THE ANSCHLUSS PROBLEM.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 243, 14 October 1929, Page 6

THE ANSCHLUSS PROBLEM.

Anxious eyes survey present developments in Austria lest another apple of discord be flung to Europe from Vienna. The problem is not whether the top-heavy little Republic becomes Fascist or remains beneficently Socialist, whether democratic Vienna 01* reactionary rural Austria wins out, but whether the national desire for the Anschluss, or union with Germany, is to be acclerated, retarded or prevented. That the resignation of the late Chancellor, Dr. Steeruwitz, an ardent advocate of the Anschluss, is a victory for separatism sharply defines the inter-European issue up to date. A timely sketch of Austria in relation to .the Pan-Germanic idea was presented five months ago by Dr. Preston Slosson, associate-professor of history at Michigan University. This expert begins by defining Austria's medieval position, not as the purely Germanic State she was then and is to-day, but as the staunch outpost of Roman Catholicism, armed first against the paganism of Prussia and Lithuania, then against the proto-Reformation of Huss, and lastly against the achieved revolt of Luther. From that principle she never wavered throughout Turkish invasion, Hussite struggles and the Thirty Years' War, out of which last German nationality emerged broken and divided, lacking now the loose dynastic sentiment that made the Holy Roman Empire at least a symbol of Continental unity. Geographically, also, while Protestant Germany remained insular in spirit, Austria grew increasingly cosmopolitan, adding to her subjects Czechs, 'Slovaks, Magyars, Poles, Ruthenians and Italians under the Hapsburg sceptre.' Though after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1800 she remained the premier Germanic State her ambition was totally against coalition with a strong, unified Germany. Retrograde from the reforms of Maria Theresa and her son, Austria, "a scarecrow of reaction," fought down every forward move of her compeers in the sounding but resultless 'forties. * Enter now Bismarck, in tune with Austrian reaction, indeed, but a jealous Prussian who could not tolerate her ascendancy. He trapped her 1 into the disastrous war of 1860 and bade her stay ! an outsider when he achieved his German Empire. Later he accorded her the favour of joining the Triple Alliance, which was little more than a humiliation, seeing that the third party, United Italy, had just slipped out of Austrian bondage. Austria had now to trim her sails in some sense to the winds of modernity, made herself the dual kingdom of Austria-Hungary, and bestowed some tentative favours on her Slavonic subjects. She knew on what dangerous seas she was sailing; it was fear rather than truculence that trapped her into the second fiasco which fired Europe in 1914. The rest is fresh in memory. In 1919 Austria was left a ruined, starving Germanic fragment, fallen from fifty millions to six and a half, nearly half resident in Vienna. She had to accept American charity and advances from the League of Nations to live at all. Beyond these alleviations her one hope has been the Anschluss. In their draft constitutions Germany and Austria included provisions for union. This the Allies forbade at Versailles, France being the spirit that kept them separate then and after. Very quietly, however, the two nations have been paving the way for that union they hope for, in commercial concessions, in simplifying passport regulations, in standardising laws and judicial methods and connection of educational institutions. Is an alien wind of Fascism permanently to wither these growths of nationalism springing from one root in the past ? —JESSIE MACKAY.