Viability_of_the_Habsburg_Monarchy

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The Viability of the Habsburg Monarchy Author(s): Hans Kohn Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Mar., 1963), pp. 37-42Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3000385Accessed: 04-09-2015 18:36 UTC

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THE VIABILITY OF THE HABSBURG MONARCHY

BY HANS KOHN

I find mrryself in general agreement with the main thesis and observations of Professor Peter Sugar's thoughtful and thought-provoking essay. Thus I hlave to confine myself to some reflections that may throw addi- tional light on a complex problem, on the solution of which the fate of central and central-eastern Europe depencded and the nionisolution of which was mainly responsible for bringing about the two great iEuro- pean ways of the twentieth century.

(1) I believe Professor Sugar is too pessimistic about the possibility of transforming the Habsburg Empire in the nineteenth century in a way that would have satisfied, more or less (and the emphasis is on "more or less") the nationalities of the multinational empire. Such a transformation would have brought the eighteenth-century dynastic state (the state of the Hatsmacht) into line with the growth of nationalism, and it would have pointed the wvay toward the emergence of supranational forms of political integration, which the need for economic cooperation and the requirements of security render essential in the second half of the twentieth century.

That no such attempt was made in the eighteenth century does not speak against the statesmanship of the Habsburgs. The problem did not arise before the French Revolution. In fact, the Austrian lands and Tuscany were (for that time!) relatively well ruled by the Habsburgs. Even Switzerland found it possible to create a modern state-and to use for the first time officially the name "Swiss nation"-only in 1848. Until then, certainly until the H-elvetic Republic imposed by France, Switzer- land resembled the ramshackle Holy Roman Empire much more than a modern state and accepted as "natural" the subjection of some of its territorial components to others (Unter-tancnlcndcer) within the very loose confederation. The concept of equality of language, ethnic group, and class was introduced into Switzerland forcibly by the French Revolution.

The opportunity for a timely transformation of the Habsburg Empire came, as it did for Switzerland, in 1848. It came in both cases after a civil war or a sequence of revolutions and counterrevolutions, of ideo- logical conflicts, which threatened to destroy the framework of the

MR. KOHN is professor of history emeritus at the City College of the City University of New York and John Hay Whitney professor of international relations at the University of Denver.



38 Slavic Review

ancieni regime state. The Swiss, who among the continental peoples most resemble the Englishi in statesmanship (and that means in a happy mixture of adherence to tradition and realistic accommodation to changing circumstances, in a nonmetaphysical pragmatism which avoids all extremes and satisfies itself with a "more or less"), seized the opportunity and succeeded in creating a Swiss idea bridging the often very deep cleavages caused by geography, by differences of language, religion, ethnic origin, and political ideology, and by the memories of past op- pression and arrogant master attitudes. They did it by the willing application of two fundamental principles-equality, which came to Switzerland through the French Revolution, and federalism, which the Swiss adapted after the model of the United States.

Switzerland was-except for Scandinavia-the only country on the European continent where in 1848 the liberal ideas triumphed. Every- where else absolutism, whether in a traditional or in a plebiscitary form, reasserted itself. In Austria, Francis Joseph, then an inexperienced youth, poorly prepared for the throne and under the influence of the haughty and energetic aristocrat Prince Schwarzenberg, followed the general trend. The great opportunity, offered by the Kremsier Consti- tution, based on equality and federalism, which would have established a new Austria and an Austrian idea, was allowed to pass, a mere episode; in that respect the fate of the Kremsier Constitution was very different from that of the Swiss Constitution of 1848.1

But more disastrous for the possibility of a supranational Austrian structure, which Lord Acton had foreseen in 1862,2 was that when the empire turned toward constitutionalism in the 1 860's-a turn then common to the whole of Europe in one or the other form-it abandoned the idea of federalism. In the Compromise with the Hungarian nobility in 1867, the aspirations of the Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croatians, and Rumanians, who in a large majority were then still loyal to the dynasty, wvere sacrificed for the purpose of winning the assent of the Magyars to a common foreign and military policy on the part of what now became the Dual Monarchy, a policy to which Francis Joseph's real interest throughout his life belonged. The prenationalist concept of the unity of the lands of the Crown of St. Stephen was made the foundation of a Magyar nationalist state. The ruling Magyar oligarchy became pre- dominant in its position vis-a-vis the non-Magyar peoples, not only in the Hungarian kingdom but throughout the Dual Monarchy. The Compromise was a blow not only to federalism but to equality and democracy. Until 1918 (and beyond) Hungary and her peoples re- mained a semifeudal, underdeveloped society. This was not true, by 1910, of the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy (perhaps with the ex-

1 See on Switzerland Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York, 1944), pp. 381 if., atnd Nationalism and Liberty: The Szviss Exanmple (New York, 1956).

2 Lord Acton, Essays on Freedom anid Pozver (Glencoe, 1948), pp. 166 ff.



The Viability of the Habsburg Moriarchby 39

ception of Galicia, where the dynasty arrived at a similar "compromise" with the Polish nobility at the expense of the native peasantry and of the non-Polish population).3

The years 1866-67 marked a disastrous turn not only in the Austrianl monarchy but in the history of all Central Europe. In Prussia Bis- marckisin triumphed over liberalism and turned it into a national liberalism which differed from Western liberalismn as later national socialism differed from Western socialism. Throughout Central Europe the bright hopes of 1848-49 were frustrated and the catastrophes of 1914 and of 1938-39-both of which involved the end of Austria in its then pre- vailing form-were in the making.

(2) Professor Sugar perhaps overstresses the division between the German and the non-German subjects of the Habsburg Empire. Such a division was certainly valid in the absolutist centralizing decade of the 1850's. It lost in significance after 1867. The really dominant element in the Dual Monarchy, the pressure group most successful in increasing its share in the communality, was then no longer the Germans but the Magyars. Austria-Hungary lost more and more the character of a pre- dominantly German state. The spread of democracy, literacy, and economic well-being in the western half of the monarchy after 1867 strengthened the non-Germanic nationalities there at the expense of the former political, cultural, and economic predominance of the Germans. The result was that many Germans in the monarchy lost their faith in an Austrian idea as much as many Slavs or other non-Germanic peoples did. In my youth in Bohemia at the beginning of the century I found at the German Charles-Ferdinand University a deeper loyalty to the dynasty, to nas cisari pan, among the Czech peasants than among the students, who came mostly from what became later known as the Sude- tenland.

By the end of the nineteenth century many Austrian Germans looked to the Prussian German Reich as their real home and venerated Bis- marck. It was not only German nationalism which brought them to abandon Austrian patriotism-or to indulge in a kind of amalgam of the two attitudes, made possible by Austria-Hungary's close alliance with t;he German Reich-it was also the feeling that the Habsburg monarchy was slow-moving, less efficient, less "modern'" than the briskly expanding Wilhelminian Reich. Pan-Germanism had its origin largely among Austrian Germans, as Pan-Slavism had its origin among Austrian Slavs. But whereas the Russian government frequently favored Pan-Slavism and tried to use it for its purposes, the government of the German Reich under Bismarck and under William II did not support Pan-Germanism in Austria. After 1879 Francis Joseph was in his foreign policy a loyal ally of Germany, but neither Crown Prince Rudolph nor Archduke

3 Yet even in Galicia the position of the Ukrainians was incomparably better than the situation of the Ukrainians and Slovaks in neighboring Hungary.



40 Slavic Review

Francis Ferdinand were, to use an understatement, enthusiastic about the alliance. German circles in Austria were widely suspicious of Fran- cis Ferdinand and regarded him as "pro-Slav."

The position of many Germans in Austria could be compared with that of the Austrian Poles or Italians. They felt part of a larger national entity the majority of whose people lived outside the Habsburg monarchy. The Austrian Germans had more recent memories of community with the Germans beyond the border, whereas the Italians of Trieste or of Trentino had never formed part of any Italian state, and Polish state- hood (with the exception of the Republic of Krakow) had gone out of existence by the end of the eighteenth century. But the Austrian Ger- mans had been part of the German Bund until 1866 and participated actively in the National Assembly at Frankfurt am Main. Thus the situation of the Germans in the Habsburg monarchy was in the age of nationalism not so fundamentally different from that of the non- Germanic elements.

(3) Perhaps the possibility of overcoming the narrow concept of an ethnic or linguistic nation-state can be illustrated by recalling the different attitudes of the Italians in the Habsburg monarchy and of those in Switzerland. Though geography, economics, and reason favored the lasting connection of the Italians in Trieste with Austria, they did not wish to remain in the Habsburg Empire, and their irredentism was of the most violent and extremist kind. Yet their connection with the Habsburgs was ancient. To secure independence from Venetian rule, the city had placed itself under Habsburg protection in 1382. In the later part of the nineteenth century the city grew most prosperous as the niatural port of the vast Austrian hinterland. However, the Italian- speaking middle class, which was a socially and culturally favored class, sshowed itself bitterly hostile to the Austrian government, a hostility which was also directed against the numerous Slavs in and around Trieste and against the Socialist Party in the city. When Francis Joseph visited Trieste in 1882, a young man from that city, Guglielmo Oberdan (1858-82), tried to kill the emperor, was consequently executed, and among Italians extolled as a martyr in the nationalist cause.

On the other hand, the Swiss Italian-speaking canton of Ticino de- cided in 1798, when asked by Napoleon to join the Cisalpine Republic, to remain Swiss, although geography, the international situation, and reason seemed to dictate the opposite course. The population of the Ticino was neither economically nor culturally prosperous. The canton is geographically separated from the rest of Switzerland by high moun- tain ranges, and its riverways and all its natural connections lead to the Lombardian plain. Nevertheless, the large majority of the Swiss Italians have faithfully adhered to Switzerland. Since 1848 Switzerland has formed a federal democracy in which the federal administration identi- fied itself with none of the ethnic, linguistic, or religious groups, so that



The Viability of the Habsburg Monarchy 41

no feeling of majority or minority relationship could powerfully assert itself.

(4) But the final disintegration of Austria was not only due to the rejection of federalism in 1867 but-a point which Professor Sugar does not sufficiently stress-to its foreign policy. In the Europe of the age of nationalism a multinational or a supranational state was most desirable in the interest of peace, and since 1918 many people have for that reason and to a growing degree regretted the disappearance of the Austro- Hungarian monarchy. But to have been able to fulfill this function, the monarchy would have had to follow, as Switzerland did, a policy of neutrality. Without such a policy, Switzerland, in spite of its democracy and federalism, might have disintegrated in 1870 or in 1914. Even in neutral Switzerland the tensions between the German-speaking and the French-speaking population were then running high.

Austria unfortunately did not understand the need for a policy of neutrality. Francis Joseph concluded the unfortunate Compromise of 1867 because he wished to gain Magyar cooperation in order to be able to resume competition with Prussia for German leadership. When this question was finally settled in 1871 by Bismarck's triumph over France, Francis Joseph accepted this outcome loyally but did not renounce an active foreign policy. He turned his attention toward the Balkans, claiming a share in the heritage of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire and came there into conflict with similar aspirations of the Russian Empire and of the Christian Balkan nations, each of which followed its own aggressive nationalist policy. The occupation of Bosnia-Hercego- vina was a step in the wrong direction, and the war which Austria did not survive was sparked by an incident stemming directly from the action of 1878.

The occupation of Bosnia-Hercegovina brought the threat of conflict with Russia and the Balkan Slavs nearer and drove the Dual Monarchy, under Count Gyula Andrassy, into an alliance with Germany. Through this alliance, which was favored by the Magyars and Germans in the monarchy but bitterly resented by the Slavs, Austria-Hungary became the chief battleground of Pan-German and Pan-Slav aspirations. Even before the war of 1914 broke out, the German Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, in a speech on April 7, 1913, characterized the coming struggle as a conflict between the Germans and the Slavs. When the war came, many Slavs, even moderate leaders such as Thomas Masaryk, feared that a German-Magyar victory over the Serbs and Russians might bring about a general deterioration of the position of the non-Germanic and non-Magyar peoples under Habsburg rule.

Before 1914 Masaryk, as a disciple of Palacky, believed in an Austrian federation as a bulwark against Pan-Germanism and Pan-Russianism. In his most important programmatic book The Czech Question: Efforts and Longings of the National Rebirth, which was first published in 1895



42 Slavic Review

and in a second edition in 1908, Masaryk wrote: "As regards the relation of the Czech lands to the Austrian state, I regard [Palacky's] idea of the Austrian state, in spite of all constitutional changes, as a still reliable guide: it is regrettable, that Palacky . . . himself abandoned to a certain degree his idea and recommended a more exclusively Slav national pro- gram; . .. I express my political experiences in the words that our policy cannot be successful if it is not supported by a true and strong interest in the fate of Austria, . . . by the cultural and political effort to work in harmony with the needs of our people for the advancement of the whole of Austria and its political administration."4

The War of 1914 changed Masaryk's outlook. But the possibility cannot be rejected that had Austria established a federal regime in 1849 and followed a policy of neutrality, the crown could have become a symbol of the common interests of the various peoples who in isolation were threatened by Russian or German expansionism. The disintegration of the Habsburg monarchy not only offered the opportunity for such expansionism; it proved also that the hostility among the various peoples of the monarchy was not primarily created by the monarchy according to the famous rule of divide et impera but was deeply rooted in that extreme nationalism which animated the various peoples before and even more after 1914-18 and which the monarchy, alas with little. success, tried to moderate.

4 Ceska otdzka: Snahy a tuzby narodniho ob-ozeni, newv edition by, Zden6k FraInta (Prague: Government Publishing House, 1924), pp. 179-80.



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