What every schoolchild doesn't know.

ABOUT THE tragedies of our century, George F. Kennan said that "all the lines of inquiry lead back to World War I." Throughout the previous century, two empires had between them dominated Central Europe and the Near East: the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Once, every schoolchild was taught that breaking up these empires was "a good thing." We are now painfully aware how false that is.

A brief look at the map shows that the immediate practical effect of the breakup was the creation of a mosaic of small countries between Germany and Red Russia, and the fragmentation of the area south of Turkey. But there was more to the destruction of these empires-and particularly the Austro-Hungarian one-than territorial changes. Winston Churchill once remarked that after 1919 all sorts of vermin emerged from the sewers, not only in the heart of Europe but also farther east. Once the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns, and the HolsteinGottorps (Romanovs) were yanked out of the driver's seat, people of a very different stamp took over, and they in turn were replaced by creatures of a lower order yet.

A compromise peace could have been concluded in 1917, except that America's entry into the war had thoroughly changed its character; no longer a "wrestling between nations," it turned into something much more dangerous-a crusade to "make the world safe for democracy." And indeed, throughout Central Europe it did install democracy, a preliminary stage of tyranny, as Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius had prophesied and the French Revolution confirmed.

This was allowed to come about partly because, in the Atlantic nations (especially the United States), an understanding of the Old World as a whole, as a live organism, was sadly lacking. Continental history, as an American professor once pointed out, is taught in the United States roughly as French history with frills (the unification of Germany and Italy and the reforms of Peter the Great are thrown in for good measure). All the rest is grossly neglected, and so is geography. To this must be added the language barrier: for someone whose native language is English, German is far more difficult than the Romance languages; the Slavic idioms are immensely more difficult yet, and Hungarian, Finnish, or Tarkish can be considered almost out of reach.

In addition, there was a sectarian prejudice at work. When, during the last century, Austria clashed with Prussia over the dominant role in the Germanies, advanced," progressive," "enlightened" opinion sided with Protestant Prussia over Catholic Austria. (It was Kennan again who pointed out that the treatment of Poland by the West after World War Il stemmed from the perception of Poland as a Roman Catholic and aristocratic country, and hence practically fascist.)

To understand fally the character of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy is by no means easy. (Two British writers did-Edward Crankshaw, who said that pre-World War I Austria was politically and socially far more "democratic" than England; and C. A. Macartney, who was even able to supervise the translation of his historical books on Hungary into Hungarian.) Austria and Hungary were linked but separate. They had a common army and navy, a common economy and currency, a common foreign policy, and a common ruler. But they had separate laws, separate constitutions, separate stamps, and separate citizenships. In this "dual" political unit there were no fewer than 13 ethnically different nationalities. What united them was the dynasty, the Church, the army, the civil service, and the multi-ethnic nobility.

All this does not mean that the Danubian Monarchy did not have weaknesses that would have had to be repaired. For one thing, it was too centralized. As there was a coronation in Budapest, there should have been others in Prague, Cracow, and Zagreb. But on the whole it was a going concern. The problem was the rise of the educated middle class, which often fell prey to the spirit of ethnic nationalism-even though as subsequent history has shown, often bloodily, new "nations" on ethnic lines could not have been established without massive movements of peoples. Whereas in Western Europe borders are more or less neatly defined, in Central and Eastern Europe they constantly overlap. Frequently a city is predominantly inhabited by people of one ethnic group, the surrounding villages by people of another.

In this simplifying age, it has been argued that multi-ethnic states had become an anomaly, and that the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was bound to fly apart with or without the Treaty of Versailles to break it up. To maintain this view, one has to ignore phenomena like the strong cohesion of multi-ethnic Switzerland. Furthermore, the Dual Monarchy did not break up during World War I; it fought together to the bitter end. On the war memorial in Trieste one finds the names of only three or four men who deserted to the other side. The Central Powers were not defeated in the field but starved to death. The author of these lines lived at that time as a child in Baden, seat of the ImperialRoyal Supreme Command, and often cried from hunger. (After the war he was fed by the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover.)

The Habsburgs considered themselves to be heirs of the Holy Roman Emperors, and they were able to use their privilege to veto a papal election as late as 1902, when Franz Joseph vetoed the election of Cardinal Rampolla (who could never have handled the modernist problem), thus clearing the way for the election of Pope (Saint) Pius X. The Habsburgs are also the German dynasty, having ruled the empire for roughly five hundred years. (The last Austrian emperor's oldest son is now a German delegate to the European Parliament.)

But the democrats had decreed that this must come to an end, and so, following what Denis Brogan rightly called the Second War of the Austrian Succession, the Habsburg "yoke" was removed and the nations that had been under it were left to their unhappy, and in some cases truly gruesome, fates. There is not one of the peoples and provinces that constituted the Empire of the Habsburgs," Churchill wrote in his memoirs, "to whom gaining their independence has not brought the tortures which ancient poets and theologians had reserved for the damned." They were conquered first by Hitler's army, then by Stalin's.

Twice in this century American soldiers have marched into Europe, and twice their victories have been frittered away by politicians at the green tables. Much could be said, specifically, about the political advisors who in World War I set the scene for World War II-Colonel House, for example, and even more fatally George D. Herron. (Over the years I have studied the 13 boxes of Herron Papers at California's Hoover Institution.) This defrocked socialist clergyman acted as President Wilson's agent in Switzerland and successfully thwarted Austria's peace effort in February 1918. But for him, the lives of nearly a million men could have been saved.

The same is true for Russia. Had Kerensky made peace (which Nicholas II wanted), Russia's Golgotha could have been avoided. But, as in a Greek drama, the tragedy ran its full course, and democracy-that "curious abuse of statistics," as Jorge Luis Borges described it-was installed almost everywhere. When it proved unworkable in Central and Eastern Europe, World War II followed. This Third War of the Austrian Succession transferred the heart of Europe from German to Russian hands.

We are now facing a situation that is, territorially and constitutionally, ominously similar to the situation in 1919. Of the Bourbons, brought back by a victorious military alliance in 1815, it has been said that they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Will the same be true in Central Europe today? Must we expect a repeat performance of the drama enacted between 1919 and 1989, for which the preconditions were established in 1789?

Young Turks

THE FALL of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy has often been mentioned in the same breath with the end of the Ottoman Empire. The analogy has weak points. The Ottoman Empire was by no means so cohesive; and unlike the Danubian Monarchy, it was outside Christendom. Still, there are indeed parallels-mostly in the aftermath. The big Armenian slaughter, for example, took place not under the Ottoman Empire, but under the "democratic" Young Turks, whose motto was Unity and Progress. Under the empire, civil-service careers in Turkey were open to Christians and Jews; under the democratic successors those doors were closed, and the Greeks were expelled.

The territorial changes after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, like those after the fall of the Habsburg Empire, brought hardly any advantages to the world at large. Syria and Lebanon became French colonies; Iraq, Jordan, and Kuwait a British mandate; Palestine a British mandate. The Sultan's nominal sovereignty over Egypt fell into abeyance. Joint American and Soviet "anti-colonialism" saw to it that these colonies and protectorates soon became "sovereign nations." We are reaping the whirlwind today.