16 Lónyay had succeeded to this post in May, on the death of von Becke.
17 Kuhn had gone further before the Conference: in a memorandum which he circulated in advance of it, he wanted Austria to intervene immediately, ‘even at the risk of setting all Europe in flames’, to send 200,000 men to Warsaw against Russia, 200,000 to Berlin and 200,000 to the Rhine, to take King Wilhelm prisoner. Austria was to take as her prizes Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, the Danubian Principalities and Bosnia.
18 The memorandum contained the words: ‘Prussia on the Inn means finis Austriae.’
19 Friedjung, Historische Aufsätze, p. 469. Friedjung writes in this connection: ‘It is all too easily forgotten that after the exclusion of Austria from Germany it took an extraordinary effort to prevent the Court, the aristocracy and the clerical circles from setting up a Bohemian State as a bulwark against the newly founded German Reich, that all efforts had to be exerted to defend the unity of Austria west of the Leitha.’
20 Friedjung writes that ‘he who did not know already’ (the state of opinion attributed by him to the Imperial House) ‘can read it in Schäffe’s memoirs’. I can only say that I have searched Schäffle’s Aus meinem Leben vainly for this statement, or anything remotely resembling it, nor have I found confirmation of this far-reaching statement in any other work.
21 This is well illustrated by Friedjung’s use of the word ‘State’ (Staat) in the above quotation.
22 Those in the know were Potocki and Taaffe from the old Ministry; Hohenwart and Schäffle among the Ministers designate (the others only at the last minute); one or two of the Czech feudal nobility (Clam-Martinic and Thun) and a few men connected with the Court: the Emperor’s Chamberlain, Prince Hohenlohe, the head of his Civilian Cabinet, Hofrat Braun, his ex-Aide-de-Camp, Count Dürkheim, and possibly one or two more.
23 Schäffle, op. cit., II. 189.
24 In his pamphlet Oesterreich und die Burgschaften seines Bestandes.
25 It had, however, already been suggested at Kremsier by the Czech, Pinkas.
26 This figure had been adopted in the Hungarian Nationalities Law and was afterwards very generally used, as in the inter-war legislation of Czechoslovakia and other countries.
27 Thus excluding local employees of the Commune, etc.
28 In Vienna, for example, rates were allowed to count as well as direct taxes for a voter’s financial qualifications, a change which raised the number of voters from 18,000 to 36,000. New appointments were made to the Upper House, as Schäffle writes (II. 35), ‘by giving their proportionate weight to the nationalities, confessions and classes previously left at a disadvantage’. The Emperor exercised his personal influence in Upper Austria (ibid.), where, and in some other Lands, the lists of voters for the First Curia were arbitrarily revised.
29 A first message had come as early as 2 September 1870.
30 Andrássy is often represented as having forced his way into the Monarch’s councils and destroyed the Czechs’ hopes single-handed. This is not the case: he behaved entirely correctly, and actually did not at first want to intervene at all; he did so only under strong pressure (which annoyed him very much) from Beust. But when invited to express his views, he did so with eloquence, and his voice was probably in fact the decisive one.
31 Schäffle tendered his individual resignation on 23 October. Hohenwart sent in his resignation, entailing that of the Ministry as a whole, on 25 October. It was formally accepted on 30 October.
32 Prince ‘Carlos’ was unwilling to return to active politics.
33 The full list was: Auersperg, Minister President; Baron Lasser, Interior; Banhans, Commerce; Stremayr, Education; Glaser, Justice; Holzgethan, Finance (after January 1872, de Pretis); General Horst, Defence; Baron Chlumetzky, Agriculture; Unger, without portfolio.
34 The title of Reich Chancellor died with Beust.
13
The Foreign Relations of the Monarchy, 1871–1903
In placing our account of the foreign relations of the Monarchy after 1871 before that of its internal developments, we are giving them the precedence which they enjoyed in practice, for Francis Joseph himself always put them first, and let no domestic considerations override what he held to be his realm’s foreign political interests. And it was Francis Joseph’s view that mattered, both in respect of priorities and of the general line of foreign policy itself. This being so, it is hardly possible to over-emphasize the importance for the Monarchy of the increased mellowness – or resignation – which came to colour Francis Joseph’s outlook on foreign affairs as he reached middle age. As he had accepted the loss of Venetia even before it was inflicted, and never thereafter entertained serious thoughts of revanche against what was now the Kingdom of Italy, so after Prussia’s crushing victory over France, he finally accepted the truth that his Monarchy could not recover its old leadership of Germany.1 That his new Foreign Minister was a Magyar, while the outgoing man had been a Saxon, was itself symbolic of the renversement which now took place in his foreign policy. It was the first time in all its history that the Monarchy genuinely and without arrière pensée faced East. It had, of course, still to safeguard its rear; the attainment of this security was Andrássy’s immediate aim, as the maintenance of it was to be a chief preoccupation of his successors; but what made this so vital was the supreme need to keep eyes and hands free for the East.
Even in this direction, the Monarchy’s policy was now almost always essentially defensive in purpose, even where a move was made which looked aggressive. Here, too, Francis Joseph’s mentality was a factor, for besides inclining increasingly as the years went on towards peace for peace’s sake, he seems to have inherited something of his great-grandmother’s indifference towards prizes of backward peoples and undeveloped territories. Andrássy saw his whole problem in terms of Russia, which in his view constituted a permanent and active threat both qua Power and qua inspirer of the Slavs outside her own frontiers, to his own Hungary and to the Monarchy on whose survival, as he was now convinced, that of Hungary itself depended. But he thought the Monarchy too weak to challenge Russia, and never seriously entertained any designs against her (he would have liked to see her weakened by the re-establishment of an independent Poland, but that was only an ideal, and he never made any move towards realizing it), so that his policy towards Russia resolved itself into deterring her from moving, both by himself preserving a correct attitude towards her, and by acquiring allies to help him hold the front, or at least neutralizing those who could not be gained as allies. It was very important that he was actually averse from the Monarchy’s expanding itself, even if it could do so with Russia’s agreement, through a deal such as Catherine had wanted to make with Joseph II. Not only would any such deal almost certainly bring Russia more profit than Austria: the effects of it would have been unwelcome to him on domestic grounds. For the result of any such expansion could only be to add more Slavs or Roumanians to the population of the Monarchy, and if these were incorporated in Hungary, they would increase the proportion of non-Magyars there; if in Cis-Leithania, or if they were given their own political formation, they would tilt the painfully-established Dualist balance against Hungary.
These calculations were no monopoly of Andrássy’s. There was, of course, a party which thought differently. Especially in the early years, when the Archduke Albrecht was still active, there existed at the Court a ‘party of action’, headed by him, from whose influence the Emperor himself was not altogether immune. Certain other influences, which will be mentioned in due course, were also in favour of the Monarchy’s expanding, for one or another reason. But considerations of the Monarchy’s weakness, or of ethnic balance, or both, weighed as heavily at least with Andrássy’s first three successors at the Ballhausplatz as with himself, and those of balance were shared not only by all Hungarian politicians, but also by the German-Austrians, in whose minds they were reinforced by their hostility to the military and their eternal preoccupation with the money-bags.
The p
olicy of territorial abnegation was always faced with one great difficulty in the increasingly precarious hold of the Porte over its own Balkan subjects. If her rule over them should prove quite impossible to maintain, the objections to Austria’s herself stepping into the consequent power-vacuum could be met by the reply that any possible alternative would also be unpleasant and even dangerous to her. If the Roumanians and Serbs became fully independent, they would exercise a strong pull on their fellow-countrymen inside the Monarchy. This might in theory be partly counteracted by the establishment of a strong Bulgaria friendly to the Monarchy, but that was hardly a practical possibility. The Czar was unlikely simply to cede the Sultan’s place to the Emperor. It was far more likely that he would take it for himself, either directly, or masking the process by allowing a nominal independence to States which in reality would be mere Russian satellites. In such case, a forward policy for Austria might well be argued to be no more than self-defence.
*
The clouds of a potential conflict with Russia in the Balkans were already visible on the horizon when Andrássy took over the Ballhausplaz. Unrest was growing year by year among the Balkan peoples, and Russia, too, seemed to be preparing to move. In 1870 she had already unilaterally denounced the clauses of the Treaty of Paris which related to navigation on the Danube – thereby conjuring up a major diplomatic crisis the details of which may be omitted from this volume. Her wishes as officially made known did not go beyond the revision of the surviving dispositions of the Treaty, but she had obviously made no spiritual renunciation of her traditional role of patroness and protectress of the Christian peoples of the Balkans. She was in constant touch with Prince Nicolas of Montenegro, and had given strong support to the ambitious plans which Michael of Serbia had pursued until his assassination in 1868. When a Bulgarian revolutionary movement took root after the establishment of the Exarchate in 1870, it received much encouragement and substantial financial support from Pan-Slav circles in Russia. Ignatiev, the Russian Ambassador to the Porte since 1864, was personally an enthusiastic Pan-Slav.
Nor, at that juncture, was Austria entirely defence-minded. A party in Vienna was urging that Austria should find a pretext to annexe Bosnia-Herzegovina. The general argument, which made some appeal to the Emperor (who had not yet quite reconciled himself to the role of eternal loser) was that the annexation would bring Austria some compensation, in the only direction still open – for annexation of the Danubian Provinces, which had looked more tempting twenty-five years earlier, was no longer a practical possibility – for her losses in Italy and Germany, and the military party also argued that now that Venetia was lost, Austria needed a hinterland to Dalmatia, to protect her sea-borne commerce from Trieste and Fiume. More remotely, both military and business interests were beginning to dream of securing for Austria an outlet on the Aegean at Salonica.
Another group wanted the annexation on ethnic-political grounds. These were the Habsburgtreu Croat nationalists, who would have liked to see all their countrymen united under Habsburg rule; that the admitted Croats of Bosnia-Herzegovina, designated as such by their Catholic faith, numbered only some 20% of the populations of the two provinces, against twice as many Orthodox Serbs and 34% Moslems of Serbo-Croat stock,2 weighed little with them against what they called the historic claim to ‘Turkish Croatia’. Although these men were few, they were influential, for they included several high-ranking officers from the old Military Frontier. One of these, General Rodić, had been made Statthalter of Dalmatia in 1870 (it was he who had pacified the insurgents there in the previous year), and had already established intimate connections with the Croat nationalists across the border.
Andrássy himself, while he did not belong to the party of action, and would have preferred to see the rule of the Porte maintained, yet thought that it would be a lesser evil that the two provinces should come under Austrian rule, in some form or another, than that they should be partitioned between Serbia and Montenegro, which might then unite and confront the Monarchy with an uncomfortably large Southern Slav State, probably under Russian patronage, on its southern frontier. In any case, the pressure in favour of annexation coming from within the Monarchy itself made it still more unlikely that the status quo in the Balkans could last much longer, so that a clash of interests between Austria and Russia seemed inevitable and even imminent, and Austria’s need for allies, urgent. The search for these therefore constituted his chief preoccupation when he took office.
Andrássy did not put all his eggs in the German basket – one of his first moves on taking office was to offer Britain an understanding, and although this was rejected, he never quite lost hope of achieving it. But Britain was in any case far away; an alliance with France was out of the question, if only on account of the Emperor’s feelings. To meet the immediate situation, and also to preserve the anti-Slav balance within the Monarchy, Germany was the obvious partner. It was Andrássy’s good fortune that Bismarck, for his part, was anxious to have Austria friendly to him (to eliminate for good and all the possibility of a Franco-Austrian combination against Germany) and personally well disposed towards Andrássy for his decisive intervention in 1870 (later the two men developed a genuine personal liking), so that he met Andrássy’s overtures halfway, and it took only a few diplomatic conversations to establish, although not yet in contractual form, that special relationship between Germany and Austria which was to remain until 1918 the most important given fact in all the Monarchy’s foreign relationships. Andrássy secured, indeed, one cardinal point almost immediately: even in these early conversations Bismarck assured the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador in Berlin that he would not tolerate an attack by Russia on the Monarchy.3
The objectives of the two men were not, indeed, quite the same. Andrássy did not want an offensive alliance against Russia, but he wanted, and for some time hoped to achieve, a full defensive alliance against her between Vienna and Berlin. Both Bismarck and his sovereign, on the other hand, were quite determined to preserve the old friendship between Germany and Russia, if only to prevent Russia from linking up with France. What Bismarck wanted to bring about was solidarity between Germany, Austria and Russia, and it was his will that prevailed as the result of the first exchanges. First it was arranged that the new Austro-Russian relationship should be signalized by personal gestures, and accordingly, after Wilhelm had been in Salzburg and Gastein, Francis Joseph was booked to visit Berlin in September 1872. The Czar, however, who was nervous about the developments, invited himself to the party, and the results of this meeting, of a journey by Wilhelm and Bismarck to Petersburg in April 1873 and of the appearance of the Czar and Gorčakov in Vienna a month later, were a complex of understandings and treaties, on the whole along lines desired by Bismarck. In Berlin Andrássy and Gorčakov told one another frankly that either would go to war if the other resorted to force in the Near East, but reassured each other on their respective intentions. In Petersburg Germany and Russia signed a secret convention for mutual support if either were attacked by a third party, but Francis Joseph and Andrássy refused to adhere to this. In Vienna, on 6 June, Austria and Russia signed the so-called ‘Convention of Schönbrunn’, agreeing to consult on any question on which their interests disagreed, ‘in order that these disputes should not overshadow the considerations of a higher order which they had at heart’ (a codicil pledged them to joint resistance against revolutionary socialism), and Germany adhered to this agreement on 22 October, thus bringing into being the so-called ‘League of the Three Emperors’ (Dreikaiserbund).
The reconciliation between Austria and Russia was made spectacular: Francis Joseph visited Petersburg and laid a wreath on the grave of Nicholas1, who had saved his Empire in 1849. But the test of the understanding was not far away. Gorčakov, who had for a while been concentrating his activities on Central Asia, suddenly turned his attention back to the Balkans, especially Bulgaria, and the forward party in Austria was equally active. In the spring of 1875 Rodić arranged for Francis Joseph to tour Dalm
atia. The visit was made the occasion for irredentist demonstrations from across the frontier, and there was much talk of the possibility, even the imminence, of the annexation. Meanwhile, Austria had stolen a march against Russia in Serbia. Russia had been offended when, after the assassination of Prince Michael, the Serbs had placed his fourteen-year-old cousin on the throne (she would have preferred Nicholas of Montenegro), and when the Regents made her overtures, had rebuffed them. The Regents, and the young Prince, as he grew up, had then turned to Austria, to which Milan had in 1875 pledged himself in extravagant terms. The attachment was, indeed, a personal one: it was not shared, either by the Serbian Liberal Party, which had won the elections in both 1874 and 1875, or by the powerful underground nationalist organization, the Omladina.
Then, in the summer of 1875, a revolt broke out in the Herzegovina, initiating a European crisis which lasted almost exactly three years; a crisis of immense complexity, of which only the barest outline can be given here. It would be quite mistaken to suppose that the Dreikaiserbund proved altogether ineffectual in face of the situation. When the revolt broke out, Andrássy and Gorčakov agreed on a policy of reforms in the Balkans, the territorial integrity of the Porte remaining intact; and a Note summoning the Sultan to introduce reforms was handed in at Constantinople in December 1875. But the ‘reforms’ enacted were derisory, and in any case, remained on paper. The unrest among the Balkan peoples grew, and on 30 June 1876 Serbia and Montenegro declared war on Russia (Prince Milan reluctantly, but under irresistible pressure from the Liberals and the Omladina) to ‘redeem’ (for themselves) Bosnia and the Herzegovina respectively.
In this situation Andrássy and Gorčakov met again, at Reichstadt, on 8 July and again reached, or thought themselves to have reached, agreement. If the Turkish armies got the better of the campaign, the territorial status quo was to be upheld; but if Serbia and Montenegro won the day, there were to be territorial changes. Unfortunately, Andrássy’s and Gorčakov’s versions of the precise nature of these changes afterwards proved not to agree. In both, Russia was to recover Southern Bessarabia, besides acquiring certain areas in the Caucasus; but Andrássy’s text allowed Austria to annex the greater part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro getting only relatively small gains; while the Russian version gave Montenegro the whole of the Herzegovina and Serbia a large part of Bosnia, Austria receiving only ‘Turkish Croatia and some parts of Bosnia contiguous to her frontiers’.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 94