The Disintegration of the Austrian Empire

Abstract

Half a century after the overthrow of one of Europe's oldest dynasties, the historic role and the achievements of its multinational empire are once again debated by historians everywhere. It is as if the experience of the second world war and our inability to conclude it with a more satisfactory settlement than the previous one were making us reconsider and question the assumptions and policies of the peacemakers of 1919. This renewed interest can be seen in the West, as for example in the United States, where the renascence of 'Habsburg Studies' leads to rather favourable reappraisals, while British historians still incline to the traditional anti-Austrian line. But more significantly still, the same process of historic revision is at work in the succession states, where it is becoming increasingly common to conduct rational debates free of cliches and emotive language. The explanation for this phenomenon is not merely the nostalgia felt by immigrants from Central Europe and their descendants, nor is it the relief felt by intellectuals cautiously moving out of the Stalinist strait-jacket. It is more likely perplexity at the nature of a region which since the end of the Austro-Hungarian regime has defied all efforts to renew its former pattern and has refused to be federated or absorbed whether in a western framework of treaties and alliances as after I918, under German leadership as in the thirties, or by Nazi or Soviet force as in the forties and fifties; and it does not appear that communism has provided a unifying drive in our time. Central Europe is simply not ready for unity. Like the pre-war Little and Balkan Ententes, which were purely diplomatic constructions and never engaged popular sympathy, so the war-time plans for federating parts or even the whole of the region, which were the work of exiled Czech, Polish, and Balkan leaders, remained academic exercises which their peoples were un-