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The Habsburg Empire
From: London School of Economics and Political Science
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Dominic Lieven |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 In many ways, the Habsburg empire was a dynastic accident brought together by marriage, death and family fortune; unlike the British empire, it was not won primarily through conquest and settlement. By 1900, Austria was almost unique in granting equal political and civil rights to the multi-ethnic populations within its territory. Dominic Lieven, professor of Russian government at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the author of Empire, also argues that the pressures faced by the Habsburg empire in the twentieth century were in some ways extraordinarily similar to the dilemmas faced by the European Union today. |
Fathom: Which countries were contained within the Habsburg empire? |
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| Dominic Lieven describes the extent of the Habsburg empire. | |
Dominic Lieven: In contemporary terms, it always included Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, much of what we called Yugoslavia--which means all of Croatia and Slovenia, parts of Serbia--and part of Romania. It included, at various times, parts of Italy, and particularly in the eighteenth century it included what we now call Belgium. Then there is the whole complication as to whether you mean the empire of the Austrian Habsburgs or you mean all the territories which were at one point ruled over by the Habsburg family. Until 1700, the senior branch of the Habsburg family ruled the Spanish empire, which included not just Iberia but of course all of the empire in Latin America and indeed the Philippines. Part of the Austrian empire in the eighteenth century, which means, above all, possessions in Italy and in the Netherlands and what we now call Belgium, were in fact inherited from the Spanish side of the monarchy after the Habsburg line died out, in 1700. |
Fathom: Can you tell us a bit about the family monarchy? |
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| Dominic Lieven on the Habsburg empire as a dynastic accident. | |
Lieven: This is a dynastic empire. It is the empire of a particular dynasty, as indeed most empires are, and it is not entirely irrelevant to examine the names of these empires: the Habsburgs and the Ottomans were both dynasties. Yet we talk about the British empire and even about the Russian empire implying that these were the empires of peoples, even of nations. That is interesting, although it is in some ways, at least in the Russian case, something of an illusion. This was to some extent an aristocratic dynastic empire, like the Habsburg one. However, the Habsburg empire was actually more dynastic, because in the Russian lands there was something closer to a Russian people and a Russian culture and even a Russian nation before 1917 than there was anything that you could call an Austrian people or nation. It was an empire put together by marriage more than anything, which helps to explain some of its strange constitutional anomalies. This reinforces the fact that this was a dynastic empire and that its fate revolved enormously around the history of a single family. |
In fact, it would be very hard to imagine that particular group of territories united in any other way. Over time, the empire came to have a certain common high culture and a common aristocratic ruling class. It acquired common institutions of state, and to some extent it acquired benefits from being a single economic space. But nobody looking down from heaven and trying to find objective reasons to create some great community in east central Europe would have come up with precisely that shape of territories on the basis of economic or even political logic. It is above all a dynastic construct. To an extent, you could say that it was born in 1526, when, by chance as much as anything, the Czech and the Hungarian crowns were united with the head of the Habsburg dynasty, which already ruled over the Austrian duchies. That was when the empire was born, and it was precisely a dynastic accident in many ways. |
Fathom: Can you discuss some of the main features of its rise and its fall? |
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| Dominic Lieven discusses the rise and fall of the Habsburg empire. | |
Lieven: It is difficult to encompass the rise and fall of a great polity in a few sentences. There are a whole range of factors, one of which undoubtedly was that for most of its existence the empire was convenient, not merely to its own rulers and ruling classes who were its direct beneficiaries but also to a great many of its neighbours. It was perceived as having a European role and usefulness. For instance, in the seventeenth century it was very much seen as a bulwark of Christendom. It was the polity which could keep the Muslims and the Turks out of central Europe. That helps to explain why, when the monarchy reached its greatest moment of crisis in the last half of the seventeenth century, when the Ottomans besieged Vienna, the army which relieved the siege was two-thirds not Habsburg. The Germans, the Poles and a great many other people as well would have agreed that the Habsburg empire was an essential bulwark against the Ottoman threat to central Europe. Similarly, in the eighteenth century the English and the Dutch, who could mobilise formidable financial and military power, very strongly believed that the survival of the Habsburg empire was essential to balance France and to avoid French domination of Europe. |
One can find the same kind of arguments in the nineteenth century as well. And, indeed, after the collapse of the Habsburg empire, some of those arguments look pretty good, because the collapse of the empire left a huge vacuum in central Europe, and whether it was Russia or Germany which filled that vacuum, the resources that they were going to control thereby, both material and human, were virtually bound to mean that they were going to dominate the whole of Europe. On top of that, once the empire disintegrated, leaving a vacuum, you were likely to get both the Russians and the Germans trying to fill that vacuum and fighting an extremely bloody conflict to work out who was going to come out on top. In a sense, that is what the Second World War was all about. In terms of European stability, the Habsburg empire did play a very important role. |
It is also important to remember that, as with most empires, a community was created in which peoples became quite intermingled. There were a number of ethnic communities in the empire who were concentrated in specific areas, but even they were intermingled, and trying to draw boundaries between them was a nightmare, especially if you were trying to draw boundaries on straight ethnic lines, as happened after 1918. On top of that, there were at least two communities, the Germans and the Jews, who were scattered across a great deal of the empire. The final result of the empire's collapse and the great war between Germany and Russia to fill the vacuum it left was the destruction of one of those communities: the Germans, who were expelled almost to a man from the areas they had lived in outside of Austria and Germany proper. This applied, of course, even more terrifyingly to the actual extermination of the Jews, who in many ways by 1914 were the most loyal community of all towards the Habsburg empire, if only because they were given considerable opportunity and status under the empire and because it was quite obvious even before 1914 that they were likely to be major targets for the nationalist hatreds of the various smaller peoples of the empire. |
Fathom: The Habsburg empire clearly brought together a range of different identities, nationalities and religions, seemingly overcoming a lot of the ethnic conflicts and religious antagonisms within. How does a historical understanding of the Habsburg empire help us think about conflict in Europe, particularly Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia, and help us think about today's attempts to create a European union? |
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| Dominic Lieven argues that the European Union faces the classic dilemmas of empire. | |
Lieven: The Habsburg empire in its Austrian half, in its last 60 years, did to some extent face up to the sort of ethnic nationalist conflicts which we have become used to in modern Europe and increasingly in the modern world. It did so because it was a very ethnically mixed community and because it faced the problems of modernisation. Among these problems was the massive movement of populations from the countryside into towns. This had immediate ethnic consequences in a region where, traditionally, Germans lived in the towns while Slavs and non-Germans lived in the countryside. It also had the strains and stresses associated with early democracy. The empire on its Austrian side was very far from being a perfect democracy in 1914, but it did have democratically elected local communal governments, semi-democratically elected provincial assemblies and a parliament in Vienna which was, after 1907, elected by universal suffrage. |
The problems of populations going through all the strains and stresses of early capitalism and the major migratory problems that this creates were combined with democratisation, and the empire certainly didn't solve those problems. It did contain them in a way that was relatively civilised. After the 1860s, it went out of its way to try to guarantee the individual civil rights of the population, but also their collective rights, such as rights to use their own language, for children to be educated in their native tongue and for equal access to jobs. In a more negative sense, and in a very praiseworthy manner, certainly relative to most states at that time, the Austrian legal system and the Austrian police never allowed the kind of racial pogroms which you got in Russia or the lynch mobs in the United States. These would not have been conceivable in the last decades of the Habsburg empire in the Austrian half of the monarchy. In that sense, the state, its judiciary and the police were remarkably fair and effective in imposing at least peaceful inter-ethnic relations. |
Within the Habsburg empire, you had hordes of often very poor--and, in terms of Christian society, culturally very alien--Galician Jews, for instance, pouring into Vienna. There were no constraints on movement. There again, you have to remember the comparison with the British white colonies. These were founded on the massive expropriation of native property and the rigid exclusion of non-white labour. So they were precisely founded on the denial of the civil rights that the Habsburg empire almost uniquely sustained in a multi-ethnic community at that time. This would certainly apply as regards race relations in the United States. So although aspects of this political system were bizarre, they were not an uncivilised and uninteresting first effort to try to contain the problems of multi-ethnicity within a modern capitalist and also semi-democratic polity. Over and above what the Habsburg authorities actually did, it is also interesting to look at the ways in which people in this empire tried to envisage the effective management of multi-ethnicity in a modern community in which the state will inevitably play a very significant role. |
This is one of the difficulties as well. It is all very well to allow large amounts of cultural autonomy in a traditional society like the Ottoman empire, where the religious communities could to a great extent run themselves as long as they preserved order and paid taxes. It is more difficult to do that as you move into the modern age, where the state is just playing a much bigger role and is therefore much more important. Controlling the state is vital in terms of providing jobs to aspiring members of the newly educated lower middle class but also in terms of the advantages that control over the state gives to the community as a whole. Therefore, the battles between nationalities over jobs, education and welfare do become much fiercer, and again the Habsburgs managed that problem relatively decently. |
Regarding the European Union, the basic point is that we have seen just how unstable a Europe based on pure national sovereignty has been in the twentieth century. We have attempted since 1945 to create some version of a European multi-ethnic confederation for all sorts of reasons. This was partly to create a large economic space, which, after all, the Habsburg empire provided in its time, and partly in order to provide political stability and the maintenance of certain political standards across Europe to end the seemingly never-ending conflict, for instance, between France and Germany for the domination of Europe. In all of these ways, the European Union does to some extent embody aspects of the Habsburg tradition and attempt to fulfil certain tasks that the empire in its time did fulfil. |
The union faces problems which actually amount to some of the classic dilemmas of empire, the most basic dilemma of empire in the modern era being that if you hope to be powerful--which also means defending your own interests and having a say in the really big global issues--you need to be a polity with a very considerable population, which usually even now means some version of continental scale. How do you combine that kind of continental scale with any form of democratic legitimacy, since continental scale usually means multi-ethnicity and we live in the age of nationalism? That was a major problem for all empires in 1900. It was more explicitly a problem for the Habsburg empire because their political system was more open and because they recognised multi-ethnicity rather than trying to suppress it. Just as it was a problem for them, so it is the main problem for the European Union now. How do you make a legitimate effective government on a European scale given the strength of nationalism and given the existence of separate national governments? If you don't even attempt this, however, you can resign yourself to living in a world in which all the really big decisions are made by the Americans. |
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