10 WORLD WAR ONE AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE EMPIRE
Austria-Hungary went to war in August 1914 to solve the South Slav problem once and for all. Four years later, in October 1918, the Empire was defeated and it collapsed. Its final disintegration has an air of inevitability about it when viewed in retrospect. But a close examination of the fateful years 1914–18 shows that the dissolution of the monarchy was not anticipated even by the opponents of the regime, at home and abroad, until the last year of the war. Before this time, alternative outcomes were possible, if not probable: victory on the battlefield; a separate peace with the Entente powers; internal reform of the Empire. To understand why these alternatives failed we need to look at the military events of 1914–18 with minds unclouded by notions of historical inevitability.
THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN ARMY AND THE WAR
In Austria-Hungary, as in all other countries in 1914, there was great initial enthusiasm for the war and all the nationalities showed themselves loyal to the Monarchy [Doc. 22]. The alliance with Germany, dating from 1879, was the constant for Austria in the war years and ultimately the deciding factor in her very existence [25]. The two Central Powers were joined by Turkey in October 1914, and by Bulgaria in September 1915, to form the so-called Quadruple Alliance, which occupied a continuous stretch of territory from the North Sea to the Anatolian peninsula. Italy took a different path. Although a member of the Triple Alliance, Italy declared her neutrality in August 1914 on the grounds that she had not been notified in time about the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. Austria’s main diplomatic task in the following months was to prevent Italy from joining the Entente powers. Berchtold was willing to cede the Trentino and parts of the Albanian coastline, but Italy’s appetite for land grew with the asking and she finally joined the Entente side (Treaty of London, April 1915) in return for the Trentino, Trieste, the most important Dalmatian islands and the southern part of Dalmatia. It is doubtful if Austria could have kept Italy neutral by making more concessions [173]. As it was, Italy declared war on Austria in May 1915 and became the only power committed to the break-up of the Empire at this early date. Partly for this reason the war against Italy was popular with all the peoples of the Monarchy [14].
The instrument charged with carrying out the Empire’s foreign policy – the Austro-Hungarian army – was not equal to the task. The problems began long before 1914. The army was actually smaller in proportion to the population in 1914 than it had been in 1870, and much less had been spent on it by Austria than was the case with the armies of any of the other Great Powers. Only one-fifth of those eligible for military service were conscripted, with the result that Austria-Hungary could field only 48 infantry divisions compared with 93 for Russia and 88 for France. The Dual Monarchy was also inferior in firepower. She had fewer pieces of artillery than the other powers and in 1914 was producing only one million shells per month, compared with seven million for Germany and four million for Russia [172].
The main dilemma for the Habsburg Monarchy was that she had to fight a two-front war with inadequate means. The problem was compounded by the Austrian General Staff, which could not decide before 1914 which of the two fronts – Galicia (against Russia) or Serbia – to treat as more important. The plan of Conrad von Hotzendorf, the Chief of Staff, was to crush Serbia first in a swift offensive and then turn against Russia. But he was unable to shift a major army grouping (B Staffel – 12 divisions) quickly enough from Serbia to Galicia, with the result that Austria suffered a series of disasters in the early months of the war [154]. Not only had the Austrians been thrown out of Serbia by December 1914, but they were also driven out of eastern Galicia and the Bukovina by the numerically superior Russian forces [170].
These early defeats had a devastating effect on the Habsburg army. In the first half-year of fighting three-quarters of a million men were lost, including a high percentage of trained officers. In a single day 120,000 men were taken when the great fortress of Pzemysl fell to the Russians in May 1915 [18]. But surprisingly the army recovered and by 1916 it had become ‘a more formidable instrument than it had been at the outbreak of the war’ [168 p. 78].
Austria began to recover from her early disasters, but only with German help and in a way which revealed a dangerous dependence on her stronger partner. In the spring of 1915 the combined Austrian-German forces drove Russia out of Galicia and conquered most of Poland. By the end of the year Austria had taken all of Serbia and Montenegro, but only with German and Bulgarian help. On the third front of the war the Austrian armies held the numerically superior Italians in eleven battles along the Isonzo River from May 1915 to September 1917. Italy was finally routed at Caporetto in late 1917, with a loss of 600,000 men, but again this was achieved only with the help of Germany [14; 161].
Austria’s victories exhausted her as much as her defeats and placed her increasingly under the Prussian heel. The turning-point came with the Brusilov offensive by Russia in the summer of 1916, when almost the whole eastern front was put under German supreme command. Rumania, encouraged by the Russian victories under Brusilov, entered the war on the Entente side, but was soon eliminated (December 1916) by a joint Austrian-German counter-offensive. By late 1916 the Austrian and German armies controlled a considerable extent of foreign territory and seemed to be in a favourable position. In fact, the situation was desperate, especially for Austria, who was now eager to conclude a separate peace with the Entente. The full weakness of Austria-Hungary became clear in 1917–18, when the home front began to crack [174].
The political history of Austria-Hungary in 1914–18 can only be understood against the background of military events [165]. During the first half of the war, the general feeling of the nationalities towards the Monarchy was one of loyalty. But among two groups – the Czechs and South Slavs – disaffection was evident, if not yet widespread. The Czechs pursued a policy of ‘keeping an iron in every fire’ [18 p. 812]. Most political leaders were pro-Habsburg: some sought the destruction of the Monarchy with Russian help; others, mostly emigrés, worked for an independent Czecho-Slovak state with Western help. At the popular level the Czechs were hostile to the Monarchy. In April 1915 the 28th Prague Infantry Batallion deserted to the Russians and the Austrian authorities responded by arresting Karel Kramar, the Young Czech leader who looked to Russia for his country’s salvation, and by combating the activities of the Czech underground organization, the so-called Mafia [174]. The most prominent Czech to go abroad to persuade the world of the justice of the idea of Czech independence was Thomas Masaryk. With Kramar under arrest, Masaryk and his assistant, Edward Beneš, were able gradually to persuade Czech politicians at home to accept the idea of seeking help from the Allied Powers and of including the Slovaks (who lived in Hungary) in an independent state. To this end he founded the Czecho-Slovak National Council in Paris in late 1916 [169].
The South Slavs, unlike the Czechs, could look to an existing independent country, Serbia, as the nucleus of a future Yugoslav state. Leading radicals, such as Mestrovic, Trumbić and Supilo, from the South Slav provinces of the Empire, decided very early in the war to go into exile and work for the unequivocal defeat and dissolution of the Monarchy. They formed the South Slav Committee in Paris in April 1915 and sought to convince the Allied politicians that the Habsburg Monarchy was ‘an artificial and monstrous structure’ [174 p. 67], Among Croatians and Slovenes within the Empire, however, the emigrés’ call went unheeded until the Declaration of Corfu (July 1917), which proclaimed the union of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in a future Yugoslav state.
The ideas of the Slav emigrés found a ready echo in Britain among a group of sympathisers, led by the historian, R. W. Seton-Watson, and The Times journalist, Wickham Steed. Both men had an inside knowledge of the Empire and in December 1916 they founded a weekly journal, The New Europe, which called for ‘the emancipation of the subject races of central and south-eastern Europe from German and Magyar control’ [167 p. 179]. Seton-Watson and Steed popularized the Slav national movements in Britain and put pressure on the Foreign Office to recognize that the Allied commitment to democracy and self-determination entailed the break-up of the Monarchy. This was not the accepted view in the West at the time; rather, it was thought that national self-determination could be satisfied within a reorganized federal Habsburg Empire [173]. But Masaryk, a frequent contributor to The New Europe, took a different view: ‘Either the Habsburgs, or a free democratic Europe; that is the question. Any compromise between the two is bound to be an unstable condition’ [169].
The New Europe, which ran from 1916 to 1922, was a brilliant journal full of insights into the world of east European politics and especially good on the danger of Pan-Germanism in the event of victory by the Central Powers. But as a guide to the events of the last two years of the war it is misleading because it exaggerates the role of the radicals in the break-up of the Monarchy. It is a mistake to predate the calls for the destruction of the Empire to the early, or even middle, years of the war. The Allied Powers had not committed themselves to the break-up of the Monarchy, nor had the forces of radical nationalism found a receptive audience among the people living inside Austria-Hungary until well into 1917 or 1918 [163].
1917 AND 1918: MILITARY DEFEAT AND DISINTEGRATION
The last two years of the war were crucial to the fate of the Habsburg Monarchy and it is to this period that we must look for the first rents in the imperial fabric. One of the most influential interpretations of the collapse of the Monarchy was put forth by Otto Bauer, the Social Democrat, in his book, The Austrian Revolution (1925). Bauer argued that the final collapse was brought about by two external events: the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the military defeat of Germany in 1918. According to Bauer, the Russian Revolution encouraged the national revolutions of the Poles, Czechs and Yugoslavs within the Dual Monarchy, and the defeat of the German Empire ensured the victory of these national revolutions [162]. This view makes sense when one thinks of the Habsburg Monarchy as a bulwark, not against the Turkish Empire, which was a spent force, but against Russian Tsardom on one side and the German Empire on the other. When both these threats disappeared, the multinational Habsburg Empire lost its inner dynamic and broke into its national units.
Bauer’s analysis stressed the vulnerability of the Habsburg Monarchy to external events, but tended to neglect developments within the Empire. The most important fact about the domestic political life of Austria was the adjournment of parliament from March 1914 to May 1917. The Reichsrat building was in fact turned into a hospital. Count Stürgkh, the Prime Minister, took this action because he feared that open discussion in parliament would lead to disloyal outbursts among the non-German representatives. Austria was ruled in an absolutist way, with many areas of life under military administration. One consequence of the suppression of freedom came in October 1916, when Victor Adler’s son, Friedrich, assassinated Stürgkh in an act of defiance against the war regime. In the public trial which followed Adler turned his defence into an indictment of the government [14].
The second significant event to occur in the late months of 1916 was the death of Franz Joseph on 21 November 1916 in the 68th year of his reign. He was succeeded by his great-nephew, the 29-year-old Archduke Charles. One of the main aims of Charles’s short reign was to obtain peace – along with Germany if possible, without Germany if necessary. To this end the two Central Powers declared their readiness to enter into peace negotiations with the Entente Powers in December 1916, but nothing came of these negotiations, owing mainly to Germany’s refusal to yield territory on the western front to France. The new Emperor then appointed the energetic Count Czernin as Foreign Minister in the hope of reaching an early peace. But Czernin refused to go too far in working for a separate peace with the Allies for fear of betraying the alliance with Germany and the ruling Austro-German and Magyar elites within the Empire. One set of peace negotiations was carried out between Austria and France in May 1917, without Czernin’s knowledge, by Charles’s brother-in-law, Prince Sixtus of Parma. Its importance lies not in the outcome, since it was abortive, but in the fact that one year later Clemenceau disclosed that Austria had supported France’s ‘just claims to Alsace-Lorraine’ [18 p. 829]. The Sixtus affair damaged the Dual Alliance and revealed the extent to which Austria had become a satellite of Germany. In August 1918, Emperor Charles had to visit the German headquarters at Spa and publicly disown his independent peace policy [14].
How was it that the Habsburg Monarchy, one of the five Great Powers in Europe, got itself into such a dependent position on Germany? In order to understand the Monarchy’s position in the war it is necessary to remember that her status as a Great Power throughout the nineteenth century always depended on the support of other powers to defend her interests. After 1866 the Balkans was the only area of influence open to her, but it was precisely in this area that Russian influence, coupled with an expanding Balkan nationalism, posed a threat to Vienna. Until the early twentieth century the Monarchy managed to co-operate with the Russians and to keep the Balkan states under control. After 1908, however, the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina shattered Austro-Russian relations for good and Vienna was thrown back on the German alliance. By 1914 both Russia and Italy had been alienated by Habsburg policy in the Balkans and this left the two Germanic powers rather isolated and with only one another to turn to.
When Archduke Charles became Emperor in November 1916, it was probably already too late for him to withdraw the Monarchy from the war. Mark Cornwall, in a recent book on The Last Days of Austria-Hungary, suggests three reasons which prevented Charles from taking such an action [4]. First, the idea of a compromise peace with the Allies was totally unacceptable to Germany’s military leadership and Austria found it impossible to exert any influence on Berlin. Military control may have been waning in Austria, but the opposite was the case in Germany, where Hindenburg and Ludendorff were obsessed with total victory.
Second, it is questionable if the Entente Powers would have agreed to a separate peace without demanding territory for Italy, which Austria would not have been prepared to concede. Third, and perhaps most important, was the fact that policy makers in Vienna and Budapest were committed to the German alliance. After all, their loyalty to Berlin stood as a guarantee of the maintenance of their German-Magyar ascendancy in the Empire. The alternative was to allow for greater rights for the other nationalities within the Empire and closer links to their brethren outside the borders. The maintenance of the dualist system, therefore, demanded the continuation of the German alliance. And yet it was the very German alliance which reduced the Habsburg Monarchy to a dependent power and in the end led to her defeat and dissolution. The military and economic weaknesses of the Habsburg Monarchy, along with her domestic instability, tied her to the fate of her northern neighbour.
The logical alternative to a separate peace for Austria was some measure of internal reform (e.g., federalism and the revival of parliament) which would break the German-Magyar stranglehold and galvanize the Slav peoples behind the war effort. Charles recognized the need for reform both in relations with Hungary and with regard to parliamentary government in Austria. Unfortunately, he did not use the occasion of his coronation in Hungary to force any changes in the Compromise of 1867. He passed up the opportunity to persuade Count Tisza, the Hungarian Prime Minister, and the Hungarian parliament to extend the franchise and grant some form of autonomy to the non-Magyar national groups. The failure to change the dualist arrangement with Hungary impeded all schemes for Slav autonomy, as Franz Ferdinand had clearly seen before 1914. This must be reckoned as one of the fundamental causes of the break-up of the Habsburg Monarchy [25; 167; 173].
Emperor Charles was eager to appear as a constitutional monarch and in May 1917 he allowed the parliament to be reconvened after three years of absolutist rule. It is interesting to note that at the meeting of the Reichsrat only a few isolated members called for the dissolution of the Monarchy. The overwhelming majority of Czechs, South Slavs and Ruthenes wanted reorganization of the Monarchy as a federal state guaranteeing the autonomy of the national groups [174]. At this stage of the war the radical ideas of the Slav emigrés and their sympathizers on the board of The New Europe had not become the accepted view of Slav politicians at home [165]. Meanwhile, two events in the early months of 1917 – the Russian Revolution and the entry of the United States into the war – changed the Allies’ policy towards the Central Powers.
More important than either the Sixtus affair or the recall of the parliament was the March Revolution in Russia in 1917 (followed by the Bolshevik Revolution in November), which brought down the Tsarist government. If the absolutist government in Russia could be brought down so easily, was the absolutist government safe in Austria? In Z. A. B. Zeman’s words, ‘the spectre of revolution began to haunt the rulers of the Danube monarchy’ [174 p. 119]. The summoning of the parliament was a response to the threat. Under the impact of the Russian Revolution a group of radical Czech authors outside parliament issued a ‘Manifesto’ calling for the first time for an independent Czecho-Slovak state. In the winter of 1917–18 there was a severe food crisis, flour was rationed in Vienna and a strike movement spread to all the industrial districts of Austria. In March, Czech prisoners of war began returning from Russia carrying Bolshevik ideas. Yet in spite of widespread disaffection among the subjects of the Habsburg Monarchy in early 1918, a Bolshevik-type revolution did not occur. Why? The reason is that unrest was diverted into national channels and hence the revolutionary movement took the form of a struggle for independence by the various nationalities [174].
The United States entered the war in April 1917, one month after the first Russian Revolution. These two events injected a strong ideological element into the war. The Allies, now rid of the incubus of Tsarist absolutism, could openly support the democratic national movements within the Habsburg Monarchy. But it must be remembered that the entry of the United States did not by itself signal the break-up of the Monarchy [162]. Point 10 of President Wilson’s 14 Points (January 1918) called for the reorganization of the Danubian Monarchy, not its disintegration: ‘The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity for autonomous development’ [165 p. 204].
It was military considerations which finally persuaded the Allies to push for the break-up of the Monarchy. The decision was made in the spring of 1918, when the Germans launched their offensive in the West. It now became clear that Austria-Hungary would not detach herself from the Dual Alliance, and so the Allies pursued a policy of encouraging the nationalist movements within the Empire [162].
In the early months of 1918 the Czech, Pole and South Slav politicians inside the Empire began calling for its disintegration. In the summer the Allied Powers followed suit. In September 1918 they recognized the right of the Czechoslovaks to independence. The position of the Czechs was crucial because, unlike the Poles and South Slavs who could look to national centres outside the Empire, the creation of a Czech state would inevitably entail the break-up of the Habsburg Monarchy [174].
The failure of the German offensive in the West and the failure of an Austrian offensive against Italy in June 1918 sealed the fate of the Empire [171]. In September, Bulgaria sued for peace and in early October Austria, Germany and Turkey appealed to President Wilson for an armistice on the basis of the 14 Points. Meanwhile, a final effort was made by Minister President Max Hussarek on 16 October to reconstruct the Monarchy into a federal state. It came too late and provided instead ‘a basis for the liquidation of the monarchy’ [162 p. 14]. On 27 October a cabinet under Professor Lammasch was set up to carry out precisely this task. By the end of the month the Czechs and Yugoslavs had proclaimed their independence, followed by the Magyars and Poles a few days later. On 11 November 1918 Emperor Charles abdicated. The Habsburg Monarchy had ceased to exist [Doc. 23].