book entitled Der Staat, den keiner wollte (The state that nobody wanted) in 1962. Austria's exact future remained uncertain until formal treaties were signed and ratified. This process began with the opening of the Peace Conference in Paris on 18 January 1919 and culminated in the signing of the Treaty of Saint Germain on 10 September that year, although the National Assembly initially rejected the draft treaty on 7 June. The First Republic, 1919–1933 Treaty of Saint Germain 1919 The fledgling Republic of German-Austria was to prove short lived. The proposed merger with the German Empire (Weimar Republic) was vetoed by the Allied victors in the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (10 September 1919) under Article 88 which prohibited economic or political union. The allies were fearful of the long-held Mitteleuropa dream—a union of all German-speaking populations. The treaty was ratified by parliament on 21 October 1919. Austria was to remain independent, and was obliged to be so for at least 20 years. The treaty also obliged the country to change its name from the "Republic of German Austria" to the "Republic of Austria" (Republik Österreich), i.e., the First Republic, a name that persists to this day. The German-speaking bordering areas of Bohemia and Moravia (later called the "Sudetenland") were allocated to the newly founded Czechoslovakia. Many Austrians and Germans regarded this as hypocrisy since U.S. president Woodrow Wilson had proclaimed in his famous "Fourteen Points" the "right of self-determination" for all nations. In Germany, the constitution of the Weimar Republic explicitly stated this in article 61: Deutschösterreich erhält nach seinem Anschluß an das Deutsche Reich das Recht der Teilnahme am Reichsrat mit der seiner Bevölkerung entsprechenden Stimmenzahl. Bis dahin haben die Vertreter Deutschösterreichs beratende Stimme.—"German Austria has the right to participate in the German Reichsrat (the constitutional representation of the federal German states) with a consulting role according to its number of inhabitants until unification with Germany." In Austria itself, almost all political parties together with the majority of public opinion continued to cling to the concept of unification laid out in Article 2 of the 1918 constitution. Although Austria-Hungary had been one of the Central Powers, the allied victors were much more lenient with a defeated Austria than with either Germany or Hungary. Representatives of the new Republic of Austria convinced the allies that it was unfair to penalize Austria for the actions of a now dissolved Empire, especially as