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peoples live together. We can only reply "no" to this question. As
before, those facts would still remain that exclude a national
minority from participation in power and that, despite the letter of
the law, which calls on t to join in governing, allow them to be
hem
not co-rulers but only the ruled. It is quite unthinkable from the
start to split up all matters by nationality. It is impossible in a
nationality mixed city to create two police forces, perhaps a
German and a Czech, each of which could take action only against
members of its own nationality. It is impossible to create a double
railroad administration in a bilingual country, one under the control
only of Germans, a second only of Czechs. If that is not done,
however, then the above-mentioned difficulties remain. The
situation is not as though handling political problems directly
connected with language was all that caused national difficulties;
rather, these difficulties permeate all of public life.
National autonomy would have offered national minorities the
possibility of administering and arranging their school systems
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Nation and State
independently. They had this possibility to a certain degree,
however, even without the implementation of this program, though
at their own cost. National autonomy would have allowed them a
special right of taxation for these purposes and, on the other hand,
relieved them from contributing to the schools of other
nationalities. That alone, however, is not worth as much as the
authors of the program of national autonomy thought.
The position that the national minority would have obtained
from the grant of national autonomy would have approximated the
position of those privileged colonies of foreigners that the estate
system established and that the princely state then established on
models bequeathed by the estate system, perhaps like the position
of the Saxons in Transylvania. This would not have been
satisfactory in modern democracy. Generally speaking, the whole
line of thought about national autonomy looks back more to the
medieval conditions of the estate system than to the conditions of
modern democracy. Given the impossibility of creating modern
democracy in a multinational state, its champions, when as
democrats they rejected the princely state, necessarily had to turn
back to the ideals of the estate system.
If one looks for a model of national autonomy in certain
problems of organization of minority churches, then this is only
quite superficially a correct comparison. It is overlooked that since
the force of faith no longer can, as it once could, determine the
entire life style of the individual, there no longer exists between
members of different churches today that impossibility of political
understanding that does indeed exist between different peoples
because of differences of language and the resulting differences in
styles of thinking and of outlook.
The personality principle can bring no solution to the
difficulties of our problem because it indulges in extreme self-
deception about the scope of the questions at issue. If only
language questions, so called in the narrower sense, were the
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Nation, State, and Economy
object of the national struggle, then one could think of paving the
way for peace between peoples by special treatment of those
questions. But the national struggle is not at all limited to schools
and educational institutions and to the official language of the
courts and authorities. It embraces all of political life, even all that
which, as Renner and many others with him believe, ties a unifying
bond around the nations, the so-called economic aspect. It is
astonishing that this could be misunderstood precisely by
Austrians, who, after all, were bound to see every day how
everything became a national bone of contention road
construction and tax reforms, bank charters and public
purveyances, customs tariffs and expositions, factories and
hospitals. And purely political questions above all. Every foreign-
policy question is the object of national struggle in the
multinational state, and never did this show up more clearly in
Austria-Hungary than during the World War. Every report from
the battlefield was received differently by the different
nationalities: some celebrated when others grieved; some felt
downcast when others were happy. All these questions are
controversial by nationality; and if they are not included in the
solution of the nationality question, then the solution just is not
complete.
The problem that the national question poses is precisely that
the state and administration are inevitably constructed on a
territorial basis in the present stage of economic development and
so inevitably must embrace the members of different nationalities
in territories of mixed language.
The great multinational states, Russia, Austria, Hungary, and
Turkey, have now fallen apart. But that too is no solution to the
constitutional problem in polyglot territories. The dissolution of
the multinational state gets rid of many superfluous complications
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