After the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I, the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye was signed between the Empire and the victorious Entente, which stipulated the complete disassembly of the component lands of the Empire into individual nations. Austrian control over its share of the Empire was reduced to the small rump republic of Deutschösterreich (en: Republic of German-Austria), officiated on 12 November 1918. During the war, the German current within the Social Democrats expressed an interest in the idea of the "Mitteleuropa" proposed by the pan-Germanic nationalist movement within Austria, hoping that a union ("Anschluß") with the rest of Germany could stymie some of the major economic problems the new republic was beginning to face.