How did the Habsburg Empire Survive?

‘Historians were quick to write it off’

R.J.W. Evans is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Oxford

After the Habsburg monarchy collapsed in the last months of 1918, historians were quick to write it off (like its Ottoman neighbour) as an anachronism long doomed to extinction for its reliance on dynastic authority as a basic principle of rule. While that monarchy existed, most of its subjects would have been surprised, perhaps offended, by their verdict. The Habsburg lands, loosely known as Austria, were not an unusual polity in earlier centuries, especially when consolidated in the 1740s-80s by a bout of effective state-building under two famous sovereigns, the ‘enlightened absolutists’ (as they have been termed) Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II. Badly shaken soon thereafter by the challenge from revolutionary France, Austria’s deteriorating internal situation nevertheless only became generally apparent in the upheavals of 1848, as national grievances were conjoined to social ones and threatened to undermine a congeries of territories and peoples which lacked any ethnic group with more than a slim relative majority.

However, that experience of breakdown actually reinvigorated the monarchy, particularly when strengthened in 1867 by a settlement with Hungary, the most cohesive as well as the most refractory of its domestic vested political interests. Habsburg rule, often even-handed and reasonably efficient, was either taken for granted or seen as preferable to the alternatives. A half-century of comparative prosperity, order, and representative government ensued. Austria-Hungary experienced episodes of disorder – but hardly more so than the United Kingdom with its Irish question, the France of the Dreyfus Affair, the Germany of the Kulturkampf, or the Russia of the 1905 Revolution. On the eve of the Great War the Dual Monarchy was still regarded as a major power and a rather conservative and cumbrous, but reliable, guardian of the international order.

Yet those censorious historians were right, too. The shock of protracted and increasingly total war aggravated and concentrated all the weaknesses of the precarious state system which had previously manifested themselves separately. There was no longer scope to contain them, or play one off against another. Over recent decades historiography has grown rather kinder towards the old monarchy. But it remains significant that no serious effort has ever been made to reconstruct any part of it.

‘It did not pose an existential threat to other powers’

Jakub S. Beneš is Associate Professor in Central European History at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies

The Habsburg Empire did not survive the world war that it helped unleash in 1914 and when it collapsed in 1918 many thought that it had survived far too long. But before the First World War few imagined it would soon disappear. For centuries it seemed an indispensable feature of the map of Europe.

Geopolitically, the Habsburg Empire after the 16th century lacked the strength to assert itself as a continental hegemon and thus did not pose an existential threat to other European powers. But it remained mighty enough to be a useful, even critical, ally in wars against would-be hegemons, especially France; its manpower and tenacity were decisive in Napoleon’s eventual defeat.

Culturally, the early modern Empire took very seriously its self-ascribed mission to defend the Catholic faith, facing down both the Ottoman Turks and Protestantism. The secularising and centralising reforms of Empress Maria Theresa, herself a devout Catholic, and her less pious son Joseph II attenuated the Empire’s identity as guardian of the faith but did not entirely undermine it. The Habsburg domains long remained a bastion of ultramontane Catholicism.

With the rise of nationalism, some began to see the multiethnic empire as an anachronism hindering the ‘natural’ development of ethnic nations into their own states. Yet smaller peoples within its boundaries increasingly saw it as a haven and guarantor of their own existence. In 1848, for instance, the Czech historian František Palacký wrote that if Austria (i.e. the Habsburg Empire) had not already existed, it would be in the general interest of humanity to create it as quickly as possible or else peoples like the Czechs would be swallowed up by mightier neighbours such as Germans or Russians. Many Hungarians, Croats, Slovenes, and others concurred. The Habsburg Empire came to embrace its new mission in practice (if not in theory), ensuring its survival into the 20th century. It finally collapsed when the Great War magnified another of its propensities, sometimes downplayed, to turn violently against its own people during crises: soon after Palacký wrote his defence of Austria, a Habsburg general bombarded revolutionary Prague into submission.

‘The Empire is built into the landscape of Central Europe’

Katalin Stráner is Lecturer in Liberal Arts at York St John University

The history of the late Habsburg Empire, in the decades preceding the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914, is often discussed in terms of crisis. The fin de siècle saw the onset of nationalism, antisemitism, and constitutional and migration crises: cumulatively, these are some of the factors associated with the collapse of the Empire at the war’s end. At the same time, it has also been recognised that the Empire survived as long as it did because it managed to create enough loyal, even if linguistically, ethnically, and culturally diverse, citizens.

For many of those living in the new ‘nation states’ in the former Habsburg lands, the Empire soon became a memory, something that happened before the First World War: Emperor Franz Joseph inspecting military units; Empress ‘Sisi’ radiant in ball gowns or on horseback; aristocrats and dashing military officers waltzing at balls in Vienna; the lost world described in the works of Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig. Traditional narratives of the Empire often focus on its leaders. But empire is also the story of ordinary people: doctors, domestic servants, factory workers, mothers, nurses, peasants, schoolchildren, soldiers, and teachers. And it was through the diversity of these people that complex legacies of the Habsburg Empire have survived its collapse: through them, the Empire has been built into the landscape of Central Europe.

Empires are often seen as laboratories of diversity. Diversity, however, is not the result of peaceful integration: ethnic and political violence marked the history of the Habsburg Empire and its aftermath, when, in the words of Hannah Arendt, the ‘last remnants of solidarity … evaporated’ between the nationalities of the Dual Monarchy. However, practices of empire remained, in the form of legal codes, architecture, and culture; the proliferation of strudel and its regional variations – cheese, cabbage, and poppy seed – is just one small (delicious) example. More importantly, however, the Empire has survived because it remained a framework for subsequent debates over belonging and difference across East Central Europe: the nationalist movements that destabilised the Empire yielded ethnically diverse successor states such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia which faced similar challenges of how to integrate their ethnic minorities.

‘The Empire thrived on shared cultural moments’

Markian Prokopovych is Professor of Modern European Cultural History at Durham University

It is telling that, nearly a century since the publication of Oszkár Jászi’s The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1929, the question of why the Empire survived, rather than why it dissolved, is now the subject of scholarly debate. Historians are no longer convinced by 20th-century teleological narratives of ‘decline and fall’ that dwell on Vienna’s failure to handle its multiple nationalisms. On the contrary, they scrutinise the Empire’s extraordinary capacity to prosper from diversity right up to the outbreak of war in 1914.

Astonishingly productive architects, from Pietro Nobile at the turn of the 19th century to Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer a century later, ensured that Habsburg cities that today are in Italy or Ukraine – Trieste, Gorizia, Lviv, or Chernivtsi, for example – looked remarkably alike. Monuments to Habsburg rulers and ‘Viennese cafés’ on public squares strengthen this sentiment. Later in the 19th century museum curators travelled across Austria-Hungary to learn the best museological practices and fashions of display from each other. Operatic performances brought under one roof singers of various backgrounds and ethnicity. At the premiere of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde in Budapest in 1901, Czech tenor Karel Burian sang in Italian while prima donna Italia Vasquez, native of Trieste, sang bel canto style in Hungarian (though the audience could not understand her, which became the subject of local jokes). What would have been a fiasco in Germany was celebrated in the Hungarian capital, with a full house and standing ovations. The Empire thrived on such shared cultural moments, supported as they were by Vienna’s funds and bureaucratic apparatus.

Certainly, the Empire was not without tensions. In the 20th century the fragile symbiosis that allowed for the coexistence of various national projects under Vienna’s watchful eye collapsed along with the empire that nurtured it. But in a contemporary world of nation states, a monument to Emperor Franz Joseph continues to stand in Ukrainian Chernivtsi despite the onslaught of missiles, while a waiter in Trieste or Gorizia will proudly tell you that local food is closer to that of Austria or Hungary than Italy.