Redrawing the maps

In my personal library I have a number of old maps and atlases dating to the beginning of the last century and the end of the 19th century. Given their age, they include a number of countries which no longer exist, including the Russian and Ottoman Empires and Austria-Hungary. Such countries as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia did not yet exist, and a few, such as Greece and Romania, were quite a bit smaller than they are today. Then the Great War broke out in 1914 and everything changed.


It's All Relative

Potential Central European Federation?

After the war ended representatives of the great powers met in Paris, where they set about to redraw the map of Europe. One of the casualties was the last of the once vast Habsburg dominions in Europe, Austria-Hungary, as shown in the map above. Had I been present at Paris in 1919 and been in a position to influence the proceedings, I would not have favoured the wholesale carving up of Europe. We now know, of course, that this new Europe created the conditions that led to the Second World War scarcely two decades later. Yet even without this foreknowledge, Clémenceau, Lloyd George, Wilson and others ought to have understood the dangers of acting in so rash a fashion. Opening up the question of international borders was certain to leave huge numbers of people dissatisfied, even as it placated some of the louder and more militant ethnic nationalists who had agitated to move them. Short of uprooting countless millions of minorities -- which, of course, is eventually what happened -- drawing new borders inevitably left sizeable communities believing they were on the wrong side of what seemed to them arbitrary lines on a map.

There would seem to be no obviously just way to partition an empire. More than eight decades later, I find myself wondering whether it might not have been better, rather than breaking up Austria-Hungary, to revive it as a Central European Federation within most of its pre-1914 territory. Perhaps the House of Habsburg could have been left as the reigning, but not ruling, dynasty, with representative parliamentary institutions in Vienna or Budapest, and substantial powers devolved to the constituent regions. Within each of these regions, political institutions might have been established to encourage power-sharing amongst the various ethnic communities, along the lines of the smaller consociational democracies.

The one exception I would have made to the preservation of much of prewar Europe is Poland. The old Polish commonwealth had been cruelly extinguished in 1795, after three successive partitions enlarged Russia, Austria and Prussia at its expense. The great powers were right to bring back Poland. But creating new countries such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, which did not survive the 20th century, was a spectacularly bad idea.

Only if a particular geographically-bounded community is obviously not being done justice within a larger territorial polity might secession or partition become necessary. But it is certainly not an answer to every ill and, even as a last resort, will almost certainly have deleterious consequences for everyone concerned. So although I am generally averse to political slogans, if I had to choose one it would be: Up with federalism; down with partition!