In 1813, the Habsburg monarchy provided the largest single contingent of troops to the Sixth Coalition against Napoleon, while Austrian officers played a key role in developing the Trachtenberg Plan, which proved instrumental in negating Napoleon's tactical prowess. Meanwhile, Anton von Metternich's diplomacy was crucial to holding the coalition together, detaching Napoleon's erstwhile German allies from the crumbling French empire and shaping post-Napoleonic europe.
Austria's key role in the Sixth Coalition was all the more remarkable given the repeated defeats the Habsburgs had suffered at the hands of the French in the 1790s and early 1800s. For A. Wess Mitchell, the monarchy's survival and ultimate triumph were not the consequences of luck or the magnanimity of its enemies. Such durability, Mitchell argues, was the result of a grand strategy, a combination of foreign policy and military thinking that developed over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which had allowed the monarchy to weather previous threats from France, Prussia, and the Ottoman Empire.
This grand strategy emerged in response to a unique set of challenges. As an interstitial power, the monarchy lacked natural defensive borders and was ringed by potentially predatory states. Moreover, it did not have the military or economic resources to fight a three-front or prolonged war. Yet despite these disadvantages, the monarchy not only survived repeated wars, but often emerged on the winning side—sometimes with enlarged territory—and continued to play a significant role in European diplomacy.
Habsburg strategy consisted of three core tenets. First was the maintenance of an arc of buffer states that shielded it from the other expansionist great powers. Second, the monarchy maintained a defensive military establishment, which also acted as a tool of enforcing loyalty to the dynasty. Key to the defense of the monarchy was a network of forts on its borders that could stall invaders and allow time for the concentration of its military. Time and space were, therefore, crucial to military planning and found expression in a well-developed interest in cartography. A prime example of this defensive structure was the military frontier with the Ottoman Empire. Finally, the empire also looked to international coalitions to maintain its position as a great power. These alliances shifted as the threat changed, while ceasefires and armistices bought the empire time to regroup and realign its military force against the most immediate military threat and improve its position relative to its rivals.
Mitchell examines how the monarchy dealt with the evolving threats posed by the Ottoman Empire and Russia in the southeast, the Prussians to the north, and the French to the west, and emphasizes the flexible nature of Habsburg strategy within the tripartite parameters previously outlined. For example, at the start of the eighteenth century, the Austrians relied on a mobile field army to counter the Ottoman threat, before adopting a militarized frontier from mid-century onward.
This system reached its zenith under Metternich in the early nineteenth century. The German Confederation created a buffer zone of smaller German states among the Habsburg monarchy, France, and Prussia, while a system of alliances formed a “first attempt at a European-wide collective security system” (236). Border fortifications were also improved. This system provided cost-effective military security, while allowing the monarchy to recover from a generation of warfare and to wield an influence on the international stage disproportionate to the strength of its army.
Mitchell's analysis focuses resolutely on the issue of foreign policy and military strategy. Consequently, it downplays domestic factors—perhaps too much so. Mitchell dismisses the argument that the monarchy ultimately declined as a consequence of economic weakness or because of its ethnic complexity. Indeed, he pays little attention to the demands for greater autonomy from the monarchy's various subject peoples and emphasizes the primacy of foreign and military strategy. He blames Emperor Franz Joseph and the military elite, who abandoned the flexible diplomacy and defensive military attitudes that had characterized Habsburg grand strategy in the eighteenth century. Instead, they relied increasingly on offensive military force, only to be outmaneuvered and outfought by the Italians, the French, and the Prussians in the 1850s and the 1860s. Defeat and parlous public finances meant the monarchy was unable to resist Hungarian demands for political concessions. Thus, the abandonment of the grand strategy led to the Ausgleich of 1867 which further undermined Habsburg claims to Great Power status.
Mitchell's excellent book provides an important corrective to the image of a Habsburg state that survived into the early twentieth century only because of the largesse and rivalries of more powerful states. Instead, he presents a picture of a dynamic political and military elite whose flexible and adaptable policies maintained the monarchy's unlikely great power status into the nineteenth century.
