The War and DemocracySeton-Watson, R. W. (Robert William)
History
The War and Democracy
Seton-Watson, R. W. (Robert William)
Europe -- Politics and government -- 1871-1918; Nationalism -- Europe; World War, 1914-1918
CRAMB. _Germany and England_. 1914. (2s. 6d. net.) (An account of
Treitschke and his school of thought: interesting for the light it throws
on German misconceptions about Great Britain.)
TREITSCHKE. _Selections from his Lectures on Politics_. 1914.
Translated by A.L. Gowans. (2s. net.)
The writings of the following German professors will be found interesting
if procurable: Oncken, Meinecke (both contributors to the _Cambridge Modern
History_), Delbrück, Sombart, Erich Marcks (see his lectures on Germany in
_Lectures on the History of the Nineteenth Century_, edited by Kirkpatrick,
Cambridge, 1900, 4s. 6d.), Schiemann, Lamprecht, Schmoller, and F. von
Liszt.
_Note_.--Such considered German writings as have come to hand since the
outbreak of the war show little tendency to cope with the real facts of the
situation, or even to seek to understand them. They seem to indicate two
developments in German opinion.
(1) A great consolidation of German national unity (except, of course, in
Poland and Alsace-Lorraine).
(2) A tendency to forgo the consideration of the immediate issues and to
hark back in thought to 1870 or even to the Wars of Liberation. It
is difficult to judge of a nation in arms from the writings of its
stay-at-homes; but no one can read recent articles by the leaders of German
thought without feeling that the Germans are still, before all things and
incurably, "the people of poets and philosophers," and that, by a tragic
irony, it is the best and most characteristic qualities of the race which
are sustaining and will continue to sustain it in the conflict in which its
dreams have involved it.
CHAPTER IV
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY AND THE SOUTHERN SLAVS
"For a century past attempts have been made to solve the Eastern Question.
On the day when it appears to have been solved Europe will inevitably be
confronted by the Austrian Question."--ALBERT SOREL (1902).
In April 1909, a week after the international crisis evoked by Austria's
annexation of Bosnia had come to an end, I paid my first visit to Cetinje,
the tiny mountain-capital of Montenegro, and was assured by the Premier,
Dr. Tomanovi, that the conflict had merely been postponed, not averted--a
fact which even then was obvious enough. "But remember," he said, "it is
a question of _Aut aut_ (either, or)--either Serbia and Montenegro or
Austria-Hungary. One or other has got to go, and you may rest assured that
in four, or at most five, years from now there will be a European war over
this very question." At the time I merely regarded his prophecy as a proof
of Serb megalomania, but it has been literally fulfilled.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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