The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, arguably a colonial state in its own territorially contiguous peripheries in Galicia,Footnote 1 Bukovina,Footnote 2 Trans-Carpathia,Footnote 3 and especially Bosnia,Footnote 4 was less obviously a colonial metropole in an overseas context. The Empire did end up owning a strip of a minuscule coastal town in Qing China (Tienjin).Footnote 5 But the material that Austrian and Hungarian archives today hold (and we have reason here to include Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Romanian, Serbian, Croatian, and even Italian archives), have not been put to good use in the explanation of why and how the Monarchy proved unable to invade and/or retain overseas colonial possessions when other, smaller European states (Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal) built or kept significant such possessions, and at a time when others such as the Spanish were in the process of losing their second overseas empire already. We found the case of Rio de Oro highly illustrative of this extremely relevant historical uncertainty. The National Archives in Hungary retains copies of all files relevant to this case. In this article, we refer to the documents according to their Hungarian catalog (document) reference in endnotes.
All too often also, colonialist violence and colonial empires, including settler empires, are dealt with in contexts of triumphalist Atlantic “success stories” of the second industrial revolution, even (inadvertently) in decolonial literature. Other actors, where “entry into the imperialist club” had proved difficult or was altogether thwarted, are often neglected in grand theory and discourse around colonialities. In order to achieve radical rehumanization of the victims of colonial conquests and exploitation, and to shed light on empires of human disposability, it is extremely valuable to study the history of failed attempts at colonization, to acquire greater understanding of the forces at work that had enabled modern colonialisms to appear and “thrive” for decades before decolonization in the mid-twentieth century.
Extant historiographic works that are in print are of serious value for our quest. A new generation of Sahrawi historians have focused on African resistance especially in the second half of the twentieth century, with occasional references to the fin-de-siécle.Footnote 6 In Austria today, historical scholarship focuses on languages, literatures, missionary history in Africa, but also on situating the history of Austria in a “global history” context. Especially Walter Sauer,Footnote 7 Evelyn Kolm,Footnote 8 Simon Loidl,Footnote 9 Endre Stiansen, Barbara Plankensteiner, Petra Kakuska, Michael Zach, Andreas Szabo, Georg F. Hamann, Barbara Köfler,Footnote 10 Franz Kotrba,Footnote 11 Daniel Haidinger,Footnote 12 Gabriele Habinger,Footnote 13 and Thomas Macho’s research are central for the nineteenth century.Footnote 14 For the twentieth century, again Walter Sauer,Footnote 15 again Simon Loidl, Marion Jaks, Helmut Neundingler,Footnote 16 Arno Sonderegger,Footnote 17 Birgit Englert, Eunice Wanghui Stuhlhofer, Eric Burton and Immanuel R. Harisch,Footnote 18 are engaged thus. In Hungary, József Böröcz “implicates” Hungary as a historically metropolitan perpetrator and partaker in Whiteness and global economic exploitation, to the bafflement of the Hungarian reading public that sometimes tends to see Hungarian history as an exercise in victimhood.Footnote 19 Zoltán Ginelli presents Hungary and the Austro-Hungarian dual state historically in both metropolitan (imperialist) and peripheral quasi-colonial subject roles.Footnote 20 The World Systems economist Tamás Gerőcs sees emancipatory “national liberation” traits as stronger in Hungary post-1945,Footnote 21 also drawing on Walter Rodney.Footnote 22 This kind of “global history” in Hungary, is relatively more pronounced when it comes to the historiography of the second half of the twentieth century, and less visible in the historiography of the pre-1918 era.Footnote 23 This article is intended as a partial corrective to this imbalance. An exciting forerunner to our article in the analytical sense is historian Zsigmond Pál Pach’s decidedly non-mainstream study that had proposed looking at Hungary itself as a colony in political economy terms, especially before 1848.Footnote 24 The economist Jenő Varga had also analyzed pre-1918 Hungarian political economy contemporaneously from a similar standpoint,Footnote 25 to later become Lenin’s friend and the USSR’s most influential economic planner during that country’s era of highest growth rates and spectacular industrialization. A critical reassessment as well as non-dismissive engagement with their heterodox analysis is long overdue.
Although Austria-Hungary conducted military advising in Qajar Iran,Footnote 26 and planned colonial operations in Yemen and Western Sahara, its effective participation in the colonization of Asia and Africa is aptly termed “utopian” by Bach.Footnote 27 What was true of Austria in general, was even more marked from the vantage point of the Empire’s lesser constituent half, the decidedly more agrarian Hungarian kingdom of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which also had its own distinctive attitude to coloniality.Footnote 28, Footnote 29 Its traditional ruling class (the landed nobility) expressed anti-Western sentiment in ways that recalls the Middle East. Not only did Hungarian insurgents routinely find refuge in the Ottoman Empire since the sixteenth century, but leading Hungarian nobles imagined themselves in roles of the “colonial Other” with non-Western pride. One of the most iconic portraits in the Hungarian National Gallery depicts a Hungarian aristocrat as the Emir of Lebanon(!).Footnote 30 The discovery of Hungary’s linguistic links with Siberian tribes, and notions of the proto-Hungarian elite’s historically Turkic entanglements only strengthened nineteenth-century Hungary’s predilection to self-Orientalizing despite the country’s solid Roman Catholic majority in religious terms.
There has often been a distinct political dimension to how thinkers constituted the history of Hungary’s political economy. Notions positing that Hungary was Austria’s internal colony were as widespread in the nineteenth as the early twentieth century,Footnote 31 and got even stronger after the Second World War.Footnote 32 These notions received official endorsement in the 1950s when they served an anti-Western, pro-Soviet propaganda purpose. These temporally canonical views were later in turn rescinded by the de-Stalinization efforts in Hungarian historiography by György Ránki and Iván T. Berend in the 1970s (the latter Eric Hobsbawm’s friend and co-author).Footnote 33 In the 1970s, nineteenth-century Hungarian economic history was reconstituted as a relative Central European success story. Albeit the Austrian (including the Czech) half of the Empire was almost undisputedly indeed a success story of industrialization and modernization (via Gründerzeit),Footnote 34 resources and the willingness to sacrifice for the cause of colonial conquest in Africa were frequently missing even in the very last years of the century when prosperity had better permeated the Empire’s central core (and even some regions of more agrarian Hungary).
We shall observe this dynamic in detail here, in an interesting case of a thwarted Rio de Oro purchase story by the Monarchy, where the state and private circles both expected the other party to bear the financial risks associated with the new colonial initiative. Hungarians are not only conspicuously absent from the Austrian negotiating party but unbelievably, it will be the Spanish negotiating party that is led by a Hungarian émigré officer(!), Juan Somogy (see last two sections of this article). Austro-Hungary generally had unbalanced internal dynamics where centrifugal forces were frequently stronger than factors contributing to unity.Footnote 35
It is fruitful also to employ a meta-theory constructed by the Nigerian postcolonial scholar Biodun Jeyifo, in order to link the so-called metropolitan “civilizing process” (psychological repression at home) and the “civilizing mission” (performed by military conquest and violent repression abroad),Footnote 36 as they intertwined and played out in the “neither-here-nor-there” zone of Europe’s central and central-eastern regions. With the arrival of capitalist accumulation in Europe’s northwest in the seventeenth century, the lack of refrigeration established the East’s role as the northwest’s provider of foodstuffs for three hundred years until the UK could finally import beef in tankers from Argentine in the late nineteenth century. East-Central Europe’s early modern agrarian specialization had reinvigorated the legal category of serfdom, as well as relative underdevelopment in various Habsburg lands. Imperial Austria and later Austro-Hungary, where large pockets of underdevelopment and internal periphery existed until 1918, integrating and economically developing these regions took too much of the already more limited resources even after the Empire’s core regions took off industrially. Local capital was thus more risk averse than in the UK, France, or even post-Bismarck Germany – a situation that did not bode “well” when it came to large-scale logistics enterprises such as overseas colonial expansion.
The case
The gist of the matter was as follows. The Austro-Hungarian Empire almost bought or else leased Rio de Oro, today’s Western Sahara, in 1899. This much is widely known. As a peacekeeper in Africa, the first author of this article had come across casual mentions of this among Spanish, as well as Hungarian military officers. For years since then, he sought to find archival evidence. The way today’s Spain continues to block declassification of all military related documents meant that attempts at reconstructing meaningfully any part of this case study by way of archival findings in Madrid, proved unrealistic.Footnote 37 In the end several relevant notes surfaced from the collections of the Österreichisches Staatsarchiv in Vienna and also the National Archives of Hungary which shed light on how the events unfolded.Footnote 38
The Danubian Monarchy did not take a very active part in most of higher level intergovernmental treaty discussions that focused on colonization, with the exception of the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815), which it had of course actually hosted. A case in point will be the Berlin Conference of 1884/85 where Austria’s representative, who participated at the event, requested no overseas territory there – and he is today better known for composing classical music than for his role in the Monarchy’s foreign policy.Footnote 39 There are three different theoretical explanations currently found in the literature, attempting to make sense of the Monarchy’s lack of success at overseas colonization and from international decision making around colonization. According to one explanation, the Monarchy was a “non-colonial” state.Footnote 40 Another possible framework posits that it pursued a consistent “anti-colonization” policy.Footnote 41 A third version carrying currency with historical scholarship is that although the Empire wanted to colonize, it failed due to a lack of appropriate tools and opportunities.Footnote 42 We tend towards the third view. “Explorers” of Africa who hailed from the Monarchy, such as Oscar Baumann, a cartographer for the Austro-Hungarian Congo Expedition (1885–87), or Sámuel Teleki who mapped large segments of the Great Rift Valley, Austrian Jesuit missionaries to South Sudan,Footnote 43 or Emil Holub (the “Austrian Livingstone”) whose plans included sending Austrian settlers to Africa, together make the picture more nuanced than the first two options would indicate. Austria was interested in long-distance trade executed through commercial companies already in the first half of the eighteenth century. By 1848, trade relations became significant with countries in the Mediterranean basin (Ottoman Turkey and Egypt) and then in the 1880s with China and British India.Footnote 44
Efforts at establishing a viable Habsburg fleet
The leading European states had begun colonization already in the fifteenth–sixteenth centuries. Although the Spanish Empire, ruled by the Habsburg family, played a major role in this process, the Austro-Czech-Hungarian lands, which belonged to another branch of the family, began with a very significant “disadvantage” in this competition.Footnote 45 The construction of this fleet began in 1707.Footnote 46 In 1733–34 the Empire had only eight of its own warships, very far from sufficient to strike the British or the French navies. Members of the Austrian nobility were resentful of the fleet and rarely wanted to serve as officers. Ships could not be adequately staffed by German-speaking Austrians. Mainly crews of Neapolitan, peninsular Italian, or other nationalities (British, Croatian, German principalities) were contracted. In 1735 the Spanish Bourbons occupied the Kingdom of Naples, and within a year Prince Eugene of Savoy, at the helm of Austrian fleet development efforts, died, leaving no influential person close to the ruling elite to carry on with the program at all.Footnote 47
The colonial policy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its interests in Africa
In the nineteenth century Austria tried to disguise its attempts at colonization overseas as scientific expeditions for commercial purposes or for religious missions, as had been routinely done by others.Footnote 48 The Empire’s interest in potential colonial territories is arguably somewhat illustrated by the government’s funding the Austrian traveller Ida Pfeiffer in the 1850s, who ended up providing important information to Foreign Ministry officials.Footnote 49 The Austro-Hungarian Congo Expedition of 1885–87 was also in effect scouting for conquest. The Monarchy also provided significant financial support for the 1887/88 expedition by Sámuel Teleki and Ludwig von Höhnel to East Africa, which included cartographers. This indicates that there was indeed imperialist interest on the part of the government, attested to by official sources.Footnote 50
A Christian mission by Austrian Jesuits was launched in South Sudan in 1846 with the express support of the Austrian government.Footnote 51 At the same time, navy leaders believed that the construction of the Suez Canal would provide a good opportunity for more active participation in maritime trade. Thus they built a railway line between Vienna and Trieste and even acquired a stake in the Suez Canal. Footnote 52 The Austrian Novara frigate’s nearly three-year expedition (1857–59) also served as a scientific disguise for reconnaissance activities.Footnote 53 Eventually, the entire project failed due to the Second Italian War of Independence of 1859 that was lost to Austria. The Monarchy was also forced to hand over their existing stake in the Suez Canal to Mohamed Sa’id Pasha (the wali of Egypt), while the British acquired majority ownership of the company that operated it. In 1857–58, under the leadership of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph,Footnote 54 the acquisition of the Island of Socotra (Indian Ocean), was proposed, in Trieste.Footnote 55
Austria’s colonization efforts were externally hampered by the fact that by the 1860s the other metropolitan countries had already occupied the best ports on the African and Asian coasts, using them as a base to begin building their colonial empires. Although the leaders of the Austro-Hungarian state did not want to give up on colonization,Footnote 56 they tried to “colonize” the territorially contiguous Balkan regions/states in this period. Central to this was the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 (much of Hungary had been composed of Ottoman vilayets until 1686, some until 1719).Footnote 57 The direction of possible Austrian export growth was the Balkans where logistics was easier, and where trade competition was far from as fierce as in other parts of the world, and where Austro-Hungarian products were already known and sought after.
The activities of the Monarchy in the Balkans were also supported by the Congress of Berlin in 1878. After the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in that year, the Monarchy became the region’s great power.Footnote 58 With the annexation of the area in 1909, the Austro-Hungarian state became the dominant power in the Balkans, which only the Russian Empire and its allies were able to confront effectively.Footnote 59
Although the Austro-Hungarian Empire did not actually hold any overseas colonies, it was invited to the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 (Congo Conference). However, the Austro-Hungarian state did not express interest in, or acquire any new territory there.Footnote 60 It tried to maintain/strengthen a continuous presence at sea and to acquire maritime ports.Footnote 61 Dr. Theodor Hertzka actively tried to establish a colony with Austrian settlers in Kenya in 1894, but this was in turn prevented by the British.Footnote 62 After this debacle in East Africa, several Austrian and Hungarian explorers offered their services to other metropolitan powers – Germany, the UK, France, Portugal, and Belgium.Footnote 63
The situation in Rio de Oro or present-day Western Sahara in the late 1890s
In 1898, after the Spanish lost the war for Cuba, they were forced to surrender several of their colonies to the victorious United States, as well as sell some others, in order to financially compensate for monies lost on the war effort itself. Thus began negotiations with the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the sale or lease of their African colony, Rio de Oro, that had been acquired by Spain in 1884.
The “late” Spanish Empire, also known as the New Empire, which existed from 1826 to 1898, still had significant colonial holdings in America, the African continent, and the Pacific. However, these colonies (e.g. Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines) began to secede from the Spanish crown.Footnote 64 Only a few smaller Spanish colonies remained in Africa, including Rio de Oro (despite the name, the colony had no gold reserves!).Footnote 65 In order to ensure the protection of the Spanish Canary Islands, it was decided they would occupy the coast between Cap Blanco and Cap Bojador (December 1884). No other European power protested. Moreover, France welcomed the weakened Spaniards in North Africa who were seen as no competition for France. For similar reasons, the British believed that they would be able to balance with the Spanish exactly the growing French presence in North Africa, which had already threatened the British position in Gibraltar.Footnote 66
In Africa Ceuta, Melilla, the Canary Islands and Equatorial Guinea – Fernando Po/ Bioko and Rio Muni – were under Spanish rule. The country acquired Ifni in 1860, which had been previously known as Santa Cruz de Mar Pequena, part of Southern Morocco.Footnote 67 As much of the African continent was occupied by other European countries, the Spaniards took every opportunity to colonize in North Africa, in order to reposition themselves as a great power. In 1876, under the leadership of Colonel Francisco Coello, the Geographical Society of Madrid (Sociedad Geografica de Madrid – SGM) was established to provide the government with information about North Africa. As a military engineer and cartographer, Coello himself “explored” much of the area and even led an expedition to Algeria in 1844 with the French. SGM was subsidized by the state and funded several expeditions, research, organized scientific conferences, and published a learned journal, the Revista de Geografia Colonial y Mercantil. Footnote 68 A year later, the “Asociación Espanola para la Exploracion del Africa” was set up to take advantage of the economic opportunities offered by the West African coasts, mainly fishing. During this period, nearly 1,000 Spanish fishermen worked off the coast of Western Sahara in thirty to fifty boats off the Canary Islands. Another relevant specialized state-aided organization, the Spanish-African Trade Society (Compania Comercial Hispano-Africana) was established on 30 March 1884.Footnote 69 “Compania Transatlantica” and several individual investors, who received a state guarantee for the return on their investment, also contributed significantly to the cost of the expeditions.Footnote 70 The Prime Minister hurried to start the expeditions as soon as possible in order to confront the countries participating in the Berlin Conference with a fait accompli, to sanction new colonies already occupied by then. The Spanish colonialist claim was unanimously accepted by the participants at the Berlin Conference of 26 February 1885, although the final demarcation of the area was not completed until 1912.Footnote 71
An expedition by the Spaniards, led by Manuel Iradier, Amado Ossorio, and Bernabe Jimenes, set out for the territory of Equatorial Guinea, and another, led by Emilio Bonelli Hernando, set out for Western Sahara. The plan to establish the colony was approved by the loyalist, conservative PM= prime minister Canovas del Castillo, but in the meantime the government resigned, and only the foreign minister of the new government could instruct the army to occupy the unconquered Sahrawi coasts. A Spanish unit led by Emilio Bonelli Hernando occupied Dakhla (Villa Cisneros), where the fortress “La Factoria” was built and a postal service was set up. Only twenty-five soldiers served in the fort under the command of a captain, who was replaced every three months when the ship carrying supplies from the Canary Islands arrived. The Spaniards also built several smaller forts on the coast, which also served as trading stations from which they could control caravans from Senegal to the Mediterranean, providing safe ports for Spanish fishermen and also for a merchant ship to Guinea.Footnote 72
In July 1886, with the help of a Spanish person who spoke perfect Arabic, several tribal representatives were found who were willing to sign a treaty recognizing Spanish authority.Footnote 73 Despite the deputies signing the said treaty, the tribes they represented took up arms against the invading troops. The Sahrawi tribes repeatedly organized uprisings against the Spanish occupying power and attacked the fortress of Villa Cisneros in 1887 and 1892, respectively, and in 1894 set fire to the ships Tres de Mayo and Las Marias anchored in the bay.Footnote 74
As a result of the treaty, the Spaniards were already able to legally keep other European states away from the approximately 80 km² of coastline under their control, and the “protection” of the Canary Islands was indeed strengthened. The real benefit for Spanish fishermen from the Canary Islands was a new coastline, extremely rich in fish. The Spaniards began to see the colony as a liability for lack of other economic benefits.Footnote 75
A history of the abortive sale of Rio de Oro
In 1898, after a lost Spanish–American war for Cuba, the Spanish offered the territory of Rio de Oro for purchase to the Austro-Hungarian Colonial Society (Österreich-Ungarische Kolonial Gesellschaft, founded in 1895).Footnote 76 The idea was initiated by Leopold Koreff, who received from the president of the Spanish colonial society the offer to lease or take over the station. Koreff first approached the German Colonization SocietyFootnote 77 and then, in the absence of any German interest at the time, the Austro-Hungarian Colonization Society, for buying the rights to a colony/commercial station to be operated by a private company for thirty or ninety years.Footnote 78 The Austro-Hungarian Colonization Society in turn contacted the Austrian Ministry of Commerce, which informed the joint Austro-Hungarian Foreign Ministry on 11 March 1899. Based on the information received, the Austrian Ministry of Commerce opined that renting the area would be beneficial to the Monarchy, and therefore suggested that the Foreign Ministry’s embassy in Madrid and the Tangier mission obtain more information about the area.Footnote 79 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs then instructed the two organizations to find out all relevant information about the background to the Spanish decision and also about Rio de Oro. It can be assumed that the ships of the Monarchy turning up at the Canary Islands and West Africa also had some information about the Rio de Oro area.Footnote 80 On 20 March 1899 the Foreign Ministry instructed the ambassador to Spain, Count Victor Dubsky von Trebomislyc, and the head of the Tangier mission, Count Gilbert von Hohenwart, to obtain further information. The two diplomats worked on this task for several months.
Dubsky sent a report on 17 April. He opined the colony could be made profitable, but asked to be given more time to gather more information.Footnote 81 Further details were later received from the Spanish. The area was taken over by a shipping company, Compania Transatlantica, who did not intend to continue operating it.Footnote 82 The same letter revealed that the British were also now interested in the area.Footnote 83, Footnote 84 Hohenwart sent his first report on 20 April, outlining the activities of Compania Transatlantica, the area and the small group of colonists that lived there.Footnote 85
Even from the text of the first reports, it becomes clear that the two diplomats had very different views on the prospects of the project. Not only was Hohenwart agile in gathering information, but he embraced the entire project, advocating for an agreement with Spain. His optimistic outlook is well reflected in a letter he wrote to his superiors in Vienna on 23 December 1899, in which he stated that he would “not leave even the crumbs falling off the table of the great ones.”Footnote 86 However, Austro-Hungarian Ambassador Dubsky did not share his enthusiasm, and he saw the project as a looming failure. Dubsky received information mainly from Spanish government agencies, members of diplomatic corps,Footnote 87 and the Madrid press. Dubsky anticipated the chances of a lease by the Monarchy were minimal also because Spain in the end would not withdraw their troops from Rio de Oro (for domestic political reasons), as that would mean relinquishing their sovereignty over the area. He also asked the German ambassador to Madrid about the lease of the area. The Ambassador stressed that his own country had pre-emptive rights to the Spanish colonies in Africa, but did not confirm whether they were specifically interested in Rio de Oro.Footnote 88
At his station in Tangier, Hohenwart not only gathered his information through diplomatic circles, but also visited Spanish and foreign merchants and missionaries in the area, and gathered a great deal of information about the coast from Canarian fishermen.Footnote 89
According to the optimistic Hohenwart, a colonial administration different from Spain’s would allow the area to flourish fast and bring significant benefits to the Monarchy. In his opinion “Rio de Oro has no value today and is only a burden on the state, but if it had the logistics, a proper colonial administration and a purposeful government, Rio de Oro would soon become a thriving area.”Footnote 90 He saw a particularly good opportunity in fishing and related activities. He envisioned this by developing existing ports, building new ones, and setting up a fish processing plant. He also wanted to develop hitherto limited trade, bypassing Morocco.Footnote 91 Hohenwart feared the British and the Germans the most, and he did not see the Italians interested in the areaFootnote 92 as opponents, expressing his views in “scientific racist” anti-Italian terms: “Italy, the most incapable country of colonial politics in terms of megalomania, lack of organisation, and a desire for adventure, has the same character as Spain, and it is not committed to pursuing a genuine, civilized policy.”Footnote 93 Hohenwart’s report also stresses that copper, manganese, and sulphate are present in greater quantities in the area.Footnote 94
Much of the data collection was completed by the diplomats by July 1899, and on 29 July, the reports they sent were received by the joint Foreign Ministry of the dual Monarchy. Although the ministry was divided on the feasibility of the project, they contacted the other ministries as well as the Austro-Hungarian Colonial Society on how to obtain Rio de Oro. The Society’s vice president, Ernst Franz Weisl, and his confidant, the foreign minister, Count Agenor Goluchowsky soon began talks with the Spanish party. They reasoned that the port of Villa Cisneros (Dakhla) in the colony, where the ships of the Austro-Hungarian fleet could have embarked safely, could well serve the Monarchy from both a commercial and a military (naval) point of view.Footnote 95 About the port and its immediate surroundings, Hohenwart reported in detail.Footnote 96
Ernst Franz Weisl, who had already been president of the Colonial Society for several years by then, was a de facto lobbyist in the Rio de Oro affair with prominent economic and political figures as well as bureaucrats in various ministries. He even took part in a “preliminary expedition” in Tangier.Footnote 97 However, the negotiating position of the Monarchy was worsened by the fact that the British,Footnote 98 the GermansFootnote 99 and even the BelgiansFootnote 100 now began to take an interest in Rio de Oro.
The Spanish took the impending lease seriously enough that the necessary amendments to their own laws were being prepared, and they also set up a working group to coordinate the affair.Footnote 101 The Spanish company that operated the colony, transferred the exploitation rights to a consortium until 31 December 1899, which was now responsible for the sale of rights. The consortium was led by Juan Bautista Somogy, a Spanish MP of Hungarian extraction,Footnote 102 who recommended leasing the area. A letter of intent about this was also sent to the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Ministry. The Colonial Society was immediately interested in what it saw as a business opportunity, but the Foreign Ministry was much more cautious and involved members of the Society in drawing up a budget. According to their calculations, the acquisition of the area by the Monarchy would cost approximately HUF 150,000, and the development and operation of the commercial site would cost an additional HUF 100,000. Seeing the abundance of fish in the coastal waters, the Austro-Hungarian Colonial Society planned to establish a fish processing plant.Footnote 103 The Monarchy’s slow and bureaucratic state machinery then seemed to gather steam. A new committee of inquiry was set up. Not only members of the state administration but also entrepreneurs began to see opportunities in the Rio de Oro venture. The Austro-Hungarian Chamber of Commerce pondered creating a syndicate by raising the financial plans for the project to HUF 300,000,Footnote 104 from 250,000.Footnote 105 However, in the opinion of the vice president of this chamber, success would have been guaranteed by investing at least one million forints, four times more than what had been contemplated. There were plans to set up an international company headquartered in Paris – with no success.Footnote 106
The Monarchy’s bureaucrats wanted to leave financial matters to private companies, who could not even agree on who would represent them in the negotiations with the Spanish consortium led by Juan Somogy. Some suggested that the Austro-Hungarian Colonial Society lead the negotiations, but this in turn was not supported by the government. The Austrian Minister of Commerce, Baron Josef Di PaoliFootnote 107 or the successful Austrian businessman Arthur Krupp seemed more acceptable to the government.Footnote 108 However, the trade minister called for Foreign Minister Agenor Goluchowsky to attend, while Krupp rejected the request, citing the losses of a previously failed Somali colonial enterprise.
On 2 December 1899, Agenor Goluchowsky made a speech in the Foreign Affairs Committee expressing his own and the government’s support for the project. As a result on 29 December, an Export and Colonial Affairs Department was established in the Lower Austrian Industrial Association under the leadership of Dr Ernst Franz Weisl (of the Colonial Society, also a Vienna lawyer).Footnote 109 Although the group numbered twenty people, many thought that it was able to provide a financial basis for initiative, with the members’ extensive economic networks.Footnote 110 Weisl could not find common groundwith the bureaucrats of the Foreign Ministry, however, and negotiations would stumble.
The idea of relocating Austrian settlers to found a settler colony in Rio de Oro was also aired around this time. It was proposed that 60,000 settlers were to be shipped to the area, who “would make the desert bloom.” The government wanted to receive HUF 8 million from the Austrian company Lloyd for this purpose, but Lloyd did not consider the return on their investment guaranteed, and declined the offer. None of the other groups was willing to start the project with their own money either. No one in the end even put down the payment for the HUF 20,000 rent for the territory for the year 1899,Footnote 111 and the HUF 50,000 deposit negotiated by the end of 1899 was not collected either. (The latter was the basic condition for the Spanish.)Footnote 112 In light of these bewildering prevarications, the Monarchy’s effective demand was now very much questioned by the Spanish party. Yet not only Hohenwart, but several leaders of the Austro-Hungarian government believed that the acquisition of Rio de Oro was the last chance for the Monarchy to ever acquire a “bona fide overseas colony” and lamented what they saw as the decision makers’ “impotence.”Footnote 113
The failure of the project
At this point Austria’s consortium tried one final time to attract a new group of investors.Footnote 114 The government expected the corporations to fully cover and implement the project, while in the absence of clear government support backed by funds, those private interests were unwilling to risk their own financial assets in a potentially risky venture.Footnote 115 Leopold Koreff, a member of the consortium outraged by this lack of interest, informed the Foreign Minister in a harsh letter at the end of 1899 about the failure of negotiations that had lasted for nearly a year and indicated that he would prefer to negotiate with the French and the Germans.Footnote 116 The government was conservative to the point of timidity with its finances, but also economically constrained.Footnote 117
The Spanish side at this point waited for another three months in expectation of an Austro-Hungarian takeover bid while they did not negotiate with anyone else.Footnote 118 Yet the Germans, the British, the French, and even the Italians were now all suddenly interested in the area. Eventually the Spaniards began negotiations with their regional rivals the French, who wanted to acquire Rio de Oro to create a contiguous colonial empire in northwest Africa.Footnote 119 Public sentiment had also noticeably changed in Spain. The government no longer wanted to sell or lease the land.Footnote 120 The French persuaded Spain to divide the disputed Cabo Blanco peninsula. This took place on 27 June 1900 in Paris “legally.”Footnote 121 Spain kept the remaining colony until their withdrawal in the year 1975.
Analysis and conclusion
Although the Habsburg lands (within and without the Holy Roman Empire until Napoleonic times, then “Austria” and from 1867 onward, “Austria-Hungary”) demonstrably wanted and tried to colonize territories on the African continent, their actual initiatives always failed due to the resistance of other European colonial powers but even more due to the inadequacy of the dual Monarchy’s material and human resources, and political structure. It was also expected that the acquisition of Rio de Oro would benefit the Austrian side of the Empire rather than the Hungarians. This is why the Hungarian government watched ongoing negotiations with suspicion from the beginning and linked it to intentions of expanding Austria’s fleet,Footnote 122 contributing to the unwillingness of the state to underwrite the operations financially.
Private economic interests in the Monarchy on the other hand, were more conservative than British, French, or German companies. It was not clear at any stage of negotiations, who actually would be ready to pay the initial costs, however relatively small in international comparison. Due to disputes between the parties and the lack of clarity on financing issues, potential investors eventually withdrew from the enterprise.Footnote 123 However, the failure of the project was also due to changed Spanish policy. Ailing Spain, similar to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in its late take-off, as well as domestic weakness of capital and a semi-peripheral global economic position, began to recover somewhat from the depression after their lost Cuban war momentarily after 1899.
The case of the thwarted Rio de Oro lease points to the following analysis, based on our new archival finds. The Austro-Hungarian Empire and its predecessor could not realistically be considered a “non-colonial” state in any case, nor did it pursue any meaningful “anti-colonization” policy. The Austro-Hungarian Empire indeed wanted to acquire colonies – not only in Africa but also here, and especially in Rio de Oro – but failed due to the lack of appropriate means, opportunities, and also the internal (Hungarian and joint foreign ministry) resistance; and the risk averse nature of both the entrepreneurial circles and the state apparatus: conservative, timid, and weak in contemporary European comparison. The state will focus on, and temporarily manage to dominate, the West Balkans in the early twentieth century, where the country’s easy logistical access, military actio radius, and local knowledge, together counterbalanced its financial and bureaucratic feebleness. Expansion in the Balkans, however, will also increase the Empire’s political lack of unity, and contribute to the outbreak of the First World War, as well as to the composite Empire’s eventual demise in 1918, ushering in the era of small nation states in Central and Eastern Europe. African colonization in successor states now became the stuff of historico-utopianist fiction.Footnote 124 Global and African imaginaries in the region will eventually only pick up and establish real links, through neutral Austria’s post-1955 role in the Global South, and through Hungary’s, Czechoslovakia’s, and other successor states’ state socialist “alternative globalization” vis-à-vis Africa, from the late 1950s to 1990.
Employing Biodun Jeyifo’s postcolonialist meta-theory on the “civilizing process” and the “civilizing mission” being the two sides of the same coin, wherein metropoles violently transformed their very selves internally, while they committed armed violence on overseas territories (and where the transformation of the metropole was indeed financed by extracting sources from those colonies in the first place), the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy possessed the desire to expand and establish colonies overseas, but the basic element that had allowed imperial Portugal, Spain, Holland, France, the UK, and others to colonize was in fact what we may call metropolitan imperial (and imperialist) unity.
Unified monarchical (absolutist) bureaucratic structures underwrote colonization and allowed for extraction economies to materialize even in the UK where the political superstructure was technically not unitary. Austria (and Habsburg royal Hungary) did not have the opportunity to unify first because of the Ottoman threat (in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries) and later the insurgencies of local nobilities, such as the Hungarian insurgents. Attempts at absolutism (Emperor Leopold I, Emperor Joseph II) ended in absolute failure. Although Austro-Hungarian foreign policy was mostly of course Vienna’s domain in the dual monarchy, the concentration of resources necessary for colonial expansion was not the kind of undertaking where internal fissions could remain vested. The extent to which the lack of unity characterized the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy at birth prior to 1867 defined it up to its very end, severely limiting its capabilities.Footnote 125
Weakness and a lack of unity also characterized capital and its representatives, the Empire’s bourgeois strata. Austria was thus not capable to centralize and execute a robust “civilizing process” at home in the Jeyifoan sense. It also proved completely unable to execute so called “civilizing missions” (in fact exercises in violent domination and extraction, i.e. colonization) overseas. Please also note that “civilizing mission” in Jeyifo’s parlance is never meant in a positive sense, and that it was indeed, in every single case, unsuccessful in altering the consciousness of the colonial subject.Footnote 126 Austria’s, Hungary’s, and other regional successor states’ arguably non-Western attitude to organizational failure (Schlamperei), eternalized by the musical genres of operetta, Straussian waltzes, and a morbid interest in decay and death, human demise and the unconscious (the latter made globally known by Freud in Vienna),Footnote 127 arguably signalled a form of cultural dissolution before the political one. Thus was even sub-imperialist contract actor Portugal “more successful” at colonization at the fin-the-siécle, despite the fact that Austria was statistically wealthier.
