Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [166]
The Yugoslavs resisted the idea of partition, which was now being floated; they also strenuously objected to the proposal, mainly from the British and the Americans, for a plebiscite. (They suspected that they would lose.) They had some support from Clemenceau, who was always mindful that he might be asked to hold one in Alsace-Lorraine. Wilson, however, was determined that in this area, at least, the inhabitants would choose for themselves. On May 31 he emerged from the Council of Four and, as the French raised their eyebrows, announced, “If the experts will follow me, I am going to explain the matter to them.” The Big Four and their experts crawled around a huge map on the floor. An irritated Orlando butted an American out of his way.29
The Yugoslavs muttered about boycotting the treaty with Austria but eventually agreed to a compromise. The part of Austria just to the north of Slovenia would have a plebiscite; if the inhabitants voted to join Yugoslavia, then the northern, more German part would also hold one. In October 1920 the vote, which all observers agreed was done in exemplary fashion, took place; a majority of 22,000 to 15,000 was for staying with Austria. The voters seemed to have been swayed by their economic links with Austria and a feeling that Austria was more advanced than the new Yugoslav state. For women voters, the knowledge that their sons were liable to conscription in Yugoslavia but not in Austria may also have played a part. If they could have seen into the future, when Austria became part of Nazi Germany, and Slovene children were forced into German schools and Slovene identity largely suppressed, would they have voted differently?30
The Yugoslav army made a dramatic march into the disputed zone immediately after the result was announced but withdrew without fuss two days later. The Slovenes in Yugoslavia complained bitterly about the “amputation” of national territory and suspected, probably correctly, that Serb leaders had never really been prepared to go to the wall, that they were far more concerned with Serbia’s borders in the north and in the east.31 Yet another grievance entered the catalog in the new Yugoslav state and yet another bitter memory was left between neighbors.
Austria asked for another concession from the Allies, a strip of territory from the western edge of Hungary. (In shape, it was close to the proposed corridor between Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, which the Peace Conference had turned down.) The Austrians argued that the inhabitants were mainly German. Unfortunately, they had never lived under Austrian rule and appeared to see themselves as part of Hungary. Of course, said a British expert, it was no use asking them because the communist revolution in Hungary had thoroughly confused them. (The Austrian government found this a useful argument when the question of a plebiscite was raised by Hungary.) Austria also used strategic grounds—Vienna, along with crucial roads and railways, was too close to the Hungarian border— and, rather plaintively, nutritional ones. The area had always supplied food to the Viennese, who had been lacking vegetables and milk ever since Hungary became an independent state. The Hungarians produced their counterarguments but the peacemakers listened to the Austrians. Most of the area, with the exception of one city, went to Austria. Hungary tried unsuccessfully to persuade Hitler to hand it back in 1938 as a reward for staying neutral during the Anschluss. Austria thus became the only defeated nation to gain new territory at the Peace Conference. It signed the Treaty of St. Germain in September 1919.32
Austria’s first experience with independence was not happy. In the 1920s its economy staggered from crisis to crisis, tided over by parsimonious loans from the powers. Even before the Depression unemployment ran at well over 10 percent a year. In March 1938, when Hitler, with the connivance