Reprinted from The Annals of the American Academy of Political Science, Philadelphia, July, 1917.
Publication No. 1138.
THE BOHEMIAN QUESTION
By Charles Pergler,
Cresco, Iowa.
The exit of Turkey from Europe is now a question of a short time. Russia is no more an autocracy, and henceforth will be a democratically governed country. Thus remains unsolved only one major international problem involving the rights of small nations, speaking of nations in the ethnical sense and as distinguished from states. The allied note to President Wilson demands the liberation of Italians, Slavs, Roumanians and Czecho-Slovaks from foreign domination. The Czechs and Slovaks ask for the reconstruction of an independent Bohemian-Solvak state. All this postulates the dissolution, or at least a very serious diminution, of Austria-Hungary.
The federalization of the Austro-Hungarian Empire has become impracticable, if not wholly impossible. The case of Switzerland is hardly in point. Mr. Toynbee defines nationality as a will to coöperate, and a nation as a group of men bound together by the immanence of this impulse in each individual. The Swiss have developed this will to coöperate, while in Austria it always has been unknown, and conditions are such that to hope even for its inception would be wholly utopian. Nor can we point to the United States of America as an example, because we are after all a nation formed by the free will of immigrants of various origins, and with an underlying basis of uniformity of outlook, uniformity of language, and uniformity of culture, furnished by the original settlers in this country who came from England.
Nationality is the modern state-forming force. To disregard it is to stand in the path of an ultimately irresistible force. The historical process of unification of various nationalities, which began with the German and Italian aspirations for a national state, ultimately will be consummated. If it is not completed now, the world is due for another convulsion within a relatively short time. When this consummation takes place, that Austrian territory inhabited by Italians will be joined to Italy, the Roumanians will be gathered in one state, there will come into being a Yougo-slav
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