AUSTRIA-HUNGARY AND THE PRESENT WAR In order to understand fully what is at stake in this war and why the Slavs are so bitterly opposed to the further existence of Austria-Hungary, it is necessary to study the foreign policy of the Central Powers during the past century. The "deepened alliance" concluded between Germany and Austria-Hungary in May, 1918, resulting in the complete surrender of Austria's independence, is in fact the natural outcome of a long development and the realisation of the hopes of Mitteleuropa cherished by the Germans for years past. The scares about the dangers of "Pan-slavism" were spread by the Germans only in order to conceal the real danger of Pan-Germanism. 1. The original theory of Pan-Germanism was the consolidation and unity of the whole German nation corresponding to the movement of the Italians for national unity. In fact it was a German, Herder, who first proclaimed the principle of nationality and declared the nation to be the natural organ of humanity, as opposed to the idea of the state as an artificial organisation: "Nothing seems to be so opposed to the purpose of government as an unnatural extension of territory of a state and a wild confusion of holding different races and nations under the sway of a single sceptre." It was this humanitarian philosophy recognising the natural rights of all nations, great or small, to freedom which inspired the first Czech regenerators such as Dobrovsky, Jungman and Kollar. The legitimate claims of the Germans to national unity became unjust and dangerous for Europe when the Germans began to think of subduing the whole of Central Europe to their hegemony, which meant the subjugation of some 100 million Slavs and Latins. At first it was Austria which, as the head of the former Holy Roman Empire, and the traditional bulwark of Germany in the east (Osterreich--an eastern march), aspired to be the head of the Pan-German Empire. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the Austrian Emperor became the head of the German Confederation. Prussia at that time entirely gave way and left the leadership to Metternich's system of absolutism.