Those flaws were intrinsic to the very nature of a dynastic monarchy. The dynasty did too little to adapt to changing conditions of legitimacy and loyalty by the beginning of the twentieth century. Franz Joseph in particular was too steeped in the conservatism and traditions of his house to change in his basic conception of personal rule. His and his ministers’ leadership remained ultimately unaccountable to the public. As parliamentary politics malfunctioned in the last decades, the monarchy’s ruling circle responded by governing through administrative fiat, and those in charge of the government were always finally responsible to the emperor. Deep in Franz Joseph’s conception, the state still belonged to the dynasty, not to the people, his to govern as he saw fit. But by 1918, people wanted their own states, theirs to govern according to the principles of democratic self-determination.
Though “what if” scenarios are too often idle speculation, it is certainly reasonable to conjecture that had a reformist leader come to power before 1914, the monarchy might have survived the war’s cataclysm. This is why the monarchy was not a failed state already at that date. For all the obvious tensions in Cisleithanian and Hungarian politics, governance was never so defective that the national groups really wanted the dissolution of the monarchy. Those tensions were often caused by nationalist or other groups working not against the dynasty, but against each other. The center was not the enemy; rather the other political factions were. The monarchy actually provided a reasonably open structure for political competition, though less so in Hungary. When that competition brought parliamentary politics to a halt, administration and governance did not fall apart. Thanks to the efficient bureaucracy and the (admittedly imposed) caretaker cabinets, government business went on almost as usual. This is what a journalist of the time meant when he described the usage of the article 14 emergency clause as a “round-trip ticket for the constitution,” since emergency decrees were always conceived as stopgap measures to ensure the basic functioning of the political system.1
Moreover, the problems of national conflict were not always intractable, since compromise solutions were worked out in Bukovina in 1910, Galicia and Bohemia in 1914. Compromise was harder to come by in Hungary, and it is not completely fair to draw long-term conclusions about the monarchy’s cohesion just from those late-date agreements between Czechs and Germans. But the point remains that the monarchy’s politics were never so “broken” as to be unfixable. It was not until the very last years of the war that nationalist political leaders began advocating for the monarchy’s end. In 1918, certainly, their actions played a role in its fall. Even then, the death of the Habsburg state should not be misunderstood. It was not just the nationalisms of the nondominant groups that undermined the monarchy. The nationalisms of the ruling Germans and Hungarians (and to a lesser extent the Poles in Galicia) frustrated the other groups’ desires for equitable political arrangements.
The end of the Habsburg monarchy did bring its peoples self- determination, but it also brought a host of other problems. The states that replaced it had many difficulties with their own national minorities: Germans and Hungarians in Czechoslovakia, Hungarians in Romania, Italians in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. With the exception of Czechoslovakia, none of the replacement states proved especially stable, all of them succumbing to authoritarian governments before World War Two. Thus many of the monarchy’s weaknesses persisted into its successor polities. This fact demonstrates the misguided insistence on the part of Britain, France, and the United States that the monarchy had to be dissolved. The image of the Habsburg state as deeply reactionary and authoritarian—as an illegitimate regime opposed to liberal democracy—was simply wrong, though that perception drove the final decision to destroy it. Further, the Habsburg monarchy’s disappearance left an enormous power vacuum, with obviously disastrous consequences for much of the twentieth century. The Habsburg state was an answer to a European problem that even in the twenty-first century has not disappeared: how to maintain peace and stability among the ethnic patchwork of peoples in the eastern and southeastern reaches of the continent.
It has therefore become a scholarly commonplace to assert that the Habsburgs were “a European necessity.”2 It is said that as no family before or since, the Habsburgs became the pivot of the balance of power, counteracting Ottoman Turkey, France, and even Russia; moreover, that they provided reasonably effective governance, and eventually cultural and economic conduits of modernization, for much of eastern central Europe. This assertion is not wrong. But it is important to recognize that the Habsburgs made themselves into a European necessity. Through the astute, occasionally ruthless and occasionally lackadaisical exploitation of key strategies of dynastic rule, this family assembled a huge patrimony and reigned for more than half a millennium, a more impressive achievement than any other European royal house can claim. Even if the Habsburgs reached their zenith in the hundred years after 1500, and their success in those years limited some of their options later, there is no question that their manipulation of dynastic strategies could serve as a textbook for dynasts past, present, and future.
The Habsburgs were extraordinarily, improbably successful with production and reproduction of the dynasty, especially up to 1527. Though partible inheritance occasionally fragmented the patrimony, in the end it was always reunited. Marital alliances and sometimes war consistently added more territories. The bonanza of Castile-Aragon and Bohemia-Hungary, all in one generation, remains unprecedented in European history. The Habsburgs managed to bring those realms into the house because they had cannily positioned themselves as a family powerful enough to protect the realms from their enemies. Thereafter, the Habsburgs were usually seen as too powerful, and so the great age of territorial expansion through marriage faded. Another reason why it faded was because the Habsburgs’ own marital strategies changed. The Reformation limited the Habsburgs’ choices, since it reduced the pool of marriageable Catholic families. The pool also decreased because the Habsburgs began considering their status too exalted for almost all other families, even the Catholic ones. This led to the ultimately iniquitous intermarriage between the Spanish and Austrian branches.
That intermarriage helps account for one of the major failures of Habsburg reproduction: not just the extinguishment of Carlos II, but the overall debasement of the family’s gene pool. With Maximilian I and his daughter Margarete; Charles V, Ferdinand I and their sister Maria; and then Felipe II, the family for a time had an admirable surplus of talent and ability. They lost it as Habsburgs began marrying Habsburgs. It would not really return until Maria Theresia and her sons, with an infusion of new blood, though already with Franz I’s marriages it was lost again. Of course there were other reasons for this diminution of Habsburg astuzia. One of them, oddly, was a further element of the dynasty’s success at reproduction, namely with inculcating its norms into succeeding generations. With only a few exceptions such as Rudolf II and Matthias’s generation, to a remarkable degree the Habsburgs managed to ensure loyalty and solidarity within the family. The downside to the strength of Habsburg norms was that their emphasis on tradition, conservatism, and intense piety meant that few Habsburgs were raised to be bold thinkers or innovators.
Though the Habsburgs are often viewed as not that fortuitous in war, it was occasionally a quite efficacious tool for the family. The most prominent such instances came in 1278, when Austria was brought into the house, and after 1683 as the Ottomans were pushed out of Hungary. The flip side of the family’s extraordinary accumulation of territories was the cultural, institutional, and even geographical distance between many of those territories. This not only hindered defense of the realms (as evinced most starkly by the Spanish Habsburgs’ Europe-wide and global military commitments) but also the development of the Habsburg monarchical state.
The Habsburgs’ prodigious territorial acquisition also limited the techniques they could employ to secure legitimacy and loyalty. In this area the Habsburgs were no more than moderately successful, and by
the nineteenth century they had been surpassed by other ruling houses. From the Middle Ages into the early modern period, the family relied on fairly standard practices of dynastic legitimacy, based on claims of divine right, piety, and bloodlines. The Habsburgs did perhaps place more of an emphasis on the idea of their destiny to rule than did other dynasties. All of these were adequate to secure legitimacy and loyalty from the small segments of the population that mattered, particularly the local aristocracies. That these practices in some sense sufficed is seen by the acceptance of Habsburg rule in lands as distant as Portugal and Hungary: in all these places the Habsburgs were acknowledged as the legitimate sovereigns. This was the legitimation of the personal right to rule. The Reformation then impacted the Habsburgs’ dynastic strategies, and again not for the best. As society secularized little by little, and after 1648 moved away from religious justifications for rule, the Habsburgs doubled down on Catholicism. Men such as Ferdinands II and III and Leopold I became even more myopically devout, as rulers elsewhere in Europe frequently became more worldly. From medieval personal legitimation, the Habsburgs held on to confessional legitimation longer than most sovereigns. After 1648 they only partially transitioned to territorial legitimation, and never to national legitimation.
The service ethos of Maria Theresia and Joseph II provided the most effective legitimation strategy until the monarchy’s end. It was partially territorial, in that it promised good governance to all people who lived in the lands of Habsburg dominion. But of course there was no natural connection between those lands, beyond the person of the sovereign. For all the services the Habsburg state provided, the failures in World War One destroyed such instrumental legitimation strategies. Besides humiliating battle defeats, the breakdown in the most basic functions of food distribution showed that the regime could no longer meet its end of the social contract to serve its people. Once that was gone, the Habsburgs had only the most vestigial legitimacy to fall back on. Because of the diversity of their realms, they could never adopt nationalism as a legitimation strategy.
The impossibility of embracing nationalism should not be seen simplistically as a failure by the Habsburgs. In fact they never wanted to pursue national legitimation. Apart from piecemeal efforts by Joseph II, and then Archdukes Karl and Johann in the early 1800s to highlight the Habsburgs’ German identity, the dynasty always held itself above national divisions. However archaic, the dynasty’s supranational self-conception was fundamental, and fervently believed. That supranational ethos conflicted with one of the fundamental claims of nationalism, that people must be loyal to the cultural collective (usually ethno-linguistic) with which they identify. The older idea that they owed loyalty to some royal who ruled over them because of personal, bloodline-based legitimacy evaporated in the era of mass politics. There was no automatic presumption that the dynastic ruler’s interests were identical with (or at least subsumed) those of his increasingly politicized, nationally diversified subjects. The dynasty’s position as unelected rulers over large populations was grounded only on consensual acts distant in history, and so that position, and those acts, were unsurprisingly contested in an era of burgeoning democratic politics.
The Habsburgs’ supranational profession was also long essential to their function and image as rulers. While the insistence on the imperial German title did divert their attention from institution building in their patrimonial lands, overall the Habsburgs effectively fulfilled their ruling role. Few of them attained military greatness in accordance with long-enduring medieval conceptions of leadership, but individual Habsburgs exemplarily satisfied other expectations. Rudolf I very respectably met his age’s demands for a German king. Maximilian I embodied the many-sided Renaissance prince, Charles V was the last great Western emperor despite his reign’s tremendous difficulties, and Felipe II personified conscientious, bureaucratic kingship. Leopold I was just competent enough to inhabit the role of Baroque absolutism, Maria Theresia struck the perfect balance between tradition and innovation and became the most accomplished ruler the dynasty ever had, and Joseph II, for all his failures, epitomized enlightened despotism. Even Franz Joseph’s grappling with the kind of sovereign he wanted to be versus the kind of sovereign his subjects would let him be showed an admirable accommodation to constitutional monarchy. The Habsburg dynasty, in short, instinctively and adroitly adapted to changing standards of kingship. They made mistakes, of course. The aggressive devotion to the defense of Catholicism led several generations of Habsburgs to engage in all kinds of violence. But the dynasty’s consistent sponsorship of cultural production cannot be reproached. Several of its monarchs, including Rudolf II and Felipe IV, stand among the greatest artistic patrons in European history.
It is customary, and somewhat reasonable, to claim that of all these dynastic strategies, the Habsburgs’ greatest failure was in building the institutions that would strengthen their rule. And the disappointments here are easy to enumerate. Though the dynasty did establish the Holy Roman Empire as a hereditary monarchy, they had little success in bolstering its central institutions. The Danubian domains themselves had very weak central institutions until the later eighteenth century. From then until the monarchy’s collapse, though the state grew significantly, it was never particularly unified nor efficient at extracting the resources necessary for the Habsburgs’ military needs. It was always a multiply composite monarchy. Finally, it can be alleged justifiably that the Habsburgs fell in the end because their state was inextricably identified with the dynasty, unlike in most other monarchies by the nineteenth century. The state was created by the dynasty—in that the Habsburgs were not unusual. But their problem was that the state was so tied to them that it had little justification for existence apart from them. Of course that did not mean that their state was ever completely illegitimate. State institutions long provided numerous benefits such as public goods and military security to the peoples of eastern central Europe. By October 1918, however, the ideology of national sovereignty overwhelmed any justification for the Habsburgs’ multinational, dynastically entwined state.
The condemnatory verdict on Habsburg institutions should not ignore either the dynasty’s successes or its extenuating circumstances, however. There were in fact some striking achievements of Habsburg state-building. For one, constructing “Austria” out of a collection of lands not necessarily destined to be together—Vorarlberg in the west, Tirol and the Salzburger Land in the middle, Styria and Carinthia in the south, and the Austrian duchies in the east—was very impressive, so much so that the modern country of Austria rests comfortably in the Habsburgs’ footprint. Additionally, there were a number of Habsburg institutions that were definitely effective in carrying out their sovereigns’ will. The Spanish Habsburgs created not only the best bureaucracy in Europe of its time, but also the world’s first global bureaucracy to manage their empire. The Cisleithanian bureaucracy of the nineteenth century, if not as innovative, was acceptably competent. For a century, the Spanish Habsburgs had Europe’s best military, and then under Eugène of Savoy in particular the Austrian Habsburgs’ armies were the equal of any on the continent. And even if the Habsburgs kept losing to Napoleon, they also kept fighting. Despite the military’s deficiencies, it always managed to rebound for another battle. Much the same can be said about the performance of Austria-Hungary’s armies in World War One.
The extenuating circumstances that force a reconsideration of Habsburg institutional failure are the dynasty’s own attitudes toward state-building. Quite simply, at least until Joseph II Habsburg sovereigns never sought to create a centralized state. They always conceived of themselves as the rulers of multiple realms who had to respect those realms’ unique privileges and institutions. The Habsburgs knew they ruled composite monarchies, and did not seriously entertain the idea of trying to forge them into a unitary monarchy. Even if they had tried, it might have been impossible; again, the dynasty’s success in amassing heterogeneous territories worked against institutional homogenization. N
onetheless, there were certain opportunities—such as Felipe II’s takeover of Portugal, or the suppression of one of the various Hungarian revolts—which Habsburg sovereigns could have seized to pursue centralization to a greater degree. Indeed, there are repeated examples, from Maximilian I onward, of rationalizing and consolidating institutions. But the Habsburgs, for better and worse, rarely chose to push that project very far.
It is all too easy to survey the dynasty with historical hindsight and point out its mistakes. But harping on about missed opportunities, or obsessing over a decline and fall, are not so pertinent in trying to understand how the dynasty actually conceived of the above strategies. The truth is that few if any Habsburgs ever really questioned the existing system of their rule. That system had made them who they were, had put them on top, so to speak, and so there was rarely a compelling reason to overhaul it. Moreover, from an ideological standpoint, it would be odd (to say the least) for “winners” like the Habsburgs to consider radically changing things. Their formation—the ideology of dynasty—was legitimized by what had been, by tradition. They were conservatives in the purest sense. The point of the dynasty was to conserve the patrimony and prestige. So while individual rulers such as Maria Theresia and her sons could make significant changes, the thinking behind those changes was not change for change’s sake, but rather to tweak just enough to keep the system that put them in power working as well as it could. From the perspective of one of the richest, most powerful, most illustrious families on the planet, if things were not broken (and they were not likely to seem broken to those who were doing very, very well), then why try to “fix” them?
The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty Page 40
