Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1919)

Provisions

The treaty declared that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was to be dissolved. According to article 177 Austria, along with the other Central Powers, accepted responsibility for starting the war. The new Republic of Austria, consisting of most of the German-speaking Danubian and Alpine provinces in former Cisleithania, recognized the independence of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The treaty included 'war reparations' of large sums of money, directed towards the Allies (however the exact amount has never been defined and collected from Austria), as well as provisions for the liquidation of the Austro-Hungarian Bank.

Territory

Cisleithanian Austria had to face significant territorial losses, amounting to over 60 percent of the prewar Austrian Empire's territory:

• The Lands of the Bohemian Crown, i.e. the Bohemia and Moravia (modern day Czechia) crownlands (including small adjacent Lower Austrian territories around Feldsberg and Gmünd) formed the core of the newly created state of Czechoslovakia. The Austrian Silesia province which was the subject of the Polish–Czechoslovak War of January 1919, was split between Czech Silesia and Polish Cieszyn Silesia, and incorporated into the Silesian Voivodeship. These cessions concerned a large German-speaking population in German Bohemia and Sudetenland.
• The former Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, made up of the territory the Habsburg monarchy had annexed in the 1772 First Partition of Poland, fell back to the re-established Polish Republic.
• The adjacent Bukovina in the east passed to the Kingdom of Romania.
• The southern half of the former Tyrolean crownland up to the Brenner Pass, including predominantly Southern Bavarian–speaking South Tyrol and the present-day Trentino province, together with the Carinthian Canal Valley around Tarvisio fell to Italy, as well as the Austrian Littoral (Gorizia and Gradisca, the Imperial Free City of Trieste, and Istria as recognized by the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920).
• The main part of the former Kingdom of Dalmatia, the Duchy of Carniola and Lower Styria with the Carinthian Mieß (Meža) Valley and Gemeinde Seeland (Jezersko) was ceded to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, contrary to what was stipulated by the 1915 London Pact. Also Bosnia and Herzegovina was given to it. The affiliation of the Southern Carinthian territory with its Slovene-speaking share of population was to be decided in a Carinthian Plebiscite.
• Austria-Hungary's only overseas possession, its concession in Tianjin, was turned over to China.
• The predominantly German- and Croatian-speaking western parts of the Hungarian counties of Moson, Sopron and Vas were awarded to Austria. The Uprising in West Hungary led to a plebiscite which resulted in the transition of Sopron and its surrounding eight villages back to Hungary. Subsequently, other villages were returned or exchanged between Austria and Hungary up to 1923. In the end, the territories finally gained from Hungary were organised as a state of Austria named Burgenland.

The Allies had explicitly committed themselves to the cause of the minority peoples of Austria-Hungary late in the war. Indeed, US Secretary of State Robert Lansing had effectively ended what slim chance existed for Austria-Hungary to survive the war when he told Vienna that since the Allies were now committed to the Czechs, Slovaks and South Slavs, autonomy for the nationalities–the tenth of the Fourteen Points–was no longer enough. Reflecting this, the Allies not only allowed the minority peoples to help create new states (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia), recreate former states (Poland), or join their ethnic brethren in existing nation-states (Romania, Italy), but allowed the successor states to absorb significant blocks of German-inhabited territory. However, the promise of self-determination ran up against the reality that no convenient line could be drawn to separate intermingled nationalities. In further cases, irredentists would claim that some German or Hungarian-inhabited territories had actually been theirs. This was well rendered by the fact that only a few plebiscites were allowed in the disputed areas to ascertain the wishes of the local populaces.

Politics and military

Article 88 of the treaty required Austria to refrain from directly or indirectly compromising its independence, which meant that Austria could not enter into political or economic union with the Weimar Republic without the agreement of the council of the League of Nations. Accordingly, the new republic's initial self-chosen name of German-Austria (German: Deutschösterreich) had to be changed to Austria. Many Austrians would come to find this term harsh (especially among the Austrian Germans being a vast majority who would support a single German nation state), due to Austria's later economic weakness, which was caused by loss of land. Because of this, support for the idea of Anschluss (political union) with Nazi Germany later proved popular.

Conscription was abolished and the Austrian Army was limited to a force of 30,000 volunteers. There were numerous provisions dealing with Danubian navigation, the transfer of railways, and other details involved in the breakup of a great empire into several small independent states.

The vast reduction of population, territory and resources of the new Austria relative to the old empire wreaked havoc on the economy of the old nation, most notably in Vienna, an imperial capital now without an empire to support it. For a time, the country's very existence was called into question.