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Fall of the Double Eagle
The Battle for Galicia and the Demise of Austria-Hungary
By John R. Schindler UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61234-804-9
CHAPTER 1
AEIOU
The cryptic vocalic motto had existed for nearly half a millennium, but no one was exactly certain what it stood for. Some believed it represented Alles Erdreich ist Österreich untertan (All the earth is subject to Austria), while others preferred the more classical Austria erit in orbe ultima (Austria will stand until the end of the world); there were other options too, and the arcane debate had continued for centuries, without resolution. Regardless, AEIOU — whatever it really meant — was found prominently on edifices all over the vast Habsburg realm, as a symbol of that family's ancient and enduring power and prestige.
The Habsburgs had burst upon the European scene out of the Swiss Alps in the eleventh century, gaining the crown of Austria in 1282 and the crown of the Holy Roman Empire in 1452. Between its Spanish and Austrian wings, the Habsburgs at their zenith controlled most of the West and much of the New World too; surely none of Europe's great royal houses thought of itself in grander terms. None could deny that it had saved Europe from the Turk. It was very much a family firm, a Hausmacht, leading to truisms such as the quip that other royal houses were periods in the history of nations, while nations were periods in the history of the Habsburgs. There was no doubt that the Habsburgs had been ensconced in their Danubian principalities for centuries when the Hohenzollerns and Romanovs were mere border-runners. Well known too was the saying, "Let others wage war; you, happy Austria, marry!" (Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube!), which implied that the Habsburg patrimony had been assembled through matchmaking rather than conquest, which was, generously, a half-truth. Most potent perhaps was the "Habsburg myth" that embodied the belief in the mission of the family and its subjects, a mystical union with religious overtones whose hold lasted centuries, longer even than the dynasty itself. In a manner that postmoderns have difficulty grasping, the Habsburgs, a distinctly German dynasty for all their polyglot holdings, represented a Reich in the ancient, non-Hitlerian sense, a throwback entity that defied easy definition as Europe became dominated by nation-states more than multinational dynasties.
Napoleon had set the Habsburgs on the path to perdition in 1806 when he disbanded the Holy Roman Empire, forcing the family to redefine itself as the emperors of Austria. Franz II, the last Holy Roman Emperor and first emperor of Austria, claimed the titles of three dozen Central European kingdoms and principalities, plus the crown of Jerusalem for good measure, but what exactly was "Austria"? That was the question that would take a century to answer, and some remained unsatisfied with any answers the Habsburgs could proffer. Having outlasted Napoleon, who with his aggressive Enlightenment views, particularly anticlericalism, represented all that the devoutly Catholic Habsburgs despised, Vienna stood as a bulwark of reaction, guided by the gifted Prince Metternich in staving off modernity in all its forms, until the revolutions of 1848 nearly destroyed the whole Habsburg edifice.
The conflagration that engulfed much of Europe in 1848 spared hardly any part of the Austrian Empire. Vienna was convulsed with social unrest from which the Habsburgs fled to the safety of the Alps, while the rest of the realm was shaken by revolts both social and national. These were crushed one by one by the army, the only element to remain mostly loyal throughout the crisis. Most consequentially, Hungary, the largest of the Habsburg dominions, engaged in open revolt led by the firebrand Lajos Kossuth, a direct challenge to Habsburg dominance in the Danubian space that was subdued only with great difficulty, including Russian military assistance, by the autumn of 1849. Hungary was brought to heel by brute force, aided by competing nationalisms: while Magyars (that is, ethnic Hungarians) believed they ought to dominate Hungary, that country's many minorities — Slavs, Romanians, Germans, amounting to half its population — did not wish to live in a Magyar ethno-state, and in considerable numbers they were willing to support the Habsburgs to avoid Magyar domination.
The new emperor who witnessed Hungary's submission was Franz Joseph, who was crowned at the end of 1848, aged eighteen, succeeding his severely epileptic uncle Ferdinand on the throne. His realm was in dissolution, and from its salvation by bayonets the teenaged monarch learned that his army was the ultimate defender of the Habsburg inheritance, and that the rising force of nationalism endangered the stability and even existence of the empire. The remedy suggested by counselors was absolutism, keeping power firmly in the hands of the monarch, his ministers, the army, and the police. Alexander Bach, the interior minister, played a key role in suppressing dissent through police measures, both overt and secret. Absolutism, however, alienated those who longed for liberty, both personal and national; and Slavs, Magyars, and Italians alike, whatever their mutual antipathy, commonly despised the Bach system, as did no small number of Germans. The rise of the bourgeoisie and educated classes to prominence and aspirations to power sharing with the monarch, a pervasive phenomenon in Central and Western Europe by the mid-nineteenth century, imperiled such throwback political systems.
The deficiencies of absolutism were laid bare by Austria's brief, painful war against the joined forces of Piedmont-Sardinia and France, waged in northern Italy in May and June of 1859. The aim of the conflict, to guard the empire's Italian province of Lombardy from the greedy hands of the house of Savoy, was not achieved thanks to French aid to the Piedmontese. Moreover, the Habsburg edifice demonstrated inefficiency, while the military showed serious weaknesses, not least the shaky performance of regiments comprised of unwilling Hungarians and Italians, and after the bloodbath at Solferino, where scenes of slaughter moved Henri Dunant to found the Red Cross, Franz Joseph sued for peace. He gave up Lombardy, allowing Piedmont to soon create the kingdom of Italy. In the wake of defeat, to shore up the realm and appease discontent, Vienna experimented with constitutionalism and limited concessions to Budapest, but it was not enough to satisfy critics, nor could it heal pressing problems of state finance. When the empire went to war again in the summer of 1866, defeat was awaiting once more. It was over in just six weeks, the Prussians defeating Habsburg forces in Bohemia, with the army proving weak and plagued by morale problems among Hungarians and others. Salving Vienna's relationship with Budapest, a wound unhealed on the heart of the realm since 1849, was now imperative if the Habsburgs wished to preserve their patrimony.
Habsburg territorial losses in 1866 were not crippling, amounting to the surrender of the province of Venetia to Italy notwithstanding the fact that Habsburg arms had defeated the Italians at Custoza on land and at Lissa on the Adriatic, but the political implications of humiliation by Prussia were immense. The Six Weeks War settled the longstanding question of who would dominate the German lands — Habsburgs or Hohenzollerns — decisively in favor of the latter. Henceforth, Austria would be the "other" German state, while Prussia would take the lead politically, militarily, and economically in Central Europe, forcing the Habsburgs to look south and east to maintain their geopolitical relevance. It was a humbling experience for the family that only six decades before still wore the crown of the Holy Roman Emperor.
Nevertheless the need to placate the Hungarians was urgent, and the outcome of the sea change in Vienna's strategic position in 1866 after defeat at Königgrätz was the Compromise (Ausgleich) with Hungary in May of the following year, the official birth of Austria-Hungary. Shepherded through Budapest by Ferenc Deák, the veteran fixer of Hungarian politics, the compromise granted Hungary what its moderate nationalists craved, self-rule and independence from Vienna in most matters, while maintaining union with Austria through the person of the monarch, the Austrian emperor and Hungarian king. Budapest was made master in its own house of all internal matters of governance, law, finance, education, and commerce. What united Austria and Hungary after 1867, aside from Franz Joseph himself, were the military, foreign affairs, and a joint finance ministry to fund the forces and the diplomats; all else was left to the Hungarians themselves. While hard-line nationalists would settle for nothing less than complete independence from the Habsburgs, their protests were drowned out by the Magyar "political nation" that ran the country and understood what an estimable deal they had obtained thanks to Prussian arms. Yet the Ausgleich, far from solving the problems of the Habsburg realm, ultimately created new ones that proved intractable and would lay paths to the disaster of 1914.
While the compromise understandably pleased the Magyars, it was anything but pleasing to the other groups that made up half of Hungary's population. In the first place, large tracts of territory, Transylvania and the Military Border on the southern flanks of Hungary were incorporated fully into the kingdom, losing their separate status, and placed under Budapest, to the chagrin of many who lived in them. Croatia-Slavonia, which had been nebulously part of Hungary since 1102, had its status ratified with its own compromise (Nagodba) in 1868 negotiated between parliaments in Budapest and Zagreb, which left the Croats in partial control of their own affairs, though bickering between the capitals, over issues great and small, continued nonstop for the next five decades. The last Habsburg census in 1910 revealed that — despite decades of Budapest's gerrymandering plus efforts to turn Slavs and Romanians into Magyar speakers — out of the population of almost twenty-one million in Hungary, barely ten million listed Magyar as their primary language; even subtracting Croatia-Slavonia, which had few Magyars, ethnic Hungarians made up less than 55 percent of the population. There were huge communities of minorities in Hungary proper, including almost three million Romanians, nearly two million each Slovaks and Germans, plus three-quarters of a million South Slavs, predominately Serbs, and almost a half-million Ruthenians (that is, Ukrainians), and in many regions of the country the minorities dominated numerically, if not politically.
Efforts by Budapest to transform the country's demographics by using the schools to Magyarize promising pupils — almost any young Slav or Romanian who went to high school or university emerged a Magyar in language and thought — were deeply resented by the minorities. In addition, the "political nation" kept non-Magyars away from power through skewing voting districts, while Budapest resisted universal manhood suffrage mightily for decades, on ethnic more than social grounds. Every decade, the compromise required official reapproval by Vienna and Budapest, and without fail the Magyar elite used this opportunity to demand more perquisites while explaining how charitable they had been to agree to the Ausgleich in the first place, amidst reminders that Hungary was not wedded to the union forever, and that the 1867 agreement represented only Hungary's minimum demands. Budapest was a showcase for the worst kind of lawyerly showboating by nationalist parliamentarians who demonstrated no concern for issues beyond their own bailiwick. It drove ministers and bureaucrats in Vienna to distraction and tested Franz Joseph's famous tolerance for Hungarian antics, as he viewed the Ausgleich as his reign's greatest accomplishment and the guarantor of the dynasty. The deleterious impact of Budapest's politicking on the military was profound, since the defense budget was held hostage every decade to Hungarian demands, while by the early twentieth century Hungary's disaffected minorities despaired of any aid from Vienna.
Austria-Hungary, alternately called the Dual Monarchy — Hungarians disavowed the Teutonic term "Reich" since it implied a unitary state, which did not exist after 1867 — was a unique creation born in response to the internal problems of the multinational empire, one that was difficult to explain to outsiders. In the first place, officially Hungary was termed Transleithania, since it stood across the small Leitha river that was the historic border between Hungary and the Austrian lands, though most people of course called the country what it was: Hungary. Cisleithania was the Austrian half of the empire, which was not officially given the name Austria until 1915; before that it was formally "the kingdoms and lands represented in the Imperial Council" (die im Reichsrat vertretenen Königreiche und Länder), that being the parliament for so-called Cisleithania located in Vienna. There was no denying that the Austria half of the Dual Monarchy lacked the coherence, historical and political, of Hungary, comprising as it did fifteen different crown lands, from Dalmatia on the Adriatic, to "holy" Tyrol in the high Alps, to the industrial heartland of Bohemia, over to Bukovina, Austria's easternmost outpost. The 1910 census showed a population of thirty million, consisting of ten ethnic groups, the biggest being Germans (36 percent), Czechs (23 percent), Poles (18 percent), and Ukrainians (13 percent).
The relationship between the dominant ethnic groups, Germans and Magyars, and the minorities in the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the monarchy was fundamentally different. At root Austria was no German ethno-state (contrary to the wishes of German nationalists) and was considerably more tolerant of non-Germans than Hungary was of non-Magyars in matters of language and cultural policy; there was no official effort to turn minorities into Germans; on the contrary, Austria allowed its Slavs and other minorities considerable leeway to be educated and receive government services in their own languages. This is not to deny that ethnic rivalry was problematic in Austria too — the struggle between Czechs and Germans in Bohemia was poisonous, serving to paralyze parliamentary life in Vienna — but Austria did offer a more diverse, if bumpy path to modernity than Hungary chose to take after 1867.
Nevertheless, the fate of fellow Slavs, particularly Slovaks, in Hungary, where they faced national oppression and their gradual absorption into a Magyar sea, served as a constant irritant among Czechs. For many of them, it was transparent that by accepting the Ausgleich Vienna had sacrificed the rights of Slovaks and many others on the altar of placating Magyardom. Standing at the middle of this controversy was the profound disconnect between historic political units and current-day populations inside Austria-Hungary. Budapest claimed the "historic" boundaries of Hungary as her own, even though these feudal-era frontiers trapped millions of unenthusiastic non-Magyars in the country; following the logic of nation-states that was becoming normative in Europe, there existed five or six ethno-states-in-waiting inside Hungary, only one of which was Magyar. However, Czech nationalists undermined their arguments by advocating the same thing in their own lands, wanting to keep millions of Germans under Prague's rule inside the "historic" boundaries of Bohemia.
Had there been options other than the Compromise of 1867? To many Habsburg Slavs the road not taken was the open embrace of the empire's essentially Slavic nature: after all, the seven Slavic nations nested together in Austria-Hungary together came to 45 percent of the monarchy's population, twice the number of either Germans or Magyars (and roughly equal to the population of the Dual Monarchy's dominant races put together). This possibility, termed Austroslavism, came to prominence in the tumult of 1848 and was hardly anti-Habsburg; indeed it envisioned reimagining the realm on the basis of nationality rather than feudally derived political models. One of its proponents was the Czech historian and politician František Palacký, who saw the Habsburgs as the defenders of the smaller peoples of Central Europe, Czechs included, against hungry neighbors. As he wrote in 1848, "Assuredly, if the Austrian state had not existed for ages, in the interests of Europe and indeed of humanity itself, we would have to endeavor to create it as soon as possible." However, enthusiasm for Austroslavism waned in the 1860s, as its advocates waited for signs of compromise from Vienna that never came, while the Ausgleich drove many to despair. As Palacký observed, "We existed before Austria, and we shall exist after it," and in 1867, he attended a Panslav congress in Russia. Like many Czech nationalists, he began to ponder options beyond the Habsburgs as Austroslavism's moment passed, unfulfilled.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fall of the Double Eagle by John R. Schindler. Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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