Wilson's reply to Austria-Hungary

On 18–19 October 1918 President Woodrow Wilson at last replied to the note from Austria-Hungary, which at the beginning of the month had asked him for an armistice and peace negotiations on the basis of the Fourteen Points. The sources differ on the date. Vienna itself, and Tomáš Masaryk in his memoirs, gave 18 October, but in the official American collection of diplomatic documents the letter from Secretary of State Robert Lansing to the Swedish minister W. A. F. Ekengren, who represented Austria-Hungary’s interests in Washington, is dated 19 October. The reply was short and crushing for the Habsburg monarchy. The President declared that he could not entertain Vienna’s proposal, because since his January address events had occurred that had altered the attitude and responsibility of the United States.

The end of the promise of autonomy

Wilson quoted the tenth of the Fourteen Points: the peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations it was wished to safeguard, should be accorded “the freest opportunity of autonomous development”. Since then, he wrote, the American government had recognised that a state of war existed between the Czechoslovaks and the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and that the Czechoslovak National Council was a de facto belligerent government, clothed with authority to direct their military and political affairs. It had also recognised in the fullest manner the justice of the nationalistic aspirations of the Yugoslavs for freedom. The President could therefore no longer accept mere “autonomy” of these peoples as a basis of peace. It was they, not he, who were to judge what action on the part of the Austro-Hungarian government would satisfy their aspirations and their conception of their rights and destiny as members of the family of nations.

The reply was shorter than either of the notes sent to Germany and contained no questions or armistice conditions. But it left no doubt: the United States had no intention of saving the monarchy in its existing form.

Two weeks of waiting

The Austro-Hungarian note had been lying in Washington since 7 October. In that time Wilson replied twice to Berlin and not at all to Vienna. According to Masaryk, nervousness in Vienna was mounting, and the reasons for the delay were inquired about in Washington through unofficial channels. Emperor Charles I tried to forestall the verdict and on 16 October issued a manifesto announcing the transformation of the Austrian half of the monarchy into a federal state of nations. Masaryk, chairman of the Czechoslovak National Council, was then in Washington. Wishing to prevent the manifesto from making an impression on the Americans, on 18 October he issued the declaration of Czechoslovak independence, having passed an earlier version of it to Lansing. He later recalled that Wilson wrote to him that the declaration had moved him, as Masaryk would see from his reply to Austria-Hungary.

Verdict on the monarchy

According to the British historian Alexander Watson, Wilson’s reply reached Vienna on 20 October, and it was this that sealed the monarchy’s fate. The Czechs, Slovaks and Yugoslavs read it as confirmation that they no longer needed to seek an accommodation with the Habsburgs, and the national councils in Prague and Zagreb began to take over power. Masaryk later called this note a “death sentence” on Austria-Hungary. Not everyone in Vienna understood this at once. Professor Heinrich Lammasch, soon to be Austria’s last prime minister, said, according to American diplomats in Switzerland, that the reply was not as unfavourable as was generally thought, because it referred the Czechs and Yugoslavs to negotiations with Vienna. The former foreign minister Ottokar Czernin, once an opponent of the Czechs, by contrast called in the House of Lords for the recognition of Czechoslovak and Yugoslav states in accordance with Wilson’s principles, so as to reach peace as quickly as possible.

Wilson’s note also accelerated changes in Vienna. The foreign minister István Burián, author of both autumn peace notes, stepped down, and his successor was the Hungarian Count Gyula Andrássy the Younger. A few days later Vienna, in its reply, accepted the President’s position on the rights of the monarchy’s peoples, “in particular the Czechoslovaks and Yugoslavs”, and asked for a separate armistice without waiting for Germany. By then, however, the monarchy was already falling apart before the eyes of the world.