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The Republic of Austria is a landlocked country bordered by 7 other south and central European nations. The capital is Vienna. The area of Austria is 32,378 square miles (83,859 square km). The estimated population of Austria in July, 2004 was 8,174,762. The official language is German. Once the center of power for the large Austro-Hungarian Empire, Austria was reduced to a small republic after its defeat in World War I. Following annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938 and subsequent occupation by the victorious Allies in 1945, Austria's status remained unclear for a decade. A State Treaty signed in 1955 ended the occupation, recognized Austria's independence, and forbade unification with Germany. A constitutional law that same year declared the country's "perpetual neutrality" as a condition for Soviet military withdrawal. Following the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 and Austria's entry into the European Union in 1995, some Austrian's have called into question this neutrality. A prosperous, democratic country, Austria entered the Economic and Monetary Union in 1999. -- The CIA World Factbook: Austria
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The New York Times, February 20, 1920:GERMAN AUSTRIA.As against this three arguments may be brought. In the first place, Germany will lose her French, Polish, and perhaps her Danish territory, so that, allowing for war losses, her population, even with German Austria included, would be hardly greater than before the war. Secondly, the Peace Conference is presumably making an international arrangement which will keep Germany in restraint; and for a body of nations so powerful as that now formed, it will be no harder to control 68,000,000 Germans than 60,000,000. Thirdly, Germany controlled Austria before the war, and not only Austria, but Hungary and all the races subject to these two states. That is to say, Germany regarded as a military Power consisted of the German Empire, with perhaps 70,000,000 people, and the Dual Monarchy, with 50,000,000, a total of 120,000,000. Of these more than 40,000,000 have been taken away by the liberation of the subject peoples of Austria-Hungary and the breaking of the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich. The man power of Central Europe has been reduced by a third, and to cut off the few millions of German Austria would make little difference with what is left. Austria in a moderate Germany will quite conceivably be a moderate, an anti-Prussian force, strengthening devolutionary and anti-militarist tendencies wherever found; for her imperialists were Austrian imperialists, whose occupation is gone since the fall of the Hapsburgs, and who were always uneasy under Prussian control. But German Austria standing alone would be as wholly at the mercy of the dominant element in Germany as was the Dual Monarchy before the war. She would have less influence on German policy than if she were a State of the new "Volksreich," for her only salvation would be in following the orders that came from Germany, whoever gave them and whatever they might be. Austria is a poor and small country, and cannot stand alone economically or politically. The French opponents of her union with Germany recognize this to some extent, and favor her entry into a Danube confederation. It is not hard to see in this the survival of the old theory that if Austria, in the sense of a monarchy uniting a dozen discordant peoples, did not exist, it would be necessary to invent her. But however true this may have been in 1848, or even in the sixties, it is a hopelessly antiquated view today. The Slavs and Latins of the Dual Monarchy have won independence after a bitter struggle, which has left them little disposed to any kind of federation with their old masters. The reasons for this appear, to some extent, in a statement by Otto Bauer, Foreign Minister of German Austria, which appeared in the Vienna Arbeiter Zeitung some weeks ago. Bauer had no confidence in the possibility of even a customs union, which for obvious reasons was favored by business interests in Vienna, and one of his objections was that, if such a union existed, the old dynastic and aristocratic groups would be constantly intriguing for its conversion into a political union. That is to say, Austria in a Danube confederation might, in conjunction with the landed nobility of Hungary, do her best to restore the old monarchy, which would add 40,000,000 more to the mass east of the Rhine. The chance of achieving this would be, of course, of the slightest, but there is no reason why we should insist on a political organization which would keep the dying Hapsburg imperialism alive. Union of Austria with Germany would kill it. Even a customs union, Bauer thought, would be impossible on account of the differing degrees of industrial development and the conflicting interests of the nations which composed it. France will be safer if the Slavs are left to themselves, and if Austria is added to such German elements as may counterbalance the Prussian militarists. |
Post WWI Austria remained independent of Germany until the Anschluss of 1938, by which time they could have no real voice in German government at all.
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