The reconstruction of South-Eastern Europe

SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE

the healing of its heart-wound and the satisfaction of its insatiable thirst for new titles and provinces.

As this new policy of the onrush to the East (Drang nach Osten) of Austria-Hungary, actively initiated after the German victories of 1870-71, was pursued only in the interests of the Hapsburg dynasty and German nation, it was necessary to concentrate the whole power in their hands. Since the position of the Magyars, the masternation in Hungary, did not rest upon their numerical or intellectual superiority, but upon the goodwill of the Crown and upon the alliance with Germany, they were only too willing partners to such a policy. To the haughty and overbearing Magyar oligarchy which ruled in Hungary the thought never occurred, that the prosperity and liberty of the Magyars could be better promoted by a just and fair understanding with other nationalities which also inhabited Hungary. —

To the position of the primus inter pares they preferred the perilous height of isolated masters. But in order to maintain that position and to pursue their policy of brutal dominion and forcible magyarisation towards all other nationalities in Hungary, they sold themselves body and soul to the Hapsburg dynasty and their allies in Berlin, becoming the most subservient pillar of the grandiose scheme of a German Central Europe from Ostend to Constantinople.

In order to realise that plan, it was in the first

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