Page - 34 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

34 On the Eve bility were related to numerous western dynasties and aristocrats. The countries of the Habsburg Monarchy were valued for their wide, open landscapes, their richness and areas of natural beauty, their palaces and hunting grounds. The conservative circles in France saw an intactness that had long since been lost in their country. The progressive, liberal circles in the west participated in intellectual life and praised the exceptional quality of the leading newspapers of the Monarchy. The Catholics regarded the Catho- lic-dominated Empire as a bulwark of faith, and those who sought a balance in Europe regarded it as the counterweight to Russia and still, to a certain extent, to Germany with its ambitions of hegemony.52 Yet nobody in the west, except for a few scholars, was particularly interested in the internal problems beleaguering the Monarchy, or even had any particular understanding of the peoples inhabiting the Habsburg Empire, let alone praised its tolerance and the security it offered to many small nationalities. To a certain extent, this was hardly surprising, however, since in most cases, the other powers only had a direct relationship with those countries that bordered their own states. In fact, this already explains why Russia and Serbia followed developments in the Monarchy in a very different way from England and France, for example, and that the Tsarist Empire in particular sought time and again to intervene in political processes and to destabilise the Monarchy. Pan-Slavism was manifest in many different forms. Ideas of a GreaerRussia were introduced in Bukovina and among the Ruthenians and Ukrainians who had settled in the east of Poland, and an emphasis was placed on their shared language, religion and culture. The Russian Orthodox Church made itself a cus- todian of political agitation, attempting to win support for Russia by the indirect means of converting members of the Greek Uniate Church to Russian Orthodoxy. In the words of Zbynek A. Zeman : ‘The clergy, supported by pro-Russian priests who have been sent for the purpose  – particularly in the areas close to the Russian border  – have become impregnable bulwarks of the Orthodox Church.’53 Time and again, priests and all-Ruthenian, Ukrainian functionaries were defendants in high treason court cases, particularly during 1914. In Bohemia and Moravia, Pan-Slavism found a different form of expression. There, it mixed with far more complex currents that also dated back much further histori- cally. The strongest was probably the one focussing on the discrimination against the Czechs over hundreds of years. One aspect was the affront to the Czechs, which always sounded fresh, originating with the ‘renewed constitution’ of 1627, which led to a form of German and Hungarian dominance that appeared to have been perpetuated by du- alism and that had excluded the Czechs. To this were added anti-Habsburg tendencies, the language dispute and numerous other factors that provided fertile soil for influence from outside. The workers’ parties, the petit-bourgeois and the young Czech intellec- tuals led the way in the national struggle. They wanted to see an end to discrimination and struggled to have their wishes and demands respected. Yet among the radicals, a