What the Hapsburg Empire Got Right

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/opinion/hapsburg-empire-austria-world-war-1.html

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Despite its stunning perch atop a hill overlooking the Seine Valley, the Renaissance chateau at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, home today to France’s renowned National Archeological Museum, does not fit into most Paris tourist agendas. Pressed for time, visitors prefer to see the nearby Versailles palace, which, as the seat of the pre-revolutionary French court, is far grander, and in the popular mind more historically important — among other things, it was the site of the famous peace treaty that concluded World War I in 1919.

Yet Versailles was not the only scenic royal setting for a treaty ending the Great War. One hundred years ago today, the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye was signed between the victorious Allies and the new Austrian Republic. The sparsely attended ceremony in a small room of the solemn chateau had none of the pomp of the Versailles Treaty signing, a few months earlier, in the magnificent Hall of Mirrors. But this simplicity belied Saint-Germain’s momentous outcome: the dismemberment of the centuries-old Hapsburg empire — the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, as it was known since 1867 — and the emergence of several brand-new states on the European map. For 50 million people, something new and exciting was beginning, while at the same time an older way of life was dying out amid the ruins of the defunct empire.

“A laboratory built over the great graveyard of the world war” was how Tomas Masaryk, the philosopher-president of the first Czechoslovak Republic, described the states whose creation was sanctioned by the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (and other postwar treaties signed in and around Paris) — Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Austria and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later known as Yugoslavia). This territorial redrawing was no mere afterthought of an atrocious world war — it cemented national self-determination as the basis for political sovereignty. The state, in other words, should correspond to the nation, which was another way of saying the people. The new countries defending this nation-state vision thus emphasized their uniqueness and demonized their predecessor as a “prison of nations”: the multinational Austro-Hungarian monarchy, presided over by the Hapsburgs.

While few people were willing to stand up for the old empire after four years of world war, a century later scholars are rethinking its legacy, eager to assert its multifaceted attributes and surprisingly progressive institutions. Stretching from today’s western Ukraine to Switzerland and from the Czech Republic’s northern border with Germany down Croatia’s Adriatic coast, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy had no internal borders, one currency, two parliaments (in Vienna and Budapest), 11 officially recognized peoples/languages and almost as many religions, including Yiddish-speaking Jews, Bosnian Muslims and a variety of Orthodox Christians and Protestants to complement its Catholic majority. Formed and reformed through six centuries of feudal alliances, dynastic marriages, wars and Great Power bargains, the Hapsburg Empire was on its way to becoming a modern multinational state by the late 19th century. The army accommodated linguistic diversity in its regiments, schooling was available in different languages, and the bureaucracy was multilingual.

Although institutional changes for more political inclusivity and democracy moved slowly in the conservative monarchy, by 1907 the Austrian Parliament was elected by universal male suffrage, and a participatory public sphere was thriving. Hapsburg citizens were hardly living and working in isolated ethno-national enclaves. To this day, the turn-of-the-century architecture of train stations and other public buildings attests both to the population’s mobility and to the vast empire’s economic vitality. The similar layout of Central European cities is another visual reminder of a shared past.

The “outdated” old monarchy also produced a remarkably rich and innovative cultural life. In 1900, its multiethnic capital, Vienna, the world’s sixth-largest city, was home to such international luminaries as the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, the composer Gustav Mahler, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the painter Gustav Klimt, the Nobel Prize-winning peace activist Bertha von Suttner, the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, the architect Otto Wagner, the feminist/freethinker Rosa Mayreder and the writers Stefan Zweig and Arthur Schnitzler.

Certainly, the empire’s official recognition of 11 constituent peoples stirred up competition over privileges — the “nationalities question,” as contemporaries called it. The 1867 “compromise” that created a “dual state” by giving Hungarians full control over their domestic affairs consequently restricted it for Romanians living in Hungarian-ruled Transylvania. Some looked toward independent Romania in their struggle for greater rights as imperial subjects, just as Italians in the Austrian-held region of South Tyrol cast an eye toward Italy. Croats, Czechs and other Slavic peoples also agitated for more autonomy under the imperial umbrella, perhaps by converting the dual system into a tripartite Austro-Hungarian-Slavic one. In 1906, a Transylvanian Romanian lawyer named Aurel Popovici published an influential book proposing the federalization of the Hapsburg Empire along ethno-national lines, to be called the United States of Greater Austria.

Such reform efforts are further indications of the monarchy’s fluidity. For the most part, nationalists fought for greater power within the empire rather than fundamentally questioning its legitimacy. Indeed, national sovereignty appeared in late 1918 largely as a response to the massive socioeconomic crisis generated by the world war and encouraged by President Woodrow Wilson’s call for the “self-determination of peoples.” Czechs, Slovaks, Poles and Croats all declared their independence from the militarily vanquished Hapsburg monarchy in October 1918. On Oct. 31, a coalition government took control in rump (German) Austria, while Hungarians formed their own National Council. The following day, western Ukrainians (known as Ruthenians) proclaimed independence and promptly took up arms against their neighbors, the Poles. By the time the monarchy concluded an armistice with Italy on Nov. 3, only the army still recognized the emperor’s authority, and it was in such a wretched state that starving soldiers were chaotically retreating toward a ravaged home front in paper-soled shoes. On Nov. 11, the day of the armistice ending World War I on the Western Front, the Hapsburg emperor relinquished his duties and released his officials from their oath of loyalty. Thus ended the 600-year reign of one of Europe’s most powerful dynasties.

After four years of war during which the monarchy lost more lives than the entire British Empire did, its glistening imperial capital of Vienna was plunged into darkness by fuel shortages. Although Austria-Hungary fought on several fronts for far longer than anyone had expected (and outlasted the Russian empire by more than a year), the cost was calamitous: Once lively streets in multinational cities like Lviv, Cracow, Trieste, Zagreb and Chernivtsi — not to mention Vienna, Budapest and Prague — were teeming with pale, hungry people lining up for coal and food or selling off furniture for survival. In January 1919, a British official warned of imminent social breakdown without immediate relief for the former empire. Demobilized soldiers, right-wing militias and fervent communists all fought for their competing visions of the postwar order.

For the new national leaders, the establishment of nation-states out of the militarily defeated and socioeconomically devastated Hapsburg monarchy seemed to coincide with the march of history toward ethno-national sovereignty. Many believed it would usher in a glorious era of progress through political autonomy, economic self-sufficiency and democracy. In short order, street names, monuments and other imperial signifiers were modified or removed altogether to consecrate a complete break with the old regime.

Yet the nationalist principle embodied in Wilsonian “self-determination” offered a simple solution to complex questions. One was borders. The successor states often claimed the same territories based on historical rights or the primary language of the local population. Some of these disputes led to military conflict (between Czechs and Poles over the border town of Tesin/Cieszyn, for example); others were settled by plebiscite.

In mixed regions, it was difficult to determine who belonged to what ethnic group and where the border should be drawn. Consequently, the postwar treaties trapped ethnic minorities within the supposedly neat new “nation-states.” Czechoslovakia, for example, was not only binational but also included nearly three million ethnic Germans. Neither did the peace settle the border conflicts, which would re-emerge as a source of friction before and during the Second World War.

The economic breakup of what had constituted a common market was also painful. Some regions were cut off from traditional trading partners. Bohemian potatoes and Hungarian beef got bogged down on the wrong side of the new borders. The division of the Austro-Hungarian rolling stock led to fierce disagreements that took decades to be resolved. The dismantling of the Hapsburg currency union generated monetary chaos. The successor states marked old Austro-Hungarian bank notes with a national stamp to control their circulation. But they did not coordinate these actions, which sparked currency speculation. Inflation, which had reached dizzying levels in wartime, increased further: Prices in Vienna in 1921 were 100 times higher than what they had been in 1914, and twice that in Poland. The continuing hunger crisis led to protectionist reflexes. It took years for the successor state economies to stabilize.

Ultimately, all the emergent nation-states would have to draw upon their imperial inheritance to move forward. Whether that meant adopting Hapsburg military standards, acceding rights to local aristocrats or accepting the economic expertise and political contacts of former Austro-Hungarian officials, cutting loose from the past was never going to be as easy as the nationalists had claimed. In countless ways, the old empire refused to give up the ghost.

It had, after all, succeeded far too long for that. Classic novels like “The Radetsky March,” written by Joseph Roth in 1932, drove home lasting stereotypes of the empire as a decrepit, ramshackle realm unsuited to the modern era of nation-states. In fact, recent research has definitively demonstrated the myriad social, economic and cultural forces binding the country together. The basic rights enjoyed by its citizens — equality before the law, freedom of association, of expression and to cultivate their own languages — meant that the monarchy was less repressive than tsarist Russia and more tolerant than imperial Germany in its management of national diversity.

One hundred years after the Hapsburg empire was officially dispatched to history’s dustbin in a brief signing ceremony at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, simplistic appeals to national sovereignty risk obscuring the messy reality of dividing what is united. Populist political parties in not only Hungary, Poland and Austria, but also France, Belgium, Germany and Italy, clamor to “take back control” from the European Union. In Britain, the Brexiteers peddled the dream of independence while refusing to acknowledge the painful consequences of leaving the common market.

As nationalism regains momentum in Europe, it is worth considering the underappreciated benefits of being part of something larger, and the limited answers offered by “going it alone.” Without falling into nostalgia for a fundamentally conservative Hapsburg empire, or seeing it as a forerunner to the European Union, it is possible to acknowledge that a multinational state is not necessarily doomed to failure. And neither, for that matter, is the nation-state the only “natural” form of political organization.

Paul Miller-Melamed is an associate professor of history at McDaniel College. Claire Morelon is an associate researcher at the University of Padova.

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