Austro-Hungarian Empire

In Cisleithania in the later 1890s the sharpening of the Czech-German conflict in Bohemia led to the paralysis of the parliamentary bodies in Prague and Vienna. The emperor resorted to governments composed of civil servants, and budgets were regularly implemented by emergency decree, until electoral reform in 1905 held out the prospect that the squabbling bourgeois nationalist politicians would be swamped by the new mass Social Democratic and Christian Social parties. Immensely more serious, meanwhile, was the rise to power in Hungary of the critics of the Compromise: the negotiations for the 1897 renewal of the Commercial Compromise dragged on until 1906; the demand arose for the distinctive treatment of the Hungarian contingents in the Imperial and Royal Army; and in 1905 the adherents of the 1867 system were defeated at the polls. In reply, Francis Joseph subjected Hungary to virtual martial law, and there was again widespread talk abroad of the impending break-up of the Dual Monarchy. Unlike the constitutional upsets over nationality questions, the Hungarian Crisis of 1903-1906 was a confrontation between the sovereign and a “master race” (the Magyars), and was the most serious domestic crisis in the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was resolved when Francis Joseph threatened to impose simple universal suffrage in Hungary—which would have put an end to Magyar supremacy over the other nationalities. At this, the oppositions agreed to take offence on the basis of the 1867 settlement, leaving the Common Army untouched, whereupon the king for his part agreed to accept an electoral reform of their devising. The Compromise had been saved, but at the expense of the minority nationalities. Again, Francis Joseph had settled for a deal with the Magyar elite at the price of further alienation of the Romanians and Slavs of Hungary; while the disillusioned Catholic Croats even began to make common cause with their erstwhile rivals, the Orthodox Serbs.

Not surprisingly, this decade of upheaval saw no great adventures in foreign affairs. As Germany drew closer to Russia again, and as Britain and the Balkan allies went their separate ways, the empire was fortunate that Russia was so heavily preoccupied with East Asia in the decade preceding the Russo-Japanese War. In 1897 Austria-Hungary and Russia reached an agreement to cooperate to prevent upheavals in the Near East—an agreement that made a notable contribution to the reductions of tensions in Europe generally for the next ten years.

In Cisleithania electoral reform proved to be no panacea, as nationalist conflicts soon invaded the new mass parties, and parliament was again in deadlock by 1914. Although in Hungary the parliamentary system functioned more effectively, especially under the firm hand of István Tisza and the “1867” Liberals after 1910, the regime continued to alienate the non-Magyar nationalities. These discontents were familiar ones, however, and none of them threatened the actual existence of the Dual Monarchy in the way the great Hungarian crisis of 1903-1906 had done. The external threat to the empire, by contrast, increased in these years. The crisis over the annexation of Bosnia by the empire in 1908 put an end to the entente with Russia; the alternative British alliance option had disappeared with the conclusion of the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907; Germany continued to be unwilling to risk war with Russia over Balkan questions; and Austria-Hungary was faced with an increasingly vociferous nationalist regime in Serbia that notoriously coveted the south-Slav territories of the Dual Monarchy. Vienna was to all intents and purposes isolated, and in 1912-1913 had to watch helplessly as the Balkan states dismembered the Ottoman Empire in Europe, and as plans seemed to be maturing for a second Balkan league, under Russian auspices, that would proceed to partition the Dual Monarchy. This threat had become a virtual obsession with Austrian statesmen by the summer of 1914; and faced with the provocation of the Sarajevo Incident, and finding Germany for once willing to lend support, they decided for the first time in 40 years that only military action could put an end to the threat to the integrity and Great Power status of the empire.

Ironically, the war that was started to preserve the status of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as an independent Great Power was to destroy that status even before defeat and dissolution overcame the Dual Monarchy. With the British and Russian options closed to it, the empire found itself totally dependent on its German ally, in whose plans for European domination there was no room for a genuinely independent Austria-Hungary. The empire’s military reverses only increased its economic and military dependence on its powerful ally; and even its military successes—in Poland and later in the Balkans—only led to acrimonious debates over the spoils in which the empire suffered successive humiliations. An attempt by the new emperor Charles I to conclude a separate peace in 1917 came to grief over the territorial claims of Italy; and the furore its subsequent revelation aroused among ethnic Germans inside and outside the empire forced the emperor to subordinate the Dual Monarchy to Germany in almost every respect (Treaty of Spa, May 1918). Until this point, however, it had been by no means certain that defeat would entail the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy. Internally, critics of the 1867 system still confined themselves to demands for more influence within, rather than independence outside, the empire; and by 1917 those states that had territorial claims on the empire had been defeated. There was still considerable support in the West for preserving the Dual Monarchy as a check on German power in the post-war world, provided it was prepared to demonstrate its independence by federal reform that would end the domination enjoyed by the German and Magyar elites that held sway under the 1867 system. It was the refusal of the elites to contemplate any such reform, and their defiant gamble on German victory to preserve the existing order, that determined the Western powers to lend support to the demands of groups of nationalist exiles for the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy. With the onset of defeat in the autumn of 1918 these groups found increasing support within the empire too, and disintegration set in. A last desperate bid by the emperor to save the Dual Monarchy by constitutional reform along federal lines was rejected as firmly as ever in Budapest: the Compromise of 1867 had maintained its stranglehold to the end.