As the hundredth anniversary of November 1918 approaches, this article suggests some ways in which historians might rethink dominant narratives about the character of the Habsburg monarchy in its final years, the reasons for its collapse, and its complex legacies to the postwar world. Currently, most accounts that narrate the fall of the empire are still shaped to some extent by outcomes whose character was defined at the time by the nationalist architects of the states that replaced the monarchy. Even accounting for a sensible revisionism of their versions of events over the past century, their general reasoning, their ideological claims, and their worldviews frame the predominant explanations for why the monarchy fell when it did. Concomitantly, they continue to influence our understanding of the character of the regimes that replaced the monarchy after its fall.
To illustrate the problems historians of both Europe and the Habsburg monarchy face when it comes to explaining the last half century of the empire's existence, let me start by reflecting on the way we relate this history to an event that shocked one of Europe's combatant empires in 1916. This particular event brought tangled issues of nationalism and empire glaringly to the fore, at a time when the empire in question could ill afford it. On the 24 of April 1916 an armed nationalist uprising broke out in a peripheral crownland capital of one of Europe's empires. The salience of nationalist activism to this incident should make it of special concern to historians who study the character of Central Europe's empires. It constituted the biggest nationalist revolt to occur during the war, and as such, it raised stunning questions about the loyalty of large parts of both the military and civilian populations to the empire.
The rebel nationalists used their violent insurrection to try to establish political autonomy for their ethnic nation. Yet the revolt did not gain the level of mass support its leaders had expected from ordinary citizens across the crownland, many of whom may have been relatively indifferent to the nationalist cause, given the quotidian challenges of wartime survival they faced on the home front. Nevertheless, this empire was forced to bring in thousands of troops along with heavy artillery to reinforce the repressive regime already present in the crownland capital. All this came at a time when such reinforcements could ill be spared from frontline service. For six days, the imperial military and gendarmes fought the nationalists in a battle that produced three thousand casualties, the majority of whom were civilians. The shelling and subsequent fires devastated many neighborhoods of the provincial capital. When, after a week of street fighting, the imperial regime finally reestablished order in the city, many leaders of the rebellion were shot, at least three thousand people were taken prisoner indiscriminately, and 1,800 of them transported to be interned in camps located elsewhere in the empire.Footnote 1
Where did this ethnic nationalist revolt take place? In which empire did oppression become so intolerable that nationalist activists in a so-called peripheral crownland actually allied themselves with an enemy power to plan an armed uprising? In fact, the crownland capital I have described is Dublin, and the uprising was the famed Easter Rebellion. Yet historians have rarely considered the British Empire the site of problematic ethnic conflict that substantially weakened that empire. Instead, for propagandists of the entente and to many later historians, this kind of incident should have taken place in the Habsburg monarchy, precisely because of the salience of the rebels’ nationalism. After all, according to so many contemporaries—and not just to entente propagandists—Austria-Hungary was unusually ripe for collapse compared to other European states, thanks to its alleged inability to accommodate many warring ethnic nationalities within its frontiers, and its forceful suppression of their legitimate demands for political autonomy. Writing from the Italian front in 1915, for example, liberal British historian George Macaulay Trevelyan argued typically that Austria-Hungary had long been a hotbed of nationalist discontent thanks to the arrogant treatment the German and Hungarian masters had meted out to what he called their Slavic “subject races.” With regard to the domestic situation of the Habsburg monarchy directly preceding the war, Trevelyan explained: “Some people ask why, if the subject races of Austria-Hungary were thus alienated from the Government, they did not rise in insurrection? The answer is because all the young men were taken into the army by the modern system of military slavery, and all the leaders were in prison or in exile.”Footnote 2 By “military slavery” Trevelyan apparently meant the system of male conscription instituted by Austria-Hungary after the settlement of 1867, a system that some contemporaries had actually praised for its democratizing tendencies because it applied—for the first time—to all social classes.Footnote 3
I found this particular essay of Trevelyan's reprinted in a series of expensively produced volumes published in the United States after the conclusion of the war under the title The Great Events of the Great War. Advertised as “non-partisan” and “non-sectarian,” these volumes constituted, in the words of their editor, “an earnest effort to give the reader such frank and full information as will enable him to comprehend clearly this greatest of all wars.”Footnote 4 And earnest they were in their effort to establish with finality the meaning of the recently concluded war. The volumes included hundreds of translated government documents and illustrations—mostly cartoons—from all the combatant countries. This very comprehensiveness, the editors implied, contributed to the objectivity of their account of the war, its origins, and its outcomes. The entire series was aimed at a broad audience made up firstly of the men from the United States who had fought the war themselves, but directed equally to later generations. I personally inherited a set of these volumes from my maternal grandfather George Moulton French, a decorated veteran of the Great War. The book series interested me especially because I have recently been curious to learn what exactly my grandfather and his contemporaries in 1921 may have learned about the Habsburg monarchy, its character, and its collapse in 1918. Yet while these volumes included a wealth of information about Britain, France, Germany, and Russia, they remained relatively silent about Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia, to say nothing of Albania. Even Volume I, How the Great War Arose, devoted only five of its 400 pages to the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand (whom it mistakenly identified as the aged Francis Joseph's son), and a short chapter of sixteen pages dedicated to the growth of Slavic nationalism in the Balkans and specifically to Serbia's troubled relationship to Austria-Hungary. That chapter, which included Trevelyan's short explanatory essay about the monarchy, provided its readers with a typical postwar framework for understanding the problems of the prewar world. It was a chapter that described an anachronistic society of many national units held together by brute force in an empire that had long outlived its raison d’être.
Ninety-nine years later, in 2014, a best-selling and respected military historian opened his own account of the war on the Eastern Front with a sentence that could have been written by Trevelyan in 1915: “Austria's weakness emanated from its quarreling, disaffected nationalities.” The same author argued that “the Habsburgs and the Ottomans were engaged in a race to the bottom for the title of Europe's sick man, the great power most likely to wither and die in everyone's lifetime.”Footnote 5 The tropes of warring nationalities and of a fundamentally moribund Austro-Hungarian state endured and even flourished during the past century, especially in literature on the First World War. But if Austria-Hungary sat poised on the brink of extinction by nationalist revolt in 1914, why is it that the major nationalist rebellion of World War I described above broke out in Dublin and not in Ljubljana, L'viv, Prague, or Zagreb? Britain, although also an empire, was evidently not a candidate for the title of sick man of Europe. No one speaks of the British state as an anachronism in the world of the early twentieth century, despite the series of crises precipitated by the Irish question before the war, the undemocratic power of the British House of Lords, or the limited parliamentary franchise in Britain compared to France, Germany, or imperial Austria. Why shouldn't we see in the British Empire the most extreme example of politically corrosive nationalist conflict within Europe, along with the ever-growing challenges it faced to rule in its colonial empire? More importantly, why do so many historians continue to maintain, like Trevelyan before them, that specifically nationalist political conflict was the preeminent reason for the collapse of Austria-Hungary, and that the collapse was therefore predestined long before the autumn of 1918?
A few specialist and far more non-specialist historians to this day presume (it is not even an argument) that Austria-Hungary collapsed in 1918 largely due to popular nationalist opposition to empire in Central Europe that had been present for decades, as if the specific experience of four long years of war had no bearing on the question. Worse still, such normative assertions tend to frame our understandings of the events of the 1920s following the war in Europe, even for those of us who reject the claims of an empire existentially weakened by nationalist conflict. I am not arguing that Austria-Hungary did not face political challenges centered on issues of political nationalism, but rather that it has been made an exception to European development in this regard in ways that cloud its comparability to other European states. The very fact that for all its alleged troubles with nationalism the Dual Monarchy never faced anything approaching the danger or destructiveness of the Irish nationalist Easter Rebellion is highly meaningful.
For those historians who interpreted Austria-Hungary's history largely in terms of this so-called “nationalities problem,” the First World War is of interest really only at two key moments: at its outbreak in the summer of 1914, and at its end, sometime between the autumn of 1918 and the cessation of fighting in the region in the early 1920s. Most general accounts of the war, for example, leave out almost everything that happened in the monarchy between July 1914 and October 1918.Footnote 6 Austria-Hungary, so the story usually goes, started the war in an attempt to stave off certain collapse. Internally, it is said, domestic nationality struggles had intensified to a dangerous peak, starting with the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 and cresting during the subsequent Balkan wars of 1912–13. For the same reasons, it is argued, Austria-Hungary feared increasing internal irredentist challenges to its existence from growing numbers of its citizens who sympathized with its neighbors to the east and south who were emboldened by their victories over the Ottoman Empire and then Bulgaria in the first and second Balkan wars. When, over four years later in October 1918, the empire could no longer be propped up by its failing ally Germany, it simply fell apart into predictable nation-state units (with some border conflicts around their edges, as between Poland and Czechoslovakia, Poland and a nascent Ukrainian state, Austria and Hungary, or Austria and Yugoslavia). There is little need to explain what happened in-between those two points—1914 and 1918—because the outcome was already anticipated before the war. Yet, as many specialist historians of the Habsburg monarchy in the past twenty years have repeatedly argued, the opposite was in fact the case. Precisely those passed-over events were decisive to the collapse of a monarchy that was certainly not teetering on the brink of extinction in 1913.Footnote 7
In the rest of this article I will focus my attention on two often misunderstood concepts that lie at the heart of this way of looking at Austria-Hungary and their complex relationship to each other: “empire” and “nation.” These two terms played key roles in Trevelyan's account of Austria-Hungary, for example, and in different guises they continue to frame our understandings of the war and its aftermath in Habsburg Central Europe. We tend to see the great continental empires as somehow problematic state structures, ill-suited to twentieth-century circumstances, thanks largely to the allegedly oppressive forms of authority they exercised over several vast regions and peoples. On the other hand, we still tend to see nation-states—at least at their beginnings—far more positively thanks to the populist, mass, and thus democratic support we believe they enjoyed from the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe. This belief about 1918 is aided by the fact that the nation-state remains normative around the world, and is viewed by many as the only state form capable of creating long-term stability, prosperity, and possibly a democratic politics. What confuses the issue further is that we often refer to France, Britain, Spain, and Italy as nation-states that also held colonial empires, thus making them less comparable to the Habsburg, Romanov, or Ottoman empires.Footnote 8
It should not, therefore, be surprising that many scholars see the events of October 1918 in terms of a popular rejection of empire in favor of nation-statehood—or more accurately of nationalism—despite a large amount of evidence to the contrary. It is certainly true that by the end of what seemed to be an endless war the Habsburg dynasty and its empire had been severely discredited in the popular mind, most often because its representatives had failed to feed the people, and its military governors—especially in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy—had crudely abandoned the civil protections of the Rechtsstaat (complaints that were also made to some extent in the other combatant empires). This does not mean that most people understood nationhood as a clear solution to their problems, however. That simple insight barely begins to address the deeper conceptual problems about nation and empire that I wish to raise. It is not enough to reflect on the common meanings and usages we attach to the terms “nation” and “empire” or to attribute a greater or lesser degree of nationalist commitment to the crowds in the streets that helped hasten regime change in 1918. The real problem is that most analyses of the Habsburg monarchy and its wartime crises treat these concepts “empire” and “nation” as if they represented binary opposed positions or two parallel universes. In fact, the two were deeply implicated with each other, and for this reason it may be time to abandon them altogether as useful conceptual tools for understanding both the character of the Habsburg monarchy as well as of the states that succeeded it.
To rethink our traditional narrative of nation positioned against empire, we need to reconsider the relationship between the political nationalism that was indeed prominent in Austrian and Austro-Hungarian public institutions and discourses after 1848, and the state that had in many ways produced it. I refer to nationalism here specifically as “political nationalism” to remind us that nationalism in Austria-Hungary was essentially a political phenomenon. As such, it was not only indebted to the imperial political institutions that had nurtured it and made it possible, it also had helped to expand and transform those institutions of empire over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Political nationalism did not necessarily desire the breakdown of empire, since empire provided nationalism with the necessary context and structures in which to thrive. Moreover, as a political phenomenon, nationalism was not necessarily always of great interest to most people in their daily lives, although at specific times, as during election campaigns or the taking of the census, of course, it could become of great interest.Footnote 9 If political nationalism did not cause the breakdown of the Habsburg's empire, however, many nationalists benefited greatly from that breakdown, as we will see.
Above all, in this article I offer a set of different approaches to understanding the relationship between ideas or models of empire and ideas of political nationalism as they developed in Austria-Hungary in the decades before the war, and how those ideas played out during the war. First, I assert a simple point that is often forgotten: that many—perhaps most—political nationalists were themselves heavily implicated in the successful functioning of numerous structures, institutions, networks and cultural practices of empire. At the same time, I will suggest some fundamental ways in which the empire came to articulate its own legitimacy using arguments that depended on elaborations of the concept of nationhood. Second, I will argue that between 1914 and 1918 specific developments unrelated or only indirectly related to nationalism help to explain how and why the empire fell when it did. Imperial collapse was not a product of internal nationalist subversion so much as it was due to two other factors. The first of these was a severe erosion of the regime's prewar popular legitimacy thanks in large part to the damaging domestic policy choices made during the war by the powerful military high command, backed too often by the crown and its highest administrators. All combatant societies experienced this type of loss of legitimacy to some degree: France experienced severe military mutinies and strikes against the war in 1917, Russia experienced two revolutions in the same year, and Germany and Britain experienced dangerous waves of industrial strikes in 1917 and 1918, not to mention the latter's Easter Rebellion. The second factor that contributed to the fall of the empire was a severe breakdown of the monarchy's internal networks of rule and representation, and in particular, in the declining ability of the imperial center to communicate over the heads of regional political elites (often themselves nationalists) directly to the people.Footnote 10 Given the nationalist parties’ power over local bureaucratic and judicial appointments before the war, for example, nationalists easily took credit for wartime policy successes while blaming Vienna or Budapest for their many failures. Again, I want to emphasize that both of these factors, or their close equivalents, were experienced to some extent in each of the combatant states. Their particulars in Austria-Hungary, however, produced an unplanned federalization with the total collapse of central power in October 1918 as opposed to either a weakening of central power on the one hand, or an outright revolution on the other.
Finally, I will address a related question, one I believe we should consider as the one-hundredth anniversary of Austria-Hungary's collapse approaches. Many historians and journalists continue to treat November 1918 as a critical break in history, as a symbolic and real moment of profound change in twentieth-century Europe. This tendency downplays the significant continuities that linked this empire very closely to the regimes that replaced it. The interwar history of the region makes far more sense, for example, if we frame it more in terms of imperial continuities rather than of sharp breaks. In the spirit of tracing these continuities I will also argue that we historians should finally abandon fully the claim—and it is only a claim—that the successor states were in fact so-called “nation-states.” In my view, most of them—including Trianon Hungary—were not nation-states, and we should stop applying this term to them, at least in an analytic or even a descriptive sense. These states may have pursued nation-state ideological programs, but most of them, I argue, were in fact empires, albeit on a much smaller scale than Austria-Hungary.
Empire and Nation
Although specialists who write the history of the monarchy and the region may have abandoned them long ago, nationalist presumptions about the existence and agency of coherent national communities in Europe continue to haunt general and popular histories of Europe. This is certainly the case when those works look eastward, and especially when they consider the end of World War I. As mentioned above, most of these nationalist presumptions originated in the very period in which the successor states were first established, and they continued for decades to influence narratives about the establishment or enlargement of those states. During the Cold War, they gained renewed power as social scientists sought to explain the apparent long-term structural conditions that separated the allegedly democratic and capitalist development of Europe's West from its backward and authoritarian East.Footnote 11 Habsburg historians know these presumptions well. These presumptions underlie a scholarship that framed the history of the region primarily in terms of transhistorical national units at the expense of common imperial institutions, experiences, and practices.Footnote 12 Habsburg historians have for many years now decisively undermined the alleged coherence of these tropes about nations as the primary subjects or even agents in the region's history.Footnote 13 Nevertheless, vampire-like in character they live on as undead historical assumptions in the popular historical imagination, too often lending their perverse nationalist shape to both popular and scholarly narratives about the empire and the war. In part, this is because these tropes remain too important to the contemporary political cultures of many of the successor states to be subjected to serious domestic scholarly critique. We find them in everything from school textbooks to national celebrations and commemorations. They are often inscribed physically in landscapes in a range of nationalist monuments. State policies, institutes, and research agendas continue to fuel their reproduction even as there is now no dearth of historians in Central Europe—especially local and regional historians—who have quietly abandoned them.
From the start, these nationalist historiographies have insisted on a dichotomous relationship of nations to the empire that supposedly contained them up until 1918.Footnote 14 Already in that year, propagandists for the successor states interpreted recent events as the outcome of a Manichean clash between two state forms: dying empires and rising nation-states. In December of 1918, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, president of the newly created Czechoslovakia, characterized the recent triumph of nations over empire in the following words: “On the whole, great multinational empires are an institution of the past, of a time when material force was held high and the principle of nationality had not yet been recognized, because democracy had not been recognized.”Footnote 15 Here, Masaryk performed a common rhetorical trick that positioned nation-states as the wave of the future, by identifying them with democratic institutions, while aligning empires with the forces of domination. Nation and empire here are polar opposites, defining each other negatively through what each is not: empires are not democratic, nation-states are not authoritarian.
Of course, these claims relied for their coherence on a highly instrumental and ideological understanding of empire. I doubt that as sophisticated a thinker as Masaryk—himself an elected representative to imperial Austria's parliament—necessarily believed fully in his statement, although he assuredly understood its propagandistic value. Claims like this especially confused some key aspects of democratic theory, allowing some nationalists later to justify practices as radical as ethnic cleansing while still maintaining their democratic credentials. After all, who in fact is the subject of this claimed democracy? Is it the abstract liberal individual, as I think it would and should have been for Masaryk? Or is it rather the imagined national community, as it was for many nationalist activists both before and after 1918?
After 1918 especially, the answer to this question about the subject of democracy almost always favored the claims of the national community over those of the individual, a trend Tara Zahra analyzed masterfully with regard to Czech and German nationalist ambivalence toward the family. Nationalist activists appear constantly to have worried, for example, that given multiple options, individual parents would too easily make a wrong choice in deciding the language of their children's schooling or what national identifications to choose for themselves. For this reason, questions of nationhood could not be left to the faulty idiosyncratic choice of the individual but should be decided in so-called objective terms by the national community.Footnote 16 This nationalist understanding of democracy strongly rejected the imperial state's evident lack of concern—as expressed in its laws or by its administrators—about the linguistic choices individuals and families made. Small wonder that by 1918 the nationalist caricature of empire—as authoritarian and repressive—served as a convenient foil to define the new nation-state as its very opposite, as something new, dynamic, and future oriented, because it was allegedly democratic.Footnote 17
If we return to the mid-nineteenth century to examine how political nationalism first developed in the Habsburg monarchy, however, we see that in conceptual terms, unlike Masaryk's claim, empire and nation were not at all binary opposites. Nor did they even describe two opposed forms of politics or political organization. Rather, starting in 1848, these terms described intimately related phenomena whose underlying logics were highly similar. The understandings of nation and empire that emerged in imperial Austria after 1848 were constitutive parts of the same conceptual world. Nationalism did not develop on its own out of awakening nations, as nineteenth-century nationalists claimed. Nor did nationalism need to reject empire. Nationhood required empire and its institutions to give it meaning and direction. In fact, imperial institutions created the rhetorical and political spaces that had enabled ethnic nationalists to make political claims on the imperial state in the first place. This remained true during the war.
To give an example of the ways in which imperial institutions shaped the character of political nationalism: In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a Habsburg pragmatism had traditionally encouraged the use of vernacular languages in local primary schools or when decrees were made public. Even though some rulers, such as Josef II, hoped to create a single language for the administration of the state, they nevertheless continued the tradition of issuing decrees in bilingual formulations.Footnote 18 In the nineteenth century, thanks partly to claims made by nationalist activists in 1848, these traditional practices gradually became reframed as fundamental and unquestioned constitutional rights of individual citizens. This implicit, and later explicit, validation of individual multilingualism—in social contexts from village schools to military regiments—created a range of claim-making possibilities at the level of the ethnic or national group in an age of growing mass politics. This was true even in situations—as in post-1867 Hungary—where the franchise remained highly limited until the end of the war. Both the Austrian Fundamental Laws of 1867 and the Hungarian Nationalities Law of 1868 made language use into a powerfully effective tool for political and social mobilization, by creating legal spaces for citizens—who often argued they spoke for entire linguistic groups—to make claims on the state on the basis of linguistic—later national—identification.
If we investigate the development of nineteenth-century political nationalism in these terms, it quickly becomes clear that it was not the raw existence of national communities in Austria-Hungary that inevitably produced the vociferous nationalist activism of the late nineteenth century. Rather, political nationalists consciously used imperial and royal institutions as the instruments to create mass national communities in the 1880s and 1890s. Differences in language use (later often figured in terms of differences of culture) offered activists a specific basis on which to demand new forms of political autonomy that rested in turn on linguistic and cultural definitions of nationhood. Activists employed credible differences of language use to make claims that their national cultures differed radically from those of their neighbors, and that the existence of such differences had to be taken into account in political institutions. Moreover, in an age of growing mass politics and municipal autonomy in both Austria and Hungary, arguments about nationhood gave local politicians effective tools to attract potential supporters who were otherwise separated by differences of social class or geographic distance.
If nationhood depended on the institutions of empire for its character, however, ideas about ethnic nations also provided the Habsburg empire with some new justifications for its very existence during the same period. The end of the Holy Roman Empire (1806) and Austria's mid-nineteenth-century defeats on the Italian peninsula and in Central Europe had meant that one major justification for its existence—as heir to a universal Roman Empire—had simply vanished within a few decades. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, national movements and their assertions about cultural difference offered Austria-Hungary an entirely new raison d’être. The empire gradually found new forms of legitimation in its alleged ability to foster the diverse cultures that existed within its borders. In 1848, even as he made his famous claim for the distinctiveness of a Czech nation in Bohemia, historian František Palacký also argued that as an empire, Austria was critical to the survival of the smaller nations within its borders, “none of whom is sufficiently powerful itself to bid successful defiance to their superior neighbor to the East” or Germany to the West. These nations “could only do so if a close and firm tie bound them all together as one.”Footnote 19
Only five years later, in an 1853 speech to the Austrian Academy of the Sciences, Orientalist and Ottoman scholar Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall also praised Austria precisely as a protector of the various nations under its rule, noting that the empire's multilingualism would be the key to its future success. The Austrian state's habits of official multilingualism, he argued, demonstrated the distinctive way that Austria promoted a praiseworthy unity and development among its many peoples, rather than their subordination to a single nation.Footnote 20 By the 1880s the Habsburg emperor-king, who had traditionally styled himself Catholicism's staunchest defender in Europe against Protestants, Jews, and Muslims, now increasingly was hailed by many of his peoples specifically as the defender and promoter of their own religions. This was not a coincidence. Francis Joseph, who in the early part of his reign had reapplied antisemitic and anti-Protestant laws, went out of his way by the 1870s and1880s to demonstrate his appreciation of the loyalty of his Jewish, Protestant, and Muslim subjects. In his inspection tour of Galicia 1880, unlike his previous Galician tour of 1859, for example, Francis Joseph went out of his way to inspect synagogues and Greek Catholic foundations.Footnote 21 Later, that kind of imperial legitimation became even more specific in arguments about a so-called Habsburg civilizational mission to the east and south, one that sought to raise up those peoples who were allegedly culturally disadvantaged.
We observe this trend particularly clearly in the changing character of academic and popular ethnography in Austria and later in Austria-Hungary. In the mid-nineteenth century, the ethnographic work of Karl von Czörnig, for example, had attributed different levels of literacy and economic prosperity among the empire's peoples largely to regional social differences. At the same time, Czörnig, like Hammer-Purgstall, argued that it was in their unity and not in their subordination that Austria's various peoples constituted the foundation of empire.Footnote 22 By the 1870s and 1880s, however, those regional social differences that Czörnig had noted became understood increasingly in terms of different levels of civilization. Now it was no longer simply the case that Austria's willingness to protect the distinctiveness of the various nations justified the empire's existence. Imperial propagandists from journalists to civil servants to anthropologists began to claim that it was this empire's active task also to raise up those cultures that suffered from a lower level of civilization. From the exhibitions of peasant homes in the Vienna World's Fair of 1873 to the founding of the German-language Franz Josef University in Czernowitz/Cernăuti/Černivci, to the occupation policies meant to bring economic development, enlightenment and civilization to Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Habsburg monarchy developed a new set of legitimating arguments that differed radically from those of a century before.Footnote 23 The symbolic apogee of this development is undoubtedly the so-called Kronprinzenwerk (Österreich Ungarn in Wort und Bild), an ambivalent but dynamic example of just how much nation and empire contributed to each other's construction by the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote 24 Another site of this work was in the administration of Bosnia-Herzegovina by both imperialist civil servants and Serb and Croat nationalists, who were often the very same people.Footnote 25
The close relationship between nation and empire can also be understood in more quotidian and pragmatic political terms. While nationalist activists and politicians often fought each other bitterly in public, they nevertheless worked to build their own empires within the empire. From social clubs to political parties to networks of minority schools to welfare institutions to economic institutions (banks) that spread across regions and sometimes even across borders, nationalists anchored their growing communities firmly in the institutional life of the empire. By 1900, appointments to the civil service at both the imperial and crownland levels were heavily influenced by lobbying of the nationalist political parties.Footnote 26
It was largely for these reasons that when the Czech National Committee took power in Bohemia in 1918, it insisted in the first general law it issued, that “all previous provincial and imperial laws and regulations remain for the time being in effect.” In an influential essay on politics and civil society in Austria-Hungary, Gary Cohen argued perceptively, with regard to this law, that the Czech National Committee's determination to maintain all previous provincial and imperial laws demonstrated the degree to which the new nationalist regime imagined its political rule in terms inherited from the empire.Footnote 27 This first law was not merely an attempt to maintain social order during a potentially perilous revolutionary moment until new laws could be drafted. It was a critical admission of the degree to which Czech nationalists had successfully used imperial structures to forge extensive networks of institutional political power for themselves.Footnote 28 Czech nationalist politicians viewed the Bohemian administration as their own creation and they were not going to destroy it, even if the empire had collapsed. This was also true for Polish nationalists in Galicia, Slovene nationalists in Carniola, or Croatian nationalists in Zagreb, not to mention Italian nationalists in the littoral.
Nationalism contributed heavily to empire, seeking to shape its institutions in new directions that would make nationhood within empire even more important. In the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy, political compromises or settlements in Moravia (1905), Bukovina (1910), and Galicia (1914) empowered local nationalists by giving them the power to divide up and organize the political life of their communities in their crownlands. Henceforth, in those three crownlands, when citizens sent their children to schools or when they voted, they would do so specifically as members of national communities inscribed in special registers, rather than as individuals who spoke one language or another. In this way, as Jeremy King noted many years ago, the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy became increasingly and officially multinational in character.Footnote 29
In Hungary, meanwhile, the relationship between nation and state or empire was quite different, both in constitutional and practical terms. Nevertheless, many contemporary ideas of nationhood there also developed in the context of what I would call an imperial framework, even if that framework often clothed itself in nationalist rhetoric. State policies of magyarization in the 1890s—however successful or not—increasingly emphasized a link between some knowledge of the Hungarian language and the full rights of citizenship. Still, that relationship was often understood—especially locally—as one negotiated between an imperial power and a local community defined often in social rather than ethnic terms.Footnote 30
Given these close and interdependent relationships between ideas of empire and nationhood, we will also have to understand the relationship of nationalists to Austria-Hungary's war efforts differently. Some nationalists, most famously Tomáš Masaryk, gambled that the Central Powers would lose the war and that defeat would create new opportunities for nationalist political power. Some irredentists, too, saw an opportunity for neighboring nation-states with whom they sided to annex regions of Austria-Hungary. Many of them also fled to those states. But these people, if lionized in those other countries, were largely exceptional. We can easily find their counterparts in other European states as well, as with Roger Casement who negotiated with Germany to purchase arms for the Easter Uprising in Ireland. The particular ways in which nationalists and their imperial state interacted may have made Austria-Hungary structurally distinctive in a European context. But this should not be taken to mean that during the First World War nationalism spelled doom for the state. As recent studies by Claire Morelon and Richard Lein have shown for the case of Czech nationalism, a range of Czech nationalists promoted loyalty to the empire during the war. Like their counterparts in other nationalist movements, however, Czech nationalists mainly did so by promoting the well-being of their particular region or city, their soldiers, or their refugees.Footnote 31
Many nationalists also hoped that victory would bring opportunities to restructure the empire to favor their agendas. During the war, as we will see, when high-level bureaucrats or military leaders irresponsibly promoted rumors about Czech national treason (as they did with Serb and Italian nationalists as well), Czech national society fought those rumors vigorously, rightly pointing out the degree to which they often depended on malicious inventions by German nationalists. After the war, however, those myths of treasonous behavior became useful to help to establish the legitimacy of the new Czechoslovak republic, and both Czech and German nationalists unintentionally colluded to promote their veracity.
Why It Broke Down
As specialist historical scholarship of the last three decades undermined the nationalist presumptions of the older nation- and state-based narratives, that same scholarship enabled us to focus on a range of other critical wartime factors that caused the empire to lose its legitimacy among local populations. It was not that these other factors were not always present in plain view. In fact, some of them were later reframed or reinterpreted by nationalists in terms that tried to link them closely to nationalist political claims. Frustrations, anxieties, and anguish about daily survival obviously weakened the central state's legitimacy during the war and made regional and metropolitan political actors far more important than far-away governmental ministers. Here, I also follow the lead of several recent historians who have argued persuasively that the Austrian government's clear abandonment of the Rechtsstaat during the first two years or so of the war, and the military's imposition of a dictatorship that viciously persecuted members of some language groups for no legitimate reason, undermined traditional shared beliefs that the empire fairly represented the common interests of all linguistic groups.Footnote 32
To understand how the empire lost its legitimacy by 1918, we need to examine the relationship between the military and the two constitutional states. After the 1867 settlement, the emperor-king had retained full control over the common military of Austria-Hungary. Both the Austrian and Hungarian parliaments had the right to examine and legislate military budgets, and this meant that despite their nominal independence from politics, in practice both the ruler and the military high command were forced regularly to negotiate for their desires with politicians. However, in a manner reminiscent of the German situation described by Isabel Hull in her study Absolute Destruction, neither the legislature nor the judiciary could hold the military to account for its actions.Footnote 33 And according to secret legislation passed in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy that set up a so-called Kriegsüberwachungsamt in Vienna, the military could impose exceptional laws during wartime that contradicted the rule of law and civil rights.Footnote 34 Not even the civilian bureaucracy had the power to oppose the military in this, although as it turned out, at the local level military functionaries needed the expertise of civil bureaucrats, and this often mitigated the enforcement of some of the more radical military orders at the local level.
The military high command held several visions of what it believed ought to become of Austria-Hungary, visions that it also shared with some influential aristocratic circles. Some of its members argued that the reforms that had produced more political democratization after 1867 had destroyed the monarchy by subjecting it to the whims of selfish nationalist political parties that did not have the interests of the empire at heart. Military leaders did not see politics as a strategy to manage or negotiate potential disagreement. Rather they saw in it a sign of weakness. In particular, they believed that political nationalism damaged the very fabric of the state. They wanted to return the empire to a pre-political age that had in fact never existed, when people had allegedly stayed out of politics altogether. In this impulse we see the last gasp of elite Austro-Hungarians who did not like the way society was changing. They wanted to reinforce their status by turning back the clock decisively to a time before 1848 that had not in fact existed in the ways they remembered it.Footnote 35
These ambitious dreams could have little effect on Hungary, where the secret laws that gave the military exceptional powers over civil society did not apply. In Hungary, given the national definition of the state, the parliament would have had to pass any such laws. Always jealous of its prerogatives against the Austrian state—and even against the common institutions of Austria-Hungary in which Hungarians exercised considerable influence—Hungarian politicians responded uncooperatively to the military's request to approve similar legislation for Hungary. In the years 1904–7 Hungary had also experienced a severe political crisis that centered on nationalist demands for a separate Hungarian military, thus making politicians even more sensitive to questions of ultimate authority. As a result, despite many efforts, the Kriegsüberwachungsamt in Vienna did not gain the powers it sought in Hungary. Instead, the Hungarians set up their own version. This is not to say that the Hungarian institution functioned all that differently than the Kriegsüberwachungsamt in Vienna. But a profound difference remained the degree of control that Hungarian civilian politicians ultimately maintained over its purview.Footnote 36
Even before the war had officially started in the summer of 1914, the utter disrespect the militarized regime showed for traditions of law and civil rights in both Austria and Hungary damaged the relationship between state and society, making it difficult to persuade people of the value of sacrifice for the war. To start with, besides suspending their civil rights and subjecting citizens to military courts, the military did not treat all language groups or nationalists with the same degree of contempt. Leaders actively persecuted Slavic language groups they suspected of being the most likely to betray the empire to its enemies. On the basis of absolutely no evidence, from the start of the war the military high command used the suspension of legal norms to persecute those citizens it imagined to be enemies of the state. Early in the war this meant so-called Serb sympathizers (often people who spoke any South Slavic language) and Ukrainian speakers. Later, it came to include Czech speakers and Italian speakers as well.
Sudden changes in the laws and legal practices, coercion, oppression, and arbitrary applications of censorship did not promote compliance and stability. On the contrary, they created high levels of confusion and anxiety in Austrian society. This confusion in turn resulted frequently in a complete loss of control over the civilian population. Radical systemic changes from above caused unexpected changes from below. As Maureen Healy tells us, heavy government censorship alone was responsible for producing waves of uncontrollable rumors and popular denunciations by neighbors. One of the very first applications of military coercion led to a complete loss of social control by both military and civil administrators in the weeks around the outbreak of the war. On 22 July 1914 the interior ministry, following military regulations, ordered local officials to be vigilant against people who expressed Serbophile or anti-military opinions. This was supposed to help local authorities fight Serbian or Russian spies and crush potential Socialist opposition. While authorities soon forgot about the Socialists, in South Styria, for example, they became obsessed by pro-Serb manifestations. Where the population included both Slovene- and German speakers, historian Martin Moll has documented in devastating detail how military suspicions provoked an orgy of local denunciations and indiscriminate arrests. Brutalized and labeled traitors for no apparent reason save for anonymous tips by neighbors or overly aggressive tactics by gendarmes, over a thousand men and women in Styria found themselves imprisoned for several weeks (almost all of whom were released within a month). By September the worried civil authorities ordered gendarmes not to arrest citizens on the basis of rumors alone. This wave of denunciation and police action seriously damaged the reputation of the state, as later parliamentary inquests made clear.Footnote 37
Up until this point, nationalist pride had formed the basis for imperial patriotism. The victims of these witch hunts had indeed been mostly patriotic citizens. Many lost their employment as a consequence of their imprisonment. Still, civil administrators were unable to prevent a repeat of this situation in Trieste and the littoral, after Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary in 1915. This time the interior ministry ordered officials to “do nothing to agitate the population,” or “to vex loyal elements.” But this hardly held the military in check, especially in zones of occupation where civil officials had no standing. The situation in Hungary was not much better. There the outbreak of war produced civilian attacks on Serbian- and Ruthenian-speaking populations often encouraged by authorities. Prime Minister István Tisza ordered the county lieutenants to show strength against the non-Hungarian population, and gendarmes immediately arrested local leaders of Serbian and Croatian associations and even deputies to Parliament. Parliamentary oversight of the civil institutions of war in Hungary did little to mitigate the harsh terms of their application.
Two further points need to be made about the corrosive effects of this dictatorship, which only changed after the death of Emperor-King Francis Joseph in November 1916. First, in order to remove attention from its many military failures in 1914–15 (or to explain them away), military leaders ratcheted up their hysterical rhetoric against the treason allegedly perpetrated by entire language groups. They increasingly blamed Austria-Hungary's defeats on subversion by disloyal troops—generally units of Serbs, Ruthenes, or Czech speakers, planting rumors in the press or openly raising the question of treason. They thus fed the rhetoric of sympathetic nationalists of other groups who were all too prepared to believe them. Myths about the entire surrender of Czech units were just myths, and, as mentioned above, many Czech nationalists contested them vigorously at the time, accusing German nationalists of having spread them. That is, until the end of the war when the mythology of Czech subversion suddenly became a very useful part of Czechoslovakia's founding myth. Many German nationalists eagerly fed these same myths about traitorous Czech units, making these apocryphal stories one of the few things that Czech and German nationalists in Bohemia actually agreed on after the war.Footnote 38 The larger point to be made is that while many historians have argued since 1914 that its peoples abandoned Austria-Hungary during the war, the opposite was in fact the case. As Laurence Cole has argued perceptively in his recent work on veterans’ organizations, “It was more the ruling elite that lost faith in its peoples, rather than the other way around.”Footnote 39 The second point to be made has to do with the spiraling dynamics of protest. When the new Emperor-King Charles tried to restore elements of the Rechtsstaat, to reopen the Austrian parliament, and to pardon jailed civilians, his actions did not rally his peoples to the regime as he hoped. Instead, he created new forums for protest and complaint, along with more heated demands for compensation and immediate reform.
Maureen Healy's exemplary study of wartime Vienna has shown the many ways in which conditions (food, shelter, fuel, education, presence of refugees) swiftly eroded the population's trust in the government. At the same time, however, she documents another critical side to this process. The urban populace increasingly asserted its right to new entitlements as rewards for its sacrifices carried out on the home front. Many actively posed those home-front sacrifices as a clear equivalent—at least rhetorically—to the sacrifices made by soldiers at the front. But just as in other combatant societies, the government could rarely keep up with the legitimate needs of the people. Even the best-intentioned of civilian administrators remained several steps behind the urban populace in terms of addressing every new crisis that arose.
How It Broke Down
On 16 October 1918, having lost the war, Emperor-King Charles issued a manifesto that federalized the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy. Charles decreed that, “following the desires of its peoples, Austria shall become a federal state in which each national component [Volksstamm] will form its own state organization in its area of settlement.” Charles took pains to emphasize that this reorganization would nevertheless “protect common interests effectively everywhere where our commonality is necessary for the [survival of the] individual unit. The … union will be given all necessary power so that it may fairly and lawfully solve the great challenges that result from the repercussions of the war.” Echoing the words that František Palacký had used some seventy years before in his reply to the invitation to attend the Frankfurt Parliament, that the small nations in Central Europe could only survive if “a close and firm tie bound them all together as one,” Charles reiterated for one final time the benefits to be had from belonging to a reformed empire.Footnote 40
By the time Charles made this announcement it was, according to most historians, much too late. The manifesto became an interesting curiosity of history. But at the same time that he made this announcement, a kind of federalization did indeed sweep the major cities and towns of the empire. Above all, this was a federalization of necessity. In order to provide for the possibility of survival, local people claimed direct power over any remaining resources like food, fuel, and transport. For this reason, it had to be a federalism that abandoned any formal common imperial interest. For over half a century, Austrian politicians, journalists, imperialists, and even nationalists had promoted the common relations that Charles emphasized in his statement. By October 1918 these common relations had temporarily broken down in dramatic fashion. For the sake of survival, each region had to go it alone.
Charles had envisioned a federalization based on national units, and later historians also imagined that the breakdown of empire split imperial Austria into national units. In fact, a different kind of breakdown was underway. As central lines of authority collapsed they gave way primarily to regional or crownland units, even if we remember them as national in character. In some cases, region and nationalist communities overlapped, allowing politicians and historians in the victorious successor states to see these regional breakaways as heroic founding moments of new nation-states. But there was nothing necessarily mythic about the will to survive that forced people to abandon any thoughts of a whole.
Take the example of a federal entity where the region did not form a convenient national unit: the crownland Styria. Here in the capital Graz in the fall of 1918, a group of influential citizens took the initiative to cut the ties of empire. Representatives of business and labor in Graz—influential people already implicated in the system of wartime organization—negotiated secretly for weeks to take over the crownland administration from the central government. This corporatist committee planned to exchange Styrian industrial products immediately for grains, fats, and meats from neighboring crownlands. A self-styled Styrian Committee of Public Welfare believed that a coup was the only way to secure the survival of their region. They published their plans a few days after the emperor's federalization manifesto, under the motto: “We don't want to die!” The public apparently greeted this action with some relief. One Graz newspaper argued, “Since there is no central office in Vienna, we here in the country cannot wait any longer. We must give up on powers that cannot protect us from starvation.”Footnote 41 As this radical act illustrates, the increasing absence of the empire from daily life was precisely the problem.
In 1918 a closer examination of the crownlands would show that constant crisis negotiations took place between the parts and the whole. And the two were not always antagonists. In the Styrian example, even as the Graz committee took over the functions of government from the Staathalterei, it nevertheless telegraphed its intention to the imperial government in Vienna as well as to the governor in Graz. The imperial government in turn agreed to the decision by the Styrians. It even informed the governor of its decision to give all power over questions of supply and intra-imperial trade to the Committee of Public Welfare.Footnote 42 I mention this because although it was a decision taken out of desperation, I think we should see it as well within a Habsburg imperial tradition of flexible accommodation. The empire lasted as long as it did thanks in part to the Habsburg ability to improvise and innovate when necessary, while of course claiming rhetorically that nothing had changed since the Pragmatic Sanction.
Continuity
What happened in the years surrounding 1918 was far more determined by imperial context, practice, and traditions than we may care to admit. As we saw with the Masaryk quotation above, post-Habsburg nationalists legitimated their new states in a language that rejected the legacies of empire, even as they quietly founded new empires to replace that of the Habsburgs. The contemporary nationalist framing of the period after 1918 saw it in terms of radical origins and new beginnings. Yet we can find countless examples of continuity between empire and successor states from legal codes to administrative structures, to educational institutions, tax policy, and to cultural politics.Footnote 43 We also should recall that popular opinion from Bohemia to Croatia also confirms this idea of continuity. When Serbian troops occupied much of Croatia, peasants complained of the incursion in terms that resembled their wartime complaints about overbearing Habsburg authorities. In Prague, popular protest into the early 1920s complained of everything from the continued presence of wartime refugees—especially Jews—to ongoing food rationing and long lines. “Is this what we fought for five years for?” was a frequently documented complaint heard in the streets. Even German nationalists in Czechoslovakia who criticized that state, called ongoing food and housing shortages, and the general lawlessness, manifestations of “Austrianness.” Little, it seems, had changed.Footnote 44
I suspect that these points appear commonsensical enough but I will make one final point that may seem more of a provocation. Considering the terms we use to analyze this period, and indeed the entire interwar period, would it not make sense, finally, to abandon the term “nation-state” altogether, at least as a critical category of analysis? Nation-state was on everyone's lips in the 1920s. It was a claim made constantly to legitimate all manner of states, but does it help us at all with historical analysis? If we examine the structures, governing practices, cultural policies of the successor states, all of them behaved as little empires. Each of these self-styled nation-states—with the notable exception of Trianon Hungary—was what the Germans called a Vielvölkerstaat, that is a state housing many peoples or nations, some to an extreme extent.Footnote 45 Even in little Austria the existence of a Slovenian-speaking minority in Carinthia and of Hungarian- and Croatian-speaking minorities in the newly acquired Burgenland occupied the imaginations of nationalists and traditional imperialists.Footnote 46 And while Hungary may have been the one example of a more ethnically homogeneous society, its interwar politicians, activists, and journalists directed their energies to regaining their empire somehow. In Poland and Romania over a third of the population did not speak the national language or practice the national religion (Catholicism for Poland, Orthodoxy for Romania). In fact, in Poland the more imperial vision of a commonwealth state that included many peoples clashed with a more ethnic vision of a smaller Polish national and Catholic state. In Czechoslovakia, as in imperial Austria, no single linguistic group constituted more than 50 percent of the population, unless one counted the Czech and Slovak languages as one, something Slovak nationalists opposed from the very beginnings of the new state. Italy ruled hundreds of thousands of people whose languages were Croatian, Slovene, or German. Yugoslavia called itself a union of three related south Slavic nations (Serb, Croat, Slovene) even though it also housed peoples who could be called Macedonians or Albanians, not to mention German- and Hungarian speakers.
The administrative structures and governing practices of these states were also decidedly imperial in the classic sense. Yugoslavia, Romania, and Italy were ruled centrally from Belgrade, Bucharest, or Rome. Geographic peripheries were ruled from imperial centers with little attention paid to local needs or differences. This meant, for example, that many former irredentist nationalists who had fought for the new states before and during the war, tended to be treated with extreme suspicion by their new rulers as being too Austrian or too Hungarian to be trustworthy. In Romania, Transylvanian Romanian nationalists quickly learned that the autonomy and self-rule they had sought while a part of Hungary would not be on offer from their new masters in Bucharest. Longtime Italian nationalists and irredentists in formerly Austrian Trentino were now passed over for civil service jobs in favor of Italians from farther south.Footnote 47
And what of these states’ colonial ambitions? Hungary sought actively to regain its former territory also occupied by Romanian, Serbian, and Slovak speakers. The others—Austria sometimes included—each demanded territories whose peoples were not necessarily ethnically or linguistically related to their nation, often using a language of security, just as it might have been in Habsburg Austria-Hungary or Romanov Russia. Czechoslovakia, for example, needed to occupy sub-Carpathian Ukraine in order to share a border with its ally Romania. Never mind that the territory was peopled by Ukrainian, Magyar, and Yiddish speakers. The new Czechoslovak government turned this former region of Hungary into its own imperial civilizational project, a backward protectorate to be improved by a paternal imperial administration from Prague, but also, as Rudolf Kučera points out, a faraway site for colonial violence.Footnote 48 This reminds us that the new empires actively deployed the terminologies of different civilizations and cultural levels developed in the Habsburg monarchy in order to manage—and nationalize—their new multinational populations. Only now, national identity became far more forcefully ascribed by the state and less a matter of individual choice. Censuses and primary schooling became tools to force statistical assimilation to the nation in ways only dreamed of under the old empire. The Romanian government asserted that Ukrainian speakers in Bukovina were in fact Romanians who had been ukrainianized by Austrian policy over centuries. They did not need schools in their own language. Szeklers in Transylvania were really Hungarianized Romanians and did not therefore need Magyar schools. In Yugoslavia, German-speaking families with Slavic surnames forfeited any rights to minority language education since they clearly had been Germanized in the recent past. And in Czechoslovakia, arguably the most liberal of the successor states, allegedly false answers about one's ethnic nationality on the census were punishable with a jail term or a stiff fine.Footnote 49
The empire of the Habsburgs fell sometime around late October 1918. The necessary commonalities of which Charles had spoken in his manifesto stopped existing, first on paper and then later thanks to the new borders established at the Paris Peace Conference. Contemporary politicians and historians quickly sought to erase the empire and its common institutions, practices, and unacknowledged continuities from public consciousness and from people's mental maps. They erected tariff barriers and pulled down Habsburg monuments. But as it turned out, empire itself was hardly finished in Habsburg Central Europe. Those commonalities to which Charles referred died with great difficulty. In the first place, traditional identifications, common experiences, ways of seeing the world around one, all served as critical orientations for popular practices in Central European societies well after 1918. One could argue that in mental maps and popular understandings, memories of commonalities occasionally haunt us now as spectral presences, difficult to eradicate from personal or family stories, if long rejected by historians and politicians. More than a few of these memories have become the basis for new forms of popular identification, such as the proud idea of a tolerant multiculturalism in today's Bukovinian region of Ukraine. This idea rests on an alleged tradition that has next to nothing to do with today's Bukovinians and everything to do with the multiethnic history of the region a century ago. At the top levels of government, too, imperial ways of thinking in the 1920s and 1930s continued to shape new state policies. Of what use is it to us today to continue to think of these states somehow as nation-states, failed or otherwise? Most of these states acted and functioned as empires, even if their geographic scales were much smaller than the reaches of the empires they replaced. I suggest that if we want to understand them, their policies, and the larger significance of both the interwar and Second World War period more fully, we should finally treat them as such.
