Between the Protestant Reformation and the outbreak of World War I, the Habsburg Monarchy underwent a remarkable transformation, beginning the period as a collection of hereditary lands ruled directly by the Holy Roman Emperor and ending it as a multinational state that had undergone extraordinary processes of state formation and consolidation, liberalization, and democratization. As Europe underwent the Counter-Reformation, French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, and Age of Nationalism, the Habsburg Monarchy charted its own unique course, consistently choosing reform over revolution and compromise over intransigence even as it acquired Great Power status. The ten authors whose works reviewed in this essay trace this path chronologically.
The first step in understanding the evolution of the Habsburg Monarchy over this period requires investigating the how the Counter-Reformation unfolded under its rule. Martin Luther launched the Reformation from within the Electorate of Saxony – a state of the Holy Roman Empire – and the century and a half of war that ensued was fought within the empire’s borders. At the Council of Trent, held in the mid-sixteenth century in the Tyrol in the Vorlande of the Habsburg possessions (so-called Outer or Further Austria), the Vatican set the agenda for the Counter-Reformation, but its progression varied across different areas of Europe and even different regions of the Habsburg Monarchy itself. While the historiography has tended to depict the Counter-Reformation in Austria as the authoritarian reassertion of Roman Catholic domination, in his studies,Joseph F. Patrouch has argued that the process was far more extensive and laborious, particularly in Upper Austria, the western half of what then was the Archduchy of Austria.
In contrast to the near uniform Catholicism of the Upper Austrian population on the eve of World War I, by the middle of the sixteenth century, Protestantism was widespread in the area, constituting the faith of the majority of the population, largely as the result of the area’s proximity to the Protestant hotbed of Bohemia. Patrouch characterizes the Habsburg Monarchy as holding a fundamentally weak position during this period, facing the opposition not only of the predominantly Protestant nobility of Upper Austria but also of the peasant population, which had become accustomed to Lutheran innovations in the mass, such as communion in both kinds (the congregation drinking wine – a privilege previously held only by clergy – in addition to eating a consecrated host), and the clergy itself, which had taken to breaking its vows of celibacy at an alarming rate. The monasteries were under the direct control of the crown but also subject to the authority of the Bishop of Passau (across the border in Bavaria), himself appointed by the Pope and thus an exemplar of Catholic orthodoxy. In contrast, the peasants fell under the direct political authority of the Herrschaften – the local nobility – which while technically subject to rule by Vienna nevertheless enjoyed substantial autonomy in local affairs. In addition, the Herrschaften were subordinate to a regional assembly of Estates that met in Linz, the Upper Austrian capital, and that was often in conflict with Vienna over religious questions.
As a result, to reassert Catholic authority, extensive compromise on the part of the crown was necessary, as well as the ability to maneuver among multiple levels of political and religious authority. Since the monasteries were directly under the crown’s authority, they provided a natural starting point for the reassertion of Catholic predominance. As Patrouch writes, “When the political constellation [in Upper Austria] changed, this foundation could and did serve as the basis for establishing Habsburg authority, together with the authority of ecclesiastical representatives allied with them as a component of the Counter-Reformation.”[1] The initial reassertion of orthodoxy took the form of rooting out married clergy – a campaign that took up much of the first decades of the Counter-Reformation. Although this measure was met with substantial resistance by the clergy and peasantry both, Patrouch argues that the promise of the withdrawal of new rights enjoyed by women during the Reformation offered an incentive for certain local and clerical authorities to abandon resistance. However, it was only after the crushing of the Bohemian Revolt in 1620 that the Protestant nobility in Upper Austria was sufficiently cowed for the crown’s Counter-Reformation efforts to escalate. The Peace of Westphalia at the end of the Thirty Years’ War ultimately settled the matter.
As noted, the Counter-Reformation in the Habsburg hereditary lands was ultimately quite successful if religious affiliation in the early twentieth century is any metric. Perhaps counterintuitively, the roughly 250 years between the Peace of Westphalia and World War I saw the Habsburgs controlling an increasingly diverse population, both ethnically and religiously, and the monarchy’s reactions to this mounting diversity was more often tolerant than intolerant. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Austria could be considered a liberal, multinational constitutional monarchy. Among the chief questions to be considered in examining the evolution of the Habsburg Monarchy from the Catholic standard bearer of Central Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries to a liberal multinational state by its dissolution is the role played by the central government in this evolution.
Chief among the institutions playing a role in this transformation was the military. In his work, Michael Hochedlinger provides a comprehensive examination of the Habsburg military, focusing primarily on its centralization over the long eighteenth century. In painstaking detail, Hochedlinger shows how Austria centralized and strengthened its military as it faced threats to its security from inside and outside Europe. In the process of meeting these challenges, beginning with the threat of Ottoman expansion into Central Europe and finishing with the French Revolutionary Wars, Hochedlinger writes, “the need to mobilize domestic resources for well-night permanent war drove forward the growth and establishment of absolutist government, making eighteenth-century Austria a highly militarized state perfectly comparable to her rivals in east-central Europe, Prussia and Russia.”[2]
The early pages of Hochedlinger’s monography on this topic focuses on the challenges with Habsburg military supremacy within the borders of the Holy Roman Empire until the mid-seventeenth century. The Peace of Augsburg (1555), which first recognized the rights of Protestants in the Empire under the principle of cuius regio, cuius religio, had resulted in the consolidation of military power in the hands of the regional Estates and out of the Catholic emperors’ hands. The defeat of these same Estates’ militaries in the first phase of the Thirty Years’ War, however, shifted the balance of military power back to the center. Subsequently, the wresting of control over Hungary from the Ottomans had two important effects. First, Habsburg control was asserted over a territory with a significant proportion of non-Catholics, so while Counter-Reformation measures were initially imposed, they were quickly abandoned due to resistance. Second, with the Habsburgs now defending the border with the Ottoman Empire, the stage was set for Austria to emerge, upon victory, as a Great Power. Victory over the Ottomans in the Siege of Vienna in 1683 is the first engagement that Hochedlinger covers in the second half of his book.
Alongside the military ascent of the Habsburg state was political centralization. Playing a key role here was the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire, which had met only irregularly and not at all for most of the Thirty Years’ War. Beginning in the 1660s, the Diet was convened permanently in Regensburg in Bavaria with the Archbishop-Elector of Mainz in the Rhineland acting as arch-chancellor of the Empire. With the immerwährender Reichstag (eternal legislature) of the Empire now constituted, the monarchy had greater ability to impose the taxation necessary to fund its centralized military. In the interest of maintaining the delicate balance of power established with the Peace of Westphalia, the Empire established France and Sweden – both allies against the Habsburg in the Thirty Years’ War and holders of imperial territory – as guarantors of the imperial constitution. “Thanks to these guarantees,” Hochedlinger writes, “the Reich now became a focus of European power politics and a centre of gravity of the European states-system,”[3] even as Habsburg power concentrated outside of the Empire’s borders.
Of course, there were other significant institutional changes under the Habsburgs beyond those treated by Hochedlinger that contributed to transforming life under their rule. In his writing, Franz A.J. Szabo has examined the reforms undertaken by the monarchy in the mid- to late 1700s. First, recapitulating Hochedlinger, Szabo details how, under the Empress Maria Theresa, control of the army was centralized from provincial control to Vienna. Second, to raise money for this new centralized military, a peacetime tax was levied for the first time on the landed gentry.
However, the brunt of the substantial changes were undertaken under Emperor Joseph II, giving the name “Josephinism” to the Austrian version of liberal reforms undertaken under enlightened absolutism. Szabo identifies cameralism as the primary political ideology underlying Joseph’s reforms. Cameralism, which “generally addressed practical problems of state building and posited policy recommendations to improve resource management and the productivity and moral well-being of society,”[4] took a peculiar form in the Habsburg Monarchy, however. Whereas in other parts of Europe, cameralism was strongly identified with mercantilist political economy, with its consequent focuses on high tariffs and a zero-sum approach to international trade, under the influence of Wenzel Anton, Prince of Kaunitz-Rietberg, state chancellor from 1753 to 1792, the Austrian economy was increasingly influenced by the anti-cameralist positions opinions of the Enlightenment in Western Europe. Emphasizing free trade over protection, this new direction in political economy was intended to provide fiscal support to the increasingly centralized state. This project did require some tweaking, however; Szabo points out that Kaunitz’s initial centralizing impulse, embodied in the Direktorium established in the 1750s as a sort of superministry, ultimately gave way in the subsequent decade to multiple autonomous government ministries and a Staatsrat (state council) to communicate to the Emperor the opinions of these competing ministries.
Szabo’s most interesting point is his inclusion of Jansenism – a Catholic movement heavily influenced by Calvinism’s emphasis on predestination, sin, and grace – among the forces pushing the Habsburg Monarchy toward reform. Under Jansenism’s influence, reformers sought to bring the Catholic Church even further under state control. As Szabo writes, Joseph “took the position that in its demands on the Church the state ought to take a maximalist position because the complaints it was bound to receive would be the same whether the demands were moderate or extreme.”[5] The result of the power of the Church being brought under the thumb of the state was that “[s]ecular, rational, and utilitarian values and a simpler, internalized religious ethos thus came to constitute the backbone of Josephinism.”[6] Thus, militant Catholicism gave way to a softer ecumenism. Within this context, Joseph’s twin reforms of the Toleranzpatent of 1781, which provided religious freedom to Lutherans, Calvinists, and Orthodox Christians living under the Habsburg Monarchy, and the Toleranzedikt of 1782, which extended these protections to Jews as well, were a logical outcome.
The importance of internal reforms, notwithstanding, if there is a watershed moment in the history of Austria’s emergence as a Great Power over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. The traditional historiography of this event has tended to view the end of the Empire as a foregone conclusion set in motion with the Peace of Westphalia and expedited by the advent of Napoleon. According to this view, by the time the coup de grace was delivered by the last Emperor Francis II, the Empire was well past its sell-by date.
However, Peter H. Wilson has argued that the Empire still played a substantive role in European power politics in the first decade of the 19th century and that Austria, as a sort of successor state, was in fact more powerful than its rival, the German state of Prussia. Wilson grounds his analysis in the notion that, compared especially to France, there was not widespread political unrest in German-speaking Europe during the French Revolution and Napoleonic period; therefore, “one must seek explanations for its [the Holy Roman Empire’s] end in the sphere of high politics.”[7] Playing a crucial role in these high politics were Austria, Prussia, and the oft-ignored “third Germany” of the Rhineland states, which were ultimately consolidated by Napoleon into the Confederation of the Rhine. Although the political maneuvering among these three German powers had to a large extent already begun by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the processes that culminated in the Empire’s dissolution were more complex than the traditional view of Napoleon carving off Rhineland provinces from the Empire to form a buffer against Prussia. Instead, innovations such as the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss (Principal Conclusion of the Imperial Delegation), according to which a massive reorganization of the Imperial states was undertaken and Catholic power within the Empire diminished relative to Protestant power, were more important. Although such a reconfiguration would seem to weaken Austria’s position within the Empire, it nevertheless allowed Francis II to consolidate authority over the remaining Catholic dominions.
The final stage of the Empire’s disappearance involved the transition of Francis II from Holy Roman Emperor to Emperor of Austria, a change that took place two years earlier, largely in preparation for the Empire’s imminent dissolution. Wilson masterfully details the delicate negotiations with France that allowed Napoleon to elevate himself to the title of Emperor while preventing him from making a claim to the throne of Charlemagne. Agreeing that neither the French nor Austrian emperor would lay claim to the title of Holy Roman Emperor, “both new titles were more royal than imperial: there was still only one Emperor in Europe.”[8] That this Emperor and the Emperor of Austria were the same person made little difference with the knowledge that the Holy Roman Empire would soon disappear.
In a final piece of Imperial chess, Francis II and his foreign minister Count Stadion agreed that Francis’s abdication from the throne of Charlemagne should coincide with the dissolution of the Empire to prevent Bavaria or Saxony from claiming the throne for themselves – a right reserved to them under the Imperial constitution during any interregnum. Thus, even in finally relinquishing control of the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburgs recognized not only the emergence of Napoleon in France as a continental power and a sort of parity with Prussia and the Confederation of the Rhine but also the potential competition to be mounted by German states left independent by the Empire’s end.
Thus, if the Holy Roman Empire did not survive the Napoleonic period, the Empire of Austria did, and with its chancellor, Klemens von Metternich, chairing the Congress of Vienna, which set the balance of the power for the subsequent century, Austria’s position as a Great Power was secured. With a new German Confederation that included Austria and Prussia replacing Napoleon’s Confederation of the Rhine, a period of stability for central Europe began that lasted three decades. Ultimately, it was the revolutions of 1848 – the “springtime of nations” – that fractured that stability. For Austria in particular, the revolutions began nearly twenty years of profound political change necessitated by the rise of nationalism among Hungarians, Italians, and Germans. The works of three historians – Jonathan Kwan, Geoffrey Wawro, and R.J.W. Evans – read together provide a full understand of how the nationalist struggles involving these peoples are their states shaped Austrian society for the last third of the nineteenth century.
The revolution that posed the greatest threat to Austrian stability was that in Hungary. As noted above, the Habsburgs had gained control over Hungary from the Ottomans. In 1848, the Hungarians rose up and demanded independence from Vienna; it was only after more than a year of fighting and with the assistance of Russia that the Habsburg were able to bring Hungary back under their control. With the expansion of government control required to bring the Magyars to heel, the new emperor, Franz Joseph, reasserted absolutism and extinguished the hopes of liberal revolutionaries.
However, Kwan argues that the generation of liberal political activists that came of age in the Vormärz – the period “before March (1848),” when the revolutions began – were not discouraged by the expansion of autocratic power on the part of the Emperor in the early 1850s; rather, he writes, “the crucial formative experiences for the liberals were their participation in the 1848 revolutions and the reckoning its multi-faceted legacy, often while working and progressing within the neo-absolutist system of the 1850s.”[9] In an essay, Kwan traces the career trajectories of seven important liberal politicians and reformers to demonstrate how certain characteristics that they shared were important to their later roles in constructing Austrian liberalism.
For instance, none of the seven men owned substantial property in land, unlike the previous generations of government elites. Instead, their families were bureaucrats or entrepreneurs. Particularly for those whose fathers had been bureaucrats, periods of work in the lower echelons of the bureaucracy were also formative. In addition, most of the seven men had participated in civil society and other voluntary organizations that arose in Austria during the Vormärz and that would play such an important role in the post-1867 liberal state. Although the Hungarian revolution of 1848-1849 caused disagreement among the seven men, Kwan writes, “there was a shared belief in constitutional reform and a mildly progressive Austrian state and society, which promoted a sense of brotherhood and common mission, even if there were disagreements over tactics and specific issues.”[10] When challenges from Italy and Germany arose in the late 1850s and early 1860s, Kwan argues, this moderate generation of liberal reformers was already in position to embrace the monarchy as it moved in a more liberal direction.
Austria’s next major crisis after the 1848 revolutions was the Risorgimento or the unification of Italy. France and Austria had fought as allies against the Italian nationalists in 1848-1849 and retained control of their respective holdings on the peninsula. However, by 1859, France’s emperor Napoleon III saw the value in siding with the nationalists, with Austria losing most of its territory in northern Italy, although it retained control over Venetia. In the seven years between Austria’s loss to the Italians at the Battle of Solferino and the outbreak of war between Austria and Prussia, Wawro argues that Franz Joseph took a consistently belligerent position toward his neighbors as a way of maintaining absolutist control over the state even as its economic fortunes consistently deteriorated. In his work, Wawro asks, “Was it mere coincidence that, in 1865-6, the Habsburg Emperor, Franz Joseph, combined a coup against parliament with foreign war on two fronts?”[11]
In Wawro’s estimation, the neo-absolutist expansion of his powers that the Emperor accomplished after 1849 was threatened following the loss to Italy in 1859; consequently, Franz Joseph intervened in the Danish-Prussian war in 1864, using victory in this case to reassert maximum political control. In the two years that followed, the Emperor both refused to cut the military budget and failed to establish credit with western European banks at anything less than usurious interest rates. This dilemma left Franz Joseph with the choice of either levying extremely unpopular taxes or waging war yet again in hopes of gaining currency through reparations from defeated enemies. Veneto provided the setting for the Emperor’s gamble, but the simultaneous outbreak of war with Prussia in June 1866 stretched Austria’s military too thin for victory. Although Prussia did not claim territory from Austria in its defeat – it merely excluded Austria from the German Reich that it would declare in 1871 – Italy won Veneto to Austria’s great embarrassment.
Like most historians of the period, Wawro sees in Austria’s defeat in 1866 the seeds of its consequent move to liberalism. However, he interprets this move in the context of resurgent nationalism, which the defeats of 1866 left the Emperor unable to effectively counter through another reassertion of absolute rule. Rebellion threatened again, not just in Hungary but now also in Bohemia, where violence broke out against Germans and Jews, the latter as progenitors of German culture among the Czech majority. With a treasury stretched to the maximum and a demoralized military, compromise would have to Franz Joseph’s strategy, rather than pacification.
It is now a truism in Austrian historiography that the Compromise of 1867 – by which Hungary received status under Habsburg rule as a kingdom with its own parliament and ministers, and the Dual Monarchy was declared – and liberal government reform were interrelated. In an essay, Evans identifies a three-step program of constitutional transformation for Austria, beginning in 1859. First, he writes, “the advisory functions of the Reichsrat [the Austrian legislature] were expanded, still in corporative (landständisch) terms, and it was allowed to grow milk teeth of consent”[12]; i.e., the Reichsrat, while retaining representation according to class and interest group, nevertheless entered into a cooperative relationship with Emperor, rather than a merely advisory one. Second, in 1860 (still seven years before the Hungarian Compromise), the Reichsrat began to push the Emperor for more complete representation, with both the establishment of regional diets and an expanded national franchise. Finally, with these pushes toward more complete representation came outreach to the ethnic German population of the Empire.
This last part of the transformation obviously alienated the Hungarian population and its elites and ultimately necessitated the Compromise. In addition, from Evans’s standpoint, it was a grave miscalculation given Austria’s ultimate exclusion from German unification. As a result, following the Compromise, Germans constituted only a small minority of the Empire’s population in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy compared to an overwhelming majority of Slavs: Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians, Slovenians, Croats, and Serbs. Although the Compromise provided standing to the Magyars that would satisfy all but the most vehement Hungarian nationalists for the remainder of the existence of the Austrian Empire, the door was now opened to demands from one Slavic population after another – first Czechs and Poles but ultimately Ukrainians and South Slavs. For the remainder of his reign, the balancing act that Franz Joseph would have to perform would consist of making concessions to nationalist movements while maintaining the territorial integrity of his empire. That the twenty years following the Compromise would be dominated by liberal politicians and governments in Vienna would demonstrate both the potential of liberalism to find accommodations with a complex population and its inability to stem the tide of dissatisfaction from both left and right in times of crisis.
The survival tactics of the regime notwithstanding, the last five decades of the Habsburg Monarchy were remarkably stable, even as the political culture of Austria transformed. In his work,István Deák argues that army officers played an essential role in this stability. Even as the liberal hold on the government was increasingly challenged by ethnic interest groups and economic dissatisfaction from both left and right, the officer corps managed to avoid being affected by these cleavages. From the standpoint of ethnicity, the army stood apart from increasing conflict because it represented a largely meritocratic institution in which individuals could rise regardless of their ethnic origins. With regard to economics, although the pay for Austrian officers was notably lower than those for French or German officers, the egalitarian ethos of the military institution lent itself to preventing the emergence of class resentments.
For instance, Deák notes, regardless of relative rank, officers addressed one another (and often were addressed by their enlisted men) with the familiar pronoun du rather than the formal Sie. Such conventions, as well as “fundamentally decent administration, unheard-of liberties, economic progress, and lack of political boundaries between the Carpathians mountains and the Swiss Alps,”[13] helped to foster an environment of toleration. This sense of familiarity dovetailed with the language policies of the army, which required officers to speak any language spoken by at least twenty percent of their men, giving rise to a leadership that, while Austrian, could not be said to German, Hungarian, or any other ethnicity. In addition, despite the fact that so many officers rose from the peasantry and the artisanal and working classes, the appeal of the more economically based parties – particularly the Social Democrats – in the last quarter of the century failed to gain ground among military men.
Other factors that Deák acknowledges as important to creating the non-nationalistic military of the Habsburg Monarchy include the military academies and the relationship between the Emperor, as supreme commander of the army, and the officers. He writes, “The military schools of the Joint Army remained stubbornly indifferent to the social background (except in the case of archdukes), ethnicity, and religion of their students.”[14] The pipeline from these academies into the officer corps operated for such a long time and Franz Joseph reigned for so long that, by the turn of the century, nearly the entirety of the officer corps had never served another sovereign. This fact contributed enormously to the officers’ sense of being direct representatives of the dynasty, in addition to (or perhaps instead of) the state. This relationship, which transcended ethnicity and politics, became primary for many of them. As Deák notes, “This alone protected them from the nearly irresistible influence of nationalist and social-political agitation.[15]”
The other demographic in the Habsburg Monarchy that tended to avoid class and national divisions was the civil service. Beyond the army and civil service, however, political cleavages along ethnic and economic lines began to exert centrifugal forces on Austrian society as the promises of liberalism began to appear false. In response to these factors, the Habsburg government, rather than react with force as it had to the Revolutions of 1848 or to Italian secessionism, sought repeated compromises over the next forty years. The major concession made by Franz Joseph was the creation of the Dual Monarchy, which acknowledged Hungary as a nation on par with Austria, deserving not only of its own government but also subject peoples – in the case of Hungary, these peoples were primarily Romanians, Serbs, and Slovaks. However, it was already clear in 1867 that the Magyars would not be the last national group under Habsburg rule to demand greater rights.
Much of the scholarship on the Habsburg Monarchy has claimed that, for the last fifty years of the monarchy’s existence, it was slowly but surely torn apart by the ethnic nationalisms of Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, and others. However, in his work, John W. Boyer has suggested that, while the plurality embraced in the 1867 Austrian constitution was disastrous for the post-World War I Austria republic, it was the right constitution for its time. Boyer writes that the 1867 constitution “sought to modulate, if not suppress, the political valence of ethnicity in favor of the juristic mirage of an Austro-Liberal state ideology.”[16] In short, the Habsburg Monarchy sought moderation with nationalistic demands within the context of liberalism in government.
Boyer’s most significant contribution the historiography of the Habsburg Monarchy consists of his two volumes on the origins, growth, and seizure of power by the Christian Social Party, led by Kurt Lueger, who was eventually appointed mayor of Vienna by the Emperor in the late 1790s. While the Social Democrats emerged from dissatisfaction with liberalism’s embrace of laisser-faire capitalism, the Christian Socials rose as the result of the abandonment of the petit bourgeois artisanal class, as well as liberal ecumenism’s removal of the Catholic Church from a privileged position within Austrian society. Thus, while the Christian Socials were not leftists like the Social Democrats, they were at least as illiberal in their political orientation and at least as popular among voters in the monarchy.
From Boyer’s standpoint, the failures of liberalism that gave rise to new political movements in the 1870s and 1880s occurred because “[i]mmature radicalisms flourished in a culture of misinformation and faulty citizenship skills”[17]; i.e., in a state offering only a limited franchise and, thus, limited class mobilization, political radicalism was a to-be-expected outcome. However, the response of the monarchy’s government was to increase the franchise and thus bring these new parties into the political tent. While the long, slow, complicated process of Austria moving from a restricted franchise in 1867 to universal male suffrage in 1907 is beyond the scope of this essay, Boyer believes that each step toward universal suffrage allowed for the release of tension and the continuation of political moderate. In his words, “This slow cooking of an increasingly dense political culture created strong regional pockets of social interest and political networking. What may have looked like political anarchy from a central, state-level perspective masked the assemblage of building blocks of Mittelstand power … which would eventually be blended into a broader democratic rhetoric and strategy after 1907.”[18]
The outcome of the 1907 election tells the story: the Christian Socials emerged at the single largest political party, with 65 of the 516 in the Reichsrat, with the Social Democrats finishing second, with 50 seats; both parties more than doubled their seats from the previous 1900-1901 election. While the Social Democrats garnered increased votes on the basis of economic stagnation and working class political mobilization, Boyer contends that it was the enfranchisement of a men able to pay a five-gulden poll tax to vote (roughly $55 in 2020 U.S. currency) that made the difference from Christian Socials, “for it made possible the slow build up of a distinctive Mittelstand political culture in the regions and in larger urban areas that did not have to face the stark pressures of Social Democracy directly.”[19]
Among the final tactics devised by the Habsburgs to maintain the territorial integrity and political unity of the monarchy was a Hungarian solution for every nationality desiring self-government. In 1906, a commission led by the crown prince, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, recommended the creation of a federation of fifteen national territories. With power devolved nearly entirely to the provincial level, this state – die Vereinigte Staaten von Groß-Österreich (United States of Greater Austria) – would satisfy (it was hoped) the national aspirations of the empire’s dozen or so nations. However, the plan never advanced beyond informal discussion, and with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, it was shelved permanently.
That said, the spirit of this plan lived on through the end of the war and the dismantling of the Dual Monarchy at the Paris Peace Conference and with the Treaties of Saint-Germain and Trianon. Although it covers a period extending far beyond 1919, Timothy Snyder’s biography of Archduke Wilhelm Franz, The Red Prince, details how the final imperial government under its final Emperor Karl attempted to engender new nation states in Eastern Europe under constitutional monarchies led by the Habsburgs. Much of Snyder’s story concerns the Polish and Ukrainians in Austrian Galicia, but the dynamics here indicate much about the larger political situation and the solutions sought by the Emperor and his family.
On the heels of the Compromise of 1867, the Habsburgs had handed much of the governing in Galicia over to the Polish nobility. During the war and the dual occupation of Polish-speaking lands by Germany and Austria, as a way of inspiring a Polish uprising in the parts of Poland under the rule of the Russian Empire, the two occupying forces in Galicia proclaimed a Kingdom of Poland in November 1916 with Franz Joseph in the role of Habsburg protector and Archduke Wilhelm’s father Archduke Stefan – a Polonophile who resided in Galicia and raised his children to speak Polish – being considered as regent. However, Franz Joseph died a mere two weeks later and was succeeded by his nephew Karl, who envisioned ruling Poland directly. Nevertheless, regardless of who ended up ruling an independent and enlarged Poland constituted of areas under both Habsburg and Romanov rule, the national aspirations of Ukrainians, who also lived under both dynasties, would be unanswered.
Here, Snyder recounts, Archduke Wilhelm saw his own role. Wilhelm had embraced Ukrainian language and culture as way to establish independence from his father. In doing so, he had inserted himself in the national debate in Ukraine and was considered a contender to become the constitutional monarch in Kyiv. Since east and west Galicia were predominantly populated by Ukrainians and Poles, respectively, Galicia could be split into separate Polish and Ukrainian realms. “If such a province were created,” Snyder writes, “western Galicia could then be joined to the Kingdom of Poland with no harm to Ukrainians… He proposed a Habsburg monarchy composed of Austrian, Bohemian, Hungarian, and Polish kingdom, as well as a ‘Principality of Ukraine.’ An archduke would be the regent of each of these kingdoms.”[20] Upon becoming Emperor, Karl collaborated directly with Archduke Wilhelm in supporting the Ukrainian national movement, in addition to leading a Ukrainian unit of soldiers on the front against Russia. The final year of the war saw the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Karl’s unsuccessful attempt to convince the Germans to sue for peace, and finally the defeat of the Central Powers.
Although any realistic aspiration of Wilhelm or his father to act as regent in a newly independent eastern European kingdom ended here, it was nevertheless the case that Emperor Karl and Archduke Wilhelm both attempted over the next five years to reassert authority over former Habsburg territories. For Karl, his aspirations focused on Hungary, which had even proclaimed itself a monarchy after the defeat of its short-lived Soviet Republic. In early 1921, he went to Budapest in an overture to the regent of Hungary, Admiral Miklos Horthy, to restore Karl to the throne. Horthy refused, stating that “a restoration in Hungary would bring an invasion from the countries that had gained Hungarian territory at the Paris peace settlements.”[21] Wilhelm’s attempts to be named King of Ukraine during a short-lived period of independence there were abortive. Finally, following Karl’s death, his son, Otto, was viewed as a possible restored monarch for the Republic of Austria, particularly during the early 1930s, when the republic sought to maintain its independence from an insurgent Nazi Germany. The Anschluss of 1938 put a final end to Habsburg monarchical aspirations.
In conclusion, if the conventional wisdom about the rise and fall of the Habsburg Monarchy is one of a Vatican-empowered state crushing the Reformation in Central Europe and asserting centuries of enlightened absolutism only to be brought down by nationalism, the readings reviewed here demonstrate the extent to which this wisdom is an oversimplification. The process of Counter-Reformation under the Habsburg was long, slow, and gradual; the period of enlightened absolutism owed at least as much to military power as to centralized reform; and the regime successfully maintained its territorial integrity for fifty years even as nationalism emerged and dominated imperial politics. Particularly after 1867, the Habsburg Monarchy had strong, apolitical central institutions and a nearly unrivaled ability to compromise with its potential destroyers. There is no reason to believe that, without World War I, the Habsburgs could not have continued that record through the twentieth century and led Central and Eastern Europe into a multinational future.
[1] Joseph F. Patrouch, A Negotiated Settlement: The Counter-Reformation in Upper Austria Under the Habsburgs (Leiden, the Netherlands, 2000), 40.
[2] Michael Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence: 1683-1797 (Milton Park, U.K.: Routledge, 2003), 2.
[3] Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars, 55.
[4]Franz A.J. Szabo, “Cameralism, Josephinism, and Enlightenment: The Dynamic of Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1740–92,” Austrian History Yearbook, 49 (2018): 4.
[5] Szabo, “Cameralism,” 13.
[6] Szabo, “Cameralism,” 5.
[7] Peter H. Wilson, “Bolstering the Prestige of the Habsburgs: The End of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806,” International History Review, 28, no. 4 (2006): 712.
[8] Wilson, “Bolstering the Prestige,” 724.
[9] Jonathan Kwan, “The Formation of the Liberal Generation in Austria, c. 1830-1861: Education, Revolution, and State Service,” in The Habsburg Civil Service and Beyond: Bureaucracy and Civil Servants From the Vormärz to the Interwar Years, edited by Franz Adlgasser and Fredrik Lindström (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2019), 70.
[10] Kwan, “The Formation,” 89.
[11] Geoffrey Wawro, “The Habsburg Flucht nach vorne in 1866: Domestic Political Origins of the Austro-Prussian War,” International History Review, 17, no. 2 (1995): 222.
[12] R.J.W Evans, “From Confederation to Compromise: The Austrian Experiment, 1849–67,” in Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Central Europe c. 1683-1867 (New York: Oxford UP, 2006), 285-286.
[13] István Deák, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps 1848-1918 (New York: Oxford UP, 1990), 9.
[14] Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 89.
[15]Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 138.
[16] John W. Boyer, “Power, Partisanship, and the Grid of Democratic Politics: 1907 as the Pivot Point of Modern Austrian History,” Austrian History Yearbook, 44 (2013): 149.
[17] Boyer, “Power, Partisanship,” 154.
[18] Boyer, “Power, Partisanship,” 153.
[19] Boyer, “Power, Partisanship,” 151.
[20] Timothy Snyder, The Red Prince: The Fall of a Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Europe (New York: Vintage, 1999), 89.
[21] Snyder, Red Prince, 141.
Inevitable Historicity 