The First World War and the Habsburg state’s metamorphosis

The Great War and the Transformation of Habsburg Central Europe, Pieter Judson and Tara Zahra, Oxford University Press, £25

Of all the major powers in the First World War, Austria-Hungary is the one whose wartime experience is most absent from the popular historical imagination. It plays a leading role in the prelude, when the assassination of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and its aftermath plunges Europe into crisis, but then rapidly fades into the background once the fighting begins in earnest. It reappears, if at all, at the very end, only to implode under the weight of its own contradictions.

It is an absence with a simple explanation. Generations of historians interpreted the First World War as the catalyst for, rather than the cause of, Austria-Hungary’s disappearance. Its war was thus only really considered interesting insofar as it confirmed what we already knew.

As an anachronistic, polyglot mix of peoples and political entities, Austria-Hungary seemed destined to be replaced by more modern, rational, democratic nation-states; a dissolution presaged by decades of nationalist agitation in the run up to the war. In AJP Taylor’s classic The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918, it enters as a walking corpse. It is ‘lifeless’, turned almost immediately into an appendage of Germany’s ‘bid for the mastery of Europe’ before it is abandoned by its nations one by one.

Indeed, as the historians Pieter Judson and Tara Zahra write in The Great War and the Transformation of Habsburg Central Europe: ‘The very idea that Austria-Hungary’s collapse was somehow necessary and even inevitable became a founding ideological claim crucial to the legitimation of the successor states that replaced the Empire.’ 

Yet Judson and Zahra are leading representatives of a very different school of thought. One that over the last half century has challenged just about every old consensus on the Habsburg Monarchy and its demise. 

In their reading, it was not a moribund empire waiting idly by to be consigned to history, but a dynamic modern state that could successfully respond to social, economic and political challenges. Far from a prison of nations, its legal and political institutions helped national movements thrive. And the nations they claimed to represent were not fixed entities poised to clash over territory, but ambiguous and amorphous identities that comfortably co-existed with wider social, religious and imperial loyalties.

Judson’s 2016 The Habsburg Empire: A New History presented this case in a wider historical perspective, but his and Zahra’s new book takes the argument a logical step further. If ‘the Habsburg Monarchy was not in a dire condition on the eve of the war, then war itself can no longer be treated as a mere postscript to its biography. Instead, the war also becomes a constitutive factor in the Empire’s dissolution’.

They trace the collapse of the monarchy not to the amorphous forces of nationalism around which democratic politics in Austria-Hungary largely revolved, but to the concrete actions of the generally incompetent and paranoid blue-blooded elite that staffed the instruments of great power politics – the military, navy and diplomatic service. 

It was this elite that was responsible for the outbreak of the war, the total debacle of its early prosecution, and the slow erosion of public trust in state institutions that marked the subsequent two years. The undemocratic, coercive, often exploitative relationship established between military state and society during the war ultimately sowed the seeds of the monarchy’s demise.

Insofar as there was an Austro-Hungarian state, it consisted only of an army, navy and diplomatic corps under the direct rule of the emperor-king. Beyond this, the trappings associated with our modern nation-states – citizenship, flags, educational systems, trade policy, parliaments, governments, and much else – were divided between two entities: Hungary and ‘Austria’.

By 1914, politics and society had been democratising for decades in both entities. Though Hungary lagged considerably in this respect, the Austrian half of the monarchy had granted universal manhood suffrage in 1907. Through a flourishing print culture, expanding education, political parties, social movements, trade unions, voluntary societies and electoral politics, ever more people were becoming aware of and involved in the business of government and transformation of society. 

The common institutions by contrast were stubbornly resistant to democratisation and suspicious of all it produced. They were dominated at the highest levels by aristocrats from storied houses with long, extravagant names. For these cosmopolitan aristocrats, the rising salience of nationalism was seen as an existential danger. South Slav nationalism was viewed with an esepcially paranoid fury totally out of proportion to any immediate danger it posed to the integrity of the monarchy. The decision to annex Bosnia in 1908, the show trial of dozens of Croatian Serb politicians in 1909, and the reaction to the Balkan Wars in 1912-3 were all coloured by this anxiety. As was the ultimate decision to go to war in 1914. 

The military-diplomatic elite saw in the Great War an opportunity to reassert its lost primacy the only way it knew how: a virile war of conquest that would assuage any doubts about Austria-Hungary’s great power status and their ability to maintain it. In July 1914, Judson and Zahra write, Austria-Hungary ‘swiftly went from being a state, governed by long-term constitutional practice and administrative efficiency to a highly inefficient military dictatorship ruled by the paranoid and pessimist visions of small military and governmental cliques’. 

This in and of itself was not fatal for the monarchy. As the two historians lay out in fascinating detail, the state did not abandon its citizens but grew to care for them in unprecedented ways over the course of the war. Funds were established to care for widows and orphans while crippled soldiers received disability payments. An expansive system of refugee camps was built to accommodate those fleeing from far-flung regions of the monarchy overwhelmed by enemy forces. It housed well over 100,000 people in addition to hundreds of thousands more who were placed in private accommodation.

Millions of ordinary citizens proved willing and able to sacrifice their lives and livelihoods for the war effort. The state displayed a certain duty of care for that sacrifice. The issue was that it was all in vain. From its very first moments, the High Command proved itself totally incompetent and unprepared for the war it had got itself into. 

Initial mobilisation was thrown into disarray by the belated realisation that some troops already sent south would have to be sent north to fight Russia. In the first four months of the war, there were a million casualties with nothing to show for them. The High Command had not planned for labour shortages in key industries, nor for the loss of critical resources as a result of the Russian occupation of Galicia, nor for the refugee wave, nor for food shortages. It hadn’t even really planned to work with the civilian authorities that were essential for the unprecedented encroachment of the state into ever more areas of daily life.

To make matters worse, the paranoia around Slav nationalisms the military had carried into the war led to thousands of executions of civilians, the detention of tens of thousands more, and the arrest of many prominent political leaders. Such repression did little but alienate the population. ‘The wartime regime constantly demonstrated its mistrust for the Empire’s own citizens’, write Judson and Zahra, and ‘those citizens returned that mistrust with dividends.’ 

Despite military successes in 1915 thanks to significant German help, by 1916 the whole monarchy was suffering from severe deprivation. Food shortages hit ordinary people the hardest, but shortages of textiles, paper, metals, rubber, leather and much else also took their toll. Tensions rose between nationalities, between city and country, Jews and Christians, Austria and Hungary. Censorship had produced a void of information which people readily filled with rumours and conspiracies.  

The sudden death of the elderly Emperor-King Franz Joseph in November 1916 felt like an ominous sign that Austria-Hungary was teetering on the brink. In his accession manifesto, the new ruler Charles I promised to ‘do everything to banish in the shortest possible time the horrors and sacrifices of war’. He fired the chief of the general staff, the foreign minister, and recalled the Austrian parliament. But, in encouraging the relaxation of military dictatorship, ‘it was as if he had removed the pin from a grenade’. The military-diplomatic elite had trapped the country in a war it could not escape. 

They had seen the war as a way to bolster their own position, but by mid-1917 the widespread expectation was that civilian society would be repaid for its sacrifice with more power and recognition. In practice, that meant calls from nationalist leaders for the total re-organisation of the state along national lines, anathema to the existing elite and impossible to imagine during wartime. It also inevitably meant a social re-ordering in which aristocrats would no longer have exclusive right to use the fate of tens of millions to play at great power politics. 

Despite these calls, nationalism had little appreciable impact on the Austro-Hungarian war effort. Soldiers of dozens of nationalities fought and died bravely until the very end. Stories of, for example, mass Czech desertions on the eastern front were exaggerated by nationalist leaders for their own purposes. As the authors point out, there was no equivalent of the Irish Easter Rising, the military mutinies suffered by the French, or the social revolution that brought down Tsarist Russia. 

What ultimately brought down the monarchy in 1918 was something resemblinga mix of all three. Desertions and mutinies plagued the beleaguered army over the course of the year. Thousands of soldiers fled to the countryside where they joined roving bands of peasant militias. Urban masses swarmed city centres demanding social as well as national revolutions. 

Over four years of war, the state had completely exhausted itself. It could no longer feed or clothe its army, let alone the population at large. Eventually, civilian political leaders stepped up to fill the void. With declarations of self-determination and then independence, they ushered in a new era of history. 

In Judson and Zahra’s reading, it was not as dramatic a break as was traditionally assumed. Though the successor states mostly rejected the heritage of the Habsburgs in rhetoric, they built upon the state structures that had been built before and especially during the war.

Austria-Hungary’s wartime experience is thus recast. No longer the last gasps of a dying empire, but a crucial period of transition and transformation that shaped Europe’s 20th century.