THE NEW EUROPE
considered it to be the truly national German church. Their motive was political, not religious, and the Austrian Government had the sense not to turn them into religious martyrs.
The Pangerman movement in Austria centred round the questions of Bohemia and Styria, which gave rise to a vehement struggle against the Czechs in the north and the Slovenes and Italians in the south. Prague and Trieste are two of the fundamental objectives of Pangermanism.
The political and strategical significance of Bohemia and of the two sister provinces of Moravia and Silesia, made of the Austrian-Germans the bitterest opponents of the Czechs and of their political aspirations. This opposition has, since the Reformation, been the chief motive power in Austrian politics. From the eighteenth century onwards, the Magyars also were the enemies of Vienna, but since the Compromise of 1867, which established the Dual Monarchy, they have joined hands with the Germans in a common campaign against the Czechs. Failing in their original attempts to crush the Czechs by main force, the Germans changed their tactics and tried to accomplish their object by administrative reforms. As early as 1899 all the German parties in Austria had shaped a national programme (the so-called Whitsun programme or programme of Linz), the final aim of which was the exclusion of Galicia from Austria, with the grant of a kind of autonomy. Such a step would mean that the Poles and Ruthenes would not send deputies to the Central Parliament, and that the Germans would consequently find it easier to hold down the Czechs. This device was openly formulated by the Pangerman leader, Georg von Schoenerer, who, in his famous motion of April, 1901, demanded for Galicia and the Bukovina a position in Austria equal to that of Hungary, and, at the same time, demanded the cession of Dalmatia to Hungary. The recently-proclaimed autonomy of Galicia thus has a wider significance than that of a German settlement of Poland; it is a definite step in the Pangerman scheme.[1]
While the majority of the Pangermans in Austria accepted Bismarck's policy concerning their country, there was a radical minority who thought that Austria-Hungary should be broken up and annexed by Germany. Bismarck's view
- ↑ The Austrian Parliament has 516 members; the exclusion of Galicia diminishes the number of Sla v deputies by 106; the Bukovina has 14, and Dalmatia 11, deputies.
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