Why bother learning about the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, concerning
events of a century ago? An empire that collapsed at the conclusion of World
War I in 1918. For me it’s like viewing an historical train wreck, the kind that
you can’t look away from, a wreck involving a state. And to boot they set the
spark that started the catastrophe that became World War I.
Were they doomed to collapse? And what were they thinking
invading Serbia in 1914? In one way of thinking Serbia was a terrorist
sponsoring state; one that had to be dealt with. It was discovered that the
group that assassinated Archduke Ferdinand had connections with Serbia military
intelligence. This doesn’t negate the fact that Austria-Hungary was isolated
and dependent on Germany’s support. In some circles, especially military, the
attack on Serbia was required so the fragile Empire could extinguish Serbian
nationalism.
The primary proponent of this wrongheaded thinking among the
military was Franz Conrad von Hertzendorf, who is said to have proposed
attacking Serbia some 25 times in the period leading up to WWI. Conrad, as
often happens with military figures, saw only a military solution to Serbia’s
perceived threat. Serbia had arisen from the disintegration of the Ottoman
Empire and was flexing its nationalist muscles on the border of the
Austrian-Hungarian Empire.
There were some 600,000 plus Serbian speaking people in the Empire.
There were some 600,000 plus Serbian speaking people in the Empire.
Chief of Staff, Conrad Von Hertzendorf, all said, was a
piece of work. He held to Social Darwinist thinking, which employed Darwinism and
its idea of the survival of the fittest towards the social and political realm.
He wrote,
He wrote,
“…the recognition of the struggle for existence as the basic
principle of all events on this earth is the only real and rational basis for
policy making”.
Thus, an attack on Serbia was imperative for Austria-Hungary
to survive in the struggle of peoples and nations. In this type of thinking an
aggressive foreign policy would bolster national unity. Weak peoples, folks and
nations were meant to be subdued. These ideas were used to justify imperialism
of the late 19th Century. Africans, South Asian Indians, Chinese and
others were deemed inferior and it was considered expedient to dominate them. Later,
others took similar concepts to the extreme and arrived at idea of the Master
Race, the superior Aryan peoples of whom the Germans were numbered.
He advocated excessively aggressive battle field tactics,
including frontal attack as the best method to continue to maintain all
important fighting moral. He would argue in doing so even a smaller army could
defeat a larger one, one fighting defensively, pointing to the Prussians
victory over the French in 1870. In addition he downplayed the effectiveness of
artillery preparation, the weapon that caused the most casualties in WWI. Employing
these aggressive attack stratagems in the first month of WWI the Empire
contributed to the loss of over 40% of its fighting capacity including some
250,000 killed. That is the number of soldiers United States lost in 3 ½ years
of fighting in WWII. The veteran battalion and regimental officer core were
decimated along with the fighting grunts. These types of veteran loses were irreplaceable.
Without the assistance of Germany, the Empire’s army was not an offensive force
for the remainder of the War.
Unrealistically assuming that the Russians wouldn’t be able
to mobilize in time, Conrad wanted to quickly strike Serbia first and sent most
of Austrian-Hungarian army south towards the Serbs. After the troops, five
corps, were being transported south to fight the Serbs, Conrad changed his mind
the next day and commanded they turn around. The logistics wouldn’t permit such
an impossible turn around and they had to continue on towards Serbia. As a
result they were neither useful for the fight against Serbia nor any assistance
in the Russian front, arriving too late to be effective. No progress was made
against the small Serbian army and after initial success in Galicia (currently
Southern Poland) they were driven back with great loss against the Russians.
All the while he was carrying on an adulterous love affair with
a married woman with 6 children, whom he met in 1903. He was obsessed with her.
He wrote 3,000 letters to his love, one 60 pages long and sometimes 3 letters
in one day. Each part of his day at the command center would be spent composing
these letters. Yet, he only visited the front briefly three times. But of
course, he sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths and yet more inflicted
with war related injury and disability. In his thinking, great battlefield
victories would grant him sufficient influence and gain esteem in the eyes of
his beloved to free him to openly pursue his forbidden love. She was granted a
divorce eventually in 1915 and they were married.
Being in a passionate love affair with a married woman is not
criminal, but sending people to their deaths, all the while, into a giant meat
grinder that was WWI, was nothing less than monstrous. Of course the biggest
diplomatic fustercluck: the Hapsburgs unintentionally but carelessly started
World War I. 84 year old Emperor Franz
Joseph ruling since 1848, acquiesced to the military thinkers and agreed to
attack its smaller neighbor Serbia in July 1914 to punish them for the
assassination of the Prince Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the throne of
Austrian-Hungarian Empire.
The critical idea here is that the Empire pursued an
independent policy of aggression toward Serbia in July 1914 with the imprimatur
of Germany, absent of any diplomatic efforts to diffuse the situation. They
were the spark that ignited the conflict and no one else.
Austria-Hungary’s foreign policy over the last half of the
19th Century was largely inept. They alienated a potential ally in monarchist
Russia, who came to their aid suppressing the Hungarian revolt of 1848, thus
preserving the Empire. The
Austrian-Hungarian Empire, a bulwark against the Ottoman Turkish Empire in the
16th and 17th Centuries, was a balancing act of an empire
by the later decades of the 19th Century. In fact, it was so
precariously unstable it refrained from pushing the tottering Ottoman Empire
into disintegration for fear it would redound to them. Thus they abstained to
lend support of any kind to the Russians in the Crimean War; later when Russia had decisively defeated the
Turks in 1878, Austria-Hungary had received authority over Bosnia-Herzegovinian
which they later annexed in 1908. That war saw the nation states of Bulgaria,
Romania and Serbia freed from the yoke of the decaying Ottoman Empire. On the
other hand Russia received very little from its victories, being on the
doorstep of Constantinople, when hostilities ceased. They were forced to give
up almost all of their gains. Note
British Empire, a nonparticipant, gained the Mediterranean island of Cyrus in
the peace negotiations, also part of the Ottoman Empire. Yes, the sun continued
to never set on jolly old British Empire.
The Empire was a tottering, decrepit throwback: an
anachronism in the age of nationalism exemplified by countries like Germany,
Italy and France, states representing national peoples. The Austrian-Hungarian
Empire dis-integrated at the conclusion of World War I under the pressure of a
dozen ethnic minorities: German, Hungarian, Czech, Slav, Slovene, Croat, Rumanian,
Ukrainian, Pole, Italians, Ukrainian, Jews…and a couple you’ve never heard of. It
was about the size of Texas with nearly 53 million people in 1914. The central
cohesive political idea was loyalty to a divinely anointed Emperor. Franz Joseph had been Emperor since 1848,
attaining the throne after the first nationalist revolts swept over Europe.
The nationalistic fervor unleashed by the French Revolution
terrified the monarchies; thousands of the nobility fell under the guillotine
and were killed in peasant revolts. A re-instatement of the status
pre-revolution was attempted in 1815, after the defeat of Napoleon. The lid
blew off this effort in 1848 when Poland, Hungary, France among others
overturned their governments and cried out for freedom and justice under the
swell of nationalistic feeling. The demands were largely the Liberal type of
the period: freedom from the demands and
constraints of feudal obligations, renunciation of the Kings right to claim
sovereignty by divine right and autonomy and independence for the national
peoples and such.
19th Century Liberalism was much different than what
the term entails today. The basic tenants consisted of a government with the
consent of an electorate, but propertied only, elimination of support for state
sponsored Church, freedom of the press and free exercise of capitalism. And it
was absent the socialistic style income transfer welfare benefits, so
characteristic today. There were a few Socialistic elements in some revolts but
the idea of a central state dispensing welfare benefits and regulating society
was far in the future. Working conditions
at the time were brutal, for factory workers, 12-15 hours a day 6 or maybe 7
days a week in sweat shop conditions. The peasant was usually monarchist in
leanings, seeing little chance of change in their circumstances with so-called
liberal or republican governments. Even a republican would fear universal
suffrage.
For a monarchy like Austria or Germany there was a grudging
acceptance of some type of popular representative Assembly or Parliament,
usually weak or anemic and elected on a narrow electorate of propertied voters.
This placed the Monarchy under the aspect of a restraint of rule of law but the
Monarch would reserve the absolute divine right but deign to hear the people
expressed in these representative assemblies. Ultimately, for the Hapsburgs the
Emperor ruled supreme but with limits. In effect the God given right of the
monarch to rule would be circumscribed in a ruling coalition with this
Assembly. Oddly, nearby up until 1797 Venice had a representative republican
government for something like a thousand years, a tiny drop of representative
government in all of Europe, nonetheless ruled by the mercantile elite.
Franz Joseph at 18 years old became Emperor of the
Austrian-Hungarian Empire in 1848 by the abdication of his father of the
Austrian-Hungarian Empire. 1848 saw a revolt of peoples energized by
nationalism. In 1848 the Hapsburg family was driven out Vienna, but shortly
thereafter realized they still had the support of the military who swept back
into Vienna. The revolt was bloodily suppressed. But it was the Russian Emperor,
Czar Nicholas I, who saved the Hapsburgs by violently suppressing the Hungarian
revolt. Russia would not be repaid.
Later the Hapsburgs were out maneuvered by Prussia’s
Bismarck, the Foreign Minister and Chancellor. Bismarck insured the neutrality
of France, sympathetic to nationalistic yearnings in large part, thus
Austria-Hungary was isolated, having failed to assist Russia in the Crimean War;
they lost the support of Russia. France supported limited nationalistic aspirations
in Northern Italy, Lombardy and Veneto, which since 1815 had been given to
Austria-Hungary. In concert with Italian states fighting in Northern Italy, Prussia
soundly defeated Austria in 1866 at Koniggratz (Sadowa) in a battle to
determine who would be dominate in the union of German states. Prussia it was
decided would lead a confederation of German states and Austria would be
excluded from the union. Bismarck, Chancellor of Prussia, completely out
maneuvered them. A Prussian led united Germany without Austria, the heavy
weight in Central Europe over the course for some four Centuries, was demoted
to spectator and then client state of the German Empire.
Besides loss of Northern Italy in its war in 1866, the defeat
led to the arrangement of a dual monarchy of Austria and Hungary. The two
states would be ruled separately under the under the sole sovereignty of
Emperor Franz Joseph. Hungary would be independent except for military and
foreign relations. This arrangement always restrained appropriations to the
military: a military that could be used to suppress the Hungarians, making the
risky invasion of Serbia all the more foolhardy. Austro-Hungarian military was
a fraction of the major powers. The Empires subjects spent as much on tobacco
and more on beer and wine than defense. It trained a quarter of its military
age male and in contrast France 80%. It was ill prepared for the military
adventure its leadership show eagerly thirsted.
***
The original question was whether Austria Hungary was doomed
to collapse. The collapse was a likely based on the anachronism that was the monarchial dual
sovereignty of Austria-Hungary, combined with a disconnected, aged monarch and
the fact the country was composed of a host of separate, diverse nationalities.
But they couldn’t have played it dumber. Let’s attack Serbia to teach it a
lesson not to spread nationalism, rather than initiating any internal reforms.
With a relatively small and decidedly unprepared army it was an act of complete
foolishness, idiocy and stupidity. It destroyed a country and led to even more
instability and war just a generation later.
***
The rot did appear at the top. Indicative of the Emperor’s ossified
behavior that led to the downfall of the Empire, was his attitude to his
nephew’s marriage. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne, fell in
love with a Czech noble women, a lady-in-waiting to the Archduchess Isabella of
Teschen. Sophie Chotek, duchess of Hohenberg, had a well-bred background, but was
deemed below his elevated station. Permission was grudgingly granted to allow a
morganatic marriage by the Emperor on the provision that his wife would not
share Franz Ferdinand’s status and the children would not be able to inherit
the throne. She was humiliatingly
shunned at the court. The Emperor only met her by accident several years after
they were married and was virtually ignored by Franz Joseph and the court
followers.
Archduke Franz
Ferdinand due to his somewhat irascible personality and the morganatic marriage,
so frowned up by the Emperor, was not in complete confidence of the Emperor. And
it appears that he harbored ill will towards the Archduke. For one the security
surrounding the Archduke was very light in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, a
patriotic holiday that commemorates the long remembered defeat of the Serbs by
the Turks in 1389: the defeat that subjugated the Serbs for half of a
millennium. Only 60 police were on duty in Sarajevo, a city of 80,000 that
Sunday morning. In fact the Austrians were given a hint that mischief was in
the air by the Serbian ambassador to Austria, resident in Vienna, who had
knowledge of possibility of an assassination plot but wasn’t at liberty to
reveal the details. Warnings by the Foreign office, the Ministry of the
Interior and Austrian military intelligence reported threats about the visit.
The Archduke was very nervous and concerned about the visit but the visit was
insisted upon by the Emperor. As a result of their visit to Sarajevo, the
Archduke and his wife were both assassinated with only two shots that day.
Another indication that the Archduke was held in low esteem
was the absence of an appropriate funeral. No foreign dignitaries were allowed
to attend, only the royal family. Initially the three surviving children were even
asked to pay for the funeral, although this was rescinded. The Emperor was said
to have expressed relief that the troublesome Archduke was finally out of the
way and showed little distress that he’d lost his heir. The Archduke might have
been the only brake to war with Serbia.
It’s interesting to know that the Emperor Franz Joseph’s
wife and son were in some profound way alienated from him, not to say they were
completely absence his presence. His wife, Elizabeth, avoiding dreary court
decorum, traveled extensively absent the Emperor, preferring to be away for
long periods of time on tour. She was tragically stabbed to death by an
anarchist in 1898. Their son Rudolf, the heir to the throne, preceded her in
death in 1889 in a murder-suicide. He is said to have shot his 17 year old
mistress and some hours later committed suicide at his hunting lodge Mayerling.
Tragic death seems to have haunted the Emperor; ones that might have initiated
reform in the Empire. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was desirous of reducing the
hegemony of the Hungarians over the lesser ethnic groups in their half of the
empire. Hungarians ruled unopposed over the Serbs, Croatians, Romanians, and
Slovenians among others. This would have re-balanced the Empire in a
tri-partite union, instead of the current one in which Hungary wouldn’t have
virtual veto over reforms that might begin to incorporate the lesser minorities
into the Empire.
Archduke Franz
Ferdinand was much opposed to aggressive military action towards Serbia, but
with his demise the military heads gained transcendence and persuaded the
Emperor Franz Joseph to allow a military operation to take place against
Serbia. They didn’t give much thought it seems to Russia who might come to Serbia’s
support.
***
This dilapidated, outmoded, archaic Empire contained a
Vienna that was a cosmopolitan vibrant city, a source of great cultural
production. Adolf Hitler, Stalin, Freud and Trotsky who lived within a few
miles of each other there in 1913 sought it out. One of 20th
Century’s most famous philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the author of logical
positivism had lived there until 1911. Composers Gustav Mahler, Brahms, Richard
Strauss (Theme used for 2001 a Space Odyssey) among others lived there. Gustav
Klimt lived there as well. How could such a vibrate civilization co-exist with
a tottering Empire? It almost makes one think the civilization was worth
saving.
One last thought regarding the collapse, four empires fell
along with Austria-Hungary; that is Germany, Russia and the Ottomans. It’s not
beyond the realm of possibility that monarchy and modernized military and mass
mobilization were incompatible with societies based on some idea of ordered
hierarchies. These societies claimed a right to existence of a ruling class and
divine ruler in which a society owed respect and fidelity based on religious principles
of the rightly ordered society. For example it would be unthinkable that the
officer staff be served the same food as the regular soldier as did other
militaries. The Americans, the French
and increasingly the British rejected this scheme. The empires couldn’t have
been more foolish in pursuing state interests through modern military means. They
were blind to their own demise, especially the Dual Monarchy of Austria and
Hungary.
A J P Taylor's Struggle for the Mastery of Europe explains that the Austrian-Hungarian Empire feared Serbia as a unifying agent in the Balkans. They had seen Emile Cavour, Prime Minister, leading Piedmont and the Kingdom of Savoy in Northern Italy to initiate unifying Italy in 1860. The unification culminated in depriving Austria-Hungary of the Northern Italian provinces of Lombardy and Veneto, granted to them in the Congress of Vienna in 1815. They may have feared a repeat in 1914, but were frightfully ill prepared for the total war fought in WWI. The ossified leadership of the Empire couldn't comprehend internal reform.
A J P Taylor's Struggle for the Mastery of Europe explains that the Austrian-Hungarian Empire feared Serbia as a unifying agent in the Balkans. They had seen Emile Cavour, Prime Minister, leading Piedmont and the Kingdom of Savoy in Northern Italy to initiate unifying Italy in 1860. The unification culminated in depriving Austria-Hungary of the Northern Italian provinces of Lombardy and Veneto, granted to them in the Congress of Vienna in 1815. They may have feared a repeat in 1914, but were frightfully ill prepared for the total war fought in WWI. The ossified leadership of the Empire couldn't comprehend internal reform.
