Page - 503 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The Easter Demands 503 one step further : original files from the Imperial and Royal Embassy in Madrid even arrived at the British Foreign Office.1186 However, since the Entente powers were not clear until the first months of 1916 regarding what goals they should formulate with respect to the Habsburg Monarchy, and the effects were still being felt from statements from 1915 such as the one made by the head of the British military mission in Bulgaria, Sir Henry Bax-Ironside, who had claimed that the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy must remain intact,1187 the émigré organisations were keen to generate a voice in the Entente countries that was directed against the Habsburg Monarchy, by means of propaganda and the use of all possible areas of academia, particularly history. Journals such as La Nation Tchèque, edited by Professor Ernest Denis at the Sorbonne in Paris, a friend of Masaryk, or New Europe, published by R. W. Seton-Watson, Henry Wickham-Steed and, again, Masaryk, were suitable instruments that had been designed to carry such propaganda. Seton-Watson, Steed, Masaryk, Beneš, the Croat Trumbić and others all agreed that the Habsburg Monarchy must be destroyed. They responded to voices that claimed that the Monar- chy was essential in order to maintain the balance of power in Europe by saying that since the Dual Alliance agreement in 1879, Austria-Hungary had been merely an ap- pendage of Germany. The mosaic of different peoples was only being held together by force, they claimed, and was ultimately nothing more than an instrument of Berlin and, as a result, the unwilling enemy of Europe. For this reason, Austria must be destroyed from the outside by separating from it those people who tended towards other ethnic groups. According to this pattern of radicalisation, Austria-Hungary was not to be destroyed for its own sake, but in order to weaken Germany in the long term.1188 This was particu- larly important for Great Britain, which had no full-blown conflict with the Habsburg Monarchy, and could therefore only be won round to working towards destroying Austria-Hungary indirectly via Germany. As the detailed evidence now subsequently shows, all of the groups emerging from the émigré organisations participated in the campaign against the Monarchy, and they did so ‘with a remarkable lack of scruple’.1189 Thus, for example, Steed’s New Europe wrote that in England, only a very few groups, namely some financiers, a few members of society, the Catholic Church and the Jews, had a vital interest in maintaining the Monarchy. Their attitude stemmed from a de- sire to maintain the German-Jewish finance system, which had created the economic conditions for Pan-Germanism, as well as to maintain the largest Roman Catholic state in Europe. According to Steed, the social circles who favoured the upkeep of the Monarchy simply regarded the Austrians as nice people because they had beautiful country houses and excellent hunting, and because their lifestyle was better than that of the Germans.1190 However, Great Britain in particular was hesitant about participat- ing in the debate on dismantling the Monarchy. If resistance to the destruction of the