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— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Austria-Hungary

14 min listen · Ch. 1 of 8
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  • Austria-Hungary was, for roughly half a century, the second-largest country in Europe by area, surpassed only by Russia. From 1867 to 1918, it held together a patchwork of a dozen or more distinct peoples under a single emperor who wore two crowns: Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary. Within its borders lived Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Croatians, Slovaks, Slovenes, Romanians, Serbs, Ukrainians, Italians, and more. The rivers running through this territory drained into four separate seas: the Baltic, the Black, the Adriatic, and the North. How did such a sprawling, fractious empire hold together for fifty years? And what, in the end, tore it apart?

  • Hungary's long and bitter relationship with the Habsburg dynasty stretched back to 1526, when defeat at the Battle of Mohacs brought the Habsburgs into the Hungarian kingdom. Over the following centuries, the Ottomans pushed the Habsburgs to a narrow north-western strip of what had once been a vast Hungarian realm. Only after the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718 did the full territory of the old Hungarian kingdom pass from Ottoman to Habsburg hands. That history of conquest, resistance, and suppressed autonomy fed Hungarian resentment for generations.

    The revolution of 1848 brought matters to a head. Hungary rose up demanding self-government, then full independence, only to see the uprising crushed by Austrian troops backed by Russian military assistance. The Habsburgs replaced the limited autonomy Hungary had previously enjoyed with direct rule from Vienna. That wound never fully healed.

    The chance for change came through two humiliating Austrian defeats in the 1860s. First, Austria lost a large swath of northern Italy following the Second Italian War of Independence. Then, in 1866, defeat in the Austro-Prussian War ended Austrian leadership of the German Confederation. Together, these setbacks forced Vienna to negotiate. The Hungarian political leader Ferenc Deák pressed the Habsburgs hard. On the 28th of July 1867, Emperor Franz Joseph, newly crowned as King of Hungary, signed laws that gave birth to the Dual Monarchy and codified a new constitutional arrangement between the two equal halves.

  • Three ministries alone were shared by both halves of the empire: foreign affairs, defence, and a finance ministry tasked only with funding those two. Everything else, from education to domestic courts to taxation, was handled separately by Austria and Hungary. The two halves even maintained separate parliaments: the Imperial Council in Cisleithania, and the Diet of Hungary, known as the National Assembly, in Transleithania.

    The abbreviation system used on official institutions reflected this split. The label k.u.k., meaning Imperial and Royal, applied to institutions common to both halves, including the navy and, during wartime, the army itself. The common army only adopted this dual label in 1889, at Hungarian insistence. Cisleithanian bodies used k.k., meaning Imperial-Royal, where the second word referred specifically to the Crown of Bohemia. Hungarian institutions used K.u. or M.k., meaning Royal Hungarian.

    Financial arrangements between the two halves were never settled permanently. The Compromise of 1867 allocated 70 percent of shared expenditures to Austria and 30 percent to Hungary. That proportion had to be renegotiated every ten years, generating political turbulence with each cycle. By 1907, Hungary's share had risen to 36.4 percent. Bosnia and Herzegovina, occupied in 1878 and annexed outright in 1908, sat outside both halves entirely, administered by the joint finance ministry as a kind of third territory belonging to neither. A constitution for Bosnia was eventually promulgated in 1910, fulfilling a promise made at the time of annexation.

  • Article 19 of the Austrian Basic State Act of 1867 declared that all races of the empire had equal rights, and that all customary languages were to enjoy equality in schools, offices, and public life. What was left unresolved, fatally, was which languages counted as customary. That gap turned language into the most contentious political issue the empire faced.

    In the Kingdom of Hungary, a separate Nationalities Law of 1868 granted individual but not communal language rights to Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs, and others. Beginning with the Primary Education Act of 1879 and the Secondary Education Act of 1883, however, the Hungarian state steadily narrowed those rights. After 1875, all Slovak-language schools above the elementary level were closed, including the only three Slovak high schools, located in Revuca, Turciansky Svaty Martin, and Klastor pod Znievom. As of June 1907, all schools in Hungary were required to ensure that after the fourth grade, pupils could express themselves fluently in Hungarian.

    The most explosive moment in the Austrian half came in April 1897, when the Austrian Prime Minister Count Kasimir Felix Badeni granted Czech equal standing with German in the internal government of Bohemia. German nationalist anger erupted across the empire. The Crown dismissed Badeni. Emperor Franz Joseph himself spoke German, Hungarian, and Czech fluently, and Croatian, Serbian, Polish, and Italian to some degree, a practical acknowledgment that language was not a private matter but a governing necessity. The old Charles University in Prague, which had been dominated by German speakers, was split into separate German and Czech faculties in 1882, a division that mirrored the deeper fracture running through every institution of the empire.

  • After Austria's expulsion from German affairs in 1866, the empire turned its ambitions south. The Balkans were alive with nationalist movements seeking independence from Ottoman rule, and both Russia and Austria-Hungary saw an opening. Russia positioned itself as the protector of Slavic and Orthodox peoples. Austria envisioned a multi-ethnic empire under Vienna's authority stretching through the region.

    Count Gyula Andrassy, a Hungarian who served as Foreign Minister from 1871 to 1879, built his entire foreign policy around blocking Russian expansion and restraining Serbian ambitions. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, he succeeded in forcing Russia to scale back the sweeping terms of the Treaty of San Stefano, which had threatened to create a large pro-Russian Bulgarian state. Austria occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina as a result, sending 150,000 troops; the provinces were placed under the finance ministry rather than under either territorial government. Austria-Hungary also concluded a mutual defence pact with Germany in 1879 and with Romania in 1883, and formed a further alliance with Britain and Italy in 1887 known as the Mediterranean Entente.

    The 1908 annexation of Bosnia pushed events toward catastrophe. Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal badly miscalculated. He had assumed the Slavic minorities could never unite. He encouraged speculation about further Austrian expansion southward, expecting it to paralyze the Balkan states. Instead it spurred them to build a defensive coalition against Austria. In Sarajevo on the 28th of June 1914, Slavic militants assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne. Austria-Hungary, backed by a pledge of full German support secured by ambassador Laszlo Szogyeny from Kaiser Wilhelm II on the 5th of July, presented Serbia with a list of ten demands known as the July Ultimatum. When Serbia accepted nine and partially accepted the tenth, Austria-Hungary declared war on the 28th of July 1914.

  • Austria-Hungary conscripted 7.8 million soldiers over the course of the war. The opening phase on the Serbian front was a catastrophe: by the end of 1914, the army had taken no territory while losing 227,000 of its initial force of 450,000 men. On the Eastern Front, the great fortress city of Przemysl fell to Russia in March 1915. The Brusilov Offensive of 1916 struck the Austrian lines with devastating effect; Austria-Hungary suffered roughly a million casualties and, according to the source, the army never recovered.

    The Italian front opened in May 1915 when Italy switched sides. Chief of Staff Luigi Cadorna marched toward the Isonzo River. Four battles were fought on that river over five months, from the 23rd of June to the 2nd of December 1915. At Caporetto on the 24th of October 1917, Austrian forces using new infiltration tactics advanced more than 100 kilometres in the direction of Venice, but could not cross the Piave River. The decisive engagement came at the Second Battle of the Piave River, fought from the 15th to the 23rd of June 1918; approximately 60,000 Austrian and 43,000 Italian soldiers were killed. The armistice was signed at Villa Giusti on the 3rd of November 1918.

    The home front deteriorated in parallel. Inflation rose from an index of 129 in 1914 to 1,589 in 1918, erasing the savings of the middle class. The war consumed roughly 20 percent of gross domestic product. Dead soldiers amounted to about 4 percent of the 1914 labour force; the wounded accounted for another 6 percent. By the summer of 1918, deserters known as Green Cadres had formed armed bands in the hills of Croatia-Slavonia, and civil order had effectively dissolved.

  • On the 14th of October 1918, Foreign Minister Baron Istvan Burian von Rajecz formally requested an armistice on the basis of President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. Two days later, Emperor Karl I issued what became known as the Imperial Manifesto of the 16th of October 1918, proposing to transform the empire into a federal union with decentralised ethnic representation. On the 18th of October, United States Secretary of State Robert Lansing replied that mere autonomy for the nationalities was no longer acceptable. A Czechoslovak provisional government had joined the Allies on the 14th of October.

    The declarations followed in rapid succession. Czech politicians peacefully took control in Prague on the 28th of October. The Slovaks acted on the 30th. On the 29th of October, the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs was proclaimed by the Slavic populations in both halves of the remaining empire. The Hungarian Parliament had already voted on the 17th of October to terminate the union with Austria. Count Mihaly Karolyi seized power in Budapest on the 31st of October in what was called the Aster Revolution, and formally repudiated the compromise agreement that day, dissolving the personal union that had held the two states together.

    Karl's last Austrian prime minister, Heinrich Lammasch, concluded that the emperor's position was untenable. On the 11th of November, Karl issued a proclamation relinquishing every participation in Austrian state affairs. The following day, the German-Austrian National Council proclaimed the Republic of German Austria. Karolyi followed on the 16th of November, proclaiming the Hungarian Democratic Republic. The successors recognized by the victorious powers in 1920 included not only Austria and Hungary but the First Czechoslovak Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and the territorial gains of Romania and Italy.

  • Among the most striking legacies of the Austro-Hungarian period was its concentration of scientific talent. Physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, physicist Erwin Schrodinger, and physicist Lise Meitner all worked within the empire's German-speaking intellectual sphere. Hungarian-born scientists included obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis, physicist Leo Szilard, and biochemist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi. From the Czech and Slovak lands came geneticist Gregor Mendel and future Czechoslovak President Tomas Garrigue Masaryk. The Polish scientific contribution included mathematician Stefan Banach and physicist Marian Smoluchowski. Nikola Tesla and Mihajlo Pupin came from the Serb and Croat communities. Karl Landsteiner and Sigmund Freud were among the Jewish scientists who flourished during what Austrian Jews came to regard as a golden era, a period when Jews held nearly 18 percent of the reserve officer corps despite making up around 5 percent of the population in the empire's lands.

    Austro-Hungarian explorers also ranged far. Samuel Teleki became the first person to reach the snow line on Mount Kilimanjaro at an altitude of 5,300 metres, and later the first to set foot on Mount Kenya, ascending to 4,300 metres. Oscar Baumann was the first European to visit what is now Rwanda. In 1871-1874, sailors Julius Payer and Karl Weyprecht sailed aboard the Admiral Tegetthoff and discovered the archipelago known as Franz Josef Land in the Arctic. The most comprehensive record of the empire's cultural geography was the 24-volume encyclopedia known as The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Image, initiated in 1883 at the suggestion of Crown Prince Rudolf. A total of 432 authors contributed; the German edition alone ran to 12,596 pages and 4,529 wood engravings.

Common questions

When was Austria-Hungary founded and how long did it last?

Austria-Hungary was founded with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 and lasted until 1918, a span of roughly fifty years. It was dissolved after Hungary terminated the union with Austria at the end of World War I, with the armistice signed at Villa Giusti on the 3rd of November 1918.

How large was Austria-Hungary compared to other European countries?

Austria-Hungary was the second-largest country in Europe by area, surpassed only by Russia. It was also the third-most populous European state, behind Russia and the German Empire, and ranked among the ten most populous countries in the world.

What was the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867?

The Compromise of 1867 was the agreement that created the Dual Monarchy by making Austria and Hungary co-equal sovereign states sharing a single monarch. It established three common ministries covering foreign affairs, defence, and the finance needed to fund those two portfolios, while all other government functions remained separate.

Why did Austria-Hungary collapse at the end of World War I?

Austria-Hungary collapsed because of military defeat, ethnic nationalism, and economic breakdown. Inflation rose from an index of 129 in 1914 to 1,589 in 1918, morale collapsed across the diverse nationalities, and the Allied powers supported independence movements. By late October 1918, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and other successor states had declared independence, and Hungary formally terminated the union on the 31st of October 1918.

What was the role of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in starting World War I?

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on the 28th of June 1914 gave Austria-Hungary the pretext it sought to confront Serbia militarily. Austria-Hungary secured German support on the 5th of July 1914 and then issued the July Ultimatum; when Serbia partially refused one of ten demands, Austria-Hungary declared war on the 28th of July 1914, triggering the chain of mobilizations that became World War I.

What nationalities and languages were present in Austria-Hungary?

Austria-Hungary included Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Croatians, Slovaks, Slovenes, Romanians, Serbs, Ukrainians, Italians, Jews, and other groups. Emperor Franz Joseph himself spoke German, Hungarian, and Czech fluently, and Croatian, Serbian, Polish, and Italian to some degree, reflecting the empire's multilingual character.

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