As the war dragged on, nationalism became an ever greater factor. Although the majority of people had no choice but to obey the call-up, fight and die in the trenches, and endure the privations of the home front, a minority did urge exploitation of the conflict for nationalist purposes, in some cases from exile abroad. These lone voices struggled initially to make themselves heard, but they were pushing at an open door. There was an inherent risk for the multinational empires in going to war at all: given the strain involved, the likelihood of a territorial shake-up and the interest of nationalists in promoting change, fault-lines were bound to emerge.
With Poles fighting on both sides, nationalist leaders were confronted with a choice between working for the Central Powers' victory or Russia's, in the certainty that neither side would necessarily offer them anything more than domination by a single power rather than three. Pilsudski, though a Russian subject, had already opted for the Central Powers in 1908 when he migrated to Austrian Galicia, where he was allowed to organise a paramilitary force, the Riflemen's Union, for possible deployment in a war with Russia. The National
Democrats under Dmowski put their faith in Russia, but their hopes of an autonomous Poland under tsarist rule were undermined by Russification. On the outbreak of war Piisudski led his riflemen on a brief but hopeless foray into Russian territory, after which the Habsburg authorities firmly subordinated his force to regular army command. Meanwhile, the Endecja continued to argue that an autonomous Poland under Russia was the only realistic prospect, even though by August 1915 the whole of Poland was under Central Power control. Dmowski transferred his activities to the West in November, setting up a Polish National Committee to lobby the French, British and American governments for support.
One of the lonest voices, on behalf of the Czechs, was the academic and politician Tomas Masaryk who, in 1914, finally convinced by the attack on Serbia that the Habsburg Monarchy was unreformable, fled to the West and started campaigning for an independent Czecho-Slovak state, on the ground that Czechs and Slovaks were so closely related that they should combine. Masaryk was joined by a fellow Czech, Edvard Benes, and the emigre Slovak astronomer Milan Stefanik, and was vocally assisted by eminent sympathisers in the West such as the Scottish historian R. W. Seton-Watson, H. Wickham Steed of The Times and others, as well as the sizeable Czech emigre community in the United States. The Entente powers, however, were not yet ready to commit themselves to a break-up of the Monarchy; in Austria-Hungary itself the political parties representing Czech and Slovak interests were hardly in a position to respond. On the eastern front Czech and Slovak troops were perpetually suspected of disaffection and tendencies to desert which, combined with the persecution of Czech and Slovak political leaders at home, soon became a self-fulfilling prophecy: sporadic disobedience and desertions began, especially after the Monarchy's catastrophic losses in 1915.
For the South Slavs, also, the war made the hitherto almost inconceivable conceivable. The first formal expression of Serbia's war aims was the Declaration of Nis in December 1914, which informed the Entente powers that Serbia's ultimate aim was 'the liberation of all our captive brethren Serbs, Croats and Slovenes'.7 Whether this amounted to a genuine 'Yugoslavia' or South Slav state, however, as opposed to a Serb-dominated Greater Serbia created by the annexation of Bosnia, Montenegro and part of the Adriatic coastline, remained to be seen. In the meantime, two Croat politicians, Frano Supilo and Ante Trumbic;, decamped from the Habsburg Monarchy to the West in 1914 and formed a Yugoslav Committee, dedicated to the establishment of a Yugoslav state on federal lines, an appeal backed by western friends such as Seton-Watson, although not by western governments. Between the Serbian government and the Yugoslav Committee there seemed little common ground other than the dismemberment of the Habsburg Monarchy. Serbia's premier Pasic; hoped to use the Committee to undermine the Monarchy, but intended a centralist, Serb-dominated state; the Yugoslav Committee saw federalism as the only feasible option. Both sides were driven together by circumstance. The Yugoslav Committee needed Serbia's support against Italy's claims, endorsed by the Entente in May 1915, to Habsburg territory inhabited by Croats and Slovenes. The Serbian government, once driven physically out of Serbia, needed whatever help it could get. The two parties came together at Corfu in July 1917 to affirm their common commitment to the formation of a Yugoslav state, but little else was agreed.
The reaction of warring governments to nationalist pressure varied. In the Habsburg Monarchy to begin with there was little sign of overt disloyalty among national minorities at home or at the front, but grievances were created by the government's internment of political leaders and the trial of some for treason. In the Austrian half of the Monarchy, at least, the military were given virtually dictatorial powers for the first two years of hostilities and made it plain they regarded the Slav and Romanian population as unreliable; in Bosnia, southern Hungary and Galicia the army behaved 'as an occupying power in enemy territory'.8 Habsburg troops began to be targeted by propaganda leaflets on the Russian and especially the Italian front, promising the Monarchy's peoples 'the fulfilment of national desires', and although the immediate effect was minimal, the cumulative impact by 1918 cannot be ignored.9 As the Monarchy's casualties mounted, cracks did begin to appear in front-line troops' morale, with units surrendering wholesale and in some instances deserting. When Francis Joseph died in November 1916, his successor Charles relaxed the censorship and reconvened the Austrian Reichsrat; the result was a swelling chorus of nationalist discontent, which really did begin to have an incremental effect on military morale. However, Charles could do nothing about the situation in Hungary, where the government refused even to consider concessions to the nationalities.
In the larger strategic context the Monarchy was fatally tied to its dominant German partner, and here the Central Powers found themselves in competition with their enemies for the allegiance of certain nationalities. In November 1916 they announced the creation of a Polish constitutional monarchy, the precise extent of which remained unspecified. This was always intended to be a puppet state; indeed, the German high command's principal purpose in urging it was their hope of raising a separate Polish army. Pilsudski, appointed to head this projected force, in vain demanded real independence, and when he and his legionaries refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the Central Powers, they were interned in July 1917. Later that year the Central Powers appointed a 'Regency Council' for Poland, but the chance to impose Brest—Litovsk on Russia, in 1918, meant that the Polish state would be scaled down to accommodate other peoples in the region. In the occupied Baltic provinces of Russia, Germany made it plain that it regarded the local Germans as the obvious helpmates, and plans were drawn up for the post-war colonisation of the area with additional Germans.
On the Entente side there was certainly no intention initially of breaking up the Habsburg Monarchy to satisfy nationality claims, even though the Entente was quite ready to buy Italian and Romanian entry into the war with the promise of specific Habsburg territories. The secret Treaty of London in
May 1915, whereby the Entente accepted Italy's claims to parts of the Habsburg Adriatic inhabited not only by Italians but also by large numbers of Slovenes and Croats, as well as a slice of southern Albania, was a bargain driven by purely strategic considerations. Britain and France, if not Russia, still regarded the Habsburg Monarchy as an essential element of the balance of power. As far as the Poles were concerned, the Russian government in 1914 did make vague noises about creating an autonomous, unified Poland after the war, but little more was heard of this again until January 1917, when the tsar announced that he supported this goal 'in union with Russia'.10 It was no part of Entente policy to work towards a genuinely independent Poland.
World History
