In light of recent research, it is no longer possible to see 1918 as a clean break between war and peace, empire and nation-state. A now established historiography has revised the “decline and fall” narratives of the Habsburg Empire, investigated the persistent, often violent legacies of the Great War, and defined the successor states in terms of “small empires.” This collection of twelve essays—edited by Paul Miller and Claire Morelon and a product of a 2012 conference held at the University of Birmingham—offers a major contribution to this research agenda, developed since the 1980s and especially encouraged by the post-1989 transitions and transformations in East Central Europe. As the insightful introduction by Morelon makes clear, recent Habsburg studies claiming the “relative successes of the Empire's institutions even in its final years” invite one to ask the following question: “Did these structures and the habitus linked to them last even beyond the collapse of the ancien régime in 1918?” To answer, the four parts of the volume depart from nationalist narratives and inquiry into “the permanence of some political, social, and even cultural elements alongside the obvious ruptures engendered by the transition” (2).
The first part of this book tests different approaches for detecting “revolution” and “permanence” across the post-Habsburg lands. On the one hand, Gabor Egry suggests looking at regional cases such as post-1918 Transylvania and Slovakia to understand the difficult establishment of the new local authorities, the only partial replacement of the old elite, and the provisional cooperation between revolutionary or counterrevolutionary groups across ethnic boundaries. On the other hand, Claire Morelon, focusing on the regime change in an urban setting like Prague, shows how the symbolic break with the past, carried out as a “revolution” against “Austria,” did not imply an end of the ongoing social conflicts after 1918. On the contrary, persistences of the ruthless wartime experience and subsequent conditions of uncertainty continued to threaten the new Czechoslovak state's political legitimacy. This perception of continuity was also embodied by the Habsburg personnel who served in the successor states’ administrations and transferred their competence from the one system to another (like the ex-Habsburg minister of finance, then statesman in the Polish Second Republic, Leon Biliński, studied by Iryna Vushko) or fostered by regional state-sponsored exhibitions, which worked as drivers of both imperial and national identification before and after 1918 (like in the Bohemian Crownlands and interwar Czechoslovak case, analyzed by Marta Filopová).
The second part pays attention to the ways in which “the Empire's last battles” shaped the war memories and the careers of the imperial army's officers in the successor states, as argued by Richard Bassett's chapter. More specifically, Irina Marin and John Paul Newman analyze the trauma represented by the defeat and collapse of Austria-Hungary for Habsburg officers and their subsequent trajectories in interwar Romania and Croatia. While the former focuses on the Romanian military servicemen and their capacity to intertwine imperial and national loyalties, the latter stresses the role of a “culture of defeat” in feeding anti-Yugoslav and revisionist positions and pushing ex-Habsburg officers toward Croatian radical right-wing groups such as the Ustaše.
The third part concentrates on the postwar strategies of the “imperial pillars” that are the Catholic Church, the Habsburg dynasty, and the landed aristocracy in the political and cultural conflicts of interwar Austria. As explained by Michael Carter-Sinclair, the upper ecclesiastic hierarchies, in spite of the early attempts of accommodation with the First Austrian Republic, especially supported the authoritarian and conservative forces by contributing to destabilizing the democratic institutions from the mid-1920s onward. Similarly, Konstantinos Raptis demonstrates that the Central European nobles, traumatized by the defeat of 1918 and by the fear of social revolution, made active, somewhat desperate attempts to survive with their lifestyle and class privileges intact after the collapse of the empire. This ambivalent mixture of nostalgic and hostile moods toward the Habsburg legacy is at the core of Christopher Brennan's analysis concerning reactions to the last emperor Karl I's death in 1922.
The final section investigates the memory-building process of the “Empire's passing” by highlighting the contests and divisions over the legacies of the Great War and their deeper implications in terms of culture and mentalité. While Christoph Mick calls attention to the monuments to dead soldiers and the uncertain meanings of their sacrifice in interwar Austria, Paul Miller describes the controversial remembrance of “the First Victim of the First World War,” the much-neglected Prince Franz Ferdinand.
Although the contributors refer to a heterogeneous set of methodological perspectives, all of them avoid focusing on national identities, ethnic conflicts, and nationalist groups in their own terms. Yet this volume encourages us to take a step forward. As a matter of fact, a focus on “continuity” (as well as on “permanence,” “persistence,” and “survival”) pushes one to critically question narratives based on “rupture,” as conceptualized by the nationalist narratives of the successor states. Nevertheless, as Pieter Judson rightly says in his afterword, “the self-confident claims of these states to represent nations in democratic terms (through national self-determination) masked the degree to which each state adopted strategies, behaviors, and practices—not to mention personnel—from the former Empire” (321). Accordingly, investigating policies of selective appropriation and creative application of administrative, legal, and cultural legacies and memories of Austria-Hungary after 1918; individual and social experiences of postwar everyday life in Central European localities; and strategies of pragmatic adaptation of both ordinary people and old elites in the successor regions and states helps to overcome an abstract and static dichotomy between “continuity” and “rupture” and to ascribe an antideterministic agency to a plurality of actors in post-Habsburg Europe.
