A French visitor to Austria-Hungary in 1902 observed that everything was “dualist” in the empire, including the banknotes. One side of an Austro-Hungarian crown note was Austrian, with the denomination spelled out in German as well as the eight other languages of Cisleithania: Polish, Italian, Czech, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Rumanian, and Ukrainian. The flip side of the note was Hungarian, with the denomination spelled out in Magyar alone. “Astonishing,” the French visitor commented; “for official Hungary, the nationalities here do not even exist.” Such ethnic arrogance naturally commanded nothing more than a sullen obedience. “Faced with this internal campaign of national annihilation, non-Hungarians here are reduced to silence and immobility, even though they are the majority!” the Frenchman concluded.1
Desperate to hit upon some new, invigorating mission for his aging empire, Franz Joseph began to repent very quickly of the great sellout of 1867.2 It sharpened, not diminished, the national rivalries in the monarchy as Hungarian Liberals jailed any priests, leaders, writers, or politicians in eastern Austria who resisted Magyarization. Having declared in 1867 that “the Slavs are not fit to govern; they must be ruled,” Hungarian prime minister Gyula Andrássy and each of his successors until 1918 enforced that rule with a hard hand.3 By the 1880s, millions of Austro-Hungarians were emigrating to America. Those who remained looked beyond Austria-Hungary for rescue—the Slavs to Russia or Serbia, the Rumanians to Rumania.
Conceived as a solution to Austria’s problems, the Ausgleich had only made the dire strategic predicament of 1866 worse, for Austria’s foreign enemies were now joined by an incorrigible domestic one. By 1900, Habsburg officials were referring to Hungary as the “internal enemy,” der innere Feind. By 1905, Emperor Franz Joseph and his nephew and heir apparent Archduke Franz Ferdinand were actually drafting secret plans to invade Hungary, shutter its parliament, and bring the Hungarians back under Vienna’s control.
Invading Hungary would not be easy. Until 1867, Hungarian regiments had been scattered across the empire in the usual extraterritorial way, to dampen national sentiment and prevent the junction of political and military power in Budapest. But the Ausgleich authorized the Hungarians to raise their own army, the Honvéd. Technically, the Honvéd was just a national guard like the Austrian Landwehr, and the Hungarians were still required to furnish regiments of conscripts to the Austro-Hungarian “imperial and royal” joint army with its German language of command and culture. But Franz Joseph never stipulated the ratios of conscripts that would be directed to the regular army and the Honvéd, so in the decades after 1867, the Hungarian parliament opportunistically bulked up the Hungarian-speaking Honvéd and starved the German-speaking army.
The Austro-Hungarian War Ministry would try to redirect recruits from the Honvéd to the regular army on the perfectly reasonable argument that fewer than 45 percent of the troops recruited east of the Leitha in any given year were actually Hungarian, but they were unfailingly thwarted by the Hungarian parliament.4 Since Austro-Hungarian budgets had to be approved by both parliaments, the Hungarians got in the habit of slashing or vetoing army bills that would expand or modernize the regular army, which they viewed as a threat: German-drilled “Mamelukes” who might invade Hungary and tear up the Ausgleich. Not content merely to bankrupt the joint army, the Hungarians aimed to demoralize it as well; politicians in Budapest demanded a steady campaign to “nationalize the Hungarian component of the regular army,” by which they meant wean it from German commands and culture and make it speak Hungarian.5
The Austro-Hungarian army withered away amid this infighting. In 1900, the joint army received a niggardly budget of 439 million crowns, which represented just 35 percent of Britain’s defense expenditures, 40 percent of Russia’s, 41 percent of Germany’s and 45 percent of France’s. Britain, which plowed most of its resources into the Royal Navy, still managed to spend more on the six divisions of its regular army than Austria-Hungary spent on its forty-eight divisions.6 For an empire that valued its great-power standing, this paucity of military funding was astonishing.
The Germans might have been expected to object to this withering away on military and political grounds. The Hungarians, after all, were their men in Vienna, mentored by Berlin since 1866 to ensure a pro-German policy in Vienna. This was another conspicuous problem after 1867: the Hungarians got dualism in large part because of German support. Fearing an Austro-French “revenge coalition” after the Prussian victories in 1866 and 1870–1871, Bismarck spent the 1870s doubling down in his support for the Hungarians inside Austria. Berlin and Budapest agreed that it would be a bad thing for the Habsburgs to try to reverse the verdict of 1866 and reenter German politics as the tribune of a “Catholic League” determined to weaken (Protestant) Bismarck’s hold on Germany’s Catholic regions.7 The Hungarians needed German support for the Ausgleich—without it Vienna might have cracked down on Budapest—and Bismarck gave that support because the Austro-Hungarian compromise seemed to kill two birds with one stone. It set an internal barrier against Austrian resurgence by cleaving the empire in half, yet it ensured that Austria-Hungary, at least in its western half, would retain its German character and culture, thus preserving Vienna as a German ally. Worried that the weakened Austria beaten in 1866 might adopt anti-Prussian policies or fall prey to pan-Slavs agitating among Austria’s Czechs, Poles, Croats, and other Slavs, Bismarck backed Budapest to the hilt and thus created the fruitless politics of dualism. Bad for Austria, it was good for Germany (in the short term), and that was all that mattered to Bismarck in the tense years after Königgrätz.8
Hungarian loyalty to the Germans was always expressed negatively: the Hungarians campaigned against any return to “Old Austrian” (i.e., independent) policy in the foreign ministry, and undercut all efforts at Austro-Russian rapprochement. The Hungarians also stymied every attempt by the Austrians to wriggle out of the Austro-German-Italian Triple Alliance, created in 1882. Although the Italians openly coveted Austrian South Tyrol, Trieste, and Dalmatia, the Hungarians vetoed every army bill that included fortifications or troops for Austria’s threatened crown lands. The Austrians, a French official concluded, were trapped in the pact by dualism, by “a Prusso-Magyar clique in the foreign ministry” that served German interests more than Austrian ones.9
The once vaunted Austrian army faded away after 1900. One of the biggest armies in 1866, it had become one of the smallest by 1914. It had just 355,000 troops and embarrassingly small quantities of field artillery, shells, and machine guns, which were the new coin of modern warfare.
These depressing data points acquired more than statistical significance during the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. Evicted from Germany and Italy in 1866, Austria-Hungary had embraced a new, hopefully revivifying role as Balkanmacht or Balkan power. Turning his gaze south after Königgrätz, Emperor Franz Joseph planned to open an Austrian corridor across Serbia and Macedonia to Salonika and the Aegean. A refurbished Austria-Hungary would inherit the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire and radiate power and influence from new ports on the Mediterranean. To this end, Vienna had occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878 and annexed it in 1908, risking a war with Russia and Serbia to enforce its sphere of influence. Now, in 1912–1913, Franz Joseph watched aghast as the Serbs, who saw themselves as more logical heirs to Turkey-in-Europe than Austria was, hunted the Turks (and then the Bulgarians) out of the formerly Ottoman provinces of Kosovo and Macedonia, both of which lay athwart the route to Salonika. Vienna was expected to intervene forcefully in the wars to ensure that Belgrade did not convert the rout of the Turks into a vast accretion of Serbian power; it tried but failed. Incensed by the Serbian freelancing, which raked in Macedonia and thrust impudently across the Austrian-administered Sanjak of Novipazar to seize the Albanian ports of Scutari (Shkodër) and Durazzo (Durrës), Emperor Franz Joseph ordered the mobilization of five corps to terrify the Serbs and make them retreat. Nothing happened: the Hungarian parliament refused funds for the venture, and the Austrian parliament�
��filled with Serbophile Slavs—enacted a month-long filibuster to deny funds there as well.
Desperate, the emperor turned to Wall Street’s Kuhn Loeb and Co. for a $25 million loan that paid for the spectacle of Austro-Hungarian regiments reporting to their depots singing Serbian anthems and cursing their own monarch. In Austria’s Czech provinces, mothers and wives of reservists lay across the rails to prevent their men from entraining for the front. The Czechs, who had one of the most sophisticated cultures of the empire, had become the monarchy’s weakest link. Political privileges revoked in the seventeenth century had never been restored, and the Czechs nursed a deep resentment of this as well as their subordination to ethnic Germans in the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. While two hundred thousand Serbian troops overran the western Balkans, twelve thousand demoralized Austrians filtered into Bosnia—hardly a fearsome deterrent. Problems in Vienna further undercut the effort. The general staff chief was forced to resign at the peak of the crisis (for being insufficiently aggressive), and the Austro-Hungarian war minister’s resignation promptly followed: he was accused of speculating on the shares of firms to which he intended to award military contracts. No sooner were replacements named than the monarchy was racked by the Redl Affair—news that forty-seven-year-old Colonel Alfred Redl had been selling German and Austrian military secrets to the Russians since 1905.
Austria’s planned intervention to arrest Serbia fizzled and the empire seemed to teeter on the brink. The Austro-Hungarian general staff studied Serbia’s annexations in the two Balkan Wars and concluded that the new territories would shortly furnish Belgrade with the men and resources to double the strength of the Serbian army, from two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand—bigger, in other words, than the peacetime establishment of the Habsburg army. General Blasius Schemua, the outgoing general staff chief, direly concluded that Austria-Hungary would no longer be able even to contemplate a war with Russia and Serbia—“our forces will no longer be sufficient for both,” surely the greatest understatement of 1913.10
The rhetoric in Vienna on the eve of 1914 recalled 1859 and 1866, when the Habsburgs had reviled the threats from Piedmont and Prussia. Serbia was now described as the “Prussia” or the “Piedmont” of the Slav South, a rising regional power committed to its manifest destiny in the Balkans, just as Piedmont had unified Italy and Prussia had done with Germany. Serbian nationalists wanted nothing less than the Austro-Hungarian provinces of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Dalmatia, Slovenia, and southern Hungary—everywhere, in short, where Serbo-Croatian was spoken. Worse, there was widespread sympathy inside Austria-Hungary for the Serbs. Treated as second-class citizens by the Germans and Hungarians, Austria-Hungary’s Slavs viewed Serbian national unification as a harbinger of their own. “Our monarchy,” Archduke Franz Ferdinand growled, “must awake from its lethargy and proceed forcefully. Should it not do so, its role is played out.”
By 1913, no one wanted a forceful Austria-Hungary more than Germany. Flanked by the modernizing armies and navies of Britain, France, and Russia—which had allied in the anti-German Triple Entente in 1907—the Germans had been reduced to a single real ally: Austria-Hungary. Berlin could not imagine a world without Austria, and it began planning a great European war to smash Serbia and Russia and shore up Vienna. At a council of war in Potsdam in December 1912, the German kaiser had recommended an immediate war with Serbia, Russia, and France, using the pretext of Serbia’s gains in the Balkans. “Germany’s sword lies loose in the scabbard,” the kaiser assured Austria-Hungary’s military attaché before the Potsdam meeting. “You can count on us.”
As usual, however, the Austrians could not count on the Hungarians. Pressed by Vienna in 1913 to vote for increases in the army and navy, to expand the strategic railways toward Russia and the Balkans, and to add batteries of field artillery, the Hungarians again demurred. They would vote for nothing that would benefit the joint army or, with regard to new railways, anything that might benefit the Austrian as opposed to the Hungarian economy.
Despite Hungary’s obstinacy—or perhaps because of it—Berlin by 1914 was ready to risk all. Scheduled French and Russian military buildups would not be completed until after 1916. Germany’s was nearly complete. Austria-Hungary, which had shrunk from war during the Moroccan Crises of 1905 and 1911, needed somehow to be forced into the breach at Germany’s side. The Balkans had to be the place. The press in Austria was helpfully lamenting the impotence exhibited during the Balkan Wars. In mid-June 1914, the Österreichische Rundschau judged Serbian expansion “a second Königgrätz,” direly noting that “in 1866, we were expelled from the German Confederation and Italy; this time we were chased out of the Balkans.”11
The running had to stop, and when the fateful pistol shots rang out in Sarajevo two weeks later, killing the Habsburg crown prince and his wife, German leaders were secretly pleased. They felt certain that the murder of the Habsburg heir apparent and the arrest of a Bosnian Serb assassin would propel even the timid Austrians to war.
chapter1
The Sick Man of Europe
“Austria is the loser—the Schlemihl—of Europe,” a Vienna newspaper scoffed in February 1913. “No one likes us and every disaster befalls us.” Only the “Sick Man of Europe,” the decrepit Ottoman Empire, which had just lost provinces in North Africa and the Balkans to hungry new powers, could compete with Austria for the title of “world’s biggest loser.”1 Indeed, 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.
Austria’s weakness emanated from its quarreling, disaffected nationalities. The name “Austria” connoted Germanic uniformity, but the sprawling empire was far more than its German-speaking core around Vienna, Graz, Salzburg, and Innsbruck. In 1913, Austria was Europe’s second-largest country (after Russia), with Europe’s third-largest population (after Russia and Germany). But only 12 million of those 52 million Austrians were Germans, and therein lay the problem. The average “Austrian” in 1913 was a Slav. The monarchy, which ran from the Swiss border in the west all the way to Russia in the east, included 8.5 million Czechs and Slovaks, 5.5 million Croats and Serbs, 5 million Poles, 4 million Ukrainians, and 1.3 million Slovenes. Slavs constituted 50 percent of the Austrian population. Plus there were nearly as many Hungarians as Germans in the monarchy—10 million, or 19 percent.
These Hungarians, who had arrived from Central Asia in the ninth century, were a unique racial islet, speaking a unique language, Magyar. Their existence was defined by fear: the fear of being mastered by the Germans or swallowed up by the Slavs. This gave the Hungarians a bullying spirit, a determination to “Magyarize” everyone around them in order to augment their own small numbers and nip ethnic competition in the bud. The most immediately affected were the Rumanians of Austria. Three million strong—6 percent of the imperial population—they lived cheek by jowl with the Hungarians in the Carpathian basin and were under constant pressure to give up their language and culture and speak Magyar instead.
Strong leadership and a spirit of fair play in Vienna might have tempered these problems, but Emperor Franz Joseph had always come across as a weakling and a temporizer. He’d lost the only war he led personally, to the French in 1859, and then lost the next war, to the Prussians in 1866, after entrusting command to a general who seemed brilliant but turned out to be incompetent. This made Franz Joseph fundamentally pessimistic and unsure of himself. To keep critics and issues requiring hard choices at bay, he surrounded himself after 1866 with a few trusted yes-men and gatekeepers, like his long-serving friend and general staff chief General Friedrich Beck. This group implemented the emperor’s only fixed policy, which was to postpone but never attack problems. They were, as Winston Churchill put it, “a curious small coterie . . . an ancient band of survivors, eminently Victorian, unswervingly faithful,” but woefully out of touch.2 Lest anyone try to get in touch with modern times, Franz Joseph made sure the
y couldn’t: he clapped Europe’s most rigid protocol on the Habsburg courts in Vienna and Budapest, leaving no opening for anyone to speak to the emperor unless spoken to first. “It’s like a musical comedy without the music,” an American traveler observed.3
The wars against the French in 1859 and the Prussians in 1866 had redefined the Habsburg monarchy. It had been a bona fide great power until then, regarded as the equal of England, France, and Russia and greater than Prussia or Italy. After those wars—in which the Austrian generals had squandered opportunities and lost every battle—the monarchy wasn’t quite a laughingstock, but almost.
Loser of two wars in his youth, Emperor Franz Joseph I—seen here at the Hofburg in Vienna—was an unimaginative pessimist in old age, the worst sort of leader for a fragile multinational empire adapting uneasily to the twentieth century.
Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien
The defeat of 1859 triggered soul-searching in Vienna. Franz Joseph’s confidence was shaken. He conceded a parliament for the first time—the Reichsrat in 1860—and then wavered between forms of government. In the 1860s, Austria began to grapple seriously with the problem of nationalism (how much power and representation to give the non-German peoples of the monarchy), which would dog it until the end in 1918. One method of coping was “centralizing,” which involved concentrating imperial powers in the capital and exercising them in the provinces through a repressive, German-speaking bureaucracy. The other method was “federalism,” relaxing the hold of the emperor and the bureaucrats in Vienna and letting the provinces govern themselves through their own peoples and languages. In the 1860s, this generally meant through aristocrats—the “hundred families” of the monarchy, such as the Windischgrätz clan of Austria, the Esterházys of Hungary, and the Schwarzenbergs of Bohemia—but also local diets or assemblies and their national clubs, including Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia, Magyars in Hungary, Croats in Zagreb, Poles in Galicia, Italians in Trieste, and Slovenes in Ljubljana.
A Mad Catastrophe Page 3