The Two Maps of Europe, and Some Other Aspects of the Great WarBelloc, Hilaire
History
The Two Maps of Europe, and Some Other Aspects of the Great War
Belloc, Hilaire
Europe -- Politics and government; Military art and science; World War, 1914-1918
Are there anomalies to be discovered with regard to this curiously
shaped body? There are; but they are of less importance than is
often imagined. Thus there are beyond Eastern Prussia and within the
Russian boundary the so-called “German” Baltic provinces of Russia.
But the term is a misnomer. The leaders of industry are largely
German, most of the towns, and the greater landed aristocracy for the
most part. But the mass of the population is not German-speaking, and
even of the German-speaking minority only a minority again are in any
sympathy with the united German feeling to the west.
There are colonies of German speech far eastward of Vienna under
the political dominion of Hungary; a particularly large one being
discoverable right up in the south-eastern Carpathians next to the
Roumanian border. But these colonies could never be included in any
united Germany. Nor could the considerable number of similar isolated
colonies of Germans in southern and western Russia. Finally, you
have on the extreme west the little province of Luxembourg, which is
German-speaking, which has its railways and most of its industries
controlled by Germans, but which would in any perfectly free system
certainly refuse incorporation with any new German unity, for it has
an historic tradition of independence which has proved very valuable
to it, and may be compared with that of the Swiss German-speaking
cantons.
(6) We next have to consider the Slavs, and these fall into two
groups, northern and southern, which two groups are thus separated
by the great Mongolian invasion of Eastern Europe in the Dark Ages.
There is further among the Slavs a cross-section of great importance,
that of religion. It separates the Slavs not into northern and
southern, but, roughly, into eastern or Greek church, and western or
Catholic. With the northern Slavs we count the Bohemians or Czechs,
the Poles, and the Russians--using the latter term, of course, for
many distinct but connected groups, for it is certain that Russia
proper must remain a unity.
There are also just north of the Carpathians two minor northern
Slavonic groups, the Slovacs and the Ruthenians. These northern Slavs
are divided into Catholic Slavs and Slavs of the Greek Church, or
Orthodox, by a vague belt of territory running, roughly, from the
town of Vilna down to the borders of the Bukovina; the Poles and
Czechs, etc., being in communion with Rome, while the Russians are of
the Greek Church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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