Struggles With Mass-Migrations, National- and State-Interests in the Late Habsburg Empire

Abstract

The 18th- and 19th-century spatial political mobilization of masses not only was a concern of self-defense of the affected communities themselves but appeared also as a tool for different “third party” actors to solve different security issues. The southern and eastern parts of the Habsburg Empire, liberated from Ottoman Turkish rule, offered an opportunity for the centralized administration to utilize mobility, namely mass migration for economic revival and other security-related goals and interests against the Hungarian nobility estate, thus planting the seeds of later security struggles. The Austro-Hungarian era’s nation-building policies used methods of mass mobilization as well. This chapter will cover three phenomena that are all implementations of the mass mobilization processes in the late Habsburg Empire. The church-led “great Serb migration” was not only a result of basic self-defense in the face of a possible Ottoman retaliation after the Great Turkish War but also a core interest of the war-torn Habsburg Monarchy. The already militarized Serb masses served a farseeing imperial political goal by gathering more loyal elements facing the Turkish border and encircling an inner threat: The Hungarian noble estate. However, this mobility of masses, with privileges, later became a wider security, by viewing the “descendants of immigrants” and their undefined status as a threat to the feudal order and, later, their military potential as a threat to the Hungarian independence movement. The second phenomenon concerns spatial mobility, namely mass immigration that brought people with capital and a suitable religious ideology (from a “Habsburg viewpoint”) from Western-Europe toward the Great Hungarian Plains during the great re-settlements of the 18th century. This “century of immigration” shaped the evolution of what would later become Hungarian nationalism and nation(-state)-building. As the “repopulating era” shows, mobility mostly served to bring about urgent economical security but also paved the way for insecurity by creating vast areas of heterogenous ethnic populations. During the third period, mobility served solely as a governmental security tool. In the age of the dual monarchy the new Hungarian government became the security actor, using ethnic capital 1 as a tool by resettling the multinational south with ethnic Hungarians, “collecting” Hungarian diaspora from the Austrian parts of the Habsburg Empire, and at the same time overlooking mass (mostly Slovak and Ruthene) transatlantic emigration to “better the ethnic composition.”