 Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, you probably know this picture, June 28th of 1914, the Serbian student, Gavrilo Prinschip, what's that, Gavrilo Prinschip here, shooting on the successor to the throne, the design successor to the throne of Franz Josef and on his wife Sophie von Kotek and both died and, well, this was the start of the last chapter of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy. Now, 16 years before, this gentleman visited Vienna. His name is Samuel Langhorn Clemens, commonly known under his name of Mark Twain. And in 1897 he moved together with his family to Vienna because Clara, his second daughter, had wished to start a piano there under the Polish pianist, professor and composer Theodor Leshiticki. Mark Twain was a keen observer of Austrian politics and there was much to observe. He published in a small volume under the somehow euphemistic title, Steering Times in Austria. Euphemistic because in this year Cisleitania, that means the Austrian part of the Austrian-Hungarian dual monarchy, witnessed its deepest political crisis. The demise of democratic parliamentarism. In 18, since 1861, Austria had a rudimentary Reichsraten's parliament, which soon became the battleground and the showcase of national conflicts. In March 1897, Prime Minister Kazimir Padeni, a Polish aristocrat, addressed one of the hottest issues, the language dispute between Czechs and Germans in Bohemia. He declared, I quote, that Czech and Germans should be the languages of the inner service throughout Bohemia. This meant that civil servants would have to know both Czech and German since government business would be conducted in both languages. Germans in Bohemia were outraged, since this effectively excluded the majority of them from government jobs. Czechs learned German in school, but Germans had usually little to no knowledge of the Czech language. The context was the ongoing retreat of German as the administrative language of the monarchy. It had only a few decades before being the administrative language of the whole monarchy. By the 1819s, however, it no longer had the status in Hungary, Galicia, Belmese, or Slovenia, Carniola. German deputies reacted in the Reichsrat to the publication of the Padeni ordinance with parliamentary obstruction. The situation escalated on 25th of November, when the Slovenian majority managed to impose new procedures to follow the obstructionists. Mark Twin described what happened. I spare you the, let's say, limited pleasure to hear it by myself. And so I asked Teodor Tararimper to read it for me, and I think it's the best man to do so. Thank you. The unlimited pleasure. Here in Vienna, in these closing days of 1897, one's blood gets no chance to stagnate. The atmosphere is brimful of political electricity. All conversation is political. Every man is a battery with brushes overworn and gives out blue sparks when you set him going on the common topic. Everybody has an opinion and lets you have it frank and hot, and out of this multitude of counsel you get merely confusion and despair, for no one really understands this political situation or can tell you what is going to be the outcome of it. Things have happened here recently which would set any country but Austria on fire from end to end and upset the government to a certainty, but no one feels confident that such results will follow here. There is some approach to agreement upon another point, that there will be no revolution. Men say, look at our history, revolutions have not been in our line, and look at our political map. Its construction is unfavorable to an organized uprising, and without unity what could a revolt accomplish? It is disunion which has held our empire together for centuries, and what it has done in the past it may continue to do now and in the future. That seems to confirm and justify the prevalent Austrian faith that in this confusion of unrelated and irreconcilable elements, this condition of incurable disunion, there is strength for the government. Nearly every day someone explains to me that a revolution would not succeed here, it couldn't you know. Broadly speaking, all the nations in the empire hate the government, but they all hate each other too, and with devoted and enthusiastic bitterness, no two of them can combine. The nation that rises must rise alone, then the others would joyfully join the government against her, and she would have just a fly's chance against the combination of spiders. This government is entirely independent, it can go its own road and do as it pleases, it has nothing to fear. In countries like England and America where there is one tongue and the public interests are common, the government must take account of public opinion. But in Austria-Hungary there are 19 public opinions, one for each state. No, two or three for each state, since there are two or three nationalities in each. A government cannot satisfy all these opinions, it can only go through the motions of trying. This government does that, it goes through the motions, but they do not succeed, but that does not worry the government much. There is a constitution and there is a parliament. The House draws its membership of 425 deputies from the 19 or 20 states here to 4 mentioned. These men represent peoples who speak 11 languages. This means 11 distinct varieties of jealousies, hostilities and warring instincts. Interests. As to the makeup of the House it is this, the deputies come from all walks of life and from all grades of society. There are princes, counts, priests, peasants, mechanics, labourers, lawyers, judges, physicians, professors, merchants, bankers, shopkeepers. They are religious men, they are earnest, sincere, devoted and they hate the Jews. The Viennese say of themselves that they are an easygoing, pleasure-loving community making the best of life and not taking it very seriously. Nevertheless, they are grieved about the ways of their parliament and say quite frankly that they are ashamed. They claim that the low condition of the parliament's manners is new, not old. A gentleman who was at the head of government 20 years ago confirms this and says that in his time the parliament was orderly and well behaved. One night, while the customary pandemonium was crushing and thundering along at its best, a fight broke out. It was a surging, struggling shoulder to shoulder scramble. A great many blows were struck. Twice Schönerer, the leader of the German nationalist, lifted one of the heavy ministerial armchairs, some say with one hand, and threatened members of the majority with it. But it was wrenched away from him. A member hammered Wolf, another German nationalist, over the head with the president's bell. And another member choked him. A professor was flung down and belabored with fists and choked. He held up an open penknife as a defense against the blows. It was snatched from him and flung at a distance. It hit a peaceful Christian socialist who wasn't doing anything and brought blood from his hand. It was an astonishing situation and imposingly dramatic. Nobody had looked for this. What next? A uniformed and helmeted battalion of bronzed and stalwart men marching in double file down the floor of the house, a free parliament profaned by an invasion of brute force. It was an odious spectacle, odious and awful. For one moment it was an unbelievable thing, a thing beyond all credibility. It must be a delusion, a dream, a nightmare. But no, it was real, pitifully real, shamefully real, hideously real. These 60 policemen had been soldiers and they went at their work with the cold unsentimentality of their trade. They ascended the steps of the tribune, laid their hands upon the invalible persons of the representatives of a nation and dragged and tugged and hauled them down the steps and out at the door. They arranged themselves in stately military array in front of the ministerialist trade and so stood. It was a tremendous episode. The memory of it will outlast all the thrones that exist today. In the whole history of free parliaments, the like of it had been seen but three times before. It takes an imposing place among the world's unforgettable things. I think that in my lifetime I have not twice seen abiding history made before any eyes, but I know that I have seen it once. Some of the results of this wild freak followed instantly. The Bidani government came down with a crash. There was a popular outbreak or two in Vienna. There were three or four days of furious rioting in Prague followed by an establishing there of martial law. The Jews and Germans were harried and plundered and their houses destroyed. In other Bohemian towns there was rioting. In some cases the Germans being the rioters, in others the Czechs. And in all cases the Jew had to roast no matter which side he was on. The Czech opinion believes that parliamentary government and the constitution are actually threatened with extinction and that the permanency of the monarchy itself is not an absolutely certain thing. Thank you. So far Mark Dwayne and many contemporary observers came to the same conclusion. Josef Redlich, for instance, wrote from this moment the Habsburg realm was doomed. But was this really the case? The system was in reality much more resilient as it appeared. There was no revolutionary situation in Austria in 1898 as in 1848. Nobody wanted to bring down the regime. They just wanted to have their peace of the pie. The parliamentary democracy collapsed and the imperial bureaucracy simply took over the job as it did already many times before. Political consultations behind closed doors and emergency ordinances made sure that life could go on as usual. The last 20 years of before the First World War were the most prolific era in science, in literature, in art and in music. The most important intellectual developments among them the Austrian school of economics reflected the feeling of uncertainty which was the dominating mood in the society. The presumptimate that something would happen that the glorious civilization rested on shaky fundaments was widely spread. What you see here is the church of the Holy Spirit at Jaworze, a perfect example of alpine-yugend steel. It lies near the top of a mountain high above the Socia or Isonzo Valley which witnessed the bloodiest petals between the Austrian-Hungarian and the German army on one side and the Italian army on the other side. Today the region belongs to Slovenia. Soldiers from all parts of the Dural Monarchy built the church during the Ossonzo Battles. It was consecrated on All Saints' Day of 1916. On the bell tower they put the Austrian-Hungarian emblem with its motto Indivisibiliter ag inseparabiliter, meaning indivisible and inseparable. The outer and inner walls are decorated with the emblems of all the territories of the Habsburg Empire. Inside the church the soldiers engraved on wooden banners the name of their comrades fallen in the battle. See it here. No, it doesn't work. On the left side here. Almost 3,000 names of soldiers from every nation and nationality. In a way this church is an epitaph of the Dural Monarchy. Its soldiers fought together until the end. There were only very few mutinous and defections. Norman Stone was there with me on a trip to the Socia Valley three years ago. As you probably know he was a great admirer of the Habsburg Monarchy. In the 18th and 19th century the Holy Roman Empire occupied most of central Europe. It consisted of about 400 political entities. Most of them German principalities, counties and archbishoprics as well as imperial and free cities. Its biggest part and its leading force since the 15th century was the Habsburg Monarchy which territories stretched over a vast era of about 700,000 square kilometers. That is about two times the size of present-day Germany. In terms of population the Habsburg Monarchy was the third largest state in Europe and comprised one seventh of the European population. Winzmetternicht called it an agglomeration. It was composed of provinces, territories and kingdoms of various forms and stages of political, economic and cultural development. And also with various stages of national identity and consciousness which had been incorporated in the Habsburg territories per force or by contract. One of the aggressive methods that the Habsburgs used to expand the territory was marriage. They married the princes or the princesses of other countries and then they incorporated the territory into the Habsburg Monarchy. The princely state has no natural boundaries. We read by Inmises' nation-state and the economy to be an increase of his family estate is the ideal of the prince. He strives to leave to his successor more land than he inherited from his father. To keep an acquiring new possessions until one encounters an equally strong or stronger adversary that is the striving of kings. For fundamentally, their greed for lands knows no boundaries. Lands and peoples are in the eyes of princes, nothing but objects of princely ownership. From the people who live in his land, the prince demands obedience and loyalty. He regards them almost as his property. Now in the feudal society, different ethnic groups can live side by side in the same territory for countries without losing their distinctness. Self-contained peasant settlements inside a country inhabited by a population with another language could maintain themselves as long as the peasants were bound to the soil. Hence the Habsburgs were not interested in Germanizing the monarchy. Still shocked by the religious wars of the 17th century, they wanted their people to remain Catholic or to reconvert to Catholicism whatever language they spoke. Still in 1732, Emperor Charles VI drove the Protestants from the state apparatus by imposing on all royal officers a form of oaths which mentioned the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary. They would have to wait until the enlightened monarch Joseph II to find official positions in their own country. At this time, five languages then had the status of official languages, Latin, German, Czech, Hungarian, and Croat. To make things a little bit more complicated, on the court of the Habsburgs, the customary language was Italian, not only the opera house, but also the first Viennese newspaper was Italian. And important discussions were conducted in Latin or Italian until the reign of Maria Theresa when they were held not in German, which remained the language of the people, but in French. In Hungary it was only in 1844 that Hungarian replaced Latin as the language of the administration. The Habsburg Archdukes themselves were polyglots. They all learned Hungarian and Czech out of courtesy towards the subjects. Until the end of the 18th century, nationality as such was definitely not a political issue. The monarchy was a tower of power where the peculiar identity of each group was respected. But they were not only regional language barriers. There was also a permanent conflict between the ruling classes in the territories in the court in Vienna. The local nobilities, which represented the privileged and historic nations, demanded that the central administration respect the tanks. Since when may we speak about national conflicts in the Habsburg monarchy? The Austrian-American historian Robert Kahn, born in 1996 in Vienna, has written, whether a national question existed in the Habsburg lands before the late 18th century is extremely complex. Certainly the concept of ethnic nationalism was not consciously formulated at the time. Hence political demands based upon it did not exist. Ban Germanism, Ban Slavism, the Salsonslav problem, and Italian irredentism were, of course, ideas lying to the Baroque period. But the religious problem, to a certain extent the language question, and definitely that of the historical political entities already existed. The Habsburgs had to face the problem of more or less loosely organized groups of people whose interests, to a very large extent, coincided with those of the ethnic national groups of later days. So, sorry. So we may distinguish three main forms of nationalism inside the Habsburg Empire. First, first to appear was political nationalism. Some entities, Bohemia and Moravia, Hungary and Transylvania, Croatia, had a history of statehood, which was even longer than the history of the Habsburg monarchy itself. The memory of a glorious past, together with the political skills that survived the dissolution of the former states, motivated their incessant striving for autonomy, the maximum of independence inside the multinational empire. The engagement for their political nation did not even need a common language. The members of the higher nobility in Hungary and in Bohemia often didn't speak the language of the peasants and the artisans. Their nationalism was political, not cultural. Second, the nationalism of the irredenta, which means the unredeemed, not yet liberated and not yet with their king states, United Nations, inside the monarchy. The term irredenta was coined by the Italian patriot Matteo Renato Imbriani in 1877. The Italian minority in the south, the Polish minority in the northeast, and the Romanians in southeastern Transylvania, the Serbs and the Paracans, had their skin states outside the empire. Whatever happened in these neighboring states had an immediate impact on themselves. Domestic and foreign policy were always strongly interconnected with the Habsburg monarchy. The dynasty feared the irredenta much more than the old-style political nationalism of the local nobilities. Emperor Francis Joseph regarded the loss of Lombardy and Venezia as his biggest defeat. This was arguably the main reason why he decided to start the war against Serbia in 1914. His nightmare was a South Slav irredenta in his realm, orchestrated by neighboring Serbia and with Russia in the background. Third, the nationalism of nations without history was the last to enter the stage. Those people had neither a history of statehood nor kin states they could refer to. They were mostly peasants sharing a similar language consisting of a variety of dialects as well as cultures and religious affinities. In the first decades of the 19th century, the identity of those nations without history was still only ethnic and linguistic. They discovered their national soul thanks to linguists, historians, academics, journalists, and teachers. The Slovaks, the Slovenians, and the Lithuanians, meaning the Ukrainians in the empire, belonged to this group. The historical nations themselves accelerated this development particularly in Hungary because the national minorities in their reign resisted the politics of forced margarization. Conflicts between the local nobilities and the court in Vienna escalated already in the late 18th century when Maria Theresa and her sons Joseph II and Leopold II attempted to transform the monarchy in a better, administrative, more centralized and more powerful absolute state with a more efficient tax system and a modernized army. They abolished internal tariffs and other restrictions to trade. They limited the power of the guilds and restricted the robots, the forced labor service the peasants had to offer their landlords. Maria Theresa and Joseph II used a new system of public schools with a high degree of uniformity. All instructors were required to receive training and certification, especially dedicated normal schools, one of which was established in every city, the capital city of every Habsburg crowned light. The old system which was based on an agreement between the crown and the local nobilities was transformed into a new centralized one in which the enlightened emperor reigned with the imperial bureaucracy as his most efficient instrument. The local nobilities tried to do their best to resist. During this era of enlightenment which lasted approximately 50 years appeared the first nationally devised political conflicts. The most contentious and strongest nationalist movement was in Hungary. Hungary has been an independent kingdom until it was defeated by the Turks in the Battle of Mohac in 1526. The Hungarian king Louis II who was also king of Bohemia and Croatia fell in the battle. Because he had no legitimate heirs those crowns fell to the house of Austria. The Hungarian nation was dominated by rich and powerful nobility. It was which besides possessed a strong national consciousness and which had gradually been forged in the face of the Ottoman invaders in German Austria which was seen as an occupier rather than an ally. The union with the Habsburg hereditary lands was a marriage of convenience, even a forced marriage. Since Hungary had been liberated from the Ottomans but was still under a foreign dynasty the Habsburgs home their nobility mistrusted. The Hungarians had shaken off Joseph II's attempts at uniform centralization. They were governed separately through their respective court censories and their political nations still claimed special rights according to their supposedly ancient constitution. But even more than mistrusting the court the Hungarian political class mistrusted the national minorities on its territory. The unintended consequence was that the aggressive propagation of the national idion by the Magyar political nation antagonized the defenders of other national groups and it contributed to the awakening of the nations without history. In Croatia where the revival of the South Slav language had been going on since the turn of the 19th century it was only after experiencing the aggressive tactics of Magyar cultural assimilation that a strong Croatian cultural nationalist movement took shape. Later a similar attempt to Magyarize Transylvania would help to promote Romanian nationalism. Okay, I think I have to... Yeah, that's an interesting... You see this as the coat of arms of the Emperor's Leopold and Francis. In the middle it seems like a supermarket basket. You put everything that you acquired inside. So it's not important what language to speak or what culture to have. Then, okay, that's the next thing. The big game changer was the French Revolution which introduced the concept of popular sovereignty. In 186 the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved by Emperor Francis II after the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor of France at the devastating defeat to Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz. The Habsburg part of the Holy Roman Empire became the Austrian Empire. Landlocked power was only two never ports in the Adriatic Sea and the very tiny fleet. It was a scarcely integrated multinational empire head together by the crown, the army and the Christian religion. It survived the revolutionary wave but it could not turn back the clock. In 1815 the Congress of Vienna established a German confederation, we see here on the slide, which consisted of 39 German speaking states in central Europe. The Austrian Empire was still part of this confederation together with the mainly non-German-speaking kingdom of Bohemia and the Duchy of Carniola, it's Slovenia nowadays. The Hungarian kingdom, Croatia, Dalmatia and the Habsburg territories in northern Italy remained outside. Also the eastern part of Russia did not belong to the confederation in which Austria and Russia were the biggest players and the main adversaries. Francis II, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire became Francis I, the first Emperor of the Austrian Empire which existed until 1867 when it was transformed into the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. Trying to isolate and contain and neutralize the terms of the revolutionary infection, the Austrian Emperor returned to a policy of unlimited absolutism. Francis reigned between 1792 and 1735, more than four long decades in which Europe suffered the Napoleonic wars, witnessed the Congress of Vienna and finally enjoyed an era of peace, order and strongly limited freedom. Francis did not recognize any limitations of his power. His basic strategy was to block any change, to repress any opposition and to preserve the status quo whatever the price would be. He reasserted the local nobility that he would not go against their interests if the nobles paid taxes they were minimal, there was no land reform, Austria should remain an agrarian society, Francis even opposed the building of factories, the importation of machinery and the construction of railways because he feared the political consequences of major economic changes. He was profoundly reactionary but he could not stop the flow of history. Around 1830, the Clemsi economic development accelerated, new factories opened in Bohemia and Moravia in Vienna in Trieste, even in Hungary. Baron Rothschild financed the first giant ironworks based on English technology as well as the first steam railway. In terms of cultural history, the first decades of the 19th century are called Biedermeier while any kind of political activity was strictly prohibited. Culture and scientific association flourished. Nobles and businessmen founded museums and theaters. Linguists codified dialects and created semi-artificial languages which only a minority understood. Historians started to rewrite or invent the glorious history of the medieval states. Documents were forged in prospect to make the case for more autonomy at the right moment. Academics proved that the nation was older and more respectable than all the others. In some parts of Europe such mythologies are still alive. I quote here the American Serbian poet Charles Simic who was told by his witty grandfather, we Serbs are very old. We are so old that even the apes descend from us. Metternich and the Habsburg authorities appeared unconcerned by this turn to cultural nationalism in the Slavic territories which presented itself as Austro-Slavism. They did not perceive it as as red rather as a controllable source of local pride and the parents to potential German liberal ambitions. The Austro-Slavs felt uncomfortable between the Germans on one side and Tsarist Russia on the other side. If the Austrian Empire did not exist it would have to be invented in the interest of Europe, said the Czech historian and politician Frantisek Balacki. Chancellor Metternich compared the Habsburg state of his time to an old pair of shoes. Worn out as they are, they are very comfortable as long as it does not rain. Stormy weather began after Francis died and his mentally challenged son Ferdinand became emperor. Secret societies like the Italian carbonari spread propagating dangerous ideas. The world is very sick and every day the gangrene spreads, commented Metternich. The relationship between the political nation, the mobility, the Habsburg state and the people, largely peasantry, was a triangular one with the peasants often regarding the Habsburg state as their protector against their noble lords even if they were of the same nation. In western Galicia in February 1846 when Polish nationalists revolted against the Austrian military the Polish peasants proclaimed themselves as lower subjects of the Austrian emperor and massacred their own lords. The Austrian military had to in vain in order to defend the rebellious aristocrats. Two years later the princely state, as Mises called it, was challenged by the biggest threat since the siege of Vienna in 1683 by the Ottoman army. During the revolution of 1848 the nations and nationalities of the Austrian empire attempted to achieve the autonomy, independence or even hegemony over other nationalities. The revolution merged into a wall of independence which was finally crushed by the united forces of Croats, Slovaks and Romanians with the help of Russia. The minorities in Hungary took the side of the monarchy because they felt themselves better protected by the emperor than under a revolutionary regime of Hungarian nationalism. The emperor survived the revolution in Vienna thanks to the military intervention of the Croats. The main obstacle for any solution of the nationality problem inside the Habsburg Empire was the distribution of ethnic and linguistic minorities inside its territories. On this map you see that this regards most of all the Germans, the red spots on the map, inside its territory. In Bohemia you see that the Czech part this is the slightly blue one is there's a ring of German settlers around it. And this was the economic powerhouse of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy. So all social conflicts concentrated there and that's the reason why the national conflict in Czechoslovakia, sorry, in Bohemia and Moravia was particularly intense and sharp. The Germans settled in centuries and in several ways they settled in the eastern part of Europe. First as peasants, then as merchants, then as officers and even one beautiful story it's in the times of Maria Theresa. Vienna was full of prostitutes then. And Maria Theresa knew that her husband Franz Josef von Laudringen knew more or less all of them personally. So she decided to collect them and they put them on a raft, on big rafts and send them down the Danube and let them out in Temesvara, that's Temesvara now in the now part of Romania. And then they went out and a lot of people from Temesvara have some of these ladies and their grandmothers or a little for other generations. But this, I show you a picture of, yeah, you see this is Transylvania. Imagine a territorial solution of national conflicts with a map like this. Ernest Gelner, one of the most interesting intellectuals occupied himself with the history of nationalism and the sociology structure of nationalism once wrote that everywhere in the West the nations, the pattern of nations is like a picture of Mondrian. In the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy it's Kokoszka and that's exactly the case. So every group had its rights, had its legal traditions. There were a lot of different, it was impossible simply to make a territorial solution on this situation. Now, what is the next one? What you see here is Pyrton. Whenever you go to Romania, don't miss it. It's like it's typical still, a typical medieval German town in the East. It's wonderful, wonderful old houses. This is the fortress, the church like a fortress. When the Turks came, the people entered behind the walls and defended them behind the walls against the aggressions and so on. And as George Esku didn't succeed in destroying the whole country so he started to destroy parts of it but he didn't completely, there was nothing left. But he didn't touch any part of it, not all parts of Romania. Particularly in Transylvania you have a beautiful heritage that you can see and I vividly invite everybody to go there and to see how old Europe was once. Well, Mises referred to this distribution of the Germans saying that one understands now the tragic position of the Germans in Austria. With a bold defiant spirit of rebellion, the Germans in 1848 wanted to create a free, great Austria out of the heritary state of the dynasty. Then they discovered that the application of democratic principles was bound to lead to the dissolution of his empire which after all they had been leading elements. Then they had to recognize that democracy was bound to the private German citizens of territories inhabited predominantly by Slavs of their political rights. Under the despotism of the sovereigns, officials, they could still live as Germans. Also they might be also subjects, enjoying the same rights as other subjects, but in a free state they would have become second-class citizens. The point at which the interests of the dynasty and of the Germans seemed to meet was the aversion to democracy. The Germans of Austria had to fear every step on the way to democratization because they were thereby being driven into the minority and delivered up to a ruthless arbitrary rule of majorities of foreign nationality. Therein Mises saw the real tragedy of the German liberals, the double monarchy. They gave up the principles of liberalism and transformed themselves into nationalists. Again Mises, the German policy in Austria, which was based on maintaining the political power position of these minorities became in this way a conservative reactionary policy. Every conservative policy however is fated from the start to fail. After all its essence is to stop something unstoppable to resist the development that cannot be impeded. The precondition to any viable and peaceful solution would have been to understand the causal relation between violence war and the rejection of self-determination which years later had been masterfully analyzed by Mises in 1927 when he published his book Liberalism. There he emphasized the importance of the right of self-determination as the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and internal wars. Right of self-determination is defined by Mises means whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory whether it be a single village or a whole district or a series of adjutant districts make it known by freely conducted plebiscites that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state their wishes are to be respected and complied with. Mises referred this right to the inhabitants of every territory not to a nation, not to an ethnic or a religious group. Quote him again, the right of self-determination of which we speak is not the right of self-determination of nations but rather the right of self-determination of the inhabitants of every territory large enough to form an independent administrative unit if it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person it would have to be done. Thank you for your attention.