A glance at the map will show how great a blow to the prosperity of the Slovenes and the Croats was the creation of the Free State of Fiume. The loss of Trieste was serious enough to the Slovenes; that of Fiume cut them off entirely from the sea; while Fiume, where the Julian and Dinaric Alps meet, is the logical outlet for Croatia, Hungary, and Slavonia. Italy justified her seizure of Fiume (the fiction of a free state is transparent) on the ground that the majority of the port’s inhabitants were Italians. If the suburb of Susak be counted as part of the city, even this claim was debatable. But the fact that Danzig’s population was over 90 per cent pure German did not weigh at Versailles against the decision to detach Danzig from Germany to make it an outlet for Poland. Memel was similarly taken from German to be later awarded to Lithuania. Here we see the application of two weights and two measures, in the case of Fiume against a state created by the Peace Conference itself! The moral of most of the decisions made since 1918 is that the supreme argument in international relations is the possession of force. Taken as a whole, the map of Europe, as redrawn since 1918, has been more influenced by the possession of superior force by its beneficiaries than any of the territorial readjustments of the nineteenth century.
Advantageous as it was, there was a loud outcry in Italy against the Treaty of Rapallo, and it has not yet been fully put into force. As I write these lines the Jugoslavs are vainly endeavoring in a conference at Abbazia to secure loyal fulfilment of Italian promises and to make conditions tolerable for the foreign trade of Jugoslavia.
The frontier disputes, entailing the possibility of war with Italy, Rumania, or Albania, made necessary the postponement of elections to the Constituent Assembly until November, 1920. During the two transitional years a provisional parliament of an extraordinary character had met at Belgrade. Its Serbian members were those of the Skupshtina elected in June, 1914, and the Croatian members were of the Diet elected under Hungarian rule in January, 1914; while the Montenegrin deputies were chosen by the revolutionary assembly of Podgoritza in November, 1918. The other representatives belonged to haphazard local organizations of non-official character and doubtful legality.