Free Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties by Paul Johnson Page A

would be accepted for Africa.
    Indeed by 1919 there could be no question of saving the old arrangements in Central and Eastern Europe. The nationalists had already torn them apart. From the distance of seventy years it is customary to regard the last years of Austria—Hungary as a tranquil exercise in multi-racialism. In fact it was a nightmare of growing racial animosity. Every reform created more problems than it solved. Hungary got status within the empire as a separate state in 1867. It at once began to oppress its own minorities, chiefly Slovaks and Romanians, with greater ferocity and ingenuity than it itself had been oppressed by Austria. Elections were suspect, and the railways, the banking system and the principles of internal free trade were savagely disrupted in the pursuit of racial advantage immediately any reform made such action possible. Czechs and other Slav groups followed the Hungarians’ example. No ethnic group behaved consistently. What the Germans demanded and the Czechs refused in Bohemia, the Germans refused and the Italians and south Slovenes demanded in the South Tyrol and Styria. All the various Diets and Parliaments, in Budapest, Prague, Graz and Innsbruck, were arenas of merciless racial discord. In Galicia, the minority Ruthenians fought the majority Poles. In Dalmatia the minority Italians fought the majority South Slavs. As a result it was impossible to form an effective parliamentary government. All of the twelve central governments between 1900 and 1918 had to be composed almost entirely of civil servants. Each local government, from which minorities were excluded, protected its home industries where it was legally empowered to do so, and if not, organized boycotts of goods made by other racial groups. There was no normality in the old empire.
    But at least there was some respect for the law. In Imperial Russia there were anti-Jewish pogroms occasionally, and other instances of violent racial conflict. But the two Germanic empires were exceptionally law-abiding up to 1914; the complaint even was that their peoples were too docile. The war changed all that with a vengeance. There is truth in the historian Fritz Stern’s remark that the Great War ushered in a period of unprecedented violence, andbegan in effect a Thirty Years’ War, with 1919 signifying the continuation of war by different means. 116 Of course in a sense the calamities of the epoch were global rather than continental. The 1918–19 influenza virus strain, a pandemic which killed forty million people in Europe, Asia and America, was not confined to the war areas, though it struck them hardest. 117 New-style outbreaks of violence were to be found almost everywhere immediately after the formal fighting ended. On 27 July—1 August, in Chicago, the USA got its first really big Northern race-riots, with thirty-six killed and 536 injured. Others followed elsewhere: at Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 30 May 1921, fifty whites and two hundred blacks were murdered. 118 In Canada, on 17 June 1919, the leaders of the Winnipeg general strike were accused, and later convicted, of a plot to destroy constitutional authority by force and set up a Soviet. 119 In Britain, there was a putative revolution in Glasgow on 31 January 1919; and civil or class war was a periodic possibility between 1919 and the end of 1921, as the hair-raising records of cabinet meetings, taken down verbatim in shorthand by Thomas Jones, survive to testify. Thus, on 4 April 1921, the cabinet discussed bringing back four battalions from Silesia, where they were holding apart frantic Poles and Germans, in order to ‘hold London’, and the Lord Chancellor observed stoically: ‘We should decide without delay around which force loyalists can gather. We ought not to be shot without a fight anyway.’ 120
    Even so it was in Central and Eastern Europe that the violence, and the racial antagonism which provoked it, were most acute, widespread and protracted. A score or more minor