I.

Introduction

Austro-Hungarian Empire or Dual Monarchy, name by which the Central and Eastern European territorial bloc—chiefly modern Austria and Hungary, but also including modern Slovakia and the Czech Republic, much of modern Poland, Slovenia, Croatia, and later Bosnia and Herzegovina—owing allegiance to the Habsburg monarchy was known from its reorganization on the basis of the Compromise (Ausgleich) of December 1867 to its demise in November 1918 following World War I.

II.

Background

Ever since it had been re-established as a European Great Power at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the agglomeration of territories ruled by the Habsburgs, known since 1804 as the Austrian Empire, had faced a number of threats; internally from nationalists and liberals dissatisfied with the centralized, absolutist regime, and externally from ambitious states such as Piedmont and Prussia that challenged the dominant position it had acquired in Italy and Germany by the peace settlement of 1815. For almost half a century Habsburg rulers managed to contain these threats with the aid of such centripetal forces as the army, the Roman Catholic Church, and the bureaucracy, and with the benevolent tolerance, and sometimes armed support, of its “super-Power” partners in the anti-Napoleonic coalition—Great Britain and Russia. Thus, it emerged from the welter of constitutional experiments, political conflicts, and wars that characterized the revolutions of 1848 in Central Europe with the absolute power of the new Emperor Francis Joseph I apparently restored. By 1859, however, having forfeited Russian support by its attitude of unfriendly neutrality in the Crimean War, the Habsburg monarchy had suffered military defeat and loss of territory in Italy at the hands of France and Piedmont, and faced a growing Prussian challenge to its authority as head of the German Confederation. Internal weaknesses were exacerbating these problems: in the war of 1859 the monarchy had had to retain forces in Hungary to repress simmering discontent; and the financial situation was not helped by the unwillingness of the German liberal bourgeoisie to lend money to an irresponsible absolutist regime. The early 1860s, therefore, saw a number of constitutional experiments designed to bring internal harmony and equip the monarchy to defend its remaining interests in Central Europe. The February Patent of 1861 established a constitutional regime that, although it was boycotted by the Hungarians and failed to satisfy many Slavs, was welcomed by the Emperor’s German subjects; but in 1866 attempts to secure a political settlement with the Magyar elite in Hungary were overtaken by the Seven Weeks’ War, the defeat of Austria and her expulsion from the German Confederation.

III.

The Compromise

The shock of defeat speedily produced the Compromise of December 1867, concluded between Francis Joseph and his Hungarian subjects. Francis Joseph reigned, separately but in parallel, as Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary—the Dual Monarchy that was the core of the system. In the rest of the empire (Cisleithania) outside the Kingdom of Hungary (Transleithania) the existing constitutional arrangements of 1861 continued, with some subsequent modifications (see below), until 1918. Hungary attained a large measure of autonomy in its internal affairs, including a parliament in Budapest in which the Magyar elite maintained its domination, by dint of a complex system of “electoral geometry” over the Romanian and Slovak minorities. By a subsidiary compromise (Nagodba) of 1868 the Kingdom of Croatia was granted a measure of autonomy within the Kingdom of Hungary. However, the emperor-king retained control—through a Common Ministry for Foreign Affairs, a Common War Ministry, and a Common Ministry of Finance to provide for them—of foreign policy and the Imperial and Royal Army (as opposed to the “home guard” forces that fell within the purview of the parliaments at Vienna and Budapest). Matters of common economic concern—tariffs, the Austro-Hungarian Bank, and the quota contributed to common funds by the two halves of the empire—were regulated by a Commercial Compromise that was subject to a revision every ten years.

These arrangements lasted in essence until the end of the empire in 1918. In their defence, it can be said that, whereas the repeated failures of the period 1848 to 1865 had shown that no solution could please all the 11 races of the empire, and that no system that ignored Magyar wishes could bring any stability, the Compromise allowed the monarchy to continue to function as a Great Power for the next 40 years and proved the most durable of all the constitutional arrangements embarked on by Francis Joseph. On the other hand, the Compromise did not put an end to political conflict: even in Hungary, the common institutions remained an object of suspicion, and between 1888 and 1912 it was to prove impossible to secure Hungarian consent to an increase in the size of the Common Army. This weakened the empire’s standing as a Great Power; as did the undermining of the empire’s Serbian and Romanian alliances by Hungarian interference in the affairs of Croatia and the Magyarization policies inflicted on Romanian and South Slav minorities within the Hungarian Kingdom. This was why in the years before World War I the heir apparent, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, planned to break the power of the Magyar elite when he came to the throne. However, the old emperor, although he never shrank from confrontation when it was a question of upholding his prerogatives in foreign and military affairs, was never prepared to jeopardize the 1867 settlement by challenging the power of the Magyars in Hungary. Indeed, he even dropped plans for constitutional reform in Cisleithania, such as a plan of 1871 to appease the Czechs by conceding a measure of autonomy to the Kingdom of Bohemia, which the Magyars regarded as a dangerous precedent for change. While the Compromise produced a workable and long-lasting solution to the problems of the 1860s, therefore, it also served over the years to confine the empire in a straitjacket that impeded the chances of further constructive reform.

IV.

The Heyday of the System

For 20 years or so after 1867 the empire enjoyed a measure of security at home and security abroad. Calm at last prevailed in Hungary under the firm hand of Prime Minister Kálmán Tisza, even though his “1867” party of Liberals loyal to the Compromise remained implacable in its hostility towards those inhabitants of the kingdom who refused to adopt Magyar culture; and Austria experienced a period of reform and prosperity under German Liberal governments (1867-1879) that were followed by the Iron Ring—a coalition of conservative, aristocratic, clerical, and Slav elements, under Francis Joseph’s childhood friend, Count Eduard Taaffe, who strove with some success to keep the nationalities “in a balanced state of dissatisfaction”. (The Compromise, an agreement between the king and the Magyars, did not establish the political supremacy of any particular national group in Cisleithania.)

By 1871 the empire’s foreign problems had been simplified by its retreat from Italy and Germany, and its main concern was henceforth to maintain control of its markets, retain its status as a Great Power in the Near East, and above all to prevent the growth of expansionist nation states beyond its borders that might lay claim to its South Slav or Romanian territories. This danger would, of course, only become real if such states could secure the support of another Great Power that could defeat the Imperial and Royal Army; and in their efforts to forestall such a fatal combination Habsburg statesmen showed a high degree of flexibility and ingenuity in adapting themselves to the changing international situation over 40 years after the Compromise settlement. War, given the empire’s relative weakness and Francis Joseph’s experiences in the 1850s and 1860s, was definitely not seen as a desirable option; and the Magyars, at times the most bellicose and anti-Russian of his subjects, never managed to influence Austro-Hungarian foreign policy in that direction. In the 1870s and 1880s Francis Joseph’s foreign ministers manoeuvred successfully between several available options. They joined blocs of like-minded powers to resist Russian attempts to control Balkan states—as with Great Britain at the Congress of Berlin (1878), where Austria-Hungary secured, in the form of occupation rights in Bosnia, a guarantee against the formation of a big Serbian state on its southern borders; and the Mediterranean Entente of 1887 with Britain and Italy, supported briefly even by Germany. They concluded defensive alliances against direct Russian attack (with Germany in 1879 and Romania in 1883); they concluded alliances to neutralize and influence potential troublemakers (with Serbia in 1881, Italy—the Triple Alliance—in 1882, and Romania in 1883); and they even managed to reach agreements with Russia itself that helped to stabilize the Balkan situations for several years (the Three Emperors’ League of 1873-1878; and the Three Emperors Alliance of 1881-1887). By all these devices the empire managed to achieve security short of war.

V.

Crises at Home, Passivity Abroad

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.

VI.

The External Threat

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.

VII.

The World War and the End of the Austro-Hungarian 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.