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It is true that the Turkish danger brought about in 1526 the union of Austria, Bohemia and Hungary; but it is equally true that the Austrian Hapsburgs very shortly abused the free union and oppressed both Bohemia and Hungary. The Hapsburgs became the right arm of the threatened theocracy and broke, with the help of Empire and Europe, Bohemia and her Hussite Revolution. With blood and iron and Jesuitism the Hapsburgs crushed the Czech Revolution (1618) and culture. The whole history of Austria and her efforts for a uniting, centralising and Germanising state is proof and example of dynastic domination, but of no federation of nations. Austria was a federation only as long as it was the union of three free states; Austria-Hungary of to-day is not a federation of small nations. Such a federation can be found only in the writings of weak-minded courtier-historians and politicians: Austria-Hungary is the organised oppression of the majority by the minority; Austria-Hungary is the continuation of mediæval dynastic absolutism.
The Dual Monarchy is composed of nine nations: Germans, Czechs with the Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians, Serbo-Croats, Slovenes, Rumanians, Italians, Magyars. Some count the Slovaks as a separate nation; the Latins in the Tirol are a separate nation, and a part of the Jews claim again nationality. In all other nationally mixed states, even in Russia, the so-called ruling nation is in the majority; only in Austria and Hungary the minority rules over the majority. What is Austria? A dynasty with the aristrocacy, the army and its higher officers, the higher bureaucracy and the church (hierarchy) furnishing the necessary spiritual police. Mickiewicz properly compares this anti-national state to the East India Company, in which 200 families exploit the nations.
Turkey also was a “federation” of nations—and she fell; with Turkey will fall also the anomaly of Austria, as Mazzini correctly foretold.
A real federation of nations will be accomplished only when the nations are free to unite of their own accord. The development of Europe points to that end. The program of the Allies answers fully to this development: free and liberated nations will organise themselves, as they find necessary, into greater units, and thus the whole continent will be organised. Should there be federations of smaller states, they will be federations freely entered upon, out of the real needs of the nations, not out of dynastic and imperialistic motives. Federation without freedom is impossible; that must be emphatically stated to those Austrian and other politicians who are promising autonomy and federation. We have now three examples of federated states, and in all three instances they are free independent states that have become federated: Switzerland, America, and even Germany. Switzerland and America are republics, Germany is a monarchy, but her single states are independent. Do the Hapsburgs want a real federation of independent states and nations? Surely not; in any case the Germans threatened that they would not permit a federalisation of Austria.
According to the program of the Allies, the small nations and states shall be treated with the same respect politically and socially as the great nations and states. A small nation, an enlightened and culturally progressing nation, is just as much of a full-fledged unit and cultural individual as a great nation. The problem of small nations and states is the same as the problem of the so-called small man; what matters is that the value of the man, the individuality of the man, is recognised without regard to his material means. This is the proper sense and kernel of the great humanitarian movement which characterises modern times, and as manifested in socialism, democracy and nationalism. The modern humanitism recognises the right of the weak; that is the meaning of all efforts for progress and for the recognition of human dignity: the strong will always help himself—the protection of the weaker and the weak, the protection of the small, of the individual, of corporations and classes, of nations and states; that is the task of modern times. Everywhere the weak, oppressed and exploited unite themselves—association is the watchword of our era: federation, the free
