The reconstruction of South-Eastern Europe

SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE

The unsettled conditions which have prevailed there for centuries, tempted the military nations of the East and the West to try to conquer all » those lands. After Rome and Byzantium, the Huns and Avars, Franks and Turks all in turn attempted to succeed where the others had failed; to impose their dominion upon all the countries between Constantinople and Vienna. At last the Germans, who were better prepared and scientifically organised, let loose the storm in order to realise their dream of a German Central Europe as a preliminary and a necessary step towards their ‘‘ World Empire.”

It was by no fortuitous chance that the World War began by the Austrian attack on Serbia. There must have been deep causes and historicopolitical reasons why the present storm broke out just from that storm-centre of Europe. It was because the Serbian or the Southern Slav question is the central problem of South-Eastern Europe and at the same time it indicates clearly that the future European peace cannot be thought of without a just and radical solution of the Serbian question in all its magnitude. If in the present volume we have spoken mainly about Serbia and the Southern Slavs it is because that question is the crucial point of the sound reconstruction of South-Eastern Europe, and when the Southern Slav’s problem is tackled and rationally solved, all other questions correlative to it will be automatically solved also.

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