Archival Legacy of Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the National States

Abstract

The article examines the consequences of the processes of disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and of making of national states for the archival heritage of the multiethnic empire of the Habsburgs. It is based on the provisions of the Saint-Germain and Trianon peace treaties concluded in 1919 and 1920 at Versailles concerning the intellectual and cultural heritage, as well as archival and published sources from Vienna and Budapest relating to the order of execution of these provisions. The victorious successor states that strove to divide the organically created archival heritage of the Monarchy and the funds of the Hungarian National Archives according to the territorial approach and ethnic principal, in order to satisfy the needs of national historiographies which needed additional resources for legitimisation of their independent statehoods. Both treaties provided for the application of the principle of provenance for the provision of archival services (or the transfer of documents), which were considered national intellectual property, but they did not provide a substantive explanation of these terms. Thus, this general regulation did not provide a solid legal basis for bilateral negotiations, so they were largely dependent on the balance of political power and economic considerations. From a historical perspective, the archival convention between Austria and Hungary turned out to be the most effective from a professional point of view, since in it the concept of national intellectual property, vaguely formulated in peace treaties, was not exclusively tied to the territory of a national state. In Austro-Hungarian relations, mutual recognition and use of the principle of common intellectual property allowed for cultural and academic interest in archival material outside its own territory, and at the same time guaranteed unrestricted access to information and the ability to influence the professional processing of archival material. The principles of the Baden Convention of 1926, progressive for their time, and the very adherence to its spirit, triumphed in international archival theory and practice in the 1960s as one of the possible models for resolving interstate archival disputes.