Europe in the meltingpot Author:Robert William Seton-Watson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: AUSTRIA-HUNGARY AND THE FEDERAL SOLUTION1 " The problem of converting a league forcibly created under the stress of military necessity into a free civil commu... more »nity is still unsolved. It was this problem which kindled the world-war." So writes the German author of a remarkable series of articles on " Austria-Hungary and the Racial Struggle," which have been recently appearing in the Frankfurter Zeitung; and he goes on to quote with approval an equally illuminating passage from the speech of a German deputy in the Austrian Parliament. " The Austrian problem is to-day no longer an Austrian, but a European problem, and indeed the world problem. It is certain that all foreign policy tends more and more to revolve round this Austrian problem which always stands in the centre of all peace conditions, proposals, and discussions." The units of what we now know as " Austria " could never have been pieced together save under the stress of a common Turkish danger. But the Habsburg mission against the Crescent has long since ended, and a new justification, a new raison d'etre is needed. Before the war it had seemed to many—among them the present writer—that this lay " in the vindication of equal rights 1 From The Contemporary Review, No. 627, March 1918. and liberties for all the races committed to its charge." When in 1908 I wrote that " the abandonment of this mission would endanger the very existence of a great Power upon the middle Danube," I could not as yet foresee how lamentably complete would be the abandonment, or what relentless forces it would bring into play. Despite the regrettable tendency of Western diplomatists and publicists both before and during the war to treat the various political problems of the Continent as forming so many watertight compartments, the events ...« less