Treaty of St. Germain

The Treaty of Saint Germain (Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye) was signed at the Paris Peace Conference on 10 September 1919. This was a treaty imposed upon Austria by the western plutocratic liberal Allies marking the end of The Great War. It was modelled on the Treaty of Versailles, as were the other peace treaties. It left Austria with little more than a quarter of its pre-war territory.

The Covenant of the League of Nations was integrally included in the peace treaties, and the war responsibility and reparations clauses were similar in form to the German treaty. Austria was limited militarily and permitted a conscript army of no more than 30,000 officers and men. Austria was expressly forbidden union (Anschluss) with Germany. The South Tyrol, with a 90% German-speaking population and which included the Brenner Pass frontier, was awarded to Italy without a vote as to whether they wanted to become Italian, as promised in the secret Allied Treaty of London of April 1915 in order to bribe Italy's entry into the war on the Allied side; Bohemia and Moravia merged into the artificial state of Czechoslovakia; Bukovina was acquired by Romania.

Other provinces were taken from Austria by the Allies for disposition by them. These regions included the northern Adriatic and Galicia. In the Klagenfurt district of Carinthia a plebiscite in October 1920 decided for Austria against Yugoslavia, another new artificial state. Austria received a small area from Hungary, and most of Burgenland, but in a smaller part of Burgenland a plebiscite favoured Hungary. Apart from these small areas, populations were transferred and frontiers redrawn without the benefit of plebiscites, a contravention of President Woodrow Wilson's infamous "Fourteen Points".

Sources

• Grenville, Professor J. A., The Major International Treaties 1914-1973, University of Birmingham, Methuen & Co., Ltd., London, 1974, p. 46. ISBN 0-416-09070-2