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and were convinced that with the unavoidable victory of democracy, Germanism would triumph
over these dying nationalities. Cf. Marx, Revolution und Kontrerevolution in Deutschland, German
translation by Kautsky, third edition (Stuttgart: 1913), pp. 61 ff.; Engels (Mehring, loc. cit.), pp. 246
ff. Cf. in addition Bauer, "Nationalitätenfrage," loc. cit., pp. 271 f.
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Nation and State
that was incumbent on every German party in Austria in national
questions. It began to become German-nationalist; then, no more
than the two older German parties of Austria, could it get around
the conditions that had brought Germanism and democracy into
contradiction in Austria. Just as the German Liberal Party finally
had to drop its democratic principles because following them was
bound to lead to harming Germanism in Austria, just as the
German Nationalist Party had done the same, so Social Democracy
too would have had to do this if history had not forestalled it and
shattered the Austrian state before this turn of events was fully
completed.
After a series of programmatic declarations of merely academic
value had been overtaken by the facts, Social Democracy at first
made a try with the program of national autonomy.71
There is no doubt that this program rests on a deeper grasp of
nationality problems than the Linz Program, on which, though, the
flower of German Austria at the time had also collaborated. In the
decades between these two programs, much had taken place that
was bound to open the eyes of the Germans of Austria also. But
there, too, they could not escape the constraint that historical
necessity had placed on them. The program of national autonomy,
even if it spoke of democracy and self-government, was also
basically nothing but what the nationality programs of the German
Liberals and the German Nationalists had really been in essence:
namely, a program for saving the Austrian state of Habsburg-
Lorraine dominion over the Imperial and Royal hereditary lands.
It claimed to be much more modern that the older programs, but it
was in essence nothing else. One cannot even say that it was more
democratic than the earlier ones, for democracy is an absolute
concept, not a concept of degree.
71
Cf. Marx, Revolution und Kontrerevolution in Deutschland, pp. 52 ff.
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Nation, State, and Economy
The most important difference between the program of national
autonomy and the older German nationality programs is that it
feels the necessity of justifying the existence and demonstrating
the necessity of the existence of the Austrian state not only from
the standpoint of the Dynasty and from the standpoint of the
Germans but also from that of the other nationalities. And it does
not content itself, moreover, with those showy phrases that were
usual among the so-called black-and-yellow writers, as, for
example, with a reference to the maxim of Palacky that one would
have had to invent Austria if it had not already existed. But this
argument, which was worked out particularly by Renner, is totally
untenable. It starts with the idea that maintaining the Austro-
Hungarian customs territory as a distinct economic territory is in
the interest of all the peoples of Austria and that each one,
therefore, has an interest in creating an order that maintains the
viability of the state. That this argument is not correct has already
been shown; when one has recognized the faultiness of the
program of national autonomy, then one sees immediately that it
contains nothing but an attempt to find a way out of the nationality
struggles without destroying the Habsburg state. Not quite
unjustifiably, therefore, the Social Democrats have occasionally
been called Imperial and Royal Social Democrats; they did appear
as the only pro-state party in Austria, especially at those moments
of the kaleidoscopically changing party constellation in Austria
when the German Nationalists temporarily set aside their Austrian
sentiment and behaved irredentistically.
The collapse of Austria saved Social Democracy from going
too far in this direction. In the first years of the World War,
Renner, in particular, did everything in this respect that was at all
possible with his doctrines that opponents called social
imperialism. That the majority of his party did not unconditionally
follow him on this path was not a merit of its own but rather the
consequence of growing dissatisfaction with a policy that was
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Nation and State
imposing the most extreme bloody sacrifices on the population and
condemning it to hunger and misery.
The German and German-Austrian Social Democrats could
represent themselves as democratic because they were opposition
parties without responsibility as long as the German people could
not fully accept democratic principles, fearing that their application
would harm the Germans in the polyglot territories of the East.
When, with the outbreak of the World War, a part, perhaps the
largest part, of the responsibility for the fate of the German people
fell to them too, they also took the path taken before them by the
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