Lansing declaration

At the end of June 1918 the American Secretary of State Robert Lansing announced that the position of the United States government was that “all branches of the Slav race should be completely freed from German and Austrian rule”. The British chronology of the war records this statement under 29 June, when the European press wrote about it. According to State Department documents, the formula first appeared in a letter of 24 June from Lansing to the Serbian minister in Washington, and on 28 June the Department announced it publicly in the government’s official bulletin and cabled it to American posts in Europe and Asia.

The statement was meant to clarify an earlier one. On 29 May Lansing had announced that the United States had followed with great interest the proceedings of the April congress of the oppressed nationalities of Austria-Hungary in Rome, and that the aspirations of the Czechoslovaks and Yugoslavs to freedom had Washington’s “earnest sympathy”. On 3 June France, Britain and Italy associated themselves with these words in the Versailles declaration, but in the same act they recognised an independent Poland as a condition of peace, while showing the Czechoslovaks and Yugoslavs only sympathy. The words about “sympathy” could be read as support for autonomy within the Habsburg monarchy rather than for independence. As late as January, President Woodrow Wilson, in his Fourteen Points, had demanded for the peoples of Austria-Hungary only “the freest opportunity of autonomous development”.

The enemy exploited this ambiguity. On 14 June the Serbian minister wrote to Lansing and to the ambassadors of the three powers in Washington that the Versailles wording had taken the Czechoslovaks and Yugoslavs by surprise, and that the Austrian press had used it in its propaganda. In his circular of 28 June Lansing wrote that German and Austrian officials and their sympathisers had sought to misrepresent the meaning of the May statement. Therefore, to avoid misunderstanding, the American government now stated openly that what was meant was the complete liberation of all the Slav peoples, and so in practice the break-up of the Habsburg monarchy. Taken literally, the formula also covered the Poles under German and Austrian rule.

The French seized on the American words at once. On 29 June the French ambassador in Washington, Jean Jules Jusserand, informed Lansing that the next day President Poincaré would present a flag to the Czechoslovak army in France, and asked for public support, citing the declarations of Wilson and Lansing repeated “yesterday”. Washington went further in the same direction. In September the United States recognised the Czechoslovak National Council as a de facto government, and in October Wilson replied to Vienna that autonomy for the peoples of the monarchy was no longer enough.