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June 20 - June 26, 2018
The causes were generally lost ones, and the ideas unpopular, but they were not always so retrograde as they seemed to those who held opposing views. The peculiar tragedy of the Habsburgs is that they were usually as far ahead of their age in some respects as they were behind it in others. They were historic failures, in the sense that they consistently missed achieving their major goals, but they count among the most imposing, or even glorious, failures in history.
As Gordon Shepherd remarks in his Austrian Odyssey, the “South Slav Problem” which was to be one of the crucial issues of the twentieth century, had its root in the Dark Ages.
A dauntless woman who upheld her contested right to the throne in two major wars, and a conscientious ruler despite her family distractions, Maria Theresa possessed both the Viennese talent of enjoying herself and the Viennese gift of simplicity.
“The Habsburg lands were a collection of entailed estates, not a State; and the Habsburgs were landlords, not rulers.”
Metternich’s phobia was an understandable one. Austria, that is the remains of the Habsburg empire, was not a nation in the sense that France, England, Prussia, Spain, and even Alexander’s Russia were nations. It was a supranational community, artificially bound together by the authority of a dynasty that derived its mandate from a mixture of habit and medieval land-jurisprudence. Patriotism itself was a suspect virtue in Habsburg Austria.
Metternich, it was true, did permit one cafe in the capital to keep a few foreign journals on its reading racks, but that was purely for the convenience of the police, so that they might more easily identify suspect intellectuals (contemporary dictatorships, in Central Europe and elsewhere, follow the same practice on occasion).
“Yes, yes, a very good idea, but we must have a bit of hanging first.”
the torrents of history can be dammed if one is strong and determined enough.
by proclaiming a new charter for the Empire based on unlimited, centralized absolutism, that, with a stroke of the pen, wiped out everything his people — and peoples — had gained in two revolutions. The Emperor, by this virtual coup d’etat, not only assumed for himself the whole weight and power of government, but abolished all the rights that had existed from time immemorial between the monarch and his vassal kingdoms or territories. Metternich himself had never dared to go so far.
Like the suicidal policies of Nicholas II in Russia, Francis Joseph’s youthful and naive experiment in autocracy illustrates what is perhaps the deadliest weapon in the arsenal of revolutionary movements: their ability to goad their adversaries into self-slaughtering madness. Ironically, Francis Joseph was probably saved from destruction by the very enormity of his error. He had so radically misread the whole politico-diplomatic situation in Europe that the saber of reaction was wrenched out of his hands before he had time to chop off his own head with it.
Chop off his own head
and he had been waiting eagerly to be aggressed.
Is this what they made me abdicate for?” exclaimed the old Emperor, Ferdinand, living under medical supervision in Prague, when he heard the news. “I could have lost those provinces myself.”)
This fatal accord granted Hungary a constitution that was extremely liberal in the privileges it gave the Magyars within the Empire, and infamously reactionary in the power it allotted them to establish a racial dictatorship over the Rumanians, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Croats living inside their historic frontiers.
maintaining the various nationalities of the Empire in a balanced state of well-tempered discontent, and substituted the principle of minority rule.
Austria, the wags said, was neither an autocracy nor a democracy, but a state of emergency.
Francis Joseph’s rule has been described as one of latent absolutism, and he was shrewd enough to preserve the element of latency whenever possible.
largely free from either democratic or autocratic controls.
It never occurred to him that in the ancient supranational tradition of his family he possessed, albeit in raw and imperfect form, an ultramodern antidote to the toxins of modern nationalism. He put his faith in the tried and tested — and unfailingly calamitous — nostrums of cautious expediency; a dram of repressive firmness, an ounce of gracious concession, a pinch of genteel trickery. It was in this spirit that the aged autocrat, confronted as we have seen earlier with the threat of Magyar separatism and harassed by left-wing agitation for electoral reform, hit on the idea of playing
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Maintaining a constant, controlled strain between the different “minorities” was an ancient Habsburg tradition.
Most of the “minorities” preferred putting up with the slovenly paternalism of Habsburg rule to being absorbed in either the German or the Russian empires.
His pathological dread of assassination had led him more than once in blind panic to shoot down inmates of his palace with the little pearl-handled automatic that never left his person (he always handled it expertly even when he was too frightened to think straight) — and he had just as delusively, if more coolly, ordered the appalling massacre of Armenians — some 86,000 of them by the most conservative count — suspected of mass disloyalty.
— who notoriously had never kept a promise in his life swore to uphold the constitution which the army had forced him at gunpoint to accept three days earlier.
The hulking but sclerotic empire of Christian Byzantium was both a permanent menace and a permanent temptation to the weaker, though more warlike, Moslem societies on its southern flank.
the millet system doubtless played a major role in preventing the different peoples of the empire from eventually knitting together into a single nation.
The reef on which brotherhood constantly splintered was the dynasty’s traditional policy of exploiting Islam for political ends by combining the sultanate and the caliphate in one office. Claiming the Moslem title of the Shadow of God on Earth while acting as the secular head of an empire in which the Christian “minorities” outnumbered the Moslem “majority” was not merely an anomaly but a congenital blunder.
The job of fighting had been turned over to mercenaries, the job of thinking and governing to foreign-born vizier-slaves, while the spoiled and frightened Sultans took refuge from all their problems among the women whose constant, self-interested adulation prevented them from developing the will, decisiveness, or firmness which are necessarily stifled in an atmosphere of chronic indulgence.
This caused every Sultan to regard with distrust the half-brothers ready to step into his shoes, many of them often not at all scrupulous about the means for emptying these shoes.
reading the adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Despite the rivalry in the Balkans between Russia and Austria-Hungary, Czar Alexander II wrung a personal promise from his cousin, Francis Joseph, to keep hands off if Russia undertook to chastize the treacherous Turk, and in April 1877 the chastisement got under way.
“We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the money too” — and then, in a rousing tutti: “The Russians shall not have Constantinople” The men and the ships, propelled by the money, anchored within firing range of the Russians, stayed there for six months, and Russia in fact did not get Constantinople nor even the territory stipulated in the Treaty of San Stefano, which did not go that far.
the underlying Austro-Russian rivalry was permanently envenomed. The temporary award of Bosnia-Herzegovina to the Dual Monarchy had an even more inflammatory effect on Austro-Serbian relations.
not among the minorities and the agents of foreign powers, but among his own Turks, and particularly in the Turkish officer-caste upon whom the protection
