crisis to the next. The Great War simply gave the final blow. “We were bound to die,” said Count Ottokar Czernin, one of the empire's last foreign ministers. “We were at liberty to choose the manner of our death, and we chose the most terrible.” The civilian and military bureaucracies, never efficient at the best of times, fell apart under the strain of war, and national rivalries turned to hatred: Germans for Hungarians and Slavs for both. From 1915 onward, desertions from the army grew sharply as Czechs, for example, asked themselves why they were fighting for German or Hungarian officers against fellow Slavs especially as the war was going badly for Austria-Hungary. In the second half of 1916, the Russians won a great victory in Galicia and the Rumanians entered the war on the Allied side, temporarily seizing Transylvania. German troops salvaged the situation but the result was to leave Austria-Hungary very much the junior partner in the alliance. When the Austrian government urged Germany to consider a negotiated peace, it was met with a contemptuous lack of interest.
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In November 1916, the old emperor, a faded symbol of better days, finally died. It was increasingly clear that the peoples of the empire were tired of the war and, more dangerous, tired of the old order. The news from Russia in February 1917 brought warning of where such moods could lead. “If the Monarchs of the Central Powers are not able to conclude peace
in the next few months,
” warned Czernin, “the people will do so over their heads.”
³
The new emperor, Karl, a gentle and sickly young man, sent out peace feelers to the Allies, which he was careful to keep secret from Germany. These went nowhere largely because the Italians, who had much to gain from the complete defeat of Austria-Hungary, were adamantly opposed to a separate peace.

By 1918, the empire was near its end. Strikes brought the cities to standstill, parts of the navy mutinied in the Adriatic and the army hemorrhaged soldiers. The authorities watched helplessly as Czech and South Slav deputies openly demanded their own independent states and demonstrators took to the streets in support throughout the provinces. That August, Czechs, Poles and South Slavs met in the southern city of Ljubljana to demand their respective freedoms. The Allies, who had up to this point insisted that they had no intention of destroying Austria-Hungary, now gave up on it. The signs were there for friends and foe alike to see: Allied support for an independent Poland (most dramatically in Wilson's Fourteen Points), France's recognition in June 1918 of the Czechoslovak National Council, Wilson's statement the same month that “all branches of the Slav race must be completely liberated from German and Austrian domination.” For Poles, Czechs, Rumanians, Slovaks, Slovenes or Croats, the prison doors were opening, whether or not they were prepared to escape.
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On September 15, 1918, his armies collapsing, Karl defied his German ally and issued a public appeal for a peace conference. The Allies, seeing victory at hand, rejected the offer. Two weeks later, after Bulgaria had dropped out of the war, Germany agreed that the Dual Alliance should ask for an armistice. On November 3 representatives of Austria-Hungary signed an armistice agreement. While Karl waited for an end to the fighting, the links that had bound his empire finally snapped. One by one the nationalities declared their independence: the Poles on October 15, the Ruthenes on October 19, and the South Slavs on October 29. On October 28 independent Czech and Hungarian governments took office in Prague and Budapest. Two days later, the German-speaking Austrian deputies in the parliament in Vienna appointed a German-Austrian government for what was left of the empire. The Social Democrats, who were particularly strong in what was an increasingly revolutionary Vienna, took the main offices. Renner became the first chancellor of the new republic of Austria.

Almost unnoticed, Karl renounced his part in the government of the two halves of his empire on November 11 and 13. In what was a forlorn attempt to keep the succession alive for his heirs, he did not formally abdicate. He kept his titles, the products of so many marriages, bargains and conquests: Emperor of Austria; King of Hungary, of Bohemia, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slovenia, Lodomeria, Galicia, and Illyria; Archduke of Austria; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Kraków; Duke of Lothringia, of Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola and Bukovina; Grand Duke of Transylvania; Margrave of Moravia; Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma, Piacenza and Guastella, of Auschwitz and Sator, of Teschen, Friaul, Ragusa and Zara; Princely Count of Habsburg and Tyrol; and on and on. It was all gone, and he himself was to slip quietly from the world in 1922, when he died in Madeira of influenza. In March 1989, a few months before the division of Europe into East and West ended, his empress, Zita, died.

Preoccupied with satisfying Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Rumania, the peacemakers had tended to overlook Austria and Hungary. The territorial commissions drawing new borders had assumed, like almost everyone else, that little Austria, reduced to its German-speaking territories, and Hungary, already shorn of the ancient kingdom of Croatia and of Slovakia, were lying inert, ready to be sliced into. What was fair to Austria and Hungary, according to the principles of self-determination, what was necessary if they were to survive, were questions that caused little concern in Paris. Neither country even had its own commission.

The greater part of the old empire had been transformed with the end of the war into friends. This raised an awkward question. Who was going to pay Austria-Hungary's reparations? Poland or Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia? “We cannot,” said Bene
firmly, “be held responsible for a war which we condemn.”
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The Allies agreed, which left as enemies only Austria and Hungary, two countries linked over the centuries at the core of the empire. Their representatives argued that they should not be seen as its heirs. As the Austrian prime minister, Karl Renner, reminded the peacemakers, the old empire had died in November 1918. “We stand before you,” he said that day in June, “as one of the parts of the vanquished and fallen Empire.” Austria was a new country. “In the same way as the other national States our new Republic too has sprung to life, consequently she can no more than the former be considered the successor to the late Monarchy.” The British legal experts thought this made sense. The Italians, who hoped to make gains at Austria's expense, did not.
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Both Austria and Hungary appealed for mercy and understanding. They admitted that there had been faults, even wickednesses, committed in the past, but these were not theirs. Like Germany, they claimed to have undergone a rebirth and a cleansing. They had got rid of the old regimes and now embraced Wilson's sacred principles wholeheartedly. The Americans listened sympathetically. Wilson wanted to see Austria in the League of Nations as soon as it signed its treaty. The Europeans were sterner: Austria and Hungary must accept responsibility for the war, just as Germany had done, and on that basis be prepared to surrender war criminals and pay reparations. When Austria raised the awkward question of the responsibility of the other parts of the old empire, the Allies replied weakly that Austrians had supported the war more enthusiastically than anyone else: “Austria should be held to assume its entire share of responsibility for the crime which has unchained upon the world such a calamity.”
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In reality, even the Europeans were prepared to go easier on Austria than on Hungary. Although Austria-Hungary bore as much responsibility as Germany for the fatal series of events that led to the outbreak of war in 1914, by 1918 even its enemies saw it as very much the junior partner, dragged along by and increasingly subordinate to an expansionist Germany hell-bent on the conquest of Europe. The well-meaning but abortive attempts in 1917 by the new emperor to open peace negotiations left a favorable impression at least on the British and the Americans.

Austria benefited more from this perception after the war than did Hungary. Lloyd George bore it no particular hostility at the peace conference. Clemenceau, whose brother was married to an Austrian, had spent much time there before the war. Like many of his compatriots, he thought Austria-Hungary had been mad to ally itself with Germany, but he had not actively promoted its disintegration until late in the war. Orlando talked dramatically about Austria being Italy's main enemy during the war, but Italian policy was ambivalent. Austria had been both enemy and ally in the past. Italy wanted to take Austrian territory, notably in the Tyrol, but it did not want Yugoslavia doing the same. Italian diplomats hinted to the Austrian government that, if there was no fuss over the Tyrol, their two countries might be able to form a close economic association.
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Hungary was another matter. Hungary went Bolshevik in 1919, while Austria remained socialist. It was fighting with most of its neighbors, while Austria was at peace. Hungary deserved punishment, Austria sympathy. It helped that, unlike Germany or Hungary, Austria was too small and too poor to be a threat. It had no strong sense of nationalism, for it had never been a country, only part of the Habsburg lands. In 1919 it was a strange misshapen orphan. Its picturesque and impoverished mountains and valleys clustered around the former imperial capital of Vienna, whose magnificent palaces, vast offices, grand avenues, parade grounds and cathedrals were built for the rulers of 50 million subjects, not some 6 million. “We have thousands more officials than we need,” the prime minister complained to a sympathetic American, “and at least two hundred thousand workmen. It is a fearful question to know what to do with them.”
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Half the population of Austria lived in Vienna, but there was little left to support them.