Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [165]
The Austrians submitted their written comments and then waited while the peacemakers, depleted in July by the departure of many of the top statesmen, considered their own responses. “The contrast was great between the sunny gardens,” recalled an Austrian financial expert, “our leisure, the good fare and our prolonged expectation of the punishment which we the defeated enemies had to expect from our conquerors.” He passed the time by reading Alexandre Dumas and avoiding the nervous conversation of his fellow delegates. The Austrian strategy was to concentrate on several key issues rather than all the terms. They left the reparations clauses alone, on the sensible grounds that they would never be able to pay. They managed, however, to get some important concessions, including a clause prohibiting Austria’s art treasures from being divided up among the successor states. 26
The peacemakers also agreed to a plebiscite in the area around Klagenfurt in the south of Carinthia, which was also being claimed by Yugoslavia. Perhaps this was to compensate for ignoring the self-determination rights of the Germans going to Czechoslovakia in the north, perhaps because Yugoslavia did not inspire quite the same enthusiasm as Czechoslovakia, or perhaps simply to defuse what threatened to become another small war.
Klagenfurt, a peaceful country of lakes and hills on the northern slope of the Karawaken mountains, dotted with medieval monasteries, Gothic churches, Baroque palaces and whitewashed chalets, had once been on the front lines between the Austrian empire and the Ottoman Turks. The end of the war had left a makeshift Austrian administration in the north; in the south, a heavy-handed Yugoslav occupation soon stirred up resistance. Tension was high between Austrians and Yugoslavs along the armistice line and there was sporadic fighting. In 1919 Klagenfurt’s population of about 150,000 was mixed; Slovene-speakers were in a majority, but the main towns were German. Most people switched easily between one language and the other. In February, an American mission drove through, stopping people at random to ask which nation they belonged to. The results surprised them: “The Slovene who does not want to be a Jugo-Slav is a curiosity we should never have believed in had we not seen him, and in large numbers.”27
Italy was the main stumbling block to a decision, objecting in principle to Yugoslav claims but also anxious to prevent the railway line that linked its new port of Trieste with Vienna from running through Yugoslav territory. The Commission on Rumanian and Yugoslav Affairs threw the issue up to the Supreme Council, which simply bounced it back again. In May, the smaller problem of Klagenfurt got drawn into the bitter dispute between Italy and its allies over Italian borders on its east. The Yugoslavs sat on the sidelines worrying. The Austrians began to hope. As Wickham Steed reported, “a marked disposition to be very tender towards Austria had become noticeable among the ‘Big Three.’ The Southern Slavs began to fear that, while the Italians were driving a hard bargain with them in the Adriatic, the other Allies would support the Austrians in driving a hard bargain with them in the delimitation of the Slovene frontier in Carinthia.” 28 The Yugoslav delegation reduced its demands slightly, a gesture that was vitiated when Yugoslav troops in Carinthia suddenly surged north at the end of May. The Council of Four ordered a cease-fire; it was a measure of the council’s dwindling authority in Central Europe that fighting stopped only after several weeks. In the