Space forbids but the most hasty survey of the
occupation and administration by Austria of Bosnia and the Herzegovina by
virtue of the Treaty of Berlin in 1878.
Bismarck, Francis Joseph, and Andrassy were swayed by differing motives
whose total result was that Austria was to become a Balkan power--the
outpost of the German _Drang nach Osten_--and that it was worth while
making a greater Serbia impossible, even at the cost of increasing the
number of Slavs in the Habsburg monarchy, which, now reenforced by the
Ausgleich, could stand the strain of advancing democracy and the necessity,
therefore, of granting further rights to the Slavs.
The occupation of Bosnia led to the first real quarrels in modern times
between Croat and Serb, for the former wanted Bosnia in Greater Croatia in
order to have connection with Dalmatia; the latter wished it annexed
to Greater Serbia, because it was Serbian. Magyar and German, further,
quarreled as to the status of Bosnia and left it unsettled. But one thing
was settled by the occupation in 1879 and the annexation in 1908. Neither
Greater Croatia nor Greater Serbia were any longer truly possible as a
final solution, only a Jugo-Slavia. The Greater Croatia received a mortal
blow by the addition of Serbs up to more than one third of the number of
Croats in Austria-Hungary, and Serbia faced the future either as a vassal
or as a territory which must be annexed.
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